The Hakawati

by Rabih Alameddine

  “What’s the purpose of your visit?” the female agent asked.

  “Just a vacation. I’ve never been to America before.” Anticipating the next question, I answered it. “I’ll be here for ten days.” I hated lying.

  Porky was jumbling up what my mother had meticulously packed. Another fat customs official approached with a German shepherd at his side. The dog began sniffing me. He reminded me of my Tulip, who had recently died of a heart attack. I bent down to pet him. “Don’t touch the dog,” Porky snapped from behind the table. “Please put your bags back on the cart and follow me.”

  My left eyelid fluttered sporadically. I discreetly covered it with my left hand and followed Porky to a small, windowless office with only a metal table and a wooden chair. The customs official with the leashed dog followed us. The German shepherd sniffed my bags.

  “I don’t have anything to declare,” I said nervously as Porky closed the door. “I swear.” I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. The back of my shirt was wet. The white walls had cement gray showing through the many chips in the paint.

  “Please empty your pockets on the table,” Porky said harshly. He used the word “please” often, but his tone suggested otherwise. My hands shook. Out came a packet of cigarettes, a lighter, my wallet, my keys to our apartment in Beirut, two guitar picks, and some Chiclets gum. The German shepherd sniffed my crotch. His owner stood back, lips curled. “Please take off your jacket,” Porky said, taking me by surprise. I handed him my brown leather jacket. He squeezed it and had the dog smell it. “Take off your shoes, please.”

  “They’re boots,” I said, “not shoes.” The distinction was important. They were cowboy boots I had bought expressly for this trip. Handmade boots, no less. Handmade in Texas, it said on the tag. I bought them for seventy-five dollars from a street vendor in Beirut. The boots were brown and had a serpent sewn in blue thread. I didn’t want just any old shoes for living in America.

  “Please take off your shirt,” he said. Sweat dripped down my chest. I wished that I were bigger, that my chest were more impressive. “And your pants.” Porky and his compatriot went through my jeans, turning out the front pockets, feeling into the back ones, fingering the coin pocket. The dog sniffed the jeans. “Please turn around and face the wall.” I put my hands on the wall and spread my legs as if Starsky and Hutch were arresting me. “No, you don’t have to do that. Just pull down your underwear.” Porky’s tone was nicer all of a sudden. His voice had a touch of discomfort. “Could you please spread your cheeks?”

  It took me a minute to realize what he meant by “cheeks.” I figured it out, but I was embarrassed that I hadn’t known that use of the word. I sensed his face approach my anus.

  “Thank you,” Porky said, his tone now hesitant. “You can get dressed now.”

  Outside, I looked for a taxi. The early-evening light was even, the sky mildly cloudy. The air was heavy, particle-filled. I took shallow breaths as the taxi driver loaded my bags into the trunk. His left hand was darker than his right, and the tops of his ears were sunburned. He drove me on my first American freeway, the 405. I noticed the roads were wet.

  We exited on Wilshire Boulevard, straight into heavy traffic. The cabbie cursed. I looked at the car next to me, a black Alfa Romeo Spider with the top down. The driver, in a colorful shirt and Porsche sunglasses, was singing along loudly to the Beatles’ “Oh! Darling,” bopping his head up and down, drumming on the steering wheel. “Please believe me,” I sang along, regretting that I hadn’t brought my guitar.

  I wasn’t some hick from the mountains. I had seen hotels before. I had stayed at the Plaza Athénée in Paris and the Dorchester in London, but neither had prepared me for the extravagent sumptuousness of the Beverly Wilshire. The desk clerk, a boy not much older than I, stood behind the counter, with hair the color of desert sand and a glint in his blue eyes, smiling, showing his excellent teeth. “My name is Osama al-Kharrat,” I said. “My father’s already here.”

  “Ah, Mr. al-Kharrat. We’ve been expecting you.” His voice was sweet, confident. “Your father left a message saying his party will be back around nine.”

  The “party” was my father and Uncle Jihad, who had both wanted to try gambling in Las Vegas. They had decided I should meet them in Los Angeles, where I could look for a school to attend. Beirut was becoming more harrowing. The civil war that everyone had thought would last only a few months had been going on for a couple of years, with no end in sight.

