The Hakawati Read online

  The gate was gold; its keeper was Job, the green imp; and his price for passage was the brooch of gems. The imp Job said, “I will offer assistance, madame, for you need help. Remember, sometimes it is wiser to choose death.”

  Fatigue possessed Fatima entirely, took root within her soul, flourished, sprang leaves within her veins. She wished to lie down, but the earth beneath her was not inviting. She should have stopped back at the moss, left her body to the insects of the night. She should have lain down in the giant-mushroom beds. She should keep moving.

  She came across a small ruby lying alongside her path, and then a sapphire, a diamond, another ruby, and then a pile, and then piles. Gems of all sizes, gold of all shapes, treasure chests that would make kings and queens salivate. And she did not have the energy to reach. She passed a gilded mirror lying against the wall. She watched her reflection, but she did not look like anyone she knew. She moved on.

  The gate was mahogany, and its keeper was a blue imp. She wept as she paid with her red headscarf of silk and the gold chain around her forehead. “Your light seems to be dimming,” Noah said. “I will offer help. Delete the need to understand. In this world and that of tales, the need is naught more than a hindrance.”

  Grief approached like an infection, overpowering her gradually and irrevocably. She marched, cried. A tear fell to the ground before every step, her dragging feet deleting any trace of the watermarks. The crows were in Noah’s domain, and their food was carcasses. Most of the bodies were human, flayed, hanging from rusty hooks, dripping an endless supply of red. Black birds on the ground drank from brooks of blood flowing on either side of her path. The ravenous crows fought over rotting morsels. She could not lie down here.

  Elijah’s gate was turquoise. “I seek entry,” she said, “but I have nothing more to give.”

  “I will take your clothes,” the indigo imp said. “Your ragged dress, your undergarments, even your shoes. I will be of service to you. I offer you this. Down here, you are always naked.”

  Past Elijah’s gate, the earth upon which the dead walked was muddy ash and smoke, like the remnants of soup stock left to simmer but long forgotten. The walking dead mimicked her, thousands upon thousands—a colony of purposeless ants, they muddled about, bumping into each other, eyeless or eyes not seeing. Men, women, and children; horses, cats, and dogs; lions, tigers, and apes; dwarfs, demons, and giants. Dead. Whatever outfits any wore were frayed, their flesh decayed. She shivered. None crossed her clear path. And she came upon the seventh gate.

  “I know who you are,” Fatima said to the keeper of the marble gate.

  The violet imp looked surprised. “And I know who you are,” he said.

  “This must be the final gate. I have arrived at the last domain. You are Adam.”

  “It must be so. Welcome, my lady. Yet I still require payment. I will take the seven rings of silver around your arm. You will no longer need them.” He climbed to her shoulder, pushed down on the rings. She felt the flooding pain as they fell, dragging Jawad’s bloodied shirtsleeve. The blood thumped in her arm. It dripped from the stump where her hand used to be, drained slowly. She stared at her wound, felt her fight seep out of it.

  “Walk,” Adam said. “You do not have far to go.” He blew out her lamp. “You do not need this down here. Move. I will help you. I offer this. In the underworld, death awakens.”

  “And you call this help?”

  She marched. As she had expected, snakes slithered everywhere except along her path. Boas, asps, and rattlers. Desert snakes, swamp snakes. She barely noticed them. Naked, helpless, exhausted, and bereft, she staggered forward. Dullness, her sole possession, clung to her.

  And the ground fell below her.

  And the ceiling lifted higher.

  And the walls opened before her.

  And Afreet-Jehanam sat on his throne.

  “Approach me, seeker,” he said.

  My father had his eyes closed; his breathing was shallow and slow. An oxygen mask nestled in the skin of his face. He opened his eyes, an effort that obviously exhausted him, and closed them again. My niece and I stood on either side of his bed.

  Tin Can arrived with two other doctors. As if they were part of a club, all three had trimmed black beards and short curly hair—Tin Can had the bushiest eyebrows. I didn’t recognize the other two, though they obviously knew the family. “You’re not looking too well, Mr. al-Kharrat,” one of the doctors said. He wore a Titian-red shirt under his white coat. “We can’t have that. The Adha holiday is tomorrow, and your family’s all here.”

