The Hakawati Read online

  “What’s the point, Father? You know they’ll kick you out the minute they see you. They always do.”

  “No, no. Not this time. That’s why you have to come with me. They’ll think we’re a family, and they won’t recognize me, because I’ll be going incognito.” From his vest he took out a white Druze skullcap and a large pair of eyeglasses that made his eyes balloon like the eyes of a goldfish in a tiny bowl. “See? I look like a peasant from the mountain.”

  Lina and I doubled over laughing. As I tumbled on the sofa, my head banged hers. My grandfather looked at his hysterical audience and began dancing and twirling around for us so we could admire him in full regalia. One of my hands rubbed the bump on my head, and the other wiped the funny tears from my eyes.

  “Come on. Let’s go,” my grandfather said. “Please take me.”

  “I want to go,” I said. I sat back up on the sofa. Lina studied me from her prone position. “I want to see the storyteller.”

  “That’s my boy.” My grandfather beamed.

  “Oh, shit,” Uncle Jihad said. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  And on a clear April morning in Beirut, the four of us—my grandfather, Uncle Jihad, Lina, and I—drove to hear the hakawati.

  “Time was much longer then,” my grandfather said, “in the old days.”

  We drove in my uncle’s Oldsmobile convertible. My father called it the problem car, but he couldn’t convince Uncle Jihad to get rid of it. Since we owned the Middle East’s exclusive Datsun and Toyota dealership, my father expected everyone in the family to drive one or the other. The business had begun as a Renault dealership, but the family had sold those rights to be the exclusive retailers of the Japanese cars.

  “You could tell a story for a whole month then, but now who’d listen? Everyone wants it quick, as if life itself was quick.”

  My mother drove a Jaguar. My father overlooked it, because she’d always driven Jaguars. She complained that the Japanese cars were horrible, that the back ends slid sideways on mountain curves like a belly dancer’s fat butt. She drove incredibly fast and claimed she needed a car that handled well. My father insisted the Japanese were consistently improving their cars, which would soon become the most reliable cars around, not simply the cheapest.

  “Mind you, it’s not that this hakawati isn’t a fool,” my grandfather said. “He’s an incompetent dimwit who wouldn’t be able to talk himself out of his execution, but we can’t blame him in this case, can we? We’re lost, I tell you.”

  My father persuaded Uncle Jihad not to drive the Olds to work, which wasn’t a problem, since the dealership was a distance of four blocks from our apartment building. My father wasn’t able to persuade him to stop calling the car Hedy, after an American actress my uncle considered “the most divinely beautiful creature on this blessed earth.”

  “And then there was radio,” my grandfather said. “A curse.”

  “And television,” my uncle added.

  “Double curse. But who watches those ugly French and English stories?”

  “I do,” Lina said. Her condition for coming on this expedition was that she would get the front seat and the top would be down. My grandfather told her that princesses sat in the back, and she replied that princesses got assassinated if they did. Grandfather wasn’t pleased about being relegated to the back seat. He had tried the age-before-beauty tactic, but my sister’s stubbornness was famous. He got to glare at the back of my sister’s hair for the trip, and I sat behind Uncle Jihad, the nape of his neck my primary view. Lina turned on the radio, moved the dial from an Arabic music station to one playing a strange beat. “Get up,” the singer wailed. The second verse sounded French. The bass thump-thumped. The singer wanted to be a sex machine.

  “Turn that off,” my grandfather said. Lina didn’t. Uncle Jihad did.

  “What’s the point of riding in a convertible if we can’t have loud music?” Lina said. She had a red ribbon tied as a headband, and she moved away from the windshield so her hair would flow in the wind, but there wasn’t much wind at the speed we were driving. “We should be driving on the freeways of America.”

  “The Autobahn is better,” Uncle Jihad claimed.

  “Why don’t you just drive on the airport runway?” My grandfather imitated their tone of voice. “Just drive off and fly.”

  We were in a neighborhood I had never been to before. The streets narrowed, as did their buildings, and cars were parked helter-skelter. Gaudily hued laundry dripped water from balconies. Earthen pots of red geraniums and green herbs covered windowsills. Layers of posters desecrated every wall. Some were partially torn, revealing the poster underneath; the left eye of a politician appeared beneath the right arm of a scantily clad redhead smoking a cigarette, with the slogan shouting, “Experience the lush life.”

