The Angel of History (21 page)

As we were about to leave, my wife turned to me. “We must get one,” she said. “Now I can’t imagine living the rest of my life without my own Arab.”

“I’m not sure we can afford one,” I said.

“We don’t have to get a wild one,” she said. “An acclimatized lighter-skinned Arab would be less expensive, I’m sure.” Then she addressed our hosts. “Though obviously, he won’t be as divinely authentic as yours.”

“The cheap ones can still be fun,” my boss said, quite graciously, in my opinion.

The woman with the large diamond pendant that contained the wealth of the world said, “Mine once rhymed orange blossom with playing possum, which was quite clever, if you ask me.”

“Please don’t get a poet,” my boss’s partner said. “They’re a dime a dozen. Though by far the worst Arabs are Lebanese novelists. They’re the cheapest because all they do is whine. Maybe a sturdy Yemeni, they can be good and are undervalued. We’ll go shopping, you and I. We’ll find you an Arab that’s just right for you.”

As hard as she tried to keep her composure, my wife could not stop herself from blushing. She had arrived. We would most certainly not return to Muncie.

It had been a few hours since the cage was covered. Its Arab was supposed to be asleep, but when I passed by on my way out, I heard him whispering in a winsome singsong voice, “And such are the parables We put forth for humankind, but only those who have knowledge will understand them.”

Tiredness became Satan, his features softened, his cheeks sagged, his posture relaxed, less stark and threatening, and the insanity residing in his eyes departed for a short vacation. He wondered which of the fourteen was best at healing inanition, who the rejuvenator was. Not Blaise.

“Forgive me for bringing this up,” Blaise said, a quiver in his voice, “and please inform me if I am being inappropriate, please. I wish to say that I admire your commitment, and, of course, his. I can see many connections between you and Jacob, but I am trying to understand what—or maybe which one of them—keeps you two inseparable.”

“Inseparable?” Satan said. “You mean like your Armenian saying, Two butts in the same pants?”

“No, I would never speak that phrase.” Blaise blushed streaks of crimson, coralline floating atop a sea of green
ascetic robes. “I could not. It’s not Armenian. I’m sure it’s Lebanese, delightful people, but methinks a bit uncouth.”

He looked to be in his late forties, with a riotous white beard, sharp nose, anxious eyes, and a wisp of hair hanging down on his forehead. No rings graced his fingers, no jewelry adorned his person, no cross, no crosier, he held only his two plain white candles, which he laid on his lap. His halo was barely perceptible, a mere shimmer in the air, an old threadbare nimbus. Like Pantaleon, Blaise was a physician, and like Denis, a bishop, but unlike the flamboyant flamer and the pompous dandy, he was pathologically shy, finding the company of others painful, if not the company of beasts. A Eurasian lynx lounged before the sylvan saint, her belly warming his bare feet. Her presence suggested that poor Behemoth might not come out of the closet for a while. On Blaise’s right lay a sizable hound with a wide Cerberean mouth, and on his left sat a wild boar on its hind legs.

Satan’s stomach rumbled. He worshipped pancetta.

“I meant only that you have been with the poet longer than any of us,” Blaise said. “We all care for him, but your devotion is exemplary, as well as inspiring. I wish to discover why you have remained with him, why you returned after so long. If the question is too personal, please feel free to ignore it, for I do not place a higher value on my curiosity than on your peace of mind.”

Satan decided to tell the truth.

“I find him thoroughly entertaining, perhaps my chief delight,” he said. “He is most certainly difficult at times, dull even, but for the most part, our relationship survives because he amuses me. In spite of his vinegary outlook these days, or maybe because of it, he rejuvenates my jaded heart.”

“And I am sure he values your commitment,” Blaise said.

“I doubt it.”

