The Hakawati (40 page)

After a few years, Mrs. Kitchen realized that the girls studied their Bibles and could sing hymns with the best of them but didn’t consider this a religion. When she attempted to make the ritual more serious (baptism?), the girls were shocked and embarrassed. Mrs. Kitchen stopped making conversion a requirement for enrollment. The girls still studied the Bible, sang hymns and Christmas carols, but there was no pretense anymore. Once, when a missionary confronted her, accusing, “But these girls aren’t Christians,” she replied, “Neither was Jesus.”

She educated thousands of girls, many from neighboring villages. She actually became a local. When she died, she was buried in a Druze cemetery. To this day, many Lebanese women, Druze and Christian, visit her grave and keep the site clean.

Mahdallah converted. He was watered. Secretly, though. He refused to baptize his son, Aref. No one suggested his wife convert. He would spend the rest of his life denying that deed.

The family spent four or five years in London. The gray weather didn’t suit them. They didn’t mind the cold—their village was colder—but the lack of sunshine ensured they would never settle in that city.

The village gossips said: The gray weather is making the harem girl barren.

The village gossips said: And God will never bless the betrayer again.

The village gossips were wrong on both counts. My great-grandparents had other children, but it took time—not as long as Abraham and Sarah, but long enough for gossip.

But here are two facts, documented and checked:

My great-grandparents Dr. Mahdallah and Mona Arisseddine and their son, Aref, around five years old at the time, boarded a Belgian-registered ship, the
Leopold II
, from England to the port city of Beirut, in June 1889.

My other great-grandfather, the esteemed missionary Dr. Simon Twining, accompanied by his recently betrothed, the heart of darkness, sailed from England to Beirut on the identical ship, the
Leopold II
, in June 1890.

The doctors would surely have met had they been on the same crossing. What would they have talked about, standing on deck, holding on to the railing, looking at the sun drowning in the golden Mediterranean? They wore similar cotton suits of Western cut, white shirts, ties. Their hats were also similar. Mahdallah would not wear his fez until he reached the village. They had countless things in common, or would have in times to come, and the conversation would not lag until, finally, Ah, sir, what say you we blend the seed of my loins with your seed and produce some exasperatingly strange characters: the wicked hag of the mountains, the naïve and haughty villager, the parsimonious simpleton, the talented, frustrated homosexual, and the sexual Sisyphus, who would betray his family over and over and over and over again?

Then there was the evil Sitt Hawwar.

Upon deciding to return to the village of his birth, Mahdallah, while he was still in London, commissioned the village builder, a man by the name of Hawwar, to put up a house. Hawwar charged the young doctor an exorbitant amount of money. One of Mahdallah’s brothers was supposed to oversee the building and its financing, but he must have been distracted, for when the young doctor returned, he found a windowless skeleton of a house with patchy cement floors and only an undercoat of paint.

Mahdallah complained. Hawwar promised to finish the job quickly, before the winter snows. Mahdallah and his family could wait out the house at his parents’. But the wife, the harem girl, the Albanian, insisted the bare-bones house was her home. She moved her family in, shaming the builder into working harder and faster.

That was a mistake. And she compounded the mistake. She didn’t know any better—she was a foreigner. Mona Arisseddine told her neighbors the truth. She said they could have built three houses for what they paid. She mentioned how much her husband paid for each material. The stove wasn’t even new: you could see it was used. “Look,” she kept saying, “look.”

Sitt Hawwar, the builder’s much younger wife, became Mona Arisseddine’s enemy.

Mona Arisseddine told people the builder was a crook.

Sitt Hawwar told people the doctor was a Christian.

Three Druze men showed up at Mahdallah’s clinic one morning to kill the good doctor. The only thing that saved him was a heavy patient load that day. The men walked into the clinic and asked to see him. They were told they would be next. A parent with a sick child entered, and the men decided to let the doctor help the child before they murdered him. Then came an elderly woman, a man with a broken foot, another sick child, and so on. At the end of the day, the sister-in-law of one of the would-be slayers arrived with her ill daughter. She asked her relative what he was doing there, and he replied that he was waiting to exterminate the doctor.

