It was the very inevitability of its destruction that compelled the bastard to rent his old house three years after having left it, when his mother died and he started at university. He wanted to recall bits of his past, but didn’t really know which ones.
Just like an old man whose still-recognizable features have been ravaged by the passing of time, when his feet first trod upon Assaad al-Assaad Street after these years of absence, it still seemed familiar to him. Yet at the same time it was so disfigured by the war that he felt a vague but intense pity toward everything there — the buildings riddled by machine guns, some of which had lost sections of their walls and even entire facades following bombardments, the asphalt cracked and full of holes, the smashed sidewalks that had almost disappeared, the burned-out cars, the bored, smoking militiamen weighed down by Kalashnikovs.
He found all of the old furniture of the low, little house well preserved but faded and smelling damp. He moved in right away, cleaned a little bit, but changed nothing, not even the furniture.
7.
Another meeting took place, others followed it, and then came a time when the two half-brothers could hardly do anything without one another. Nonetheless, a vague sense of apprehension stopped the legitimate son from visiting the bastard’s house; he imagined a sort of curse hovering above Assaad al-Assaad Street.
And all this time, the bastard’s influence over his brother, which he received as sincere affection, was increasing: he gave him lessons in Marxism-Leninism, pushed him to join the Communist Party, introduced him to his circle of friends — all of this without any of it coming to their father’s attention.
Yet it was the issue of women that finally sealed the legitimate son’s dependence once and for all. One day, walking quickly toward Assaad al-Assaad Street for the first time in years, he glanced anxiously at a little scrap of paper that he held in his clammy hand, on which he’d hastily scribbled a few notes the evening before. A certain favor he’d wanted to ask of the bastard had left him in a state of extreme anxiety for the past several weeks. Every time they met, while he was thinking about it, he’d hesitate, his ideas would become blurred, and he couldn’t manage to say a single word. He tortured his brain searching for the precise words he wanted to use; then, when he finally found them, he recorded them immediately on paper. His memory — highly developed thanks to the arduous retention of barbarous medical vocabulary — preserved them as is, but now while walking, doubts started encroaching, giving him the feeling that he’d forgotten something. Every time he looked at the paper, however, his writing reflected the same text that his mind had been repeating relentlessly back to him.
Obsessed with these exhausting mental rehearsals, he didn’t realize that he’d reached the street on which he’d spent his childhood and adolescence until the exact moment when he found himself right in front of his brother’s abode. His anxiety about forgetting his memorized speech then gave way to that of remembering his past. And it was for this reason that until now he’d avoided coming to his brother’s place — so as not to give in to the temptation to remember a horrible secret, or perhaps even to discover one. But ultimately he’d understood that he’d only be able to ask this favor that he so coveted if the two brothers could find themselves in a spot completely cut off from the rest of the world — not on the street or in a café or bar, their sole meeting places — so he’d resigned himself to visiting his old neighborhood.
He threw a quick glance around; the state of near-ruin of Assaad al-Assaad Street aroused no emotion in him. He rang the bell, entered the house, and when the actual moment occurred, his memory betrayed him. However, having realized what was happening long before, his brother said to him abruptly: “You want someone to fuck, right?”
Noticing that he was stunned, blushing all the way to his scalp, the brother continued with a soothing, protective smile: “Don’t worry, we can arrange everything.”
Then, in a wavering, barely audible voice — as though he wanted to hide away somewhere and never speak again — the legitimate son stammered, “You should... you should... you should... It would be better if you came with me to... to the brothel?”
The other one tried to get ahold of himself, but it was a bit too much to ask, this shy, startled virgin being so irresistibly comic. So he burst out with a loud, sardonic laugh. Then, somewhat calmer, he said, “A brothel...? No, no, no, that’s totally out of the question; you’ll get a woman, a real woman, not a whore!”
Women were what the bastard especially enjoyed and what he despised above all. He picked them up everywhere: in streets and bars and at the university. There were more than a few in whom he inspired an intense repulsion, though his successes were by far more frequent: he mistreated them terribly; they suffered but took great pleasure in him. He had one who delivered notes to him at home from classes he never attended, but in which he always succeeded in getting the top mark; another who, every time they spent the night together, put his shoes and socks on in the morning; a third who he often made cry; a fourth who he insulted; a fifth who he beat up; and finally a sixth who he managed completely according to his will. He thus handed this one over to his brother.
A few days later, barely able to stand up on his own two legs but unable to sit still either, the legitimate son paced in his brother’s house, tripping all over the furniture. He could hear nothing but the beat of his own heart. Big drops of sweat amassed on the edges of his glasses, trickling onto the lenses. He took them off to dry them with his shirtsleeve. He noticed his face in the little mirror nailed to the walclass="underline" he found himself uglier than ever. Sitting in bed, calmly smoking a cigarette, the bastard followed him with his eyes and shook his head in disdainful pity. “Calm down, it’ll go fine,” he repeated from time to time. Then they heard the doorbell.
It’s her, the brother thought, horrified, and rushed to the bathroom.
Even in his hiding place, fuzzy sounds, footsteps, and muffled laughter reached him. He couldn’t make sense of anything; he saw double, he had vertigo, he sat down on the ground. Food came up through his esophagus; he pushed it back with difficulty, swallowing saliva. He couldn’t stop regurgitating his rebellious vomit, which filled his entire mouth a few times. Unable to resist anymore, he plunged his head into the toilet bowl and let it out. His brother the bastard, who’d had a weeklong bout of diarrhea, had forgotten to flush the toilet that day: a spray of half-digested stew with tomato sauce flew into the tranquil tide of runny, very mushy excrement, and splatters of shit hit him right in the face. He vomited again... Then someone knocked on the door, someone called him, but he didn’t have the strength to respond.
After washing his face, he finally thought about leaving the bathroom but immediately remembered that outside, she was waiting to fuck him... How the hell would he get a hard-on? Surely she wouldn’t be able to help but snicker at the sight of his flaccid penis. Better to run away... impossible... stay in the toilet... impossible... die... but how stupid... what then? And he could do nothing but prepare himself once again to leave. Like how a desperate man in a burning building throws himself out a window hoping to fly or be caught by the hand of God, he yanked the door open and ventured outside.
The memory of having lost his virginity in this low, little house on Assaad al-Assaad Street came back to haunt him in his old age — at this belated period in his life, sometimes it even seemed to him that he had been deflowered by his half-brother, the bastard.