He told his brother that mass was the most beautiful thing — angelic voices, a metropolitan wearing a crown, and white beards puffed up with the perfumes of incense. From that day on Nasim was regular in his attendance at mass and imposed on the family the tradition of eating kenafeh-with-cheese for breakfast on Sundays.
“At the end of the mass, she led me by the hand and made me stand behind her in the line till I received communion. I drank a drop of sweet red wine mixed with a little crumbled bread from a little spoon carried by the priest and felt I was drunk. Afterward we went to el-Burj Square and ate kenafeh at Buhsali’s. She told me, ‘You’re to eat kenafeh here every Sunday, got it? Now you’ve sweated your father out of your system and it’s time for you to go home. Don’t tell anyone where you were. That’s your secret and your secret has to become a part of you. If you tell your secret, you’ll get it in the neck. The secret has to stay between you and me.’ ”
“So you learned holiness from a prostitute!” Karim said, laughing.
“I’m not talking about holiness, I’m talking about the taste of life. That’s what it tastes like — Suzanne and kenafeh and the mass, not that teacher of yours who put one over on you and made all the students laugh at us.”
Nasim went back home on Sunday at noon. He opened the door and went into the bedroom. His brother caught up with him and started yelling and asking him where he’d been. Nasri came in, told Karim to shut up, hugged his son, wept, and didn’t ask a single question. The father behaved as though nothing had happened and ran to get the table ready. Nasim said he wasn’t hungry because he’d eaten kenafeh-with-cheese. The father went out and returned bearing a platter of kenafeh and from that day on kenafeh became a part of Sunday breakfast and remained so until Nasri died.
Nasim didn’t tell the story of his week away from home. He kept the secret to himself and let no one in on what had happened. What he told Karim was the synopsis but, as we know, the relation between the actual story and its synopsis isn’t always exact. He never told how he’d arrived at the souk that Sunday morning to find the street empty and the houses shut. When he asked the guard of the building where she worked about Suzanne, the man chased him off. “Go away, asshole, and don’t let me see you here again! It’s Sunday and Sunday morning there’s no work. You think the women are machines? They’re human beings just like you and me. Plus we don’t take kids. Don’t let me see your face again and get out of here before I give you a hiding.”
Nasim had had no other option. He’d decided he couldn’t go on living through the torture parties by day and the insults he received from his father during the evening tutoring. He’d felt his head wasn’t working properly and that all he wanted to do was sleep. The letters following one another over the pages just looked like lines of ants; he was incapable of deciphering what they stood for, and when he succeeded with his father’s help he found he was incapable of memorizing them. The words slipped about in front of him and his eyes would become swollen with drowsiness. It was an endless daily torment accompanied by insults and beatings. Nasri had never before actually beaten his sons. When he became incandescent with anger and felt the need to beat the boys, he’d leave the apartment and not come back until he’d smoked a narghile at the café. He’d fill his head and chest with Persian tobacco, which cools hot heads, and return to the apartment, where he’d tell them, smiling that implacable smile of his from the corner of his lower lip, that he would never beat them because they were orphans. All the same it seems that when he found out about his younger son’s laziness, the Devil got into him, and the gurgling of the narghile no longer sufficed to calm his fury. Karim never believed his father hadn’t known the truth about his younger son’s academic situation. He felt Nasri had been aware of the problem but had shrugged it off. Then he discovered, from practicing medicine, that parents see in their children only what they want to because love is blind, and Nasri had dealt with his younger son like a blind man. Nasim’s body became covered in pimples, the light in his eye died, and he ended up almost unable to move. His naughtiness at school ceased completely and the boy was transformed into a pitiful rag.
The blind love that Nasri harbored for his boys was transformed into something like an aversion. He came to hate himself in his sons: instead of seeing himself split into two halves, as he had supposed, he began to see them as mirrors of his failure and loneliness. The oppression was all directed at Nasim but Karim too was close to feeling afraid and losing his balance.
Karim began to lose weight. The pharmacist father diagnosed his son as anemic and took to giving him fish oil and forcing him to eat raw sheep’s liver.
The one was divided into two and home became a hell. Nasim despaired of life and made up his mind to kill himself. Not a chink opened in the solid wall before him so he ran away from the apartment at eight on a Sunday morning, only to find himself alone in front of Suzanne’s closed door.
All he could remember was her name, so he decided it was her. He went to her because no one had gone to him. He’d decided to go away and never return, so he found himself standing at the end of the street not knowing what to do.
When he saw her, he recognized her by her shoulders. He didn’t see her face when she came through the doorway of the building where she lived but he saw her straight shoulders and ran to her. Suzanne found him in front of her, recognized him immediately, and asked what the matter was. He uttered broken words from which she gathered that his father had thrown him out of the house. Instead of continuing on her errand to wherever it was she was going, she took him by the hand and went back into the house. “He’s a relative,” she told the guard, whose eyebrows had shaped themselves into exclamation marks.
He sat down on the couch in the small living room attached to her bedroom. She made him a cup of tea, lit a cigarette, and asked him to tell her his story.
He spoke but did so without telling because he didn’t know how to tell stories. When his brother asked him about Suzanne on his return from France, he told him not to ask what had happened because he didn’t know how to tell it. “Till now I still can’t talk about what happened. All I know is she asked me to tell her my story and I didn’t know what to say, so she pulled the words out of me and put them together differently and in the end it was her that told me what had happened. Please, I’ve forgotten about it and I don’t want to talk about it.”
Nasim said he’d forgotten, but he had forgotten nothing. It was that week which made him what he became. He returned home and the persecution stopped, but his life had been turned upside down and he started to feel an obscure hatred for his brother.
The story he’d told Hend about his father refusing to allow him to be held back a year at school and deciding to take his sons out wasn’t true. It was one of Nasim’s tricks to convince himself that separation from his brother had been impossible. He’d failed years more than once and endured the coercion that followed, and all he wanted was to make it as far as the final exam class because he knew his brother would take the exam for him. The business about transferring from one school to another happened after Brother Eugène decided to expel Nasim. The boy was moved about among a number of schools, eventually finding refuge in one called Pioneer Secondary, which specialized in lazy students with rich parents. There Nasim managed to get as far as the graduation diploma exam, which he passed because his brother went disguised as him. Karim continued the swapping game when he took the Faculty of Pharmacy entrance exams at the Jesuit university in his brother’s place and passed. That, however, was where the charade ended, with Nasim bluffing his way to being a pharmacist, meaning that he never took a university degree but just started practicing the profession with his father.