Broken Mirrors (13 page)

“Do you think Hend knows about her mother’s thing with the pharmacist?”

“Don’t even say Hend’s name.”

The drawer with the pictures had pursued him since his arrival in Beirut. True, he’d opened the drawer and found it empty, but he hadn’t dared ask his brother what had happened to the album.

Now, though, he found himself uncertain of everything. Had things reached a point where the old man had drunk the same green liquid that was his means of access to women’s bodies?

When Karim had left Muna in bed on that final morning of farewell and gone to the kitchen to make breakfast, she’d followed him, wrapped in her towel, to tell him she was in a hurry because Ahmad was waiting for her at home, and he’d responded, “No, you can’t leave until you’ve tasted the most delicious breakfast in the world.” He made a Spanish omelette out of fried eggs, labneh, and pine nuts. “This was Father’s favorite breakfast,” he said, “but I was an ass and I used to think, stupid as I was, that I hated the taste of eggs with labneh. Then I grew up and realized that eggs with labneh is the best dish in the world. In France, whenever I slept with a woman, I’d taste labneh and pine nuts on my tongue, but they don’t have labneh there.” He said the French had three hundred types of cheese and even so they didn’t know the most delicious thing in the world, and how “when we dunk the labneh in the oil we smell life. Life smells green, like olive oil.”

“I didn’t realize you were so in love with your stomach. I would have cooked you fattet makdous,” she said. “Granny’s from Aleppo and for her Aleppo is fattet makdous and kufta with cherries.”

“Cherries with meat! The most important thing, mind, is to put pine nuts in the omelette.”

As she got up in a hurry to get dressed and go, she said she’d loved the breakfast.

“Shall I teach you to make it? It’s very easy.”

“No. I’d rather keep the omelette as a memory.”

When she came back to the kitchen, where Karim was washing the frying pan, he turned and saw her standing in front of the door, waiting for him.

He went up to kiss her and she pulled back, said she was late, and left.

He made a pot of coffee and sat down alone. He lit a cigarette and heard Nasri’s voice stealing into his ears, breaking through the barriers of cotton wool and talking of women.

“Was my mother like that?” asked Nasim.

“Don’t you dare speak your mother’s name! The mother is a sacred being, my son. I’m not talking about mothers, I’m talking about women.”

“But mothers are women too,” said Nasim.

His father nodded and didn’t reply. Then he suddenly pushed his plate aside, stood up from his chair, and said that talking to his son was a waste of time.

The father left the breakfast table and desisted from all further talk about women. Now his voice came back to Karim, who had pretended to hear nothing.

“A woman is the essence of desire. Men are just a small detail in the world of love, which has no limits. That’s why I’m amazed when men come to me and ask for restoratives, because they won’t do any good. The real man is the one who makes the woman feel he’s a man, end of story.”

“How exactly?” asked Nasim.

“What I mean, my dear son, is that, when we speak of love we’re speaking of something magical and the magic is all in the hands of the woman. If she wants you, you’ll do fine, and if she doesn’t want you, nothing will work, because men are nothing.”

Nasri tried to explain to his son that he wasn’t talking about the urges of
early adolescence, when desire is blind and random. He was talking about love when it became the heart’s warmth and soul’s nourishment. At that point, it could only be through the woman and for her.

Nasim tried to ask him about prostitutes: “But with them it doesn’t make any difference to me and it’s not like what you say but things work fine all the same.” The father answered that that was something temporary and linked to being young. Youth was life’s little trick “because it dupes us into thinking that its exuberance is life itself when it’s only an excess of life that we have to rid ourselves of so that we can enjoy life.”

“Prostitutes,” he said, “are needed to take life’s overflow, meaning needed by men who’ve been emptied of life.”

“But you told me you went there, and you weren’t an adolescent.”

“That was just a passing mood but now it’s over. Love comes to me, and when it comes I let it come.”

“You mean you’re this old and you don’t take restoratives?”

“Never. Absolutely not.”