  The desk clerk handed me the keys. “Don’t you want to see my passport?” I asked.

  “No, I trust you.” His smile widened. “If you’re not Mr. al-Kharrat, then I’ll be in big trouble.” He wore a dark suit and a white shirt, but his tie was bright yellow, with tiny Daffy Ducks running all over the place.

  I grinned back at him. “I am who I said I am.”

  “The suite is two floors,” the bellboy said, opening the door. I walked in ahead of him, trying my best not to appear overwhelmed. “There are two bedrooms on this floor, and a master bedroom below.” He carried my bags to one of the rooms. I stood by the banister and stared down at the living room. A spherical crystal chandelier hung from the cathedral ceiling to the lower level. The drapes, as heavy as theater curtains, covering windows two stories high, were the same color and pattern as the wallpaper, gold with stylized metallic gray-blue paisley peacocks. The wall-to-wall carpeting was inches deep and avocado green. I was taking it all in when I noticed that the bellboy was still waiting behind me.

  “Oh, sorry,” I said, taking out my wallet. My smallest bill was a five. He thanked me and left. One point against this hotel. At the Plaza Athénée in Paris, the bellboys and waiters deliver and leave before you have a chance to tip them. Much classier. I walked into the first room, with the same avocado carpet, the wallpaper in dark rose with a big white floral pattern, matching the bedspread and curtains. The bellboy had put my bags in this room. The bathroom was cream and yellow ocher, with two doors, each opening to one of the upstairs rooms. I walked through the bathroom to the second room, which I assumed to be my father’s, but on the nightstand was a Patek Philippe, rather than one of the Baume et Mercier watches that he wore. The cologne was the black Paco Rabanne, definitely Uncle Jihad’s, too strong for my father. I descended the stairs to the living room and master bedroom. I sat on the bed, caressed the pillow, laid my head down. I usually loved smelling the scents of my parents on their bed, but something here was peculiar. I stood up, looked around, and saw one of my father’s watches.

  I went out to my room’s balcony with the newspaper and smoked a cigarette, figuring my father would never come out there and catch me. I saw Beverly Hills and America, the parade of cars along an endless boulevard. Dusk. The clouds in the sky had become more ominous, pewter-colored. I was excited, about to see a summer storm. A neon sign on the building across the street said seventy-eight degrees in bright red. In Celsius, 25.555 into infinity, I thought.

  Again I wished I had brought my guitar, but I couldn’t risk immigration officials’ figuring out I was not here for a short tourist visit. In any case, I hoped to buy a better guitar for my new life in America. The Los Angeles Times said Thursday’s weather forecast was more rain, and highs in the mid-eighties. There was an advertisement for chambray “work shirts” with a touch of class. Why only a touch? A bus hijacker had released the seventy hostages he was holding at a Baha’i retreat not too far from Los Angeles. I felt the moistness of the air, a hot, light-smeared night. I stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray.

  The hospital’s fluorescent light emitted a tiresome buzz. I’d grown inured to it in my father’s first room, but once Tin Can had him moved to the second room, with all the monitors, at my sister’s insistence, I found the interminable hum annoying. I turned off the main lights and switched on a small lamp with a pleated shade that my sister had brought in. I sat on the bed next to my father, focused my eyes on him. I forced myself to look at him, to see him as he was. The image
of a younger version kept superimposing itself upon his face. I wasn’t sure that the younger image was accurate, either. My father used to say he looked like Robert Mitchum—the hair, the nose, the mouth. “I’m his brother,” he’d tell us. Of course, he looked nothing like the actor—not the hair, the nose, or the mouth—but you couldn’t argue him out of the resemblance.

  Now his skin was slack and spongy. His nose didn’t flare, nostrils no longer nervous: another ineffectual organ added to his collection. His eyelids sagged, unmoving. His hair was all white now, even his eyebrows, and his lips had practically disappeared. I kissed his brow.

  How black your hair was.

  I should feed his hungry ears, but instead I wept, immodestly and noiselessly.

