Broken Mirrors (14 page)

But he couldn’t swallow his eldest son’s decision to study medicine and he never forgave him. “You, the one I’ve been depending on to complete me and complete my mission, you, the clever one Brother Eugène used to adore because you were so exceptionally intelligent when it came to maths and chemistry – you want to abandon me? Who am I going to leave the pharmacy to? Your dumb brother who’s a dunce at everything? I swear I’ll never forgive you. You’re not my son.”

“But, Father, pharmacists can’t work without doctors.”

“That’s what they want you to think but you know it’s just nonsense.”

When Nasri uttered these words he wasn’t telling the truth. In fact he thought this son of his, so clever at school, was a fool when it came to the practicalities of life and believed his younger brother, sharp as a tack, could take his herbal mission forward properly. He just wished he could merge his two sons into one. “It’s like I’d been sliced in two,” he told his adolescent sons as they discussed how Karim would present himself using the name of his younger brother at the entrance examinations for the Faculty of Pharmacy at the Jesuit university.

Nasri’s dreams about his two sons were ambiguous and confused but the image he wanted to remember – even though he wasn’t certain he’d actually seen it in a dream – was that of a youth with one body and two heads. The features of the two faces were so close as to be identical; the problem lay in the eyes. The eyes were closed and surrounded by circles of darkness. Faced with this dream, Nasri found himself incapable of waking from sleep, even though he knew this double visage only visited him just as dawn was breaking and that it was enough for him to open his eyes for the image, which hurt them and held him immobile in his bed, to dissolve.

Nasri told Salma his greatest disappointment was his two boys. They were drinking coffee on Nasim’s balcony, after he had married Hend. The houseplants he’d given his son were bright, large, and green. He talked to her of basil because he knew she was fond of it and used it in innumerable dishes.

“See that basil, Salma? It’s all my own work!” he said, laughing.

“Your son will kill you if you pull that dirty trick on Hend. Be careful!”

“Don’t worry, Salma. Does anyone kill his own? I go personally once a week and apply the potion. Those games are over now. But it was kind of a nice game and I can still taste it on my tongue.”

The woman’s face seemed to close and Nasri saw the sorrow and realized
she had locked a door and there was nothing he could say. He wanted to tell her that he’d repudiated those days, that what was left of the era of the green fluid was the memory of what he’d had with her, and that today he wanted her as the companion of his last days, as his sweetheart. Nasri had no idea from where such salvation and tenderness had suddenly descended upon him but he was honest to the point of embarrassment in talking about them. All he would ever remember of this meeting was that word; he’d felt the
embarrassment
of salvation and discovered that his love for his sick wife and his affection for her still slept in some secret part of his soul, and that Salma could now occupy that place. Salma was fated never to believe him, not because he was lying but because he was incapable of believing himself and because there were dozens of reasons to make her doubt his words, especially after the scandal of the two elderly spinsters.

Salma had told Nasim it wouldn’t do. The woman had no idea where she’d found the courage to say this. First she spoke to her daughter and asked her to ask her husband to take his father in hand. Hend’s answer was that she wouldn’t get between her husband and his father.

“I’ve got enough problems, Mother.”

“Why? Your husband too?”

“Please. Don’t make me say anything, it’ll be better for us both.”

Salma found herself talking to her son-in-law. She knew he knew what had happened between her and his father but she screwed up her courage and spoke. The man’s face turned pale and he left his apartment in a fury and didn’t return that night. Did Nasim really not know about the business with the two sisters, which was common knowledge? Or was he just pretending in front of his mother-in-law? Or was he angry at the impudence of this woman who knew he knew what had happened between her and his father but had the effrontery to talk of virtue?

The next morning he phoned his wife and told her to stop worrying and asked her not to ask him what had happened but to ask her mother.

