“How did you know?” asked Nasim, who noted that the man wasn’t wearing a white cap like the rest of the workers and that his sideburns were graying.
“The boys told me. Welcome, Lebanon, and the scents of Lebanon!”
Nasim took the spoon to eat but noticed there was a question in the man’s eyes.
“Can I ask you a question?” said Nasim.
“Of course,” answered the man.
“The fact is I came from Lebanon specially, because I have a message for the owner of the shop.”
“All’s well, I hope,” said the man, and sat down.
Nasim said he carried a message to the three brothers from their mother in Beirut. He said he was married to her daughter, Hend, that the woman had one foot in the grave, and that her last wish before she died was to see her children, whom she called “the three moons,” and hold them to her breast.
“Salma!” said the man.
Nasim said he understood their position and that of their father, “but to forgive is noble, and Salma is a mother who was deprived of her children.”
The man stood up, then sat down again. He lit a cigarette while Nasim devoted himself to devouring the pastry in front of him.
“What a cheese pastry! You should be proud,” said Nasim, adding that he’d buy two kilos to take back to Beirut.
The man waved to one of the workers, and in minutes Nasim found the table before him covered with three sorts of pastry that he’d never seen before.
“This is bashmeeneh,” said the man. “Layers of wheat baked with country butter between which we put a mixture of sugar syrup and natef. It’s made only in Homs. And this is khubziyeh and this is simsimiyeh. Eat and praise God, as the Beirutis say. Come here, Shukri. Fetch me three kilos of cheese pastry for the gentleman. Put the clotted cream on its own in a cold pack because the gentleman’s traveling to Lebanon, and we’ll need a box of bashmeeneh too.”
The man rested his head on his hand, looked at Nasim for a long time, and then said he was Mokhtar, Salma’s third son. He said he didn’t remember his mother because she’d left them when he was very little. He’d been raised to hate and despise her; he’d never married because he loathed women — all because of her. Yet he too had been waiting for this moment. He said he’d never seen a picture of his mother, which was why he didn’t remember her, but he’d seen her in his dreams and was sure that the phantom which had for so long visited him in his dreams looked like her. When he saw her he’d know her without her having to be pointed out. “I know my mother’s very pretty, a real cutie.”
The story of the three brothers in their exile can excite only pity. They’d spent their childhood without a mother and with their cruel paternal grandfather, who despised his son Qasem because he’d been cuckolded. Their father had been stricken with depression and taken to the bottle. When their grandfather died and authority passed to the drunkard son, he began behaving like the feudal lords of Mamluke times. His cruelty and the savagery of his behavior toward the peasants were on every tongue. The peasants of Kherbet el-Raheb and the seven villages had never suffered oppression as they did with this man. He seemed to have become a different person. His haughtiness, drunkenness, and depression were replaced by viciousness. He imposed compulsory labor on the peasants, roaming through the farms with a group of rifle-bearing guards. The crack of a whip heralded his coming and people would pray God to protect them from the Devil. He’d even wanted to revive an ancient custom no longer widely practiced, the droit du seigneur, and his appetite for food and women knew no bounds.
The people of Kherbet el-Raheb could never forget the savagery with which he treated Salma’s father, Abu Salah. Sheikh Deyab Abd el-Karim had refused to allow Abu Salah to leave his land and prevented him from moving about the village, but when Qasem inherited he took possession of the land that Abu Salah had farmed and threw him out of his house. He allowed his daughters to take their mother in but Abu Salah was forced to remain alone, without shelter or work. He died homeless. He told his wife to go to her eldest daughter, Daad, and remained alone in the open, then vanished. Presumably he died, though no one found his body to wash and bury.
Mokhtar said the peasants’ revolution that had burned down their house and killed their father was the last chapter in the tragedy of their life with that savage man, “though there was no call for them to drag our father’s body through the streets of the village. That was wrong and indecent.” He recounted how his eldest brother, Deyab, had hidden gold liras in the waistband of his trousers and taken the decision to migrate to Homs.
“And why didn’t you go back after things had calmed down?”
“We thought about returning but the civil war had begun. ‘Where are we going to go?’ we said. ‘The land has been left unsown and here we have a pastry shop which is doing well, thank God,’ and then Deyab and Ahmad married sisters from the Atassi family, which is a very respected Homs family, and I’m now about to marry a girl from Tartous and we’re doing fine, thank God.”
Mokhtar said he wanted Nasim to give his mother and Hend his greetings and that he didn’t think he could arrange a meeting between Salma and her children. “That Deyab, God protect us! Like his father, arrogant and without a trace of tenderness. He certainly won’t agree to let Salma come here, but thank God, three years ago God gave him guidance and he stopped drinking arak, his wife started covering her hair, and even his daughter, Salwa, who’s fifteen, covers her hair. This year the three of us are going to make the pilgrimage. May you do so too, God willing, brother-in-law.”
“His eldest daughter’s called Salma?” asked Nasim.
“Salwa, not Salma, and forgive me: you’re one of our Christian brethren, right?”
“Right,” said Nasim.
“No problem — ‘May you do so too’ because God guides to the Truth whomsoever He pleases.”
Mokhtar started to laugh but his laughter was choked off in his throat, his face darkened, and he started fidgeting in his chair. Then he rose and looked in the direction of two men who had entered the premises.
He spoke with them in a low voice, pointing at Nasim. The men, on whose foreheads could be seen the dark mark made by frequent prayer, approached him.
“I’m Deyab,” said one of them, who, from the gray of his sideburns, seemed to be the eldest.
Nasim stood up and extended his hand in welcome, but the other man’s hand wasn’t extended to meet it so Nasim withdrew his and said, tripping over his words, that he brought a message to Deyab, Ahmad, and Mokhtar from Beirut.
“But we don’t have anybody in Beirut,” said Ahmad.
“The message is from your mother, Salma. I’m the husband of her daughter, Hend, and she wants to ask for forgiveness from her three sons before she dies and to see them.”
As soon as Deyab heard the first words he raised his hand and pointed toward the door. “Out!” he said. “We don’t have a mother.”
Nasim rose and began walking backward, feeling it could be dangerous to turn his back and leave. He saw Mokhtar coming toward him carrying the two boxes of pastries.
“Leave them here,” shouted Deyab. “We don’t want to sell to him.”
“But the man paid and they’re his,” said Mokhtar, giving the pastries to Nasim.
Nasim tried to say he hadn’t paid and wanted nothing but he saw something like supplication in Mokhtar’s eyes, as though he were pleading with him to take the pastries to his mother and tell her, “These are from your youngest son, Mokhtar.”
Hend told him her mother had diabetes and shouldn’t be given the pastries. “Even now when she sees the children eating chocolate I don’t know what comes over her. It seems she can’t resist anything sweet because when you have diabetes you can’t resist your cravings.”