The Hakawati

by Rabih Alameddine

  At the court, Prince Baybars received the paper from Azkoul and turned his back to open the diwan’s door. Azkoul took out his sword and raised it to strike. As Baybars swung the doors open, Azkoul’s bloodied head rolled into the diwan, and his body collapsed behind the prince.

  “What manner of murder is this?” bellowed the king’s judge. “How can the prince of protocol kill a seeker of the diwan?”

  Two men entered the diwan and bowed before the king. “No one but us killed the seeker,” the fierce Uzbeks confessed. To an astonished council they relayed the story. “The man is named Azkoul; he is an infamous killer. We saw him enter the city and recognized him. We trailed him, knowing that where he travels treachery follows. We saw him raise his sword to kill the prince, who had his back turned, and we struck, cutting a cankerous blight from a devout world.”

  And the king said, “Justice prevails again.”

  Baybars thanked the Uzbeks for saving his life and invited them to be his guests. The Uzbeks rode with Baybars out of the palace. When they arrived at Najem’s, they asked if this was his home, and the prince replied that it belonged to his uncle. Baybars could not own a house, since he himself was owned. “But that is not true,” one of the Uzbeks said. “We will present our case to the king tomorrow.”

  In the morning, the prince and the fighters knelt before the king. The Uzbeks said, “Your Majesty, Prince Baybars is not a slave. He is naught but a son of kings. We have proof of his history and his genealogy.”

  The king said, “I would like to hear about Prince Baybars. How did he come about? Who is he? What happened? Tell me his story.”

  My grandfather died in April 1973. I had just gotten home from school when Aunt Samia’s panicked Filipina maid called on my mother, saying that my grandfather, who was visiting his daughter, wasn’t doing well. My mother ran up the stairs in her housedress and clogs.

  My grandfather lay shivering on the couch, Aunt Samia on her knees before him. She shivered as well, but it was an altogether different kind. “I don’t understand,” she said. “What can I do?” My grandfather clutched his chest with his right hand. When Aunt Samia saw my mother, she begged, “Help me, please.” My mother knelt beside my aunt. Shoulder to shoulder, they seemed to be praying before my grandfather, the altar. I was the only witness.

  “His heart,” my aunt said. She had called an ambulance. “He wants to know his name.” Her voice sounded like cheap plastic. “He doesn’t know who he is?”

  My grandfather had trouble breathing. He shook his head. “No,” he uttered.

  “Hold on, Father,” Aunt Samia said. “Help is on the way.”

  “Your name is Ismail al-Kharrat,” my mother said.

  “We know you,” Aunt Samia said. “You’ll be fine. We know who you are.”

  His eyelids fluttered; his eyes seemed to scream in pain. “He doesn’t know my name.”

  “Who doesn’t?” my mother asked. “Osama? He knows your name. We all do.”

  “No,” he said. “He knows not.” His tremors subsided.

  “Calm down, Father,” Aunt Samia said. “Just breathe. In, out. Don’t worry.”

  And he shook again, an unearthly quiver. “No.” His hand tightened.

  Aunt Samia whimpered. My mother teared. “He knows your name,” she said. “He always knew your name.”

  “No,” he said. “He knows not my name.”

  “Say your name,” my mother said. “Whisper in my ears and He will hear it.” Aunt Samia stared at my mother. She grasped her arm. “In my ears,” my mother said. “From mine to His.”

  She moved her head to my grandfather’s lips. And my grandfather spoke.

  “The Saviour knows your name,” my mother said. “He knows.”

  The paramedics arrived five minutes later. They rolled him on the gurney into the elevator. “You drive.” Aunt Samia handed my mother the keys. “You’ll get us there before they do.” They trampled down the stairs. The clamor of my mother’s clogs slapping the stone echoed off the walls. He died on the way.

  I knew his names. I knew his story.

  My mother didn’t want me to attend his funeral. I was too young, she insisted. I’d be scarred. At first, my father agreed with her. I would attend the consolations but not the burial.

  But then Aunt Samia had a fit. And Uncle Wajih had a fit. And Uncle Halim had a fit. I was twelve, a man, and this was family. I became the cutoff: any cousin older than I was (Anwar, Hafez) would attend; younger ones (Munir, etc.) wouldn’t.

