Broken Mirrors (7 page)

Karim set off for the past, only to discover that he could no longer visit it. Things happen in a deluge and pile up one on top of the other. The father dies as a result of slipping on the living room floor at Nasim’s apartment, and the man’s image holds sway over his son’s imagination in a southern French city, where the father holds up his glass of red wine and announces
he never drinks water. The pharmacist’s medical theory in this regard rested on a curious supposition. When asked at the café why he never drank his glass of iced water before starting on the Turkish coffee, he answered that he never went near water because it was bad for one’s health. “A man’s blood is full of iron and what happens if you put water on iron? The iron turns to rust. That’s why I only drink the juice of the grape. Wine doesn’t rust and it stops everything else from rusting.”

The man who had come up with the rust theory began his day by drinking a liter of cold water: in the early morning one’s sun still hadn’t risen, the soul was in a limbo between life and death, the blood was cold, and you had to drink water to clean the body out. In the morning, and only in the morning, water didn’t oxidize the blood. The morning was for water, the rest of the day and the night were for wine. The only exception was Sunday. Nasri would get up early to buy mutton and prepare the kibbeh nayyeh, the tabbouleh, and the grill. He’d set up the arak table too, where alcohol worked as an antidote to the poison of the water and turned it white as milk. The only thing that went with the raw meat was alcohol that had been distilled by fire, which made it purer than water.

Sunday was arak day. The father would sit at the head of the table and get drunk, talking of women in their role as the chemistry of the world. He would eat and talk and discuss mutton, which had to be eaten raw, for the sheep, by virtue of its not needing fire, had become a symbol. It was the last marker that tied a person to his past and reminded him of the taste of the beginning.

The sons didn’t understand the connection between chemistry and flesh, were disgusted by the smell of the blood in the raw liver, and would eat the kibbeh only after it had been dipped in olive oil, which absorbed the taste. In France, though, the flavor of things would change.

Two months after his marriage, on a Sunday, while Karim was waiting
for his wife, Bernadette, to finish putting on her makeup so that they could go to the Place de la Comédie and eat lunch at one of the restaurants there, he’d felt a desire for kibbeh nayyeh and a glass of arak, and to tell his wife about the chemistry of women. The Lebanese doctor hadn’t drunk a drop of arak since his arrival in the French city, having turned instead to French wine, in which he had discovered the flavor of life. He had become an expert on the different kinds, and how to match them to the dishes of French cuisine, which he’d adopted, claiming it was the greatest in the world. But once he found himself in his own home, and with the woman to whom he was married, he’d felt things weren’t right without arak on Sundays. He told his wife, as they ate their coq au vin, that the following week he’d invite her to eat a Lebanese lunch that he’d prepare at home. The nurse looked at him uncompre​hendingly with her blue eyes. Karim had avoided talking about his country and had refused her invitation to the city’s Lebanese restaurant, saying Lebanese food was heavy on the stomach and reminded him of things he’d decided to forget. He’d kept in touch with the taste of his country only through his Turkish coffee, which, after his marriage, he would also stop drinking, substituting it with espresso.

She’d asked him what was going on and he told her about his father’s Sunday ceremonies. The woman smiled and said her father had warned her that this homesickness would soon appear.

“What did he say?” he asked her.

She told him her father had said that when a man marries, he returns to his family and his homeland.

“But he wants to forget Lebanon. He’s more French than you are,” she’d responded. “Plus I don’t mind. I married a Lebanese and I want him to be a bit Lebanese. It’s better.”

She said her father had warned her against Arab men. They bullied their wives and beat them.

“And did you believe him?” asked Karim.

“Of course not,” she answered.

“You were wrong. You should have believed him,” he said, and burst out laughing as he saw how her face changed, her lower lip falling, a sign of her annoyance. He put out his hand, touched her lip, and felt desire. She’d known since their first encounter that when he put his hand out to touch her lower lip, it meant he wanted her right then, after which remaining in the bar or restaurant where they were was out of the question.

She said they hadn’t yet eaten. “Wait a little. Plus you know I don’t like making love in the afternoon.”

