Broken Mirrors (55 page)

That day, while Nasim was getting the grill ready, mixing the tabbouleh, and diluting the arak with water, Salma was sitting silently on the end of the couch like an unwanted guest, unresponsive to the fooling around of the boys, who considered her visits to their house, like theirs to hers, an occasion for celebration.

“What’s up with you, Mother, sitting there like an owl and not answering the boys?” Hend asked, as she came and went bearing the food her husband had made in the kitchen. “I always thought you adored them.”

The conversation between the two women flew in all directions and was made up of incomplete sentences that followed the rhythm of Hend’s shuttling to and from the kitchen. As a result Karim didn’t understand a thing. The only thing that stuck in his mind was the phrase “the three moons” and he thought the women must be discussing the school of that name located in Nazlet el-Akkawi, a semi-private school founded by the Greek Orthodox diocese of Beirut for the poor children of the community. He surmised Hend had decided to move her boys from the Lycée to the school.

“How come? The Three Moons isn’t an SKS barracks any longer?” he said, referring to the Phalangist military police.

Hend explained that the diocese had recovered the school from the Phalanges Party and appointed a new headmaster, a graduate of the Greek Orthodox Balamand Monastery called Father Eliyya, “but we weren’t talking about the school, we were talking about something else.”

Karim recalled the story of Salma’s three sons by her first marriage in the Akkar district whom Hend had called “the three moons.” He wanted to ask Hend why she hadn’t told her mother that the three brothers had fled their village after the peasants burned their houses during the revolution led by Yahya Nabulsi. But he thought the subject too sensitive and that it would cast a shadow over the feast his brother was preparing, so decided to drop it. He spoke of the children’s problems at school and said a solution could be found for that of Nasri, his brother’s second son, who was seven: the boy
was no worse than his father and his inability to write was a minor issue, especially with the development of modern pedagogical methods. There was no need to ruin the boys’ future by transferring them from the school they were in to another of below-average standard.

He looked at Salma and said, “I’m sure Mrs. Salma would agree with me.”

But Salma didn’t answer. She looked at him with vacant eyes and said she was sorry but she hadn’t been paying attention.

Karim fled the stifling atmosphere of the dining room, preferring to go to the kitchen to help his brother.

In the kitchen he beheld an extraordinary sight: Nasim, sleeves rolled up, was threading pieces of meat onto the skewers; giving strict orders to his wife; mincing the parsley, then discovering that he’d forgotten the bulgur; shouting for a bowl, then starting to chop the aubergine preparatory to threading it on the skewers next to the meat; yelling, then laughing, then pouring himself a glass of arak and sipping it. He noticed his brother in the kitchen. “What’s wrong with you, standing around doing nothing? Pour yourself a glass of arak and come and help me.”

“What’s this shambles?” said Karim.

“It’s a shambles and worse than a shambles,” said Hend. “I swear, every Sunday he comes back from church all hot and bothered and look what happens. He calls himself a chef! He’s a disaster – strews bulgur and parsley all over the floor and stinks up the sink with scraps of meat and fat, and then it’s, ‘Hop to it, Hend, clean up this mess!’ ”

“If I were all hot and bothered like you say, I’d have screwed you on the bed, madam!”

“I’ve told you a hundred times I hate that kind of talk, especially in front of other people.”

“Why? Where are the other people? My brother’s ‘other people’ now?”

Nasim looked at his brother and explained that his wife was crazy. “We begged her to let us get her a maid and she kicked up a terrible fuss, saying she couldn’t bring herself to exploit people. Ghazala came. I told her, ‘This is Matrouk’s wife and Matrouk’s my friend. Let her come and help you with the apartment.’ Then when Ghazala was here she’d sit with her in the living room and treat her like a lady and they’d drink coffee and when they were through she’d give her some money – and now she comes and starts going on about the housework. Sunday’s the one day when I can enjoy myself. I like cooking and getting drunk with my family, and every Sunday, swear to God, it’s the same. Even on my birthday she wants to spoil my mood. But, with the arak in place, morale is high! Cheers!”

Karim went to the table and began threading meat with his brother and the laughter – of a childhood recovered in the shape of two grown men drinking arak and cooking – rose high.

