“Why didn’t you tell me so that I could come to the burial?” Karim had asked angrily.
“I couldn’t get a line. Have you forgotten where we are? It’s the war’s fault. Anyway, don’t take on. We all die someday. What matters is that the man didn’t suffer.”
Karim now understood why his brother’s voice had been neutral, even indifferent. Now, in the Beirut to which the dermatologist had returned, leaving France to smell once more the scent of ground coffee mixed with apples, he understood that the father who had slipped in his son Nasim’s living room had committed his last crime at the moment of his death, and that the man had lived his whole life for Sawsan.
Sawsan was the name the brothers gave to having sex, and the woman with the dirty violet fingernails occupied a large area of the private language that they hadn’t stopped using. When Karim decided to emigrate, his brother had asked, “What are we going to tell Hend about Sawsan?” and Karim had given him an angry look and asked him not to mix Hend up in things of that kind.
“What, you haven’t done any Sawsan together?”
“Of course not. Are you crazy?”
“You mean you love her without having …?”
“It’s none of your business.”
“You must be lying. You can’t think I’m so stupid I’d believe you.”
He hadn’t got as far as Sawsan with Hend. Throughout the four years, they’d played around at the edges of sex, which was why he didn’t feel guilty when he decided to go to France. He’d spoken to Bernadette of fear. He’d told her that the war had taught him that fear makes an empty space in one’s heart. He’d told her that the fear which hits you in the knees is only a beginning and not to be compared with the deep fear that grips the rib cage and makes holes in the heart.
He hadn’t been able to explain to Hend the fear that had made him lose all his feelings for her and everything else in Beirut, and think of nothing but escape. He’d wanted to leave so that he could find his heart again and learn to breathe once more.
He’d told his French wife he was going to Beirut just to take a look, promising he’d leave the final decision to her. Bernadette didn’t believe him. She said he was a liar, like all Lebanese. She also said it had amazed her to discover that the Lebanese lie without realizing they’re lying; they lie and believe themselves, and then proceed to act in accordance with their lies. She said she couldn’t tell fact from fiction in her husband’s stories and then was even more taken aback by his reaction. He’d laughed and said, “You’re right mais c’est pas grave.” How was he to explain to her that nothing was grave except the grave, meaning death, and that the rest was “all soap”? When she heard his translations of Lebanese proverbs, she’d scowl and get angry and ask him not to talk to her about soap or speak of “slipping people up.”
She’d been right to do so. He’d kept going on about soap till his father had slipped and died and now he had no choice but to go back to France. He thought of telling her, when he got back to his home there, that it was the soap that had decided everything, and he smiled. Then he seemed to see her scowl, which devoured her face until there was nothing of it left but her long reddish nose.
Nasri Shammas, to whom the title “Dr.” had attached itself because of the remedies he put together in his pharmacy and which he claimed to have invented, hadn’t slipped: someone had made him slip. Hend told him this, but Nasim believed he was responsible. Nasim was astounded when he found out that Hend had told his brother and railed at his wife for it. “Don’t believe her, she’s a whore!” he’d told his brother, and he’d screamed in his wife’s face: “All women are whores. That’s what Nasri used to say and she’s just like the rest of them.”
When Hend heard the word on her husband’s lips she left the apartment saying she’d never come back. It was night, and raining. Karim tried to catch up with the woman to persuade her not to leave but he stopped in his tracks when he heard his brother’s voice say in threatening tones, “You too, you want to screw my wife for me? Stay where you are and don’t move.”
Nasim’s voice sounded like those of the militiamen, and in his finger, raised in warning, Karim had seen a phantom gun poised to shoot.
After everything that had happened, Karim had decided to go and see the older woman, for Hend’s sake, but what was he supposed to say and where would he find the words? Should he apologize to Salma because he’d fled Beirut out of fear for his life and of the fate the war would bring? Or should he use as his excuse the destiny that had decreed Hend remain in the family as his twin brother, Nasim’s, wife? Should he try to justify the brutality with which his brother dealt with his wife or get to the bottom of the truth, which would otherwise remain forever unknown? When he visited her on the last day of his Beirut trip, he’d felt as though he’d been struck dumb. He’d sat down like an idiot and had no idea what to say.
Hend had gone back and had no need of his words, but she’d become another woman. She would live the rest of her life with a husband who no longer resembled the Nasim who had consoled her after her fiancé’s departure, and had then made her an offer her broken heart could not refuse.
3
KARIM HADN’T felt sad at missing his father’s funeral because he’d decided, from the moment of his arrival in Montpellier, to forget Beirut and the war and devote himself to rebuilding his life. But he had felt a chasm open up inside him, that “valley that forms inside a person’s guts to teach him that he’s the slave of time,” as Nasri used to say when flown with wine. The pharmacist drank red wine in inordinate quantities and his tears would run down his cheeks as he listened to Umm Kulthoum singing about waiting for love. He’d answer his sons’ questioning looks at these lachrymose moments by saying that Umm Kulthoum’s voice opened up the bottomless chasm that exists inside us all. Karim saw his father cry only at moments of ecstasy, when the Egyptian singer’s voice became a great womb that expanded to embrace all desires and sorrows. Water and tears, these were the waters of life, Nasri would say as he devoured raw sheep’s flesh. He’d put together little morsels of raw sheep’s liver for his sons and decorate them with mint and onions, and he’d drink and wipe away the tears of ecstasy.
Deep in his soul, Nasri believed himself to be a philosopher because he’d discovered the secret of desire. This business of the secret came about after the incident with Sawsan and because of his sense of guilt when faced with his sons’ tear-drenched dreams, which had made him decide to change his life. He gave up his weekly visits to Beirut’s street of prostitutes, cut his ties to the woman with the violet nails, and devoted himself to developing his talents as a maker of potions and blender of herbs.
This new chapter in Nasri’s emotional life revolved around his shop and took bizarre forms that drove his firstborn son, who was studying medicine at the American University in Beirut, to feel alienated from everything. It was a story never told, but all its elements were present in the minds of the two brothers, as though they knew all its details, and as though it had been told to them complete. No story is real that isn’t born of silence, whispers, and fidgets.
Nasri Shammas was celebrated for his brilliance as a pharmacist. The fame of the Shefa Pharmacy took wing after he discovered a cure for burns. The preparation was just a kind of heavy, sticky, black ointment, but it took Nasri Shammas’s name to new heights when the Beirut fire brigade endorsed it as the one and only treatment for the burns their men sometimes suffered. Nasri never disclosed the secret of this black ointment, and he continued to make pharmaceutical discoveries, including a potion he sold as a cure for houseplants, from which he made a fortune. He told everyone there were no chemicals in this Green Potion because he’d concocted it from a combination of herbs, and that the miraculous powers it possessed could bring dead plants back to life and make living plants flourish amazingly. The Green Potion was his means of worming his way into women’s hearts. He refused to go to people’s houses; those wanting his remedy had to bring their plants to his pharmacy, where he would mix the required amounts. And the potions he prepared produced magical results.