  My father smiled wanly behind the mask. He tried to remove it but couldn’t. Lina leaned over and pulled it down a little. He mumbled something.

  “He says maybe Ali and the Virgin can intervene,” Lina said. Everyone laughed. I didn’t understand the joke, probably the punch line of a ditty making the Lebanese rounds, to which I was yet to be privy.

  The doctor in the red shirt said he wanted to look at the vitals and left for the nurses’ desk. The third doctor, a pulmonologist with sea-bass eyes, listened to my father’s lungs. Tin Can suggested to my niece that she shouldn’t remain standing for so long. The pulmonologist asked why the electrodes were not attached. My sister gasped. Dr. Titian returned and sheepishly announced that there were no vitals, because the monitors had not been recording. Two nurses rushed in. One dragged a portable machine, and the other hurriedly attached electrodes to my father’s chest. The overbite nurse who had given him a bath at noon had forgotten to reattach the tabs, and the other nurses and doctors had not noticed in more than five hours. Doctor Titian pressed buttons on the machine. “Something’s wrong,” he said. He walked over to my father. “The pacemaker has stopped.” Dr. Titian looked at the lump in my father’s chest. He tapped it twice, went back to his machine, then back to my father’s chest, then the machine.

  And the jinn returned to my father’s eyes. Instantaneous. His face muscles relaxed. His bony fingers ungripped the bed rail. He took a deep breath.

  “Don’t scare us like that,” Tin Can joked.

  “Now you can celebrate the holiday,” the pulmonary specialist said.

  “With your whole family,” Dr. Titian, my father’s cardiac surgeon, added.

  With the palm of my hand, I covered my sister’s eyes. I gently forced her to close them. She had a murderous glare. “Breathe,” I whispered. “Breathe.” She rested her arms on my shoulders. My hand remained on her face until I felt it dampen.

  Fatima wanted to tell the jinni to return her hand. She wanted to challenge him. She craved revenge. She genuflected before Afreet-Jehanam. “I have come down to die.”

  “Yes.” His deep, sibilant voice made her soul shudder. “My world is a wonderful place to die.” He opened his hand, and sixteen black scorpions slithered across his blue fingers toward her. “Yet do I detect a bit of resistance?”

  “No, sire,” she replied. “I have seen the light. I surrender.”

  A forked tongue unfurled out of the jinni’s mouth. “Ah, the sweet smell of surrender excites me so.” She did not cringe when the scorpions crawled up her body. She wished one of them would sting her. When he stood up, his throne dissolved into hundreds of asps. “You will be my plaything.” She did not flinch at that, either. “Our plaything.” And a young boa coiled around her handless arm.

  Afreet-Jehanam picked her up, cradled her in the palm of his hand. He brought her closer to his face, but his stench did not bother her. “It pleases me that you finally submit to my desire.”

  She wanted to laugh. “We are not much of a match sexually.”

  “But we are, Sitt Fatima. Size is not everything.”

  The first scorpion stung her in the throat, and a cobra bit into her stump. The scorpions stung all over her body. Afreet-Jehanam laid Fatima down on a bed of shimmering snakes. And the demon began to shrink—half his size in a blink of an eye, another half in another blink, until he achieved the dimensions of a large, muscular man. But the transformat
ion did not stop there. He removed the third eye from his forehead and made it disappear. His skin grew paler in color; the burning hair turned black, a human nose appeared. And a human hand reached out for her.

  Fatima saw the most handsome of men bring his face close to hers. He kissed her. She kissed back. And life surged through her. She made love to him. In some moments she saw him as a man, in others as a demon. And she was being stung and bitten. She was a riverbed. She was a mere channel of life and its stories. She gained strength.

  Fatima woke up. She felt refreshed and rejuvenated, filled with vigor. Afreet-Jehanam, no longer human, leaned on his elbow next to her. “You are beautiful,” he said.

  “I am without a hand,” she replied.

  “You are without much,” the demon said, “and so you are beautiful.”