  My mother wept continuously and didn’t leave her room. By early evening, when the rest of the family and guests began to stream in, she was called out. She wore mourning black, which accentuated the redness of her puffy eyes. Upon seeing her, Aunt Nazek bellowed, “Look. Look and see the grief your leaving has caused.” Aunt Samia beat her chest and yelled, “Why, Father, why? Why did you leave me?”

  My father’s cousins, the Arisseddines, took over logistics. They began to send their children out with the death announcement to all the Druze villages. They seemed so efficient and meticulous. The sons of Jalal Arisseddine divvied up the important families, government officials, and parliamentarians. The sons of my father’s uncle Maan divided up the villages and the religious communities. Every time my father approached his cousins, he forgot what he was about to say, and was led back to his chair by Lina, who didn’t leave his side. He seemed shrouded in fog. The Arisseddine women greeted arriving mourners and guided them toward the family. They moved chairs from Uncle Jihad’s apartment into ours. Cups of coffee were in constant rotation.

  My mother seemed lost and despondent. She slumped in her chair, back bent, head down, staring at her shoes. More of the ladies cried, and Aunt Samia wailed. The wail woke my mother up. She stood up straight, looked at me, then at Lina across the room, next to my father. She arched her eyebrows when she caught Lina’s eye. My mother wiped her mouth, and Lina took out a tissue and wiped her lipstick off hers. My mother walked over to my father and began whispering in his ear. He nodded once, twice. He shook his head no. He nodded again. And life revisited his face.

  It wasn’t an accident that Aladdin was Chinese.

  “Once, a long, long time ago, in the land of China,” my grandfather used to start his tale, “there was a mischievous boy called Alaeddine.”

  “Why China?” I would ask.

  “The Druze and the Chinese are related,” he would reply.

  I didn’t look Chinese. I once asked my father if it was true, and he dismissed it as one of my grandfather’s ramblings. So did my mother. “Well, you see,” my grandfather had said, “the Druze believe that when someone dies the soul instantly jumps into the body of a baby being born. So we’re supposed to be able to figure out who was reincarnated into whom. There aren’t that many Druze. The wise men of the Druze, and you know they’re not that wise, realized there was a problem. A Druze would die, and there’d be no one who was born at that same instant. They had to be born somewhere, you see. The dead were sometimes born in China, the land of a thousand dawns. The Chinese believe in reincarnation, which could mean they’re related to the Druze. And, most important, China is far enough away so that no one can check. The Chinese get born over here, and we’re reborn in China.”

  When I repeated that to my mother, she thought it was ridiculous.

  Yet, as we sat in the living room the day my grandfather died, Ghassan Arisseddine, one of my father’s older cousins, announced quietly to the room, “Lucky are the gentle people in China for receiving you in their midst at this hour.” Neither my mother nor my father flinched.

  The family met at eight in the morning to accompany the coffin from the morgue to the village, to the bey’s mansion, where the funeral was being held. The hearse led a motorcade of thirty cars on an agonizingly slow drive up the mountain.

  I sat behind my mother in our car—an unhurried, hushed, uphill ride. At a donkey’s pace, the journey’s markers strolled by unfamiliarly, the orange orchard, the three ban
ana groves in a row, the unmarked turnoff, the protruding rock that looked like a detrunked elephant. The lush blue shore that should have danced only shimmied. The change from the green of pines to that of oaks took longer; the shades of ocher lingered, imprinted strange blends onto my retinas.

  My mother broke the silence once. “It’s not a good idea to have an open casket.”

  My father guided me toward a pavilion where the men gathered. Hundreds of white plastic chairs were set in rows facing another row of chairs with faded russet cushions. The bey, his brother, and his two sons approached our family; all exchanged kisses and condolences. My father had told me to reply with “May you be compensated with your health” to anything that was said to me. There was discussion and insincere protestation about seating arrangements. As the eldest male, Uncle Wajih had the main seat, and the bey sat next to him. Uncle Jihad took the end chair, and I the next one. My father maneuvered himself next to me. The bey’s brother ran up to my father and offered to exchange seats. My father begged off. “I’m sure the seating will be rearranged when others begin to arrive.”