Nasri claimed that Sawsan’s visit to the apartment had been a mistake, but he was lying. He’d known the first time that he slept with her that she was the one, this was the woman he wanted. He’d had sex with lots of prostitutes before and had felt empty after the encounter, like a vessel whose water had been poured out onto the ground, as though the woman he was sleeping with wanted him to get it over with quickly and go. This Sawsan, though, made him feel a desire not demeaned at the moment of its ending. He took to visiting her twice a week and spending a lot of time talking with her. She
told him her story and he told her his and in the end he couldn’t leave her. On a stormy Saturday night, with the rain pelting down, he entered her room in the souk and began to talk. He ordered a bottle of wine and said that that night he wanted her
skarsa
, for the whole night, and that he was ready to pay. That was the night of his insane decision. He slept wrapped around her fragile white body and whispered that he wanted to marry her. She laughed, patted him on the back, and told him to go to sleep. He sat up in the bed, lit a cigarette, said he wasn’t joking, and repeated his declaration. She said she didn’t believe him and it was impossible. He told her he’d made his mind up and was inviting her to come to his home on Monday to meet his sons. Things didn’t work out well though. Sawsan made the mistake of coming as she was, with her fingernails painted violet, in her short dress that showed off her thighs, and with mascara smudges around her eyes.

Nasri told her he couldn’t, for the boys’ sake. She said she’d expected as much. He said he loved her and would never stop loving her.

It all fell apart though. Sawsan changed and turned back into a prostitute like the rest and the fire was extinguished. With the extinction of Sawsan’s eyes and her body Nasri realized his love wouldn’t be able to rescue him from the abyss of his sense of worthlessness and impotence. When Sawsan dropped the reins of desire, love fell by the wayside and the man could no longer save the situation. What confused him was that Sawsan’s phantom never stopped making him burn with desire and longing, but when he went to her and got close to the indifferent body lying on the bed he was extinguished and felt impotent. At first Sawsan would try but her mechanical efforts were no use. Then she’d burst into laughter and say, “You’d better change, sweetie. It looks like it’s over. The spark’s gone. It’s a good thing we didn’t get married because it would have been a mess.”

He tried to tell her he didn’t know what was going on but he wanted her. When he started to lose confidence in himself he decided he’d change
partners, and it was okay, but his thirst for women’s bodies only got worse, and it was this that would lead him to come up with the Green Potion.

Nasri didn’t tell his children what had happened with Sawsan. The prostitute’s visit became taboo, never to be talked about, as though it had never happened. Despite this Nasim had a different opinion and he used Sawsan, who never left his memory, to justify his flight from home and failure at school.

“Did you sleep with Sawsan?” Karim asked him.

“I told you, she was the one who got me work at the shawarma and bean restaurant, with Boss Nakhleh Kafouri.”

“So you slept with her.”

“But it wasn’t important. She told me I reminded her of Nasri and she believed my story and got me work and it was fine.”

Nasim’s flight, which lasted a week, changed Karim’s life because he still felt so guilty three years later that he felt compelled to impersonate his brother in the government exams, and if he hadn’t, Nasim would never have got into the Faculty of Pharmacy at Beirut’s Jesuit university.

Sawsan turned the family’s life upside down and transformed Nasri into a wolf – which is how Karim described his father when he told Bernadette about the man’s loneliness, wolfishness, and alienation.

His Greek experience changed Karim greatly. After that he decided to keep clear of his brother’s way of life because he’d discovered that Nasim wasn’t his mirror, and he began to construct his own emotional life. When his Greek instructress got sick he stopped going to the souk and started secret affairs with girls, which reached their peak with his love for Hend. Even that, which he’d hoped would remain a secret, almost turned into scandal. One day Nasim came to him and said he fancied Salma’s only daughter.

When Nasim mentioned Hend to his brother, Karim turned pale and said nothing. “It looks like there’s something going on I don’t know about,” said Nasim, and he turned to his brother, patted him on his shoulder, and told him it didn’t matter. “Don’t get upset. There are more girls than you can shake a stick at. It’s good I didn’t get any more involved with her than that.”

