Authors: Elias Khoury
But Hend didn’t want to understand. She spent her time at home with books. He had no idea from where this reading fever had come to her nor why she read only depressing novels. He told her Kafka had nothing to do with them. “What kind of a story is that that you’ve read three times now? All we need is to start turning into cockroaches!”
“But we are cockroaches and we don’t know it. Perhaps if we did we’d find a way out of the situation.”
When Nasim wanted to summarize the crisis in his relationship with the woman, he’d say the problem was one of choosing between life and death. “I love life and all you can see is death. I want to live and go out and get drunk and dance and you want to stay at home. I want to love you and you want me to be fed up with you and everything else.”
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.”
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.