Broken Mirrors (12 page)

“So did he make a Greek philosopher out of you or not?”

“Of course not! What a thing to say!”

“I’m going to make an honest-to-goodness philosopher out of you and I’m going to use a Greek lady professor too!”

Nasim said that “if it weren’t for Madam Athena’s patience and experience we would have been in trouble.” He said he’d asked Uzun the Turk for advice and she’d suggested the Greek because “a case like your brother’s needs a woman with real experience or the kid will be lost.”

“And when I took you to Madam Athena’s and saw how you turned red as a beetroot and your voice stopped coming out, I was scared to death. But the lady was terrific. She was patient as an angel with you and everything went okay.”

The parting of the ways between the two brothers began when they were sixteen. At first they were like stand-ins for one another: that was how Karim explained his relationship with his brother to Bernadette. Nasim would live out his naughtiness and tell his brother about it and Karim would live out his life of books and take his brother into the worlds of the heroes
of novels. “We were like one person divided into two,” he said, “till I discovered that I wasn’t living my own life. That happened when Nasim came and told me he’d been to the souk and slept with a prostitute. He advised me to stop masturbating and said, laughing, that the entrance to life was via the vagina and that women possessed something insatiable and only a real man could quench it. He invited me to go with him but I was afraid. At the beginning I made out it wasn’t allowed and said it was a sin and dishonorable for a man to buy something beyond price. I said that love couldn’t be bought or sold. My brother laughed and explained that he wasn’t talking about love but about sex: ‘That’s one thing and this is another, old man.’ I could do nothing faced with a woman of forty. I saw her there in front of me, naked, with her big breasts and her curves. She came up to me, took my hand, and put it on her breast, and I felt paralyzed and broke into a cold sweat. The sweat spread, making patches on my clothes, and I wanted to get out of the place. The sweat clouded my view like tears. It was salty like tears but its salt was acrid. At that point the Greek woman took me by the hand and led me into the bathroom. She filled the tub with hot water topped with soap bubbles that smelled of orange blossom. She ordered me to take off my clothes and put me in the water. She closed my eyes and I felt as though the mountain that had been crushing my chest had been lifted off me and the buoyancy of the water got to work – a silken hand massaged my body and I rose upward to embrace desire. I don’t know what happened but later I found myself in the bed, drinking in the gasps of that woman who made me taste the flavor of life.”

He told Bernadette, the first time he slept with her after they were married, that he wanted to drink the air she breathed. She didn’t understand. “Drink the air! What kind of metaphor is that?”

He tried to explain to her that words must enclose meaning so that the meaning can keep its meaning, and that in spoken Arabic they don’t say, “I
want to smoke a cigarette,” but, “I want to drink a cigarette,” so the tobacco melts in the mouth and imparts to it the flavor of the plant.

“All that smoking imparts to the mouth is a nasty smell and in the meantime it destroys your lungs,” she said. “Also, I don’t like having to play with water every time we make love. Love’s one thing and taking a shower is another.”

Karim had made a great mistake in telling her the story of the Greek woman. Lovers only become aware of their mistakes when it’s too late. In the early days, though, buoyed by desire, they rush into reckless talk and tell stories that shouldn’t be told. Stories aren’t to be thrown around without regard for their significance, or they become absurd. He told Bernadette of the family’s decision to take him to the prostitutes’ quarter because of their fear of the priest’s fondness for him, and he talked to her about the woman whom he’d persisted in seeing until the end, meaning until she told him, “That’s it, son. I’m old enough to be your mother. And it won’t do anymore, I’m very sick.” Two days later they took the woman to the hospital because of a clot on the lungs and she died there a week later.

“
Tu es un homosexuel latent
,” said Bernadette.

Karim told Bernadette that he used to visit her twice a day during that last week.

“So you were in love with her.”

“That’s what Father and my brother thought, but it’s not true.”

“That week, she used to call me ‘son’ and I called her ‘mother.’ ”

“It looks as though until I rescued you from your drunkenness at the bar and brought you back to your place you’d never made love to anyone but prostitutes.”