“If only you could be with us, Nasri!” said Karim.

“What made you think of the departed in the middle of all this?” asked Nasim.

Karim said that ever since his return to Beirut he’d felt a strange yearning for the man. “You know, we didn’t give him his due and caused him a lot of grief at the end of his life. All the poor man had eyes for in this world was his Trinity and by the time we came together again and started working, he was dead. Damn it, life’s cruel! If he could just have been in on the hospital project with us, it would have been the happiest time of his life.”

Nasim nodded in agreement and said he’d discovered he grew more like his father the older he got. “Even those rituals of his that I used to hate I now perform with my children without realizing it. Strange how people change!”

They were once again the twins that Nasri Shammas had wanted to see complement each other so they could become him. “I have to mix you into
one another so you can become like me. There must have been some kind of technical slip-up and instead of the genetic components sticking together in one egg so that you could come out as one boy they got divided into two, one my brainy half and the other my canny half. It’s all your late mother’s fault. Her body couldn’t muster enough strength to push, so she sliced the genes into two, God rest her soul – she was sick and her body was weak.”

It was this sort of talk that had made the blood of the two small boys run cold with fear. It made them feel permanently inferior.

“But he was very hard on us, God rest his soul, and gave us no room to breathe,” said Nasim.

“But the poor man lived a long life alone,” said Karim. “Twice we prevented him from marrying. He used to say, ‘All the women in the world aren’t worth one of my boys’ legs!’ ”

“Don’t forget there was nothing lousy he didn’t take a shot at. Why should he marry again when he could get any woman he wanted? I’m sure Father was a dirtier dog than us. He was always in macho mode and had a roving eye till the day he died,” Nasim said.

In this exchange, which took place to the clatter of pots and plates, what wasn’t said was more important than what was. Nasim would have liked to tell his brother that the sympathy Karim now felt for Nasri stemmed from the fact that he hadn’t lived with him; he’d run away to France and left the entire burden on his brother’s shoulders. Plus he’d been the indulged child while the whole weight of repression had fallen on his younger brother. Karim for his part would have liked to say that all the disasters started when his brother had run away from home. Nasri had changed radically that day and become mean and full of bitterness. He would have liked to ask his brother if he’d ever felt the need to apologize to his father and acknowledge his mistakes.

For his part, Nasim hadn’t been able to understand his brother’s behavior in Beirut. “Who gets up to that sort of thing with the maid? Damn, he must be repressed! He comes all the way from France, the land of sexual freedom, to make scandals for us?! If God hadn’t kept the lid on it and Matrouk hadn’t turned out to be a fool, there would have been a crime in the family. And why does he make sheep’s eyes every time he sees Muna? Doesn’t he know she’s my friend’s wife? Though for sure he didn’t do anything with her anyway. If she’d wanted any she would have come to me. Karim’s off his rocker. Father used to think he was smart – God, how wrong he was!”

But Nasim said nothing – he was wallowing in the pleasure of preparing the feast like his father, who believed that making Sunday dinner was more fun than eating it. Nasri would pour himself a glass of arak and go off into the kitchen alone because he didn’t like people helping. He would reappear bearing the dishes, drunk and staggering, and put on a song by Abd el-Wahhab or Umm Kulthoum, turning his feast into a moment of joy with the family, and this he thought the greatest pleasure life had to offer.

That day they drank and worked in the kitchen like one man divided in two and listened to Hend’s voice as she shouted at her mother to change the subject.

Nasim opened the kitchen door and yelled, “Food’s ready!”

Hend came bearing dishes and the boys sat at their places at the table. Salma sat at the head and they started hearing snatches of Umm Kulthoum’s song “You Are my Life” emerging from Nasim’s throat as he gave the final touches to the food.

Suddenly Hend shouted, “No!” shut the kitchen door, and told her husband in a low voice that it wouldn’t do. “I told her about it yesterday, and now she’s in a terrible state. We can’t put the cheese pastry you got from Homs on the table. Mother will break down.”

He said she was being silly; they had either to eat the cheese pastry that day or to throw it away because it wouldn’t last.