“He must,” Blaise said, sounding muffled as he bent to scratch between his lynx’s ears. “It may not seem so to you, but I’m sure he finds you as amusing as you find him.” Blaise’s white hair was shaved in a Roman tonsure, and when sunbeams struck his bowed head, it looked like a sunny-side-up egg. “I’m envious, for I miss him. I wish he would call me back.”

“Why do you like him?” Satan asked.

“That’s easy,” Blaise said. “Because he’s likable. He loves his beasts and they love him right back. Who else could have fallen in love with Behemoth? Such a delightful troublemaker, Satan’s spawn.” The palm of his hand quickly covered his mouth; his cheeks turned a deeper coral. “Oh my, I apologize. I meant it endearingly.”

“And I took it as such. I am proud to claim Behemoth.”

Blaise looked toward the closet, shut his eyes for a moment. “It’s time to come out, my dear boy.”

Behemoth jumped out, landing on the hardwood floor delicately. He looked around, sauntered past the wild boar, hesitated momentarily in front of the lynx, then leaped into the saint’s lap. He circled twice, shoved both candles off with his paw. One fell on the floor, the other on the lynx, who seemed perplexed. Behemoth settled in and began to chew on a rear toenail.

“Such a beautiful boy,” Blaise said to the purring cat.

“So you love Jacob because he loves animals?”

“No, but that was how it started,” Blaise said, “the first impression, so to speak. There are a number of monsters who loved beasts, and I don’t return that love, I couldn’t.”

“Adolf loved animals,” Satan said.

“Worse,” Blaise said, “the pope’s pet from Assisi does as well. Francis surrounds himself with cute animals.”

“Don’t mention him, please. Francis needs a fisting.”

Blaise grinned. “No, it wasn’t only about Jacob’s love for beasts. You remember what Catherine Deneuve said about that fascist Brigitte Bardot, that it was easy to love animals, much harder to love people. Well, Jacob loved both, in spite of what he thinks. He was the one that held that group of friends together.”

“You think so?” Satan said. “That’s comical because he believes the opposite. He thinks that they only tolerated him, that he was the seventh wheel!”

“But he was the one Greg loved best. He’d have had nothing to do with the rest of them if not for Jacob. Pinto considered him his doppelgänger. Does he think any of the others would have befriended Lou if not for him?”

“Enlighten him,” Satan said.

“Lou was the pretty one, definitely not the smart one. He once told the poet that he had never read a single book in his life, not one,
People
magazine was where it was at for him. Where was he from? I can’t remember. Maybe Omaha or Lubbock or Midland. He wasn’t the masculine one either. The others could camp it up, but if need be, they could all pass for normal, or almost normal, as was the case with Jacob, who learned to put on the mask at an early age. Not Lou, he was a hairdresser after all, dedicated to his profession. He made all of them uncomfortable except for Jacob, and Lou loved him for that, adored him. I remember one evening when none of the seven were remotely sober, every conversation ending up lost in a maze as they lay
about the room, draped over the couches, splayed on the rug. They decided to play the What Superpower Would You Want game. Doc wanted to be irresistible so he could seduce anybody. Greg wanted flight, Jim, mind control. Of all things, Jacob wanted speed-reading, the ability to read every book ever written within his lifetime. His was not the strangest, though. Lou wanted to be able to stop time like Professor X, not to become famous, rich, or powerful, but because he saw so many horrible hairdos while riding the bus and he always fantasized that he could stop time, give the offending party a quick trim or
coup de peigne,
and return to his seat without anyone being the wiser. The other five groaned loudly, what a boring superpower, and wondered aloud whether that was his life’s ambition. It was. Jacob, on the other hand, considered Lou’s desire both wonderful and laudable. He loved the idea of someone using superpowers to help others look better.”

“You know,” Satan said, “he hasn’t had a good haircut since Lou died.”

“That hair, my lord!”

