Karim wasn’t convinced by the idealized image his brother drew of his father. At first he’d objected to the name of the hospital, not wanting it to inherit the name and lore of the pharmacy, but he’d resigned himself because he saw in it a sign of his brother’s atonement for his sins. He did, however, refuse absolutely to allow the laboratory attached to the hospital to be named the Nasri Shammas Laboratory. “That I will not agree to. We’re starting from scratch, not inheriting a hospital. Not to mention that you know very well, my dear brother, what Father did to people and the uses to which he put his concoctions.”
Nasim looked at his brother uncomprehendingly, as though he’d traded in his old memory for a new one, as though it hadn’t been Nasim who’d uncovered his father’s scandalous doings when he revealed the secret of the cupboard in one of whose drawers Nasri had put photographs of the women who were his victims.
Nasri hadn’t died with the outbreak of the war as Nasim had tried to imply to his brother. The man had died by degrees, as everyone does. He had at its outset treated the war as a silly game in which he could see a repetition of the Lebanese megalomania which turned the disasters of the country’s modern history into a kind of joke. He supported his argument with two names — Said Aql and Charles Malek. The first was a well-known poet who had learned nothing from al-Mutanabbi but self-conceit. This had led him in the end to call for the adoption of the Latin alphabet in place of the Arabic, and to a folie de grandeur, which made him believe that Lebanon was the greatest country in the world. He had also made the embarrassingly racist statement that “it is the duty of every Lebanese to kill a Palestinian.”
The second was an Americanized philosopher who ended up prostrating himself before Camille Chamoun and pleading with him not to leave the Lebanese Front (an alliance that brought together the right-wing Christian sectarian parties during the war). He also proclaimed that Bashir Gemayel had created the first Christian army in the East! This happened after the Phalangist militias annihilated Chamoun’s in a bloody massacre at the Safra Marina, leaving a swimming pool full of corpses floating in water and blood, and the Lebanese Forces as the sole army of the Christian Right.
“One preening his mustache and the other on his knees — that’s your war!” Nasri screamed in Nasim’s face.
“What? You think your clever son Karim’s Palestinians are better than us?”
“God damn the hour!”
“What hour?” asked Nasim.
“The hour I fathered you. No one else has had it like me. Is this some kind of bad joke? The war’s come right inside my house.”
Despite his harsh words against his sons, Nasri didn’t take the war seriously. He thought it was just a little game that would end in a few months. But as time passed and the war became a way of life, he began to feel his world was dying and that he’d lost both his place and his status. The twins had separated forever and his pharmacy was now desolate. In the war, amidst the downpour of shells, Nasri discovered how the city had aged. Beirut, which to him had been a symbol of youthfulness and renewal, shrank into itself. Its skin cracked and it ended up resembling a blind old woman wrapped up and bent over as she walked, her back humped and her head buried in her chest. Beirut had come to look like an old woman called Catherine, distantly related to his mother, of whom he could remember only her hunched back, her long toenails that she couldn’t clip, and her black clothes. The image of this aged woman rose up unexpectedly from some hidden corner of his memory. Nasri couldn’t remember where he’d seen her, for she’d died when he was six, and her image, like most images of the first stages of childhood, had formed only through what his mother had said about her. And his mother had spoken of her only every September 20, on which day she would hold an annual memorial service for the dead in her family and include Catherine in the list.
This image of an aged hunchbacked woman began to replace that of Beirut as Nasri started to notice the aging of the city and smell its decay, which was like that of the bodies of the old. Nasri sank toward his end without realizing it. He mocked a city that could behave like an old woman. Once, he told Karim — who was reciting verses by Khalil Hawi in which the poet calls Beirut a whore in order to justify its necessary destruction — that he didn’t like that kind of literature, which converted entities into metonymies. The metaphor is the ugliest form of simile and to speak of the city as “a woman” or “a whore” was to create bad literature because literature shouldn’t imitate reality. It should be the other way round.
He only learned that the poet Khalil Hawi had committed suicide during the Israeli incursion into the city in 1982 when Karim phoned him from Montpellier and told him in a sad voice that Khalil Hawi had killed himself with a shot to the head from a hunting rifle in protest at the Israeli occupation.
Nasri was on the verge of laughter as he told his son, “How stupid! Wouldn’t it have been better if he’d shot at the Israelis instead of himself?” But his tears poured out and he started sobbing. Karim had rung off in his father’s face and didn’t hear him weep. At that instant Nasri had seen a vision of Catherine in front of him, but she’d turned into a man who looked like him. He’d brought the woman back from his memories to make her a metaphor for Beirut, and so to hide his old age from his own eyes. He’d come to understand why writers and poets resorted to metaphor: metaphor is the world’s senectitude, which resembles childhood only in its inability to distinguish among feelings, which it jams together, so that laughter becomes a synonym for weeping. Catherine had turned into a man and the man was bending over the remains of the herbs that had rotted in a nearly deserted pharmacy located in a city consumed by rust.
“I am Catherine,” Nasri said to his reflection in the mirror. He was standing in front of a huge looking glass that he’d placed in the back room of his shop, where he would transform herbs into remedies and have sex with women whom he’d intoxicated with love of life via the herbal mixtures distilled in his small alembic. There, in front of the mirror reflecting the image of his secret room, Nasri stood alone and saw the image of the hunchbacked woman on whose thick skin rings like those on tree trunks had erupted. She had dressed herself in him and taken him off to taste the bitterness he felt each time he imitated one of his father’s movements, or performed some involuntary action that reminded him that he was now an old man.
Against his own will, Nasri began to see himself as his father and began to hate himself. He had never loved his father and had loathed his smell, which was of a kind of old-fashioned jasmine in which the fetid scent of the flower mixed with that of cheap cologne.
Catherine came and the smell of musk, which Nasri used to perfume himself, was overlaid by the smell of fetid jasmine. It was like the smell of urine, and Nasri’s battle with his father’s smell, which had taken root in him, began. It was an unwinnable battle in which no soap or perfume availed.
The first battle Nasri lost was to smell and thereafter one defeat followed another, reaching a final climax with his collapse in front of Salma, who believed him only after he was dead.
That day he’d stood in surrender before the mirror. He’d lost all his desires in one go. He’d lost all appetite for food, for women, for wine. He’d lost his desire to play backgammon. He felt the city was mendacious and deceptive: it insinuated to him its own death so that it could kill him and take him to the end.
He wished he could bring his two sons together just once more around the breakfast table to tell them he didn’t want to die but was going to in spite of himself. He didn’t want them to promise him anything because he knew now that they would eventually become one man, as he’d hoped they would, though all that man would find before him to cloak himself in would be the image of an aged father. After that day he wouldn’t want to see them again, so that their image would deteriorate no further and they wouldn’t end up, as he had now, hating it and despising human nature.