Broken Mirrors by Elias Khoury Page B

and said the boys were the problem. He tried to explain, and the older man closed his eyes again and gestured with his hand for him to stop talking. But this time Nasri didn’t stop talking, so Abdo shook himself, jumped up from his chair, and started cursing, at which point Nasri left the house.
    The break didn’t come about because of the curses that rained down on the widowed pharmacist’s head but because Nasri committed an unforgivable sin in the Tibshirani family’s eyes: he tried to use Abd el-Nour Yaziji as a go-between. Abd el-Nour was the neighborhood butcher. His left leg had been severed in an accident he’d suffered as a young man when he jumped off a tram to avoid paying the five-piastre fare and found himself in a welter of blood beneath its wheels. He survived with one leg, moved around with a stick, and acquired a reputation as a good man because of his kindness to the poor, becoming, with the passing of time, a kind of headman for the neighborhood, making peace among its people and arbitrating its disputes. Everyone was confident that the only thing this forty-year-old man wanted from an ephemeral world was that it provide for his modest needs.
    Abd el-Nour had never married. He told anyone who asked that he’d taken a vow of chastity following his painful accident, and that he’d meant to become a monk in any case, except he’d been prevented by his fear for and love of his aging mother. This wasn’t the whole truth, naturally, but it was – as Nasri was wont to put it – a close relative. It was rumored, though God alone knew if this was true, that he’d gone to the monastery of Mar Elias Shouweya in Dhour el-Shoueir to become a monk, but that the head of the monastery had turned him down on account of his lost leg. As thehead of the monastery pointed out, affliction by reason of impairment or physical disability was not admitted as a valid reason for donning a monk’s habit. “Go, Abd el-Nour,” the Greek head of the monastery had said, “and be a monk in society.”
    The “societal monk” had not, as he claimed, forgotten the things of this world, and it was this that led to a complete break between the butcher and the pharmacist. “People are deep. No one knows what’s inside them till they produce what’s inside them, and the butcher was a dark horse,” said Nasri to his sons as he told them the story of how the family had cut its ties with both him and its grandsons.
    Nasim remembered the story only vaguely. He remembered that it was he who had started the rebellion but didn’t remember the details. Karim, who was six, had burst into tears when his father informed him that Marta was going to be his mother. He remembered crying and then starting to play along with his brother’s craziness. Nasim climbed onto his bed and started jumping up and down as he cried, and Karim started jumping up and down with him. Then the younger brother picked up his pillow and started jumping with it and they started throwing the pillows, screaming the whole time.
    Nasri tried to understand what was going on but was deafened by the boys’ jumping and screaming.
    “Okay! I won’t marry Marta and you won’t have another mother.”
    Suddenly things calmed down, the storm blew over, and the twins sat down jammed up against one another on the edge of the bed, where their tears blended with unending laughter.
    “I won’t get married, but tell me why,” said Nasri.
    All he could hear was the sound of the children as they choked on their tears and wiped their noses with their sleeves. He looked at Karim and asked him but instead of answering Karim looked at his younger brother.
    “What is it Nasim, sweetheart? What’s the matter?”
    When the father heard what the matter was, he burst out laughing.
    “You don’t want me to marry Marta because she’s got big ears? That’s what’s wrong? If that’s all, then I am going to marry.”
    This time the children exploded with anger and started throwing