Face/Mask by Gabriel Boutros Page A

listening to his contented breathing as he slept. As tired as she was, she often forced herself to stay awake in order to fully enjoy this peaceful time with him.
    Suddenly Rafik woke up and smiled at her.
    “Guess what I just thought of?”
    “You mean while you were sleeping,” she laughed.
    “Yes, while I was sleeping. It occurred to me that your parents misspelled your name. It shouldn’t be Sarah, it should be Sahar. Because you are like magic.”
    “Then forget the name they gave me,” she said, stroking his fine hair. “I love the name that you’re giving me. From now on, I am your bride to be, Sahar.”
    The following years were happy ones, despite the circumstances. She missed her mother and brothers, and even her father who had doted on her for so much of her life. But she’d found her place as the wife of Rafik Chamseddine, mother of Wafah, their first-born, and two years later, Almaz. As Sahar’s father had done with her, Rafik spoiled his two daughters as much as he could while working long hours getting his auto-body shop up and running.
    The money set aside by her father was of great help, but it wasn’t without end. Sahar often told her husband that she could get a job to help with expenses, but he insisted that she stay home with their children. Although born and raised in Montreal, he retained an old-world mentality. He would hear no talk of his wife going to work, nor would he listen to any arguments on this point.
    After six years of saving and struggle it was in 2018 that Rafik’s hard work bore fruit. He came home one day, bursting with excitement good news which he tried to tell her as slowly and calmly as he could. The week before, he’d repaired a damaged Mercedes sports coupe that a young driver had rammed into a brick wall. The car belonged to the head of a large business conglomerate and the driver, barely out of his teens and full of reckless energy, was the rich man’s son.
    The boy had insisted that the car’s brakes failed, unusual in such a reliable model, and the father suspected street-racing was the cause of the accident, if not his son’s likely drunkenness. Rafik had no idea why the man had brought the car to his garage instead of taking it to his dealer. (“Allah must have sent him to me,” he said while recounting the story to Sahar, beaming like a child who’d won a spelling-bee.) While taking the details from the father Rafik could see the son, sitting alone in his father’s sedan, looking miserable.
    “ C’est mon fils ,” the man told Rafik, pointing toward his waiting car. “He’s the brilliant driver who crashed my lovely little coupe. He says the brakes failed, but I don’t believe a word of it. But I guess it won’t hurt to check them out while doing the rest of the repairs. Once you confirm that the brakes were fine I’m taking his licence away for a year, and that’s just the beginning of his misery.”
    Rafik glanced again toward the boy and felt a pang of sympathy. It hadn’t been so long before that he’d been a reckless young man himself, living every minute of life as if it were his last. Before Sahar and the children.
    Later that day, looking up at the undercarriage of the damaged car, Rafik realized that he didn’t want to hurt this spoiled rich boy whom he didn’t even know. He looked at the brakes, but there were no visible problems. Sometimes, he knew, air built up in the brake lines, which could conceivably cause brake failure.
    Strange how that can happen , he thought with a wry smile. It would make for an acceptable explanation for the alleged brake failure.
    He pulled a pen out of his shirt pocket and inscribed on the work order that the brake lines needed to be bled, then he picked up his screwdriver and set about doing the job.
    Sahar looked at him in awe when he told her this part of this story. “You would never do such a thing,” she said. “There must have been a reason for it.”
    “There was, my love. It was fated for