Broken Mirrors (6 page)

Nasri Shammas, to whom the title “Dr.” had attached itself because of the remedies he put together in his pharmacy and which he claimed to have invented, hadn’t slipped: someone had made him slip. Hend told him this, but Nasim believed he was responsible. Nasim was astounded when he found out that Hend had told his brother and railed at his wife for it. “Don’t believe her, she’s a whore!” he’d told his brother, and he’d screamed in his wife’s face: “All women are whores. That’s what Nasri used to say and she’s just like the rest of them.”

When Hend heard the word on her husband’s lips she left the apartment saying she’d never come back. It was night, and raining. Karim tried to catch up with the woman to persuade her not to leave but he stopped in his tracks when he heard his brother’s voice say in threatening tones, “You too, you want to screw my wife for me? Stay where you are and don’t move.”

Nasim’s voice sounded like those of the militiamen, and in his finger, raised in warning, Karim had seen a phantom gun poised to shoot.

After everything that had happened, Karim had decided to go and see the older woman, for Hend’s sake, but what was he supposed to say and where would he find the words? Should he apologize to Salma because he’d fled Beirut out of fear for his life and of the fate the war would bring?
Or should he use as his excuse the destiny that had decreed Hend remain in the family as his twin brother, Nasim’s, wife? Should he try to justify the brutality with which his brother dealt with his wife or get to the bottom of the truth, which would otherwise remain forever unknown? When he visited her on the last day of his Beirut trip, he’d felt as though he’d been struck dumb. He’d sat down like an idiot and had no idea what to say.

Hend had gone back and had no need of his words, but she’d become another woman. She would live the rest of her life with a husband who no longer resembled the Nasim who had consoled her after her fiancé’s departure, and had then made her an offer her broken heart could not refuse.

K
ARIM HADN
’
T
felt sad at missing his father’s funeral because he’d decided, from the moment of his arrival in Montpellier, to forget Beirut and the war and devote himself to rebuilding his life. But he had felt a chasm open up inside him, that “valley that forms inside a person’s guts to teach him that he’s the slave of time,” as Nasri used to say when flown with wine. The pharmacist drank red wine in inordinate quantities and his tears would run down his cheeks as he listened to Umm Kulthoum singing about waiting for love. He’d answer his sons’ questioning looks at these lachrymose moments by saying that Umm Kulthoum’s voice opened up the bottomless chasm that exists inside us all. Karim saw his father cry only at moments of ecstasy, when the Egyptian singer’s voice became a great womb that expanded to embrace all desires and sorrows. Water and tears, these were the waters of life, Nasri would say as he devoured raw sheep’s flesh. He’d put together little morsels of raw sheep’s liver for his sons and decorate them with mint and onions, and he’d drink and wipe away the tears of ecstasy.

Deep in his soul, Nasri believed himself to be a philosopher because he’d discovered the secret of desire. This business of the secret came about after
the incident with Sawsan and because of his sense of guilt when faced with his sons’ tear-drenched dreams, which had made him decide to change his life. He gave up his weekly visits to Beirut’s street of prostitutes, cut his ties to the woman with the violet nails, and devoted himself to developing his talents as a maker of potions and blender of herbs.

This new chapter in Nasri’s emotional life revolved around his shop and took bizarre forms that drove his firstborn son, who was studying medicine at the American University in Beirut, to feel alienated from everything. It was a story never told, but all its elements were present in the minds of the two brothers, as though they knew all its details, and as though it had been told to them complete. No story is real that isn’t born of silence, whispers, and fidgets.

Nasri Shammas was celebrated for his brilliance as a pharmacist. The fame of the Shefa Pharmacy took wing after he discovered a cure for burns. The preparation was just a kind of heavy, sticky, black ointment, but it took Nasri Shammas’s name to new heights when the Beirut fire brigade endorsed it as the one and only treatment for the burns their men sometimes suffered. Nasri never disclosed the secret of this black ointment, and he continued to make pharmaceutical discoveries, including a potion he sold as a cure for houseplants, from which he made a fortune. He told everyone there were no chemicals in this Green Potion because he’d concocted it from a combination of herbs, and that the miraculous powers it possessed could bring dead plants back to life and make living plants flourish amazingly. The Green Potion was his means of worming his way into women’s hearts. He refused to go to people’s houses; those wanting his remedy had to bring their plants to his pharmacy, where he would mix the required amounts. And the potions he prepared produced magical results.

