The Hakawati

by Rabih Alameddine

  The midwife changed the third son into a white calf. The calf looked up at his father just as the sword was about to fall, and the king held his hand. “I refuse to be the father of this,” the king said. “Inform the butcher I want this calf’s heart for dinner.”

  The queen wept and asked, “What happened to my children?” The king spoke to her. “I have offered you everything and received pain and disdain in return. I can bear no more. I refuse to be a husband to you.” He forbade his queen to leave her chambers, and he stopped visiting.

  The butcher received the calf and thought to himself, “This is a majestic specimen. It would be a shame to kill it for a fleeting meal. I will kill another calf and save this regal animal for breeding.” The calf proved that the butcher understood his beasts, for he grew to become a white bull of unparalleled size and beauty. The great bull matured among the rest of the king’s cattle until, one day, a new milkmaid appeared, and he fell in love. The young maiden flinched and blanched when the great white bull approached her. She ran away from him, and he did not chase her, for he did not wish to frighten his beloved. She joined the other girls as they milked the cows, but her eyes kept surreptitiously moving back to the magnificent beast.

  The following morning, the white bull led the cows to a meadow where a profusion of spring flowers bloomed. Joy blossomed on the milkmaids’ faces upon seeing the flowers, and they set forth picking narcissi, roses, hyacinths, violets, and thyme. The bull cooed a lover’s call, and the maiden went up to him, garlanded his broad neck with gardenias, his silver horns with violets, hyacinths, and thyme. The bull sighed in pleasure and slumped down on the grass before his beloved. The maiden climbed astride the great bull, and he rose and carried her away. The other milkmaids blushed at the sight of a virgin astraddle the great bull. He carried her for leagues and they came across an old crone resting on a large rock. The maiden greeted the crone who asked, “Is he your husband?” The girl said he was not, and the crone asked, “Is he your brother?” The maiden swore that he was not. “Then why are you not veiled?” the crone wondered.

  “He is but a beast.” The maiden stroked her bull’s neck.

  “He is a boy in love. A witch had changed him into a bull.”

  “That is awful,” cried the maiden. “He would have been such a handsome man. Is there anything we can do?”

  “There always is. Changing one species to another is difficult, requiring magic, skill, and elaborate potions. Regaining its original form is easy, requiring nothing more than the pure, true love of one of its kind.”

  The maiden asked, “Are you suggesting—” But when she glanced up, the crone was no more. The bull lay on the grass once again, and the maiden climbed off his back. “I will love you,” she told him, and kissed him. They made love in the meadow, and when the maiden finally opened her eyes, fulfilled and filled, she saw above her the perfect prince.

  The milkmaids heard of the miracle and informed the butcher, who wanted to see for himself. The butcher told the boy, “You look familiar, almost as if you are family.” His wife trembled, and her face flushed, so the butcher beat her until she told the truth.

  The king listened to the story and ordered the two sisters and the midwife beheaded in the public square. He visited his queen for the first time in years and apologized, but she said, “I had offered you everything and received pain and disdain in return. I will bear no more. You have killed my sons. I refuse to be your wife.”

  The king said, “I was wrong. How can I make up for it?”

  “Die,” the queen replied.

  And so it was. Guilt and sorrow did the disloyal king in. The queen witnessed her son’s rise to the throne, and the milkmaid wore the crown of the betrothed.

  I was trying to stop crying. My knee hurt, my elbow hurt, and the bruise on my left upper arm was turning darker by the second. Uncle Jihad knelt before me, calming and shushing me. He had put his first-aid kit on the dining-room table and me on one of its chairs.

  “They were older than me, too,” he said. “They were Wajih’s friends. That’s what drove my mother crazy. Wajih didn’t do anything, but he didn’t stop his friends. He was too scared. He just watched. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. These boys don’t hate you. They’re scared of you. You’re much smarter, more talented.”

  “And much smaller,” I snapped. “And there are a lot of them.”

  “I know that.” He swabbed mercurochrome on my knee. “But this won’t last long. Soon you’ll be running these stupid boys in circles. Soon they’ll be shining your shoes and picking up after you.” He tickle-poked my stomach. “You’d like that, right?”

  “But what’ll I do now? I can’t wait till soon.”

  “I’ll take care of things now. Don’t worry.”

  “You won’t tell my father?”

  He mimed running a needle and thread through his lips. He covered my knee with a Band-Aid and began to examine my elbow.

  “What’ll I tell them when they see me like this?” I asked.

  “Tell them you fell.”

  “You’re telling me to lie to my parents?” I stared at him.

