Karim decided to ignore his father’s lessons, which he considered banal. He’d succeeded in training himself to shut his ears and listen to the silence. It was no use just to think about other things during his father’s lectures: Nasri was a master at jumping from one topic to another to pique his sons’ curiosity. As a result, Karim had discovered what he called “secret cotton wool.” As soon as his father began to speak, he’d plant invisible cotton wool in his ears to block out the sound. To the rhythm of the silence he’d eat the labneh dipped in oil and entertain himself by observing his father’s inaudible enthusiasms.
All the same, what had stuck in his ears was enough to make him hate himself in France, especially when he began to hear the echo of his father’s voice in his own and see how he had involuntarily adopted many of his father’s rituals and theories.
When Hend told him how his father had died and his brother later angrily corrected her version, he’d understood that both versions were lies, but the subject didn’t interest him. He’d felt he was in danger of becoming a dupe like his mother, and that even in death his father was capable of devouring everyone around him.
It wasn’t true that he’d left Hend after seeing the contents of the drawer that his younger brother had opened onto hell. On the eve of his departure for France he’d thought it was the reason, but now, back in Beirut and listening to the story of his father’s death, he was no longer certain of anything. As soon as he’d arrived in Beirut, at the moment he’d found himself in his brother’s home eating kibbeh nayyeh and seen Salma swathed in black, the pictures in the drawer and the window onto his father’s sex life with which they had provided him, with the Shefa Pharmacy as backdrop, had come back. He could see himself at that moment, standing next to his brother, who had managed to steal the key to the secret drawer, and the drawer opening before his eyes to reveal those terrible pictures in which Salma appeared in unbelievable positions. The pictures were part of an album that brought together a number of the women who had fallen victim to Nasri’s amazing Green Potion.
“Just look at Salma! What a fucking beauty! If I’d been in your place, I’d have had the mother and daughter together,” said Nasim, laughing.
Karim’s throat was dry and he couldn’t respond. He tried to swallow but could find no saliva in his mouth. He could feel thorns sprouting in his gullet as he set upon the pictures, trying to tear them up.
His brother pushed him away from the drawer and said, “You’re a fool. All that intelligence and medicine and multiplication and division, but you’re still an idiot, pretending like you didn’t know. Everyone used to see Mrs. Salma going to the pharmacist’s all hot to trot and coming out glowing. What’s the big deal? I just wanted you to have a laugh. Now you’ve seen what that shit does to women — but I want to ask him how he persuaded them to be photographed. Can you imagine the scene? What a mess! There’s Salma …”
“Shut up! You and your father are both shits. I want to get out of this house.”
“Do you think Hend knows about her mother’s thing with the pharmacist?”
“Don’t even say Hend’s name.”
The drawer with the pictures had pursued him since his arrival in Beirut. True, he’d opened the drawer and found it empty, but he hadn’t dared ask his brother what had happened to the album.
Now, though, he found himself uncertain of everything. Had things reached a point where the old man had drunk the same green liquid that was his means of access to women’s bodies?
When Karim had left Muna in bed on that final morning of farewell and gone to the kitchen to make breakfast, she’d followed him, wrapped in her towel, to tell him she was in a hurry because Ahmad was waiting for her at home, and he’d responded, “No, you can’t leave until you’ve tasted the most delicious breakfast in the world.” He made a Spanish omelette out of fried eggs, labneh, and pine nuts. “This was Father’s favorite breakfast,” he said, “but I was an ass and I used to think, stupid as I was, that I hated the taste of eggs with labneh. Then I grew up and realized that eggs with labneh is the best dish in the world. In France, whenever I slept with a woman, I’d taste labneh and pine nuts on my tongue, but they don’t have labneh there.” He said the French had three hundred types of cheese and even so they didn’t know the most delicious thing in the world, and how “when we dunk the labneh in the oil we smell life. Life smells green, like olive oil.”
“I didn’t realize you were so in love with your stomach. I would have cooked you fattet makdous,” she said. “Granny’s from Aleppo and for her Aleppo is fattet makdous and kufta with cherries.”
“Cherries with meat! The most important thing, mind, is to put pine nuts in the omelette.”
As she got up in a hurry to get dressed and go, she said she’d loved the breakfast.
“Shall I teach you to make it? It’s very easy.”
“No. I’d rather keep the omelette as a memory.”
When she came back to the kitchen, where Karim was washing the frying pan, he turned and saw her standing in front of the door, waiting for him.
He went up to kiss her and she pulled back, said she was late, and left.
He made a pot of coffee and sat down alone. He lit a cigarette and heard Nasri’s voice stealing into his ears, breaking through the barriers of cotton wool and talking of women.
“Was my mother like that?” asked Nasim.
“Don’t you dare speak your mother’s name! The mother is a sacred being, my son. I’m not talking about mothers, I’m talking about women.”
“But mothers are women too,” said Nasim.
His father nodded and didn’t reply. Then he suddenly pushed his plate aside, stood up from his chair, and said that talking to his son was a waste of time.
The father left the breakfast table and desisted from all further talk about women. Now his voice came back to Karim, who had pretended to hear nothing.
“A woman is the essence of desire. Men are just a small detail in the world of love, which has no limits. That’s why I’m amazed when men come to me and ask for restoratives, because they won’t do any good. The real man is the one who makes the woman feel he’s a man, end of story.”
“How exactly?” asked Nasim.
“What I mean, my dear son, is that, when we speak of love we’re speaking of something magical and the magic is all in the hands of the woman. If she wants you, you’ll do fine, and if she doesn’t want you, nothing will work, because men are nothing.”
Nasri tried to explain to his son that he wasn’t talking about the urges of early adolescence, when desire is blind and random. He was talking about love when it became the heart’s warmth and soul’s nourishment. At that point, it could only be through the woman and for her.
Nasim tried to ask him about prostitutes: “But with them it doesn’t make any difference to me and it’s not like what you say but things work fine all the same.” The father answered that that was something temporary and linked to being young. Youth was life’s little trick “because it dupes us into thinking that its exuberance is life itself when it’s only an excess of life that we have to rid ourselves of so that we can enjoy life.”
I was created for fidelity; should I return to youth again,
I would take leave of my gray hair with pain in my heart, weeping.
“Prostitutes,” he said, “are needed to take life’s overflow, meaning needed by men who’ve been emptied of life.”