The Hakawati (80 page)

“And he just happened to be able to read?”

“Of course. He read and was entranced and bewitched. He repacked the poems and kept them for years, had them copied and distributed. One would hope he was able to repack all the poems without losing any to the harsh desert winds.”

“But what if he wasn’t able to,” my mother said, “and some of the papyrus flew away?”

“Imagine. Poetry still hovering over the skies of Baghdad.”

“Or buried under the desert sands,” my mother said. “Someone drills a well in Iraq, and out gushes poetry instead of oil.”

“But will the discoverers understand Arabic or appreciate poetry, for that matter?”

“Al-Mutanabbi’s basic problem to begin with.”

Nick shook his head. “I know that sounds romantic, but what
was the point of al-Mutanabbi’s death? Has his poetry saved a single life?”

My mother sank into a chair, closed her eyes, and sighed softly.

“Let me introduce you to my brother,” Uncle Jihad said.

So what happened to Nick, and how did my mother end up not marrying him if she was unable to say no? My sister, who had met Nicholas Khoury, believed that he and my mother didn’t marry because a voice inside her must have been issuing warnings, if not outright curses, the whole time. Lina couldn’t imagine my mother ever caring for anything political. That my mother would have committed herself to a man who believed that opposing Zionism was not just a worthy goal but a way of life, a prerequisite for being human, was unthinkable to Lina. My mother, who had transformed being apolitical into an art form, could never have completely submerged who she was for the sake of a man. “I know that a discussion about art and poetry was the puff that brought down the house of cards,” Lina once told me, “but how could the house have stood for so long, given his views? This was a man who believed in didactic art, for heaven’s sake. Novels should uplift the people and guide them to a better understanding of how persecuted they were. He saw Trotsky, Sartre, Lenin, Orwell, and Huxley as models to emulate and wasn’t bright enough to perceive a contradiction. Mother was getting a degree in liberal arts while she was with him. This was a woman who wore mourning black for forty days when Calvino died. Everyone kept asking her which member of the family had passed away. She went to her deathbed sincerely believing
Anna Karenina
was mankind’s greatest achievement. That idiot told her that Tolstoy was the epitome of the spoiled bourgeoisie. He told her not to listen to violin concertos because the best violinists were Jews and therefore probably supporters of the terrible policies of Israel. Told that to my mother? She mentioned it to me in passing, and I practically fainted. She may have agreed to marry him, but even if he hadn’t spun right into disaster head-on, she wouldn’t have. She knew he was a tragedy.”

The disaster occurred on the day of Nick’s commencement. My mother attended his ceremony, sat in the audience with his family. Nick’s mother couldn’t contain her pride. His father had desperately wanted to see his son’s graduation but was unable to leave his sickbed. At the end of the ceremony, my mother faked a headache and left the happy party to be on her own. She didn’t want to discuss the future.

Nick, wearing his cap and gown, returned home to check on his father, who felt such pride that he volunteered to be Nick’s first patient. Nick’s father had been complaining that day of dizziness, lethargy, and digestive problems. Nick treated him by setting up a glucose intravenous tube. His father died before he had a chance to sneeze, a tragedy and a scandal. Nick locked himself in his room for two weeks after the funeral. His entire family grieved.

The human soul is resilient; Nick did recover emotionally and psychologically.

Human societies are less resilient; the dishonor would not be easily forgotten.

Two months after he had killed his first patient, Nick understood that he wouldn’t be able to work in Beirut. No one would consent to be his second patient. He would have to go far away, to a place where no one had heard of his misdeed. Nick asked my mother to go with him to Kirkuk. She refused, of course. And my father began his wooing in earnest.

My father set out to make himself someone else, someone better, someone important. He persuaded his brother to give up his pigeons so they could set up a business. To do that, they needed money. Following their mother’s footsteps of long ago, my father and Uncle Jihad walked the same hill to the mansion of the bey, who was always claiming to be our family’s benefactor. The bey greeted my father and uncle warmly and called for coffee to be served, but he also called his servant, my grandfather. What insidious thought could have been going through the bey’s head no one knew, and this was one story that neither my grandfather nor my uncle nor my father wished to provide theories for or elaborate on.

Before his own father, my father had to ask the bey for financial help. The bey said, “Isn’t that too grand a project for you? You don’t know the first thing about automobiles. How can you sell cars when you don’t even have one of your own?”

Dispirited, my father returned to a rainy Beirut, and for the first time it was Uncle Jihad who had to remind him of the dream. “You’ll see,” Uncle Jihad said. “In every story, when things are at their most dire, an angel comes and helps the hero.”

“But this is no story,” replied my father.

“Of course it isn’t. This is life. In real life you get more than one angel. You get two or three. Hell, you get an army of angels.”

My grandfather quit that day. He was so embarrassed for his sons he told the bey he could no longer work for him. The bey asked how he would survive without his entertainment, and my grandfather said, “All you have to do is ask, my lord, and I will come running to entertain you. Yet I’ve worked for you for so long that my stories have become aged and corroded. I cannot in good faith take your money and pretend I’m offering anything in return.”