  “I’d never do such a thing,” Uncle Jihad replied in mock seriousness. “Never, ever lie to anyone, let alone your parents; lying is bad. But being discreet is good. You fell, right? Maybe they pushed you, but still, you fell. That’s what we’ll say. We’re not going to tell your parents everything, for their own good. We don’t want them to worry unnecessarily.” I flinched as he dabbed hydrogen peroxide on my elbow. “Wait here,” he said. “I think we’ve earned some fruit juice.” He went to his kitchen and returned with two tall half-filled glasses of pomegranate juice.

  “Are you going to tell me what happened to you that day?” I asked.

  “I was watching the village boys. It was cold but clear, so all the boys that weren’t working were sledding down the hill. Snow had fallen for three straight days, so it was perfect. They didn’t really have sleds, of course, only broken wooden boxes. I saw Farid with his friends, but before I could reach them, four or five big boys jumped me. They were Wajih’s friends, so they couldn’t have been less than fifteen or so. They lifted me up and put me in a box and pushed it downhill. They were amusing themselves. I was too frightened to scream and had no idea what to do. My feet and hands were inside the box. The sled picked up speed. Even the laughter of the other boys stopped. I finally heard Farid screaming for me to use my hands to slow the box. I tried but couldn’t. Farid was running down the hill, but I was sliding too fast and toward a cliff. It was a small cliff, mind you, but a huge drop to fly over in a wooden box. Everyone, including me, thought I was a goner. And I was. I hit the edge and flew with my box, higher and higher, until a large pine tree bent its hand and picked me up out of the sky.”

  “The hand of a pine tree?”

  “Imagination, my boy. Cum grano salo. The branch of a pine tree, it was. It felt like a hand because the tree caught me while I was flying. The hand of God came down and took the form of a pine branch. By my coat it caught me, while the box kept soaring higher and shattered when it hit the ground. I was saved.”

  “How did you get down from the tree?”

  “It took forever.”

  The Chinese magnolia trees were covered with divine pink-and-white blossoms, practically the only beautiful sight anywhere near my classes. Unlike the rest of the university, the science campus was unsightly, mostly built in the ugly sixties: large cubes of concrete whose windows opened upward, as if the buildings were sticking their collective tongues out at the world and saying, “We’re ugly and we don’t care.”

  A voice shouted, “Hey, champ.” I walked over to a table occupied by my fellow Lebanese. Four of the six were playing cards, and one was eating a hamburger even though it was still morning. No matter what time of day you arrived at the Bombshelter, the burger bar in the Court of Sciences, you were almost guaranteed to find at least one of the Lebanese students there. A card game was sure to sprout as soon a
s there were two. I was probably the only Lebanese at UCLA who didn’t care for cards.

  “Where’ve you been?” cried Sharbel. He was by far the oldest and biggest guy in the group, towering over everyone. He was in three of my classes.

  “Where is it?” he asked. He was trying to sound jovial, but his voice betrayed his anxiety.

  I handed him my folder, and he immediately began copying the math assignment into his own notebook. He was so large he took up almost half the table by himself, and the other boys had to adjust their card game to accommodate.

  “How can you live in the dorms?” Iyad asked. “Isn’t it too crowded?”

  “You have to live with strangers,” Joseph said. He was in two of my classes. All the Lebanese students at UCLA were in engineering school, no exceptions. The only variation was which discipline within engineering; mine was computers.

  “I’m not living with strangers,” I objected. “I have my own room.”

  “Well,” Sharbel said, “it’s not like you’re living with a friend. That makes a difference.”

  Iyad banged his hand on the table and yelled triumphantly. All the Americans stared at our table with disapproving eyes. I turned my back, moved my chair slightly, hoping that anyone who looked our way would think I wasn’t part of the group.

  Two Americans, engineering students, nodded at Iyad as they passed by. He completely ignored them. When he was with the group, which was more often than not, he showed disdain toward all non-Lebanese. He had once called his American girlfriend his sperm depository while she was sitting in his lap as he played cards. The group spoke Lebanese, even or maybe especially around people who didn’t understand the language. They would have been speaking English or French had they been in Lebanon, but in America, they spoke Arabic. We were all misfits.

  The morning after God, the miraculous tree, saved her youngest, my grandmother put on two black sweaters and covered her head and torso with a diaphanous mandeel that dropped almost to the ground in back. In Druze white and black, she left her house and trudged up the hill through the snow to the bey’s mansion. It was official visiting hours. Petitioners and supplicants were going in and out of the main entrance, so my grandmother went in from the side. She greeted everyone in the women’s hall, sat down, and inquired whether she could have an audience with the bey. Yes, the bey himself, not his wonderful wife. She knew he was busy, very busy, but if he could spare a few minutes, she would be grateful. No, she would not mind waiting. She had all day. She drank coffee with the other visitors, chatted with the women. She had the chance to have a second cup of coffee. “I know he will see you,” the bey’s wife said. “Forgive him, but he’s very busy, what with the world preparing for its next big war.”

