How though could the husband have swallowed her infidelity? Karim believed males couldn’t take infidelity, and that the least Matrouk should have done was divorce his wife. Naturally, a man such as Karim could not in any way support people killing their wives, or what were technically known as “honor killings.” All the same, he secretly wished someone would kill Ghazala. Jealousy cries out for murder. When the woman you love betrays you, you both obsess over her more and hate her more. Only death can extinguish the flames burning in your breast. Death extinguishes everything, because death is the moment that lays the foundation for a space where everything is clear.
Karim was amazed at the attitude of the deceived husband and never questioned himself or his own views. He contented himself with supposing he’d never loved Ghazala, that his relationship with her had been purely sexual, and that Matrouk’s visit had been enough to erase the story from his emotional world.
This wasn’t, however, the truth. The truth was that Karim’s affair with Muna had been an attempt to escape the impact Ghazala had had on him; he’d found himself getting more and more immersed in his relationship with that woman, who wanted no attachments, and who had, indeed, wanted her affair with Karim to be like one between passing travelers. “You’re leaving now and I’m leaving in a little while so let’s keep it light. Please, I don’t like things to get heavy,” Muna had told him when he found himself raving about “the love that grants one the capacity to hover in the heavens of the soul.” At such moments he was recalling Ghazala as she jumped up and ran into the kitchen, as though flying. He spoke to Muna of hovering and before his eyes he saw Ghazala, but it was Muna who, unawares, would later cast him into the inferno of Sinalcol in the alleyways of Tripoli, and who, by recounting the stories of her husband’s father, made him remember the pain.
Ghazala remained a question mark and Muna couldn’t hover. It fell to Karim to find a solution that would allow him to come to terms with his sense of humiliation. This was not due to Ghazala’s betrayal. Her betrayal of him was logical, for she’d found in him a lover willing to accept anything because of his lust for her, an accessory to her great passion for the militia boy who’d stolen her heart with his gallantry, courage, and sad eyes. Karim’s humiliation was the consequence of his having deceived himself.
She’d said her name was Ghazala. She’d said she was from a village called Shuhba in Jabal el-Arab, or Jabal el-Durouz, in Syria. She’d said she was the mother of two small children and didn’t do houses but had said yes for Khawaja Nasim’s sake. She’d told him the story a number of times. After the ecstasy had raised her to the heights of love, she’d jump off the bed as though flying. She’d spread her arms like wings and leap away naked, and the brownness of her complexion would blaze out and the void of the room would be given a lining of musk. She’d laugh as she took him by the hand and led him to the bathroom.
She’d told him he was like a woman: he liked to stay in bed all sticky with the glue of love while she, by contrast, found the ecstasy could only be maintained with water. “Water purifies and renews love and washes it in light.” She’d asked him if he could see the light from the water and he’d smiled at her naïveté and told her water was like glass: it didn’t give off light, it reflected it. She’d said she didn’t understand scientific language but she knew her grandmother’s stories, and that water was the swaddling of the soul; people were born of water, died in water, and transmigrated by means of water.
Ghazala was fascinated by her own body. Now that Karim was in a position to put his memories into order he realized the woman had never looked at his when he was naked. She’d kept her eyes closed the whole time and never opened them until she flew from the bed and stood naked in front of the mirror, contemplating her lust-inflamed breasts and smiling before turning on the cold shower and swaying and letting out oohs and aahs beneath the gushing water, which refracted the light and spread it over the eyes of the man as he stood, astonished, in front of the bathtub, waiting for a signal from the woman to show that she was ready to bury him in water. He told her that water wasn’t sand that you could bury someone in it. She replied that everyone came from water and had to return to water.
And she told him the strangest story he’d ever heard.
“They called me Ghazala after my grandmother. Father worshipped his mother and whenever he described a beautiful woman he’d say, ‘Like my mother, Ghazala.’ His wife, my mother, would look at him as though she couldn’t believe her eyes. My mother was never my mother. My mother was my grandmother and since she died five years ago I don’t know what happened, it’s as though her soul has passed into me and lives with mine. When she was dying she sat me down beside her and told me she didn’t want to go to anyone else, she only wanted to go to me and when she died I don’t know what happened to me, it’s as though her soul entered my body.”
“You mean you have two souls?” Karim asked, smiling.
“I knew you wouldn’t understand what I mean. Obviously you don’t believe in the transmigration of souls. I don’t know why I’m telling you.” Ghazala was sitting on the edge of the bed and Karim was lying on his back smoking and watching how, as she told her stories, the dark blue of evening fell and covered the room with the remnants of the light.
Ghazala’s memory was devoid of any concept of the succession of events. Events went round in circles. A moment of terror, such as that created by the encounter with Matrouk over the glass of arak and the grilled chicken, had been needed to break the circle and unstring its components. After that, her memory could do nothing but pick up the broken pieces.
She said her grandmother had experienced a very strange marriage, because she’d married her own grandfather. “Can you imagine, doctor? When my grandmother found out, she refused to sleep with her husband!”
He said he didn’t believe in such superstitions but wanted to hear the rest of the story.
The story went that the grandmother found out about her husband when she gave birth to her son, Anwar. The same day her husband told her they must leave their tumbledown village, and without delay. He said that at the very moment Anwar had seen the light, Arif Bey Elwan had been found shot dead. “I don’t know who killed him, but I do know the Elwan clan will attack us and kidnap the child. They will never accept that the sheikh’s soul passed into a poor peasant family like ours.”
The woman was confined to bed and couldn’t be moved. Next to her sat her mother, who pleaded with the man to delay the departure by two days so the woman could regain her health. This forced the husband to come up with an amazing stratagem. He announced that his wife had given birth to a girl, and he refused to receive well-wishers, wreathing his face in a genuine scowl born of fear. And after a week he escaped with his son to the village of Shuhba.
The story is not, however, about Anwar, who remembered his former life only intermittently. His parents suppressed his memories and he lived his early childhood under the terror of both that trauma and of finding himself in the poor household where he had been reincarnated. The story is that of the grandmother, who’d been skeptical about transmigration until the day her husband told her that, when he was three years old, he had spoken and recalled his former life, only for his mother to discover, twenty years later, that he wanted to marry his own granddaughter.
“I didn’t recognize you because you were reborn five years after I died, but you’re my daughter’s daughter.”
“You mean you went and asked for my hand from your daughter?”
“When I saw you I lost my heart and there was nothing to do but marry you.”