The Hakawati Read online

  Acclaim for Rabih Alameddine’s The Hakawati

  A Globe and Mail Best Book

  “In the best tradition of magical realism, [Alameddine’s] tales commingle the fabulous with the mundane, the grandiose with laugh-out-loud wit.… [It is also] a fascinating portrait of Lebanon, a country that defies stereotypes.… As it journeys effortlessly back and forth between centuries, The Hakawati is also a saga of families, tribes, and nations that are like families—sprawling, bound by birth and passion, combative, destructive, and essential.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “The Hakawati is both genius and genie out of the ink bottle, a glorious, gorgeous masterpiece of pure storytelling and fable making.… What is timeless about this story makes it very timely indeed.”

  —Amy Tan

  “A rollicking good read. Bawdy, allusive, sad, funny and universal in its themes, yet with a finely observed sense of place, The Hakawati is a splendid achievement.”

  —The Globe and Mail

  “Extraordinary.… These tales have some of the biblical brutality of the Old Testament, tempered with the subtlety and magic of Shakespeare, and the wisdom and guile of Scheherazade.… Alameddine’s is a crafted work that—like the master storyteller—works its magic by stealth.”

  —The Times Literary Supplement (London)

  “A skillfully wrought, emotional story.… Alameddine should be commended for the chances he takes, and [his] prodigious skills.… He deserves credit for telling a story the West should pay attention to, and evoking the diversity of the Arab world (Christian, Muslim, Jew and even Druze, they are all here) that is often taken for granted in our ever narrowing perspective of righteousness.… Bravely ambitious.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “[An] entertaining, kaleidoscopic novel.”

  —Details

  “An epic in the oldest and newest senses, careening from the Koran to the Old Testament, Homer to Scheherazade. It’s hard to imagine the person who wouldn’t get carried away.”

  —Jonathan Safran Foer

  “Exhilarating.… Audacious.… Alameddine has great fun telling this story, and it’s infectious.”

  —San Jose Mercury News

  “Astonishingly inventive.… Alameddine’s enchanting language [has] a fascinating, lyrical quality.… He juggles his many narratives effortlessly, enhancing each with small details from the world they inhabit.”

  —Time Out Chicago

  “Captivating.… A wildly imaginative patchwork of tales improbably threading together Greek mythology, biblical parables, Arab-Islamic lore, and even modern Lebanese politics [that] charm and amuse.”

  —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

  “No book this bewitching has ever felt so important; no book this important has ever been so lovingly enchanted. The Hakawati is both a snapshot of our current crisis, and a story for the ages. What else can we ask the djinn of literature for?”

  —Andrew Sean Greer

  “Be thankful for Rabih Alameddine’s new novel, The Hakawati.… David Bowie and Santa Claus can be found in these stories as well as Abraham, Orpheus, jinnis, sultans, crusaders, magic carpets, virgins, houris and, of course, evil viziers.… A book to be read and read again.”

  —Santa Cruz Sentinel

  “Fables, both old and new, reinterpreted by Alameddine, weave throughout a modern-day story.… In the end, the tales create an intricate tapestry that displays the complexities of a family and a culture.”

  —National Geographic Traveler

  “An Arabian Nights for the 21st century. Bewitching readers with tales of spellbinding genies and shape-shifting demons, Alameddine gives classic tales a modern twist.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “Astonishing: a triumph of storytelling.”

  —Aleksandar Hemon

  Rabih Alameddine

  The Hakawati

  Rabih Alameddine is the author of Koolaids, The Perv, and I, the Divine. He divides his time between San Francisco and Beirut.

  www.rabihalameddine.com

  ALSO BY RABIH ALAMEDDINE

  I, the Divine

  The Perv

  Koolaids

  Copyright © 2008 Rabih Alameddine

  Anchor Canada edition published 2009

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Anchor Canada and colophon are trademarks

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  Lili Fabilli Osborne: Excerpt from The Passionate State of Mind and Other Aphorisms by Eric Hoffer (New York: HarperCollins, 1955). Reprinted by permission of Lili Fabilli Osborne, literary executor of the estate of Eric Hoffer.

  Penguin Group (UK) and Assírio & Alvim: Excerpt from The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, translated by Richard Zenith, copyright © 2001 by Richard Zenith (London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 2001). Reprinted by permission of Penguin Group and Assírio & Alvim.

  The Arabic word for al-hakawati, which appeared on the title page, was designed and drawn by Dr. Sami Makarem.

  Chapter 10 was previously published in Zoetrope, in slightly different form, as “In-country.”

