The Hakawati (84 page)

“Will they ever stop?” my mother said. The shelling had been going on and on, and we were all getting tired. “This infernal night is never ending. Make it pass, Jihad. Make it pass or make those bombs stop. Those are your options.”

“Shall we play cards?” Uncle Jihad asked.

“No. Tell me another story. Entertain me once more.”

Uncle Jihad turned to me and winked. “Why don’t you tell us a story, Osama? It’s time you contributed to our lore.”

“Yours are so much better,” I said, “and she asked you.”

My mother stretched her back. “I’d love to hear a story, Osama. Really, my dear, any story is good. Anything is better than this boredom.”

“I can tell the story of Baybars,” I said. “It used to be one of Grandfather’s favorites.”

“Baybars?” My mother turned to Uncle Jihad. “The Mamluke? Is there a story about him that I don’t know about?”

“The story is a classic,” Uncle Jihad said. “One of the standards.”

“Why?”

Uncle Jihad laughed, and I said, “Because he’s a hero.”

“Actually, Osama, that’s a great question,” Uncle Jihad said. He took a deep breath, searched his pockets for a cigarette, which basically meant that he was going to tell a tale, not I. “I’m laughing because your mother has a talent for getting to the crux of an issue. I’m assuming she knows who the man is.”

“Of course I do.”

“What she’s asking is why there’s a story about him. You see, the story of the story of Baybars is in some ways more interesting. Listen. Contrary to what my father and most people believe, the only true event in that whole story, in all its versions, is that the man existed. Everything else has been distorted beyond recognition. Al-Malik al-Zahir Rukn al-Din Baybars al-Bunduq-dari al-Salihi owes his fame to his talent for public relations, without which his reign might have been reduced to a historical footnote.”

“Wait,” I said. “At Ain Jalut he—”

“Listen and learn, Osama,” my uncle interrupted. “Though it’s true that Baybars defeated both the Mongols and the Crusaders, it actually was a victory for the Mamlukes. He wasn’t the best general among them by any means. And his victories over the Crusaders, like Saladin’s, were temporary, for whenever ferment spread in Europe, nervous kings and popes called for new crusades. There were so many crusades. You know, when the knights of the First Crusade landed on our shores, they massacred the entire population of Beirut without showing mercy on a single soul before heading toward Jerusalem—all of Beirut, every citizen was killed. And after the Great War, in 1918, when the French arrived with their fleet of innumerable warships, the first governor, General Henri Gouraud, announced upon landing in Beirut, ‘Saladin, we have returned.’ Believe me, Baybars did not defeat the Crusaders. No one did. But he also wasn’t a decent ruler. His subjects despised him, because he was a ruthless, fork-tongued megalomaniac who rose to power through treachery and murder. Quite a few sultans followed his mentor, al-Saleh, but their reigns were shortened when the ambitious slave killed them. He murdered two openly, Touran Shah and Qutuz; the death of Qutuz was Baybars’s springboard to power, since he insisted on applying an old law of the Turks stipulating that he who killed the ruler should take his place. He was also
despised because he was born with blue eyes and developed cataracts in one. One blue and one white meant an evil eye.”

“So he wasn’t a hero?”

“He was in a way,” Uncle Jihad went on. He laughed when he saw my face. “Don’t be so disappointed. He was definitely a marketing hero. Baybars consolidated his power and created a cult of personality by paying, bribing, and forcing an army of hakawatis to promulgate tales of his valor and piety. These days, few can discern historical accounts from the stories of the hakawatis. He was the precursor to all the Arab presidents we have today.” He reached out and stroked my chin, lifted it up so my mouth closed. “Here’s a fun fact, in almost all the remaining versions of the story, none of them are about Baybars. You see, the hakawatis’ audience is the common man who couldn’t really identify with a royal, almost infallible hero, so early on the hakawatis began to introduce characters that their audience could empathize with. The tale, even during its inchoate years, was never about Baybars, but those around him. The story of the king is the story of the people, and unfortunately, to this day, no king has learned that lesson.”

