Karim began his siesta feeling a bitterness that he would later discover to be unjustified. Instead of dying away with the ghosts of sleepiness, his bitterness started to increase. He felt the woman was a deviclass="underline" instead of his tricking her or exercising power over her, as was supposed to happen in an affair between a man and his maid, she’d taken charge of everything, aroused desire, and then deftly and mockingly withdrawn. The magic had melted in the frying pan with the eggs, and the desire had uncovered the musk with which the woman washed herself for her husband’s sake, not his.
There was no jealousy — not only because Karim knew that jealousy of a mistress’s husband incurs laughter and has no place in the expression of love, but because he’d decided at that instant, as sleep benumbed his limbs, that his relationship with this woman must never be more than purely physical. True, the role of rapist that he’d decided to assume had come to an end on the living room carpet and evaporated entirely in the bathtub, but he was capable of imagining another relationship similar to rape without actually being rape, a relationship of body on body that ended immediately once orgasm was reached and was erased the instant the desire to make love had been satisfied.
Karim nodded off, or it appeared he had done so without realizing, because when he opened his eyes all he could see was darkness. It seemed he’d slept many hours without feeling the tingling of sleep that accompanies dreams. He got out of bed. The apartment was swimming in darkness. He turned on the light and went into the kitchen. On the kitchen table he found a pot of cold coffee covered with a small plate and placed on a tray with a folded piece of paper next to it. He poured the coffee into a cup, drank a little, discovering that it had been flavored with orange blossom water, opened the folded sheet, and read a single word written in an oddly childish hand. He read, “Thanks,” and smiled, feeling his manhood restored to him.
This sexual rite would be repeated twice a week, with the addition of a cooked meal that Ghazala would prepare to make the session “cozy,” as she put it. Over the table she told him many stories of her village, her childhood, her grandmother, her husband, Matrouk, and her love for and fear of Beirut. She filled the place with random talk that blended with the taste of the arak that Karim drank at the table on his own because Ghazala said she was afraid of what might come over her if she drank arak. She’d drunk it a few times, and each time had felt another woman come awake inside her. It had made her afraid and she’d decided never to drink it. When Karim insisted she drink a little from his glass, she took it and sucked at the white liquid. Her eyes glazed, as though she could get drunk on a single drop.
Two months of heedless pleasure uninterrupted by a single moment of unpleasantness. From the second week, Karim would put what he called “the weekly gift” on a plate in the kitchen and she’d take it without saying anything. She’d take it as though she weren’t taking it, in exactly the same way as, in bed, she took as though she were giving. Karim felt no regret about the gift: it was her due as maid and mistress.
Her sudden disappearance, however, caused him anxiety. Suddenly she’d disappeared and she didn’t phone. Karim waited a week before asking his brother about her and the answer only made things more mysterious: “Forget Ghazala. Tomorrow I’ll send you a better maid. Don’t worry about it.”
“Why? What happened?” asked Karim.
“What happened happened,” answered his brother. “Why would you want to get involved? Tomorrow I’ll send you another woman to clean the apartment.”
At first Karim was afraid Ghazala had discovered he was having an affair with Muna. She must have known. She must surely have made herself a copy of the key: this woman who was such a strange combination of cunning and naïveté knew her own interests very well.
The affair with Muna came about by coincidence and was innocent compared to the one with Ghazala. The love he practiced with Muna was full of concealment and shyness. The woman, who had come to him to have her skin treated, said nothing in bed. He would feel her interior quiverings, though not even a sigh escaped her, as though her thin body was the opposite of Ghazala’s in every way.
Why then had he initiated an affair with this woman in the midst of the waves of desire that wooed him? Was it because he wanted to extinguish his desire for Ghazala’s body, that storehouse of inexhaustible convolutions of lust, in that of another woman who seemed soaked in drowsiness and governed by shyness?
Karim didn’t know the answer, or at least he did but didn’t dare confess that he was being an out-and-out bastard. That was what Sawsan had told his brother when he gave her a respectable old age and saved her from abuse and death. For him to say he was a bastard, though, was meaningless. He hadn’t come to Beirut for the sake of Ghazala or Muna, he’d come for the sake of another woman. He’d discovered, however, the moment he entered his brother’s apartment, that that woman no longer existed because the man she’d loved many years before had disappeared.
“The issue, my dear,” he’d said to Hend, “is that exile forces us to recompose ourselves; one has to reinvent oneself each day or lose oneself. But someone who remains in his own country and among his family doesn’t have to do anything. He stays who he is without effort and without having to try to fabricate himself.”
Hend smiled wryly and said exile had made him forget how people lived in Lebanon. “You’ve really got things the wrong way round. Beirut may be the only place in the world where a person has to reinvent himself every day.”
She spoke of Beirut as a city that was sliding. She said Beirut had decided to die ages ago but its inhabitants refused to acknowledge the fact; each time the city died its population raised it from the dead against its will. The hardest thing was not dying but coming back from the dead, because then one was obliged to reinvent oneself once more. That, she said, was why she didn’t like the story of Lazarus in the Bible. “Your brother doesn’t understand why I don’t like to take the children to church on Palm Sunday.”
“Who doesn’t like Palm Sunday?” said Karim.
“I don’t,” answered Hend.
“What about the candles and the olive branches and the palm leaves? You must be joking. The way I see it, those kinds of celebrations are the only nice thing about religion.”
She said she hated Palm Sunday because instead of singing hymns to Christ the King who had entered Jerusalem on the foal of an ass to be crucified, they sang hymns of the resurrection of Lazarus. Had anyone asked Lazarus his opinion? The poor man hadn’t uttered a word after his rebirth. Only Khalil Hawi had understood and written his poem “Lazarus ’62,” in which the protagonist calls on the gravedigger to deepen his grave because he doesn’t want resurrection. “Have you read the poem?”
“Deepen the hole, gravedigger! Deepen it till it has no bottom!” intoned Karim.
“My, my! You like poetry now? When we were together you used to say poetry and Umm Kulthoum were the reason for the Arabs’ defeat.”
“And now I like Umm Kulthoum too but that’s not the point. The point is I don’t like symbols. Khalil Hawi did to Lazarus what the Bible did: he turned him from a person into a symbol. No doubt the poet was right, the man wanted to go back into his grave, but his reasons had nothing to do with the poet’s. He wanted to go back into the grave because he was afraid of life and the poet wanted to turn him into a symbol for the failure of Arab nationalism and the failure of the project of rebirth. I hate symbols in literature, politics, and life because in the end the symbolist poet or writer is obliged to die symbolically, meaning he never savors the flavor of death. That’s what happened to Ghassan Kanafani and that’s what Khalil Hawi did when he committed suicide,” said Karim.