Karim didn’t ask his brother how deeply he had been involved with her, just as he didn’t ask Hend, and he forgot about the whole thing.

Fate, however, had something else in mind.

It was only in Beirut that Karim heard the story of how his father, the pharmacist Nasri Shammas, had died, and it was Hend who told him.

Nasim and Hend had come to see him on New Year’s morning, bringing a breakfast of manaqish and kenafeh-with-cheese. They’d begun eating when the phone rang. Nasim picked up the receiver, his face turned pale, and he said he had to leave.

Hend stood up to go with her husband, but Nasim asked her to stay. Karim and Hend finished their breakfast in silence, he gazing into space, she looking at the ground. The sound of chewing rang in his ears and he felt he’d lost the power of speech.

He was afraid Hend would revisit the story of their former love, as she had when she’d visited him during the first days of his stay in Beirut. Ghazala had been mopping the living room floor and Karim was wearing his pajamas, sitting at his desk sipping coffee and feeling an irresistible desire for the woman. He dressed quickly and received his brother’s wife in the living room, from which the large carpet that covered the now damp tiles had been removed, leaving everything gleaming with water.

They went to Paul’s restaurant nearby and Hend began to talk. He wanted the meeting to end quickly, before Ghazala could leave. Listening
to Hend, he felt he was seeing his life through the veil of tears that covered the face of this woman who didn’t drink a single drop of the espresso that had been placed in front of her. But his desire for Ghazala had taken such control of him that he was incapable of concentrating, and this gave her an impression he hadn’t intended to convey.

When he got up to pay the bill and leave, Hend put out her hand and took hold of his. He left his hand in the soft outstretched hand and no longer knew in what direction desire was taking him.

Hend didn’t speak on that occasion of the love that had fallen into oblivion, she spoke of her disappointment. She asked him if he knew his brother well because she’d discovered after they got married that she did not. She said she’d been surprised to find that after a month of marriage the man had changed utterly and she’d felt she’d fallen into a trap.

“At first he was like you. I swear he was like you down to the last detail. He’d soften his voice and hang his head when he spoke of love as though he was you. I felt as though I’d known him for ages. I don’t know how I came to accept his invitation to a cup of coffee. He said there was something important he wanted to talk to me about and I felt a kind of drowsiness come over me. From the first moment I felt as though the love story I’d lived with you might go on. I felt as though God was maybe going to pull me up from the bottom of the well into which you’d shoved me, and I couldn’t refuse. He made me an offer I couldn’t refuse, and I accepted.”

Karim said it had nothing to do with him. “You’re one of the family now and you should think of me as your brother.”

“My brother!” she said, and smiled bitterly.

She spoke, and Karim felt as though he wasn’t there. A white cloud covered his eyes – he felt as though he had cataracts. He saw Nasri in front of him, describing the milky whiteness that had invaded his eyes. He called it “the blue water” and said he hated that name and didn’t know why people
had come up with a name that didn’t refer to anything real: the blue was just an illusion because all one sees is white. And he said if the operation wasn’t a success he’d commit suicide. He asked Nasim to put a poison pill in his drawer: “Afterward you can say what you like, but blindness means suicide. Nasri isn’t going to live a single second as a blind man. Got it, you assholes?”

Nasri was sixty years old when the milky color started to take over his left eye. He realized from the first moment that he was going to have to face it and there was no alternative to an operation. This man, who had spent his whole life treating people and prescribing treatments and who had conducted himself before his patients like a god, was terror-stricken by the idea of having to undergo a surgery. He’d treated himself with herbs, diets, and combinations of medicines, and these, he was convinced, suited his body, but he’d never got involved with two things: the eyes and diseases of the prostate. Faced by cases of this sort he’d stand in front of his patients like an idiot, raise his thick white-streaked eyebrows, and advise a visit to the doctor. The pharmacist, who despised doctors and said they were no more than fungi growing on the tips of the tree of chemistry fashioned by pharmacists, would, when faced with the mysteries of the eye and before the terrible spectre of diseases of the prostate that afflict men with sterility, lose his cunning, swallow his words, and advise his patients to visit a doctor.