  She looked at her wound, saw it honestly for the first time: the lines of blood, the clots, scabs growing, the tissue attempting to heal itself out of grief and loss, the skin trying to forget what was once there. But the air about her missing hand began to shimmer in startling waves. A mass grew from her wrist, bubbled out like slow-boiling lava. She saw it swell, felt her blood pour into it. Stumps sprouted, and fingers began to form. And Fatima moved the fingers. Her hand was back. “This is unlike any hell I could have imagined,” she said.

  “Hell? I am insulted. Whatever possessed you to think of my realm as hell?”

  “Well,” she said, “you are a demon. This is the underworld. I just assumed.”

  “Ah, humans. Your ideas of hell are nothing more than the lees and dregs of unimaginative minds long since dead. Listen. Let me tell you a story.”

  Once there was and once there was not a devout, God-fearing man who lived his entire life according to stoic principles. He died on his fortieth birthday and woke up floating in nothing. Now, mind you, floating in nothing was comforting, lightless, airless, like a mother’s womb. This man was grateful.

  But then he decided he would love to have sturdy ground beneath his feet, so he would feel more solid himself. Lo and behold, he was standing on earth. He knew it to be earth, for he knew the feel of it.

  Yet he wanted to see. I desire light, he thought, and light appeared. I want sunlight, not any light, and at night it shall be moonlight. His desires were granted. Let there be grass. I love the feel of grass beneath my feet. And so it was. I no longer wish to be naked. Only robes of the finest silk must touch my skin. And shelter, I need a grand palace whose entrance has double-sided stairs, and the floors must be marble and the carpets Persian. And food, the finest of food. His breakfast was English; his midmorning snack French. His lunch was Chinese. His afternoon tea was Indian. His supper was Italian, and his late-night snack was Lebanese. Libation? He had the best of wines, of course, and champagne. And company, the finest of company. He demanded poets and writers, thinkers and philosophers, hakawatis and musicians, fools and clowns.

  And then he desired sex.

  He asked for light-skinned women and dark-skinned, blondes and brunettes, Chinese, South Asian, African, Scandinavian. He asked for them singly and two at a time, and in the evenings he had orgies. He asked for younger girls, after which he asked for older women, just to try. Then he tried men, muscular men, skinny men. Then boys. Then boys and girls together.

  Then he got bored. He tried sex with food. Boys with Chinese, girls with Indian. Redheads with ice cream. Then he tried sex with company. He fucked the poet. Everybody fucked the poet.

  But again he got bored. The days were endless. Coming up with new ideas became tiring and tiresome. Every desire he could ever think of was satisfied.

  He had had enough. He walked out of his house, looked up at the glorious sky, and said, “Dear God. I thank You for Your abundance, but I cannot stand it here anymore. I would rather be anywhere else. I would rather be in hell.”

  And the booming voice from above replied, “And where do you think you are?”

  Fatima chuckled. Her hands touched her stomach, and suddenly she wondered if she was pregnant. She knew it was possible. History was filled with tales of half-demons. Would her child resemble Afreet-Jehanam, the ugly demon, or her lover, the most beautiful of men? And what if she was carrying a girl? An unattractive son might be one thing, but a daughter who looked like a demon? The potion. “I need my things.”

  “Needs, wants, desires,” Afreet-Jehanam said. “I might as well be telling children’s tales.” He paused, looked into his beloved’s eyes. “I can dress you in royal clothing, in silks and furs, in emeralds and pearls. What need you of past belongings?”

  “One can never be free from the past and its pull.”

  Afreet-Jehanam waved his hand, and in a moment the red imp Ishmael came running with her clothes. “I collected everything,” he said, “except for the robe. Ezra likes it quite a bit. He thought I wanted it for myself and would not give it up.”

  Fatima took the vial from the dress’s pocket. “Has it been seven hours yet?”

  “No,” the grand demon said. Fatima drank the liquid. “But there was no need,” he added. “Had you not panicked, you would have realized that it is a boy. Magic potions are redundant.”

  Ishmael looked stunned. “I am going to be an uncle?”