“Are you crazy?” she yelled. “This man is treating my daughter and you want to kill him? Why don’t you go kill a government official or something?”

The three embarrassed killers left, and a village story was born. And the bey warned that he would personally torture and kill anyone who attempted to injure the
Druze
doctor.

“If that woman hadn’t shown up,” my grandfather said, “you kids wouldn’t be here. Think about that. It was fate. Mahdallah had converted, so he had insulted their faith. Neighbors had killed neighbors before. Why wasn’t your great-grandfather killed? You ask me and I’ll tell you. It was because I was meant to marry your grandmother, of course. Do you see that?”

“No,” I said. The other kids didn’t even hear him. Anwar was too busy pummeling Hafez. Lina, who had been sitting next to me, had disappeared with my other cousins. Little Mona was in Aunt Samia’s arms, fidgeting.

“Stop it, Baba,” Aunt Samia said. “It’s Eid al-Adha, no time for your crazy stories. You’ve no idea what a bad example you set.” She stood up, put her daughter down. “And you,” she admonished me, “why do you just sit there and listen? Why don’t you get into a fight with your cousins? You want people to think you’re a coward? Get in there and smack one of them.”

I jumped off the sofa and ran out of the room, looking for my mother. She wasn’t in the dining room, where the rest of the family was yelling. I sprinted to the terrace. Every apartment in the building had a large balcony, but Aunt Samia’s penthouse had a terrace encircling it. I envied Anwar and Hafez for being able to run around whenever they felt like it.

My father said Aunt Samia got the biggest apartment because she was the eldest.

My mother said Aunt Samia got it by whining for ten whole days that she deserved it because she was married to the most helpless man in the world.

I ran almost all the way around the terrace before I found my mother leaning against a wall, smoking a cigarette. My father was talking, gazing warily at her. She stared out toward Beirut’s dappled rooftops, distracted, as if counting the tines of each television antenna on every roof in the city.

“You’ve been spending too much time alone,” my father said, “and that makes it harder for you to tolerate other people. It’s a family get-together, Layla. You can’t leave before lunch.”

After each drag on her cigarette, my mother moved her hand to cup the bun at the back of her head, as if doubting its existence. The smoke would circle the bun for an instant before dying.

“If those children were mine,” she said, “I would short-circuit them. Poof. Clack. Everything tumbles. The motor sputters, rumble-rumble, dies. No more noise.”

My father’s face tightened in shock. “That’s an awful thing to say, even for you. How could you?”

My mother noticed me. Her lips curled into a smile. “Osama, I don’t want you hanging around your cousins too much. Too many bad habits.”

I knew she’d want me to ask this now, at this moment. “Is it true they kill Christians in the village?”

My father looked at me in horror. “Of course it’s not true. Who told you that?”

“Grandfather said the village men almost killed your grandfather because he was a Christian.”

“How many times have I told you not to believe any of my father’s stories? He’s a hakawati. He makes things up. My grandfather wasn’t
Christian. He was a Druze. You know that. If anyone tried to kill him, it was about something else.”

“Yes,” my mother said. The sun struck her face, and she looked brighter. “It was probably about something like an elevator. You know how the Druze are. They’re hospitable, and they take care of their own. Mind your seventh neighbor and all that.”

“Don’t do this,” my father said. “The old man’s tales are more than enough. Let’s not confuse the boy with more, I beg you.”

My mother straightened. “You’re right.” Her crisp voice melded with the sound of approaching steps. “No one tried to kill any Christians in the village. Your grandfather makes things up.”

Lina turned the corner, followed by Anwar, who was always trying to engage her in some convoluted game. “They kill Christians in the village?” she asked.

“No,” my father said. “No, they don’t.” He turned around and faced the railing.

“If it’s true,” Anwar told Lina, “I’ll have to slit your throat with a knife.”

