Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

“You talk like that because I’ve grown old. You’re right, Salma, but the older the body becomes the smaller the soul feels itself to be. I spit on you, mankind! How you disgust me! One ends up as a child again in an old man’s body. God, how hard it is!”

Nasri didn’t try to convince Salma to overcome her fear of him because he didn’t in fact know what had driven him to go to her. He told her that what’s gone never comes back and she was right to fear him: “No one’s more frightening than one who’s frightened.” He said he’d been afraid of love, so he’d squandered it in play, he’d been afraid of life, so he’d smashed it, and he’d been afraid for his children, so he’d lost them.

She asked him how he spent his days, half blind. She advised him to employ a maid to help him and see to his needs, to which he muttered that he’d sworn no woman would enter his house after the death of his wife, “and it would be stupid to break my oath just to bring a maid. I wish Salma … but I know it’s not possible because Nasim would kill us both. Maybe it’s better like this. And then there’s God, and God helps me.”

“What? You’ve started believing in God?”

He didn’t say anything but stood, picked up his crutch, and left, humming a tune by Abd el-Wahhab.

Nasri was alone now — that was what he’d wanted to tell Karim on the phone when he asked him to come and see him in Beirut before he died. “I just want to see the girls. Do you really want me to die without having seen Nadine and Lara?” He didn’t say, though, that in his last days he had discovered the existence of God.

Nasri wasn’t prepared to explain his relations with God. The man who had spent his life mocking religion — so much so that he despised the Bolsheviks as the proselytizers of a new one — found God in the midst of the blindness that enveloped him in whiteness. His god wasn’t the wooden doll that his friend Seroufim, the pharmacist, had given him as a present when he returned from Paris. The man had brought with him a small African mask carved on an oblong piece of wood about twenty centimeters in length. The mask was made of ebony and its wide eyes seemed to open onto an abyss. The chemist told him that he’d happened upon it on the Boulevard Saint-Germain and had bought it from a black female vendor standing behind a stall full of such masks. The vendor had enchanted him with her African costume and the tattoos that covered her hands. The woman, who resembled the work she sold, had told the Lebanese chemist that her small sculptures were the faces of gods. She’d tried to explain, in halting French, that he could turn the mask he’d buy into a personal god for his own private use.

“But how does the mask become a god?” he asked her.

“The moment you believe in it, the spirit of one of your ancestors occupies it and it becomes a god.”

Seroufim said he’d bought the mask for Nasri.

The idea of a personal god pleased Nasri immensely, especially over the period when he became aware of the danger to Karim from Brother Eugène, for Karim was outstanding not only academically but in religion classes too. This scared Nasri, who knew that nothing is more conducive to illicit sexual relations than a religious atmosphere, in which the smell of incense blends with that of desire and prayers become whispers that lead people into the darkness of the soul.

Nasri announced the birth of his personal god at the lunch table. He raised his glass, poured a little of the wine on the ground, drank a toast to the ancestors, held the black mask in front of him, lifted it up, and looked at Karim, declaring as he did so that this god was better than all the other gods because it only became real when you believed in it: “We can pray to it and we can insult it. We can worship it when we want and we can hit it when we want and it will stay with us and never leave us the way the other gods do with their followers.” He kissed the forehead of the god, to whom he had given the name Hubal-bubble, and told his sons that the African tradition from which this black god hailed required that sons worship the god of their fathers; when the father died they had to bury the god with him, at which point each son had to find his own personal god before whom to bow.

“If Brother Eugène asks you about God, tell him we worship our own special god and have nothing to do with his god that died on the cross. Our god doesn’t die and he belongs to nobody but us. We love him and we hate him and we entreat him and when he doesn’t answer our prayers we ignore him. There is no sin in our religion and no regret. Our god makes mistakes like us and we don’t punish him because he doesn’t punish us, but we can do with him as we please.”

Nasim roared with laughter, took the black face from his father’s hands, kissed it, then spat on it. Then he turned to his brother and told him to kiss the god’s forehead. “What did you say his name is?”

“This is farcical,” said Karim, and got up to leave. His father grabbed him by the wrist and forced him to sit down.

Hubal-bubble was thenceforth a guest at the dining table, where Nasri and Nasim found him a source of material for jokes at the expense of the Jesuit priests and of Karim’s faith in the god whom the Jesuits worshipped at the school, and in whose name they compelled pupils to recite prayers each morning.

Then, all of a sudden, Hubal-bubble disappeared.

Nasri was certain Karim had thrown Hubal-bubble in the trash but he was wrong. Hubal-bubble was the gift Nasim had wanted to give Suzanne when he went to see her. He’d worked out a whole scenario of worship and even made up a prayer to be recited before they had sex. He imagined Suzanne taking off her clothes in the room and looking at him out of the corner of her eye. He saw her creamy white breasts bursting out and felt dizzy. But instead of jumping up and taking her in his arms he’d take Hubal-bubble in his hand and place him on her head. He would ask her to kneel, he’d kneel beside her himself, and he’d recite the prayer, then ask her to repeat after him the words, in which he spoke of the human body as incense for the gods.

But Suzanne had mocked him and thrown him out.

She’d left him standing on the sidewalk and spoken words that had made wounds in his heart that healed only when he married Hend.

And when Hend had shut the door to herself in his face, he’d felt the need for Hubal-bubble and regretted having thrown the wooden god onto the rubbish tip in Mutanabbi Street.

Nasri hadn’t asked his sons about the black mask. Hubal-bubble disappeared and his story along with him. Instead, the elderly man, now partially blind, had closed the pharmacy because he could no longer work and had overcome his loneliness with music. He’d discovered his god through the songs of Mohamed Abd el-Wahhab, and dispelled the gloom with the ecstasy of rhythm.

He was sitting in Nasim’s apartment trying to tell Hend about the comfort that music spreads and poetry fashions. He told her she must teach the children to play instruments. He said God was the rhythm of the world and that the world fashioned its rhythms through music. He recited lines of verse that Abd el-Wahhab had set to music and said that a single line of verse summed up all the prayers that mankind had composed to glorify their gods.

“Listen!” he said:

My lord, when my soul was in his hand ,

Destroyed it, may his hand forever rest unharmed!

He stood up and asked for the tape recorder so he could play her the ballad called “The One You Have Made to Suffer.” His foot tripped on the edge of the carpet and he tipped forward, hands outstretched. Hend recoiled but the man could not stop his forward trajectory, and it looked as though he was going to fall on top of her. She tried to free herself from his hands by pushing them away and he fell to the floor.