“I’m not a bully and I’ll never beat you, but it’s how things are,” he’d told her, saying the problem was one of language. The Arabs call the father or husband “the master of the house” and he’d discovered that in Hebrew the word
baal
was used for “husband” – the very word used in classical Arabic. In the ancient Phoenician-Canaanite language the word meant “lord” but was also the name of their chief god, which meant, in other words, that the husband was a
baal
, a god.

She looked at him with her sky-blue eyes and said she didn’t appreciate that kind of humor. They finished their meal in silence and when they went home he didn’t try to have sex with her during their siesta but lay next to her like an angel.

The following Sunday morning Bernadette awoke to a clattering in the kitchen and found her husband fine-chopping parsley and tomatoes and mixing minced meat with onion, the dishes piling up in the sink. She went to help him but he asked her to leave as her presence would spoil the surprise. He said he’d make her a café au lait and bring it to her in the living room.

At one p.m. the surprise had turned into a table covered with vegetables, the tabbouleh and kibbeh nayyeh at their center. He poured the arak and they
drank. She said the Ricard tasted different. “Ricard!” he said angrily. “Like Ricard,” she said. At this he explained to her that arak was the essence of white grapes, that it was mixed with aniseed while being distilled, and that it was the most sublime product of the Ottoman Empire at its height and was not to be compared to the aniseed liquor from which Ricard was made. He made her a plate of tabbouleh and she ate and said the salad was nice but there was something in it that tasted strange. He explained to her, as he gave her a piece of the large tomato that he had hollowed out and filled with salt, spices, ice, and arak, that the people of Lebanon sprinkled arak over the tabbouleh, which was not a salad as she thought, but God’s
juneina
or garden, being all the vegetables produced by the earth mixed with cracked wheat. He explained that the word
juneina
was the diminutive of
janna
, meaning Paradise, because the paradise that God had promised Man was an endless garden whose vegetables, fruit, and waters were never depleted.

Bernadette ate of God’s garden, feeling the burning taste of the arak, and just as her tongue started to get used to the arak flavor that permeated the parsley, the time came for the kibbeh nayyeh. He presented her with a plate decorated with mint and white onion, and she had barely inserted her fork into the dish when she heard him say there was no need for a fork. The kibbeh was eaten with bread, using the hand. She placed a morsel in her mouth and tried to get used to its strange taste, closing her eyes to concentrate on appreciating the kibbeh, then asked him what it was. He tried to explain to her that kibbeh was a mixture of mutton, onions, cracked wheat, salt, and spices and resembled steak tartare.

“Now I understand,” she said.

She jumped up and ran to the kitchen, returning with a raw egg, and before the astounded Karim could say or do anything, she’d broken the egg into a small dish and beaten it with her fork preparatory to putting it on top of the dish of kibbeh.

Karim snatched the dish from his wife’s hand and the raw egg spilled onto the table.

“What are you doing?” he yelled in Arabic.

“
C’est du steak tartare, non?
”

“Absolutely
non
! Now look what you’ve done.”

The Frenchwoman burst out laughing and took a napkin to remove the traces of egg, which gave off a cloying smell, from the table. He took the plate of kibbeh and threw it into the garbage, trying to explain to her that egg made everything
zinikh
. When he searched for an equivalent of the word
zinikh
in French he couldn’t find one – not
odeur âcre
, not
pourriture
, certainly not
relent acide
. How was he to explain to her the meaning of
zinikh
? He resorted to the dictionary but found nothing and contented himself with saying, “
C’est un odeur désagréable
.”

She said she understood nothing and that his conduct did not resemble that of the civilized man she had married. He tried to placate her, saying it wasn’t his fault but that of the French language for not including the word
zinikh
.

Time, however, would change everything. Bernadette ended up making tabbouleh, kibbeh, and all the different casseroles. She didn’t sprinkle arak over the tabbouleh because she discovered that the custom had died out in Lebanon and that Nasri Shammas was the last Lebanese to sprinkle arak over the “vegetable garden,” as the two small boys had called tabbouleh, which became an almost daily dish.