Nasri was sitting on the balcony contemplating the green leaves and watching his three little grandsons, Nadim, Nasri, and Bashir, who were playing under their grandmother’s supervision. He hated his grandsons. Well, that wasn’t the right word, but he felt slighted because Nasim hadn’t given his eldest son his name. He hadn’t said anything, not having given his own eldest son his father’s name. He’d been right, though. How could he have named his eldest son Georges after the man who’d squandered the family’s wealth and spent his life at the gambling table, compelling his eldest son to go to work when he was twelve so he could guarantee his school fees? “But I’m not Georges. I’m his opposite. I didn’t die of diabetes like Father, I dedicated my life to those bastards and didn’t remarry when their mother died.” Suddenly he saw Nasim’s finger approaching his face. Salma had withdrawn with the children indoors and Nasri found himself looking into his son’s face, sclerotic with fury, and at his wagging index finger.

He was struck dumb that day and saw the spectre of the end. He could find nothing to say because he felt as though the wall with which he’d fenced off his life had collapsed. He believed a person built a wall around himself and this wall fell apart at the moment of death, when one could no longer control oneself and therefore lost all dignity, the smell spreading everywhere. On his son’s finger, pregnant with threat, he smelled his demise and he felt the need to get to the bathroom as he could no longer hold himself in.

Nasri ran to the bathroom but lost his way and saw everything wreathed in milky white, as though “the blue water” had returned to fill his eyes. He wanted to tell his son everything but couldn’t speak. The words rained down as tears and he went staggering toward the bathroom, closed the door, and instead of urinating wept and smelled the smell of his tears.

From that moment Nasri decided to cut off all contact with his son. He
shut himself up in his apartment, stopped going to the shop, and remained alone waiting for the angel of death.

His defeat was not on account of Nasim’s finger. He was used to his son’s abuse and when the Prodigal Son, as he called him, had hit him, he’d taken the decision to throw him out of the pharmacy. Nasri’s defeat, rather, bore the name Salma. He’d always refused to confess to the woman that he loved her. Her loving him was love enough as far as he was concerned. It wasn’t just a game of seduction and a green potion. What Salma had never told the foolish pharmacist was that what he’d thought was no more than sexual desire resulting from his magic potion was love, or something like it.

But Salma had lost her faith in love because of Nasri’s stupidity and never used the word again. Once, in fact, she chided her daughter, who’d come to her in tears over her husband’s bad behavior, and said she was so sick of the miseries of love that she’d rather she never had to use the word again because it had no meaning.

“But, Mother, you abandoned the whole world and your heart suffered agonies over your sons because of love!”

“I was an ass and maybe I still am but there’s no need for you to be like your mother.”

Salma’s love for the foolish pharmacist, who never saw life from any perspective other than that of hunger, dried up: in his feverish lovemaking with her he used only words connected with food and he made sounds like someone smacking his lips while eating, not those of someone enjoying the pleasures of love. And when she despaired of his love she threw a flask of the magic potion in his face, went rigid on the couch that they used as a bed in the back room of the pharmacy, and watched him fall apart.

He had come to her with words of love after the scandal of the Shartouni sisters. Salma had taken the women to the hospital and told the doctor the reason for the fit of nerves that had afflicted them, and which had made
them go out into the street naked. The doctor said a case should be brought against the pharmacist, his license revoked and the fellow thrown in jail, but Salma refused to give him his name.

Nasri told Hend he was done for and had lost his will to live. He said Nasim had murdered him “and it’s not the first time but this time I can’t take it anymore. I’ve put up with a lot, my daughter, as you know.”

He began telling the same story, about how he’d thrown him out of the pharmacy because Nasim had turned it into a hashish den. “He’s not a pharmacist. You know how he got into the pharmacy faculty at the Jesuit university – I’m sure he must have told you – and he didn’t do well. His brother couldn’t take the exams for him anymore. The teachers know the students there and there’s no messing around.”

She said she knew the story because he’d told it to her numerous times; she’d come as an honest broker and wanted to invite him to Nasri’s birthday party. “It’s amazing how the boy’s growing up to look like you, he’s just like the young Nasri!”

“And him?” Nasri asked.

“He’s agreed. Just like nothing ever happened.”

And so it was, and what had been ended up as though it had never been.

