The Hakawati Page 17

  And Baybars prepared to meet his destiny.

  BOOK TWO

  Please tell my story. It is surely as weird as the story of Moses’s staff, the resurrection of Jesus, and the election of the husband of a lady bird to the presidency of the United States.

  Emile Habibi, The Secret Life of Saeed, the Pessoptimist

  … stories do not belong only to those who were present or to those who invent them, once a story has been told, it’s anyone’s, it becomes common currency, it gets twisted and distorted, no story is told the same way twice or in quite the same words, not even if the same person tells the story twice, not even if there is only ever one storyteller …

  Javier Marías, Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me

  All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.

  Isak Dinesen, cited by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition

  Six

  So—what do you think of the emir’s story?” Fatima asked Afreet-Jehanam. She was lying in her lover’s arms, on the bed of slithering snakes, relaxing and unwinding. She could feel the changes in her body, but she still did not look pregnant.

  The jinni, stroking her sensuously, said, “The emir is a good storyteller.”

  She shifted her naked weight onto her elbow so she could face him. The snakes released by her movement rearranged themselves. “Is it a good adventure story?”

  Afreet-Jehanam stretched and yawned. “The story of Baybars is many lifetimes old. There are numerous versions.”

  “I am loving it,” said Ishmael, who was on his knees scrubbing the floor. The imps busied themselves with their chores. Hither and thither they ran.

  “Me, too,” Noah chimed in. “It is a delightful story.”

  “True,” said Fatima, “but it sounds to me like many of his other stories, without the sentimental romance. Is this tale adventuresome enough? Will this story, unlike his earlier ones, produce the desired effect, a son to inherit his throne?”

  “That was your rule,” said the jinni. “I thought you made it up.”

  “I did, but I know it to be true.”

  “Maybe fate does not wish them to have a son.”

  “Ah, fate,” she said. “Is fate anything more than what man chooses to do? Is fate not our expectations of ourselves?”

  “If it is true, they will have a son,” Afreet-Jehanam said, “but since the tale being told is not the most traditional of adventure stories, not enough killing and pillaging, he will not grow to be the greatest of warriors.”

  “Then he will grow to be wise,” she said. “But the emir’s tale and its hero are young yet. Let us be patient and see what transpires.”

  “Whatever may transpire, we can be sure the son will be different,” said the jinni.

  “Wonderful.” Ishmael jumped up and down gleefully. “He will be able to decorate that horror of a castle.”

  “Oh, great,” said Isaac. “Just what the world needs, another accessorizer.”

  Suddenly all the snakes hissed as one, and the scorpions raised their tails and readied their stingers. The crows and bats descended in droves from above. Afreet-Jehanam sat up, a snarl upon his face. But the snarl remained frozen like that of a once-feared predator after a visit to the taxidermist. A magician in white robes and a long white beard materialized out of nothingness. His hand unleashed a white beam that froze the jinni stock-still. The crows attacked first, but hit an invisible shield around the magician and fell stunned to the floor. The bats followed. The snakes spat their venom from below, but it hit the shield and dripped down slowly to the ground. The traces left by the viscous poisons showed the shield to be egg-shaped. With his other hand, the magician let loose a force upon each imp and sent them all crashing into the walls. And his eyes turned to naked Fatima. He waved his arm and waved it again. Fatima felt the talisman, the turquoise hand with its inlaid eye, grow warm between her breasts. Regaining her senses after the initial shock, she bent down, picked up her sword, and charged the magician. Before she reached him, he began to fade. “Whore,” he called before he completely disappeared. She turned around to find her lover gone.

  On a Monday morning in June 1967, near the end of term, Madame Shammas entered our class without knocking, not allowing us time to stand up and greet her respectfully. Businesslike, she marched swiftly to Nabeel Ayoub and announced, “Please get your things, son. Your father is here to take you home.” Voice gentle yet authoritative.

  Nabeel stood up, bewildered initially, then looked slyly at his classmates, his seated nonspecial friends. He hurriedly packed his things and left the room behind Madame Shammas.

