Broken Mirrors (18 page)

When Karim went back to the apartment in Gemmeizeh, everything had changed. Even the smell had changed. The smell of the quarter, a mixture of jasmine and the incandescence of burnt coffee, had disappeared, its place taken by a smell like the burning of rotten garbage.

“That smell comes from the Normandie tip. They keep filling the sea with landfill made from rubbish. It extends the surface area of Beirut and the rubbish of the past gets mixed up with the rubbish of the present. A city that uses rubbish to devour the sea and grow, that’s Beirut,” said Nasim.

Three years was all it had taken to destroy his memories. Karim saw how his father had changed from a man into an old man. Nasri was sixty-four. He had known how to fine-tune his health to the rhythm of his desires, so where had this old age come from all of a sudden? He would eat fatty meats and then flush them out with two days of a milk diet. He would smoke a narghile and not inhale. He’d enjoyed sex in a disciplined way and without excess. He’d walked a full hour every day to burn off his fat and cholesterol.

Karim had no idea what had happened to the man. Was it the war? Fear of the unknown that life might bring? Nasri hadn’t been afraid of the war
because he had no respect for it. He’d told Karim on the phone that he wasn’t afraid. “Come whenever you like, boy. You’re afraid of the barricades? Fuck the barricades and those that man them! They don’t scare anyone because they’re just kids playing around. Wait for me at the Museum Crossing and I’ll come and get you.”

How could he convince his father that the war was not a game but “the engine of history,” as Danny used to say, citing Karl Marx?

“Why? You think you know your Marx? If you knew Marx you’d stay out of it. Do any of you know what Marx said about the Lebanese in the war of 1860? He called them ‘the savage tribes of Lebanon.’ That’s what Marx wrote about you, you assholes. And what kind of a family is this anyway? One thinks he’s a communist and the other’s a Phalangist and a Fascist. All we need is for one of you to kill the other and we’ll be a parable. Come back here and set your brother straight for me. I’ll work it out with the Phalanges and we’ll get you into the Jesuit university and you can work with me in the shop.”

When Karim came to say goodbye to his father he found himself alienated from everything. The district had been scarred by shelling, the people traumatized. Nasri said he’d retrieved his double-barreled shotgun from the storeroom and everyone was terrified.

“I felt as though everything had been laid bare. We were at the mercy of the bullets and I couldn’t think of any solution except to get the gun out of the storeroom and not die till I’d killed one of them.”

“Are you going to go out and fight, Father?”

“I didn’t say I was going to go out and fight, I said I wanted to defend myself. The fact is I was scared to death but when I took hold of the gun I felt myself stop trembling. That was when I understood the fighters. It’s funny really. A fighter goes to fight and he’s dying of fear. So, to stop being afraid, he shoots someone. It’s like the merry-go-round children play on.”

He spoke of the murder of Michel Hajji. “His father, Seroufim, God
rest his soul, was my only competitor. We used to meet at Hajj Niqoula Ghamiqah the barber’s. He was an old man with white hair and I was young, and he was a great pharmacist and I was rising like a rocket. He used a strange expression to say he wanted to cut his hair: he’d tell the hajj, ‘I want to cut my head.’ I don’t know why he talked that way. He told me, ‘Your future’s all before you, Nasri. What do you say we go into partnership? That way you can be a mentor to Michel and help him.’ God rest his soul and ours.”

Nasri had been saddened by Michel Hajji’s death fighting in front of his pharmacy. He said he feared for his son Nasim. “True, he’s a dog but blood’s thicker than water, my boy.”

Nasri had expelled his younger son from the shop after he’d turned it into a hashish den, “but Nasim’s done well. I don’t know what he does for a living but it looks like he’s made it to the top.”

“Imagine! He said he wanted to kill me. He raised his hand at me and then he couldn’t find anyone but me to take care of him. He came to me with a wound in his thigh. The bullet was lodged in the flesh and we couldn’t go to the hospital. I operated without anesthetic, I had no other option. I anesthetized it with some ice from the shop refrigerator and he started bellowing like an ox and cursing me and saying he wanted to kill me. I had the scalpel in my hand. I told him, ‘Shut up! I could kill you right now,’ but no one kills his son. When he got better he claimed he was lame and went back home saying I’d deliberately messed up his leg and uttering threats and warnings. No, no, I don’t want to see him. Damn him and damn you along with him. I don’t have children. I’m an orphan.”

