Broken Mirrors (10 page)

“When Abu Sultan reached his house at nine p.m., drunk as usual, he was stunned by what he saw; and when people told him what had happened to his wife and how they had cleaned out the house and that the woman was now in the Hôtel Dieu hospital, all he asked was about the contents of the house.

“ ‘Where’s the stuff?’ he screamed.

“ ‘God will replace it for you, neighbor,’ said one of the aged women who had hurried to the shack on hearing the man’s screams, thinking something
bad must have happened to Majda. ‘There was nothing worth keeping – bedding and rugs. It’s not a problem, we’ll get you more. Go to the hospital now and check on your wife.’

“ ‘Where’s the stuff?’ Abu Sultan asked again, moaning like a wounded animal.

“ ‘I think they threw everything onto the dump at the end of the street,’ said the woman.

“Abu Sultan ran and the men and women of the area ran after him, everyone fearing the man had lost his wits because his wife had died. They ran till they found themselves at the garbage dump, where the man waded into the blood-soaked things and a cloying stench filled the air.

“The story goes that the Beirut rain fell in ropes that stormy autumn evening and that Abu Sultan drowned in blood. He was searching for something like a madman and the people around him kept trying to calm him down, advising him to put his trust in God. But he paid them no attention and spoke to no one. He stuck his head into the mound of garbage and sank into it.

“Everyone said it rained blood that evening.

“They said they saw Abu Sultan raise his blood-smeared face from the mound of rubbish, hugging a pillow and dancing.

“They said the man burst out laughing as he danced with the pillow, screaming that he’d found his life’s savings.

“They said he lifted the pillow, which was stuffed with money, and ran in the direction of his shack, which he doused in paraffin and set fire to; and that he danced before the columns of flame, which rose upward, challenging the rain. Then he disappeared. He took the pillow, soaked in blood and water, and left behind him the ruins of his shack, a woman on her own, and a child.

“Was the money in the pillowcase ruined? Or did the man manage to
dry the banknotes out and use them to start life anew elsewhere? Did he use the money with which he’d stuffed the pillowcase to find work or did he spend it on booze before returning to his old profession as a beggar and marry another woman to support him with the money she earned as a maid?

“No one knows what really happened,” Nasri told his two boys when they asked him about the Green Woman. He said he’d never seen her again after the incident. But people talk a lot. People need saints and victims and fill their lives with them, and Majda was a victim who asked for nothing because she was a saint.” It’s best when the saint is the victim. Then the story’s the way it should be. I know Abu Sultan and I know it wasn’t like that. He was a decent fellow. He worked at the gas station at Hajj Murad’s place washing cars and in the neighborhood they called him ‘Wadia the gas station guy.’ But his name wasn’t Abu Sultan – I don’t know where ‘Abu Sultan’ came from. Well, maybe it was from his first wife, who they say stole his money and ran off with an Egyptian building guard to Egypt. She was a widow and her name was Imm Sultan, I know that. Then Abu Sultan was hit by a truck at the gas station and crippled and Hajj Murad fired him without giving him a penny in compensation. I don’t know how Majda put up with him. It’s wrong to tell tales. He used to beat her a lot. I know because I used to treat the poor woman. Then I realized he was beating her because he had a problem and I got rid of the problem with a potion that I’d invented. I don’t know what to call it – a complex about women had turned into a practical problem with his wife – but I do know that everything was fine and there’s no call for all this gossip.”

Nasri’s words failed to convince his sons, who thought his story about Majda was of a piece with the ones about fairies and afreets that he told them. They named her “the Green Fairy” and saw her looming out of the ropes of rain and waving to them from afar.

What happened to Majda is wrapped in mystery. The woman didn’t
return to the neighborhood. She left the hospital with her infant and people only saw her after that in her green apparitions – a Green Woman who appeared only after sunset, standing in the shadows and looking into the distance, bending over the remains of her shack and waving to people with her little green pocketbook, then vanishing into the dark.

