The Hakawati (41 page)

This story about neighbors arrives from far away, so listen. The parable is Iraqi, all the way from the ancient city of Baghdad; it flew here on waves of air, needing to alight in cavernous ears. Long ago, in a time long past, there lived an honorable Bedouin who was so hospitable and charitable that he was known as Abou al-Karam, Father of Generosity. One day, a poor man raised his tent pole next to the Bedouin’s, and of course Abou al-Karam made sure his neighbor lacked nothing, offering him food, water, and clothing. For seven years, whenever the tribe traveled, their tents remained adjacent. The neighbor became known as Bin al-Kareem, Son of the Generous One. After each of the tribe’s raids, Abou al-Karam would share the spoils with his neighbor: horses, mares, camels, food, slaves, the enemy tribe’s possessions.

By the end of those seven years, Bin al-Kareem and his sons had become wealthy. By the end of those seven years, Abou al-Karam’s youngest daughter had become a desert beauty, lithe and tall as a
poplar, graceful as a doe. And Bin al-Kareem’s younger son wanted her. He courted her. He sang verses for her, followed her when she went to the well, knelt outside her tent when she tried to sleep, whispering endearments. The beautiful girl refused him. He stalked her wherever she went, made it impossible for her to move freely. And the girl told her father, who said, “One night more and you will not have to worry about this nefarious boy.”

That night, when the girl went to bed, the boy appeared outside her tent and began whispering to her. “Wait but one more night,” she said, “and you shall receive your just reward.”

At dawn, Abou al-Karam gave the order to break camp. Later that morning, the camels and pack animals were laden and the tribe began to march. For all of the previous seven years, wherever Abou al-Karam pitched his tent in a new camp, Bin al-Kareem pitched his right next to it. That day, arriving at a suitable pasture, Abou al-Karam searched until he found a spot next to a teeming anthill. There he made his home. When Bin al-Kareem arrived to pitch his tent, he said, “O dear neighbor, there is an anthill on my site.”

“So there is,” replied Abou al-Karam, “and God’s earth is wide.”

Bin al-Kareem said nothing further. He drove his family and his belongings away from the tribe, up north, far away from his once-beloved neighbor. But his heart ached, and his mind was troubled. He relived the insult over and over in his head. Why? he asked himself. Why did his friend betray him? One night, he had a dream. He saw Abou al-Karam’s daughter walking in the desert, followed by wisps of clouds, and he divined what might have happened. The next morning, while hunting with his elder son, he said, “What a shame we had to leave our good neighbor. And that daughter. What a beautiful girl. Our family is inferior to hers and there was no hope of matrimony between us, but, still, what a gorgeous lass. A shame we left before you had a chance with her.”

“Shame?” the son yelled. “You call that a shame? Shame on you for uttering such words. Was she not my sister? Did we not eat of the same food? Did we not share the same honor for seven years? Only sons of whores and sons of shame would consider what you’re thinking.”

“Forgive me, my son,” the father said. “The sorrow of parting must have clouded my judgment. Let us return to our tent and forget we had this conversation.”

The next day, while hunting, Bin al-Kareem said to his younger son, “What a shame about that adorable girl.”

“Shame?” sighed the boy. “One night more, Father, and she would have been mine. One night more.”

And the father unsheathed his sword and cut off his son’s head.

And the father wound woolen thread around his son’s head, and wound, and wound, until he had a large ball of yarn. He waited until he met a traveler heading south, and he asked, “Will you carry this gift to my friend Abou al-Karam?”

When the traveler arrived at Abou al-Karam’s camp, he found him in his tent, sitting with guests. The traveler placed the gift before Abou al-Karam, who asked, “Who sends this gift?”

“A man who called you his friend and brother,” said the traveler.

Abou al-Karam summoned his slaves to unwind the yarn. As they unraveled it, they uncovered the son’s head. And Abou al-Karam beat his chest in sorrow, sighed the breath of remorse. He understood that his neighbor of seven years was as true as a brother and as jealous of his name. The guests demanded the tale, and Abou al-Karam told it. The guests all said in one voice that he must marry his daughter to his neighbor’s elder son, which would make Abou al-Karam and Bin al-Kareem brothers.

And so it was. Two neighbors, one superior and one inferior, but equals in honor and pride, became one family, and lived long to take pleasure in their children.