Karim laughed as he tried to convince his father that a father who had lost his children wasn’t called an orphan.

Nasri wasn’t serious about refusing to be reconciled with his son. Karim read in his eyes the shadows of humiliation. “There are only two things in
this world, my boy, that can humiliate a man – children and love. I escaped from the humiliation of love and then you and your brother came along to humiliate me over again.”

Karim told his brother it was shameful for him to humiliate his father and that he’d take him to the apartment. “You drop in and say hello to him and have lunch with us and that’s the end of it.”

“But he’s the one who humiliated me,” said Nasim. “It was the Hundred Days’ War, the last I took part in. I said, ‘That’s it! I’ve had enough! We die and the thugs are as happy as larks, so I decided to become a thug and be happy too. I worked at the port, import-export, and God began to look kindly on my efforts. But your father has a narrow outlook, he can’t accept the idea that I’ve left the pharmacy. He threw me out and he’s waiting for me to come back like a dog, but I’m not going back.”

Karim tried to persuade his younger brother that reconciliation with their father didn’t mean going back to working at the pharmacy. It just meant making up so that he wouldn’t feel lonely.

Karim didn’t believe the story his brother had told him about their father trying to kill him when taking the bullet out of his thigh. “That’s all bullshit, my dear brother. When are you going to stop telling lies?”

“I swear to God it’s not bullshit! When the shelling stopped I went to the doctor. I was dragging my leg on the ground. He examined me and said, ‘It’s probably a split tendon,’ and advised me to have it massaged. He said I might be lame for about three months till the tendon grew back. Father must have done it deliberately. He knows more than a doctor. He wanted to lame me but I’ll show him. The war will be long, and one day I’m going to kill him.”

“You want to kill Father?” Karim asked in amazement.

“And you too. I know why you’ve come. Of course, you want money from Father so you can go to France. He won’t give you a penny. If you want money ask me and I’ll give it to you.”

“You want to kill me?”

Karim had got up to leave, certain his brother was demented, when Nasim launched himself at him, seized him in his arms, and kissed him. He asked him not to be angry and said he’d only been joking.

“What kind of a stupid joke is that? Please, don’t make jokes like that with me or with Father.”

“Fine. Do you want money?” asked Nasim.

“A little, around three thousand lira.”

“You’ll have it tomorrow.”

“No. I won’t take tainted money.”

At this Nasim jumped to his feet and started swearing. “Tainted? All money’s tainted. If people weren’t thieves they wouldn’t have invented money. People invented money so they could steal. Do you know anyone with money who isn’t a crook? You believe Father invented medicines and made his money by honest means? Father’s a con man. He stole the burn medicine from Seroufim Hajji. Michel, who died a martyr, God rest his soul, told me. He said his father didn’t want to talk about it because Nasri had threatened him. Hajji’s from Antioch and has no family to back him up and Father fooled him and made him think he could have him killed.”

“To be honest, brother,” said Karim, “I don’t believe a word you say. I haven’t been able to understand anything you’ve said since the time you disappeared that week and went to Sawsan, the one you call Suzanne. It feels to me as though whatever you say you’re bullshitting. Even when you’re telling the truth it feels like you’re lying. God help the woman who marries you, I don’t know how she’ll be able to deal with your lies.”

Karim couldn’t believe what his brother had said about his father. Nasim wasn’t a liar in the way his brother claimed, but he did try to fit in with life. He deceived everyone and was deceived by everyone. Everyone treated him like an animal so he had no choice but to become one. He behaved like
a wolf when he could, a fox when he found himself hemmed in, and a ewe lamb when he had to save himself from being destroyed. He rose with the waves and slept beneath them.

