Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

Nasim had had no other option. He’d decided he couldn’t go on living through the torture parties by day and the insults he received from his father during the evening tutoring. He’d felt his head wasn’t working properly and that all he wanted to do was sleep. The letters following one another over the pages just looked like lines of ants; he was incapable of deciphering what they stood for, and when he succeeded with his father’s help he found he was incapable of memorizing them. The words slipped about in front of him and his eyes would become swollen with drowsiness. It was an endless daily torment accompanied by insults and beatings. Nasri had never before actually beaten his sons. When he became incandescent with anger and felt the need to beat the boys, he’d leave the apartment and not come back until he’d smoked a narghile at the café. He’d fill his head and chest with Persian tobacco, which cools hot heads, and return to the apartment, where he’d tell them, smiling that implacable smile of his from the corner of his lower lip, that he would never beat them because they were orphans. All the same it seems that when he found out about his younger son’s laziness, the Devil got into him, and the gurgling of the narghile no longer sufficed to calm his fury. Karim never believed his father hadn’t known the truth about his younger son’s academic situation. He felt Nasri had been aware of the problem but had shrugged it off. Then he discovered, from practicing medicine, that parents see in their children only what they want to because love is blind, and Nasri had dealt with his younger son like a blind man. Nasim’s body became covered in pimples, the light in his eye died, and he ended up almost unable to move. His naughtiness at school ceased completely and the boy was transformed into a pitiful rag.

The blind love that Nasri harbored for his boys was transformed into something like an aversion. He came to hate himself in his sons: instead of seeing himself split into two halves, as he had supposed, he began to see them as mirrors of his failure and loneliness. The oppression was all directed at Nasim but Karim too was close to feeling afraid and losing his balance.

Karim began to lose weight. The pharmacist father diagnosed his son as anemic and took to giving him fish oil and forcing him to eat raw sheep’s liver.

The one was divided into two and home became a hell. Nasim despaired of life and made up his mind to kill himself. Not a chink opened in the solid wall before him so he ran away from the apartment at eight on a Sunday morning, only to find himself alone in front of Suzanne’s closed door.

All he could remember was her name, so he decided it was her. He went to her because no one had gone to him. He’d decided to go away and never return, so he found himself standing at the end of the street not knowing what to do.

When he saw her, he recognized her by her shoulders. He didn’t see her face when she came through the doorway of the building where she lived but he saw her straight shoulders and ran to her. Suzanne found him in front of her, recognized him immediately, and asked what the matter was. He uttered broken words from which she gathered that his father had thrown him out of the house. Instead of continuing on her errand to wherever it was she was going, she took him by the hand and went back into the house. “He’s a relative,” she told the guard, whose eyebrows had shaped themselves into exclamation marks.

He sat down on the couch in the small living room attached to her bedroom. She made him a cup of tea, lit a cigarette, and asked him to tell her his story.

He spoke but did so without telling because he didn’t know how to tell stories. When his brother asked him about Suzanne on his return from France, he told him not to ask what had happened because he didn’t know how to tell it. “Till now I still can’t talk about what happened. All I know is she asked me to tell her my story and I didn’t know what to say, so she pulled the words out of me and put them together differently and in the end it was her that told me what had happened. Please, I’ve forgotten about it and I don’t want to talk about it.”

Nasim said he’d forgotten, but he had forgotten nothing. It was that week which made him what he became. He returned home and the persecution stopped, but his life had been turned upside down and he started to feel an obscure hatred for his brother.

The story he’d told Hend about his father refusing to allow him to be held back a year at school and deciding to take his sons out wasn’t true. It was one of Nasim’s tricks to convince himself that separation from his brother had been impossible. He’d failed years more than once and endured the coercion that followed, and all he wanted was to make it as far as the final exam class because he knew his brother would take the exam for him. The business about transferring from one school to another happened after Brother Eugène decided to expel Nasim. The boy was moved about among a number of schools, eventually finding refuge in one called Pioneer Secondary, which specialized in lazy students with rich parents. There Nasim managed to get as far as the graduation diploma exam, which he passed because his brother went disguised as him. Karim continued the swapping game when he took the Faculty of Pharmacy entrance exams at the Jesuit university in his brother’s place and passed. That, however, was where the charade ended, with Nasim bluffing his way to being a pharmacist, meaning that he never took a university degree but just started practicing the profession with his father.

When the civil war broke out in April 1975, Karim was a student at AUB, living in West Beirut. His relationship with the Left was taking root. He was in the process of becoming an activist in a small Lebanese organization set up by Fatah called the Socialist Revolution Movement. Nasim was living in East Beirut and had begun to have dealings with youths who referred to themselves as “the Organization” before this was incorporated into the Phalanges.

The civil war wasn’t the main reason for the split between the two brothers. That had happened the day Nasim disappeared and then returned to the apartment a week later a different person. Everything changed. True, they went on with their game, which reached its climax when Nasim married Hend, but they knew it had ended and that the “four eyes” were now only shadows fashioned by memory.

Nasim turned to sports and became a champion swimmer. His muscles bulged and he spent a lot of his time at the sports club. Karim, on the other hand, grew thinner and more introverted, finding his tongue only at the university, where he discovered that ideas could be transformed into material force, and where he embraced the belief that men could make history.

Nasim became a make-believe pharmacist and only stopped working with his father when Nasri discovered his son wasn’t merely selling the narcotic pills from the shop but taking them himself. He would vanish for days, then return in a filthy state, seemingly drunk, throw his rifle down in the corner of his room and sleep as though in a deep coma.

Nasri fired his son, telling him he was destroying his father’s reputation. “I, boy, invent real medicines and you want to turn the shop into a hashish den?”

That day Nasim raised his hand against his father. He was on the verge of striking him but held back at the last moment. He gathered up his things and left, and only went home again when he was wounded in the war. When this happened Nasim gritted his teeth and told Nasri he ought to kill him but wasn’t going to. “Do you know why I’m not going to kill you? Because you aren’t worth the loss of a bullet. God protect you though, because I may kill you at any moment.”