Broken Mirrors (5 page)

The brothers had come home from school to find their father sitting in front of a woman. They pulled back to get away from the strange smell but Nasri ordered them to come forward and shake hands with Tante Sawsan, as he called her.

The brothers never mentioned the matter again, as though it had been erased, and Nasim’s tears and Karim’s silence and sudden dumbness along
with it. When Karim listened to the story of his father’s death, though, the smell came back, he could see before his eyes the bulging thighs, red-painted lips, and long violet-colored nails, and he believed the story.

“You mean Father didn’t slip, the way you told me over the phone?” asked Karim. And when he found out that his father hadn’t died quickly but had been taken to the hospital where the doctors diagnosed a small crack in the skull and internal bleeding caused by his fall, he’d felt afraid. Nasri took six days to die and opened his eyes only once, for a few moments.

“I was standing next to him, holding his hand, and he opened his eyes. He saw me, his hand let go of mine, and he closed them again. Then two days later he died.”

“Did he recognize you?” asked Karim.

“I don’t know,” his brother replied.

“Maybe he thought you were me,” said Karim.

It was a habit of Nasri’s deliberately to get the names of the two brothers wrong. He’d call out to one of them using the other’s name and when the boy got angry the father would roar with laughter and apologize and say it was going to be hard for women in the future.

When his brother called to tell him of their father’s death, Karim had been struck dumb. He replaced the receiver and put his head between his hands, preparing to weep, but the tears hadn’t flowed. A lump had stuck in his throat and choked him and he’d felt he was being throttled. Against habit, he went home at noon. Bernadette asked what was wrong and he didn’t answer. He stood up, opened a bottle of wine, started drinking, and told his wife he was hungry. He ate a huge amount of spaghetti and basil and drank two bottles of red wine. Eating the spaghetti he thought of ox cheek. Talal, a Lebanese youth who had come to France to study cinema, had told him about this amazing dish when they were in some bar. He said that a friend of his father’s from Damascus who was living in Paris, and who called
himself Zeryab, cooked the tastiest French dishes and had invited him to taste ox cheek. He said the flesh melted in the mouth even as the tongue savored the fragrance of the spices. Karim ate the spaghetti and thought of ox cheek; in fact, he might go so far as to say now that at that moment he could see the ox in front of him and had been ready to attack it, rip it to pieces. That was the day he discovered that death stimulates the appetite. He told his wife that Man is a cruel and trivial being because he believes he can overcome death by eating. Then he burst into tears and told Bernadette he didn’t believe Nasri was dead because the man could never die; how was he to explain to her that he’d been convinced his father would never die because he had no soul? All his life he’d felt quite comfortable with this idea, which had struck him long ago, only for him to discover its fragility at the moment of the old man’s death.

The brothers were sure their father would never die: he’d told them as much himself. Karim didn’t know when his father had spoken those words, but he knew they were a part of his life, as though he’d been born with them. In all probability Nasri had said what he had to his sons to reassure them. The boys had been terrified by the death of the father of a boy at school. They hadn’t talked about it but had been unable to sleep; their dreams had become more like waking fantasies and they’d stopped being able to recount what they dreamed.

They used to tell their father their dreams to entertain him. Nasri believed that sleep was a person’s window onto the soul, so he trained his sons to remember their dreams and the boys were expected to make up shared dreams. Things got mixed up in Karim’s mind because he no longer knew how dreams ought to be told. Usually, his brother began and he interrupted Nasim to tell his own stories, but soon he’d find himself following the course of his brother’s dream. Did the twins see the same dreams?

Though, in fact, they weren’t twins. It was their father who’d turned
them into twins and imposed on them the illusion that they resembled one another in everything, in so doing leaving his fingerprints on every aspect of their future lives.