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Alameddine, Rabih

  The hakawati / Rabih Alameddine.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-37483-7

  I. Title.

  PS3551.L25H35 2009 813′.54 C2008-906976-5

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published in Canada by Anchor Canada,

  a division of Random House of Canada Limited

  Visit Random House of Canada Limited’s website: www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  For Nicole Aragi

  Demon Destroyer

  Luscious Dove

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Book One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Book Two

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Book Three

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Book Four

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Notes and Acknowledgments

  BOOK ONE

  Praise be to God, Who has so disposed matters that pleasant literary anecdotes may serve as an instrument for the polishing of wits and the cleansing of rust from our hearts.

  Ahmad al-Tifashi, The Delights of Hearts

  Everything can be told. It’s just a matter of starting, one word follows another.

  Javier Marías, A Heart So White

  What Hells and Purgatories and Heavens I have inside of me! But who sees me do anythin
g that disagrees with life—me, so calm and peaceful?

  Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

  One

  Listen. Allow me to be your god. Let me take you on a journey beyond imagining. Let me tell you a story.

  A long, long time ago, an emir lived in a distant land, in a beautiful city, a green city with many trees and exquisite gurgling fountains whose sound lulled the citizens to sleep at night. Now, the emir had everything, except for the one thing his heart desired, a son. He had wealth, earned and inherited. He had health and good teeth. He had status, charm, respect. His beautiful wife loved him. His clan looked up to him. He had a good pedicurist. Twenty years he had been married, twelve lovely girls, but no son. What to do?

  He called his vizier. “Wise vizier,” he said, “I need your help. My lovely wife has been unable to deliver me a son, as you know. Each of my twelve girls is more beautiful than the other. They have milk-white skin as smooth as the finest silk from China. The glistening pearls from the Arabian Gulf pale next to their eyes. The luster of their hair outshines the black dyes from the land of Sind. The oldest has seventeen poets singing her praises. My daughters have given me much pleasure, much to be proud of. Yet I yearn to see an offspring with a little penis run around my courtyard, a boy to carry my name and my honor, a future leader of our clan. I am at a loss. My wife says we should try once more, but I cannot put her through all this again for another girl. Tell me, what can I do to ensure a boy?”

  The vizier, for the thousandth upon thousandth time, suggested his master take a second wife. “Before it is too late, my lord. It is obvious that your wife will not produce a boy. We must find someone who will. My liege is the only man within these borders who has only one wife.”

  The emir had rejected the suggestion countless times, and that day would be no different. He looked wistfully out onto his garden. “I cannot marry another, my dear vizier. I am terribly in love with my wife. She can be ornery now and then, vain for sure, petulant and impetuous, silly at times, ill disposed toward the help, even malicious and malevolent when angry, but, still, she has always been the one for me.”

  “Then produce a son with one of your slaves. Fatima the Egyptian would be an excellent candidate. Her hips are more than adequate; her breasts have been measured. A tremendous nominee, if I may say so myself.”

  “But I have no wish to be with another.”

  “Sarah offered her Egyptian slave to her husband to produce a boy. If it was good enough for our prophet, it can be good enough for us.”

  That night, in their bedroom, the emir and his wife discussed their problem. His wife agreed with the vizier. “I know you want a son,” she said, “but I believe it has gone beyond your desires. The situation is dire. Our people talk. All wonder what will happen when you ascend to heaven. Who will lead our tribes? I believe some may wish to ask the question sooner.”

  “I will kill them,” the emir yelled. “I will destroy them. Who dares question how I choose to live my life?”

  “Settle down and be reasonable. You can have intercourse with Fatima until she conceives. She is pretty, available, and amenable. We can have our boy through her.”

  “But I do not think I can.”

  His wife smiled as she stood. “Worry not, husband. I will attend, and I will do that thing you enjoy. I will call Fatima and we can inform her of what we want. We will set an appointment for Wednesday night, a full moon.”

  When Fatima was told of their intentions, she did not hesitate. “I am always at your service,” she said. “However, if the emir wishes to have a son with his own wife, there is another way. In my hometown of Alexandria, I know of a woman, Bast, whose powers are unmatched. She is directly descended, female line, from Ankhara herself, Cleopatra’s healer and keeper of the asps. If she is given a lock of my mistress’s hair, she will be able to see why my mistress has not produced a boy and will give out the appropriate remedy. She never fails.”

  “But that is astounding,” the emir exclaimed. “You are heaven-sent, my dear Fatima. We must fetch this healer right away.”

  Fatima shook her head. “Oh, no, my lord. A healer can never leave her home. It is where her magic comes from. She would be helpless and useless if she were uprooted. A healer might travel, begin quests, but in the end, to come into her full powers, she can never stray too far from home. I can travel with a lock of my mistress’s hair and return with the remedy.”

  “Then go you must,” the emir’s wife said.

  The emir added, “And may God guide you and light your way.”

