Broken Mirrors (11 page)

Abdo closed his eyes; when the elderly man closed his eyes it meant that the conversation was over, for neither his wife nor his sons dared talk in the presence of this pantomime of sleep, during which he became another person. The whispered speech that was his means of communicating with his sons would turn into a yell, the calm that filled his face would turn into an angry flush, and in that condition he would think nothing of beating his sons or his wife. Nasri saw the closed eyes, but instead of leaving he made himself comfortable on the couch and closed his eyes too.

Two men with eyes closed, as though in a duel with the darkness, neither daring to open his eyes “out of fear of being trapped in a confrontation” from which there was no escape.

The first man opened his eyes, looked at Nasri, and whispered, “Get
up, son, there’s a good fellow. Go back to your boys and sort things out for the best.”

“Honestly, uncle, I’d like to,” said Nasri, his eyes still closed. Then he opened them, looked into the older man’s eyes, and said the boys were the problem. He tried to explain, and the older man closed his eyes again and gestured with his hand for him to stop talking. But this time Nasri didn’t stop talking, so Abdo shook himself, jumped up from his chair, and started cursing, at which point Nasri left the house.

The break didn’t come about because of the curses that rained down on the widowed pharmacist’s head but because Nasri committed an unforgivable sin in the Tibshirani family’s eyes: he tried to use Abd el-Nour Yaziji as a go-between. Abd el-Nour was the neighborhood butcher. His left leg had been severed in an accident he’d suffered as a young man when he jumped off a tram to avoid paying the five-piastre fare and found himself in a welter of blood beneath its wheels. He survived with one leg, moved around with a stick, and acquired a reputation as a good man because of his kindness to the poor, becoming, with the passing of time, a kind of headman for the neighborhood, making peace among its people and arbitrating its disputes. Everyone was confident that the only thing this forty-year-old man wanted from an ephemeral world was that it provide for his modest needs.

Abd el-Nour had never married. He told anyone who asked that he’d taken a vow of chastity following his painful accident, and that he’d meant to become a monk in any case, except he’d been prevented by his fear for and love of his aging mother. This wasn’t the whole truth, naturally, but it was – as Nasri was wont to put it – a close relative. It was rumored, though God alone knew if this was true, that he’d gone to the monastery of Mar Elias Shouweya in Dhour el-Shoueir to become a monk, but that the head of the monastery had turned him down on account of his lost leg. As the
head of the monastery pointed out, affliction by reason of impairment or physical disability was not admitted as a valid reason for donning a monk’s habit. “Go, Abd el-Nour,” the Greek head of the monastery had said, “and be a monk in society.”

The “societal monk” had not, as he claimed, forgotten the things of this world, and it was this that led to a complete break between the butcher and the pharmacist. “People are deep. No one knows what’s inside them till they produce what’s inside them, and the butcher was a dark horse,” said Nasri to his sons as he told them the story of how the family had cut its ties with both him and its grandsons.

Nasim remembered the story only vaguely. He remembered that it was he who had started the rebellion but didn’t remember the details. Karim, who was six, had burst into tears when his father informed him that Marta was going to be his mother. He remembered crying and then starting to play along with his brother’s craziness. Nasim climbed onto his bed and started jumping up and down as he cried, and Karim started jumping up and down with him. Then the younger brother picked up his pillow and started jumping with it and they started throwing the pillows, screaming the whole time.

Nasri tried to understand what was going on but was deafened by the boys’ jumping and screaming.

“Okay! I won’t marry Marta and you won’t have another mother.”

Suddenly things calmed down, the storm blew over, and the twins sat down jammed up against one another on the edge of the bed, where their tears blended with unending laughter.

“I won’t get married, but tell me why,” said Nasri.

All he could hear was the sound of the children as they choked on their tears and wiped their noses with their sleeves. He looked at Karim and asked him but instead of answering Karim looked at his younger brother.

“What is it Nasim, sweetheart? What’s the matter?”

When the father heard what the matter was, he burst out laughing.

“You don’t want me to marry Marta because she’s got big ears? That’s what’s wrong? If that’s all, then I am going to marry.”