Alone in the waiting room. Alone I used to walk the grounds next to l’orphelinat de la Nativité, through the Catholic cemetery with its headstones of moribund marble, so many alabaster Jesuses on crucifixes, where I once saw a cortege of mourners quietly walk between two juniper bushes and away from a crypt within which they had surely discarded the recently deceased and bade their farewells, and I thought that was the one place given to us to be completely alone, but then I had you cremated, Doc, just as you wanted, but you didn’t get a place, I dispersed you all over, where are you now?

The fractious wind picked up in the alley, but the bleared windows, rickety though they were, refused to rattle, it was my time to be rattled, saddled with spooks and Iblis, the angel of the bottomless pit.

I prefer angel of light, thank you very much, Satan said, the most perfect of us all, and by the way, why do you call those fatuous statues with exposed hearts and barbed-wire crowns Jesuses and not Jesi? I am aware of his tongue and its dangers, Doc, his words lead me astray. Satan said, You’re trying to deceive these mental ill-health amateurs to check you into an institution and you think I’m the one who’s leading you off the path, I swear, I’ve worked with thick protégés before but you take the cake and the rainbow sprinkles.

The Lord God always said, It is not good that man should be alone, and the American Psychiatric Association agreed, which is why it gave the world group therapy, and a couple of men came through the clinic’s doors heading directly to the frizzy redhead receptionist behind the triple windows, I could hear their commotion but not see them, psychotics should be seen and not heard, Well, now you won’t be alone for long, Satan said.

I was always alone, Doc, solitary whether I wished to be or not, ever since I could remember I wished to be lost in another, thought that somehow I could disappear into that heart of yours, take walks within your veins, wander through the bones of you. You had friends, Satan said, you loved and were loved, you must not forget that, at least not that. But did I allow anyone in, I asked Satan, and he said, Did you, does anyone?

A man with a snippet of a mustache came into the waiting room, sat in the farthest corner, lowered himself carefully into the chair as if gauging whether someone was already sitting there, refused to raise his eyes from his untied shoelaces and the frayed hems of his khakis, looked as if he
had been subsisting on meals that would leave a housefly famished.

Ask him, Satan said, ask him if he’d let you in, and I snickered. Out of his coat pocket, the man fished an orange and began to assiduously defrock it with his thick fingers, concentrating as if he were defusing a ticking bomb, and when he bit into it, a tear of juice slid languorously along the spiral peel still clinging to the white rind of the fruit and dropped onto the floor. Charming, Satan said, and I said, Only the best of us come here, the man was a cleaner facsimile of Deke, asymmetrically gelled flop of blond hair, mismatched shirt and T-shirt, and if that were not enough to signal his heterosexuality, the way he claimed all space within his vicinity by spreading his legs would have tipped the straight scale. I should make wedding arrangements, Satan said, winking at me, but I was not interested at all, whatever pheromones Blondie secreted, my receptors were not impressed.

Hey, Pantaleon, Satan said, bring back the Iraqi, this one is a no-go, and he frowned at Blondie’s outstretched legs, They just don’t teach manners the way they used to, come to think of it, who do you think instilled more decorum in you, the nuns or the whores? I told him to shut up for the umpteenth time, wished I could afford a private shrink instead of the free clinic, but I was desperate, even though I had been working for the same law firm for decades, I had no health insurance, I was hired as a temp and never made permanent, and Satan said, You are a temp in life.

The winter had lasted years and years, but the bees in their blissful hive were mostly awake now, the workers made heat by whirling their butter-color wings, the queens lounged about demanding to be serviced, the cold in the air eased, almost disappeared, in floated the fragrance of leaves, of early flowers and fruits. Some bees went to work, filling their bodies with sweetness, some of the small creatures danced and danced, how could we not moan in happiness? Then the black bear woke, much too hungry after hibernating for so long, not a delicate thing that bear, how large a body it carried, hunger demanded destruction.
Smack,
the hive was torn apart,
crack.
What could we do? Our stings were as nothing, our resistance flicked away with a mere gesture. We disappeared in his fur, we dissolved under his breath, vanished into the curl of his tongue.