The first time Salma came to his pharmacy it was because of a basil plant that was refusing to grow, the second over a wilting jasmine. The white-skinned
widow had found her sole consolation in the world of plants. Her balcony, which looked out over the Beydoun Mosque in the lower part of Beirut’s Ashrafieh district, was full of them. She planted Damascus rose bushes, claiming that their smell reminded her of the three sons she had left behind in their distant village when, compelled by her heart, she had come to Beirut. Love, though, has no logic: she had come because of a desire that had filled her heart only to find that same heart ground to powder by the longing for another kind of love. Once, she’d told her daughter she was an ass. “I’m an ass. I left three men for the sake of one and look what happened to me! The man died and left me with a girl and now I live like I’m dead.”

Why did Salma always lie to herself? Hend discovered the secret of her lies only when she got married and began herself to live the lie of a hankering for a love that had vanished and was now forbidden to her. She’d told her husband, as she warned him against her mother, that the woman was a liar. Salma didn’t make up stories, as many do, as a veil to conceal her life; rather, she put together tragic scenarios in whose shadows she could live and so give her life meaning. She wept for her children and wore mourning for her husband, but she lived out a long affair with the lawyer in whose office she worked. It came to an end only when he proposed to her that they change to being friends, saying that he couldn’t anymore, that he had to remember his age, and that it was over. This was the beginning of the desert. The lawyer was seventy-one and Salma had just turned forty-five. She was terrified by the thought of the end and what they call, in literary Arabic, “the age of despair.” It was then that the pharmacist’s shop opened its doors to her and she tasted, in the herbal preparations that he made, an unquenchable desire.

The relationship remained a secret because the pharmacist was implacable with his women – no emotions and no melodrama; plants and pleasure, and that was it. No calls, no love letters. When the Damascus rose
had reached more than a meter, he decided it was time for Salma to enter the trap. He told her her eyes were sad and that her radiant white face was under threat of losing its bloom. He told her that the age of despair didn’t begin at forty. “It’s long after that. That’s just an illusion. Your despair, madam, is psychological and I have the answer.” He said he had an herbal potion that would give her back her luster and keep the dullness from her eyes. “Maybe it’s because I don’t sleep well at night,” she said. He disappeared for a few minutes and returned bearing a small flask.

“Is it like the Green Potion for the roses?” she asked.

“Take it and put a teaspoonful in a cup of hot tea before you go to bed and then see how well you sleep.”

He said if she put a teaspoonful of the herbal liquid into her tea in the evening and drank it before sleeping, she would wake up a new woman. “Drink it, come back here tomorrow evening at five, and tell me.”

Salma hesitated before agreeing. Then she took the small bottle and left, only to find herself the next morning just as the old pharmacist had said. Everything in her was bursting open and desire was plunging from her lips to her breasts. In the midst of the biting chills of March, she took a cold shower and ended up hotter than before. Everything in her was alight, she felt she was another woman, and she found herself, without knowing how or why, on her way to the pharmacy. She remembered the man had told her to come at five in the evening but she was in front of his shop door at ten in the morning. He saw her, made a sign to her with his finger to go away, and held up the five fingers of his hand to remind her of their appointment. Salma’s face flushed red with embarrassment and shame and she left, having decided never to return. She felt humiliated before this older man who was always swallowing his saliva and gargling with water and spitting it out because his salivary glands had dried up. Despite this, she found herself counting the minutes; time hardened over her eyes and
refused to move. She took a hot shower, stood contemplating her naked body before the mirror, and was swept by an irresistible lust. She was aware of her body as she never had been before. She approached the mirror to allow her body to embrace its image and saw desire dangling like bunches of light and darkness. She told the old pharmacist, who was greedily licking her breasts with his tongue, that the waters of his flask had watered both the image and the shadow of the image as the two merged and parted, and that she’d discovered the other woman who lived inside her. “Tell me, doctor. What’s that called?”