This time the children exploded with anger and started throwing the pillows at Nasri, who heard Nasim say, “If she comes to the apartment, we’ll run away,” and Karim echo him: “It’s us or Big Ears!”

Nasri hadn’t noticed how large the earlobes were that hung down from Marta’s head. In fact, he hadn’t looked at his intended bride as a female. When he married Laure her sister hadn’t attracted his attention at all and with time, and especially with his wife’s long illness, he’d come to see her as comic. She’d come to the apartment like a whirlwind, go to her sister’s room, and immediately take hold of the patient’s wrist to see if she had a pulse, then check that she had had her medicine. Next she’d turn her attention to what needed doing in the apartment. She’d wash the clothes, clean, and cook. She rejected Nasri’s idea of getting a maid and said a maid would turn everything upside down and be a bad influence on the children. Marta became a dictator. The only time Nasri had to himself was early in the morning when he met his sons at the breakfast table while Marta closed the patient’s door and bathed her.

Nasri thought of her as a free maid while the boys thought of her as the phantom of death. What Nasri didn’t know was that Marta used her ears to scare the boys. The young woman, who had passed thirty without finding a groom, believed that by making a display of her wealth and wearing her jewelry she might attract the awaited suitor. To this end she filled her wrists with bracelets and hung an odd kind of heavy gold earring from her ears. What Marta hadn’t realized was that the earrings would stretch her earlobes, and to a comical degree. Was it because the young woman noticed the distortion that she took to wrapping a black silk shawl round herself, which she kept pulled above her neck to cover her ears? Or did she
wear the shawl because of chronic neck pain? No one knew. But Karim and Nasim were filled with terror every time their aunt took hold of a big bronze key and threatened to unlock her ears and put them inside if she heard a peep out of them.

Big ears like caves, dangling earlobes, a key, a woman, and darkness. Karim didn’t know whether the story about the earlobes was real or if he’d made it up when he saw a Nepalese exhibition in Montpellier to which the French professor had taken them to show them that human skin had been used as a cosmetic device at all periods and in all cultures. When, during his visit to Beirut, he’d tried to get corroboration from his brother’s memories, Nasim appeared to remember nothing but the jumping up and down on the bed, the throwing of pillows, and the crying. He couldn’t even remember what his aunt looked like.

“I’ve forgotten my mother. All I can remember is the photo of her that Father hung at home, as though she’d turned into a picture. When you forget the voice of someone who’s died, it’s over, and I can’t remember my mother’s voice. You want me to remember the ears of a woman whose name I wouldn’t even have thought of if it weren’t for you?”

The issue wasn’t the two brothers’ memories or the woman’s ears. It was that the butcher-monk had had his eyes set on Marta, and instead of acting in good faith as an intermediary had told everyone what was going on. All the women of the neighborhood came to know that Nasri’s boys didn’t want him to marry, and that the man wasn’t going to break his sons’ hearts just to solve the marriage problems of the Tibshirani girl with the long ears.

At this point in the story Nasri’s involvement in the matter comes to an end because Abdo Tibshirani threw him out of his house when he paid him a visit at the suggestion of the butcher who claimed to be acting as a mediator.

It all ended up with the butcher marrying the Tibshirani girl, after the
man with the missing leg succeeded in stanching the young woman’s tears and conquering her heart with sweet words. This compelled Abdo to agree to his daughter’s marriage because Marta threatened to commit suicide if she didn’t marry the butcher.

When Nasri learned of the marriage he realized that the source of the story that had made the rounds had been the butcher, and he went to him and congratulated him, laughing. But the butcher thought he was visiting him to make fun of him, so he threatened the pharmacist with his cleaver and told him never to mention Marta again.

“The world’s a great mystery,” Nasri told his sons as he related to them the story of how the Tibshirani clan had exited their small family’s life forever.

“The only thing he got out of his monkishness was the one line from the Gospel, ‘Marta, Marta, thou art troubled about many things; but one thing is needful.’ He sweet-talked the girl with that one thing till he got to do one to her himself,” he told the boys, laughing.