  Our teacher, Madame Saleh, stared at the closing door, outside which a muffled rush of high heels echoed. “I want you to behave yourselves, children,” she said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.” She walked to the door, stopped, turned around, almost caught me stuffing a piece of paper in my mouth. She addressed the bespectacled girl two seats to my right. “Mira, I’m leaving you in charge.”

  My spitball missed Mira’s back. Her chestnut pigtail swung like a pendulum as she walked to the front. The class was atwitter, nervous with pent-up energy. We knew we were supposed to misbehave because Madame Saleh was out, but we didn’t know exactly what to do. We settled on throwing crumpled paper at Mira and hissing every time she yelled, “Shut up.”

  Ten minutes later, the class was in an uproar. Madame Shammas announced on the intercom that we all should get our things ready to be picked up. The Israelis had begun the war.

  Traffic congealed as parents came to collect their children. Some of the adults were nervous, some angry, a few nonchalant. I saw a tiny bump of an accident and two almosts, because the cars were in a hurry. I waited, but no one came for me. The maid had told Madame Shammas that my mother was at her weekly visit to the hairdresser.

  One of my favorite programs was Lost in Space. I thought of the Israelis as space aliens. They’re not like us, people said. They come from all over the place and keep coming. They’re foreigners, people said. Godless.

  Finally. “There you are, champ,” Uncle Jihad said. He had walked from his apartment, which was right next to ours, not too far from school—five streets, four turns, three jasmine vines, two jacarandas, and one white-oleander bush away.

  “There’s a war,” I yelled, jumping up and down.

  “Don’t worry.” Uncle Jihad’s belly shook as he laughed, his bald head glittered in the sun. “It’s very far from here.” I hadn’t thought of worrying.

  Uncle Jihad walked in a manner that suggested all was proper in the world. I trotted behind him, my eyes unable to stray from the back of his turquoise jacket. He wore his clothes the way a peacock fanned his tail. “Keep up with me,” he said cheerfully.

  I grasped the offered hand. I loved his well-manicured fingers and the light smell of lotion emanating from them. We walked hand in hand down the street, a spring in our step.

  A radio from a coffee shop across the street screamed that we must dig trenches with our fingernails. “The Palestinian Resistance can be so delightfully melodramatic,” Uncle Jihad said.

  The beasts of the underworld looked to Fatima for guidance. The snakes coiled about themselves, holding their heads high, waiting. They looked like thousands of miniature minarets, tiny lighthouses in an infinite sea without a shore. The bats and crows, too stunned to fly, began to gather in groups of their own kind. Fatima sought the imps. One by one she found them, shocked and woozy.

  Adam wept. Ezra wailed. “My brother,” Job cried. Each imp shed tears of skin-matching color. “Our brother is gone,” Elijah moaned. “We’ll never see him again,” Noah added. And the scorpions and spiders and the beasts of the underworld joined in mourning.

  “Wait,” interrupted Fatima. “What happened? Who was that white son of a whore? Where has he taken Afreet-Jehanam?”

  “Do not mention the name of the departed to the bereaved,” Isaac said. “It grates our hearts.” He shook his head in dismay.


  “The name of the magician is King Kade, the master of light,” Ishmael said.

  “He loathes the underworld and its inhabitants,” Ezra said.

  “Considers us parasites,” added Noah.

  “His mission is to rid the world of dark,” said Jacob. “That is his vow. Are we dark? Look at me. I am yellow.”

  “He is obsessed with jinn,” Ishmael said, “but he does not attempt to use our power. He kidnaps the powerful jinn and tortures them. He chains and whips them, forces them to work on his palaces before he kills them. He had Mithras, the mighty demon, paint a giant mural of bucolic scenes. As he painted, King Kade’s angels threw darts at him and they touched up the mural with dabs of white, dab, dab, dart, dab, dab, dart. And then King Kade sucked the life out of Mithras. Oh, Afreet-Jehanam, my poor brother. What tragedy awaits you.”

  “Stop this,” Fatima yelled. “What has become of you? Why are you bemoaning your brother’s fate already? First, we will find that white idiot and kill him; we will annihilate him for coming into our realm without an invitation. After that, we will bring my lover home.”