At a quarter to five Salma had found herself walking once more in the direction of the pharmacy where the man was waiting for her. He took her hand and led her into the back room. She smelled perfumes, herbs, and medicines, felt dizzy, and put out her hand to steady herself against the wall. The pharmacist took her by the arm and sat her down on the couch and began to devour her. She told him, “Take me,” and he answered that he was going to eat her and started devouring her breasts. She tried to ask him about the mirror and how she’d seen the image merging with its shadow but he told her to stop talking. “No talking!” he yelled at her, so she stopped talking and went inside herself, where everything was overflowing. Slowly, darkness spread over the man and the woman lying on the bed of lust and they became like two shadows.

And when the rite of love that the pharmacist refused to call love had ended, Salma put on her clothes and got ready to leave. This time, however, she refused to take the little bottle. “That’s it, Nasri. Hend and Nasim are about to get married and you still want to fool around? That’s it, my dear. I’m getting old and soon I’ll be a grandmother. Plus you’re never satisfied. Tell me: you give me that medicine, but what do you take yourself? How can your body stand it at your age? Anyway, I’m done with it. I’m tired of this body of mine that doesn’t feel like my own anymore.”

He told her he’d thought about it and maybe she was right, “but what does ‘right’ mean? There is no right in this world.” He also said that his medicine had proved that the body had no limits. “Desire is like time: it’s always there because it repeats itself endlessly.” She asked him about the other days of the week and he scowled and said there were no other days and asked her not to mention the subject again.

After two months of their meetings, which took place every Tuesday at five, she told him she wouldn’t be sticking to the time he’d set and would arrive whenever she felt like it because she’d begun to feel jealous. He told her sharply that the game of love and jealousy ill became one who had reached the last stage of life’s journey, and that if she was looking for love she’d have to find it elsewhere, “because I don’t have any room left in my heart.”

Did Salma break the agreement and arrive some other day to find the shop’s doors closed? Did she feel jealous, or was it that she’d had enough of “the love potion” game? And did the relationship go on for years, as Karim believed?

No one but Salma knew the true story and she revealed it to no one. She told her daughter, whose heart Karim had broken by leaving for France forever, to accept Nasim’s offer of marriage. She said life had taught her that “it’s all the same. What matters is for the woman to know how to make her soul hover above her body when she’s making love. Love, my dear, isn’t feelings. Love is practice.”

How had this woman, who had abandoned her village and her children for another man, come by such a capacity to philosophize? Is it true that once she went to Nasri without taking the potion and that when the man realized the woman wasn’t intoxicated with desire but was watching him, everything in him went soft and he couldn’t perform anymore? That he put his clothes on in a hurry and said, “It’s over”?

But it wasn’t over because Salma kept up her relationship with Nasri for the sake of her plants. The strange thing is that she didn’t feel the man had tricked her. She told him once she was grateful to him for his amazing potion, which had made her savor the taste of the lees, and he’d smiled and said nothing. The relationship would take another turn, however, when Nasri found himself obliged to accompany his son Nasim on a visit to Salma’s apartment to ask for the hand of her only daughter.

When Karim had heard the news of his father’s death, he’d drunk two bottles of red wine, then sat in the living room with a glass of cognac before him, swaying in ecstasy to the voice of Umm Kulthoum resounding through the apartment as she sang to the music of Sheikh Zakariya Ahmad, “I wait for you.” Bernadette had asked him to turn down the volume “because we’re living in a civilized country called France”; he’d cursed her sotto voce in Arabic. He’d felt the chasm opening inside him and heard Nasri’s voice, coated with wine, declaring that Man was an idiotic creature incapable of understanding that his death as an individual was of no importance except as a marker of time.

Had Salma’s relationship with his father been the impetus of his decision to leave Lebanon and never return? When Karim left for Montpellier, he was afraid, because of the savagery with which his friend Khaled Nabulsi had been killed. Had Nabulsi been his friend? He’d hardly known him and had no idea why Khaled had chosen him, of all people, to tell him of how he’d seen death in the General’s eyes. He’d seen death and died. What did death look like? Does everyone see his death before he dies?