“And before you do,” Lina replied without missing a beat, “I’ll take that knife and shove it up a place that will surprise you.”

Anwar gasped. My parents both yelled Lina’s name. “I have to go talk to that loon,” my father said. “Things can’t go on like this. He’s a menace.”

“Don’t.” My mother held out her hand. “You’ll only upset yourself, and you’ll regret it later. Let it go. Nothing can be done. Not now. Not here.” He took her hand. “Family,” she said, and pulled him to her. She dropped her spent cigarette.

“Oh, no,” Anwar said. “Mother gets upset if anyone leaves cigarettes on the terrace.”

“I’m sure she does.” My mother stepped on the cigarette with her stiletto heel, her calf tensing. She twisted the ball of her foot to the right, to the left, to the right. She took my father’s arm and walked away, leaving a trivial stain of ash, mashed filter, and loose tobacco in her wake.

About the elevator. When Mahdallah returned from London, he was asked by the villagers what he had seen in the great land of abroad.

Many wonders. Strange inhabitants. There were buildings in London
where people did not use stairs. A room moved, carried passengers from floor to floor. Moved up and down. Buildings had many floors. Visitors didn’t have to tire themselves by walking up stairs. Why, in the great city of New York, buildings were even higher. Twenty stories or more.

The villagers went away shaking their heads. Should such a foolish man be allowed to walk the streets of the village? Was he dangerous? Should a madman be allowed to mingle with the innocent? A committee was sent to interview the doctor subtly. Luckily for our family, Mona was there. The committee said some villagers had the notion that buildings in the land of the foreign had mobile rooms within them. How exactly did Londoners move between floors?

Before the doctor could reply, his wife jumped in. Why, they ascended and descended stairs, of course. Climbed the stairs when they wanted to go up. Most stairs were made of cement and stone, some of wood, and the latter were often rickety. The doctor stared at his wife, uncomprehending. The committee waited for him to add something. There were great banisters, he said. Beautifully carved. Some staircases were marvelously ornate. Some buildings had a flight of imposing stairs on each side, complete with balustrades and carved mythical animals.

The committee apologized to the doctor. The villagers were simple folk, they said. They always misheard or misunderstood what was being said. The committee begged forgiveness and left the well-grounded doctor to his own devices.

Finally, my great-grandparents had their second child. Jalal Arisseddine was born in 1891. His brother, Aref, was eight then. Mona might have hoped that with Jalal’s arrival people would stop referring to her as the harem girl, since she was now the mother of two sheikhs.

Jalal would grow up to be an important personality in Lebanese history. He was an attorney, a keen student of letters, possessor of a piercing intellect, a man worthy of admiration. Even his critics, and he had many because of his writings rejecting pan-Arabism, respected him. He was jailed three times by the French colonial government. His last internment coincided with the end of Vichy rule in Lebanon. He was released in November 1943, on Independence Day.

Every day he spent in prison, his aged mother brought him food,
though she fasted in protest. She could barely walk, but she refused to have anyone carry the meals for her. She waited outside the prison doors on the day of his release.

He came out a hero. She remained that harem girl.

My great-uncle Ma
an Arisseddine was born in 1894. My father loved him deeply, for he was the man who gave him his early breaks. In the grand scheme of stories, he was nothing, almost an unmentionable, for he was not an odd character or an interesting one. He was a thread, one of many, without which the tapestry would crumble, the yarn fray, and the tale unravel.

But I know of another thread.

Even though the evil Sitt Hawwar loathed my great-grandmother, or probably because of it, she showed up to congratulate the new mother when baby Ma
an was born. She dragged along her husband, the builder, who was wearing a robe of Chinese silk. She made her husband walk around the small living room. The villagers oohed and aahed, admiring their first view of foreign silk, ignoring the newborn. Now, the proverb was that one should look after one’s seventh neighbor, and Sitt Hawwar was Mona Arisseddine’s second neighbor on the right, so Mona should have treated her even better, or at least been more circumspect. But, then, there was history. And Mona Arisseddine asked her neighbor how much that robe cost.