Broken Mirrors (16 page)

The Tunisian woman was thirty. Brown and full, with shining eyes and a laughing, radiant face. He’d met her at a conference in support of the Palestinian cause organized by the student council at AUB. She was working for a Tunisian underground paper put out by the Trotskyites called
Perspectif
.

She gave a lecture on the Tunisian fighters during the 1948 war and mentioned a man from Sfax whose oral witness she said she had recorded and was going to publish in a book. She said he’d gone from Tunisia to Palestine on foot via Libya and the Sinai Desert. She said the Egyptian army had arrested him in Falouja and the man had spent four years in Egyptian prisons before being released and making his way back to his country. The Tunisian woman had held the audience spellbound. Karim didn’t know how he found himself next to her. It was eight p.m. and the darkness of the humid June evening was advancing down Bliss Street. She asked him to show her to a restaurant and they walked for innumerable hours on the Corniche after buying falafel sandwiches. He told her she was a free woman and she laughed. “What does free mean?” she asked. He said it meant being emancipated like the women of Europe. She said it was the Revolution that had emancipated her. By the time they got to the Inter​continental Hotel in the Rawsheh district he’d taken her hand. When they reached the hotel entrance and it seemed that Karim was determined to go up with her to her room she said she was tired and he was still too young for such things.

He invited her to lunch the next day. She said she would accept his invitation on condition that he took her to his family home because she wanted
to eat home-cooked Lebanese food, and, “Don’t forget, we’re cousins: we’re both descendants of Elissa the Phoenician.” He didn’t dare tell her no one cooked in his house because his mother was dead. He decided not to tell his father, who didn’t eat at home in the middle of the day anyway, and to get his brother out of the way so he could be alone with the woman, who was ten years older than him.

He gave himself away, though, when he asked his father about the best restaurant from which to buy food cooked in the traditional way. The game was up and the Tunisian woman found herself surrounded by three men. Karim recalled her saying she’d found herself in front of three copies of one man and that Nasri had roared with laughter, boasting to her that he’d fathered two sons in one year.

“Am I like my father?” he’d asked before leaving her room at the hotel.

“You will be when you’re older,” she’d said, laughing.

The banquet Nasri had prepared was magnificent – vine leaves with trotters and kibbeh labaniyyeh, as well as starters, with tabbouleh in pride of place.

The father presided over the show. He cracked jokes, told stories, and filled the dining room with undulations of desire.

He said he’d cooked everything with his own hands and that he hated restaurant food because the flavor of things disappeared.

“Food is history, mademoiselle! A spiritual chemistry to be perfected only by those who know that matter can be transformed into spirit.”

“You’re a cook?” she asked. “Karim didn’t tell me his father was a cook.”

“I’m a pharmacist, I know how to mix things,” he replied, and he began telling her about his pharmacy and his inventions and the special green liquid that set plants ablaze with life.

Karim and his brother tried to get a word in but Nasri had the conversation on the end of a fine thread, which slipped from his hand only when Karim spoke of the Fedayeen bases in the south. At that, Nasri’s face
clouded over. He left the dining room and returned bearing a bowl of red watermelon.

“I love
dalla
’!” she said.

She described how they called watermelon
dalla
’ in her country. Nasri regained control of the conversation by praising
dalla
’ and saying the word came from
dala
’, meaning coquettishness, and that he wished he’d had a daughter so he could call her Dala’.

“No, sir, I don’t think so. The word must be Berber originally,” she said. “The
dala
’ you’re talking about is something else. It’s an Egyptian word” – and she roared with laughter.

“Words are like the stones of a monument,” said Nasri, “or like fossilized fish. But the difference between the word and the stone is that the word is a spirit and the spirit doesn’t disappear. It lives even if it loses its memory.”

When the Tunisian woman got up to go and Karim stood up to leave with her, the father leapt up and said, “I’ll take you in my car.” Karim sat in the back while his father drove, the woman sitting next to him. Karim beheld that day how his father laid down a carpet of words to cover the road over which the tires of the Peugeot 304 were gliding.

When they arrived in front of the hotel, Nasri turned off the engine and kept on talking and the girl remained immobile. Karim got out, opened the front door, and stretched out his hand; the girl got out, uttering words of thanks.

