Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

Karim hadn’t understood what memories his brother was talking about. He’d come back without giving his decision a moment’s thought. He’d taken unpaid leave and arrived without thinking through the implications of his decision. He’d known Bernadette would never come to Beirut and he had no reason to destroy his little French family, which was his refuge from himself and his sense of loss. Despite this, and because he’d drunk a lot of arak while eating the kibbeh nayyeh, he’d slipped up and told a dream he hadn’t seen.

“Strange,” said Nasim, “I thought that was Hend’s dream. Now you’ve got me confused and I don’t know what to think anymore.”

“Give me a cigarette!” said Karim.

“What? Seems as soon as you’ve arrived you’ve started smoking again. Didn’t you tell us you’d stopped in France?”

Karim blew the cigarette smoke into the air and stood gazing at Rawsheh Rock, feeling pins and needles all over his body.

“You told me you dreamed Rawsheh Rock had sunk,” said Nasim, and he burst into laughter.

Suddenly Karim began laughing too. Their laughter fluttered over the place. It was as though the brothers had gone back to being twins, tricking the world with their complemen​tarity and finding themselves some room for independence from the overbearing presence of their father, who used to force himself between them on the excuse that he was the third side of their unbreakable triangle.

The triangle had come apart long ago. The duality, which the brothers had maintained despite the outbreak of the civil war and the fact that they were in two warring camps, had begun to come apart the moment Karim decided to leave for France. It had disintegrated once and for all with the phone call during which Nasim had informed his brother of his marriage to Hend and Karim had choked on his cough and lost the ability to speak.

That Beirut night, in front of Rawsheh Rock, their duality was resurrected. They became two children once more, playing with words, tossing jokes at one another, making fun of everything.

“Tell me,” said Nasim. “There’s something I never understood. Father would hint at it and Suzanne drew the conclusion that it had happened. On your honor now, tell the truth. Did Brother Eugène really fuck you?”

“Of course not. Don’t you remember what your father used to say about him and his sons being ‘up a tiger’s ass’?”

“What?”

“What’s the matter with you? Have you forgotten everything? Whenever he drank he’d finish the session by saying, ‘Thank God, I’m still up a tiger’s ass.’ ”

“I don’t remember but it doesn’t matter. Tell me what a tiger’s ass is first and then answer my question.”

“Being up a tiger’s ass means no one can ride you. Who’d want to get that close to the tiger? That’s my answer.”

“Okay, so don’t answer. Just tell me what it feels like when a man sleeps with you.”

“You think I’m stupid? But I’ll tell you all the same. It feels as though your heart has leapt from its place and something inside you is opening up the closed doors of your soul.”

“So he stuck it in you. I knew, I swear, that that was your first betrayal of our relationship.”

“You were an idiot and always will be. If you can believe that trite poetic stuff you can believe anything.”

“You mean you’re having me on?” said Nasim.

“As usual, chéri. Nothing’s changed between us. I say, and you believe like a fool. That’s how we were and how we always will be.”

“You’re the fool, chéri. I’m the one who played you and your father and made you think you were seeing stars at noon. I took you to the sea and brought you back thirsty, as they say. And Suzanne? Is it true you went to see her after I’d gone home and she threw you out saying, ‘Go away, dear, and leave me alone, you, your father, and your brother. You think I’m running a charity?’ ”

“Me? It looks like you’re the one who’s drunk, not me.”

“She told me. You know I’m not one to forget a favor. When the war started I went to the souk and got her out of there and put her up in a small apartment in Ashrafieh and supported her till she died. She’d grown very old and her eyes, poor thing, seemed to have got smaller. The rheuminess had eaten away at them. She told me, ‘You’re the only real man in Lebanon because you’re authentic’ — and then she told me. Unbelievable! Who goes to his brother’s girlfriend? Aren’t you my brother? I swear I don’t know.”

“I didn’t go to her,” said Karim. “She must have said that because she was demented. Maybe she got us mixed up and she meant you when she said me.”

“No way!” said Nasim. “Everyone got us mixed up except women. Women have a strong sense of smell. They never make a mistake.”

“I can’t be sure,” said Karim.

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing, I’m just talking about the principle of the thing.”

“If you mean something else, forget it right now because there isn’t anything.”

Silence and night, and a sea stretching to infinity. Two rocks, one squatting over the sea and opening its heart to the water and the wind, the other like a piece of the first rock that the waves have separated and that stands there, waiting. And two men standing in silence.

Karim felt he’d fallen into the trap. His younger brother had prepared his revenge with care. He’d lured him with the hospital project knowing that Nasri’s older son wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation of returning to Lebanon. He’d lured him with the hospital so he could show him that inheriting everything from their father wasn’t enough. He’d inherited from his brother too, and married a cultured woman who loved the sea, a woman whom in the past he couldn’t have dreamed of approaching.

“You win,” said Karim.

“Win what?” said Nasim.

“Everything, even though I didn’t go to Suzanne and you must know I had nothing to do with it. But it looks as though it’s what you say that’s going to be taken as the truth. In fact it doesn’t matter. What matters is what stays in our memory and your memory is stronger because you are stronger.”

They parted in peace. Nasim took his brother to their father’s apartment, where he was going to live during his stay in Beirut, and went home.

When Nasim got home at two in the morning, Hend was asleep. He lay beside her in bed and felt the urge to have sex. He started to awaken her gently, kissing her here and there on her lips and closed eyes. Half asleep, she asked why he was so late and said she was tired. “Tomorrow, dear. It’s very late now and I’m dog tired.” Nasim kept on at her. He told her he couldn’t stop halfway, he wanted her. “But, dear …” He silenced her with a long kiss on the lips, moved closer, and began to make his way in. Hend closed her eyes again and surrendered to the flood of her husband’s desire. It reminded her of the days of their first love, when he’d always made love to her after they had eaten white grapes that gave off a smell of incense.

Hend couldn’t resist and, despite the conflicting emotions caused by Karim’s return, found herself swept away by that rush of love her husband was capable of giving, and which changed him in bed into another man. The nighttime man seemed to be different from the daytime man, and the man when he was present wasn’t the same as the man when he was absent. By day she felt alienated from his mysterious secret world, and during his nightly absences, from which he’d return exhausted, the smell of alcohol wafting from him, she hated him and felt the need to explode in his face and tell him that marrying him had been a mistake. And when she listened to him as he conducted the rituals of breakfast with his children she felt she was in the presence of Nasri, and that this man, who made no secret of his hatred and contempt for his father, was in fact his double.