Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

Salma’s love for the foolish pharmacist, who never saw life from any perspective other than that of hunger, dried up: in his feverish lovemaking with her he used only words connected with food and he made sounds like someone smacking his lips while eating, not those of someone enjoying the pleasures of love. And when she despaired of his love she threw a flask of the magic potion in his face, went rigid on the couch that they used as a bed in the back room of the pharmacy, and watched him fall apart.

He had come to her with words of love after the scandal of the Shartouni sisters. Salma had taken the women to the hospital and told the doctor the reason for the fit of nerves that had afflicted them, and which had made them go out into the street naked. The doctor said a case should be brought against the pharmacist, his license revoked and the fellow thrown in jail, but Salma refused to give him his name.

Nasri told Hend he was done for and had lost his will to live. He said Nasim had murdered him “and it’s not the first time but this time I can’t take it anymore. I’ve put up with a lot, my daughter, as you know.”

He began telling the same story, about how he’d thrown him out of the pharmacy because Nasim had turned it into a hashish den. “He’s not a pharmacist. You know how he got into the pharmacy faculty at the Jesuit university — I’m sure he must have told you — and he didn’t do well. His brother couldn’t take the exams for him anymore. The teachers know the students there and there’s no messing around.”

She said she knew the story because he’d told it to her numerous times; she’d come as an honest broker and wanted to invite him to Nasri’s birthday party. “It’s amazing how the boy’s growing up to look like you, he’s just like the young Nasri!”

“And him?” Nasri asked.

“He’s agreed. Just like nothing ever happened.”

And so it was, and what had been ended up as though it had never been.

Karim said he couldn’t make head nor tail of the story. They were sitting on their own, chewing their food in silence and waiting for Nasim to come back, when Hend said Nasri had neither slipped nor fallen.

“I don’t know what happened but he seemed restless. He’d sit and stand and take a sip from his coffee cup and get up and open the windows. I said, ‘Uncle, it’s cold.’ He said he was hot. I was afraid his blood pressure might have gone up. I asked him if he’d taken his medicine. He said he’d taken it but he seemed excited. His movements weren’t normal. He stood up and said he wanted to go. He pulled a cassette out of his pocket and said he wanted to play it to me. I don’t know what happened — he tripped on the chair and was going to fall. I ran and took hold of him. He stood up and grabbed on to me. I tried to get out of his grip but couldn’t. I yelled at him to let go. His hands were like iron and he kept pulling me toward him. It seems I kicked him and he fell and his head started bleeding and he passed out. I phoned Nasim. He came and took him to the hospital and said, ‘Don’t say a word, I don’t want anyone to know what happened.’ And then he died.”

“So it was you?”

She nodded.

Karim tried to speak but a cough devoured his throat. He tried to tell Hend she’d been the hand of justice. He tried to say that justice was the great Satanic intervention in human life. Satan was the inventor of justice because of all creatures Satan alone could be just: he was both oppressed and oppressor, for justice was the other name of vengeance. His coughing obscured much of what he said and instead of speaking he choked on his words. He tried to tell her … he would try to speak, the coughing would get worse and Hend sat before him, her lips shining with the sugar syrup she’d eaten with the kenafeh, looking at the ground in silence. As his coughing got worse, she ran to the kitchen and came back with a glass of water.

This was what Hend told her mother when she went to live with her, after she decided she could bear no more humiliation in her conjugal home. When the coughing fit had passed, Karim lit a cigarette and said what she’d done was called just, but he hated justice because the just in Lebanon were the criminals given that there was no scale by which to measure life or justice.

He asked her why she’d told him.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I thought someone should know.”

“But my brother knows. You told me he asked you not to tell anyone.”

“I felt you specifically should know because you’re the real killer.”

“Me!”

“Of course you. Who else? You’re the one who put me in that situation. You took off without telling me anything and I was left stuck with this family.”

“Please don’t talk like that. It makes me feel like I’m living in a melodrama.”

“But melodramas express the truth.”

“Maybe, but they shouldn’t be turned into stories. So it was you?”

“I didn’t say that, but maybe. I don’t know what was happening to him. There was nothing I could do. I didn’t mean to push him. Perhaps I didn’t push him. I don’t know what happened. I asked Nasim and he told me, ‘Drop it. It looks like he’d been smoking hashish and there’s no point creating a scandal.’ Why did your father take drugs?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you should ask your mother.”

“My mother! What’s it got to do with my mother?”

At that moment Nasim arrived. His face was black with fury and sorrow. He looked at his brother and told him that things had gotten difficult and he’d call on him the next day and give him the bad news. Hend got up and left with her husband.

Hend told her husband she’d told his brother about his father’s death, and that was a mistake. Her mistake was not in the saying but in the timing, as Karim tried to explain when he phoned her to say goodbye.

“No, doctor!” said Hend. “No, it had nothing to do with the timing. Does any self-respecting man tell his wife she’s a whore and the daughter of a whore in front of their children?”

Karim tried to explain to her that insults shouldn’t be taken at face value and told her about his friend the Iraqi poet whom he’d met in Montpellier and who, whenever he got drunk, would delight in Lebanese insults because they were the most refined form of metaphor.

“What does metaphor mean?”

“It means making comparisons. How can I put it? It means saying one thing and meaning another. You package the words in images and the image becomes the point and the words lose their meanings.”

Karim didn’t tell Hend what had taken place during his meeting with his brother and the direct approach, devoid of any of the rules of metaphor, that Nasim had used to describe his father. He limited himself to offering advice, because a woman has no place if not next to her husband and her children.

KARIM HADN’T GONE back to Beirut to search for his father’s killers or to take revenge on them. Such a story wasn’t right for him and wasn’t like him. Karim had read something similar about a man who went back from France in search of his father’s killers that was written by Maroun Baghdadi and published in the al-Nahar Supplement after the young Lebanese director’s death. Maroun was a beautiful man and could seduce any woman; that was how Karim had seen him when he met him in Montpellier. He recalled that he’d watched his film Little Wars at a private showing at the university, after which the Lebanese student who’d talked to him about his ox-cheek feast in Paris had invited him to a restaurant in the Place de la Comédie. There the students hovered around the director, who told them of his project for a new film he was making about mutual forgiveness and said he was looking for a writer to help him with the screenplay. At the time, the idea of becoming the writer of the screenplay had occurred to Karim but he’d been afraid of looking ridiculous so gave it no more thought.