Elias Khoury - Broken Mirrors

Against his own will, Nasri began to see himself as his father and began to hate himself. He had never loved his father and had loathed his smell, which was of a kind of old-fashioned jasmine in which the fetid scent of the flower mixed with that of cheap cologne.

Catherine came and the smell of musk, which Nasri used to perfume himself, was overlaid by the smell of fetid jasmine. It was like the smell of urine, and Nasri’s battle with his father’s smell, which had taken root in him, began. It was an unwinnable battle in which no soap or perfume availed.

The first battle Nasri lost was to smell and thereafter one defeat followed another, reaching a final climax with his collapse in front of Salma, who believed him only after he was dead.

That day he’d stood in surrender before the mirror. He’d lost all his desires in one go. He’d lost all appetite for food, for women, for wine. He’d lost his desire to play backgammon. He felt the city was mendacious and deceptive: it insinuated to him its own death so that it could kill him and take him to the end.

He wished he could bring his two sons together just once more around the breakfast table to tell them he didn’t want to die but was going to in spite of himself. He didn’t want them to promise him anything because he knew now that they would eventually become one man, as he’d hoped they would, though all that man would find before him to cloak himself in would be the image of an aged father. After that day he wouldn’t want to see them again, so that their image would deteriorate no further and they wouldn’t end up, as he had now, hating it and despising human nature.

“The man’s thoughts were very confused,” said Salma. “He came to see me a number of times but would stay for only a few minutes. I don’t know what happened to him during those last months. When he told me he couldn’t see anymore he said it was a psychological thing.

“ ‘I’ve stopped seeing because I hate myself. The whiteness has descended to save me from my own image. It’s so horrible. In the mirror I see the image of my father and hate myself. You know, the idea of the killing of the father is silly. If you kill him you’re killing yourself, and if you don’t kill him you’re committing suicide. I tried to explain the idea to Nasim but he can’t take in anything new and he decided that I meant to kill him when I did the operation on his thigh after he got hurt. And the other one, the smart one, isn’t here. I’m sure he’s become French and has made up his mind to forget us. And I hate people now. I see myself in their eyes, as though their eyes were mirrors. I spit on life!’ ”

Salma said that on his last visit to her, a week before his death, he’d complained that the image of his father was pursuing him. He said a person’s life wasn’t worth an onion skin and that the end was like the beginning because one was compelled to imitate someone else in order to exist. She said she could think of nothing to say and had tried to cheer him up. She told him she was going to make him a glass of lemonade the way he liked it, meaning by chopping the unpeeled lemon finely with sugar, then adding water, orange blossom water, and rosewater to it. “I left him sitting in the living room and when I came back with the lemonade he’d gone. That was the last time.”

Nasim asked what she’d done with the lemonade and she didn’t answer. A smile more like a grimace traced itself on his face as he gripped the glass of chilled lemonade his mother-in-law had brought him from the kitchen and drank it at one go. “Just like the departed,” said Salma. “Your father, God rest his soul, was like you, he loved lemonade. Sometimes he’d put qarqashalli biscuit into it and take out the bits with a spoon and eat them. God rest your soul, Nasri.”

When Karim told Ahmad Dakiz that he longed to visit Tripoli so that he could stop at Batroun on the way and stand in the Hilmi Café and drink the finely chopped Batroun lemonade whose flavor he craved so much, his brother looked at him in surprise and said, “You like lemonade too?” But Ahmad Dakiz picked on his words as a cue to say, “Who doesn’t like Batroun lemonade? Surely you must know the two verses that speak of lemonade and its relation to love?”

“Please, Ahmad, we don’t want to hear that,” said his wife, Muna.

“Let’s hear them,” said Nasim.

“The madam will get upset,” said Ahmad. “Whatever you say, my dear. I won’t, but if you ever want to go to the Fragrant City, and you should, you can forget about Batroun. Go to Ash’ash in the port. It’s a small café opposite the Dakiz Mosque where they make lemonade ice cream. It’s to die for. You get the authentic taste of sailors!”

Nasim smiled as he told his brother that the people of Tripoli have a strange way of talking and refer to bitter lemons as “sailors.”

“If you want to hear a really strange way of talking you should pay a visit to Ahmad’s father,” said Muna. “Tell them about your father, Ahmad.”

“I’d like to visit your father,” said Karim. “It’s been ages since I went to the Fragrant City.”

“I’ll come with you,” said Nasim.

“Many thanks, dear brother, but I’d rather go on my own.”

Ahmad wrote his father’s telephone number on a small piece of paper and gave it to Karim.

“But God help you if you get in touch with him! He’ll talk till kingdom come. Those old codgers don’t know how to stop talking once they get going.”

Later, in bed, Muna would recite the two lines of verse about lemonade to the doctor, rocking with laughter at the childishness of men:

He who stops off at Batroun

And doesn’t taste the lemonade he fancies

Is like someone who sits a girl down beside him

And doesn’t get a hand in her panties .

Muna laughed, then said, “Ahmad thought he was giving me what I wanted but I was exhausted. He’d take me on trips to Tripoli, up to the Castle of Saint-Gilles, and give me a tour of the city’s markets, thinking that would make me fall in love with him. I did fall in love with him, I can’t deny it, and then I got sick of all the talk about love and told Ahmad, ‘Come on, let’s get married,’ and we did, and now we’re off to Canada.”

She told him men were like that. They know but they behave as though they don’t because they can’t face the truth. She laughed as she told Karim she was sure he was no different from other men in such matters, and that it was all attributable to a cowardice that could only be explained by men’s fear of women and of the secrets they believe they harbor.

Had Nasim been afraid of Hend and her secrets? She’d told him she didn’t know him. “After six years of marriage I’ve discovered I don’t know you.”

He told her she was mistaken and that she didn’t want to believe that he’d turned over a new leaf.

Hend would never be able to forget the night of December 22, 1988. Nasim had come home early carrying a large bag and a bottle of champagne.

“What’s that you’ve brought?” Hend asked.

“A present and champagne,” he said. He said he’d got a present for himself, for his birthday.

“I’m sorry, dear, I completely forgot it’s your birthday today.”

Hend always forgot her husband’s birthday and always apologized a few days later, when Nasim would say he didn’t like celebrating his birthday. That year he’d departed from custom and decided to celebrate his birthday in a special way.

“Okay, so let’s see the present,” she said.

“Not now,” he answered. “When the boys have gone to sleep we’ll open the champagne and you’ll see what a nice present I got.”

Later, Nasim opened the bottle of champagne and turned on the tape recorder with George Wassouf singing “Forget You?” by Umm Kulthoum. Hend stood up and turned down the tape recorder while they were drinking.