In 1982, a couple of months after the infernal Israelis blew up the dealership during an aerial bombardment, and after their siege of Beirut, I went home for Christmas. The city was mired in civil war and occupied by Israeli troops, but that didn’t stop my mother from asking me to take four-year-old Salwa for a walk while she got a manicure and pedicure. A week of calm had inspired courage in the city’s denizens, but not in me. Whether that was because courage was never my forte or because I was no longer a denizen of Beirut, I couldn’t tell. A few months earlier, the Israelis had bombed the city incessantly. A few months earlier, the Syrians had assassinated the Lebanese president. A few months before that, the militias had massacred thousands of Palestinian civilians in the camps. Today, my mother wanted a manicure.

“At least the PLO is gone,” she said. “It’s safer now, in principle.” The Israeli invasion had incapacitated her for quite some time, but recently she’d been reclaiming her normal life.

It wasn’t as if my mother were the only crazy one. The Lebanese took advantage of every lull. The blare of car horns as I pushed Salwa’s
stroller along was deafening. Military jeeps drove by and honked their way past civilian automobiles. The Corniche was filled with promenaders.

I stood in front of the building where my mother was having her nails done. She was somewhere on the second floor. The manicurist usually came to the apartment, but today my mother had wanted an excuse to go out. I considered pushing the stroller across the boulevard to the Corniche, but I felt paralyzed. The people enjoying their walks didn’t inspire any confidence in me. I felt safer standing close to the building, and my napping niece didn’t seem to mind.

In the midst of my passive panic attack, I heard a hissing sound coming from behind the war-damaged green wall separating the building from its neighbor: “Psst, psst.” I began to back away slowly, pulling the stroller. My blood was rushing so fast I almost blacked out. I was twenty-one, too young to die, much too young. “Over here,” the voice behind the wall said, quietly and urgently. I couldn’t tell who was stupider: the man who was hiding and expecting someone to respond to his call, or me for not running into the building screaming my terror out. “Osama,” the man called. A bearded face appeared from behind the wall. “It’s me, Elie.”

I barely recognized my brother-in-law, although he had the same features, the same nose and mouth and brow. It wasn’t the beard or the gauntness that made him unrecognizable and disturbing. It was the eyes, brimming with the brilliance of insanity. Elie’s most distinctive feature had been his swagger, but he wasn’t able to exhibit any as a disconnected head.

“Hey. You look different.” I backed up another step. “I can’t stay, because I have to take Salwa inside.”

“No, wait,” he pleaded. He didn’t move from behind the wall. Only his angled head with its crown of untrimmed hair showed. “I can’t stay, either—too many traitors around—but I want to talk to you. I saw you from two buildings away and ducked over here; it’s too dangerous. We must meet at a secure location.”

“A secure location?”

“Where no one will kill me. Meet me at Trader Vic’s tonight at eight. I have many things to tell you. Don’t stand me up, I beg you. Promise me.” He withdrew his head without waiting for my agreement. I looked around, wondered why the air didn’t feel different, why
there wasn’t some form of proof that Elie had been there. Salwa stirred in the pram. I checked, but she was still napping. Elie hadn’t even asked who she was.

The dank fog of smoke forced what dim light there was to scatter randomly. Elie was sitting on a high stool at the bar, and seemed about to tip over. The bartender, a bald, muscular man in a colored polyester shirt, leaned across the bar surface and whispered something into Elie’s ear. When the bartender pulled his head back, I could see that he wasn’t exactly sober, either. The room groaned and sweated, feverish amid an infestation of bamboo. I shuddered. The bartender noticed me and arched his eyebrows. I sat next to Elie and ordered a beer.

Elie discovered my existence when the bartender placed the bottle in front of me. “My mother won’t talk to me anymore,” he said.

He exhaled a dragon’s worth of smoke. I wiped the irritation from my eyes and took a sip of beer. “How are you doing?” I asked.

“My mother won’t talk to me,” he repeated. “I’ve been trying to get in touch, but she won’t even open the door. I might get murdered any minute and she doesn’t care.”

I felt as if I were stuck in a portentous Godard movie. “Tell him why,” the bartender said as he cleaned glasses with a dingy towel. He looked like a wrestler flexing before a match.

“I threw an ashtray at her.”

“And he’s surprised she doesn’t talk to him,” said the bartender.

“I didn’t hit her, did I? I threw the glass ashtray at the door to get her to move. She didn’t want me to leave. She argued and argued and then threw herself in front of the door, as if that was going to stop me. She can’t tell me what to do.”

