“He died too? Your mother must have salt on her thighs, as they say.”
“Don’t talk like that. My mother was a respectable woman.”
“But you told me he bought you the apartment — just like that, for charity’s sake?”
“I don’t know, but I do know that Uncle Samir left us something too, and my mother used to say that his wife was mad and kept having nervous breakdowns. The man lived an awful life even though he had the golden touch when it came to money.”
The fourth time she told him how much her mother loved her. “I know I’m her whole life. That’s why I don’t have the heart to leave her and why I agreed when she told me she wanted me and my husband to live with her.”
The fifth time Hend showed her exasperation. “I don’t know what she does at that old pharmacist’s place. I can’t understand her. She clings to me as though she loves me but I know she never has.”
“ ‘That pharmacist’ is my father,” said Karim.
“I know he’s your father. You’ve never told me anything about him. I’ve told you everything about my mother.”
“There’s nothing to tell,” he answered.
Salma was everywhere. Karim met her for the first time when she was forty-five. He saw her coming out of the pharmacy with her short black dress that revealed the whiteness of her thighs and gave an indication of the possibilities of her firmly projecting breasts. He went into the pharmacy smiling and Nasri said to him, “See the red plums? At forty a woman’s like a ripe plum and I love plums.”
Karim Shammas found the woman everywhere he looked. When he discovered she was Hend’s mother, he felt afraid, but it was too late to go back and he came to think there was a gap of silence that could not be bridged. He kept the secret to himself and avoided visiting Hend in her home so that he wouldn’t be reminded of that savage flash he’d once seen in her mother’s eyes.
He hadn’t talked about it even to his twin brother, so how could he speak of it with Hend? Mothers are off limits. “Thank God my mother died when I was little,” he’d said once to Hend.
“Doesn’t everyone love their mother?” Hend had asked in disbelief.
“No, not that. I meant something else,” he replied.
“What did you mean?” she asked.
“No, well, how can I put it? Maybe it was better that way because she didn’t have to put up with Father any longer.”
“Why? Did Uncle Nasri give her a hard time?”
“No, but his eye was very ‘white.’ ”
“What does that mean, ‘His eye was white’?”
The discussion ended in silence. He took her hand, kissed it, and said nothing. How was he supposed to tell a daughter about her mother when mothers were wrapped in the cotton wool of sanctity? How was he to tell her about the amazing potion his father had concocted from wild plants to make women his victims?
When Karim joined the medical school at the American University of Beirut, the secrets of the Shefa Pharmacy started to reveal themselves to him. Contempt for his father and hatred for his insatiable sexual appetite grew within him. His father said he’d understand things when he grew older, and refused to let him enter the laboratory. “It’s the secrets of the profession, my son, and you refused to do pharmacy. Your brother, who was no good at school, knows more about pharmacy than you. One day, when you’re older, you’ll understand.”
Nasri Shammas was fifty when the incomprehensible obsession struck him. His sex life had more or less settled down after his wife’s death. He’d refused to remarry “for the boys’ sake,” he used to say, and he believed that one marriage was enough for him and there was no need for a second round of sexual dissatisfaction. He took care of his needs with prostitutes. Once a week he’d go to a brothel in that celebrated street of prostitutes named after the greatest of Arab poets, al-Mutanabbi. Once, he told Nasim the hardest thing one could do was love a prostitute. “When that happens everything turns into a mirage. You’re thirsty and you drink thirst. You drink to quench your thirst and you find yourself thirsty again.” Nasim didn’t ask what the story, which everyone knew about, was because the man had become such an idiot he’d invited Sawsan to the apartment. The smell of scandal had spread through the neighborhood and the twins had felt ashamed.
As Karim had listened to his brother haltingly recount Hend’s version of his father’s death, he’d said he could see the woman in their apartment in front of him and remember how nauseous he’d felt.
The brothers had come home from school to find their father sitting in front of a woman. They pulled back to get away from the strange smell but Nasri ordered them to come forward and shake hands with Tante Sawsan, as he called her.
The brothers never mentioned the matter again, as though it had been erased, and Nasim’s tears and Karim’s silence and sudden dumbness along with it. When Karim listened to the story of his father’s death, though, the smell came back, he could see before his eyes the bulging thighs, red-painted lips, and long violet-colored nails, and he believed the story.
“You mean Father didn’t slip, the way you told me over the phone?” asked Karim. And when he found out that his father hadn’t died quickly but had been taken to the hospital where the doctors diagnosed a small crack in the skull and internal bleeding caused by his fall, he’d felt afraid. Nasri took six days to die and opened his eyes only once, for a few moments.
“I was standing next to him, holding his hand, and he opened his eyes. He saw me, his hand let go of mine, and he closed them again. Then two days later he died.”
“Did he recognize you?” asked Karim.
“I don’t know,” his brother replied.
“Maybe he thought you were me,” said Karim.
It was a habit of Nasri’s deliberately to get the names of the two brothers wrong. He’d call out to one of them using the other’s name and when the boy got angry the father would roar with laughter and apologize and say it was going to be hard for women in the future.
When his brother called to tell him of their father’s death, Karim had been struck dumb. He replaced the receiver and put his head between his hands, preparing to weep, but the tears hadn’t flowed. A lump had stuck in his throat and choked him and he’d felt he was being throttled. Against habit, he went home at noon. Bernadette asked what was wrong and he didn’t answer. He stood up, opened a bottle of wine, started drinking, and told his wife he was hungry. He ate a huge amount of spaghetti and basil and drank two bottles of red wine. Eating the spaghetti he thought of ox cheek. Talal, a Lebanese youth who had come to France to study cinema, had told him about this amazing dish when they were in some bar. He said that a friend of his father’s from Damascus who was living in Paris, and who called himself Zeryab, cooked the tastiest French dishes and had invited him to taste ox cheek. He said the flesh melted in the mouth even as the tongue savored the fragrance of the spices. Karim ate the spaghetti and thought of ox cheek; in fact, he might go so far as to say now that at that moment he could see the ox in front of him and had been ready to attack it, rip it to pieces. That was the day he discovered that death stimulates the appetite. He told his wife that Man is a cruel and trivial being because he believes he can overcome death by eating. Then he burst into tears and told Bernadette he didn’t believe Nasri was dead because the man could never die; how was he to explain to her that he’d been convinced his father would never die because he had no soul? All his life he’d felt quite comfortable with this idea, which had struck him long ago, only for him to discover its fragility at the moment of the old man’s death.