“Come on. Get in, kid!” said Nasri.

“See you later,” replied Karim. He slammed the door and went into the hotel with the girl.

“You slept with him on the same sheets?”

“Your father’s a sweetie. There’s a man for you.”

She asked him how his father was and said he’d sent her lots of messages
and that he was the romantic type. She hadn’t answered his messages, though, because when she got back to Paris she decided to marry her French boyfriend and was now the mother of three boys. She said her eldest son looked a lot like Nasri; she thought she’d got pregnant in Beirut but wasn’t sure, and that anyway she’d named her son Victor in honor of Nasri.

“You mean I have a Tunisian brother?”

“No, French. My former husband was French. Now I’m living with a Tunisian here in Paris, but my boys are French.”

Why hadn’t she agreed to let him sleep with her? She’d let him come up to her room, then said she was tired and sleepy because she’d drunk a lot of wine. She lay down on the bed fully dressed. Karim lay down next to her. He kissed her but she turned her face away. She said she wanted to sleep, turned her back on him, and dozed off. Karim left the room on tiptoe, bearing the taste of
dalla
’ on his lips, only to discover years later that his father had stolen from him both the woman and the
dalla
’.

This son-devouring father was behind the problem that led to his split with his brother. Madam Bride had nothing to do with it, she was just a fragrance – that was how Karim decided to remember her. The fragrance vanished a year after she started working at the school. It was said that the math teacher, Nabil Moussa, had married her and taken her off with him to America. Karim had hated the teacher, with his thick mustache, small eyes, and extremely brown skin. Now he understood that the man had won his teacher’s heart and his kindness to Karim looked more like pity. No doubt Madam Bride had told her friend about her twelve-year-old suitor, but instead of making him feel jealousy of his rival she’d made him feel pity. Thus was a further layer of sorrow added to Karim’s face.

The day he went to school and discovered that a new teacher had taken her place he was overcome with depression. He’d wanted to tell her he’d read
L’Étranger
by Albert Camus for her sake, and that from the first line,
when the French writer announces his mother’s death, he’d felt as though it was he who was writing the novel. The same feeling would stay with him throughout his life: he’d read, and once the words had become embedded in his eyes, he’d be transformed from reader into writer, which was what convinced him he could never become one. Every time he got drunk with the Iraqi poet in Montpellier and began reciting passages that he’d learned by heart from Arabic, French, and Russian novels, his drinking companion would look at him suspiciously and tell him he was mad: “People usually learn poetry by heart but you learn prose. You’re insane, I swear.” He didn’t say he’d committed the prose to heart because of a woman, the taste of whose kiss on his cheek on the last day of the school term, and how his face had been stained with red and he’d felt the tears spreading in his eyes, he could never forget. The same day the man with the mustaches had pinched his cheek, laughing as he advised him to get some exercise during the summer and not waste all his time reading: “Olga tells me you read a lot. You’re too young still for reading. Go and play and be happy. The days that pass don’t come back.”

Could Karim describe what the lady teacher did as a betrayal? He couldn’t claim he hadn’t understood the meaning of the word “love” and when he came, many years later, to memorize the poem “He weeps and laughs” and got to the line that says

he felt that al-Akhtal al-Saghir had written the verse for him.

He’d seen Madam Olga’s white thighs gleaming through her skirt in front of him and felt pins and needles in his lips.

“What kind of shitty love is that?” Nasim asked him. “You’ve got the whole school laughing at us.”

“What business is it of yours what I do?” answered Karim.

“Everyone gets us mixed up. Even the teacher herself can’t tell the difference between us. I swear if you weren’t my brother and like my own soul and more, I’d have stuck it in her.”

“Don’t talk that way about the mademoiselle! She was the best teacher.”

“You’re an idiot. All the students saw how Mr. Nabil used to go with her to the classroom at the lunch break and smooch with her. You believed that story they told us about how she’d married him and gone off with him to America? Brother Eugène caught them at it and threw them out of the school. They didn’t get married or anything. She’s a whore. She put one over you and made you her patsy and made us look like idiots and if I hadn’t been there Michel and his gang would have made mincemeat of you.”

