Broken Mirrors (38 page)

Karim hadn’t returned to look for justice. The issue of justice had assailed him only once he was in Beirut, where it took the form of a throbbing pain in his head, and all because of Hend and her ambiguous tale of his father’s end. He decided to check the details of the story with Salma, but where was he to find the courage to confront a woman who’d told him that the war would never end? On his first night in Beirut, while eating the kibbeh nayyeh that Salma had prepared, the black-clad woman had looked closely at him and asked about his situation in France, about his wife and daughters. Before he could answer she said everyone received their apportioned lot in life, “and more has fallen to our lot, praise God, than we deserve.
Hate nothing – it may be better for you
.”

Nasim looked at her with furious eyes to make her shut up.

“I’m talking about the war, son. Who would have thought the war would go on so long? It’s amazing – we’ll be finished before the war is, as though it came out of our insides. Plus, who would have thought that a person could live through war and have children and make money. Praise God!
Hate nothing – it may be better for you!
”

With these words Salma closed the door, on the first night of his return, to any possibility of discussion.

When Salma had heard the news of Karim’s return she was terrified. She told her daughter it was her duty to convince her husband that the hospital project was a mistake from the outset. “It’s all wrong from beginning to end, my girl. Thank God your husband has repented and become domesticated and God-fearing. But it still won’t work out right. It’s bound to lead to ruin. The project has to stop or your life and your family’s will be destroyed.”

Salma was convinced that the idea of opening a branch for treating drug addicts had been the doctor’s. She saw in the project as a whole an attempt by Karim to exploit his brother’s turning over of a new leaf: he thought he could return to Beirut and luxuriate in the wealth his brother had collected through the sweat of his brow and get a free ride.

“I’m sure that monkey of a doctor came up with the idea so he could get a free ride out of his brother the way he’s done all his life. Anyway what’s it all about? Tell your husband that that’s not how you turn over a new leaf. First they sell poisons and drugs to make money and then they treat the addicts, and that way they make even more money. His brother must have exploited his desire to repent and sweet-talked him with some story about treating addicts. What does that monkey, who makes out he’s such a saint and so humane, know about treating addicts? He’s a doctor for syphilis and skin and venereal diseases! What’s he got to do with all that?”

He’d gone to Salma because he knew she was the only person who understood the story from every angle. But what does it mean for us to know exactly what happened, how Nasri died or was killed?

Nasri had died before he died. He’d died the day the civil war started, when he turned into a ghost lost in the foggy maze of his memory. Suddenly his world had collapsed and he hadn’t been able to salvage anything from it. He hadn’t been able to understand where his sons and their comrades got their passion for war and destruction. Nasri belonged to another world. His memory didn’t go back before the Second World War, when people in Beirut heard of the woes of war but paid none of its costs. Even the Palestine Catastrophe of 1948 had seemed to him more like a movie; he’d been convinced that the early Hebrew state would be no more than a place of refuge for the Jewish minorities and that it was destined to blend into the region. War never crossed his mind. He believed it was the duty of the inhabitants of this country of theirs to take everything in their stride. True, he remembered some of his father’s stories about the terrible famine that had struck Lebanon and wiped out a third of its population during World War I. However, he’d never troubled himself to think about the destiny of this small nation which had been put together from the rubble of an empire – the Ottoman Empire – which had collapsed and of a kingdom – the Arab Kingdom founded by Feisal I in Damascus – which had been intended to gather together all the parts of “the Land of Shem,” namely Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine, but which had existed only as a mirage. He was certain what had happened and would happen were no concern of the Lebanese, that life was more powerful than politics and conflict. He’d ended up, though, a stranger in a land he didn’t know, as though the sleeping devils of war had suddenly awoken, emerging from he knew not where, and carried off his sons and most of that accursed generation; as though the calm that Lebanon
had known for a hundred years, since the end of its first civil war in the nineteenth century, had been just a break or a truce.

