I, the Divine (17 page)

She went into Amal’s office. Her stepdaughter was on the phone. Saniya sat down and waited for her to finish. She noted for the umpteenth time how sparsely the office was furnished. Functional, nothing decorative, no paintings, no pictures of children, no knickknacks or trinkets. Amal moved her arms in circles, suggesting the conversation was endless. Her fingers then returned to drumming on the desk.

Saniya had never seen her so happy. She wondered whether Amal’s flowering was due to finding out after all those years that she was a good businesswoman or that she was a desirable lover. It could have been a combination of both, but Saniya would have put money on the latter. After being in a dull marriage, Amal began to discover the pleasures of being desired. She assumed no one knew about the affairs. But she was not very discreet. So far, Saniya knew of at least three affairs, each with a successively more prominent man. Mustapha, Saniya’s husband, had indoctrinated his children to believe that passion was the antithesis of morality. Only when she discarded stifling morality did Amal find passion of any kind.

Amal, unlike her sister Sarah, was a conglomeration of contemporary ordinariness. Her average face was congenial, making every child she came across wish it had her for a mother. She kept her dark hair in a bun. The very angle of her ears suggested ordinary. Her eyes were unastonishing. An appearance which belied the fact that she was sleeping with one of the most powerful men in Lebanon.

“Ramzi called while you were coming over,” Amal said when she finished on the phone. “It seems Kooky now sings opera, so he had to kick him out of the room.” They both laughed. “Ramzi is so much like his father in many ways.”

She had found Kooky a long time ago. The year was 1979. The war seemed endless. Saniya was utterly broken down. Her eldest daughter had been dead a year, killed at the hand of a lunatic, a stalker. Saniya felt she was no longer part of life, living in an anteroom of grief while the rest of the world reveled in the large living room. She walked home. This was long before she bought a car, long before a driver. For great distances, her husband or his driver would take her. Otherwise she walked.

She noticed the parrot on the way home. At first, she spotted leaves dropping. One leaf, two, three, two at a time, a small branch. She looked up and saw him, did not trust her eyes on first glance. Kooky was on a mission. He wanted to make sure not a single leaf was left on the tree. He had thousands left, but he was intent. She trusted he would do the job.

“Hey,” she called up to him. “Hey, you.” The parrot stopped his destruction. He bobbed up and down, reminding her of the silly dog dolls in the back windows of cars, popular before the war.

“What are you doing up there?”

He emitted a funny noise, bobbed up and down some more. She raised her hand, her finger pointing to form a perch. Kooky played coy for a bit, before beginning a climb down. He bit her finger to make sure it would not move and climbed on it.

She brought him closer. He surprised her with a kiss, beak to mouth. “You must be a boy,” she said.

Saniya had never seen a live parrot before. She did not expect to come across a dull-colored one. Kooky was predominantly gray, an African gray parrot.

She considered trying to locate Kooky’s owners. Maybe he belonged to some child somewhere in Beirut. Before she went home, she stopped by the local veterinarian, who was infamous for killing more pets than treating them. She assumed he might know if this gray belonged to anyone. She was right.

The minute she rang the doorbell, Kooky started laughing. Short bursts of laughter. “Hehheh, hehheh, hehheh.” Bobbing frantically up and down on her finger. Intriguing behavior, she thought. He squawked loudly. A woman’s voice from behind the door screamed, “Take him away from here.”

Kooky yelled back at her, “
Sharmoutah, intee sharmoutah
.”

“I’m not a whore,” the woman replied to the parrot. “I’m not a whore, you son of a dog. Take that cursed parrot away from here. I’m not opening the door.”

“I only want to know if he’s owned by anybody,” Saniya said, terrifically amused.

“Satan. The damned parrot is owned by Satan.”

“You obviously know him,” Saniya said. “Who owns him?”

“No one. No one owns him. Take him away and burn the devil’s spawn. No one wants him. They left Kooky to die. He’s nothing but trouble. Burn him.”

“His name is Kooky?” Saniya asked her innocently.

