Karim hadn’t believed in the potential riches of which his brother had spoken. That wasn’t what he’d come in search of, and had he wanted money he would have gone to the Gulf, where inexhaustible wealth awaits those who wish for it.
He’d never told his brother the story of Sheikha Murjana, the wife of one of the Gulf sheikhs, who’d come to him at the clinic in Montpellier after a series of cosmetic operations all over her body and asked him to treat her skin, which was thick and given to sweating. He’d prescribed some ointments and told her — when, glorying in the achievements of French cosmetic medicine, she’d shown him an old photo of herself — that he couldn’t recognize her, she’d changed so much. She laughed, revealing two rows of sparkling white teeth, and said she’d been reborn but wanted him to solve her sweat problem. She used vulgar expressions and laughed loudly, as though she’d left modesty behind in her hot country and had become another woman at the hands of some French doctor who had managed to redesign her face, making her nose smaller, lips fuller, forehead higher, and cheekbones more pronounced. The vulgar expressions this fortyish woman used made Karim feel she was wearing a mask. He asked if she covered her hair in her country. She said she covered her face and neck as well, with a thick black cloth that hung down from below her eyes. The Lebanese doctor cleared his throat as he searched for words to express himself but the woman preempted him, saying she had had the cosmetic surgery for her own sake, not to please a particular man or for any other reason. She said it was through such operations that she’d regained her self-confidence, her need to appear attractive to herself. She said a woman not attractive to herself would never be able to attract a man, and that the essence of the game was a dialogue within the ego.
“But after all that surgery there shouldn’t be any need for you to cover your face since the face we see today isn’t your face and you aren’t you.”
“And who told you, doctor, that this isn’t true for everyone? With or without cosmetic surgery, with or without a veil, we all cover and change.”
Sheikha Murjana had studied psychology at the American University in Beirut. “I used to take off my veil and mantle at the door of the airplane the moment I arrived in Beirut. I’d wear jeans, put my long black hair up, and recover my body by surrendering it to the looks of the passersby. But I had to go back to my country to get married to my paternal cousin, and I married and bore a boy and two girls. That’s how the world goes round.”
She said she didn’t understand Lebanese women anymore. “We used to escape from our veils to their unveiledness. What’s happened to your women? Half the women of Lebanon wear veils and the other half go about half naked. Why?”
Karim couldn’t come up with an answer. Should he tell her that Lebanon too was a mirror? And what would such casuistry mean to a woman who came with specific questions and expected clear answers? He gave her medicine for the sweating, prescribed her a diet, and promised her everything would be fine. As to what she thought was “thickness of the skin,” it was, he told her, a simple illusion as there was no such thing as thick skin and thin skin. Her dark complexion made her think that; but it needed to be borne in mind that dark skin was preferable to white as it absorbed heat better.
He massaged her wrist as he told her that her skin was smooth and attractive and only needed some creams to shine and radiate. To this point there was no mention of a story that was still to unfold. This started four months after the encounter, when Karim Shammas received a phone call from Sheikha Murjana thanking him for his medicines and his advice and saying that she was now completely cured of the sweat that used to soak her body from head to toe whenever Sheikh Zeidan came near her. She said she’d discussed matters with Sheikh Zeidan and invited Karim to the Gulf to work there; she mentioned fantastic figures such as he’d never dreamed of.
Karim went only once, to treat a group of the sheikha’s friends. He discovered there that the number of foreign workers in the country was far greater than its inhabitants, who were referred to as “citizens,” and all of whom, women and men, wore traditional dress to distinguish them from the workers, who were referred to as “newcomers.”
When Sheikh Zeidan broached the topic of his staying on to work in the small emirate, Karim was at a loss over how to turn down such a generous offer, so he used his French wife and daughters as an excuse. At his only meeting with Sheikh Zeidan, Karim listened to the strangest analysis he had ever heard of the relationship between the two blessings — Islam and oil — for which the Arabian Peninsula provided a stage. The sheikh recounted that Islam had forced people out of the Arabian Peninsula: Islam was a gateway to conquest, extension, and expansion, so people had left this hot, naked, uninhabitable desert land and settled in the various countries and great settlements of the world, where they lived in the luxury of cities traversed by rivers. Had it not been for the duty of pilgrimage to Mecca, the country would have been emptied of its inhabitants, or of the best of them at any rate. The Arabian Peninsula then had to wait for its new dawn, which began with the discovery of oil. “With oil came air conditioners and instead of people emigrating this became a land for immigrants looking for a crust of bread. Islam gave us glory and forced us out of this land; oil brought us back to it and made us lords of the world once more. The rebirth that began here will radiate to the entire world. It is the product of this encounter, which is a manifestation of divine wisdom.”
“But you don’t allow people to become citizens of your country.”
“And we must not, or we shall disintegrate and all trace of us will be lost,” answered the sheikh as he invited the miracle-working doctor to reside in his small emirate.
He said his wife had become ethereal with beauty through use of the magical medicine the doctor had given her and he didn’t know how to thank him; that he didn’t want to seem ungrateful but he hoped the doctor would convert to Islam and take up residence there, “thus making God’s favors to us complete.”
The magical relationship between oil and Islam had never before occurred to Karim. Poor Khaled Nabulsi! He’d joined a fundamentalist Islam that had no oil so as to complete the revolution, and his body had been ripped to pieces — after which the revolution had continued on its course without him and his like! The revolutions of the day were in need of oil wells. Money oils everything and is “the adornment of this present life,” as it says in the Koran.
For his part, Karim had no idea how to respond to the sheikh’s offer. The man was kind and didn’t insist, telling the doctor that he was one of the People of the Book, “and the People of the Book are under our protection.” He said he’d only wanted to honor him with the best possible offer; however, there was “no compulsion in religion.”
Nasim thought medicine was Lebanon’s oil and that through the hospital that he’d decided to build he would be able finally to put his relationship to the war behind him and start a new life as a respectable businessman.
In no way then would he resemble the thug who’d risked his life for every penny he harvested from the fruits of war. But the hospital needed a certain deal to go through before it could be completed. And when Karim tried to inquire about the nature of that deal his brother said it was nothing to do with him; his job now was to wait, draw up the plans, and supervise the preparations. The wait was long. Six months of nothing, of wasted time, of abortive affairs that left only a bitter taste on his tongue.
When Ghazala appeared, in all her glory, Karim’s body was filled with tremors of desire such as he had never realized lay concealed in the darkness of his soul. He started with the lust to rape and ended a total captive to this terrifyingly beautiful woman; he told her her beauty was “terrifying” because he could find no more suitable word to describe it.