But the issue of language grew in importance: it reached its peak after his brother informed Karim that he’d married Hend, and Karim became afflicted, when talking to his wife, with the habit of coughing through his words.

Dr. Karim Shammas met Nurse Bernadette César at the Tex-Mex bar. The Lebanese doctor was drunk. He had drunk too many beers and tequilas to count. He had no idea how the blonde with blue eyes found her way into his bed. In the morning he got a surprise when she told him she worked as a nurse at the Hôpital Saint Bernard, where he did.

He told her he hadn’t noticed her, perhaps because the white nurses’ uniform was like a veil, and was seeing her now as though for the first time.

“You and the nurses!” she said.

“Me?”

How had he failed to notice the presence of this woman, for whom he’d been looking? Since arriving in France he’d found himself incapable of approaching any blue-eyed blonde. All the women he’d met were brunettes.

Later he’d tell Bernadette that he’d left Beirut to escape the sun, which tanned the earth, the trees, and the women brown.

“Aren’t the leaves of the trees over there green?” she’d asked incredulously.

“Not exactly. You know, it’s just a way of speaking (
c’est le sens de la parole
),” he said. He saw the confusion in her eyes and tried to explain that “when we Lebanese say ‘it’s just a way of speaking,’ it means we don’t have that particular meaning in mind, or that the meaning doesn’t have a meaning.” He laughed out loud and asked her to forget about it.

Karim had discovered Montpellier’s Tex-Mex bar by chance. He was walking down a dark street and the name caught his fancy. He went in and drank a beer. Suddenly his eyes caught Sophie’s. The tall, well-fleshed woman was standing behind the bar and laughing, the drunks gathered around her. He could see her large firm breasts gleaming through the opening of her blouse. He went up to the bar and found himself beneath the huge bosoms and within range of the loud chortling. Sophie turned toward him and yelled, “A new customer! He has to try the tequila with salt.” The
clamoring and murmuring around the bar increased and Karim had the feeling he wasn’t following what was being said. He stood there waiting for his glass of tequila. The woman undid the buttons of her yellow blouse and, with lightning speed, her breasts popped out. She took the bottle of tequila, doused her cleavage, and sprinkled a little salt on while simultaneously seizing Karim’s head. The Lebanese doctor found himself following the droplets with their intoxicating bouquet on their downward course and gobbling at her cleavage. He felt the woman press his head between her huge breasts and that the world was spinning.

She pulled his head out and poured again, and the faces and lips leapt forward. Karim saw his face among those of the others. He tried to gather up the drops with his tongue and the dizziness started. He pulled back and his eyes met those of a French girl with a dainty face smiling at him and nodding her head. He couldn’t remember what they said but in the morning, when he saw the girl in his bed and found out she was the Nurse Bernadette who worked with him at the hospital, he felt a bit embarrassed. He lit his first cigarette of the morning and contemplated the beauty that had been hidden from his eyes throughout the previous months by a nurse’s uniform. She asked him why he’d said the night before that his name was Sinalcol. “You made me laugh,” she said. “You were lapping up the tequila and claiming your name was Sinalcol?
C’était sympa
.” She explained to him that
sin alcohol
was Spanish and meant “alcohol-free.” He said he couldn’t remember, and that it was the name of a friend of his so he hadn’t thought about what it meant.

He said he didn’t know the man: “It was just my idea that he was my friend because he was like a ghost. The war had created a ghost whom no one ever met. Maybe the man didn’t exist but he became a name and I thought of him as my friend because he fascinated me.”

“How could he fascinate you when you hadn’t met him?” she asked.

“His name fascinated me,” he answered. “It’s a long story. I’ll tell you about it someday.”

He heard her say, “You Lebanese!” and ask him where he kept the coffee because she needed a cup of café au lait.

He leapt out of bed, trotted to the kitchen, and put the little pot in which he boiled the water for his coffee on the stove, explaining to the French nurse that he didn’t drink French café au lait in the morning, he drank Turkish coffee.

“You’re Turkish?” she said wonderingly. “I thought you were Lebanese.”