  Then the posters changed, became neater and less colorful. Pictures of Gamal Abd al-Nasser and Yasser Arafat, and pictures of others I didn’t recognize. Photographs of Palestinian martyrs. The phrase “This generation shall see the sea” covered a map of the occupied lands. Ahead, three teenagers in army fatigues, with Palestinian kaffiyehs stylishly draped on their shoulders, waved their rifles at us to stop. One of the teenagers stared wide-eyed at the car. Another gawked at my sister’s breasts. I wanted to warn him that she was sensitive. My grandfather moved forward in his seat and said firmly, “Look elsewhere, young man.” The boy mumbled something apologetically and stared at the tire of the Olds.

  “Now, why are such fine young men as you stopping our car?” Uncle Jihad asked. “We’re not going anywhere near your camp.”

  The oldest of the three, who looked no more than fifteen, stood straighter. “Our orders are to check suspicious cars in the neighborhood. The Israelis are going to try something sneaky.”

  “True,” my uncle said. “You can’t be too careful. And I’m sure you boys are doing an exemplary job. You look like smart boys. Hold on. Are you the young lions? You’re part of my friend Hawatmeh’s Ashbal, aren’t you?”

  All three boys fell back half a step. In a quiet voice, the eldest asked, “You know the valiant leader?”

  “But of course. Didn’t you recognize the car? Who else but the valiant leader has such impeccable taste and magnificent manners as to offer such a wonderful gift to a lowly friend like me? I feel so overwhelmed whenever I think of him. May God show him the path to victory.”

  “Oh, sir, do not speak of yourself as lowly,” the leader said. The other boys nodded in unison. They all stroked the car with their hands. “The valiant leader would never offer such a magnificent car to anyone who is not deserving. You’re a great man, sir. Your modesty is a lesson for all of us.”

  “You’re very kind, my boy,” Uncle Jihad said. His bald head swayed as if he were being enchanted by a lovely melody. “I’m not deserving of adulation. But please give my regards to the valiant leader, and tell him—oh, I don’t know, tell him that the car is a treasure and I’m ever so grateful.” The boys cleared a path for us, and as we drove away, Uncle Jihad waved farewell to them like passing British royalty.

  “My son,” my grandfather said. Uncle Jihad bowed his head slightly in acknowledgment.

  “You bought the car in Tehran, didn’t you?” Lina said. “I remember. You had it driven here.” She leaned back on the headrest and laughed, tried to imitate our mother. “Do you even know their stupid leader?”

  “Yes,” my uncle said, “that I do. He’s a jackass. Every year he buys a few cars for his toadies. I charge him triple, and he thinks he’s robbing me blind. Sad, really. Breaks my heart.”

  “You’re wasting your talents, son,” my grandfather said. “In a different era, you could have been the greatest, probably better than your silly father.”

  “You’re very kind,” Uncle Jihad said.

  “Don’t patronize me,” my grandfather said.

  “No, I mean it. But I’m not wasting the talent. I’m a car salesman, the modern storyteller. We’re doing really well, Father. In the l
ast year, we’ve made more money than in all the previous years combined. It seems that this is what I was born to do.”

  “Stop fooling yourself,” my grandfather said. “Stupidity is unbecoming.”

  My father didn’t like old Arabic cafés. According to him, only gamblers, drunkards, and swindlers patronized them. I assumed that everyone around us fit the description, because the café looked like every other one Uncle Jihad had taken me to. White paint peeled off the walls in sheets; cigarette and hookah smoke fumed the dank air. The customers sat on cheap wooden chairs with twine seats. The square tables were either Formica or white plastic. Greaseproof wraps and balls of foil speckled a few of the tables. Two kids roamed the room: a tea boy carried glasses filled with the scalding amber liquid, and a coal boy carried a brazier to replenish the hookah’s embers. On a small wooden platform, a lonely chair was pushed back against the dirt-stained wall. This was where the hakawati would sit. This was where my grandfather’s goldfish eyes remained fixed.

  “I’m sure he’ll use props,” my grandfather sneered.

  “I want to see how fast you’ll get kicked out of here.” Lina smiled at him, and he laughed.

  My glass was too hot to hold, so I moved my lips toward it and slurped a bit of tea. It was too sweet. Lina leaned forward, too, laid her head on her crossed arms on the table, and looked up at my grandfather. “Do you think he is good at accents?” she asked.

  “You’re nothing but trouble,” he replied. “He is awful at accents. You knew I’d say that, because it’s true. He’s Egyptian. They wouldn’t know any accent other than theirs if it kicked them in the ass. But what’s horrible about him is that he doesn’t know how ghastly he is. Even his native accent is atrocious, and I don’t think he’s really Egyptian. He sounds like a foreigner in every accent.”