Some survived, befuddled we flew away and flew, we no longer noticed how warm the still-rising sun was, how lovely the shape of clouds, how white the daisies, how unsteady blossoms broke into flames, how swaths of fierce lilacs released bewildering sirens of scent, that stupefying smell of spring. How could we?

Sorrow makes for lousy honey.

Tears do not make good ink.

Let winter return.

About a year before the latest Egyptian revolution, Auntie Badeea wrote me a long letter describing many of the changes in the city. She had been keeping me abreast of the goings and comings of her world, about one letter a month for as long as I could remember, and even though I had been e-mailing my replies for years, she preferred old-fashioned epistolary pen and paper, not because she was a Luddite, far from it, but because like most Egyptians, she was a romantic. Naguib Mahfouz once wrote that it was a most distressing affliction to have a sentimental heart and a skeptical mind. What was different about that letter was the exasperated tone in which she chronicled what was happening in Cairo and, more important, at the house with its new clientele of upscale Egyptians. She had always paid protection money to the double mafia, police and army, she’d bribed politicians, but it seemed a new breed of ill-bred idiots were coming to power and coming to her whorehouse, entitled bastards she called them to their face. Apart from protection and bribes,
these new boys demanded a cut and an ownership stake, and as part owners, they no longer felt the need to pay for what they fucked. One of the boys was the president’s grandson.

When he and his sycophantic entourage first appeared at the house, the workingwomen were all atwitter, how wonderful, how fabulous, they would climb one or two rungs up the ladder of desirability, if not respectability. Auntie Badeea, however, was not impressed by the boy, like his grandfather, she wrote, that boy doesn’t have enough blood coursing in his veins to sate a mosquito, which alarmed me, since no Egyptian who valued her skin should insult the president, and the aunties were quickly disabused of their infatuation, the president’s grandson was no Uday or Qusay Hussein, he did not torture any of the girls for pleasure, he was just a brat, and worse, a bore, and worst, a tightwad. Once the boys even brought an Israeli in young and trendy civilian garb with a not-so-subtle military demeanor, they preened more than usual, look at how modern we are, the boys declaimed, grandstanding, showboating, and flaunting, the Israeli humored them, seemed amused, and he certainly tipped his girl more than any of them, and they all departed into the late night laughing.

Auntie Badeea had had enough, but what could she do, she asked, not much, she wished to kill them with her bare hands, risking her manicure. The ubiquitous Arab shame, she called it, having to endure eternal humiliation in your own home. When the boys appeared next, she prophesied the end of their empire, Fools, she told them, your time is nigh, and they laughed. They shouldn’t have.

Not too long after I received that letter, a bereft young fruit peddler in Tunisia doused himself in paint thinner and set himself on fire. On that day, Auntie Badeea sent me an e-mail,
it was time, she wrote. It took a while for a demonstration to get organized but it did, I was late getting to work the day it started, I swear, Doc, it was the first time I was late in years, but I couldn’t tear myself away from the wavering transmissions on the television, I switched from CNN to BBC to ABC, I had Al Jazeera blaring on my computer screen, that first day, Doc, that first day was miraculous, pride pricked every morose cell in my body, dignity filled my soul, I knelt by the chair in the living room and wept until I laughed and laughed until I wept.

In yet another letter, Auntie Badeea told me she was doused with a water hose, not paint thinner, but aflame she was, in her seventies and no longer wishing to bow or kowtow, The police wanted to stop this body with a measly water cannon, she wrote, this body had endured Suleymah’s massages at the hammam, believe me, the water barely made my fat jiggle, let them come with bullets. They did the next day, they shot at the crowd and the crowd grew bigger, from thousands to millions, we had ourselves an honest-to-goodness revolution.

An Arab is an Arab is an Arab, Satan said, such a sucker, you fooled yourself once more, didn’t you? O Satan, take pity on my long misery.