And Mahdallah Arisseddine worked hard. He became a well-respected doctor in the region. Patients arrived from all over. Yet he couldn’t increase the size of his family by much.

Finally, ten years after his third son was born, Mona got pregnant again. This time, everyone knew it was a girl. They had waited long enough. The eldest, Aref, was already twenty-one years old. When Mona was in her eighth month, the doctor was asked to trek to Aleppo to heal a man from the al-Atrash family, a prince from Jabal al-Druze in Syria who had fallen gravely ill while traveling. Mona objected, but Mahdallah said he would be back before she gave birth. She said she didn’t believe him. He said he had never lied to her. She let him go.

Her last words to him were “I’m calling her Najla, after my mother.”

For, although the doctor healed the prince, the doctor died. He
spent his last few days away from his family, wasting away in a strange bed, trying to medicate himself, alone, in a city farther north than Tripoli, where he met his wife, a much longer journey.

Like my great-grandmother Lucine Guiragossian, my great-grandfather Mahdallah Arisseddine died of amoebic dysentery. His death in 1904 came four years after hers; his was in the city of Aleppo, a little bit farther south than Urfa, the city where she died.

He died a Druze, but he was buried in a Christian cemetery, since there were no Druze cemeteries in Aleppo. God rest his soul.

This would not be Mona’s only tragedy. My great-uncle Aref was a wild young man. While his father was still alive, he managed to keep himself under some semblance of control. His father’s influence was such that the boy graduated at the top of his class and enrolled in medical school at his father’s alma mater. Mahdallah rented him a small room in Beirut. Aref studied hard, but he also played hard. Rumors of his mad conquests trickled to the village.

To his impressionable teenage brother, Jalal, he said, “All women are different. A Druze woman tastes like half-cooked lamb with rosemary and peppers, a Maronite tastes like beef marinated in olive oil, a Sunni girl like calf’s liver cooked in white wine, a Shiite like chicken in vinegar with pine nuts, an Orthodox like fish in tahini sauce, a Jewish woman like baked kibbeh, a Melchite like semolina stew, a Protestant like chicken soup, and an Alawite like okra in beef stock.”

And Aref tasted them all and more. He wanted a bite of each sect of his land, and that desire developed into a gastronomical obsession. The Sunni (university girl), Maronite (housewife in Sinn el-Fil), Orthodox (housewife in Ain el-Rumaneh), and Druze (maid in Beiteddine) were not difficult to obtain. The Jewish wife of Mr. Salim Kuhin wasn’t hard, either; he met her outside the downtown synagogue. For the Melchite, he had to travel all the way to the Bekaa Valley, to Zahlé, and find Mrs. Ballat, the manager of the pension where he stayed. The Shiite was difficult. He traveled to the south and met a number of girls, but Sidon didn’t open its gates for him. Tyre resisted him as it did Alexander the Great. He had Alexander’s moxie and cunning, but he lacked Two-Horned’s patience and resources. Tyre defeated Aref. He was lucky enough to find a Shiite prostitute in a nightclub near the port of Beirut.

Three days after Aref’s twenty-first birthday, his father died. Aref shook off whatever constraints he may have had. The Protestant was his biology professor, an Englishwoman, but then he decided that, as a nonnational, she wasn’t a representative morsel of the delicious sectarian spectrum. He had to search for three months, fail one class, and barely pass another before he found an appropriate Lebanese Protestant. He rode the train north to Tripoli to savor an Alawite, had to live there for two months before the seduction was complete. He made love to an Armenian in Bourj Hammoud on the way back to Beirut.

When he finished the entire menu, he celebrated with a drunken, boastful evening with friends, and then he returned to the village for a few days, his medical education all but forgotten. Those days dragged into a few more, and those into a few more still, as he grew fond of a married woman, Sitt Yasmine, whose husband was a farmhand for the bey.

Every morning, Aref hid behind the village’s great oak tree, waiting for the farmhand to leave. Then my great-uncle would ride his horse to the house, tie the reins to the window shutter, and entertain himself with Sitt Yasmine. If only he had tied the horse to the back window. The neighbors told the husband he was being cuckolded, but he didn’t believe at first. One morning, a friend took the farmhand by the arm and brought him back to his house. “See,” his friend said, “there’s the horse.” The farmhand yelled, screamed, “O Sheikh, get out of my house now or I will commit murder.” Aref escaped out the back. The farmhand and his friend gave chase, intending to do him harm with a rake, a hoe, and an empty bucket between them. Aref laughed, tried to tie his belt while running. He reached a cascade of olive orchards, the silver-green trees in rows that stretched to the bottom of the hill. He jumped across into the lower orchard, landed on the soft earth, ran a little more, and jumped again, but this time his foot caught in an olive branch. He spun in midair like a tetherball and shot headfirst to the ground. He died on impact.

