Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

“It looks like you’ve slept a lot with women,” said the doctor.

He patted him on the back of the neck and told him to get dressed. Then they went out together to the waiting room where Nasri was waiting, standing up.

“The boy’s in great shape and clean,” said the doctor.

Nasim never got the chance to spit the way Suzanne had taught him. He went back to school but the persecution stopped. All the same he had to face his feelings of inferiority regarding his brother and lead a wandering life from one school to the next, so he chose to excel at sports and spit on the world of his father and his brother.

“Father shafted me. What a hard-hearted bastard! Not once did he ask me where I’d been and he died without my telling him. It wasn’t long ago. He was at my place and we were drinking and Hend went into the kitchen or somewhere — never once has Hend sat with us when Father’s came to the apartment, she pretends she’s busy and disappears. I said to him, ‘Father, don’t you want to know where I disappeared to when I left home for a whole week? It’s been on my mind to tell you.’ He lifted his glass and sucked a small sip from it. Till the end of his life Father always sucked at his wine and arak and every time he saw me belch he gave me a hard time. ‘Alcohol is a spirit, my boy,’ he’d say. ‘The spirit can’t be drunk, it has to be sucked up. It’s a sin to gulp at it. Man is spirit and alcohol is spirit and when spirits meet they meet transparently. Alcohol isn’t water and it isn’t food. Alcohol is spirituous matter that cannot be experienced in material form.’ ”

“God rest his soul, he loved to philosophize to us,” said Karim.

“But he wasn’t philosophizing then. I felt he was talking from the heart and I believed him. Father changed a lot after the scandal with the two sisters. He became spiritual and all he’d talk about was the poetry of Ibn Arabi. It seems he went back to the teachings of Dr. Dahesh.”

“Father became a human being?” Karim asked in surprise.

“If you’d seen him the past three years you wouldn’t have known him.”

“So why —?” Karim swallowed his question and fell silent.

Nasim behaved as though he hadn’t heard the truncated question and went on with his story.

“As I was saying, he said he didn’t want to hear because the subject pained him. ‘But it’s a nice story,’ I told him. He said he didn’t need stories anymore and anyway he knew everything. ‘Did she tell you?’ I asked. ‘What “she”?’ he answered. ‘Since you know, you must know who I’m talking about,’ I said. He pushed the plate away from him and buggered off.”

“But Father did know,” said Karim.

“You told him?” asked Nasim.

“Of course I told him. Every time he looked at me I could see the question in his eyes and I couldn’t help it.”

“But you swore to me and said we were twins and twins don’t betray each other!”

“I swear I couldn’t help it.”

“Now I understand why Suzanne did to me what she did. You’re a traitor, a Jesuit, and an ape! You’re the one I should have killed.”

Nasim had never mentioned what Suzanne had done. He’d decided long before to wipe the insult from his memory. He’d gone to Suzanne a month after his return home. She’d told him to keep away for a whole month, she didn’t want to see him till he’d spat out all the words in his heart. “Come back and see me in a month, on Sunday the tenth of January, and we’ll go to church together and take communion and then you can come back here.”

“Sunday! But you don’t work on Sunday and I’ll be wanting to …”

“You’re an idiot. With you it’s not called work, it’s called affection.”

On Sunday, January 10, Nasim left the apartment. Nasri was getting dressed so he could go and buy kenafeh-with-cheese when he heard his son say he was invited to breakfast at a friend’s and would be late getting back.

His father went on getting dressed as though he’d heard nothing and Nasim left the apartment without objection from his father.

Suzanne was walking to church with her women friends. When she saw him standing waiting for her at the entrance to the souk she turned her eyes away and kept going. He caught up with her. She turned round and said, “What have you come here for? Go back to your father.”

“But I came because we had a date.”

“Go back to your father and leave me alone. Who makes a date with a prostitute? I’m a prostitute, sonny, and you’re from a respectable family. Leave me alone, please!”

“But I love you!”

“Don’t use that word with me. I’ve heard it a lot already and when I believed it I turned into a cum rag. Ask your father and he’ll tell you. And you too, you’re hardly out of the egg and already up to no good. Leave me alone! You’re all liars.”

“Us?”

“Right, you. All of you. All men are liars. You and your father and all your kind. You’re the real prostitutes. For us it’s work. We have to prostitute ourselves to live, but who’s forcing you? Money, respect, dignity, and you whore yourselves like streetwalkers. Leave me alone and go say hi to your father for me. If I see you here again I’ll break your leg.”

Laughter rose around Suzanne, who continued on her way to church.

Nasim’s heart broke that day. He felt a pain in his ribs and couldn’t inhale. He felt as though his ribs had pierced his chest wall and that his gullet was on fire. He’d bent his neck and couldn’t raise his head again. The woman he loved had made him a laughingstock and murdered him with her mocking laugh.

He told Hend when he asked her to marry him that he knew she had a broken heart and that he wasn’t offering to mend it for her. In fact, he was offering to join the breaks in his to those in hers. He said Fate had broken his heart too and he wanted her so that he could taste the flavor of the beginning of things once more, because all he could taste now was the end.

Suddenly this rough-spoken man became a mass of tenderness, but Hend hesitated all the same. She told her mother she was afraid of him because he was so like his brother. She said he was Karim but with coarser features. “It’s as though I’ve lived this moment before and heard these words, as though real isn’t real.”

Her mother smiled and said all men resembled one another in the end and marriage was a cup all women had to drink. “You have to marry, daughter.”

“But I don’t love Nasim, Mother.”

“The one you don’t love you come to love, and the one you love you come to hate. That’s life.”

“All right, but why?”

“Don’t make things complicated. See how it goes. It’s better than sitting at home like a care on the heart. Plus, at least you’ll get a child.”

Hend worked as a secretary in the office of the ophthal​mologist Said Haddad. Her mother had found her the job after the family’s financial situation had become unbearable but Hend had been planning a different future for herself. She’d finished her degree in political science at the Lebanese University and wanted to find work befitting her aspirations. She dismissed the idea of trying to join the diplomatic corps because Mrs. Salma had said she’d rather live with war than with the humiliation of life abroad. So Hend worked for an advertising company but after three months found herself incapable of coming up endlessly with slogans for washing powders. She thought of working for a government department, but they weren’t taking on new employees, not to mention that to get a position you needed the backing of one of the country’s political leaders, none of whom she knew. In the end she agreed to work as a secretary at the ophthal​mologist’s, where she discovered a world of slavery she hadn’t believed still existed in this day and age. Her work was limited to recording the appointments of the patients and taking them in to see the doctor. True, she feared for her sight when faced with the horrible eye diseases she saw and with the idea of blindness that was ever present in the clinic, but in the end she got used to it and ceased to see, discovering that what mankind strives for is to not see. This is the secret of life: to get so used to things that you don’t see them; then when you do lose your sight you discover the enormity of your loss — or so Nasri told her when he spoke to her of his horror of “the blue water,” or cataracts, which devour the eye with their milky whiteness. Listening to her account of the world that she’d discovered in the ophthal​mologist’s clinic, Nasri had said things became important only when you lost them, “and I’ve lost everything or I’m about to. That’s why everything now is important to me.”