“Kooky wants to fuck you,” the parrot yelled. “Kooky wants to fuck you.”

Saniya laughed. For the first time in over a year, she laughed.

“Farid,” the voice screamed. “Farid. That damn Kooky is outside. If you don’t do something, I’ll kill myself.”

Saniya walked home, Kooky nuzzling her cheek.

“You’re a bad boy,” she told him.

“Hehheh, hehheh, hehheh.”

Kooky became the lord of the manor. Her husband felt the competition, did not want him in his house, but Saniya put her foot down. Mustapha noticed her spirits lifting and relented. The children loved him. Kooky became Ramzi’s constant companion.

Kooky had a fascination with big toes. He attacked her big toe whenever she walked barefoot, which was all the time. When she wore shoes, he tried to bite through them to get to the toe.

The devil’s spawn had a large vocabulary, mostly obscene words, which he had learned to place in different combinations. He rarely used them on her, but whenever guests arrived, he rattled them off one after another. It made her husband furious, but amused her to no end. He even had a basic understanding of feminine and masculine words to use on visitors. When he made grammatical mistakes, he sounded like an Armenian.

Kooky’s relationship to Satan manifested itself clearly as the bombs fell. Ronnie, her husband’s dog, was the only other pet in the house at the time. Mustapha had wanted a hunting dog. Ronnie’s pedigree was impeccable, except he turned out to be more a
chien de salon
, terrified by the mere sound of gunfire. It was Ramzi who ruined him. When Ronnie arrived as a puppy, Ramzi began playing with him, dressing him in elaborate outfits, allowing the dog to sleep with him at night. Ronnie ended up not going on a single hunting trip.

Kooky and Ronnie were best friends. They slept together, ate out of the same bowl, and chased each other around the apartment. A slight difference in personality was the main problem. Kooky was afraid of nothing, and Ronnie was afraid of his own shadow. Whenever minor gunfire erupted, Ronnie cowered in a corner, and Kooky got excited. When the large guns erupted, and Saniya had to go down to the shelter, she spent at least fifteen minutes trying to convince Ronnie to come down with her, whereas Kooky would scream obscenities at the dog. He wanted action.

It was the missiles that turned Ronnie into a quivering mass of jelly. When the whistle began, he would quail, his four limbs a study in vibration. By the time the explosion happened, his bladder would be empty. Within a short period of time, Kooky had assessed the situation. In calm times, while the family was at the dining room table or watching television, and Ronnie was lying down nearby, Kooky would begin a missile whistle. The devil’s spawn had it down to a science, except for the explosion at the end, which he could not imitate. Ronnie would stand up, quiver, and pee in place, without even lifting a leg. Kooky would laugh.

For the following ten days, the duration of her son’s stay, the cook would make Ramzi’s favorite meals for lunch. The cook, who was from the same village as Mustapha, did not particularly like Saniya. He was devoted to her husband and simply worshiped Ramzi. For the next ten days, the meals would be impeccable.

The meal was
gigot
, leg of lamb. Amal and her husband were already coming, but Saniya knew that would not be the entire lunch crowd. She returned home at noon to find out that her daughter Majida and her husband had called the maid and told her they were coming for lunch. While she was getting into her housedress, her husband’s sister called. “What’s for lunch?” she asked. Saniya told her.

“Count me in. I’m coming.” Mustapha’s sister was seventy-six years old, lassitude incarnate, but when it came to good meals, she moved heaven and earth to be there.

Some time to herself before the crowd started arriving. She looked at herself in the mirror. Getting older. Thunder thighs. I must lose a little weight, she thought. At least there was still someone who found her sexually attractive. That was a blessing.

“How many people for lunch, madam?” Miki asked. She came into the bedroom to turn down the beds for the afternoon.

“Eight so far, but I think it’ll be ten.”

The phone rang on cue. Kooky, sleeping on his perch, imitated the sound until she picked up the phone, and then went back to sleep. “What’s for lunch?” No hello, no small talk. Her husband’s nephew was a busy man. He was coming. She knew there would be one more, the other nephew. She knew it would not be long.