If Nasri had spoken he would have said that his blindness was a part of his decision to not see, for when you don’t understand you don’t see even when you do, and Nasri didn’t understand. He was sure his sons were in the wrong but didn’t know what the right was. He’d become like Jeha in the story he used to tell his sons when they were little, to prove to them there was no justice in this world. He’d shout and argue; then, when asked for his opinion and how to save Lebanon from its wars, he’d fall silent because he didn’t have the answers.

But this is not an accurate picture of Nasri after the outbreak of the war. Nasim’s memory had refashioned the image starting from the end, as memory usually does when it reduces persons and events to a summary and fossilizes them within a closed moment. The problem with memory is that it cannot stand inconsis​tencies, so it draws an immutable picture of things. Thus, in Nasim’s memory, the image of Nasri was transformed after his tragic death from that of a monster into that of a saint. It wasn’t true that Nasri died the instant war broke out, or that his appetite for life had suddenly disappeared and he’d lost his way in the milky whiteness that traced itself over his eyes. Nasim had decided he would remember of his father only the final image of him that Salma had drawn as he lay on his deathbed, as though a new man had been born in his memory after the death of the old. Who can say if Salma was telling the truth? Or, supposing Salma reported accurately what Nasri had told her, what reason is there to believe a man who had lied to everyone throughout his life?

Karim wasn’t convinced by the idealized image his brother drew of his father. At first he’d objected to the name of the hospital, not wanting it to inherit the name and lore of the pharmacy, but he’d resigned himself
because he saw in it a sign of his brother’s atonement for his sins. He did, however, refuse absolutely to allow the laboratory attached to the hospital to be named the Nasri Shammas Laboratory. “That I will not agree to. We’re starting from scratch, not inheriting a hospital. Not to mention that you know very well, my dear brother, what Father did to people and the uses to which he put his concoctions.”

Nasim looked at his brother uncompre​hendingly, as though he’d traded in his old memory for a new one, as though it hadn’t been Nasim who’d uncovered his father’s scandalous doings when he revealed the secret of the cupboard in one of whose drawers Nasri had put photographs of the women who were his victims.

Nasri hadn’t died with the outbreak of the war as Nasim had tried to imply to his brother. The man had died by degrees, as everyone does. He had at its outset treated the war as a silly game in which he could see a repetition of the Lebanese megalomania which turned the disasters of the country’s modern history into a kind of joke. He supported his argument with two names – Said Aql and Charles Malek. The first was a well-known poet who had learned nothing from al-Mutanabbi but self-conceit. This had led him in the end to call for the adoption of the Latin alphabet in place of the Arabic, and to a
folie de grandeur
, which made him believe that Lebanon was the greatest country in the world. He had also made the embarrassingly racist statement that “it is the duty of every Lebanese to kill a Palestinian.”

The second was an Americanized philosopher who ended up prostrating himself before Camille Chamoun and pleading with him not to leave the Lebanese Front (an alliance that brought together the right-wing Christian sectarian parties during the war). He also proclaimed that Bashir Gemayel had created the first Christian army in the East! This happened after the Phalangist militias annihilated Chamoun’s in a bloody massacre at the Safra
Marina, leaving a swimming pool full of corpses floating in water and blood, and the Lebanese Forces as the sole army of the Christian Right.

“One preening his mustache and the other on his knees – that’s your war!” Nasri screamed in Nasim’s face.

“What? You think your clever son Karim’s Palestinians are better than us?”

“God damn the hour!”

“What hour?” asked Nasim.

“The hour I fathered you. No one else has had it like me. Is this some kind of bad joke? The war’s come right inside my house.”

Despite his harsh words against his sons, Nasri didn’t take the war seriously. He thought it was just a little game that would end in a few months. But as time passed and the war became a way of life, he began to feel his world was dying and that he’d lost both his place and his status. The twins had separated forever and his pharmacy was now desolate. In the war, amidst the downpour of shells, Nasri discovered how the city had aged. Beirut, which to him had been a symbol of youthfulness and renewal, shrank into itself. Its skin cracked and it ended up resembling a blind old woman wrapped up and bent over as she walked, her back humped and her head buried in her chest. Beirut had come to look like an old woman called Catherine, distantly related to his mother, of whom he could remember only her hunched back, her long toenails that she couldn’t clip, and her black clothes. The image of this aged woman rose up unexpectedly from some hidden corner of his memory. Nasri couldn’t remember where he’d seen her, for she’d died when he was six, and her image, like most images of the first stages of childhood, had formed only through what his mother had said about her. And his mother had spoken of her only every September 20, on which day she would hold an annual memorial service for the dead in her family and include Catherine in the list.