Olga wasn’t the issue that created the first fissures in the twinned relationship between the two brothers. The real rift came about because of Nasri, who discovered that Nasim was no good at school.

The father discovered that Brother Eugène had been telling him the truth: Nasim had a real problem with his studies, it was something to which all the teachers drew attention. He found reading difficult and seemed to understand nothing in class. The surprise came though with the exam marks, when the boy got Outstanding in everything. He almost rivaled his brother, as to whose intelligence all the teachers were agreed.

“Perhaps the boy has a psychological problem and needs treatment. Maybe he gets confused with the teachers because he’s shy. Really, it’s very odd. The boy’s a little devil. There must be something not right. I suggest he see a psychiatrist.”

“A psychiatrist! Are you saying my son’s crazy? No, mon Frère! We don’t have any of that nonsense in our family. The boy’s fine and his marks are good and praise God both boys are turning out to be smart. Did you know, mon Frère, that I didn’t get married because of these boys? I look at them
and can’t believe it, and now you come and talk to me about psychological problems? Out of the question!”

When the father left the school the veil fell from his eyes. He realized that the boys were hiding something and that what the Jesuit had said was true. He dismissed any possibility of a psychological problem from the first moment since, in his opinion, that just could not be, and he dealt with the matter himself. The morning of the next day he decided not to take the boys to the shop with him early, as he usually did in the summer, wanting them to smell curative herbs from their earliest days so that they could go on with his work after he was gone; he gave them Tuesdays off, when he allowed them to stay home to give him a chance to attend to his private affairs.

That day, the egg breakfast over, instead of getting up and telling them to get dressed, he asked the boys to fetch their schoolbooks. The examination began and Nasri discovered the deception. Nasim read with difficulty, as though he were spelling out the letters.

“What kind of a farce is this?” yelled Nasri.

And the man listened to the strangest confession he’d ever heard. The two boys were one person. The first was for lessons and the second for being naughty. He also discovered that he was now paying the price for his child-raising methods, since he’d never bothered to teach his boys himself but had left it to the older one.

“What else could I do?” asked Karim. “Do you really want me to let my brother fail at school?”

“It would be better for him to fail and redo the year and learn something, but this way we’re making him half illiterate, plus he’s a year younger than you. I put you in the same class so you wouldn’t be separated and this is the result. Brother Eugène was right. He told me, ‘Your son Nasim has a psychological problem,’ though in fact it looks like you, the dumb elder brother, are the one with the problem.”

“I can’t survive if my brother isn’t with me in the classroom,” said Karim.

“Nor me,” said Nasim.

And the journey of torment began. Apparently the father wasn’t the only one to have noticed the problem and the new school year was transformed into a kind of festival of persecution that encompassed both home and school. At school the new maths teacher, Maxim Sininian, discovered that Nasim hadn’t grasped a thing, while at home the task of teaching his son was taken on by the father, who went about it savagely, and this situation came to an end only with Nasim’s disappearance.

Karim was sixteen when he woke up to find that his brother had left home. He informed his father, who was shaving while listening as usual to the BBC news in Arabic on a transistor radio he’d put in the bathroom. Then began the search and the torment, which lasted a week, during which they went all over Lebanon and looked everywhere except in the place where Nasim had taken refuge.

Years later Nasim told his brother he’d felt as though his heart had burst and he couldn’t take it anymore. The whole world was falling apart and all he could see was blackness, so he ran to Sawsan, who adopted him, and he called her Suzanne. “Do you know what it means if a woman adopts you? You sleep with her and she behaves like she’s your mother. She found me work at the bean and shawarma restaurant at the end of Mutanabbi Street. I worked from five in the morning and went back to her at the end of the evening dog tired and she’d give me a bath and feed me and put me to sleep. Do you know what it’s like to stand next to a shawarma spit that’s turning in front of the fire all day long? The sweat came out all over my body and I’d be preparing sandwiches and dishes for the women who’d be coming from the souk dying of hunger, and with every drop of sweat I felt like Nasri was being pulled out from under my skin and I felt I was free. Sunday morning I woke up early as usual and began getting dressed to go to work. Suzanne
grabbed me and told me, ‘Go back to sleep. It’s Sunday and Sunday is the Lord’s Day. Sleep and in a little we’ll get up together and go to church.’ ”