When Karim attempted to remind his brother of the scene, he was surprised to find that Nasim didn’t remember the open eyes. Nasim said he hadn’t seen anything: “I saw something small and white on a white sheet. Are you sure Father closed her eyes? Why, did she die with her eyes open too?”
Karim was aware from his experience as a doctor that lots of people die with their eyes open and that it has nothing to do with the dead person’s psychological state; it’s a purely physiological matter connected to the circumstances of the moment of death. But at that moment he saw his father lying on the ground, the blood running out of him, his eyes open onto the abyss of death.
5
THEY WERE TWINS, or so they believed. Karim was born on January 4, 1950, Nasim on December 22 of the same year. This was a source of pride to the pharmacist Nasri Shammas and a compensation to him for the fact that his wife, Laure, had been incapable of bearing more children. The boys were alike in every way and never left each other’s side.
Nasri Shammas, owner of Beirut’s Shefa Pharmacy, spent most of his spare time at the Gemmeizeh Café, where he never stopped recounting his heroic deeds and telling of his ability to father two children in a single year. He would smoke his daily narghile, play backgammon, and narrate. The boys only discovered why their father insisted on taking them each day to the café, where they were bored, when they found out that their mother was ill.
Two light-skinned boys who looked so much like each other they could have been twins. The elder, Karim, was introverted, while the younger was cheerful and sociable, but they never left each other’s side. After their mother’s death they turned into a single person, or so it seemed to most people. Nasim, the sturdy one, defended his brother at school and stopped the bigger boys from hitting him, while Karim did the studying for both of them. He trained his younger brother till their handwriting ended up looking the same and the teachers couldn’t tell the difference. This game of one person with two heads appealed to their father. When he asked one of them to tell him a dream he’d dreamed, he’d interrupt him and ask the other son to finish it for him, so that the boys came to believe they were one soul with two bodies.
They slept in one large bed but when they turned nine Nasri decided the time had come for each to sleep by himself. They refused but the stubborn father exchanged the wide bed the boys had inherited from their mother for two beds, which he put in the same room. Karim and Nasim rebelled and took to sneakily sleeping together in one of the beds, so that the father had to carry one of them to the second bed at midnight, though when he got up in the morning he’d find them both sleeping in one.
They lived alone with their father, without relatives. Nasri, who was an only child, had no contact with his distant cousins. His wife, Laure, was from a large family but the fates had willed that her family should distance themselves from the two boys. When she died everyone expected Nasri would marry Laure’s younger sister. Marta was three years younger than her sister but “the doors of destiny had failed to open before her,” as they say. True, she was short and not beautiful, but the family decided to believe that the reason she had failed to marry was her devotion to her sick sister and the care she took of her sister’s two boys. Nasri thought it was all over for him and didn’t argue when his father-in-law visited him and opened the conversation by talking about the need for decency, saying Laure’s sister would make the best mother for the boys. Nasri just asked for a bit of time, arguing he couldn’t marry until a year after his wife’s death. The whole family thought this a logical arrangement and things seemed to be heading in the right direction, but they hadn’t reckoned with the boys going mad.
Nasri told Laure’s father that the boys had gone mad and that he wanted him to talk to them in his capacity as their grandfather.
Abdo Tibshirani was sixty-five years old. The dignity of white hair covered his head and thick mustaches adorned his broad white face — a man who knew life inside out. He had a shop in Souq el-Efrenj, where he sold the best kinds of fruit. He’d seen his three sons married and believed nothing could make up for the pain of the loss of his daughter Laure but the marriage of her sister. And now his son-in-law had come along to make a mess of his dignity.
Abdo placed a hand on his mustache and looked at Nasri with his bulbous eyes: “You think you can make a fool of these mustaches of mine?” he whispered. “You want me to believe a story like that and demean myself by negotiating with those brats?”
Nasri tried to tell him what had happened but the man refused to listen. “We’ve set the date for the wedding and I don’t want to hear any more such nonsense from you.”
Abdo closed his eyes; when the elderly man closed his eyes it meant that the conversation was over, for neither his wife nor his sons dared talk in the presence of this pantomime of sleep, during which he became another person. The whispered speech that was his means of communicating with his sons would turn into a yell, the calm that filled his face would turn into an angry flush, and in that condition he would think nothing of beating his sons or his wife. Nasri saw the closed eyes, but instead of leaving he made himself comfortable on the couch and closed his eyes too.
Two men with eyes closed, as though in a duel with the darkness, neither daring to open his eyes “out of fear of being trapped in a confrontation” from which there was no escape.
The first man opened his eyes, looked at Nasri, and whispered, “Get up, son, there’s a good fellow. Go back to your boys and sort things out for the best.”
“Honestly, uncle, I’d like to,” said Nasri, his eyes still closed. Then he opened them, looked into the older man’s eyes, and said the boys were the problem. He tried to explain, and the older man closed his eyes again and gestured with his hand for him to stop talking. But this time Nasri didn’t stop talking, so Abdo shook himself, jumped up from his chair, and started cursing, at which point Nasri left the house.
The break didn’t come about because of the curses that rained down on the widowed pharmacist’s head but because Nasri committed an unforgivable sin in the Tibshirani family’s eyes: he tried to use Abd el-Nour Yaziji as a go-between. Abd el-Nour was the neighborhood butcher. His left leg had been severed in an accident he’d suffered as a young man when he jumped off a tram to avoid paying the five-piastre fare and found himself in a welter of blood beneath its wheels. He survived with one leg, moved around with a stick, and acquired a reputation as a good man because of his kindness to the poor, becoming, with the passing of time, a kind of headman for the neighborhood, making peace among its people and arbitrating its disputes. Everyone was confident that the only thing this forty-year-old man wanted from an ephemeral world was that it provide for his modest needs.
Abd el-Nour had never married. He told anyone who asked that he’d taken a vow of chastity following his painful accident, and that he’d meant to become a monk in any case, except he’d been prevented by his fear for and love of his aging mother. This wasn’t the whole truth, naturally, but it was — as Nasri was wont to put it — a close relative. It was rumored, though God alone knew if this was true, that he’d gone to the monastery of Mar Elias Shouweya in Dhour el-Shoueir to become a monk, but that the head of the monastery had turned him down on account of his lost leg. As the head of the monastery pointed out, affliction by reason of impairment or physical disability was not admitted as a valid reason for donning a monk’s habit. “Go, Abd el-Nour,” the Greek head of the monastery had said, “and be a monk in society.”