Broken Mirrors Read Online Free PDF

herself in her tears. He said he wanted to weep because he loved her but that that would be unbecoming, and he left the room.
    When Salma disappeared, Qasem couldn’t believe she’d gone off with another man. She’d lived with him six years and had had three boys by him, and then suddenly she’d vanished as though she’d never been. She disappeared, and so did all her belongings. She took everything: the clothes and the small mirror and the face towel that she perfumed with rosewater. Andwhen the report arrived that she was living with the agricultural engineer, the unsuccessful crime was committed.
    Abu Salah wept and wailed before his feudal master, saying he’d kill the woman himself because she had sullied his honor, but his master looked at him with contempt and said, “No, it’s nothing to do with you. She’s ours. She was ours alive and she’ll be ours dead.”
    The husband came, carrying a gun. He knocked on the door and the engineer opened it. The man fired, then went into the bedroom where Salma lay trembling, shot her and left.
    “But he didn’t kill anyone,” said Hend. “Father was hit in the leg and my mother wasn’t hurt. The victim was my grandmother, Father’s mother, who was visiting her son to beg him to send the woman back to her husband, because she could smell blood.”
    “It seems the blood my grandmother smelled was her own,” said Hend. The story ended with reconciliation, the dropping of the court case, and Salma’s marriage to her beloved.
    The engineer died four years later of a clot in the brain and the first husband died too, killed during the peasant uprising in Akkar, and Salma had to swallow all these bitter pills at one go.
    “I don’t know how to say this, but I never forgave her,” said Hend. “I lived all on my own. She put me in the Zahret el-Ehsan school as a half-boarder. I lived with the orphans who walk in funeral processions to collect donations and only went home at night. I’d come home with my eyes half closed and when I opened them again I’d find my mother had taken me back to school.”
    “Childhood memories aren’t the story,” said Karim. “Childhoods are just scraps of memories that we patch together later to make up our story when we’re grown.”
    The first time Hend told him the story and said how her mother had puther in the boarding school so she could live her life the way she wanted and work in the office of Samir Yunes, the lawyer, he assumed that the woman, who was still a girl, had abandoned her daughter to be free to pursue her romantic involvement with “Uncle Samir,” as Hend called the lawyer. But the second time Hend told the story, she told it differently. She said her mother had gone to the lawyer to recover her rights to her three children and that she, Hend, had been jealous of her three brothers, whose pictures she’d never seen; that her mother had spent all her time finding people to intervene with Sheikh Deyab Abd el-Karim to allow her to see the boys; and that she’d tried to get in touch with her father to help him. The latter had told the young lawyer from Tripoli, whom Maître Samir had sent to see him, that his daughter was dead, that he was condemned to live in shame, and that he hadn’t seen his grandchildren since the day she’d run off with the engineer, because he no longer dared leave his house.
    Hend said her mother had suffered greatly. She’d gone to everyone, had behaved like a mother bereaved, and had refused for the rest of her life to stop wearing her mourning clothes. When Uncle Samir asked her once, as he ate lunch at their apartment, why she didn’t stop wearing mourning clothes – seeing the man had died five years earlier – she said she wore black for herself, because she couldn’t see her children.
    Hend said her mother had spent her life chasing a mirage, while she had spent her childhood jealous of her three brothers.
    “My mother never stopped talking about them. The tears would run