  “Like Dalida,” I piped.

  “But he must be good,” Lina said. “They brought him all the way here.”

  “No one brought him here. He’s probably getting paid two cups of tea for this. He’s that bad. Just you wait. You’ll see. Ah, look. Here comes the dimwit.”

  The hakawati, a man in his fifties or sixties, wearing a fez and an Egyptian jalabiya that was short and threadbare at the ankles, walked in from the boisterous kitchen. He carried a plastic sword in his right hand and a tattered book in his left. His gray mustache was waxed into glistening loops. My grandfather stared contemptuously, his nostrils flaring as if he smelled vomit. His tongue clucked. He muttered to himself. I heard only the word “book.”

  The hakawati lifted the jalabiya slightly and stepped onto the dais. He walked to the front and bowed, even though no one had clapped.

  “Look at the silly peacock,” my grandfather hissed.

  “Don’t, Father,” Uncle Jihad said. “You’re working yourself up.”

  “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” the man announced. Lina and I both covered our mouths to hide our laughter. He cultivated his vowels, elongated them, and reaped a pretentious inflection.

  “All the tra-la-la,” my grandfather whispered. “Show-off.” He turned away, and his elbow knocked his tea glass, almost tipping it over.

  “In the name of God, the most compassionate, the merciful,” the hakawati began.

  “He’s going religious on us,” Grandfather snickered.

  “Praise be to God, the Lord of justice, the Benefactor, the Faithful, and I state there is no god but God alone and He has no partners, a statement that saves whoever states it on the Day of Judgment, the Day of Religion, and I state that our master Muhammad is His slave and His prophet and His honest lover, may God pray on his soul, and on the souls of his honorable, decent, and virtuous relatives, and on the souls of his upright friends.”

  “Pfflt,” Grandfather said to the table.

  “And so,” the hakawati proceeded, “God in all His glory made the stories of the early heroes a model to the faithful, a guide to the ignorant, a warning to the infidels, and I heeded God’s wishes in choosing to tell this tale, for I saw that it contained the triumph of Islam and the humiliation of the mean infidels, and I looked up other stories but couldn’t find one that was more truthful or offered better proof or was wiser than the story of al-Zaher Baybars, the hero of heroes, to whom God promised eternal victories as a reward for his unwavering faith, and what glorious and enchanting details I shall relate to you were told to me by my teachers—Sofian, the grand hakawati of Algeria, and Nazir, the Damascene hakawati of the Hamidieh—as they heard from their illustrious teachers, may God have mercy upon all of them.”

  And my grandfather stood up, his chair clank-clanking as it fell to the ground. Uncle Jihad quickly covered his face with both hands. My grandfather pointed a finger at his nemesis. “You,” he bellowed. Behind the glasses, the red lines in his eyes looked like mighty rivers on a map. “You’re a pretender. You’ve never met Nazir. You’re not worthy of eating his shit.”

  The hakawati was speechless, his fez askew.

  And my grandfather resumed his tale. “Just as the morning star outshines all others, Murat’s beauty surpassed any in the city of Urfa. His splendor was such as to make poets weep for not being able to describe it adequately or honorably. Yet this most obvious of traits was exceeded by his modesty. He was studious, honest, kind, and devout, which were amazing qualities for any man, but he was—what?—a boy of seventeen or so. Everyone wished him for a son, but the girls—the girls wished him for a husband. They prayed every night. They swore vows they could never keep, but in the end it didn’t matter, for few of Urfa’s girls could marry a dervish, and that was what he was.

  “Like all dervish boys his age, Murat had to practice his religious rites and rituals relentlessly. But, unlike other boys, he took his duty of watching Abraham’s pool seriously. No Narcissus he. Wearing his religious dervish uniform—a fez hat, short white skirt atop white breeches—he stood guard ceremoniously, didn’t move, play, interact with the other boys or passersby. When not watched by an elder, the other boys broke loose, relaxed, and did what all boys do. Every dervish turned devilish. But Murat believed that God was always with him, and behaved accordingly. Like a statue sculpted by a master artist, the boy stood still before the pool, watched from atop his shoulder by God and from across the street by a gaggle of girls.