Karim said he’d seen the Green Woman once in his life. “I was with my brother, Nasim. He said to me, ‘Come on, let’s go and see the Green Fairy!’ It was five in the afternoon, raining, and we got soaked. I told my brother, ‘Forget it. We’ll get sick standing out under the rain like this,’ but he wouldn’t agree. He said I was a coward. That was what he thought of me even then. So we waited and when it started to get dark we saw her. She was like a ghost or something and I started shivering with fear and the cold. She looked at me, raised her hand as though she was pointing at me, or as though she was asking me to go to her. I wanted to run home but I was rooted to the spot and couldn’t move. I screamed but no sound came out. I grabbed hold of Nasim and heard him say, ‘Let’s go closer.’ I saw him bend over, pick up a stone, and throw it at the woman, but it seemed as though the stone just flew and never landed on the ground and the woman disappeared.”

Karim said that when he thought of his encounter with the Green Woman, he saw a stone flying and not landing, as though the Green Woman had turned into a tree, and he didn’t know how he got back home, all wet with the rain and the darkness and the fear.

Had he told Muna that story? She’d asked him about the story of the Green Woman and he’d smiled and said he loved her green skirt. She’d said she was tired and wanted to sleep and had turned her back and begun to breathe deeply. Then suddenly she’d sat up in bed and said she had to go home:
“Ahmad will be waiting for me now.” She ran to the bathroom and closed the door behind her and he heard the sound of the shower. He went up to the bathroom door and opened it. She yelled at him from behind the plastic curtain, telling him to go out and shut the door: “I don’t like anyone to watch me when I’m showering.” He shut the door, went back to the bed, closed his eyes, and slept.

Muna left the apartment while Karim was dozing. He opened his eyes and saw that the sun had colored everything green. The green sky was falling through the window onto his bed. He rubbed his eyes thoroughly to get the green shadows out of them. Had it been a dream? Had he seen the Green Woman beckoning to him to approach while he dreamed? What had his father been doing there?

The Green Woman pushed Nasri and the man fell to the ground, black blood ran from his forehead, and he died next to the remains of the drenched shack and the fire.

This dream would pursue the doctor throughout the six months he spent in Beirut. He decided not to believe Hend’s story. Could it really be true? Could Nasri have been murdered? And was the story of his father having fallen into a coma, as related to him by his brother, just a half-lie intended to cover over the blood that had been spilled?

All Karim could remember about his mother was her fear of blood. Even during her long illness she had trembled at the sight of blood on her sons’ knees and screamed, “O Lord, save us from the blood!” The disease had ravaged the woman until all that was left of her were her shining brown eyes. Her body had grown emaciated and she’d ended up the size of a little girl, but the brilliance of her eyes, which lasted until she died, concealed the life she hadn’t lived.

Karim remembered his father yelling at the priest, who had sat down at
the dining table to prepare the announcement of her death and had written, “The late lamented Laure Tibshirani, wife of Nasri Shammas, departed this life having performed in full her religious obligations, etc.”

“No!” Nasri had screamed. “She didn’t depart this life!” And the priest had said, “You’re right, Mr. Nasri. We should write, ‘passed into the mercy of the Almighty.’ ” “No!” said Nasri. “She didn’t depart and she didn’t pass. Life departed from her. The pity of it! Those eyes of hers kept on shining even after she was dead. She didn’t depart and she didn’t pass. The pity of it, Laure!”

Karim didn’t remember what they wrote in the announcement because he was too young and didn’t understand that the clichés written at the important moments of people’s lives aren’t just clichés. They are complex figures of speech possessing a status in people’s souls so emotive it makes tears fall from their eyes. He did remember his mother’s eyes, though. The father had led his sons toward the bed of their dead mother, whom cancer had transformed into something more like a small child, and ordered them to look into her eyes, which shone with a brilliance like that of water: “You mustn’t forget your mother’s eyes, the way they stayed open gazing at life even after death.” The father went forward, placed his hand over his wife’s eyes and closed them. At that moment everything went white. All Karim could remember was the white that filled his eyes. It wasn’t a fainting fit because the child didn’t fall to the ground. He remained rigid where he was and didn’t move. The milky white surrounded him on all sides. Nasri led his sons to the living room, which was crammed full of people, and there they heard the wailing, and they cried. Karim said that the tears that fell from his eyes opened them, and he saw the people and felt the need to hide.