Nasim had told his brother only fragments of the story of his blind flight that winter morning. He’d intended never to return home because suddenly home had collapsed and the game had ended. He hadn’t known where he was going. His world was narrow and allowed him no room. He’d left the apartment without a penny in his pocket and walked along Gemmeizeh Street. That cold winter Sunday morning the Beirut streets were empty and it was raining heavily. He paused in front of old Abu Fu’ad’s barbershop. The man, who was more than seventy, was bent over arranging the newspapers he sold. Nasim noticed on the front page of
al-Nahar
a picture of Abdel Nasser addressing the crowds. He didn’t read the headline. He looked at the huge throng waiting for a word from the Leader’s mouth and felt as though his own was full of stones: when Abu Fu’ad asked him what was wrong and where he was going in all that rain, Nasim didn’t reply. He wanted to speak but the words refused to emerge from his mouth, so he swallowed them and moved on. Later, with Suzanne, he would learn to spit words. That amazing woman used the word “spit” to mean “speak.” She told him that lying was the spittle that made everything stick together. “Don’t you tell anyone you came to me. If they ask you, and I’m sure they will, don’t say anything. Spit and lie. That’ll teach your father a lesson. How could anyone with a gorgeous boy like you behave like that?! You’re a real man, that’s why your father gives you a hard time. Screw him and the school and the Frères. You think if the Frère had fucked you like he fucked your brother your father would be happy?”

Nasim was surprised his father hadn’t asked him where he’d spent that week. He’d hugged him to his chest and kissed him. When he heard his son say he’d had kenafeh for breakfast he’d gone to Buhsali’s central Beirut
branch and bought a platter of kenafeh-with-cheese. Nasim had eaten again because he hadn’t been able to say no to his father’s sad eyes. Karim asked his brother where he’d been but Nasri had rebuked his elder son and told him not to ask. “For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost and is found,” said Nasri, repeating what the Gospel says about the Prodigal Son, and the second day he told him not to go to school. He took him instead to a dermatologist whose name he couldn’t remember but who had fair hair. The father whispered to the doctor and then Nasim went into the inner room of the clinic on his own. The doctor asked Nasim to take off his trousers and expose his lower half. He examined him in front and behind.

“It looks like you’ve slept a lot with women,” said the doctor.

He patted him on the back of the neck and told him to get dressed. Then they went out together to the waiting room where Nasri was waiting, standing up.

“The boy’s in great shape and clean,” said the doctor.

Nasim never got the chance to spit the way Suzanne had taught him. He went back to school but the persecution stopped. All the same he had to face his feelings of inferiority regarding his brother and lead a wandering life from one school to the next, so he chose to excel at sports and spit on the world of his father and his brother.

“Father shafted me. What a hard-hearted bastard! Not once did he ask me where I’d been and he died without my telling him. It wasn’t long ago. He was at my place and we were drinking and Hend went into the kitchen or somewhere – never once has Hend sat with us when Father’s came to the apartment, she pretends she’s busy and disappears. I said to him, ‘Father, don’t you want to know where I disappeared to when I left home for a whole week? It’s been on my mind to tell you.’ He lifted his glass and sucked a small sip from it. Till the end of his life Father always sucked at his wine and arak and every time he saw me belch he gave me a hard time. ‘Alcohol
is a spirit, my boy,’ he’d say. ‘The spirit can’t be drunk, it has to be sucked up. It’s a sin to gulp at it. Man is spirit and alcohol is spirit and when spirits meet they meet transparently. Alcohol isn’t water and it isn’t food. Alcohol is spirituous matter that cannot be experienced in material form.’ ”

“God rest his soul, he loved to philosophize to us,” said Karim.

“But he wasn’t philosophizing then. I felt he was talking from the heart and I believed him. Father changed a lot after the scandal with the two sisters. He became spiritual and all he’d talk about was the poetry of Ibn Arabi. It seems he went back to the teachings of Dr. Dahesh.”

“Father became a human being?” Karim asked in surprise.

“If you’d seen him the past three years you wouldn’t have known him.”

“So why –?” Karim swallowed his question and fell silent.

Nasim behaved as though he hadn’t heard the truncated question and went on with his story.

“As I was saying, he said he didn’t want to hear because the subject pained him. ‘But it’s a nice story,’ I told him. He said he didn’t need stories anymore and anyway he knew everything. ‘Did she tell you?’ I asked. ‘What “she”?’ he answered. ‘Since you know, you must know who I’m talking about,’ I said. He pushed the plate away from him and buggered off.”

“But Father did know,” said Karim.

“You told him?” asked Nasim.

“Of course I told him. Every time he looked at me I could see the question in his eyes and I couldn’t help it.”