He said he hadn’t bought the usual platter of kenafeh because there was nothing better than the cheese pastry made in Homs, and instead of thanking him for having gone to Syria, which had been a major undertaking, she was giving him the usual hard time “because madam is never happy.”

“Please, you’re the only one who can convince him,” she said to Karim.

“But I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Karim.

“Tell him no cheese pastry, if you have any regard for me.”

“Forget it, Nasim. Let’s do it another time.”

“As you wish, madam.”

Nasim poured four glasses of arak. Then he poured three glasses of what he called “kids’ arak” and handed them round to the boys. He raised his glass and drank a toast to life.

Salma raised her glass and drank a toast to Bernadette, Nadine, and Lara. “Your children should meet and the whole family should get together. May God give you better days than mine.”

Things were going smoothly. Nasim kept up a constant stream of jokes, passing little morsels of food to the boys, and asking everyone if they liked the kibbeh nayyeh that he’d made with his own hands.

Salma said life had changed a lot. “In the past we used to pound the meat in the mortar till it was smooth and all mixed together. That was the difficult part. The trick was getting the onion into the fiber of the meat before we mixed it with the bulgur. These days kibbeh isn’t kibbeh anymore. The butcher grinds it up with the onion in the blender so it never really mixes. Never mind though, we all do it that way and we’ve got used to it.”

Nasim said he was the one who used to pound the meat at home and to this day he felt a numbness in his right hand every Sunday morning.

“I’m the one who used to pound the kibbeh!” said Karim. “You used to stay in bed and pretend to be ill.”

“Me? How can you say such a thing? All I can remember is me pounding away at the meat and you standing next to Father and the two of you giving me orders.”

“Now the lies begin,” said Karim, addressing the boys. “Your father’s like that, he can’t say a true word to save his life.”

“By the Virgin I swear I’m not lying! You’re the liar!”

At this point Hend intervened to give them a lecture on memory. She said the most curious thing was to hear two people who’d been present at some event in the past recount their memories. “Each remembers things differently but that doesn’t mean they’re lying. It just shows the limitations of memory and that it’s always mixed up with the imagination.”

“So who’s right in this case?” asked Nasim.

“You’re both right,” said Hend.

“You mean memory is an
illusion
?” said Karim, using the French word.

“A
wahm
, Uncle.
Illusion
in Arabic is
wahm
,” said Nadim, Nasim’s eldest son. “I hear you speaking French a lot. Does that mean you don’t know Arabic?”

“And in France I speak Arabic, because memory, as your mother said, is a
wahm
.”

Suddenly the atmosphere became electric. Nasim leapt to the kitchen, staggering drunk. His wife ran after him and everyone heard them quarrel. Then Nasim came back bearing a square cardboard box wrapped in shiny green paper on which was written “Raheb Pastries – Homs.” He opened the box and said he’d brought them the best pastries in the world, that in Homs they made the best cheese pastry, and that when he tasted it he’d discovered that the secret of Arabic baking was a 100 percent Homs thing.

Salma looked at him as though she couldn’t believe her eyes, her lower lip trembled, and a cold sweat started from her forehead.

Hend took hold of the pastries and said she was going to throw them in the trash.

“You, shut up and sit down!” said Salma, who then looked straight at Nasim and asked in a trembling voice, “That’s the boys’ pastry, isn’t it?”

Nasim nodded. “Mokhtar was on his own in the shop when I went in. He gave me a warm welcome and I could feel how tenderhearted the boy was. He refused to take money and like I told you, Mother, he said he was very anxious to get to know his mother, and then I don’t know what happened. The atmosphere changed. Two men arrived and I gathered that one of them was called Deyab.”

“He’s the eldest,” said Salma.

“When Deyab saw me and heard my first few words, he held up his hand, pointed to the door, and said, ‘Out! We don’t have a mother.’ ”

Salma’s face started to flush red and shadows drew themselves over her eyes.

“Tell me more,” she said.

“I told you yesterday, Mother. Damn this whole business!” said Hend.

Salma’s face grew more flushed and she tried to get up from her chair, steadying herself against the table, but fell back into a sitting position saying she felt dizzy.