When Karim attempted to remind his brother of the scene, he was surprised to find that Nasim didn’t remember the open eyes. Nasim said he hadn’t seen anything: “I saw something small and white on a white sheet.
Are you sure Father closed her eyes? Why, did she die with her eyes open too?”

Karim was aware from his experience as a doctor that lots of people die with their eyes open and that it has nothing to do with the dead person’s psychological state; it’s a purely physiological matter connected to the circumstances of the moment of death. But at that moment he saw his father lying on the ground, the blood running out of him, his eyes open onto the abyss of death.

T
HEY WERE TWINS
, or so they believed. Karim was born on January 4, 1950, Nasim on December 22 of the same year. This was a source of pride to the pharmacist Nasri Shammas and a compensation to him for the fact that his wife, Laure, had been incapable of bearing more children. The boys were alike in every way and never left each other’s side.

Nasri Shammas, owner of Beirut’s Shefa Pharmacy, spent most of his spare time at the Gemmeizeh Café, where he never stopped recounting his heroic deeds and telling of his ability to father two children in a single year. He would smoke his daily narghile, play backgammon, and narrate. The boys only discovered why their father insisted on taking them each day to the café, where they were bored, when they found out that their mother was ill.

Two light-skinned boys who looked so much like each other they could have been twins. The elder, Karim, was introverted, while the younger was cheerful and sociable, but they never left each other’s side. After their mother’s death they turned into a single person, or so it seemed to most people. Nasim, the sturdy one, defended his brother at school and stopped
the bigger boys from hitting him, while Karim did the studying for both of them. He trained his younger brother till their handwriting ended up looking the same and the teachers couldn’t tell the difference. This game of one person with two heads appealed to their father. When he asked one of them to tell him a dream he’d dreamed, he’d interrupt him and ask the other son to finish it for him, so that the boys came to believe they were one soul with two bodies.

They slept in one large bed but when they turned nine Nasri decided the time had come for each to sleep by himself. They refused but the stubborn father exchanged the wide bed the boys had inherited from their mother for two beds, which he put in the same room. Karim and Nasim rebelled and took to sneakily sleeping together in one of the beds, so that the father had to carry one of them to the second bed at midnight, though when he got up in the morning he’d find them both sleeping in one.

They lived alone with their father, without relatives. Nasri, who was an only child, had no contact with his distant cousins. His wife, Laure, was from a large family but the fates had willed that her family should distance themselves from the two boys. When she died everyone expected Nasri would marry Laure’s younger sister. Marta was three years younger than her sister but “the doors of destiny had failed to open before her,” as they say. True, she was short and not beautiful, but the family decided to believe that the reason she had failed to marry was her devotion to her sick sister and the care she took of her sister’s two boys. Nasri thought it was all over for him and didn’t argue when his father-in-law visited him and opened the conversation by talking about the need for decency, saying Laure’s sister would make the best mother for the boys. Nasri just asked for a bit of time, arguing he couldn’t marry until a year after his wife’s death. The whole family thought this a logical arrangement and things seemed to be heading in the right direction, but they hadn’t reckoned with the boys going mad.

Nasri told Laure’s father that the boys had gone mad and that he wanted him to talk to them in his capacity as their grandfather.

Abdo Tibshirani was sixty-five years old. The dignity of white hair covered his head and thick mustaches adorned his broad white face – a man who knew life inside out. He had a shop in Souq el-Efrenj, where he sold the best kinds of fruit. He’d seen his three sons married and believed nothing could make up for the pain of the loss of his daughter Laure but the marriage of her sister. And now his son-in-law had come along to make a mess of his dignity.

Abdo placed a hand on his mustache and looked at Nasri with his bulbous eyes: “You think you can make a fool of these mustaches of mine?” he whispered. “You want me to believe a story like that
and
demean myself by negotiating with those brats?”

Nasri tried to tell him what had happened but the man refused to listen. “We’ve set the date for the wedding and I don’t want to hear any more such nonsense from you.”