This image of an aged hunchbacked woman began to replace that of Beirut as Nasri started to notice the aging of the city and smell its decay, which was like that of the bodies of the old. Nasri sank toward his end without realizing it. He mocked a city that could behave like an old woman. Once, he told Karim – who was reciting verses by Khalil Hawi in which the poet calls Beirut a whore in order to justify its necessary destruction – that he didn’t like that kind of literature, which converted entities into metonymies. The metaphor is the ugliest form of simile and to speak of the city as “a woman” or “a whore” was to create bad literature because literature shouldn’t imitate reality. It should be the other way round.

He only learned that the poet Khalil Hawi had committed suicide during the Israeli incursion into the city in 1982 when Karim phoned him from Montpellier and told him in a sad voice that Khalil Hawi had killed himself with a shot to the head from a hunting rifle in protest at the Israeli occupation.

Nasri was on the verge of laughter as he told his son, “How stupid! Wouldn’t it have been better if he’d shot at the Israelis instead of himself?” But his tears poured out and he started sobbing. Karim had rung off in his father’s face and didn’t hear him weep. At that instant Nasri had seen a vision of Catherine in front of him, but she’d turned into a man who looked like him. He’d brought the woman back from his memories to make her a metaphor for Beirut, and so to hide his old age from his own eyes. He’d come to understand why writers and poets resorted to metaphor: metaphor is the world’s senectitude, which resembles childhood only in its inability to distinguish among feelings, which it jams together, so that laughter becomes a synonym for weeping. Catherine had turned into a man and the man was bending over the remains of the herbs that had rotted in a nearly deserted pharmacy located in a city consumed by rust.

“I am Catherine,” Nasri said to his reflection in the mirror. He was
standing in front of a huge looking glass that he’d placed in the back room of his shop, where he would transform herbs into remedies and have sex with women whom he’d intoxicated with love of life via the herbal mixtures distilled in his small alembic. There, in front of the mirror reflecting the image of his secret room, Nasri stood alone and saw the image of the hunchbacked woman on whose thick skin rings like those on tree trunks had erupted. She had dressed herself in him and taken him off to taste the bitterness he felt each time he imitated one of his father’s movements, or performed some involuntary action that reminded him that he was now an old man.

Against his own will, Nasri began to see himself as his father and began to hate himself. He had never loved his father and had loathed his smell, which was of a kind of old-fashioned jasmine in which the fetid scent of the flower mixed with that of cheap cologne.

Catherine came and the smell of musk, which Nasri used to perfume himself, was overlaid by the smell of fetid jasmine. It was like the smell of urine, and Nasri’s battle with his father’s smell, which had taken root in him, began. It was an unwinnable battle in which no soap or perfume availed.

The first battle Nasri lost was to smell and thereafter one defeat followed another, reaching a final climax with his collapse in front of Salma, who believed him only after he was dead.

That day he’d stood in surrender before the mirror. He’d lost all his desires in one go. He’d lost all appetite for food, for women, for wine. He’d lost his desire to play backgammon. He felt the city was mendacious and deceptive: it insinuated to him its own death so that it could kill him and take him to the end.

He wished he could bring his two sons together just once more around the breakfast table to tell them he didn’t want to die but was going to in spite of himself. He didn’t want them to promise him anything because he
knew now that they would eventually become one man, as he’d hoped they would, though all that man would find before him to cloak himself in would be the image of an aged father. After that day he wouldn’t want to see them again, so that their image would deteriorate no further and they wouldn’t end up, as he had now, hating it and despising human nature.