The two children were terrified when the father of one of the students at the Frères School died unexpectedly of a heart attack. They came home from school with the signs of panic sketched in their eyes, but Nasri noticed nothing. He was sitting in the living room sipping coffee and smoking, and sitting next to him was Tante Sawsan. The woman’s nails were painted a bright violet and there were smears of lipstick on the butt of her cigarette. Her voice was loud and hard and her eyes looked droopy because the mascara had run. Nasri was looking at her, his smile swaying to the swaying of her face as he sank into the thick smoke from her cigarette. He saw his sons were in the apartment though he hadn’t noticed their arrival. He asked them to come up to the woman, who kissed them, leaving on them a smell of sweat mixed with a cloying perfume. When the boys had arrived home at four p.m. they’d been surprised to see movement in the living room. Usually the apartment was empty, their father at the shop, the windows closed, and there’d be a smell of the disinfectants with which the pharmacist cleaned the apartment for fear of germs. That sunny spring day in April, however, they’d found the windows open and smelled a strange smell. Their father went off with the woman, leaving them on their own, and when he returned at nine p.m. the apartment was in darkness and the boys were in bed. He heard a strange sound in their room, went in on tiptoe without turning on the light, and found them crying. He went up to them and they pretended to be asleep. He shook them and tried to wake them up, and their crying stopped. But they never showed they were awake. The next morning, as they were eating fried eggs, he asked them what they’d been dreaming about, but they didn’t answer. When he insisted and looked at Nasim, who as a child had provided the weak point through which the
pharmacist could force himself into the life of his sons, the boy burst into tears and asked his father not to die.

That morning Nasri promised his sons he wouldn’t die. He told them he would stay with them and never leave them.

“We don’t want that woman who was with you yesterday,” said Nasim, crying.

“Okay,” said Nasri. “Forgive me. I was abandoned for a moment. God abandoned me and put me in the way of that whore.”

“What’s a whore?” asked Nasim.

“You’re still young. Shut up and don’t ask questions!” yelled Karim.

The boys decided to believe Nasri, but Sawsan’s shadow continued to haunt the apartment, even creeping into their dreams, and the name of the woman with the violet nails stayed with them a long time.

When Nasim told his brother about the first time he had sex with a prostitute in the souk, he said he’d “sawsanned” to the singing of Mohamed Abd el-Wahhab emerging from a large wooden wireless set on the prostitute’s bedside table; she’d opened her legs, yawned, and fallen into a doze.

“Was her name really Sawsan?” asked Karim.

“Sawsan’s something else. I’m telling you how I got on. I was sawsanning her and everything was going fine but when I told her how nice sawsanning was she started to laugh and you know what happens if someone laughs and you’re inside them.”

“I don’t know and I don’t want to know,” said Karim.

“You’re an idiot and you always will be an idiot about women. The only way to learn, you ass, is from whores, because if you don’t start practicing now, the women will laugh at you and you’ll have a headache all your life from the horns.”

When Nasim had told his brother he was an idiot, he was referring to his relationship with Hend. Nasim took back his words when he found his
brother was having an affair with the brown-skinned girl. In truth, though, there was nothing to take back as matters hadn’t gone any further between them than smiles when she’d come to the pharmacist’s with her mother. Nasim had said to his brother jokingly that perhaps she’d love both of them at the same time, then noticed the anger on his brother’s face and said, “No, I was just joking, don’t take it so hard. But I have to take you to the souk so you can get some practice on the women there.”

Karim couldn’t get Sawsan out of his mind. He saw the image of his father mixed up with weird sexual dreams. Karim hadn’t admitted to his brother that the first ejaculation of his life had been a result of one of those dreams, but Nasim had known with a twin’s intuition that Sawsan’s nights moistened his brother’s too with the smell of manhood.

Nasri had told his sons not to be afraid as he was never going to die. Karim believed his father, and the business became linked to a strange concep​tualiza​tion that had taken shape in his mind via some process he couldn’t understand. He grew convinced his father wouldn’t die because the man had no soul. His father, with his white hair, was a mass of taut nerves and muscles. The pharmacist continued to run and swim up to his death at the age of seventy-six: he was thin and had firm muscles – unlike his sons, who tended to be slightly overweight and had problems with their health. Karim got stomachaches and Nasim carried from his childhood the burden of asthma, which, he reckoned, was the result of genetic factors inherited from their mother. She, who had died when the twins were five, had passed on to them the whiteness of her skin, her straight back, and her poor health. The dark-skinned father with the crown of white hair looked at his sons in sorrow and asked himself what relation they bore to him: “It’s like you weren’t my children. I swear I have no idea where your mother got you from.” Nasim overcame the asthma when he was twelve and started to swim, but poor health continued to dog his elder brother.