Within a few weeks of the beginning of the Egyptian revolution, Auntie Badeea began to tweet, every demonstration, every arrest, every shot, every beating she shared with the entire universe and its foreign constellations, the revolution got rid of one president, then another, but the arrests kept on, the tortures never abated, A permanent revolution is what we need, tweeted Auntie Badeea, quoting Trotsky. She still had not given up hope, but I did. Revolutions are a Lernaean Hydra, Satan said, why do you think Death likes them so much, you cut off one head and two take its place, when you’re getting
fucked over, it matters little if it’s the president or the general, you can throw as much tea as you want into the harbor, you’ll still have to bend over, baby, eternal justice for the rebellious.

I gave up hope, I gave up, when Mubarak was pardoned by the military government, with each bomb that Assad dropped on his people, with each suicide bomb in Baghdad or Benghazi, in Barca or Cyrene, a razor blade cut through another vein. I bled whatever pride the revolution had engendered. Hope might be the thing with feathers but in the Middle East we hunt those birds for sport.

I could have saved you so much trouble, Satan said, but you never listen to me.

I know thee, stranger, who thou art, how great my grief, my joys how few, since first it was my fate to know thee.

I dream of him, Doc, I do, Procrustes, do you remember what I told you about him? The Greek who waylaid travelers—well, he offered his hospitality to passing strangers, come in, come in, join me in a meal and rest your weary legs, I have a special mattress, no, an iron bed, one that fits the exact measurements of every man, magical, yes. Once the guest was in the bed, if he was too short, Procrustes took out his smith’s hammer and stretched him to fit, if too tall, he chopped off the excess length. He had the bed for the perfect man, searched for such a one to fit, why bother with a glass slipper, I ask you, Doc, he was an anthropometrist, just like you. We, your boys, had to be a certain height and weight, never varied, one size fits all, you were a specialist.

In this morning’s dream I’m back at l’orphelinat de la Nativité in the infirmary iron bed surrounded by white, including the hood and wimple of the nun nurse except she was an unshaven man under the garb, obviously Procrustes himself since he carried a silver smith’s hammer,
bang, bang,
he’d make sure I was dead, except his thick Greek lips were trembling, just like my mother’s when she had a decision to make, should she put on the red dress or the green dress for this evening’s entertainment. Around his neck, the only color in the room, hung a long coral necklace that reached below his belt and swung like a pendulum. When I woke up, I wondered why the school’s infirmary, I fit that bed, the one that was unlike the others at school, I felt comfortable there.

We slept in school beds that were all the same and I used to look forward to being ill in the infirmary because no one troubled me much, except for the nun nurse with the slightly ducklike nose who checked on me twice a day at most, but I could not remain there for long, as I was always sent back to my hard bed with everyone else. The nuns, those learned torturers with shrill instruments, had rules and laws and regulations that all us boys had to follow in order to make perfect men out of us, they taught us to add and subtract and sing French, to read French history and literature, and à la Yeats, to be neat in everything in the best modern way. Ye sons of France, awake to glory—well,
enfants de la Patrie manqués
we were, all of us, bottomless crucibles of sin, they would bleach our tawdry hearts, blanch our sooty souls, they would scour away the lees and dregs of barbarism, lest we thought we could someday return to our aboriginal ways. The collars almost choked us as we
matured, but it was for the best, all agreed, because truly, who would not want to be civilized, we dressed alike, walked alike, studied alike, and when the civil war started most of us joined fascist militias in order to keep Lebanon pure and not Arab. The French still sing about spilling impure blood in the “Marseillaise.” Most of the other boys joined militias, but not me, the militias would not have accepted me, you know, Doc, every now and then I may have been able to pretend that I fit the bed, but I was never able to sustain the deceit.

