Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

After the finger that his son had held up to his face — as though about to poke his eye out — Nasri had waged a battle with headaches against which no herbal medicine proved effective. Then suddenly his eye problems began; the left eye, on which a cataract operation had been performed, began to dim even while the right flooded with white, and terror and silence prevailed. Dr. Said, the best-known ophthal​mologist in Beirut, proposed cleaning the left eye using electroshock therapy and operating on the right. He explained to his patient that the procedure involved a certain risk: the lens that had been placed in the left eye was scratched and could not be replaced; as for the right eye, it was difficult to predict the degree of success of any operation because it wasn’t just a matter of the lens but also of a torn and broken cornea.

From that moment on Nasri lived in a state of melancholia from which he never emerged. He had no one left to consult or complain to about his cares. The man discovered he had no friends and was alone.

“This is old age,” Nasri told Salma. “Old age is discovering that you’re alone in the world, that you have no friends you can consult or whose advice you can seek as you confront your fate.” He’d gone to Salma as one lost, wanting to tell her that he’d discovered he loved her and wanted her to be the companion of his last days. He knew the visit would avail him nothing because he’d left it too late, and that he would never be able to soften the woman’s heart, which had fossilized with sorrow, but he went to her having no idea why.

She’d screamed, as she wept, that it was her fault. She was standing with Nasim and Hend by the bed in the hospital. An oxygen mask covered Nasri’s face and nose. Salma said it was her fault because she’d never told Nasim the truth.

“What truth, mother-in-law? The man tripped in front of me and fell down! His oil had run out, as we say. The doctor had told me it was only a matter of days.”

“Fell in front of you or didn’t fall in front of you, I don’t know. What I do know is that Nasri came to see me a week ago and told me the truth and the truth was that he was nearly blind. He’d refused the cataract operation for his right eye and only saw shapes with his left. I ought to have told you but I said nothing, I don’t know why. Every time I came by to tell you, I’d forget. The man fell because he was blind and we let him die.”

“Blind?” screamed Hend.

Had Nasri really been blind? Why had he waited three years to tell the truth about his condition and how had he managed, living amongst the white shadows that consumed his eyes?

Nasim believed his father had probably come under the influence of a dermatologist who was a follower of Daheshism. This man seemed to have pulled the wool over his eyes with the wonder working of that Palestinian of the Assyrian sect who had been born in Bethlehem and, on moving to Beirut, declared himself the prophet of a religious movement that combined Christianity with Islam. Nasim knew nothing about Salim Moussa Ashi and his school, which had dominated the Lebanese political scene in the forties and fifties of the twentieth century, before the two brothers were born. Nor in fact was the pharmacist Nasri interested in the matter. In his youth he’d been an enemy of all things spiritual, reading atheistical books and parading his admiration for a Lebanese physician and thinker called George Hanna who had created turmoil in Beirut with a little book entitled Uproar in the Upper Sixth . Nasri was a disciple of Dr. Hanna’s but refused to join the Bolsheviks because he didn’t believe mankind bore within itself any singular nature that was good. “You’ve convinced us, doctor, that mankind is descended from the apes. Well and good. We believe you. Now how do you expect us to believe that the ape which became a man forgot his animal nature and became all good? What’s all this nonsense about conflicts ceasing if we assure mankind its basic needs? An animal, and with an imagination — how do you expect it to be content with its needs? Human need never ends.” In a heated discussion that took place at the pharmacist’s he told Dr. Hanna he didn’t understand how an atheistical party intended to popularize religious ideas under the guise of fighting religion. “Man isn’t the flat plain you think he is,” he said to Dr. Hanna. “Man is a tangled forest and when you take away the unconscious it means you’re founding a new church and that, my dear doctor, won’t do.”

What had happened to Nasri, who’d believed that man was a chemical formula? How could he have allowed the dermatologist, Dr. Kheneisar, to brainwash him into believing in the spirituality of magic, that man possessed more than a body, and that Christianity and Islam might be a single religion, or two faces of the same religion?

Karim had had no idea of the radical change that had come over his father in recent years. His relationship with him had been limited to a seasonal phone call lasting no more than two minutes, during which the father would restrict himself to asking after his two granddaughters and refuse to answer any question relating to himself. “Don’t ask me ‘How are you?’ What do you want me to say? Can anyone say of himself that he’s well when he can no longer savor life? Can you explain to me, my dear doctor, why the taste of things has gone? Whether I’m eating kenafeh or I’m eating shit, it all tastes the same to me. When you can tell me that I’ll answer your question. Please, drop the questions and reassure me that Nadine and Lara speak Arabic. Don’t you dare not teach them Arabic, my boy, or they won’t be your daughters anymore. Men aren’t the sons of their fathers and mothers, they’re the sons of the language they speak. That’s why we call it the mother tongue. Our true mother is the language. Tell me you speak Arabic with them.”

How could Karim explain to his father that that was impossible? How indeed could he tell him that they hated Lebanese food and refused to say at school that they were Lebanese and spoke Arabic? That when they pronounced their family name they did so with a French accent, so that “Shammas” came out as “Shammah,” and that they pretended they were from Lyon, their mother’s city?

Nasri had wanted to end his life with Salma. None of them knew — though Salma did know — that he loved her and that the game with the Green Potion had been simply a beginning, but that the woman had been afraid of him. Throwing the flask of Green Potion in his face, she’d told him he understood nothing. “You think I come here to you because of this but you don’t understand and you don’t want to understand that life isn’t about a lot of ballyhoo and a few moans and lying. Life’s about love and companionship and tenderness.”

When he told her about his eyes and the white that was turning into shadows and covering everything with pale yellow, she smiled and told him to stop playing games with her. “That’s enough, Nasri. Gimmicks like that won’t work anymore, with me or anyone else. Anyway, what we need now is a cloak to draw over our sins. To make a decent end you have to ask the Lord of Worlds for decorousness, may God grant it to both you and us. Tell me, do you see yellow or green?”

When she looked at his eyes wandering over the distance she realized the man wasn’t lying but still found herself unable to believe him. “You know what your problem is, Nasri? Your problem is that I used to be afraid of you and maybe I still am, but when you’re afraid, my dear, you can’t believe. That’s why I can’t believe you, and your boys too never believed you even for an instant.”

“But I lived like that for the boys’ sake!”

Nasri didn’t know how those words came to slip out from his lips because that wasn’t how he saw his life, though in fact he no longer knew how to read it. His past seemed very far away and his story seemed unfamiliar, as though the man who’d lived his life was some other person, or persons. It was as though things would have passed in a flash and the twinkling of an eye but for this accursed body.