An excerpt from Ceasefire, a short story by Malek Takieddine.
Read the complete story on Substack.
When his grandmother called ‘Marcel’, two people answered.
“The one who can carry a tray,” she said from the corridor.
“You,” said the old man.
“I’m holding the mirror.”
“Then she will have to bring it herself.”
His grandfather stretched his upper lip and drew the razor beneath his nose. Marcel stood by the bedroom window, angling the little mirror toward the light. He had been trusted with the whole left side of a face. If his arms grew tired and the mirror sank, the old man lowered his head to follow it, until one of them laughed and the operation had to stop.
“Steady. You want them to think I fought a cat?”
Marcel lifted the mirror. There was a narrow white strip beside his grandfather’s ear, but he was saving it. It would be his to remove with the corner of the towel.
At eight, he already knew the order of things: shaving, dark suit, coffee, the visitors who arrived with complaints and stayed for lunch. His grandfather wore a suit even when he had nowhere to go. Across the room its jacket waited on a chair, the sleeves bent at the elbows as though someone had only just stepped out of it.
“They’ve stopped,” Marcel said.
The old man rinsed his razor.
“For now.”
From the valley came the noise of a lorry struggling uphill. For several days they had heard shelling beyond the mountains. At night Marcel had counted the time between the flash and the sound, without knowing what the numbers told him.
“Did you hear the bomb before it came into this room?”
“I was asleep.”
“But when it came?”
“Still asleep.”
“All of it?”
“Ask your grandmother. Apparently I missed something important.”
The story belonged to everyone in the house. A stray bomb had broken open the bedroom while the old man lay in this bed. They had found him under glass and plaster, and his wife’s screams had woken him. Visitors pointed at the repaired wall. Some touched the bed. Marcel liked to lie in it when nobody was looking, precisely where his grandfather’s head had been.
“Would it work again?” he asked.
The razor stopped.
“Would what?”
“The bed.”
His grandfather looked at him over the mirror.
“Come here.”
Marcel lowered it. The old man took his wrist and turned the mirror so that both their faces appeared: the large one almost clean, the smaller one with its mouth slightly open.
“There are two Marcels in this house. Who is going to tell us apart?”
He dipped a finger into the bowl and put a spot of lather on the boy’s chin.
“Now you’ve made it worse,” Marcel said.
His grandfather laughed until the remaining foam trembled beside his ear.
When his grandmother came with the coffee, Marcel was still standing between the old man’s knees. She set the tray down and wiped his chin with her thumb.
“Another one. God help us.”
Rima, the older of his two younger sisters, appeared behind her with a broken sandal. She held it by the strap.
“Grandpa, you said.”
“In a minute.”
He was allowing Marcel to wipe away the last of the lather. Rima waited until their grandmother took the sandal and led her out. Marcel saw them go in the mirror. He moved the towel carefully around the soft fold of his grandfather’s ear.