  I felt foreign to myself. Doubt, that blind mole, burrowed down my spine. I leaned back on the car, surveyed the neighborhood, felt the blood throb in the veins of my arms. I could hear a soft gurgling, but was unsure whether it came from a fountain or a broken water pipe. There was once, a long time ago, a filigreed marble fountain in the building’s lobby, but it had ceased to exist. Poof.

  I was a tourist in a bizarre land. I was home.

  There were not many people around. An old man sat dejectedly on a stool with a seat of interlocking softened twine. His white hair was naturally spiked, almost as if he had rested his hands on a static ball. He fit the place, one of the few neighborhoods in Beirut still war-torn.

  “This was our building,” I told him, because I needed to say something. I nodded toward the lobby, cavernous, fountain-free, now perfectly open-air. I realized he wasn’t looking at me but at my car, my father’s black BMW sedan.

  The street had turned into a muddy pathway. The neighborhood was off the main roads. Few cars drove this street then; fewer now, it seemed. A cement mixer hobbled by. There were two buildings going up. The old ones were falling apart, with little hope of resuscitation.

  My building looked abandoned. I knew it wasn’t—squatters and refugees had made it their home since we left during the early years of the civil war—but I didn’t see how anyone could live there now.

  Listen. I lived here twenty-six years ago.

  Across the street from our building, our old home, there used to be a large enclosed garden with a gate of intricate spears. It was no longer a garden, and it certainly wasn’t gated anymore. Shards of metal, twisted rubble, strips of tile, and broken glass were scattered across piles of dirt. A giant white rhododendron bloomed in the middle of the debris. Two begonias, one white and the other red, flourished in front of a recently erected three-story. That building looked odd: no crater, no bullet holes, no tree growing out of it. The begonias, glorious begonias, seemed to burst from every branch, no unopened buds. Burgeoning life, but subdued color. The red—the red was off. Paler than I would want. The reds of my Beirut, the home city I remember, were wilder, primary. The colors were better then, more vivid, more alive.

  A Syrian laborer walked by, trying to steer clear of the puddles under his feet, and his eyes avoided mine. February 2003, more than twelve years since the civil war ended, yet construction still lagged in the neighborhood. Most of Beirut had been rebuilt, but this plot remained damaged and decrepit.

  There was Mary in a lockbox.

  A windowed box stood at the front of our building, locked in its own separate altar of cement and brick, topped with A-shaped slabs of Italian marble, a Catholic Joseph Cornell. Inside stood a benevolent Mary, a questioning St. Anthony, a coral rosary, three finger candles, stray dahlia and rose petals, and a picture of Santa Claus pushpinned to a white foam backboard.

  When did this peculiarity spring to life? Was the Virgin there when I was a boy?

  I shouldn’t have come here. I was supposed to pick Fatima up before going to the hospital to see my father but found myself driving to the old neighborhood as if I were in a toy truck being pulled by a willful child. I had planned this trip to Beirut to spend Eid al-Adha with my family and was shocked to find out that my father was hospitalized. Yet I wasn’t with family, but standing distracted and bewildered before my old home, dwelling in the past.

  A young woman in tight jeans and a skimpy white s
weater walked out of our building. She carried notebooks and a textbook. I wanted to ask her which floor she and her family lived on. Obviously not the second; a fig tree had taken root on that one. That must have been Uncle Halim’s apartment.

  The family, my father and his siblings, owned the building and had lived in five of its twelve apartments. My aunt Samia and her family lived in the sixth-floor penthouse. My father had one of the fourth-floor flats, and Uncle Jihad had the other. An apartment on the fifth belonged to Uncle Wajih, and Uncle Halim had one on the second floor—fig tree, I presumed. The apartment on the ground floor belonged to the concierge, whose son Elie became a militia leader as a teenager and killed quite a few people during the civil war.

  Our car dealership, al-Kharrat Corporation, the family fountain of fortune, was walking distance from the building, on the main street. The Lebanese lacked a sense of irony. No one paid attention to the little things. No one thought it strange that a car dealership, and the family that ran it, had a name that meant “exaggerator,” “teller of tall tales,” “liar.”

  The girl strolled past, indifferently, seductively, her eyes hidden by cheap sunglasses. The old man sat up when the girl passed him. “Don’t you think your pants are too tight?” he asked.

  “Kiss my ass, Uncle,” she replied.

  He leaned forward. She kept going. “No one listens anymore,” he said quietly.

  I couldn’t tell you when last I had seen the neighborhood, but I could pinpoint the last day we lived there, because we left in a flurry of bedlam, all atop each other, and that day my father proved to be a hero of sorts. February 1977, and the war that had been going on for almost two years had finally reached our neighborhood. Earlier, during those violent twenty-one months, the building’s underground garage, like its counterparts across the city, proved to be a more than adequate shelter. But then militias had begun to set up camp much too close. The family, those of us who hadn’t left already, had to find safety in the mountains.