Not a Godard movie, a Hollywood B-movie. An abrasive Don Ho was actually singing in the background. “She can’t tell you what to do,” said the bartender, “and now she won’t talk to you. You can’t have it both ways.”

“Hey,” called Elie, “whose side are you on?”

“Your mother’s. I’m always on a mother’s side. She raised you better than this. And you know she’d do anything for you. Tell him.” The bartender jerked his head toward me and flicked his towel at Elie, who turned his back and almost fell off the stool.

The bartender sighed and told me the story himself. When the
Israelis laid siege to Beirut, the Palestinians and the Lebanese leftist militias hunkered in for the last stand. The city was shelled by battleships in the west, tanks and rocket launchers from the mountains in the east, north, and south, and jets from above. Elie didn’t return home for two weeks, remaining in the bunker and dozing whenever he could on the beach, where he was launching ineffective rockets at Israeli gunboats. For a fortnight, his mother, the concierge’s wife, worried to the point where she pricked her arms with darning needles in order not to think of her son. Finally, after midnight on a night of heavy shelling, she left her house and walked the two miles to the bunker. Her son was sleeping on a raffia mat, shoeless but fully clothed under a single blanket.

He opened his eyes and saw his mother glaring at him. “I only wanted to make sure you’re all right,” she said, turning around to go home.

Elie’s gaze was fastened on the label of his beer bottle, which he was systematically tearing to shreds. “It’s the Christians,” he said out of nowhere. “They betrayed us all.”

I wished he would look at me when he talked, but, then again, it was probably just as well that he didn’t. “But you’re Christian,” I said.

“I mean the Maronites. Don’t pretend you’re a foreigner with me.”

“Elie. My mother is a Maronite.”

“I don’t mean all of them, just most of them. You can’t deny it. They’re going to kill all of us. If they don’t shoot us, they’ll slit our throats. If they don’t slit our throats, they’ll poison us. If they don’t poison us, they’ll run us over with their Range Rovers one by one and break our bones and watch us bleed to death on the road.”

“Elie. My sister—your wife—is a Maronite.”

“No, she’s not. I don’t care what she thinks. She’s not. She would take after your father, not your crazy mother. You don’t get to choose. And she was baptized Orthodox to marry, so she can’t fool me. I know better now, and I knew better then. I’m in control. Did I tell you my mother isn’t talking to me? Can your mother talk to her?”

“Elie.” I repeated his name in hopes of calming him. “Have you been sleeping all right?”

“What a stupid question. I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in years. Do you think it’s easy? You escaped. You ran away. The rest of us can’t. We’re not all like your family. When things get rough, they go to the
mountains—or, better, they go to Paris. Your house gets destroyed, you buy another, or two. All I can do is kill, kill, kill.”

I drank the rest of my Heineken in one long gulp. “Have you run over someone with a Range Rover lately?”

“Two of them, ran over them twice, but I wish I had a Range Rover, because then they’d be dead instead of in the hospital. If I had a four-wheeler, everything would run smoother.”

I slid off my barstool and started to leave, but Elie grabbed my arm. “Wait,” he said, “I have a good story for you,” and he plunged off into uninterruptible jabber territory. “We weren’t ready. In principle, we should have been. We used to use it as a threat: The Israelis are going to invade. The Israelis are going to invade. We didn’t really believe it. We also thought that if they did the Syrians would stand in their way. After all, that was why they were here. But the second the invasion began, the Syrians started running and hiding like the dogs they are. It was left to the Palestinians and us to fight. The glory of the left. For Trotsky, Che, and all that. My men ended up on the beach trying to stop the Israelis from landing troops there. There were so few of us compared with them. We had to do it in six-hour shifts. It was exhausting. Having to be one hundred percent on your guard for six hours was deadly.” I pulled my arm away, and he panicked. “Wait, wait, I’m getting to the strange part of the story. So, one day—we’ve been doing this for about a month, everyone was exhausted and psychotic—I finished my shift at noon and was going to take a shower and force myself to sleep, but then a jeep full of Palestinian commandos stopped next to me, and a friend of mine tells me to get in. I tried to tell him that I wanted to shower and sleep, but he wasn’t buying it. They were going to see a movie, and I was coming with them. A movie.