Broken Mirrors Read Online Free PDF Page B

down her cheeks even though she wasn’t crying, and she’d talk of the three white moons, so beautiful that their light dazzled people, and she’d give me strange looks as though I was the one keeping her from them. I’d feel, I don’t know … I’d feel as though the night had stuck to my skin and I’d hate myself because I wasn’t white like my mother or the three moons.”
    The third time, she told him how her mother was forced to work in thelawyer’s office from dawn till dusk to make an honest living. “The money she inherited from my father ran out and she had no choice. My mother had learned how to type and went to the lawyer who’d been kind to her from the beginning and had tried to help her get her boys back. She worked for him for the rest of his life and became more than a secretary. If it hadn’t been for him, God rest his soul, we would have died of hunger.”
    “He died too? Your mother must have salt on her thighs, as they say.”
    “Don’t talk like that. My mother was a respectable woman.”
    “But you told me he bought you the apartment – just like that, for charity’s sake?”
    “I don’t know, but I do know that Uncle Samir left us something too, and my mother used to say that his wife was mad and kept having nervous breakdowns. The man lived an awful life even though he had the golden touch when it came to money.”
    The fourth time she told him how much her mother loved her. “I know I’m her whole life. That’s why I don’t have the heart to leave her and why I agreed when she told me she wanted me and my husband to live with her.”
    The fifth time Hend showed her exasperation. “I don’t know what she does at that old pharmacist’s place. I can’t understand her. She clings to me as though she loves me but I know she never has.”
    “ ‘That pharmacist’ is my father,” said Karim.
    “I know he’s your father. You’ve never told me anything about him. I’ve told you everything about my mother.”
    “There’s nothing to tell,” he answered.
    Salma was everywhere. Karim met her for the first time when she was forty-five. He saw her coming out of the pharmacy with her short black dress that revealed the whiteness of her thighs and gave an indication of the possibilities of her firmly projecting breasts. He went into the pharmacysmiling and Nasri said to him, “See the red plums? At forty a woman’s like a ripe plum and I love plums.”
    Karim Shammas found the woman everywhere he looked. When he discovered she was Hend’s mother, he felt afraid, but it was too late to go back and he came to think there was a gap of silence that could not be bridged. He kept the secret to himself and avoided visiting Hend in her home so that he wouldn’t be reminded of that savage flash he’d once seen in her mother’s eyes.
    He hadn’t talked about it even to his twin brother, so how could he speak of it with Hend? Mothers are off limits. “Thank God my mother died when I was little,” he’d said once to Hend.
    “Doesn’t everyone love their mother?” Hend had asked in disbelief.
    “No, not that. I meant something else,” he replied.
    “What did you mean?” she asked.
    “No, well, how can I put it? Maybe it was better that way because she didn’t have to put up with Father any longer.”
    “Why? Did Uncle Nasri give her a hard time?”
    “No, but his eye was very ‘white.’ ”
    “What does that mean, ‘His eye was white’?”
    The discussion ended in silence. He took her hand, kissed it, and said nothing. How was he supposed to tell a daughter about her mother when mothers were wrapped in the cotton wool of sanctity? How was he to tell her about the amazing potion his father had concocted from wild plants to make women his victims?
    When Karim joined the medical school at the American University of Beirut, the secrets of the Shefa Pharmacy started to reveal themselves to him. Contempt for his father and hatred for his insatiable sexual appetitegrew