The Hakawati (7 page)

And on the seventh night, outside the gates of Alexandria, Khayal knelt before his adored, defeated. “I have nothing more to offer, nothing but myself. If you want me to leave you, I will depart before the dawn, but if you take my hand, I will make you the same covenant that Ruth made with Naomi: Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die, I will die and there I will be buried.”

Jawad took Khayal’s hand.

Two

L
ook here,” my grandfather said, pointing at the only colorless spot on the map spread across the wooden table. I sat beside him, but my head couldn’t get close enough for me to see. I stood on the chair, put a knee on the rickety table, felt as if I were floating atop a world of color. I saw Lebanon. I was able to recognize my country in faded purple, but his finger was farther north, above Tripoli. Turkey in yellow ocher. The exact spot discolored, bleached. “This is where I was born.” He didn’t look at the map, as if his fingers could find his birthplace by touch. “Urfa, it’s called. Now they call it Şanliurfa. Means ‘glorious Urfa.’ Damnable Urfa is more like it.”

He cursed easily, smoothly, one reason my mother didn’t want me spending too much time with him. But Aunt Samia always insisted on it. He was family. I was a descendant. She was headstrong. That day, she had driven her three sons and me up from Beirut, dropped us at his house in the morning, and left to make her monthly visits in the village. My cousins preferred to play with the bey’s nephews. As was their habit, Hafez, Anwar, and Munir walked up to the bey’s mansion the instant their mother drove off. My grandfather did not allow me to leave him.

“I am of a time when maps had fewer colors,” he was saying. Shaggy white hair sprouted as profusely from his ears and brows as it did from his head. He wasn’t in a good mood.

I didn’t always understand what he said, but that never stopped him. He stood up. I remained above the map, hovering in its sky. He gesticulated wildly; the floorboards creaked beneath his pacing, an off-key Morse code. “They say Şanliurfa has a mixture of Turkish and Arabic cultures. Sometimes they might even mention the Kurds. But never, if
you see all the brochures and travel agents, never do they mention the Armenians. As if we were never there.”

“Who are they, and who are we?” I asked

He stopped and stared out the grimy window into the distance as pinecones crackled in the iron stove.

Ah, Urfa, city of prophets. Jethro, Job, Elijah, and Moses spent part of their lives there, but it will always remain the city of Abraham, his birthplace. Yet Urfa’s history is far more complex than mere myths, mere tales. It is Osrhoe, it is Edessa. It is in the Bible, the Koran, the Torah.

In the days of the mighty King Nimrod, there lived a young man named Abraham, son of Azar, an idol-maker. Out of wood, Azar sculpted beautiful gods that the people loved and worshipped. Azar would send his son to market with the idols, but Abraham never sold any. He called out, “Who’ll buy my idols? They’re cheap and worthless. Will you buy one? It won’t hurt you.” When a passerby stopped to look at the beauty of the craftsmanship, Abraham slapped the idol. “Talk,” he said. “Tell this honest man to buy you. Do something.” There would be no sale.

Of course, his father was upset. He was losing money and had a nonbeliever for a son. He told Abraham to believe in the gods or leave the house. Abraham left.

Abraham walked into a temple while all the townsfolk were in their own homes preparing for an evening of worshipping their beloved gods. Abraham held out food for the gods. “Eat. Aren’t you hungry? Why don’t you talk to me?” Again he slapped their faces, one by one. Slap, move over, slap. But then he took an ax and chopped the gods to pieces, some as small as toothpicks. He chopped all but the largest, and put the ax in this idol’s hand.

When the people came to worship their gods, they found them in a large pile around the chief idol. They bemoaned their fate and that of their gods. “Who would do this?” they cried in unison, a chorus of wails.

“Surely it was someone,” Abraham exclaimed. “The big one stands there with a guilty ax in his hand. Perhaps he was envious of the rest and chopped them up. Should we ask him?”

“You know they don’t speak,” the priest said.

“Then why do you worship them?”

“Heresy,” the people called, and took him to see his king.

My grandfather was the product of an indiscreet affair. His father was Simon Twining—like the tea—an alcoholic English doctor, a missionary helping Christian Armenians in southern Turkey. His mother, Lucine, was one of the doctor’s Armenian servants.

My grandfather’s first name, Ismail, was predetermined. What would you call a son of your maid if you lived in Urfa? His last name was not Twining. The doctor’s wife wouldn’t allow that. It was Guiragossian, his mother’s name. He received his full name, our family’s bane, in Lebanon, as a full-fledged hakawati.

What is a hakawati, you ask? Ah, listen.

A hakawati is a teller of tales, myths, and fables (hekayât). A storyteller, an entertainer. A troubadour of sorts, someone who earns his keep by beguiling an audience with yarns. Like the word “hekayeh” (story, fable, news), “hakawati” is derived from the Lebanese word “haki,” which means “talk” or “conversation.” This suggests that in Lebanese the mere act of talking is storytelling.

A great hakawati grows rich, and a bad one sleeps hungry or headless. In the old days, villages had their own hakawatis, but great ones left their homes to earn fortunes. In the cities, cafés were the hakawatis’ domain. A hakawati can tell a tale in one sitting or spin the same tale over a period of months, impregnating it with nightly cliffhangers.

It is said that in the eighteenth century, in a café in Aleppo, the great one, Ahmad al-Saidawi, once told the story of King Baybars for three hundred and seventy-two evenings, which may or may not have been a record. It is also said that al-Saidawi cut the story short because the Ottoman governor begged him to finish it. The city’s despot had spent every night enthralled and had been recalled to Istanbul for growing lax with the affairs of state, even neglecting the collection of taxes. The governor needed to know how the tale ended.