The farmhand returned the horse to my great-grandmother. She must have opened the door for him with my grandmother Najla in her arms.

Miraculously, Sitt Yasmine remained unharmed. It is said the farmhand was so shocked by witnessing the demise of a sheikh that he forgot his wife’s betrayal and didn’t remember to beat her.

•   •   •

When my grandfather decided he wanted my grandmother for a wife, he sent word to her brother Jalal, already a respected family man at twenty-seven. Jalal had left the confines of the village for a more cosmopolitan life in Beirut. Since Ismail al-Kharrat didn’t have a family to represent him, he sent one of his admirers, a charming but not very gifted fellow, a sheikh himself, and the first cousin of the bey on his mother’s side. My great-uncle received him as a good host should, but when the guest requested his sister’s hand for the hakawati, Jalal said a simple no. My great-uncle would have laughed, but, as an Arab intellectual, he lacked a sense of humor.

“And that bastard just said no,” my grandfather said. “He didn’t elaborate, felt no need to explain his position. I had my guy prepared with all kinds of wonderful things to say about me and why I’d make a good husband for your grandmother, but the bastard didn’t have the courtesy to let my guy speak. Just no.”

“You can’t call him a bastard, Baba,” Aunt Samia said. “He’s my uncle. He’s the children’s great-uncle. You can’t just curse him like that.”

“The man was a bastard,” Uncle Halim insisted. Already drunk, he sipped his arak delicately. He took another sip and then gulped down the rest. “It’s not like Baba is adding anything new to the equation.”

“You’re taking his side?” Aunt Samia said. She stood up, handed Little Mona to her bewildered husband. “Of all people, you have the gall to say something like that?” Uncle Akram held the girl with his arms straight and outstretched, as if she were smelly locker-room laundry. “In
my
house?” Mona’s legs dangled in midair. Her father turned his head left and right, hoping someone would rescue him. “You choose to do this in front of all these kids? Do you care if they all grow up to be gypsies with no morals? Maybe you want them to grow up to be Kurds?” She walked toward the kitchen, pivoted, returned to take her daughter. “And you,” she admonished her husband, “you sit here and listen to him insult the family and you do nothing.”

“But it’s not my family.” Uncle Akram looked to my father for support.

“You always resort to that, don’t you? Whenever I need you, you hide.” She took a deep breath, raised her voice. “Uncle Jalal was called a bastard. What are you going to do about it?”

“But he’s not my uncle,” her husband said.

“And he is a bastard,” Uncle Halim said, snickering.

“No,” Aunt Samia said. “No, no, no.” Her daughter began to pout and whimper.

Lina grinned. My mother looked at her and winked. Uncle Jihad, who was sitting on the corner couch, entered the winking fest. Then he nodded at my mother, as if agreeing to something, and threw his contribution into the ring.

“Osama,” he called loudly, “what happened to the money you borrowed from me?” I didn’t understand. “Did you spend all of it?” His voice didn’t match his face. My mother was trying to catch his attention. She nodded to Little Mona and raised her eyebrows. “Samia, my dear,” he said, “why don’t you give me the precious darling?” Aunt Samia, still staring at Uncle Halim, handed her daughter over distractedly. With the little girl in his arms, Uncle Jihad returned to me. “Did you think I’d forget the money, Osama?” He waited a few breaths before adding, “Did you waste the money”—breath—”or did you hide”—breath—”the money?”

My mother grinned, shook her head slowly from side to side in admiration, as if telling Uncle Jihad she was in awe. He shrugged, as if replying it was nothing.

You could count. One. Two. And the jinn of hell broke their chains.

“You stole my money,” Aunt Samia shouted at Uncle Halim, who recoiled visibly. Her face was as red as if dunked in tomato paste, and her eyes were as white and wide as saucers.

“Samia, no,” my father yelled, but she was off in her outraged world.

“It was my money. It was mine. My mother wanted to give it to me. To me. My money.”