  And we sat in silence. My father didn’t bat an eyelash. He gazed at the rows of empty chairs facing him. Uncle Jihad stared to his right, down the hill, at the undulating olive orchards beneath us. A damp, cold gust brushed and licked my face. Uncle Jihad pulled his jacket across his chest. He wept silently. My father didn’t. “Are you warm enough?” Uncle Jihad asked me.

  As if planned and coordinated, the residents of three villages arrived at the same time. The men and women separated at the gate of the bey’s mansion and marched up the delicate incline. The women nodded toward us as they ambled by. Before us, the men arranged themselves in a line, whose order, who stood where and next to whom, seemed predetermined. They covered their hearts with the palms of their hands, uttered in unison something I couldn’t understand. My father and uncle and all the men in our line made the same gesture and replied in a different incomprehensible sentence. Their line snaked toward ours; their hands shook our hands. Most of the men kissed the bey’s hand.

  The Christian families didn’t perform the same ritual. Neither did the Muslims. All paid their respects. Friends kissed in greeting. Whenever a man of some import appeared, he was given a seat in the family line: You are family. The special men accepted condolences for a couple of rounds before moving into the anonymity of the guests. The Ajaweed, the Druze religious, sat in the first row facing us, fully decked in their traditional outfits.

  The bey moved next to my father. He was much older than my father and looked it. He wore an English-cut suit and an awkward-looking fez. “My father loved yours,” he said, twirling his white mustache with thumb and forefinger. A man from a lost era.

  “And for that,” my father replied, “we are eternally grateful.”

  “If you need anything in these trying times, our family will do whatever it takes.”

  “And your generosity is boundless,” my father said to the bey.

  They both stood up to greet the new arrivals, the ritual beginning again. As if it were a magician’s trick, Uncle Jihad now sat next to the bey, and my father was on my other side.

  “We were so happy to hear the news,” Uncle Jihad said, covering his eyes with dark sunglasses. “A worthy grandson at last. Our family was overjoyed for yours.”

  “A birth is always happy news,” the bey said. He flushed, and his eyelashes fluttered spastically in my uncle’s direction.

  “The birth made us happy,” my uncle said, “but it wasn’t what brought joy to our hearts. The miraculous news is that the boy looks exactly like you. God smiled upon us.”

  The bey giggled and jiggled, tried to stifle his mirth. “Yes, the little bey takes after me.”

  “And God raised the degree of difficulty for the ladies of his generation. How will they be able to resist the little rascal’s charms?”

  The bey slapped his thigh, and his Jell-O-mold paunch shivered in glee. “How will they indeed?”

  We stood up for the next batch. When we sat down, my father’s seat was empty. He sat between his two older brothers. Already bored, Anwar and Hafez elbowed each other. I spent my time counting suits, sports jackets, and religious Druze dress. I counted three fez hats, twenty-three Ajaweed hats, one Borsalino, and seventeen bald heads. The sky lowered, and a spring fog ascended. From the valley below, the thin mist rose languorously toward us, obstructing our view of Beirut. Normally, the whole city could be seen, the multistory buildings along the coast, the old Mediterranean houses, the airport with its crisscrossing beachfront runways. All went blank. I concentrated on the fog, now a translucent layer covering the olive groves. It would rise and cover, in order, the loquat trees, the lemons, the mulberries, and the fig trees. The fog made the village appear to be wobbly, wavering atop a precipice.

  Upon seeing a skinny man in an ill-fitting suit walking to a jerrybuilt podium, the cliques of chatterers hushed. He began to recite poetry in a nasal voice, sang beautifully, like a goldfinch with a slight cold. The mood shifted. The poet recalled my grandfather, sang about his family and those left behind. When the poet brought up the years of service to the bey, he called my grandfather the bey’s friend, not his servant. The bey’s face molded into sad at the mention of his own deceased father’s name. A few seats away, Uncle Wajih coughed and cleared his throat in an unsubtle attempt at disguising tears. My father remained stoic.

  The poet paused, took a deep breath, and lowered his eyes. The air bristled with a tense silence. The poet began a new verse, raised his voice to the proud skies. He stepped off the podium, and all the men stood up. I felt Uncle Jihad’s hand on my back, guiding me. The family men marched behind the song, and the remaining male mourners followed us. Into the house we went, without a pause in the incandescent song.