He didn’t tell her about Hend out of fear that he’d find himself caught up in the story of Salma, and he was right not to: had he told her, Bernadette
would have thought he was going to Beirut because of his former sweetheart and never have believed he was going to look for Sinalcol.

In any case, his French wife didn’t believe the business about Sinalcol. What Karim had told her when, drunk in the bar, he’d given himself that name wasn’t the truth. He had in fact adopted the mocking nickname given to him by the youths of Tripoli because, in the character of that mysterious man whom he’d never met, he’d seen his double and his mirror.

When Karim emerged from the Greek bath and found his brother waiting for him, he was dumbstruck: he discovered that his brother resembled him only in being a larger, coarser, version of himself. The same features, a circular whiteness forming the face, a large nose, thick lips, honey-colored eyes. Nasim was taller, his chest muscles rippled under his shirt because he swam, his nose was slightly crooked and larger than his brother’s, and his little pot belly, which would get larger with time, gave him a touch of manliness that Karim lacked. The fundamental difference between the two brothers lay in their eyebrows. Karim’s were long and thin, his brother’s short and thick.

“Like a woman’s,” his brother said.

“What pretty eyebrows!” Brother Eugène had said as he put his hand on his clever student’s head and brought his fingers down to the full lips.

“Do you pluck your eyebrows?” the Greek madam had asked, once she’d succeeded in untying his tongue.

Karim came to hate his eyebrows and wanted them to change so that people would stop telling him his face was pretty as a girl’s. His brother told him that the best way to make hair grow was to put chicken droppings on it. The boy, who was then ten, believed his brother and took to slipping into the garden of the sisters Marie and Angèle Shartouni every evening,
entering the coop and looking for chicken droppings to put on his eyebrows before going to sleep.

When the sisters came to the pharmacy and complained that Karim was stealing eggs from their coop, the father roared with laughter and said, “That’s impossible! My son hates eggs. I force him to eat eggs in the morning against his will and now you come along and tell me he’s stealing your hens’ eggs! My dear ladies, we give eggs away!”

At first Nasri couldn’t understand the reason for the bad smell given off by his older son. He went into the sleeping boys’ room and the smell hit him in the face. He bent over Karim and smelled shit. He shook him hard but the young boy refused to open his eyes, so he turned on the light and screamed. Nasim woke up at the noise but Karim turned over, pretending to be asleep.

“What’s that smell?” yelled the father.

Nasim burst out laughing and told his father the story.

“Get up, you idiot. I thought you were more intelligent than that. Your younger brother’s played a trick on you and made you put shit on your eyebrows. Ride the rooster and see where it takes you!”

The next morning Nasri explained to his elder son that long thin eyebrows were a sign of beauty: “Don’t you believe any of that stuff, my boy! Women pluck their hair and go through hell to make their eyebrows nice. Princes have eyebrows like that and you’re a prince and the son of a prince.”

“But what does ‘ride the rooster’ mean?” asked Karim.

“You’ll find out for yourself soon enough, when you grow up.”

It was only later, in Montpellier, that Karim would become convinced of what his father had said, when Bernadette told him, on the morning of their first encounter, that his eyebrows were beautiful and that when she’d seen him beneath the tequila woman’s breasts it was his long eyebrows, soaked with alcohol and salt, that had bewitched her.

The two spinster sisters wouldn’t drink the pharmacist’s potion until years later, when the story of their hysteria came to be on the lips and tongues of all, and they were the rooster that Nasri rode, compelling him to give them a stupefying potion to put an end to a scandal that destroyed his reputation.

Salma’s story wasn’t as straight​forward as Nasri would have told it, had he told it, but once Salma withdrew from his life the man, who had been feeling he was starting to get old and that his body was beginning to betray him, collapsed. The scandal of the two elderly women wasn’t the cause because it was still in his power to turn their tragedy into a joke. Indeed, the man treated even the Lebanese Civil War as a comic phenomenon. When the discussions that took place at the Gemmeizeh Café among the backgammon players grew heated, he used the word “comedy” again and again to describe his country. “Lebanon is death’s comedy. There isn’t another people in the world that has turned everything it holds holy into farce the way we have. Even death makes us laugh now. Laugh, brothers, because nothing ever ends in this country. Whatever goes comes back and if it doesn’t its ghost comes back. Laugh so I can have a laugh too!”