Karim had told his brother that their father had no soul and would, therefore, never die, since, for a person to die, the soul has to leave the body. Nasri, though, was a body without a soul, one that held itself together on its own, as uniform in its consistency as something cast out of brown mud and then baked in the sun.

When Karim had picked up the receiver in Montpellier and heard his brother’s voice recounting the news, he’d seen, as clearly as though it were taking place before his eyes, a strange scene: his father falling to the ground and breaking up into pieces like a child’s doll, the limbs and parts all becoming detached. He’d knelt down to pick up the pieces and put them together again, and every time he touched one it had turned into sticky clay. Had the dream come from the sense of exile and loneliness he’d felt when his brother told him their father had died and that there was no need to come to Beirut because they’d already buried him? Or was it a fantasy, a picture created by the poor connection and the crackling that had obscured his brother’s voice?

“Why didn’t you tell me so that I could come to the burial?” Karim had asked angrily.

“I couldn’t get a line. Have you forgotten where we are? It’s the war’s fault. Anyway, don’t take on. We all die someday. What matters is that the man didn’t suffer.”

Karim now understood why his brother’s voice had been neutral, even indifferent. Now, in the Beirut to which the dermatologist had returned, leaving France to smell once more the scent of ground coffee mixed with apples, he understood that the father who had slipped in his son Nasim’s living room had committed his last crime at the moment of his death, and that the man had lived his whole life for Sawsan.

Sawsan was the name the brothers gave to having sex, and the woman
with the dirty violet fingernails occupied a large area of the private language that they hadn’t stopped using. When Karim decided to emigrate, his brother had asked, “What are we going to tell Hend about Sawsan?” and Karim had given him an angry look and asked him not to mix Hend up in things of that kind.

“What, you haven’t done any Sawsan together?”

“Of course not. Are you crazy?”

“You mean you love her without having …?”

“It’s none of your business.”

“You must be lying. You can’t think I’m so stupid I’d believe you.”

He hadn’t got as far as Sawsan with Hend. Throughout the four years, they’d played around at the edges of sex, which was why he didn’t feel guilty when he decided to go to France. He’d spoken to Bernadette of fear. He’d told her that the war had taught him that fear makes an empty space in one’s heart. He’d told her that the fear which hits you in the knees is only a beginning and not to be compared with the deep fear that grips the rib cage and makes holes in the heart.

He hadn’t been able to explain to Hend the fear that had made him lose all his feelings for her and everything else in Beirut, and think of nothing but escape. He’d wanted to leave so that he could find his heart again and learn to breathe once more.

He’d told his French wife he was going to Beirut just to take a look, promising he’d leave the final decision to her. Bernadette didn’t believe him. She said he was a liar, like all Lebanese. She also said it had amazed her to discover that the Lebanese lie without realizing they’re lying; they lie and believe themselves, and then proceed to act in accordance with their lies. She said she couldn’t tell fact from fiction in her husband’s stories and then was even more taken aback by his reaction. He’d laughed and said, “You’re right
mais c’est pas grave
.” How was he to explain to her that
nothing was
grave
except the grave, meaning death, and that the rest was “all soap”? When she heard his translations of Lebanese proverbs, she’d scowl and get angry and ask him not to talk to her about soap or speak of “slipping people up.”

She’d been right to do so. He’d kept going on about soap till his father had slipped and died and now he had no choice but to go back to France. He thought of telling her, when he got back to his home there, that it was the soap that had decided everything, and he smiled. Then he seemed to see her scowl, which devoured her face until there was nothing of it left but her long reddish nose.