Suddenly Hend shouted, “No!” shut the kitchen door, and told her husband in a low voice that it wouldn’t do. “I told her about it yesterday, and now she’s in a terrible state. We can’t put the cheese pastry you got from Homs on the table. Mother will break down.”
He said she was being silly; they had either to eat the cheese pastry that day or to throw it away because it wouldn’t last.
He said he hadn’t bought the usual platter of kenafeh because there was nothing better than the cheese pastry made in Homs, and instead of thanking him for having gone to Syria, which had been a major undertaking, she was giving him the usual hard time “because madam is never happy.”
“Please, you’re the only one who can convince him,” she said to Karim.
“But I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Karim.
“Tell him no cheese pastry, if you have any regard for me.”
“Forget it, Nasim. Let’s do it another time.”
“As you wish, madam.”
Nasim poured four glasses of arak. Then he poured three glasses of what he called “kids’ arak” and handed them round to the boys. He raised his glass and drank a toast to life.
Salma raised her glass and drank a toast to Bernadette, Nadine, and Lara. “Your children should meet and the whole family should get together. May God give you better days than mine.”
Things were going smoothly. Nasim kept up a constant stream of jokes, passing little morsels of food to the boys, and asking everyone if they liked the kibbeh nayyeh that he’d made with his own hands.
Salma said life had changed a lot. “In the past we used to pound the meat in the mortar till it was smooth and all mixed together. That was the difficult part. The trick was getting the onion into the fiber of the meat before we mixed it with the bulgur. These days kibbeh isn’t kibbeh anymore. The butcher grinds it up with the onion in the blender so it never really mixes. Never mind though, we all do it that way and we’ve got used to it.”
Nasim said he was the one who used to pound the meat at home and to this day he felt a numbness in his right hand every Sunday morning.
“I’m the one who used to pound the kibbeh!” said Karim. “You used to stay in bed and pretend to be ill.”
“Me? How can you say such a thing? All I can remember is me pounding away at the meat and you standing next to Father and the two of you giving me orders.”
“Now the lies begin,” said Karim, addressing the boys. “Your father’s like that, he can’t say a true word to save his life.”
“By the Virgin I swear I’m not lying! You’re the liar!”
At this point Hend intervened to give them a lecture on memory. She said the most curious thing was to hear two people who’d been present at some event in the past recount their memories. “Each remembers things differently but that doesn’t mean they’re lying. It just shows the limitations of memory and that it’s always mixed up with the imagination.”
“So who’s right in this case?” asked Nasim.
“You’re both right,” said Hend.
“You mean memory is an illusion?” said Karim, using the French word.
“A wahm, Uncle. Illusion in Arabic is wahm,” said Nadim, Nasim’s eldest son. “I hear you speaking French a lot. Does that mean you don’t know Arabic?”
“And in France I speak Arabic, because memory, as your mother said, is a wahm.”
Suddenly the atmosphere became electric. Nasim leapt to the kitchen, staggering drunk. His wife ran after him and everyone heard them quarrel. Then Nasim came back bearing a square cardboard box wrapped in shiny green paper on which was written “Raheb Pastries — Homs.” He opened the box and said he’d brought them the best pastries in the world, that in Homs they made the best cheese pastry, and that when he tasted it he’d discovered that the secret of Arabic baking was a 100 percent Homs thing.
Salma looked at him as though she couldn’t believe her eyes, her lower lip trembled, and a cold sweat started from her forehead.
Hend took hold of the pastries and said she was going to throw them in the trash.
“You, shut up and sit down!” said Salma, who then looked straight at Nasim and asked in a trembling voice, “That’s the boys’ pastry, isn’t it?”
Nasim nodded. “Mokhtar was on his own in the shop when I went in. He gave me a warm welcome and I could feel how tenderhearted the boy was. He refused to take money and like I told you, Mother, he said he was very anxious to get to know his mother, and then I don’t know what happened. The atmosphere changed. Two men arrived and I gathered that one of them was called Deyab.”
“He’s the eldest,” said Salma.
“When Deyab saw me and heard my first few words, he held up his hand, pointed to the door, and said, ‘Out! We don’t have a mother.’ ”
Salma’s face started to flush red and shadows drew themselves over her eyes.
“Tell me more,” she said.
“I told you yesterday, Mother. Damn this whole business!” said Hend.
Salma’s face grew more flushed and she tried to get up from her chair, steadying herself against the table, but fell back into a sitting position saying she felt dizzy.
Hend ran to the kitchen and came back with a big head of garlic. Nadim jumped up, got a knife, began quickly peeling the garlic and giving cloves of the raw garlic to his grandmother, who devoured them, an expression of disgust on her face.
“What are you doing?” asked Karim.
“Her blood pressure’s gone up,” answered Nasim. “Her blood pressure’s started to scare us because it goes up so fast.”
“But why the garlic? Don’t you have any medicine? Adizem’s the best. Run to the pharmacy, Nadim, and buy your grandmother medicine instead of this silly nonsense.”
“I don’t like medicine,” said Salma, catching her breath and licking her lips with a tongue that burned with thirst.
Hend said the best medicine for blood pressure was raw garlic; it was something her mother had learned from the late Nasri. “Anyway this garlic doesn’t have chemicals. We buy it from Jalal Turmus.”
“Don’t talk to me about garlic and all that nonsense! What a farrago! I’m a doctor, my dear Mrs. Salma, and at your age everyone should take medicine for blood pressure.”
Hend continued to give her son cloves of garlic, which the boy would peel and feed to his grandmother and the smell spread everywhere, blending with that of the sugar syrup — the scene was bizarre. Facing this comedy Karim felt he was about to burst out laughing; he got up and went to the bathroom, where his laughter faded into a half smile. He washed his hands and face and when he got back Salma’s expression had begun to relax. She had stopped eating garlic and announced that she had to go home. Hend got up and said she’d drive her mother. The two women left and the boys disappeared into the living room to sit in front of the television.
The brothers found themselves alone at the table with its cheese pastries — into which the smells of sweat, sugar syrup, and garlic had been infused — like the heroes of a comedy set in an atmosphere of fake tragedy. Karim looked at his brother and said it was his fault.
“Your wife told you to forget the dessert. Why did you put it on the table?” he asked.
“Damned drink!” said Nasim. “Shit, the woman could have died in front of us and then we’d never have heard the end of it, with Mrs. Hend accusing me of having killed her mother.”
Nasim said the story had begun eight months earlier. Hend had asked him to look for her half-brothers. She’d said she was sure they were in Homs and that Karim had told her how they’d fled from Kherbet el-Raheb during the peasant uprising in Akkar and migrated to the Syrian city closest to their village.