What had happened to Nasri, who’d believed that man was a chemical formula? How could he have allowed the dermatologist, Dr. Kheneisar, to brainwash him into believing in the spirituality of magic, that man possessed more than a body, and that Christianity and Islam might be a single religion, or two faces of the same religion?
Karim had had no idea of the radical change that had come over his father in recent years. His relationship with him had been limited to a seasonal phone call lasting no more than two minutes, during which the father would restrict himself to asking after his two granddaughters and refuse to answer any question relating to himself. “Don’t ask me ‘How are you?’ What do you want me to say? Can anyone say of himself that he’s well when he can no longer savor life? Can you explain to me, my dear doctor, why the taste of things has gone? Whether I’m eating kenafeh or I’m eating shit, it all tastes the same to me. When you can tell me that I’ll answer your question. Please, drop the questions and reassure me that Nadine and Lara speak Arabic. Don’t you dare not teach them Arabic, my boy, or they won’t be your daughters anymore. Men aren’t the sons of their fathers and mothers, they’re the sons of the language they speak. That’s why we call it the mother tongue. Our true mother is the language. Tell me you speak Arabic with them.”
How could Karim explain to his father that that was impossible? How indeed could he tell him that they hated Lebanese food and refused to say at school that they were Lebanese and spoke Arabic? That when they pronounced their family name they did so with a French accent, so that “Shammas” came out as “Shammah,” and that they pretended they were from Lyon, their mother’s city?
Nasri had wanted to end his life with Salma. None of them knew — though Salma did know — that he loved her and that the game with the Green Potion had been simply a beginning, but that the woman had been afraid of him. Throwing the flask of Green Potion in his face, she’d told him he understood nothing. “You think I come here to you because of this but you don’t understand and you don’t want to understand that life isn’t about a lot of ballyhoo and a few moans and lying. Life’s about love and companionship and tenderness.”
When he told her about his eyes and the white that was turning into shadows and covering everything with pale yellow, she smiled and told him to stop playing games with her. “That’s enough, Nasri. Gimmicks like that won’t work anymore, with me or anyone else. Anyway, what we need now is a cloak to draw over our sins. To make a decent end you have to ask the Lord of Worlds for decorousness, may God grant it to both you and us. Tell me, do you see yellow or green?”
When she looked at his eyes wandering over the distance she realized the man wasn’t lying but still found herself unable to believe him. “You know what your problem is, Nasri? Your problem is that I used to be afraid of you and maybe I still am, but when you’re afraid, my dear, you can’t believe. That’s why I can’t believe you, and your boys too never believed you even for an instant.”
“But I lived like that for the boys’ sake!”
Nasri didn’t know how those words came to slip out from his lips because that wasn’t how he saw his life, though in fact he no longer knew how to read it. His past seemed very far away and his story seemed unfamiliar, as though the man who’d lived his life was some other person, or persons. It was as though things would have passed in a flash and the twinkling of an eye but for this accursed body.
“You talk like that because I’ve grown old. You’re right, Salma, but the older the body becomes the smaller the soul feels itself to be. I spit on you, mankind! How you disgust me! One ends up as a child again in an old man’s body. God, how hard it is!”
Nasri didn’t try to convince Salma to overcome her fear of him because he didn’t in fact know what had driven him to go to her. He told her that what’s gone never comes back and she was right to fear him: “No one’s more frightening than one who’s frightened.” He said he’d been afraid of love, so he’d squandered it in play, he’d been afraid of life, so he’d smashed it, and he’d been afraid for his children, so he’d lost them.
She asked him how he spent his days, half blind. She advised him to employ a maid to help him and see to his needs, to which he muttered that he’d sworn no woman would enter his house after the death of his wife, “and it would be stupid to break my oath just to bring a maid. I wish Salma … but I know it’s not possible because Nasim would kill us both. Maybe it’s better like this. And then there’s God, and God helps me.”
“What? You’ve started believing in God?”
He didn’t say anything but stood, picked up his crutch, and left, humming a tune by Abd el-Wahhab.
Nasri was alone now — that was what he’d wanted to tell Karim on the phone when he asked him to come and see him in Beirut before he died. “I just want to see the girls. Do you really want me to die without having seen Nadine and Lara?” He didn’t say, though, that in his last days he had discovered the existence of God.
Nasri wasn’t prepared to explain his relations with God. The man who had spent his life mocking religion — so much so that he despised the Bolsheviks as the proselytizers of a new one — found God in the midst of the blindness that enveloped him in whiteness. His god wasn’t the wooden doll that his friend Seroufim, the pharmacist, had given him as a present when he returned from Paris. The man had brought with him a small African mask carved on an oblong piece of wood about twenty centimeters in length. The mask was made of ebony and its wide eyes seemed to open onto an abyss. The chemist told him that he’d happened upon it on the Boulevard Saint-Germain and had bought it from a black female vendor standing behind a stall full of such masks. The vendor had enchanted him with her African costume and the tattoos that covered her hands. The woman, who resembled the work she sold, had told the Lebanese chemist that her small sculptures were the faces of gods. She’d tried to explain, in halting French, that he could turn the mask he’d buy into a personal god for his own private use.
“But how does the mask become a god?” he asked her.
“The moment you believe in it, the spirit of one of your ancestors occupies it and it becomes a god.”
Seroufim said he’d bought the mask for Nasri.
The idea of a personal god pleased Nasri immensely, especially over the period when he became aware of the danger to Karim from Brother Eugène, for Karim was outstanding not only academically but in religion classes too. This scared Nasri, who knew that nothing is more conducive to illicit sexual relations than a religious atmosphere, in which the smell of incense blends with that of desire and prayers become whispers that lead people into the darkness of the soul.
Nasri announced the birth of his personal god at the lunch table. He raised his glass, poured a little of the wine on the ground, drank a toast to the ancestors, held the black mask in front of him, lifted it up, and looked at Karim, declaring as he did so that this god was better than all the other gods because it only became real when you believed in it: “We can pray to it and we can insult it. We can worship it when we want and we can hit it when we want and it will stay with us and never leave us the way the other gods do with their followers.” He kissed the forehead of the god, to whom he had given the name Hubal-bubble, and told his sons that the African tradition from which this black god hailed required that sons worship the god of their fathers; when the father died they had to bury the god with him, at which point each son had to find his own personal god before whom to bow.