Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

He gave himself away, though, when he asked his father about the best restaurant from which to buy food cooked in the traditional way. The game was up and the Tunisian woman found herself surrounded by three men. Karim recalled her saying she’d found herself in front of three copies of one man and that Nasri had roared with laughter, boasting to her that he’d fathered two sons in one year.

“Am I like my father?” he’d asked before leaving her room at the hotel.

“You will be when you’re older,” she’d said, laughing.

The banquet Nasri had prepared was magnificent — vine leaves with trotters and kibbeh labaniyyeh, as well as starters, with tabbouleh in pride of place.

The father presided over the show. He cracked jokes, told stories, and filled the dining room with undulations of desire.

He said he’d cooked everything with his own hands and that he hated restaurant food because the flavor of things disappeared.

“Food is history, mademoiselle! A spiritual chemistry to be perfected only by those who know that matter can be transformed into spirit.”

“You’re a cook?” she asked. “Karim didn’t tell me his father was a cook.”

“I’m a pharmacist, I know how to mix things,” he replied, and he began telling her about his pharmacy and his inventions and the special green liquid that set plants ablaze with life.

Karim and his brother tried to get a word in but Nasri had the conversation on the end of a fine thread, which slipped from his hand only when Karim spoke of the Fedayeen bases in the south. At that, Nasri’s face clouded over. He left the dining room and returned bearing a bowl of red watermelon.

“I love dalla ’!” she said.

She described how they called watermelon dalla ’ in her country. Nasri regained control of the conversation by praising dalla ’ and saying the word came from dala ’, meaning coquettishness, and that he wished he’d had a daughter so he could call her Dala’.

“No, sir, I don’t think so. The word must be Berber originally,” she said. “The dala ’ you’re talking about is something else. It’s an Egyptian word” — and she roared with laughter.

“Words are like the stones of a monument,” said Nasri, “or like fossilized fish. But the difference between the word and the stone is that the word is a spirit and the spirit doesn’t disappear. It lives even if it loses its memory.”

When the Tunisian woman got up to go and Karim stood up to leave with her, the father leapt up and said, “I’ll take you in my car.” Karim sat in the back while his father drove, the woman sitting next to him. Karim beheld that day how his father laid down a carpet of words to cover the road over which the tires of the Peugeot 304 were gliding.

When they arrived in front of the hotel, Nasri turned off the engine and kept on talking and the girl remained immobile. Karim got out, opened the front door, and stretched out his hand; the girl got out, uttering words of thanks.

“Come on. Get in, kid!” said Nasri.

“See you later,” replied Karim. He slammed the door and went into the hotel with the girl.

“You slept with him on the same sheets?”

“Your father’s a sweetie. There’s a man for you.”

She asked him how his father was and said he’d sent her lots of messages and that he was the romantic type. She hadn’t answered his messages, though, because when she got back to Paris she decided to marry her French boyfriend and was now the mother of three boys. She said her eldest son looked a lot like Nasri; she thought she’d got pregnant in Beirut but wasn’t sure, and that anyway she’d named her son Victor in honor of Nasri.

“You mean I have a Tunisian brother?”

“No, French. My former husband was French. Now I’m living with a Tunisian here in Paris, but my boys are French.”

Why hadn’t she agreed to let him sleep with her? She’d let him come up to her room, then said she was tired and sleepy because she’d drunk a lot of wine. She lay down on the bed fully dressed. Karim lay down next to her. He kissed her but she turned her face away. She said she wanted to sleep, turned her back on him, and dozed off. Karim left the room on tiptoe, bearing the taste of dalla ’ on his lips, only to discover years later that his father had stolen from him both the woman and the dalla ’.

This son-devouring father was behind the problem that led to his split with his brother. Madam Bride had nothing to do with it, she was just a fragrance — that was how Karim decided to remember her. The fragrance vanished a year after she started working at the school. It was said that the math teacher, Nabil Moussa, had married her and taken her off with him to America. Karim had hated the teacher, with his thick mustache, small eyes, and extremely brown skin. Now he understood that the man had won his teacher’s heart and his kindness to Karim looked more like pity. No doubt Madam Bride had told her friend about her twelve-year-old suitor, but instead of making him feel jealousy of his rival she’d made him feel pity. Thus was a further layer of sorrow added to Karim’s face.

The day he went to school and discovered that a new teacher had taken her place he was overcome with depression. He’d wanted to tell her he’d read L’Étranger by Albert Camus for her sake, and that from the first line, when the French writer announces his mother’s death, he’d felt as though it was he who was writing the novel. The same feeling would stay with him throughout his life: he’d read, and once the words had become embedded in his eyes, he’d be transformed from reader into writer, which was what convinced him he could never become one. Every time he got drunk with the Iraqi poet in Montpellier and began reciting passages that he’d learned by heart from Arabic, French, and Russian novels, his drinking companion would look at him suspiciously and tell him he was mad: “People usually learn poetry by heart but you learn prose. You’re insane, I swear.” He didn’t say he’d committed the prose to heart because of a woman, the taste of whose kiss on his cheek on the last day of the school term, and how his face had been stained with red and he’d felt the tears spreading in his eyes, he could never forget. The same day the man with the mustaches had pinched his cheek, laughing as he advised him to get some exercise during the summer and not waste all his time reading: “Olga tells me you read a lot. You’re too young still for reading. Go and play and be happy. The days that pass don’t come back.”

Could Karim describe what the lady teacher did as a betrayal? He couldn’t claim he hadn’t understood the meaning of the word “love” and when he came, many years later, to memorize the poem “He weeps and laughs” and got to the line that says

A heart habituated to pleasures while young

Like a rose bud opened by the touch of the breeze

he felt that al-Akhtal al-Saghir had written the verse for him.

He’d seen Madam Olga’s white thighs gleaming through her skirt in front of him and felt pins and needles in his lips.

“What kind of shitty love is that?” Nasim asked him. “You’ve got the whole school laughing at us.”

“What business is it of yours what I do?” answered Karim.

“Everyone gets us mixed up. Even the teacher herself can’t tell the difference between us. I swear if you weren’t my brother and like my own soul and more, I’d have stuck it in her.”

“Don’t talk that way about the mademoiselle! She was the best teacher.”

“You’re an idiot. All the students saw how Mr. Nabil used to go with her to the classroom at the lunch break and smooch with her. You believed that story they told us about how she’d married him and gone off with him to America? Brother Eugène caught them at it and threw them out of the school. They didn’t get married or anything. She’s a whore. She put one over you and made you her patsy and made us look like idiots and if I hadn’t been there Michel and his gang would have made mincemeat of you.”