The clever boy did all his brother’s homework, coached him, and performed miracles to make sure he passed and wasn’t held back a year: Nasim couldn’t bear the thought that he and his brother might be in different classes. The first real crisis between the brothers occurred when Nasim failed First Intermediary and Brother Eugène decided to make him repeat the year.
“What’s going on between you and Brother Eugène?” Nasim asked his brother derisively.
Nasim said he was going to leave school. “I’m sick of priests and the smell of incense and I can’t take the Jesuits and their whisperings anymore.”
Nasri agreed with his son. He went to see Brother Eugène and said he’d never agree to the twins being in separate classes. Brother Eugène tried to convince the man that he was ruining his son’s future.
“Karim est un génie, I mean your son’s a genius, and you’ll ruin his future like this. If Nasim doesn’t want to repeat, it’s up to him, and you. You can move him to any other school, but for Karim it would be a terrible thing to do. We want him.”
Nasri said that when he heard the words “we want him” he was struck with fear and decided to move both boys to another school, whatever the cost. “When those priests set their eyes on a boy, they get him.”
“What do you mean, ‘They get him’?” asked Nasim.
“I mean they sweet-talk him till they make a priest of him.”
“But I don’t want to become a priest,” said Karim. “I want to study to be a doctor.”
“No, you’re going to study pharmacy. Who else am I going to leave the shop to?”
“What about me?” asked Nasim.
“You’re going to study pharmacy too.”
“But I’m not convinced we have to change schools,” said Karim.
“I told you, I’m afraid of the priests.”
“But I told you that I’m not going to become a priest, whatever happens.”
“I’m afraid of something else,” said the father.
“I don’t understand,” said Karim.
“I do,” said Nasim, and burst out laughing.
“Shut up, boy!” Nasri yelled, and left the apartment.
Two days later Brother Eugène came to the house and informed Nasri that the school administration had agreed Nasim could move on to middle school on condition that he vowed to apply himself to his studies.
And that was how it was. Nasim agreed, but an exposure that would come close to ruining his life lay in wait for him. And when Nasim tried to escape the scandal two years later by running away from home, it was he, with his father’s connivance, who cooked up the business of the souk to save his elder brother from falling prey to the machinations of the Jesuit priest.
Did Nasri engineer the incident?
Many years later Nasim would tell his brother that his father had asked him to take his elder brother to the souk so he wouldn’t have to wonder anymore. He said their father knew Nasim went there but he’d turned a blind eye. “I remember I was coming back from there one time. It was a Saturday evening, and it was summer and hot. Father came up to me and said, ‘So how were the sports, you little prick?’ and laughed. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Good health to you! That’s how men are supposed to be.’
“I answered that I’d been at the club doing sports.
“Father burst into laughter and said, ‘Do you take me for an idiot? I saw you there! I was coming out from Uzun the Turk’s. I can see you’re a connoisseur like your father. But you have to tell me, boy, because we can’t have father and son going to the same places. That would be wrong.’
“ ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘That would be wrong,’ and I burst out laughing.”
“ ‘Take your brother,’ he told me. ‘He’s blind and doesn’t know anything. Take him before the priests get their claws into him and we lose him for good.’ ”
“You mean Father was worried about something?”
“Why? Was there something?” asked Nasim.
“No. I mean, like all the boys,” said Karim.
“You mean he fucked you?”
“Of course not! I mean, something not far off.”
Karim never told anyone what “not far off” meant. He’d put the whole thing out of his mind, as though it had never been, and when his brother insisted on knowing the details his response was just to give a small smile so that he didn’t have to say anything. “I mean it was nothing. Just talk, that was all. Stuff about the Greek philosophers and how they used to interact with their students through intimate relationships.”
“So did he make a Greek philosopher out of you or not?”
“Of course not! What a thing to say!”
“I’m going to make an honest-to-goodness philosopher out of you and I’m going to use a Greek lady professor too!”
Nasim said that “if it weren’t for Madam Athena’s patience and experience we would have been in trouble.” He said he’d asked Uzun the Turk for advice and she’d suggested the Greek because “a case like your brother’s needs a woman with real experience or the kid will be lost.”
“And when I took you to Madam Athena’s and saw how you turned red as a beetroot and your voice stopped coming out, I was scared to death. But the lady was terrific. She was patient as an angel with you and everything went okay.”
The parting of the ways between the two brothers began when they were sixteen. At first they were like stand-ins for one another: that was how Karim explained his relationship with his brother to Bernadette. Nasim would live out his naughtiness and tell his brother about it and Karim would live out his life of books and take his brother into the worlds of the heroes of novels. “We were like one person divided into two,” he said, “till I discovered that I wasn’t living my own life. That happened when Nasim came and told me he’d been to the souk and slept with a prostitute. He advised me to stop masturbating and said, laughing, that the entrance to life was via the vagina and that women possessed something insatiable and only a real man could quench it. He invited me to go with him but I was afraid. At the beginning I made out it wasn’t allowed and said it was a sin and dishonorable for a man to buy something beyond price. I said that love couldn’t be bought or sold. My brother laughed and explained that he wasn’t talking about love but about sex: ‘That’s one thing and this is another, old man.’ I could do nothing faced with a woman of forty. I saw her there in front of me, naked, with her big breasts and her curves. She came up to me, took my hand, and put it on her breast, and I felt paralyzed and broke into a cold sweat. The sweat spread, making patches on my clothes, and I wanted to get out of the place. The sweat clouded my view like tears. It was salty like tears but its salt was acrid. At that point the Greek woman took me by the hand and led me into the bathroom. She filled the tub with hot water topped with soap bubbles that smelled of orange blossom. She ordered me to take off my clothes and put me in the water. She closed my eyes and I felt as though the mountain that had been crushing my chest had been lifted off me and the buoyancy of the water got to work — a silken hand massaged my body and I rose upward to embrace desire. I don’t know what happened but later I found myself in the bed, drinking in the gasps of that woman who made me taste the flavor of life.”
He told Bernadette, the first time he slept with her after they were married, that he wanted to drink the air she breathed. She didn’t understand. “Drink the air! What kind of metaphor is that?”
He tried to explain to her that words must enclose meaning so that the meaning can keep its meaning, and that in spoken Arabic they don’t say, “I want to smoke a cigarette,” but, “I want to drink a cigarette,” so the tobacco melts in the mouth and imparts to it the flavor of the plant.