Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

“Don’t talk to me about garlic and all that nonsense! What a farrago! I’m a doctor, my dear Mrs. Salma, and at your age everyone should take medicine for blood pressure.”

Hend continued to give her son cloves of garlic, which the boy would peel and feed to his grandmother and the smell spread everywhere, blending with that of the sugar syrup — the scene was bizarre. Facing this comedy Karim felt he was about to burst out laughing; he got up and went to the bathroom, where his laughter faded into a half smile. He washed his hands and face and when he got back Salma’s expression had begun to relax. She had stopped eating garlic and announced that she had to go home. Hend got up and said she’d drive her mother. The two women left and the boys disappeared into the living room to sit in front of the television.

The brothers found themselves alone at the table with its cheese pastries — into which the smells of sweat, sugar syrup, and garlic had been infused — like the heroes of a comedy set in an atmosphere of fake tragedy. Karim looked at his brother and said it was his fault.

“Your wife told you to forget the dessert. Why did you put it on the table?” he asked.

“Damned drink!” said Nasim. “Shit, the woman could have died in front of us and then we’d never have heard the end of it, with Mrs. Hend accusing me of having killed her mother.”

Nasim said the story had begun eight months earlier. Hend had asked him to look for her half-brothers. She’d said she was sure they were in Homs and that Karim had told her how they’d fled from Kherbet el-Raheb during the peasant uprising in Akkar and migrated to the Syrian city closest to their village.

Hend had decided to forget the story, which Karim had told her a long time before, believing the reappearance of the three brothers would only cause her mother pain. But when her mother, who suffered from diabetes, started to show symptoms of high blood pressure, she’d felt she didn’t have the right not to tell her the truth before she died. All Hend knew of the story was what Karim had told her, based on Yahya Nabulsi’s memoirs, written in prison before his death. Also, Karim was abroad and she didn’t want to phone him because she’d decided to forget him; Hend believed forgetting was a decision that had to be taken if life was to go on. When she overheard fragments of the heated discussion between Karim and Ahmad Dakiz about the memory of Beirut, she’d wanted to say the discussion had no meaning — we have to forget if we are to go on living. This was Beirut’s greatness — it was the opposite of all the other cities of the Levant because it was built on the idea of forgetting and drew its vitality from this fact. But Karim’s suggestion that forgetting was why the civil war had repeated itself several times over during a single century was meaningless too. The war kept repeating itself because they were a small people surrounded by greedy neighbors. They were at the crossroads of a disturbed region incapable of solving its problems. That, not memory, was the reason for the war.

When Karim returned to Beirut, he’d questioned Salma repeatedly on her health. He told Hend that he’d noted as a doctor that the woman needed to undergo a full medical examination because her red face and bleary eyes indicated a problem.

Hend had wanted to ask him what information he had on “the three moons,” and whether he’d be able to help her find them. But she did not. She was sure Karim too had decided to forget, and that after his long sojourn in France he wouldn’t want to speak of the past — how else was she supposed to interpret his agreement to return to work in a hospital to be built in East Beirut, stronghold of the Phalangists, against whom he’d fought during the war?

Hend told her husband she didn’t want to get Karim involved in the matter. “You know everybody and you can fix it.”

“But it’s difficult for someone like me to make a trip to Syria. You know I was with the Lebanese Forces and the Syrians don’t like us.”

“I know, but I’m sure you can if you want to.”

He’d returned from Homs two days before that wretched Sunday. He told his wife the brothers didn’t want to see their mother and recounted what had happened when he met them. The same evening his wife begged him to go with her to Salma’s, who wanted to hear the story from him in person. He went and summarized it for her with a single sentence: “The boys don’t want to see you, mother-in-law.” Salma asked no questions. She coughed a lot, her tears flowed, and she curled herself into a ball, repeating over and over again, “I bear witness that there is no god but God and I bear witness that Muhammad is the Prophet of God.” She said it five times. She kept drinking water from a glass placed next to her and repeating the twofold profession of faith, leading Nasim to suppose she wanted to die.

On their way home Nasim told his wife they had to start looking for a solution then and there; the woman’s death shouldn’t take them by surprise or they’d have to tie themselves in knots trying to find a way to bury her in an Islamic cemetery.

“Don’t be so pessimistic! What a way to talk! This isn’t the time. The poor thing couldn’t ask you a single question, but when I told her the news this morning she drove me round the bend asking about how they looked and their health and whether they were married and how many children they had.”

Nasim told his brother as he poured two fresh glasses of arak that he couldn’t understand why Salma had behaved as though it was a surprise to her — “She had already heard what happened two days before!” He said he’d gone to a lot of trouble to arrange the business of his visit to Homs, “and then we came out of it looking like fools. I ought to have taken you with me so you could see the results of what you did, you and the Tripoli boys. Now the sons of the feudalists look just like the heroes who led the peasants in that silly revolution, and then both sides turned into fanatical Muslims and their women covered their hair, and you came out of it with nothing.”

As usual, Nasim was not telling the whole truth. He hadn’t had to go to any great trouble to get to Homs. He’d simply fixed it with Mustafa Najjar. This Mustafa had been leader of the Syrian Ba’ath Party in Lebanon and, in all probability, now worked for Syrian Intelligence. He was an old colleague of Nasim’s from his drug smuggling days who had also given up his former business in favor of running one that imported Sri Lankan and Ethiopian maids.

Nasim had phoned his old friend, who’d fixed it. Waiting for him in front of the Syrian-Lebanese border post, he’d found the man Mustafa had sent for him. The fellow got into the car next to him and they crossed the border on a military road usually used by Intelligence and not subject to inspections. The escort had stayed with him until they arrived in front of the Hotel Safir in Homs.

The man got out with him and fetched the key to Room 877, sparing Nasim the trouble of having to take out his passport for formalities at the reception desk. The fellow told him he’d be waiting for him the next day at four p.m. in the lobby of the hotel to take him back to Beirut and gave him a phone number, saying if he needed anything he should ask for Abu Ahmad and he’d be with him in minutes.

Nasim concluded he was supposed to have nothing to do with the hotel management as his account had been settled in advance, and he was free to wander around Homs as he wished.

Mustafa hadn’t been able to come up with residential addresses for the three brothers or their phone numbers but he’d provided the address of the Raheb pastry shop on Shukri Qawatli Street. “Ask anyone in Homs for Shukri Qawatli Street and they’ll show you, but the three most important things in the city are the Dik al-Jinn restaurant on the River Asi, the grave of Khaled ibn al-Walid, and the Nouri Mosque.