  “No,” said the imps, all eight of them in one voice. “We cannot.”

  “Then I will go alone,” Fatima said. “You sit here and cower if you choose. I will fight the bastard myself.”

  “There is no hope,” said Ishmael. “He wove a potent spell eons ago. Nothing from the underworld, living or not, can harm him. The most powerful jinn have tried to no avail. Creatures mightier than all of us combined have declared war upon him. The spell he wove cannot be undone. He cannot be conquered by anyone from the underworld.”

  “But I am not from here,” announced Fatima. “I will defeat him.”

  One by one, the little imps’ facial expressions changed, their demeanor transformed. Ishmael stood up first. “I may not be of any use at the great encounter, but I will make sure you get there.”

  “And I will confound his armies,” Job said.

  “I will get the carpet,” said Noah.

  “Get a few,” said Elijah. “It is a long trip—why be cramped?”

  “Come, my lovelies,” Jacob said. He raised his arms and created a yellow orb of mist above his head. The bats flew into it and disappeared. Elijah invited the crows into his sphere, and Adam brought the snakes, the scorpions, and the spiders.

  “Let us be on our way,” commanded Fatima, sitting on one of the carpets.

  “Upon thy head, King Kade,” said Isaac, “we declare war.”

  “North,” said Ishmael. “We go to the land of fog and rain, the land of ice and snow, the land of infinite skies.”

  “No, not yet,” said Fatima. “First, I go home.”

  Once upon a time, the oud was my instrument, my companion, my lover. I played it between the two wars, started taking lessons during the Six-Day War and gave them up during the Yom Kippur War, a period of seven years.

  My mother had wanted me to take piano lessons. “The lessons will be good for you,” she said one evening, when I was sitting on her lap out on the balcony of our apartment. The railing was a whorly arabesque of metal roses sprouting wherever the lines changed angles. My mother’s raised feet rested on one of the few unrosed spots. She attempted to tidy my hair while staring at the swirl of stars in the dark summer sky. “I think you’re talented. I hear you singing all the time.” She pulled my head to her bosom. I felt the softness of her silk housedress on my cheek, my eyes focusing on a print marigold as it heaved and contracted with each breath. The tireless scrapings of cicadas saturated the air. “Never once off-key. You’re my gifted baby.”

  I squirmed, pushed myself off her chest with both hands. “I don’t like piano,” I said.

  My sister, Lina, had been taking piano lessons for the past four years, ever since she was six, my age now. Her teacher was Mademoiselle Finkelstein, a white-haired, dowdy, bespectacled spinster who smelled of mothballs and vanilla. Whenever Lina slipped, made a mistake as she played the “Méthode Rose,” Mademoiselle Finkelstein would smack her knuckles with a wooden ruler that she used to tap a beat on the top of the piano. I asked Lina why she never complained about being hit. She said that the ruler wasn’t painful, that Mademoiselle Finkelstein only tapped her gently, that she loved her teacher. Her crimson knuckles told a different story. When I asked my father why Mademoiselle Finkelstein was such a cruel woman, he said it was because she was unmarried, which caused women to become bitter, harsh, and unforgiving after they reached the age of thirty. Of course, he explained, they made wonderful teachers, because they had the unfettered time to dedicate to their profession and they knew how to instill discipline. On the other hand, unmarried men, like his younger brother, Uncle Jihad, were simply eccentrics and did not suffer accordingly. The difference, he elaborated, was that men chose to be unmarried, whereas women had to live with never having been chosen.

  For Fatima, the bogs of the Nile Delta were a welcoming sight, though the imps held their noses. She bade the carpets descend as they approached Bast’s cottage. “I beg you,” Bast said the instant she saw Fatima. “Do not talk to me of King Kade. I am not having a happy day. Cleopatra wants to mate, and I am in a foul mood. When I bleed, that so-called holy magician of light is not what I want to talk about.” The healer turned around and walked into her cottage.

  Fatima and her entourage followed. “Stop being childish and churlish. You are needed.”

  “Leave me,” Bast said, trying to stare Fatima down.