In this tripartite family so nearly cut off from the rest of the world the two children lived alone, growing in closeness to one another and in isolation from the rest.

The twinning relationship that had bound the boys to one another began to come apart at school. Karim differed from his younger brother in everything. Nasim was the “sly one,” as Brother Eugène, headmaster of the Frères School, called him, and the sly one was naughty, lazy, and a bully. The clever boy, on the other hand, was shy, sad, and a loner.

The clever boy did all his brother’s homework, coached him, and performed miracles to make sure he passed and wasn’t held back a year: Nasim couldn’t bear the thought that he and his brother might be in different classes. The first real crisis between the brothers occurred when Nasim
failed First Intermediary and Brother Eugène decided to make him repeat the year.

“What’s going on between you and Brother Eugène?” Nasim asked his brother derisively.

Nasim said he was going to leave school. “I’m sick of priests and the smell of incense and I can’t take the Jesuits and their whisperings anymore.”

Nasri agreed with his son. He went to see Brother Eugène and said he’d never agree to the twins being in separate classes. Brother Eugène tried to convince the man that he was ruining his son’s future.

“Karim
est un génie
, I mean your son’s a genius, and you’ll ruin his future like this. If Nasim doesn’t want to repeat, it’s up to him, and you. You can move him to any other school, but for Karim it would be a terrible thing to do. We want him.”

Nasri said that when he heard the words “we want him” he was struck with fear and decided to move both boys to another school, whatever the cost. “When those priests set their eyes on a boy, they get him.”

“What do you mean, ‘They get him’?” asked Nasim.

“I mean they sweet-talk him till they make a priest of him.”

“But I don’t want to become a priest,” said Karim. “I want to study to be a doctor.”

“No, you’re going to study pharmacy. Who else am I going to leave the shop to?”

“What about me?” asked Nasim.

“You’re going to study pharmacy too.”

“But I’m not convinced we have to change schools,” said Karim.

“I told you, I’m afraid of the priests.”

“But I told you that I’m not going to become a priest, whatever happens.”

“I’m afraid of something else,” said the father.

“I don’t understand,” said Karim.

“I do,” said Nasim, and burst out laughing.

“Shut up, boy!” Nasri yelled, and left the apartment.

Two days later Brother Eugène came to the house and informed Nasri that the school administration had agreed Nasim could move on to middle school on condition that he vowed to apply himself to his studies.

And that was how it was. Nasim agreed, but an exposure that would come close to ruining his life lay in wait for him. And when Nasim tried to escape the scandal two years later by running away from home, it was he, with his father’s connivance, who cooked up the business of the souk to save his elder brother from falling prey to the machinations of the Jesuit priest.

Did Nasri engineer the incident?

Many years later Nasim would tell his brother that his father had asked him to take his elder brother to the souk so he wouldn’t have to wonder anymore. He said their father knew Nasim went there but he’d turned a blind eye. “I remember I was coming back from there one time. It was a Saturday evening, and it was summer and hot. Father came up to me and said, ‘So how were the sports, you little prick?’ and laughed. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Good health to you! That’s how men are supposed to be.’

“I answered that I’d been at the club doing sports.

“Father burst into laughter and said, ‘Do you take me for an idiot? I saw you there! I was coming out from Uzun the Turk’s. I can see you’re a connoisseur like your father. But you have to tell me, boy, because we can’t have father and son going to the same places. That would be wrong.’

“ ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘That would be wrong,’ and I burst out laughing.”

“ ‘Take your brother,’ he told me. ‘He’s blind and doesn’t know anything. Take him before the priests get their claws into him and we lose him for good.’ ”

“You mean Father was worried about something?”

“Why? Was there something?” asked Nasim.

“No. I mean, like all the boys,” said Karim.

“You mean he fucked you?”

“Of course not! I mean, something not far off.”

Karim never told anyone what “not far off” meant. He’d put the whole thing out of his mind, as though it had never been, and when his brother insisted on knowing the details his response was just to give a small smile so that he didn’t have to say anything. “I mean it was nothing. Just talk, that was all. Stuff about the Greek philosophers and how they used to interact with their students through intimate relationships.”