The bey first met my grandfather, a waiflike, hungry thirteen-year-old hakawati, in a sleazy bar in the Zeitouneh district of Beirut before the Great War. My grandfather had been eking out a meager living by entertaining customers in between various salacious or pseudo-musical acts. The bey was inordinately charmed by the witty stories. When he
inquired after my grandfather’s background, the young Ismail provided three different improbable tales in a row. On the spot, the bey hired my grandfather to be his fool, and from that point on referred to him as “al-kharrat,” the fibster, or “hal-kharrat,” that fibster. One day, feeling generous, the bey decided to give the rootless boy some dignity. Since my grandfather had no papers, no documented father, the bey called in favors, paid bribes, and offered his boy a new birth certificate, baptizing him with a fresh name, Ismail al-Kharrat.

The little hakawati arrived in our world in the early evening of January 16, 1900. Simon Twining was telling the tale of Abraham and Nimrod to a rapt audience of his wife, his two daughters, his two Armenian maids, and four Armenian orphans in his care.

“Abraham stood defiantly before his king.” The language English, the tone rising, the voice smooth. “King Nimrod grew nervous, since it was his first encounter with a free soul. ‘You are not my god,’ Abraham told Nimrod.”

Lucine felt the first pang of pain; a wave of nausea swept through her. She breathed deeply, dismissing the pain as transitory, because the baby had one more month to go. She steadied herself, felt grateful that the stool was four-legged. The doctor believed three-legged furniture to be the work of Satan. It was unstable and mocked the Trinity.

“The young man grew in stature when he defied the hunter-king Nimrod. ‘Who is this mighty God you speak of?’ asked the frightened king.” The doctor picked up the long-handled broom leaning on the corner behind him, lifted it above his head. The handle almost knocked off a small box that he had placed below the angle of a ceiling beam to catch the droppings of a pair of swallows nesting there.

Lucine’s second shot of pain arrived three fingers below her belly button, four to the right. She struggled for breath but made no sound.

“Abraham was resolute. ‘He it is who gives life and death,’ he answered, his gaze unwavering. The king said, ‘But I too give life and death. I can pardon a man sentenced to die and execute an innocent child.’ ” All the children gasped. Lucine felt flushed and dizzy. “Abraham said, ‘That is not the way of God. But can you do this? Each morning God makes the sun rise in the east. Can you make it rise in the west?’ Nimrod grew angry, had his minions build a great big fire,
and ordered Abraham thrown into it. The men came to carry Abraham, but he told them he could walk.”

Just at that instant, as Abraham walked into the blazing fire, Lucine’s scream was heard throughout the valley. Water spread beneath her four-legged stool, on the scrubbed stones, collecting in the grooves that acted as miniature Roman aqueducts.

A hakawati’s timing must always be perfect.

Ah, births, births. Tell me how a man is born and I will tell you his future.

A seer had told King Nimrod that one shortly to be born would dethrone him. The king beheaded the seer as the bearer of bad tidings. He called his viziers into the throne room and commanded the death of all newborns.

What to do? Adna, pregnant with baby Abraham, left her home in Urfa without having time to pack, walked carefully across town, and headed toward a cave in one of the surrounding hills. There she gave birth. Abraham arrived with eyes open, inquisitive and watchful. The baby did not cry. Adna had no milk. The baby reached for her hand, placed two of her fingers in his mouth, and suckled. One finger supplied milk and the other honey.

And now you want to know how the hakawati was conceived, so listen.

The spring before his birth in Urfa. The sun was setting, the temperature had cooled, and the last birds were settling in the highest branches. Dr. Twining was walking home when he saw his maid, Lucine, standing on an unstable log, trying to cover the outhouse with dry palm branches, a seasonal chore: a true ceiling would trap odors, so sun-dried branches mixed with lavender and jasmine covered the top. The faux plafond protected from the elements, provided a botanical sweetness, and allowed God the choice of not looking directly at a family excreting.

The colors deepened at that time of day, allowing Dr. Twining to see his maid, with her back to him, as a mirage—ephemeral, shimmering, divine. Turkeys, chickens, rabbits, geese, three dogs, and two tortoises could all be seen moving around the perched Lucine. She was their daily feeder, and they were waiting for her. The doctor was grateful that he could provide selfless service to all the unfortunates, to the
needy and the meek. A solitary swallow flew low in front of him. He saw the forked tail clearly. He fixed his gaze on Lucine, saw that she wasn’t a mirage; she moved back and forth on the unsteady log. “Lucine,” he called out. The chickens dispersed at his shout. Lucine looked back, her eyes surprised, as if they were questioning the reason for all this. She lost her balance. She opened her mouth to ask for help, swayed forward once, then stiffened, rigid as a column, and fell. Turkeys and geese scattered in all directions.

By the time he reached her, she had still not uttered a sound. She leaned against the gray wall of the outhouse, holding her bare ankle, having pulled up her skirt slightly to look at it. He bent down to examine it. “Are you all right?” he asked. “Let me see.” She removed her hand, and his took over, pressing gently. She shuddered. “That hurts?” he whispered. She nodded. His fingers pressed below the joint, gently stroked her sole. She remained quiet. “I think it’s a sprain.” His thumb and forefinger formed a gentle vise, massaging her calf. “Does this hurt?” She shook her head. Her eyes were new to him. He held her ankle with his right hand. His left massaged up farther, almost to the knee. “Does this hurt? And this? This?”