Did Salma break the agreement and arrive some other day to find the shop’s doors closed? Did she feel jealous, or was it that she’d had enough of “the love potion” game? And did the relationship go on for years, as Karim believed?
No one but Salma knew the true story and she revealed it to no one. She told her daughter, whose heart Karim had broken by leaving for France forever, to accept Nasim’s offer of marriage. She said life had taught her that “it’s all the same. What matters is for the woman to know how to make her soul hover above her body when she’s making love. Love, my dear, isn’t feelings. Love is practice.”
How had this woman, who had abandoned her village and her children for another man, come by such a capacity to philosophize? Is it true that once she went to Nasri without taking the potion and that when the man realized the woman wasn’t intoxicated with desire but was watching him, everything in him went soft and he couldn’t perform anymore? That he put his clothes on in a hurry and said, “It’s over”?
But it wasn’t over because Salma kept up her relationship with Nasri for the sake of her plants. The strange thing is that she didn’t feel the man had tricked her. She told him once she was grateful to him for his amazing potion, which had made her savor the taste of the lees, and he’d smiled and said nothing. The relationship would take another turn, however, when Nasri found himself obliged to accompany his son Nasim on a visit to Salma’s apartment to ask for the hand of her only daughter.
When Karim had heard the news of his father’s death, he’d drunk two bottles of red wine, then sat in the living room with a glass of cognac before him, swaying in ecstasy to the voice of Umm Kulthoum resounding through the apartment as she sang to the music of Sheikh Zakariya Ahmad, “I wait for you.” Bernadette had asked him to turn down the volume “because we’re living in a civilized country called France”; he’d cursed her sotto voce in Arabic. He’d felt the chasm opening inside him and heard Nasri’s voice, coated with wine, declaring that Man was an idiotic creature incapable of understanding that his death as an individual was of no importance except as a marker of time.
Had Salma’s relationship with his father been the impetus of his decision to leave Lebanon and never return? When Karim left for Montpellier, he was afraid, because of the savagery with which his friend Khaled Nabulsi had been killed. Had Nabulsi been his friend? He’d hardly known him and had no idea why Khaled had chosen him, of all people, to tell him of how he’d seen death in the General’s eyes. He’d seen death and died. What did death look like? Does everyone see his death before he dies?
Karim set off for the past, only to discover that he could no longer visit it. Things happen in a deluge and pile up one on top of the other. The father dies as a result of slipping on the living room floor at Nasim’s apartment, and the man’s image holds sway over his son’s imagination in a southern French city, where the father holds up his glass of red wine and announces he never drinks water. The pharmacist’s medical theory in this regard rested on a curious supposition. When asked at the café why he never drank his glass of iced water before starting on the Turkish coffee, he answered that he never went near water because it was bad for one’s health. “A man’s blood is full of iron and what happens if you put water on iron? The iron turns to rust. That’s why I only drink the juice of the grape. Wine doesn’t rust and it stops everything else from rusting.”
The man who had come up with the rust theory began his day by drinking a liter of cold water: in the early morning one’s sun still hadn’t risen, the soul was in a limbo between life and death, the blood was cold, and you had to drink water to clean the body out. In the morning, and only in the morning, water didn’t oxidize the blood. The morning was for water, the rest of the day and the night were for wine. The only exception was Sunday. Nasri would get up early to buy mutton and prepare the kibbeh nayyeh, the tabbouleh, and the grill. He’d set up the arak table too, where alcohol worked as an antidote to the poison of the water and turned it white as milk. The only thing that went with the raw meat was alcohol that had been distilled by fire, which made it purer than water.
Sunday was arak day. The father would sit at the head of the table and get drunk, talking of women in their role as the chemistry of the world. He would eat and talk and discuss mutton, which had to be eaten raw, for the sheep, by virtue of its not needing fire, had become a symbol. It was the last marker that tied a person to his past and reminded him of the taste of the beginning.
The sons didn’t understand the connection between chemistry and flesh, were disgusted by the smell of the blood in the raw liver, and would eat the kibbeh only after it had been dipped in olive oil, which absorbed the taste. In France, though, the flavor of things would change.
Two months after his marriage, on a Sunday, while Karim was waiting for his wife, Bernadette, to finish putting on her makeup so that they could go to the Place de la Comédie and eat lunch at one of the restaurants there, he’d felt a desire for kibbeh nayyeh and a glass of arak, and to tell his wife about the chemistry of women. The Lebanese doctor hadn’t drunk a drop of arak since his arrival in the French city, having turned instead to French wine, in which he had discovered the flavor of life. He had become an expert on the different kinds, and how to match them to the dishes of French cuisine, which he’d adopted, claiming it was the greatest in the world. But once he found himself in his own home, and with the woman to whom he was married, he’d felt things weren’t right without arak on Sundays. He told his wife, as they ate their coq au vin, that the following week he’d invite her to eat a Lebanese lunch that he’d prepare at home. The nurse looked at him uncomprehendingly with her blue eyes. Karim had avoided talking about his country and had refused her invitation to the city’s Lebanese restaurant, saying Lebanese food was heavy on the stomach and reminded him of things he’d decided to forget. He’d kept in touch with the taste of his country only through his Turkish coffee, which, after his marriage, he would also stop drinking, substituting it with espresso.
She’d asked him what was going on and he told her about his father’s Sunday ceremonies. The woman smiled and said her father had warned her that this homesickness would soon appear.
“What did he say?” he asked her.
She told him her father had said that when a man marries, he returns to his family and his homeland.
“But he wants to forget Lebanon. He’s more French than you are,” she’d responded. “Plus I don’t mind. I married a Lebanese and I want him to be a bit Lebanese. It’s better.”
She said her father had warned her against Arab men. They bullied their wives and beat them.
“And did you believe him?” asked Karim.
“Of course not,” she answered.
“You were wrong. You should have believed him,” he said, and burst out laughing as he saw how her face changed, her lower lip falling, a sign of her annoyance. He put out his hand, touched her lip, and felt desire. She’d known since their first encounter that when he put his hand out to touch her lower lip, it meant he wanted her right then, after which remaining in the bar or restaurant where they were was out of the question.
She said they hadn’t yet eaten. “Wait a little. Plus you know I don’t like making love in the afternoon.”
“I’m not a bully and I’ll never beat you, but it’s how things are,” he’d told her, saying the problem was one of language. The Arabs call the father or husband “the master of the house” and he’d discovered that in Hebrew the word baal was used for “husband” — the very word used in classical Arabic. In the ancient Phoenician-Canaanite language the word meant “lord” but was also the name of their chief god, which meant, in other words, that the husband was a baal, a god.