  Guilt, that little demon, gnawing and debilitating, voice thief.

  I awoke to the pain of a pinched nerve in my shoulder and the sound of Lina entering the room. “You should have used a pillow and blanket.” The light seemed fuzzy, as if I were looking at the world through grubby contact lenses. Lina walked over to my father. Her hair was matted, sleep-flattened. The strange early light made her seem acutely lonely. “How is he?”

  He’s dying, I wanted to say. He seemed fine two days ago, or was it three days ago? I hadn’t wanted to sleep. I’d wanted to spend the night by his side, available. I’d wanted to enchant him. I had wanted so much.

  I heard the key turning on the lower floor, made sure the balcony doors were closed, and descended the winding stairs to greet my father. Uncle Jihad was pouring drinks at the bar.

  “Osama,” he said loudly. His eyes sparkled, and his lips broke into a delicious smile. He topped his tall scotch with water and managed to take a sip before I reached him. I stood on my toes to kiss his cheek. He wasn’t particularly tall, but at five feet four, I had to stretch to kiss practically anybody. Jolly creases appeared on his chubby face. He looked dapper in a blue suit, jacket unbuttoned, showing his distended stomach, as if he had swallowed a basketball. I heard my father moving about in his room. “Want me to make you a drink?” Uncle Jihad asked.

  “I’ll take a Coke,” I said, walking toward my father’s room.

  A young blonde woman stood in front of my father’s mirror applying lipstick, burgundy red, on full lips. She smiled, put her lipstick in the handbag on the dresser. “Hello,” she said, extending her hand. “I’m Melanie.” My father came out of the bathroom, zipping his pants.

  I felt Uncle Jihad’s hand on my shoulder. “Here’s your Coke,” he said.

  “Elvis is dead,” my father announced in Arabic. He sat on the large sofa, sipping his scotch. He was his brother’s follicular opposite: he had a full head of wavy, thick black hair that you could lose quarters in. He’d changed into brown shorts and a green Lacoste shirt—a concession to Melanie, the stranger among us. Had she not been here, he would be in boxer shorts and T-shirt.

  I glanced at Melanie and hesitated before I replied in Arabic, “I know. I read about it.”

  Even in Western getup, my father didn’t look American—too short, too dumpy. When I was younger, my father always wanted me to watch wrestling with him on television. Before the match began, he’d pick a wrestler to root for, and I was left with the other. He wouldn’t let me pick first, or choose the same wrestler he did. His man always won. “Pick the one who looks like a decent man,” he said. “Decent men never lose.” Since I got stuck with the eventual loser, I passed the time comparing my father, in boxers and T-shirt, with the wrestlers in tight trunks. My father had the loose calves of a sedentary man.

  “I thought you’d be more upset,” he said. “Rock and roll is dead and all that.”

  “I’m not upset.” My voice rose. “I don’t care if Elvis is dead. I don’t like him. He was old and fat and stupid. It’s about time he died.”

  My father snorted. “We have an appointment tomorrow with the dean of engineering at UCLA.” He was still speaking in Arabic, completely ignoring Melanie, who sat across the room. “He says that admission is closed for this fall, but he was impressed with your youth and your grades.”

  Melanie was reading Time magazine, pursing her lips.

  “This isn’t a child’s game,” my father said. “It’s an interview that will determine your future. Do you understand that?”

  “Yes, yes. I’m ready.”

  “The appointment is tomorrow afternoon at three,” he said, picking up the barricading newspaper, a signal ending the conversation.

  Melanie sat serenely in her chair. She looked young, couldn’t be more than twenty-three, but she had a confident manner. She was like a prettier Nancy Sinatra, with full breasts that were about to burst from her décolleté black dress. Her bleached-blond hair fell below her shoulders. Her eyebrows were plucked. I wanted to inspect them and see if they’d been shaved and drawn in with brown pencil. Her nose was dainty, her chin tiny. The most prominent aspect of her face was the makeup. Her thickly applied lipstick was too dark against her skin. Her eyeliner seemed to cover her lids, and the eye shadow was three-toned, mauve, purple, and light blue. She was the opposite of my mother, who applied her makeup judiciously. I knew Melanie was taking my measure as much as I was hers, but she was more subtle about it.

