Karim said it had nothing to do with him. “You’re one of the family now and you should think of me as your brother.”
“My brother!” she said, and smiled bitterly.
She spoke, and Karim felt as though he wasn’t there. A white cloud covered his eyes — he felt as though he had cataracts. He saw Nasri in front of him, describing the milky whiteness that had invaded his eyes. He called it “the blue water” and said he hated that name and didn’t know why people had come up with a name that didn’t refer to anything reaclass="underline" the blue was just an illusion because all one sees is white. And he said if the operation wasn’t a success he’d commit suicide. He asked Nasim to put a poison pill in his drawer: “Afterward you can say what you like, but blindness means suicide. Nasri isn’t going to live a single second as a blind man. Got it, you assholes?”
Nasri was sixty years old when the milky color started to take over his left eye. He realized from the first moment that he was going to have to face it and there was no alternative to an operation. This man, who had spent his whole life treating people and prescribing treatments and who had conducted himself before his patients like a god, was terror-stricken by the idea of having to undergo a surgery. He’d treated himself with herbs, diets, and combinations of medicines, and these, he was convinced, suited his body, but he’d never got involved with two things: the eyes and diseases of the prostate. Faced by cases of this sort he’d stand in front of his patients like an idiot, raise his thick white-streaked eyebrows, and advise a visit to the doctor. The pharmacist, who despised doctors and said they were no more than fungi growing on the tips of the tree of chemistry fashioned by pharmacists, would, when faced with the mysteries of the eye and before the terrible spectre of diseases of the prostate that afflict men with sterility, lose his cunning, swallow his words, and advise his patients to visit a doctor.
But he couldn’t swallow his eldest son’s decision to study medicine and he never forgave him. “You, the one I’ve been depending on to complete me and complete my mission, you, the clever one Brother Eugène used to adore because you were so exceptionally intelligent when it came to maths and chemistry — you want to abandon me? Who am I going to leave the pharmacy to? Your dumb brother who’s a dunce at everything? I swear I’ll never forgive you. You’re not my son.”
“But, Father, pharmacists can’t work without doctors.”
“That’s what they want you to think but you know it’s just nonsense.”
When Nasri uttered these words he wasn’t telling the truth. In fact he thought this son of his, so clever at school, was a fool when it came to the practicalities of life and believed his younger brother, sharp as a tack, could take his herbal mission forward properly. He just wished he could merge his two sons into one. “It’s like I’d been sliced in two,” he told his adolescent sons as they discussed how Karim would present himself using the name of his younger brother at the entrance examinations for the Faculty of Pharmacy at the Jesuit university.
Nasri’s dreams about his two sons were ambiguous and confused but the image he wanted to remember — even though he wasn’t certain he’d actually seen it in a dream — was that of a youth with one body and two heads. The features of the two faces were so close as to be identical; the problem lay in the eyes. The eyes were closed and surrounded by circles of darkness. Faced with this dream, Nasri found himself incapable of waking from sleep, even though he knew this double visage only visited him just as dawn was breaking and that it was enough for him to open his eyes for the image, which hurt them and held him immobile in his bed, to dissolve.
Nasri told Salma his greatest disappointment was his two boys. They were drinking coffee on Nasim’s balcony, after he had married Hend. The houseplants he’d given his son were bright, large, and green. He talked to her of basil because he knew she was fond of it and used it in innumerable dishes.
“See that basil, Salma? It’s all my own work!” he said, laughing.
“Your son will kill you if you pull that dirty trick on Hend. Be careful!”
“Don’t worry, Salma. Does anyone kill his own? I go personally once a week and apply the potion. Those games are over now. But it was kind of a nice game and I can still taste it on my tongue.”
The woman’s face seemed to close and Nasri saw the sorrow and realized she had locked a door and there was nothing he could say. He wanted to tell her that he’d repudiated those days, that what was left of the era of the green fluid was the memory of what he’d had with her, and that today he wanted her as the companion of his last days, as his sweetheart. Nasri had no idea from where such salvation and tenderness had suddenly descended upon him but he was honest to the point of embarrassment in talking about them. All he would ever remember of this meeting was that word; he’d felt the embarrassment of salvation and discovered that his love for his sick wife and his affection for her still slept in some secret part of his soul, and that Salma could now occupy that place. Salma was fated never to believe him, not because he was lying but because he was incapable of believing himself and because there were dozens of reasons to make her doubt his words, especially after the scandal of the two elderly spinsters.
Salma had told Nasim it wouldn’t do. The woman had no idea where she’d found the courage to say this. First she spoke to her daughter and asked her to ask her husband to take his father in hand. Hend’s answer was that she wouldn’t get between her husband and his father.
“I’ve got enough problems, Mother.”
“Why? Your husband too?”
“Please. Don’t make me say anything, it’ll be better for us both.”
Salma found herself talking to her son-in-law. She knew he knew what had happened between her and his father but she screwed up her courage and spoke. The man’s face turned pale and he left his apartment in a fury and didn’t return that night. Did Nasim really not know about the business with the two sisters, which was common knowledge? Or was he just pretending in front of his mother-in-law? Or was he angry at the impudence of this woman who knew he knew what had happened between her and his father but had the effrontery to talk of virtue?
The next morning he phoned his wife and told her to stop worrying and asked her not to ask him what had happened but to ask her mother.
Nasri was sitting on the balcony contemplating the green leaves and watching his three little grandsons, Nadim, Nasri, and Bashir, who were playing under their grandmother’s supervision. He hated his grandsons. Well, that wasn’t the right word, but he felt slighted because Nasim hadn’t given his eldest son his name. He hadn’t said anything, not having given his own eldest son his father’s name. He’d been right, though. How could he have named his eldest son Georges after the man who’d squandered the family’s wealth and spent his life at the gambling table, compelling his eldest son to go to work when he was twelve so he could guarantee his school fees? “But I’m not Georges. I’m his opposite. I didn’t die of diabetes like Father, I dedicated my life to those bastards and didn’t remarry when their mother died.” Suddenly he saw Nasim’s finger approaching his face. Salma had withdrawn with the children indoors and Nasri found himself looking into his son’s face, sclerotic with fury, and at his wagging index finger.
He was struck dumb that day and saw the spectre of the end. He could find nothing to say because he felt as though the wall with which he’d fenced off his life had collapsed. He believed a person built a wall around himself and this wall fell apart at the moment of death, when one could no longer control oneself and therefore lost all dignity, the smell spreading everywhere. On his son’s finger, pregnant with threat, he smelled his demise and he felt the need to get to the bathroom as he could no longer hold himself in.