Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

Olga wasn’t the issue that created the first fissures in the twinned relationship between the two brothers. The real rift came about because of Nasri, who discovered that Nasim was no good at school.

The father discovered that Brother Eugène had been telling him the truth: Nasim had a real problem with his studies, it was something to which all the teachers drew attention. He found reading difficult and seemed to understand nothing in class. The surprise came though with the exam marks, when the boy got Outstanding in everything. He almost rivaled his brother, as to whose intelligence all the teachers were agreed.

“Perhaps the boy has a psychological problem and needs treatment. Maybe he gets confused with the teachers because he’s shy. Really, it’s very odd. The boy’s a little devil. There must be something not right. I suggest he see a psychiatrist.”

“A psychiatrist! Are you saying my son’s crazy? No, mon Frère! We don’t have any of that nonsense in our family. The boy’s fine and his marks are good and praise God both boys are turning out to be smart. Did you know, mon Frère, that I didn’t get married because of these boys? I look at them and can’t believe it, and now you come and talk to me about psychological problems? Out of the question!”

When the father left the school the veil fell from his eyes. He realized that the boys were hiding something and that what the Jesuit had said was true. He dismissed any possibility of a psychological problem from the first moment since, in his opinion, that just could not be, and he dealt with the matter himself. The morning of the next day he decided not to take the boys to the shop with him early, as he usually did in the summer, wanting them to smell curative herbs from their earliest days so that they could go on with his work after he was gone; he gave them Tuesdays off, when he allowed them to stay home to give him a chance to attend to his private affairs.

That day, the egg breakfast over, instead of getting up and telling them to get dressed, he asked the boys to fetch their schoolbooks. The examination began and Nasri discovered the deception. Nasim read with difficulty, as though he were spelling out the letters.

“What kind of a farce is this?” yelled Nasri.

And the man listened to the strangest confession he’d ever heard. The two boys were one person. The first was for lessons and the second for being naughty. He also discovered that he was now paying the price for his child-raising methods, since he’d never bothered to teach his boys himself but had left it to the older one.

“What else could I do?” asked Karim. “Do you really want me to let my brother fail at school?”

“It would be better for him to fail and redo the year and learn something, but this way we’re making him half illiterate, plus he’s a year younger than you. I put you in the same class so you wouldn’t be separated and this is the result. Brother Eugène was right. He told me, ‘Your son Nasim has a psychological problem,’ though in fact it looks like you, the dumb elder brother, are the one with the problem.”

“I can’t survive if my brother isn’t with me in the classroom,” said Karim.

“Nor me,” said Nasim.

And the journey of torment began. Apparently the father wasn’t the only one to have noticed the problem and the new school year was transformed into a kind of festival of persecution that encompassed both home and school. At school the new maths teacher, Maxim Sininian, discovered that Nasim hadn’t grasped a thing, while at home the task of teaching his son was taken on by the father, who went about it savagely, and this situation came to an end only with Nasim’s disappearance.

Karim was sixteen when he woke up to find that his brother had left home. He informed his father, who was shaving while listening as usual to the BBC news in Arabic on a transistor radio he’d put in the bathroom. Then began the search and the torment, which lasted a week, during which they went all over Lebanon and looked everywhere except in the place where Nasim had taken refuge.

Years later Nasim told his brother he’d felt as though his heart had burst and he couldn’t take it anymore. The whole world was falling apart and all he could see was blackness, so he ran to Sawsan, who adopted him, and he called her Suzanne. “Do you know what it means if a woman adopts you? You sleep with her and she behaves like she’s your mother. She found me work at the bean and shawarma restaurant at the end of Mutanabbi Street. I worked from five in the morning and went back to her at the end of the evening dog tired and she’d give me a bath and feed me and put me to sleep. Do you know what it’s like to stand next to a shawarma spit that’s turning in front of the fire all day long? The sweat came out all over my body and I’d be preparing sandwiches and dishes for the women who’d be coming from the souk dying of hunger, and with every drop of sweat I felt like Nasri was being pulled out from under my skin and I felt I was free. Sunday morning I woke up early as usual and began getting dressed to go to work. Suzanne grabbed me and told me, ‘Go back to sleep. It’s Sunday and Sunday is the Lord’s Day. Sleep and in a little we’ll get up together and go to church.’ ”

“But we don’t go to church,” he told her.

“From now on you’re going to go. Sunday’s set aside for the smell of incense, the light of candles, and a plate of kenafeh-with-cheese. Go back to sleep and then we’ll talk.”

Nasim went back to sleep and woke at eight thirty a.m. to a kiss on the brow from Suzanne. He took a shower, got dressed, and they went to church, where he discovered incense.

He told his brother that mass was the most beautiful thing — angelic voices, a metropolitan wearing a crown, and white beards puffed up with the perfumes of incense. From that day on Nasim was regular in his attendance at mass and imposed on the family the tradition of eating kenafeh-with-cheese for breakfast on Sundays.

“At the end of the mass, she led me by the hand and made me stand behind her in the line till I received communion. I drank a drop of sweet red wine mixed with a little crumbled bread from a little spoon carried by the priest and felt I was drunk. Afterward we went to el-Burj Square and ate kenafeh at Buhsali’s. She told me, ‘You’re to eat kenafeh here every Sunday, got it? Now you’ve sweated your father out of your system and it’s time for you to go home. Don’t tell anyone where you were. That’s your secret and your secret has to become a part of you. If you tell your secret, you’ll get it in the neck. The secret has to stay between you and me.’ ”

“So you learned holiness from a prostitute!” Karim said, laughing.

“I’m not talking about holiness, I’m talking about the taste of life. That’s what it tastes like — Suzanne and kenafeh and the mass, not that teacher of yours who put one over on you and made all the students laugh at us.”

Nasim went back home on Sunday at noon. He opened the door and went into the bedroom. His brother caught up with him and started yelling and asking him where he’d been. Nasri came in, told Karim to shut up, hugged his son, wept, and didn’t ask a single question. The father behaved as though nothing had happened and ran to get the table ready. Nasim said he wasn’t hungry because he’d eaten kenafeh-with-cheese. The father went out and returned bearing a platter of kenafeh and from that day on kenafeh became a part of Sunday breakfast and remained so until Nasri died.

Nasim didn’t tell the story of his week away from home. He kept the secret to himself and let no one in on what had happened. What he told Karim was the synopsis but, as we know, the relation between the actual story and its synopsis isn’t always exact. He never told how he’d arrived at the souk that Sunday morning to find the street empty and the houses shut. When he asked the guard of the building where she worked about Suzanne, the man chased him off. “Go away, asshole, and don’t let me see you here again! It’s Sunday and Sunday morning there’s no work. You think the women are machines? They’re human beings just like you and me. Plus we don’t take kids. Don’t let me see your face again and get out of here before I give you a hiding.”