Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

But he couldn’t swallow his eldest son’s decision to study medicine and he never forgave him. “You, the one I’ve been depending on to complete me and complete my mission, you, the clever one Brother Eugène used to adore because you were so exceptionally intelligent when it came to maths and chemistry — you want to abandon me? Who am I going to leave the pharmacy to? Your dumb brother who’s a dunce at everything? I swear I’ll never forgive you. You’re not my son.”

“But, Father, pharmacists can’t work without doctors.”

“That’s what they want you to think but you know it’s just nonsense.”

When Nasri uttered these words he wasn’t telling the truth. In fact he thought this son of his, so clever at school, was a fool when it came to the practicalities of life and believed his younger brother, sharp as a tack, could take his herbal mission forward properly. He just wished he could merge his two sons into one. “It’s like I’d been sliced in two,” he told his adolescent sons as they discussed how Karim would present himself using the name of his younger brother at the entrance examinations for the Faculty of Pharmacy at the Jesuit university.

Nasri’s dreams about his two sons were ambiguous and confused but the image he wanted to remember — even though he wasn’t certain he’d actually seen it in a dream — was that of a youth with one body and two heads. The features of the two faces were so close as to be identical; the problem lay in the eyes. The eyes were closed and surrounded by circles of darkness. Faced with this dream, Nasri found himself incapable of waking from sleep, even though he knew this double visage only visited him just as dawn was breaking and that it was enough for him to open his eyes for the image, which hurt them and held him immobile in his bed, to dissolve.

Nasri told Salma his greatest disappointment was his two boys. They were drinking coffee on Nasim’s balcony, after he had married Hend. The houseplants he’d given his son were bright, large, and green. He talked to her of basil because he knew she was fond of it and used it in innumerable dishes.

“See that basil, Salma? It’s all my own work!” he said, laughing.

“Your son will kill you if you pull that dirty trick on Hend. Be careful!”

“Don’t worry, Salma. Does anyone kill his own? I go personally once a week and apply the potion. Those games are over now. But it was kind of a nice game and I can still taste it on my tongue.”

The woman’s face seemed to close and Nasri saw the sorrow and realized she had locked a door and there was nothing he could say. He wanted to tell her that he’d repudiated those days, that what was left of the era of the green fluid was the memory of what he’d had with her, and that today he wanted her as the companion of his last days, as his sweetheart. Nasri had no idea from where such salvation and tenderness had suddenly descended upon him but he was honest to the point of embarrassment in talking about them. All he would ever remember of this meeting was that word; he’d felt the embarrassment of salvation and discovered that his love for his sick wife and his affection for her still slept in some secret part of his soul, and that Salma could now occupy that place. Salma was fated never to believe him, not because he was lying but because he was incapable of believing himself and because there were dozens of reasons to make her doubt his words, especially after the scandal of the two elderly spinsters.

Salma had told Nasim it wouldn’t do. The woman had no idea where she’d found the courage to say this. First she spoke to her daughter and asked her to ask her husband to take his father in hand. Hend’s answer was that she wouldn’t get between her husband and his father.

“I’ve got enough problems, Mother.”

“Why? Your husband too?”

“Please. Don’t make me say anything, it’ll be better for us both.”

Salma found herself talking to her son-in-law. She knew he knew what had happened between her and his father but she screwed up her courage and spoke. The man’s face turned pale and he left his apartment in a fury and didn’t return that night. Did Nasim really not know about the business with the two sisters, which was common knowledge? Or was he just pretending in front of his mother-in-law? Or was he angry at the impudence of this woman who knew he knew what had happened between her and his father but had the effrontery to talk of virtue?

The next morning he phoned his wife and told her to stop worrying and asked her not to ask him what had happened but to ask her mother.

Nasri was sitting on the balcony contemplating the green leaves and watching his three little grandsons, Nadim, Nasri, and Bashir, who were playing under their grandmother’s supervision. He hated his grandsons. Well, that wasn’t the right word, but he felt slighted because Nasim hadn’t given his eldest son his name. He hadn’t said anything, not having given his own eldest son his father’s name. He’d been right, though. How could he have named his eldest son Georges after the man who’d squandered the family’s wealth and spent his life at the gambling table, compelling his eldest son to go to work when he was twelve so he could guarantee his school fees? “But I’m not Georges. I’m his opposite. I didn’t die of diabetes like Father, I dedicated my life to those bastards and didn’t remarry when their mother died.” Suddenly he saw Nasim’s finger approaching his face. Salma had withdrawn with the children indoors and Nasri found himself looking into his son’s face, sclerotic with fury, and at his wagging index finger.

He was struck dumb that day and saw the spectre of the end. He could find nothing to say because he felt as though the wall with which he’d fenced off his life had collapsed. He believed a person built a wall around himself and this wall fell apart at the moment of death, when one could no longer control oneself and therefore lost all dignity, the smell spreading everywhere. On his son’s finger, pregnant with threat, he smelled his demise and he felt the need to get to the bathroom as he could no longer hold himself in.

Nasri ran to the bathroom but lost his way and saw everything wreathed in milky white, as though “the blue water” had returned to fill his eyes. He wanted to tell his son everything but couldn’t speak. The words rained down as tears and he went staggering toward the bathroom, closed the door, and instead of urinating wept and smelled the smell of his tears.

From that moment Nasri decided to cut off all contact with his son. He shut himself up in his apartment, stopped going to the shop, and remained alone waiting for the angel of death.

His defeat was not on account of Nasim’s finger. He was used to his son’s abuse and when the Prodigal Son, as he called him, had hit him, he’d taken the decision to throw him out of the pharmacy. Nasri’s defeat, rather, bore the name Salma. He’d always refused to confess to the woman that he loved her. Her loving him was love enough as far as he was concerned. It wasn’t just a game of seduction and a green potion. What Salma had never told the foolish pharmacist was that what he’d thought was no more than sexual desire resulting from his magic potion was love, or something like it.

But Salma had lost her faith in love because of Nasri’s stupidity and never used the word again. Once, in fact, she chided her daughter, who’d come to her in tears over her husband’s bad behavior, and said she was so sick of the miseries of love that she’d rather she never had to use the word again because it had no meaning.

“But, Mother, you abandoned the whole world and your heart suffered agonies over your sons because of love!”

“I was an ass and maybe I still am but there’s no need for you to be like your mother.”