  “I must leave,” Fatima said. “I must complete my mission.”

  “Why?” Afreet-Jehanam asked. “You have ingested the potion you were to deliver.”

  “I am not free. I will return. As to the potion, I have another plan. I must continue. I am still far from the green city. The sooner I leave the better.” Her lover opened his hand, and in his palm Fatima saw her decapitated hand. “That is my third hand,” she said.

  “And in it I will place my third eye,” he said. “This will be the proof of our union. Place it upon your person and no demon will dare hurt you. Place it above the door of your house and evil will never enter.”

  She took the talisman, and it transformed in her hands. It became stone, turquoise, and the eye in the palm a slightly darker blue.

  “Stay the night,” the demon said. “You will be with your masters in the morning.”

  Four

  According to my grandfather, I owed my existence, my special place in the world, to either of two things, the slaughter of a stud pigeon or the swallowing of matches. Depending on which story he was in the mood to tell, one of those two events forced him to escape Urfa, or, as he sometimes said, provided him with the opportunity of a lifetime.

  There were always Armenian orphans living in the Twinings’ household, but none stayed more than a year or so. The Twinings, being good missionaries, found homes for the various children. My grandfather, though, was a different story. Since Poor Anahid became the Twinings’ maid and he was her charge, he lasted for eleven years. My grandfather claimed, and he was probably right, that the missionary doctor harbored some feeling toward him, his bastard offspring. My grandfather was an anomaly both in his length of stay at the house and in the timing of his escape to Lebanon. One can safely assume that all the orphans he grew up with, those who were not massacred during the Great War, escaped to Lebanon during the great Armenian orphan migration. My grandfather was ahead of his time. He survived the doctor’s wife, and he didn’t have to deal with the genocide and its consequences. He was blessed; hence, so was I.

  In his early years, Ismail’s father carried him everywhere, even after he learned to walk. But one day, after my grandfather’s second birthday, the doctor’s wife told her husband, “Shame on you. You treat this orphan better than you treat your own blood. Do you not love your daughters? Do they not deserve your attention?” The doctor was embarrassed. “This is Barbara,” his wife added, “and this is Joan. Maybe you’ve forgotten who they are.”

  Simon Twining put my grandfather down and took his daughters for a walk.

  When my grandfather was four, the doctor tried to teach him to read and write, but his wife said, “Don’t be silly, my husband. English will be of little use to him. We’ll send him to school with th
e other Armenians. He’ll learn his language and be able to talk to his people.”

  However, when my grandfather, after services on Sundays, joined the other children for Bible study with the doctor, she did not object.

  “I come from a time when ink was still liquid and lush.” My grandfather broke silence as he stoked the fire. “None of this cheap Biro shit. My father’s wife thought teaching me to write was money ill spent and time wasted.” He performed the maté ritual—poured hot water from the kettle onto the metal straw, after which he ran a lemon peel across it. He replaced the now sanitized straw in the maté gourd and passed it to me. “You might think the doctor’s wife was mean, and she was, but you’d be missing the point of the story. I wasn’t allowed to learn to read, but Bible study is more valuable for a hakawati. Look at the great one, Umm Kalthoum. She was born into the poorest of families in a remote village of the Nile Delta in Lower Egypt. Umm Kalthoum should have been married off at twelve or thirteen. She would’ve remained unschooled and mothered a dozen kids: Muslim girls weren’t allowed to be educated in that part of the world. But here’s the gift, you see. At a very young age, girls are taught to read the Koran and nothing else. It gets hammered into them every day. For a singer, that’s the greatest of gifts. She learned tone and rhythm, learned perfect enunciation and breath, voice projection, inflection—you name it. She never mumbles. One can understand every word she utters. She mastered the witchcraft of voice. When the time was right, she opened her mouth, unleashed her soul, and helped all of us get closer to God. It was a gift, I tell you. The doctor’s wife may have been spiteful, but fate was on my side.”

  Poor Anahid and Zovik cared for the boy, treated him as their own, but they were servants in a house that desired constant labor. My grandfather followed them around, and the maids made sure he didn’t interfere with their work.