  “No.” Fatima sat upon one of the barrels in the room, as she had once before.

  “At least tell your companions to disappear. They are so colorful they sour my eyes.”

  “Self-centered witch,” Elijah harrumphed, and he vanished, leaving a barely discernible indigo cloud that dissipated quickly.

  “What is wrong with color?” Ezra asked. “Are you some big-city artist? Oh, never mind.” And he, too, disappeared into his orange cloud, followed by Jacob, Job, Noah, and Adam.

  Isaac looked at Ishmael and shrugged. Ishmael grinned. They turned into cats. Isaac became a red Abyssinian and Ishmael an Egyptian Mau with dark eyes. And the Alexandrian healer laughed. “Still too red,” Bast said. Isaac wined his red and meowed.

  Istez Camil, the oud teacher, was a widower. I met him at our concierge’s apartment, a small, sparsely furnished two-bedroom unit on the ground floor. I was visiting the concierge’s son, Elie, who was thirteen, seven years older than me. Everybody was gathered around the blue-gray transistor radio, listening to a scratchy news report. The beige waxed-paper shade of a small lamp sitting atop the radio vibrated each time the announcer pronounced an “s.” The concierge sat in the main chair of the living room, his wife next to him on the chair’s arm, Istez Camil in the other chair, and the five children, including Elie, huddled on the floor around the crackling radio.

  The perfidious enemy attacked. The mighty Arab army. By the grace of God. We shall conquer. The evil imperialist forces will be crushed, spat the radio.

  I noticed an oud leaning against the wall. I bent down, traced my fingers across the delectable wood, along the intricate designs of the mother-of-pearl encrustations, the delicately carved inlaid ivory. The instrument felt bigger than I was. For a moment, I felt lost in its magic.

  “Do you like it?” asked Istez Camil, kneeling on one knee, his hand centered on my back.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said.

  “My father made it a long time ago.” Istez Camil lifted the oud gently, bringing the front close to my eyes. “Would you like to learn to play?”

  “There’s a war going on,” snapped the concierge, looking up at the ceiling. “Can we concentrate a little?” He leaned over and pumped up the volume of the transistor.

  We shall get rid of the occupying forces once and for all, liberate all of Jerusalem.

  “Ask your parents if they’re willing to pay for lessons.” Istez Camil’s shirt buttons were fastened incorrectly, making his collar look oddly skewed. “And don’t worry about hi
m,” he whispered, discreetly pointing at the concierge. “He’s just a crusty old man who thinks politics is important.”

  Elie stood up, stretched languidly, and gestured with his head for me to follow. I heard the concierge mutter as we left the room. Elie didn’t speak, and I tried to keep pace with his long strides. His faded orange jumpsuit, a couple of sizes too big, billowed between his legs with each step. Slim and athletic, he moved with a cocky assurance. He descended the stairs to the garage, entered his father’s tool shed, and handed me a toolbox to carry for him. I almost dropped it, had to lift it with both hands. The toolbox made it difficult to walk. By the time he noticed I wasn’t behind him, he was already up the ramp and on the street. He came back down and took the toolbox with one hand; I followed him unencumbered. We entered the garage of a building around the corner from ours. He stopped in front of an old, rusty motorcycle, put the toolbox down. I broke the silence. “Is that yours?”

  Elie nodded. His permanently serious face appeared to be concentrating on the machine in front of him, his lower lip completely hidden behind his jutting upper one.

  “Your father lets you have a motorcycle?” I asked.

  “He doesn’t know, does he? And he won’t know, because you won’t say anything to anyone about this, will you?”

  I raised my eyebrows, but Elie paid no attention. He was on his knees. His wide eyes, their whites gleaming, looked intently at the engine. A vaccination scar on his arm looked like an old, frayed button. He opened the toolbox, handed me two screwdrivers, a box wrench, a monkey wrench, and two pairs of pliers. I held them close to my chest to ensure their safety.

  “I got this for free because it doesn’t run,” Elie said, “but I’m going to fix it.” He put his palm out, extending his long, tapered fingers. “Screwdriver.” I carefully placed one in his hand.