The “societal monk” had not, as he claimed, forgotten the things of this world, and it was this that led to a complete break between the butcher and the pharmacist. “People are deep. No one knows what’s inside them till they produce what’s inside them, and the butcher was a dark horse,” said Nasri to his sons as he told them the story of how the family had cut its ties with both him and its grandsons.
Nasim remembered the story only vaguely. He remembered that it was he who had started the rebellion but didn’t remember the details. Karim, who was six, had burst into tears when his father informed him that Marta was going to be his mother. He remembered crying and then starting to play along with his brother’s craziness. Nasim climbed onto his bed and started jumping up and down as he cried, and Karim started jumping up and down with him. Then the younger brother picked up his pillow and started jumping with it and they started throwing the pillows, screaming the whole time.
Nasri tried to understand what was going on but was deafened by the boys’ jumping and screaming.
“Okay! I won’t marry Marta and you won’t have another mother.”
Suddenly things calmed down, the storm blew over, and the twins sat down jammed up against one another on the edge of the bed, where their tears blended with unending laughter.
“I won’t get married, but tell me why,” said Nasri.
All he could hear was the sound of the children as they choked on their tears and wiped their noses with their sleeves. He looked at Karim and asked him but instead of answering Karim looked at his younger brother.
“What is it Nasim, sweetheart? What’s the matter?”
When the father heard what the matter was, he burst out laughing.
“You don’t want me to marry Marta because she’s got big ears? That’s what’s wrong? If that’s all, then I am going to marry.”
This time the children exploded with anger and started throwing the pillows at Nasri, who heard Nasim say, “If she comes to the apartment, we’ll run away,” and Karim echo him: “It’s us or Big Ears!”
Nasri hadn’t noticed how large the earlobes were that hung down from Marta’s head. In fact, he hadn’t looked at his intended bride as a female. When he married Laure her sister hadn’t attracted his attention at all and with time, and especially with his wife’s long illness, he’d come to see her as comic. She’d come to the apartment like a whirlwind, go to her sister’s room, and immediately take hold of the patient’s wrist to see if she had a pulse, then check that she had had her medicine. Next she’d turn her attention to what needed doing in the apartment. She’d wash the clothes, clean, and cook. She rejected Nasri’s idea of getting a maid and said a maid would turn everything upside down and be a bad influence on the children. Marta became a dictator. The only time Nasri had to himself was early in the morning when he met his sons at the breakfast table while Marta closed the patient’s door and bathed her.
Nasri thought of her as a free maid while the boys thought of her as the phantom of death. What Nasri didn’t know was that Marta used her ears to scare the boys. The young woman, who had passed thirty without finding a groom, believed that by making a display of her wealth and wearing her jewelry she might attract the awaited suitor. To this end she filled her wrists with bracelets and hung an odd kind of heavy gold earring from her ears. What Marta hadn’t realized was that the earrings would stretch her earlobes, and to a comical degree. Was it because the young woman noticed the distortion that she took to wrapping a black silk shawl round herself, which she kept pulled above her neck to cover her ears? Or did she wear the shawl because of chronic neck pain? No one knew. But Karim and Nasim were filled with terror every time their aunt took hold of a big bronze key and threatened to unlock her ears and put them inside if she heard a peep out of them.
Big ears like caves, dangling earlobes, a key, a woman, and darkness. Karim didn’t know whether the story about the earlobes was real or if he’d made it up when he saw a Nepalese exhibition in Montpellier to which the French professor had taken them to show them that human skin had been used as a cosmetic device at all periods and in all cultures. When, during his visit to Beirut, he’d tried to get corroboration from his brother’s memories, Nasim appeared to remember nothing but the jumping up and down on the bed, the throwing of pillows, and the crying. He couldn’t even remember what his aunt looked like.
“I’ve forgotten my mother. All I can remember is the photo of her that Father hung at home, as though she’d turned into a picture. When you forget the voice of someone who’s died, it’s over, and I can’t remember my mother’s voice. You want me to remember the ears of a woman whose name I wouldn’t even have thought of if it weren’t for you?”
The issue wasn’t the two brothers’ memories or the woman’s ears. It was that the butcher-monk had had his eyes set on Marta, and instead of acting in good faith as an intermediary had told everyone what was going on. All the women of the neighborhood came to know that Nasri’s boys didn’t want him to marry, and that the man wasn’t going to break his sons’ hearts just to solve the marriage problems of the Tibshirani girl with the long ears.
At this point in the story Nasri’s involvement in the matter comes to an end because Abdo Tibshirani threw him out of his house when he paid him a visit at the suggestion of the butcher who claimed to be acting as a mediator.
It all ended up with the butcher marrying the Tibshirani girl, after the man with the missing leg succeeded in stanching the young woman’s tears and conquering her heart with sweet words. This compelled Abdo to agree to his daughter’s marriage because Marta threatened to commit suicide if she didn’t marry the butcher.
When Nasri learned of the marriage he realized that the source of the story that had made the rounds had been the butcher, and he went to him and congratulated him, laughing. But the butcher thought he was visiting him to make fun of him, so he threatened the pharmacist with his cleaver and told him never to mention Marta again.
“The world’s a great mystery,” Nasri told his sons as he related to them the story of how the Tibshirani clan had exited their small family’s life forever.
“The only thing he got out of his monkishness was the one line from the Gospel, ‘Marta, Marta, thou art troubled about many things; but one thing is needful.’ He sweet-talked the girl with that one thing till he got to do one to her himself,” he told the boys, laughing.
In this tripartite family so nearly cut off from the rest of the world the two children lived alone, growing in closeness to one another and in isolation from the rest.
The twinning relationship that had bound the boys to one another began to come apart at school. Karim differed from his younger brother in everything. Nasim was the “sly one,” as Brother Eugène, headmaster of the Frères School, called him, and the sly one was naughty, lazy, and a bully. The clever boy, on the other hand, was shy, sad, and a loner.