  “Some of the girls were veiled, most were not. Muslims, Christians, Turks, Arabs, Armenians, Kurds, they came for a glimpse of heaven. But one kept coming back again and again. She knew his schedule. She wasn’t allowed to get close to him, so she began to talk to him from across the pool, across the street, making a fool of herself. She didn’t follow the well-worn laws of discretion. She arrived early and waited anxiously for him, standing as if her knees were unsure they could support her weight. And when Murat appeared, dressed in his glorious dervish outfit, she yelled, ‘Look at me!’ The boy was so devout he didn’t hear or see her. That is the greatest and deepest wound for a girl of fifteen, and that’s how old my half-sister was.

  “My father was the shah of his realm, and, like most shahs, he had no inkling that the realm was imploding. Did he notice the simmering stew of war? Did he feel the tension in the world? Did he hear the dying gasps of empire? Did he realize that the city’s Turks had begun to regard him and his English family suspiciously? Obviously, he was on a mission. God had sent him to minister to the poor Christians in Urfa, and that was what he was doing. Did he notice that the people he was ministering to were getting poorer? The Armenians of the area were not being hired anymore. Did he notice that many more were having ‘accidents’? He was spreading the word of God. He was ministering to a people but didn’t realize how terrified they were growing. Did he feel the tension between the Turks and the Armenians?

  “Did he feel the tensions at home? Did he see his daughters growing up? He didn’t realize his elder daughter, Joan, was of marriageable age until she turned sixteen and his wife had to point out that there were no eligible husbands for her daughter in Urfa. He suggested she could wait for an
other year, and if not, he could send her to his wife’s sister in Sussex. His wife didn’t know what to do. She tried to point out that the world they knew was disappearing, that the Urfa they knew was disappearing, that the daughters they knew were disappearing. But the doctor had a job to do, a job that meant something, a job that defined who he was.

  “And he paid no mind to Barbara the troubled. Barbara hated me, just like her sister and her mother did. She was closer to me in age, only five years’ difference, so her insults were more humiliating. What still upsets me to this day is that every now and then a few Muslim boys would call her names—infidel, unbeliever—and she’d get melancholy, weep for days on end, but then she’d turn around and call me an orphan bastard. She wasn’t always melancholy. Often she’d get excited about one thing or another—a game she’d played, a new dress she wanted. She would jump like a bunny while talking. She talked faster than anyone I’ve known.

  “Once, I got stuck in the mulberry tree. I was young, maybe five, maybe six. I had climbed the tree for some fruit and ended up on a branch with my rear end higher than my head. My legs dangled from either side of the branch. I got scared and froze in place. I was relieved when Barbara saw me, because I thought she would get help, but instead she got a cane. I don’t know why she did it. She whipped my bare feet and laughed. I couldn’t lift my legs for fear of falling, and she didn’t stop whipping my soles. I cried so hard that Zovik came out running. She tried to take the cane away, and Barbara turned on the maid. She caned Zovik. She hit Zovik over and over until she tired. She threw the cane at Zovik and went into the house.

  “Of course, I avoided Barbara after that. I tried to be anywhere she was not. And once I began to work, that became less and less difficult. Before she finally turned to me for help, I probably hadn’t spoken to her in over two years, and that’s while living in the same pious house.

  “She was in love, she told me, and I must help her. She said her heart was afire and she needed a go-between, a boy to inform her boy of the possibility of love. This wasn’t some lovely fairy tale. Do you think I’m crazy? In the middle of her confession, I turned around and bolted. But where could I go? She was my half-sister. She came after me the second day. ‘You must help me. I have no one else. I will die, and it will be your fault.’ I scampered away again. I spent one night at the Masal; the next night I slept on Mehmet’s roof. Poor Anahid was worried sick. She screamed at me when she saw me. Then Barbara screamed at me. I ran again and stayed away for about two weeks. But Barbara forgot about me the same way she remembered me. All of a sudden, I was no longer part of her grand scheme. I didn’t try to find out what her new plans were, but by the time I returned to sleeping at home, Poor Anahid and Zovik had heard about Barbara and Murat. Now, you have to remember that Barbara was still only stalking Murat, and the poor boy hadn’t yet acknowledged her existence. He must have known, I think, because the other boys must have told him. Whether it was so or not, he didn’t look at her. And everybody began to talk. One day, a Turkish boy approached Barbara. If she was willing to love Murat, why could she not love him? He might not be as beautiful as Murat, but he could reciprocate, and he certainly could please her. Horrified, she slapped the boy and bolted home. The next day, another boy approached, and another. She stopped running away and ignored her new suitors.