  The women, all in black with white mandeels, sat in a semicircle around the open coffin, rows and rows. My grandfather looked like a wax model sculpted by an incompetent artist. His hair was combed, forced under control for the first time. His face looked like a composite drawing. The model hadn’t sat for the artist.

  The women wailed. Aunt Samia called upon her brothers to resuscitate her father, to breathe the fire of life into his lungs. Village women bemoaned the bey’s misfortune. My sister could only look shocked and dumbfounded. My mother stared at the floor. Behind her sat a silent Mrs. Farouk. The poet sang of my grandfather’s sense of humor. The men stroked the coffin. Uncle Jihad closed his eyes and mouthed words of piety. I placed my palm on the wood, and the coffin shook as if in anger, rejecting my touch. I clasped my hands behind my back. My cousins looked petrified. My mother tried to catch my eye. Calm down, her hands mimed.

  The women began their ultimate laments. “Who will replace him?” “How will we live with such sorrow?” “O Lord, be gentle with his journey.” Aunt Nazek draped herself across the coffin, shouting, “Don’t take him away.” Aunt Samia cleared a path for herself by moving two men aside. She held her father’s face with her hands, but withdrew them quickly upon first touch. “You can’t go without me.” She lifted her left leg off the floor and raised her knee, but it wouldn’t reach the coffin. She tried pushing herself up with her trembling arms. “I’m going with you,” she announced.

  The men lifted the coffin, raised it above their shoulders. It floated out of the hall. And after prayers, the men carried it to the cemetery. I watched the coffin drown, sink into the mist.

  “Are you feeling bad?” asked Uncle Jihad. “Was it the funeral?”

  “Why did everybody have to shout so much?” I asked. Tulip lay at my feet, and I used her body as a footstool, the way she liked. “Aren’t we Druze supposed to have silent funerals?”

  He sipped his drink slowly, seemed to be having a conversation with the ceiling and not me. “In principle, but not in practice, for how will the dead know that we love them?” he said. “You know, darling, funerals used to be much more dramatic when I was your age. Believe it or not, they are quieter now, more
sedate.” He hummed, took another sip. “Why, I can just imagine what they’ll be like when you’re my age now. Probably no one will show up. Bang, bang, bang, and it’s over. Mourners will arrive only if alcohol is being served, like at Irish funerals.” He ran a washrag over his head. “It’s only the funeral, my sweet. You know, some people flagellate themselves on the first day, the third day, the week, and the fortieth. It’s a never-ending process. We have crazy funerals, and that’s it. We’re much more sane, don’t you think?” I assumed the question was rhetorical. “You’re not buying any of this, are you?” I shook my head. “Well, listen. A long, long time ago,” he began, “when the Mongol hordes ran amok in our world, when Genghis Khan scorched the deserts of China and plundered the rest of the world, after the barbarian king had burned Baghdad to its final ember, after he massacred one hundred thousand in Damascus and watched the city’s streets covered in rivers of blood, after the Mongol general descended upon our fertile lands, my story begins. The general’s brother Tu Khan was bored.”

  “Tu Khan?” I asked. “That’s a bad pun. That’s not even Syrian good.”

  “Don’t interrupt, my boy,” he replied. His eyes, aloft still, were wide-set, dark, and revivified. “I’m on a roll. Tu Khan was bored.”

  “Bored, not bird.”

  “Acch, now, that’s bad. Listen. Tu Khan decided to have a feast. He brought the seven best cooks in the region and demanded that they create the greatest meal that had ever been served. The cooks toiled and slaved and came up with seven courses. The first course was exquisite, one oyster on a bed of lemon purée. Tu Khan ate it in one bite and wept, for the taste was glorious. To ensure that no one else would share the taste and thereby dilute his experience, Tu Khan had the cook beheaded. The second course was soup, a pork-and-apple consommé. So thin, so clear, so delectable, and its creator was beheaded. Third was sautéed sand dabs, fourth was grilled pheasant, fifth was filet mignon. Off with all their heads. The sixth was rack of lamb, of course. Tu Khan could not believe his tongue. His jaws extended farther, moved toward the plate. Within minutes, his mouth was a hand’s width in front of his face.”