Karim said he couldn’t make head nor tail of the story. They were sitting on their own, chewing their food in silence and waiting for Nasim to come back, when Hend said Nasri had neither slipped nor fallen.

“I don’t know what happened but he seemed restless. He’d sit and stand and take a sip from his coffee cup and get up and open the windows. I said, ‘Uncle, it’s cold.’ He said he was hot. I was afraid his blood pressure might have gone up. I asked him if he’d taken his medicine. He said he’d taken it but he seemed excited. His movements weren’t normal. He stood up and said he wanted to go. He pulled a cassette out of his pocket and said he wanted to play it to me. I don’t know what happened – he tripped on the
chair and was going to fall. I ran and took hold of him. He stood up and grabbed on to me. I tried to get out of his grip but couldn’t. I yelled at him to let go. His hands were like iron and he kept pulling me toward him. It seems I kicked him and he fell and his head started bleeding and he passed out. I phoned Nasim. He came and took him to the hospital and said, ‘Don’t say a word, I don’t want anyone to know what happened.’ And then he died.”

“So it was you?”

She nodded.

Karim tried to speak but a cough devoured his throat. He tried to tell Hend she’d been the hand of justice. He tried to say that justice was the great Satanic intervention in human life. Satan was the inventor of justice because of all creatures Satan alone could be just: he was both oppressed and oppressor, for justice was the other name of vengeance. His coughing obscured much of what he said and instead of speaking he choked on his words. He tried to tell her … he would try to speak, the coughing would get worse and Hend sat before him, her lips shining with the sugar syrup she’d eaten with the kenafeh, looking at the ground in silence. As his coughing got worse, she ran to the kitchen and came back with a glass of water.

This was what Hend told her mother when she went to live with her, after she decided she could bear no more humiliation in her conjugal home. When the coughing fit had passed, Karim lit a cigarette and said what she’d done was called just, but he hated justice because the just in Lebanon were the criminals given that there was no scale by which to measure life or justice.

He asked her why she’d told him.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I thought someone should know.”

“But my brother knows. You told me he asked you not to tell anyone.”

“I felt you specifically should know because you’re the real killer.”

“Me!”

“Of course you. Who else? You’re the one who put me in that situation. You took off without telling me anything and I was left stuck with this family.”

“Please don’t talk like that. It makes me feel like I’m living in a melodrama.”

“But melodramas express the truth.”

“Maybe, but they shouldn’t be turned into stories. So it was you?”

“I didn’t say that, but maybe. I don’t know what was happening to him. There was nothing I could do. I didn’t mean to push him. Perhaps I didn’t push him. I don’t know what happened. I asked Nasim and he told me, ‘Drop it. It looks like he’d been smoking hashish and there’s no point creating a scandal.’ Why did your father take drugs?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you should ask your mother.”

“My mother! What’s it got to do with my mother?”

At that moment Nasim arrived. His face was black with fury and sorrow. He looked at his brother and told him that things had gotten difficult and he’d call on him the next day and give him the bad news. Hend got up and left with her husband.

Hend told her husband she’d told his brother about his father’s death, and that was a mistake. Her mistake was not in the saying but in the timing, as Karim tried to explain when he phoned her to say goodbye.

“No, doctor!” said Hend. “No, it had nothing to do with the timing. Does any self-respecting man tell his wife she’s a whore and the daughter of a whore in front of their children?”

Karim tried to explain to her that insults shouldn’t be taken at face value and told her about his friend the Iraqi poet whom he’d met in Montpellier and who, whenever he got drunk, would delight in Lebanese insults because they were the most refined form of metaphor.

“What does metaphor mean?”

“It means making comparisons. How can I put it? It means saying one thing and meaning another. You package the words in images and the image becomes the point and the words lose their meanings.”

Karim didn’t tell Hend what had taken place during his meeting with his brother and the direct approach, devoid of any of the rules of metaphor, that Nasim had used to describe his father. He limited himself to offering advice, because a woman has no place if not next to her husband and her children.