The story of the two spinster sisters would have made for good comedy but it cost Nasri his mocking wit and was the beginning of his descent into melancholy, where he would remain until he died.

The problem the twins had with their father was that throughout his life the man never stopped proclaiming his good opinion of himself, and it was the brothers’ duty to listen to his theories and show their astonishment so that he didn’t get upset and start scowling.

After the Greek bath that proved to the father that his firstborn son had escaped the perils of the priests, he began to expatiate at the breakfast table on matters of sex and the erotic sciences and boast of his being one of the leading experts on the chemistry of the relationship between body and soul.

He’d devour two fried eggs every morning because he’d found a permanent cure for cholesterol in the herbs that he distilled in his alembic. Nasri had made the breakfast table, on which he’d set out labneh, cheese, olives, and innumerable kinds of jam, the main locus for the exercise of his authority over his sons, starting with his theory that from the medical point of view breakfast ought to be the main meal of the day for anyone who wanted to keep healthy.

Surrounded by his boys’ dislike of the smell of fried eggs and their unwillingness to eat, he would turn this morning encounter into a playing field for his ideas and those essential lessons, drawn from his life experience, from which he wanted his sons to benefit.

Karim decided to ignore his father’s lessons, which he considered banal. He’d succeeded in training himself to shut his ears and listen to the silence. It was no use just to think about other things during his father’s lectures: Nasri was a master at jumping from one topic to another to pique his sons’ curiosity. As a result, Karim had discovered what he called “secret cotton wool.” As soon as his father began to speak, he’d plant invisible cotton wool in his ears to block out the sound. To the rhythm of the silence he’d eat the labneh dipped in oil and entertain himself by observing his father’s inaudible enthusiasms.

All the same, what had stuck in his ears was enough to make him hate himself in France, especially when he began to hear the echo of his father’s voice in his own and see how he had involuntarily adopted many of his father’s rituals and theories.

When Hend told him how his father had died and his brother later angrily corrected her version, he’d understood that both versions were lies, but the subject didn’t interest him. He’d felt he was in danger of becoming a dupe like his mother, and that even in death his father was capable of devouring everyone around him.

It wasn’t true that he’d left Hend after seeing the contents of the drawer that his younger brother had opened onto hell. On the eve of his departure for France he’d thought it was the reason, but now, back in Beirut and listening to the story of his father’s death, he was no longer certain of anything. As soon as he’d arrived in Beirut, at the moment he’d found himself in his brother’s home eating kibbeh nayyeh and seen Salma swathed in black, the pictures in the drawer and the window onto his father’s sex life with which they had provided him, with the Shefa Pharmacy as backdrop, had come back. He could see himself at that moment, standing next to his brother, who had managed to steal the key to the secret drawer, and the drawer opening before his eyes to reveal those terrible pictures in which Salma appeared in unbelievable positions. The pictures were part of an album that brought together a number of the women who had fallen victim to Nasri’s amazing Green Potion.

“Just look at Salma! What a fucking beauty! If I’d been in your place, I’d have had the mother and daughter together,” said Nasim, laughing.

Karim’s throat was dry and he couldn’t respond. He tried to swallow but could find no saliva in his mouth. He could feel thorns sprouting in his gullet as he set upon the pictures, trying to tear them up.

His brother pushed him away from the drawer and said, “You’re a fool. All that intelligence and medicine and multiplication and division, but you’re still an idiot, pretending like you didn’t know. Everyone used to see Mrs. Salma going to the pharmacist’s all hot to trot and coming out glowing. What’s the big deal? I just wanted you to have a laugh. Now you’ve seen what that shit does to women – but I want to ask him how he persuaded them to be photographed. Can you imagine the scene? What a mess! There’s Salma …”

“Shut up! You and your father are both shits. I want to get out of this house.”