Could Karim describe what the lady teacher did as a betrayal? He couldn’t claim he hadn’t understood the meaning of the word “love” and when he came, many years later, to memorize the poem “He weeps and laughs” and got to the line that says
A heart habituated to pleasures while young
Like a rose bud opened by the touch of the breeze
he felt that al-Akhtal al-Saghir had written the verse for him.
He’d seen Madam Olga’s white thighs gleaming through her skirt in front of him and felt pins and needles in his lips.
“What kind of shitty love is that?” Nasim asked him. “You’ve got the whole school laughing at us.”
“What business is it of yours what I do?” answered Karim.
“Everyone gets us mixed up. Even the teacher herself can’t tell the difference between us. I swear if you weren’t my brother and like my own soul and more, I’d have stuck it in her.”
“Don’t talk that way about the mademoiselle! She was the best teacher.”
“You’re an idiot. All the students saw how Mr. Nabil used to go with her to the classroom at the lunch break and smooch with her. You believed that story they told us about how she’d married him and gone off with him to America? Brother Eugène caught them at it and threw them out of the school. They didn’t get married or anything. She’s a whore. She put one over you and made you her patsy and made us look like idiots and if I hadn’t been there Michel and his gang would have made mincemeat of you.”
Olga wasn’t the issue that created the first fissures in the twinned relationship between the two brothers. The real rift came about because of Nasri, who discovered that Nasim was no good at school.
The father discovered that Brother Eugène had been telling him the truth: Nasim had a real problem with his studies, it was something to which all the teachers drew attention. He found reading difficult and seemed to understand nothing in class. The surprise came though with the exam marks, when the boy got Outstanding in everything. He almost rivaled his brother, as to whose intelligence all the teachers were agreed.
“Perhaps the boy has a psychological problem and needs treatment. Maybe he gets confused with the teachers because he’s shy. Really, it’s very odd. The boy’s a little devil. There must be something not right. I suggest he see a psychiatrist.”
“A psychiatrist! Are you saying my son’s crazy? No, mon Frère! We don’t have any of that nonsense in our family. The boy’s fine and his marks are good and praise God both boys are turning out to be smart. Did you know, mon Frère, that I didn’t get married because of these boys? I look at them and can’t believe it, and now you come and talk to me about psychological problems? Out of the question!”
When the father left the school the veil fell from his eyes. He realized that the boys were hiding something and that what the Jesuit had said was true. He dismissed any possibility of a psychological problem from the first moment since, in his opinion, that just could not be, and he dealt with the matter himself. The morning of the next day he decided not to take the boys to the shop with him early, as he usually did in the summer, wanting them to smell curative herbs from their earliest days so that they could go on with his work after he was gone; he gave them Tuesdays off, when he allowed them to stay home to give him a chance to attend to his private affairs.
That day, the egg breakfast over, instead of getting up and telling them to get dressed, he asked the boys to fetch their schoolbooks. The examination began and Nasri discovered the deception. Nasim read with difficulty, as though he were spelling out the letters.
“What kind of a farce is this?” yelled Nasri.
And the man listened to the strangest confession he’d ever heard. The two boys were one person. The first was for lessons and the second for being naughty. He also discovered that he was now paying the price for his child-raising methods, since he’d never bothered to teach his boys himself but had left it to the older one.
“What else could I do?” asked Karim. “Do you really want me to let my brother fail at school?”
“It would be better for him to fail and redo the year and learn something, but this way we’re making him half illiterate, plus he’s a year younger than you. I put you in the same class so you wouldn’t be separated and this is the result. Brother Eugène was right. He told me, ‘Your son Nasim has a psychological problem,’ though in fact it looks like you, the dumb elder brother, are the one with the problem.”
“I can’t survive if my brother isn’t with me in the classroom,” said Karim.
“Nor me,” said Nasim.
And the journey of torment began. Apparently the father wasn’t the only one to have noticed the problem and the new school year was transformed into a kind of festival of persecution that encompassed both home and school. At school the new maths teacher, Maxim Sininian, discovered that Nasim hadn’t grasped a thing, while at home the task of teaching his son was taken on by the father, who went about it savagely, and this situation came to an end only with Nasim’s disappearance.
Karim was sixteen when he woke up to find that his brother had left home. He informed his father, who was shaving while listening as usual to the BBC news in Arabic on a transistor radio he’d put in the bathroom. Then began the search and the torment, which lasted a week, during which they went all over Lebanon and looked everywhere except in the place where Nasim had taken refuge.
Years later Nasim told his brother he’d felt as though his heart had burst and he couldn’t take it anymore. The whole world was falling apart and all he could see was blackness, so he ran to Sawsan, who adopted him, and he called her Suzanne. “Do you know what it means if a woman adopts you? You sleep with her and she behaves like she’s your mother. She found me work at the bean and shawarma restaurant at the end of Mutanabbi Street. I worked from five in the morning and went back to her at the end of the evening dog tired and she’d give me a bath and feed me and put me to sleep. Do you know what it’s like to stand next to a shawarma spit that’s turning in front of the fire all day long? The sweat came out all over my body and I’d be preparing sandwiches and dishes for the women who’d be coming from the souk dying of hunger, and with every drop of sweat I felt like Nasri was being pulled out from under my skin and I felt I was free. Sunday morning I woke up early as usual and began getting dressed to go to work. Suzanne grabbed me and told me, ‘Go back to sleep. It’s Sunday and Sunday is the Lord’s Day. Sleep and in a little we’ll get up together and go to church.’ ”
“But we don’t go to church,” he told her.
“From now on you’re going to go. Sunday’s set aside for the smell of incense, the light of candles, and a plate of kenafeh-with-cheese. Go back to sleep and then we’ll talk.”
Nasim went back to sleep and woke at eight thirty a.m. to a kiss on the brow from Suzanne. He took a shower, got dressed, and they went to church, where he discovered incense.