It was summer, through the infirmary window I saw the Mediterranean, the blue in the west unraveled the luminous threads of saffron signaling the descending night, but I wished to stifle the beauty of the world since my head throbbed with delicious pain, hark, hark, the lark at heaven’s gates shrieked, hark, hark, my soul, and the saints appeared before me at the end of the bed, all haloed and incandescent. I believe it is time you met us, Saint Catherine said, all of us in glory, she sat next to me, held my hand, and began the introductions, one by one, as if they were the von Trapp children saying good night at the Nazi party. This is Saint George, born in Lod, Palestine, the city of Zeus, he defeated the dragon of the lake in Libya, at first my idiot heart was terrified and I remained as still as a lizard, and this is Saint Blaise, the Armenian bishop with his crossed candles, he was tortured, scourged, and beheaded, he had the face of a generous accountant, Saint Erasmus loved Lebanon because that was where he hid from Diocletian for a while, except he made my stomach cramp since his intestines were wound around a windlass, Saint Pantaleon in a checkered doctor’s coat who survived burning, a
molten-lead bath, forced drowning, and stretching on the wheel, until he was finally beheaded, and then the Sicilian Saint Vitus with his palm leaf, and the giant Saint Christopher who looked even taller because of the child with the coral necklace on his shoulder, and Saint Denis carrying his own head, and Saint Cyriac who had conjunctivitis in both eyes, Saint Agathius the Greek wearing his soldier’s vest, Saint Eustace who saw a shining cross nestled in a stag’s antlers, Saint Giles of Athens who suckled on the milk of a hind, Saint Margaret of Antioch who conquered Satan in the form of a dragon, and last, though by no means least, we have the beautiful maiden Saint Barbara, beheaded by her own father, Dioscorus, who was immediately struck by lightning, fire from Heaven.

My migraine, soft sift in an hourglass, dissipated. The saints and I chatted, shreds of conversation, scraps of poetry, fourteen saints they were, twenty-eight healing hands that touched me when I needed solace, help me, Doc. But no traveler fit the bed of Procrustes, he adjusted them all to death, and the secret as to why not a single man had the right measurement was that he had two iron beds, not one, he placed each traveler in the bed that did not belong to him, and do you think the nuns had just one bed? Of course not, they slept on different beds from ours, but we must pray to the same God.
Liberté, egalité, fraternité, ce n’est pas sérieux,
we’re only kidding,
allez-y,
you boys must pursue civilization, not that you could ever attain it, bitch, please, the endless pursuit is where thou shalt remain, look up to us, lift up your eyes and look to the heavens for it is there that you will find us. And then the gargoyle nuns gave me my own ill-fitting bed.

Querulous skylarks settled their squabbles in the bamboo grove right outside my window, in my neighbor’s yard, Behemoth on his haunches on the duvet watched with unrestrained longing, desire full of endless distances, tremors of his mouth, spasms of his jaw, whispery wistful meows. I ached for him, damn you, feathered things, frolic elsewhere, end his torture. On the screen of my laptop, I read the last words of a three-year-old Syrian girl, mortally wounded, besmeared with immortal blood, I’m going to tell God everything, she said. Wonderful, I said to the Facebook news-feed, just wonderful, make sure to tell that son of a bitch his firmament of Hell still stands, still spouts cataracts of fire upon his unchosen people while his privileged practice yoga asana, the forgotten suffer their drones and missiles, unrespited, unpitied, unreprieved.

As it was in the beginning, said Satan, lying on my bed, so shall it be in the end, so shall it be first, last, midst, and without end, basically you’re screwed, Jacob, you know, the supremacy of Western civilization is based entirely on the ability to kill people from a distance.

I could not bear it anymore and jumped Satan, wanted to pummel him, but who was I kidding, I had never thrown a punch and never would, he laughed as I struggled to hold the angel of light. Next to us Behemoth watched us instead of the birds, imperturbable, refusing to budge. In one swift motion, Satan turned me over, sat on my midriff, held my arms down next to my head on the pillow, brought his face down next to mine, You can never win, Jacob, he said, and kissed me. Call me Ya’qub, I told the Devil Iblis.