The phone rang.

“I hope you won’t be late,” Saniya said. “I can’t believe you waited this long to call. Are they working you hard?”

“You know, business stuff. Have to keep up on all the news.”

“
Gigot
.”

“That’s all the news I need. I’ll be there. Is he making it with pine nuts?”

“Yes, I’m sure he is.”

“Chestnuts?”

“It’s not the season, silly. It’s only September.”

“Well, tell your son to come back during chestnut season.”

“I’ll make sure to mention that.”

Ramzi came home at one o’clock. Tariq had been driving him. At one-fifteen sharp, Mustapha walked through the door. She could set her watch by his schedule. As was his habit, he began undressing the minute he walked through the door, Saniya picking up after him. The jacket in the anteroom, the tie in the living room, the shoes in the corridor, the shirt on the floor in the bedroom, the pants on the bed, the underwear, the socks. Emerged seconds later in pajama bottoms and undershirt. Saniya followed him with warm socks. “Put these on. It’s cold.”

By one-twenty, everyone had arrived. By one-thirty, they were seated at the dining table, all ten of them. Timing was essential for Mustapha. By two they would be done.

The conversation at the table covered a lot of ground. Ramzi’s health, his work. Mustapha asked his son about clients. Ramzi practiced medicine in a part of San Francisco where clients were not all genteel and white, but a procession of multicolored flesh, a new cause of consternation for his father. Even Saniya was surprised at her son’s choices, not prejudice, but a seeming distortion of the immaculate image she had of him. Mustapha’s pointed questioning had its usual effect on Ramzi. He raised and lowered his eyelids slowly while his father spoke, a sure sign of his waning interest.

“How’s Sarah doing?” Saniya asked, coming to her son’s rescue. “She called today to wish us a happy anniversary. I was surprised she remembered.”

“Of course, she would remember,” Majida said. This was a conversation the whole family could participate in. “Ramzi must have told her before he left.”

“I did tell her. She’s doing fine, still as lost as ever.”

“I wish she’d move back here where she belongs,” Mustapha said. Always the same refrain.

“She never will, Father. You know that.”

“Is she still writing her book?” Amal asked.

“I’m not sure. She hasn’t mentioned it in a while.”

“That girl was just spit out by her mother. She behaves in exactly the same way.” Mustapha’s statement was the usual one, which ended any conversation about Sarah. Saniya could see the girls wanting to find out more, but they would wait until Mustapha had gone in for his afternoon nap. Amal would want to know whether her sister was still obsessed with the man who had dumped her. They could not talk about Sarah’s relationships while her father was present. They could not talk about Ramzi’s lover either. Relationships, the unmentionable topic.

“Can Tariq drive me this afternoon?” her son asked.

“No. I need him. Can you drive yourself?”

“Sure.” He turned toward his father. “Are the players coming this afternoon?” Mustapha simply nodded.

The lunch was over. Two o’clock. Mustapha stood up. “I guess we’ll see you all tomorrow.” Laughter all around.

“Bring the kids tomorrow. It’s Saturday.”

“Ramzi should visit more often.”

By two-fifteen, Mustapha and his wife were in bed for a brief siesta. At two forty-five, Miki came in with the coffee. By three the cardplayers began arriving. They had been playing
quatorze
every day since before Saniya was married. The same five people every single day, from three-thirty till eight. All of them worked half days, even though they were all professionals. Mustapha played
quatorze
on his wedding day—they did not have a honeymoon—on the day Rana was born, the day Majida was born, and even the day Ramzi was born.

She started dressing when they were four. She would greet the fifth and leave as was her habit. For the first ten years, she was there every day making sure all their needs were met. She finally began to train the maids to do her job. When the doorbell rang, she was the one to open the door.

“How’s the little business lady?”

“Fine. How are you today?”

“Going off to work?”

“Someone has to.” The last she said as the elevator door closed.