Hend refused to go out with her husband to the nightspots that had sprouted like mushrooms at a seaside resort called Maameltein. Just once, because he insisted, she went with him and listened to a young male singer performing Umm Kulthoum songs in a voice with a light coating of huskiness, but she’d felt the place was like a cabaret and that the women were behaving like whores. The dancing started to the rhythm of “You Are My Life” but it wasn’t Oriental dancing. Men and women took over the dance floor and swayed back and forth arbitrarily without moving from their places and their laughter rang through the space. Then, when the singer began singing about Ramallah, a kind of fire ran through the dancing throng and they started yelling the words along with the young singer. At this point Nasim grabbed her hand to pull her onto the dance floor, but she yanked it back and said she wanted to go home because she felt she was choking.
On the way back she said she was amazed at how such people could sing about Ramallah and Palestine while the blood of Shatila and Sabra had yet to dry. Nasim threw his cigar out the window and told her she hated life. “I swear I don’t understand you. What do you expect us to do? People want to live and dance and sing. Ramallah, Shramallah — do you think anyone cares what they’re singing? The people were drunk and wanting to live.”
“That’s the drunkenness of death,” she said.
She hadn’t been able to tell the women from the whores, she said. It was as though the borders of things had broken down and the men had turned into pimps for their wives. “What’s that about? Who could live like that?”
He said it was the war. “War’s like that and we have to live.”
“No. You’re like that and I won’t accept that way of life.”
But Hend couldn’t find another. She felt disgust at the charitable associations that took care of the wounded and disabled because she saw in them the ghost of the Association for the Defense of Human Rights that had done nothing for Meena. At the same time she refused to enter her husband’s world, which she saw as a mirror of the disintegration of Lebanese society, and she could no longer find anything to say to her mother, who saw in her son-in-law, Nasim, the man she’d never managed to find.
“The most important thing in men is generosity, my dear. Your husband’s well off, he’s doing well. Why are you always making a long face? Why can’t you understand that this is your lot in life?”
Karim had no idea why Hend had told him the story of his father’s death. He hadn’t understood exactly what had happened: had she pushed him, or had he fallen as she tried to escape his grasp? Could it really be that Nasri had tried to see how far he could get with her too? If that were so, why had Nasim said Nasri had changed a lot during his last days, exciting only pity and grief?
“It was almost like he was my son but, how can I put it, it was like someone who has a cripple, God forbid, for a son: he feels sorry for him and he loves him. You love your son whatever he is, after all he’s your son, but with your father it’s difficult, I swear it’s difficult. You can’t not feel pity for him but where are you supposed to get the love from? Love has to be new, like Brother Eugène used to teach us at school, and that was why Christ became a baby, so we’d love him. There’s no love without the beginning.”
Nasim recounted how Nasri had become much thinner, and that his skin was turning black and breaking out. If you looked at him from behind, you might think you were looking at a wide pair of trousers with a man hidden inside, but when you were facing him you saw a phantom wreathed in black. Nasri had insisted on dyeing his hair, because the whiteness, whose praises he’d sung while life still coursed through his body, had come to seem hateful. When Nasim mocked his black hair, which looked like a wig, he told him white was the mark of death and he couldn’t stand it anymore because it was the color of blindness.
After the finger that his son had held up to his face — as though about to poke his eye out — Nasri had waged a battle with headaches against which no herbal medicine proved effective. Then suddenly his eye problems began; the left eye, on which a cataract operation had been performed, began to dim even while the right flooded with white, and terror and silence prevailed. Dr. Said, the best-known ophthalmologist in Beirut, proposed cleaning the left eye using electroshock therapy and operating on the right. He explained to his patient that the procedure involved a certain risk: the lens that had been placed in the left eye was scratched and could not be replaced; as for the right eye, it was difficult to predict the degree of success of any operation because it wasn’t just a matter of the lens but also of a torn and broken cornea.
From that moment on Nasri lived in a state of melancholia from which he never emerged. He had no one left to consult or complain to about his cares. The man discovered he had no friends and was alone.
“This is old age,” Nasri told Salma. “Old age is discovering that you’re alone in the world, that you have no friends you can consult or whose advice you can seek as you confront your fate.” He’d gone to Salma as one lost, wanting to tell her that he’d discovered he loved her and wanted her to be the companion of his last days. He knew the visit would avail him nothing because he’d left it too late, and that he would never be able to soften the woman’s heart, which had fossilized with sorrow, but he went to her having no idea why.
She’d screamed, as she wept, that it was her fault. She was standing with Nasim and Hend by the bed in the hospital. An oxygen mask covered Nasri’s face and nose. Salma said it was her fault because she’d never told Nasim the truth.
“What truth, mother-in-law? The man tripped in front of me and fell down! His oil had run out, as we say. The doctor had told me it was only a matter of days.”
“Fell in front of you or didn’t fall in front of you, I don’t know. What I do know is that Nasri came to see me a week ago and told me the truth and the truth was that he was nearly blind. He’d refused the cataract operation for his right eye and only saw shapes with his left. I ought to have told you but I said nothing, I don’t know why. Every time I came by to tell you, I’d forget. The man fell because he was blind and we let him die.”
“Blind?” screamed Hend.
Had Nasri really been blind? Why had he waited three years to tell the truth about his condition and how had he managed, living amongst the white shadows that consumed his eyes?
Nasim believed his father had probably come under the influence of a dermatologist who was a follower of Daheshism. This man seemed to have pulled the wool over his eyes with the wonder working of that Palestinian of the Assyrian sect who had been born in Bethlehem and, on moving to Beirut, declared himself the prophet of a religious movement that combined Christianity with Islam. Nasim knew nothing about Salim Moussa Ashi and his school, which had dominated the Lebanese political scene in the forties and fifties of the twentieth century, before the two brothers were born. Nor in fact was the pharmacist Nasri interested in the matter. In his youth he’d been an enemy of all things spiritual, reading atheistical books and parading his admiration for a Lebanese physician and thinker called George Hanna who had created turmoil in Beirut with a little book entitled Uproar in the Upper Sixth. Nasri was a disciple of Dr. Hanna’s but refused to join the Bolsheviks because he didn’t believe mankind bore within itself any singular nature that was good. “You’ve convinced us, doctor, that mankind is descended from the apes. Well and good. We believe you. Now how do you expect us to believe that the ape which became a man forgot his animal nature and became all good? What’s all this nonsense about conflicts ceasing if we assure mankind its basic needs? An animal, and with an imagination — how do you expect it to be content with its needs? Human need never ends.” In a heated discussion that took place at the pharmacist’s he told Dr. Hanna he didn’t understand how an atheistical party intended to popularize religious ideas under the guise of fighting religion. “Man isn’t the flat plain you think he is,” he said to Dr. Hanna. “Man is a tangled forest and when you take away the unconscious it means you’re founding a new church and that, my dear doctor, won’t do.”