That night, my grandmother berated her husband. How would they be able to support themselves? They still had an unmarried daughter. The bey gave my grandfather two days of rest before calling him to the mansion. “Tell me a story,” the bey commanded, and my grandfather did. “You have served my family well,” the bey said, and resumed paying him his weekly salary. And my grandfather remained at his master’s beck and call until the day he died—my grandfather, that is, not the bey, for when the master dies his son takes over his possessions.

The al-Kharrat Corporation was birthed officially in 1955. Like most newborns, it began life small and odd-looking. My father had asked his old Iraqi school friend Khaled Mathaher, an up-and-coming businessman—or, as Uncle Jihad used to call himself when he started out, a businessboy—for advice. The reply had come in a letter from Baghdad that became a family keepsake. “Automobiles!” it shouted. “Sell automobiles. Cars are the future.” The Mathaher family had a Renault dealership in Baghdad, and Khaled would help my father obtain one for Lebanon. And the story began.

Listening to the advice of my grandmother and not my grandfather, my father registered the corporation as a family business, with the four brothers, Wajih, Halim, Farid, and Jihad, as partners. The fact that my father listened to his mother and not his father wasn’t surprising—my father didn’t get along with his father, was embarrassed by him, and rarely if ever listened to him. He should have on this occasion, because my grandfather’s counsel proved to be prescient. My grandfather told my father that his two older brothers shouldn’t be part of the corporation. My father could hire them or help them, but if they were partners, he and Uncle Jihad would have to work around their incompetence for years to follow. My father not only ignored the advice, he convinced
Uncle Jihad that Uncle Wajih should be president of the company, since he was the eldest. My grandmother brimmed with joy as she saw her family reunite.

My great-uncle Ma
an offered his two charges a final gift, two small plots of land in Beirut. One would become the family workplace, the first dealership, and the other the family home, the building that would be erected not long after as one of the pledges my father made my mother if she married him. The army of angels, friends of my father and Uncle Jihad, provided loans—with no interest, of course. The dealership building was one shoddily built room that barely had space for six clean desks. In its lot, the company opened its doors with three cars, which were sold the first day. “A bang,” Uncle Jihad used to say. “We opened with a bang.”

Within a year, they added the Fiat dealership, and then the exclusive Arab-world Toyota and Datsun dealership a few years later. On the day the Japanese contracts were signed, my father and Uncle Jihad bought their first custom-made Brioni suits, and my mother received a diamond necklace whose price no one talked about publicly.

My father did accept my grandfather’s advice on one thing, the poetic choice. Yes, my mother was seduced with poetry. My mother was a romantic but not a fool. In the two years during which my father pursued her, after he had declared his intentions to Uncle Jihad and her, she had made a point of objectively gauging whether he would make her a good husband. She studied him, found out almost everything there was to know about him: where his career was going, how he treated his family, his level of education or lack thereof, his womanizing. She claimed to have kept a notebook of checks and balances. She tested him. She misbehaved in public to observe his reaction. She made him wait when he picked her up. She interviewed him endlessly.

For his part, my father interviewed Uncle Jihad. What would she like? He never bought flowers that weren’t approved by my uncle. My mother kept no secrets from Uncle Jihad, and she soon found out that he kept none from my father. My mother would point out a wonderful dress to Uncle Jihad, and the next day a package would arrive at her house. My father knew who her favorite singers were, what her favorite food was, and of course, who her favorite poets were. My father sent her poems, and my mother adored that. He sent her poetry
she knew well. Whether it was Rilke, Dickinson, or Barrett Browning, she knew the Westerners. She loved the old Arabs, al-Mutanabbi or the
Muallaqat
—Amru al-Qais and Zuhair in particular. My father worked hard.

One day, my grandmother asked him when he intended to marry, and he told her about my mother even though she hadn’t consented to marry him yet. He confessed his entire seduction scheme. And my grandfather, in his usual obstreperous manner, interrupted, “But you’re no poet.” When no one understood what he meant, he elaborated. “Only a poet can sing a familiar poem and make it sound as if it has never been uttered before. Only a hakawati can bewitch with a tale twice-told. You have to dazzle her with something she doesn’t know, a poet like Saadi. Lovers flock to lesser poets, but few are better than him.”

When my grandfather recited some lines from Saadi, my father wasn’t impressed, but later, when my mother sat him down to talk, he could come up with nothing else.

“I know you could make me happy,” she said. “I know you would take care of me, but we’re such different people. That could be hell for the both of us.”

And my father replied, “It is better to burn with you in hell than to be in paradise with another. The scent of onions from a beautiful mouth is more fragrant than that of a rose held by an ugly hand.” Stunned, my mother searched for a translation of Saadi seemingly forever. He became one of her favorites. Even on her deathbed, she quoted him to the nurses.

My mother agreed to marry my father if he pledged three things: to become more successful, to buy her a better home, and to stop his womanizing. Two out of three.

Back in Cairo, Othman lay on the sofa and admired his wife as she undressed. By the light of a dozen candles, she rubbed a concoction of olive oil and verbena onto her arms. Othman said, “I am pleased that bedtime modesty is not something you insist upon.”

She raised her gaze slowly, looked into his eyes to gauge his meaning, but he lowered his quickly in embarrassment. Though she returned to applying the lotion, pretending nonchalance, they knew
each other too well. He saw her ears were pricked. “I have been thinking,” he said.