  Uncle Jihad was nursing his drink. He still wore his suit, his tie slightly askew. “Why engineering?” he asked me. “You told me a month ago you wanted to study math.”

  I looked at the dents and ridges of his bald head. Sweat collected in them, forming miniature pools. Every few minutes he ran his handkerchief over his scalp, momentarily reducing the sheen. Whenever he and my father went gambling, my father kissed the top of Uncle Jihad’s head for good luck.

  “I like math, Uncle. It’s what I’m good at. Engineering is applied math, basically.”

  “Are you sure that’s what you want?”

  “Of course he is,” my father interrupted from behind the paper. “He can’t make a living with a math degree.”

  It was almost one in the morning, eleven in the morning Beirut time, and I had been up for more than thirty-six hours, but I wasn’t ready to sleep yet. I slumped in my chair, my mind racing. “It’s raining a lot,” I said in English, hoping to engage Melanie in conversation.

  “It’s been raining all over,” Uncle Jihad said.

  “This isn’t normal,” Melanie said. A smooth, melodic voice. “It’s unseasonable. The California deserts are having major floods. It even rained in Vegas.”

  “Is that where you met?” I asked.

  In the large bed, with the lights out, I lay thinking. My father had gone into his room with her, closing the door. The night was humid.

  The dialysis machine chugalugged my father’s blood and regurgitated it back into him. Could a scene be déjà vu if it was truly repeating itself? This was another day. Salwa sat on the bed and held my father’s hand. “This won’t take long,” she told him. “Only another forty-five minutes.” My sister, on the rust recliner, leaned back and covered her eyes with her forearm. The narcoleptic technician’s head rested on his chest. I stood at the foot of the bed, counting off red time with the dialysis machine.

  There was a knock on the open door. I was the only one who could see out, and my sister waved for me to send whoever it was away. A beautiful woman of indeterminate age stood in the doorway in an extravagant sable coat and stiletto heels. She wore stylish, heavy makeup, which made her face look as white and pure as a cake of halloumi. Her short bouffant hair was dyed a chestnut brown with precisely equidistant blond streaks. I recognized her after she smiled a childlike smile yet terribly saucy. I hadn’t seen her in over twenty years.

  “Nisrine,” I said softly as I walked toward her. I surprised myself by using her first name. How old was she? She kissed me, cheek to cheek, three times. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to go in,” I said. “He doesn’t like to be seen when he’s sick.”

  She kept her hand on my cheek. “I knocked only to make sure he’s decent.” She strolled in and stopped as if she ha
d encountered an invisible electric fence, as if she were face to face with death’s scythe. A tiny cry escaped her lips, and her face crumpled. Her first tear carved a furrow in her foundation. Nisrine’s hand went to her left eye, and her finger removed one contact lens, then the other. She cried, holding her tiny lenses in the palm of her hand as an offering to the gods of grief.

  Nisrine and Jamil Sadek moved into the third floor of the building behind ours in 1967. In no time, they had established themselves as the most popular couple in the neighborhood. She was beautiful, witty, and flirtatious, and he was a delightful drunk. Few remembered she was a mother of three, for she was rarely seen with her children in public. Fewer still could help enjoying the misshapen, congenital liar she was married to. Captain Jamil was the only man in the neighborhood I was able to look down on, literally and figuratively. He was shorter than many children, but not exactly a dwarf. His huge paunch always seemed about to topple him. He canted his side hair like a sheaf over the top of his bald head. And he was no captain.

  Stories about him were legion, but none were as famous as the one about his repeated failures at being promoted to full-fledged pilot. He made sure that all called him Captain Jamil. He was the oldest copilot at the airline and flunked every captain exam, but you’d never know it from talking to him. He told tall tales of saving flights from sure disasters, of passengers writing him sheaves of letters detailing their gratitude. He told of the other captains’ looking up to him and pleading with him for flying lessons. None of his listeners believed him, and all pretended they did.