  “His generosity knows no bounds,” my grandmother replied.

  Finally, one of the attendants whispered that the bey would see my grandmother. She and the bey’s wife went to a smaller room, where the bey was deep in discussion with another man. The bey used my grandmother as an excuse to terminate the conversation. “A delicate matter,” he told the man. “I’m afraid it can’t wait.”

  Alone with the bey and his wife, my grandmother had to ask after the children, the grandchildren, the cousins, the house, the meals, the vacations, before the bey inquired what she wanted. “You’ve been very generous to our family,” she said. “May God keep you above us to guide us, protect us, and be the shining example for us to follow. Your father educated my father and uncles, and your kindness extended to my brothers. We are ever in your debt.”

  “You are most kind,” the bey’s wife said, and the bey added, “You are most eloquent.”

  “Our family is thriving because of your liberality, and I am embarrassed to bring this up. As you probably know, my two youngest sons are going to the local school. They are doing very well, too well. I’m not sure the school is providing them with enough opportunities.”

  The bey’s wife coughed. “Are you saying the school isn’t good enough for your boys?”

  “No, of course not. It’s a good school. My other boys went there, but the young ones are special. My youngest loves to read, and there aren’t any books at the school.”

  “Have you talked to your husband about this?” The bey leaned back in his chair, no longer feeling the need to listen. “You want them in a better school?”

  “That would be ideal, but it would cost a lot more money. I’m willing to work. My older children no longer need me in the house. I’ll pay everything back.”

  “The best schools are very expensive. Have you asked your brothers for help?”

  “They have children and worries of their own.”

  “As do I, and a lot more children, and more charities and more obligations,” the bey said. “The greatest happiness is accepting one’s life for what it is.”

  Stories of the beys abound—their origin, valor, heroism, gallantry, generosity, wit or lack thereof. Uncle Jihad’s favorite origin story:

  In the thirteenth century, maybe the fourteenth, maybe the fifteenth, a brigand, an escaped black slave from Egypt, wreaked havoc in the Bekaa Valley and Mount Lebanon, and neither the local authorities nor the Ottoman government could do anything to stop him. A bounty was placed on the brigand’s head. The man killed the innocents, raped the virgins. The Ottomans declared that anyone who captured or killed the slave would be given the title of bey. (In some versions of the story, the title offered was pasha, and a further heroic act was needed to receive a full bey’s worth of plot and adventure.) The brigand passed through the village and raped two women, one of them the sister of the first bey-to-be and the other his betrothed, his first cousin. After slaying his sister and ensuring that his fiancée was honorably killed by her brother, the soon-to-be-bey searched the village and mountainside for the nefarious slave, but to no avail. That evening, despondent and intending to drown his sorrows, he descended to his basement to partake heavily of his secret cache of red wine. Lo and behold, he found the black slave prostrate, facedown in a shallow pool of spilled wine. Livid, he cudgeled the limp slave’s head and split his skull, causing blood to pour into the wine puddle.

  He was honored and glorified and became our bey.

  Wait. One more. Not a story of origin, but one of wit. On a night in the eighteenth century, maybe the beginning of the nineteenth, the bey commanded one of his minions to deliver a letter to a sheikh in Hasbayya, a town a few hours’ ride by horseback. The man asked if he might wait till daylight to ride. The bey wanted him to leave instantly, saying, “Do not fret, for the moon is bright, and I will command it to follow you and light your way.”

  The man set off on his horse, and every few minutes he looked up at the sky and the moon was still there. No matter how far from the village he rode, the moon followed. He entered Hasbayya and woke all its citizens. “Long live our wise bey,” he shouted. “He bade the moon follow me, and it surely did. Look upon the sky and admire the wonder, the bey’s gift to your village. Rise, rise, and behold the mystery.”

  The townsfolk rose and beat him and went back to sleep.

  “You know,” my grandmother said, “it’s not as if I brought up whether any of his grandchildren attended the local school.” She was slicing white cheese for sandwiches.

  Uncle Jihad held a book in front of his face and pretended not to listen. My great-grandmother clucked her tongue. She waited for the kettle to boil.

  “Why did you approach him?” my great-grandmother asked. “What did you expect the simpleton to say? ‘Take my money, because I care about your problems’?”

  “He helps other people. Why not our family?” My grandmother stopped slicing, sighed. “I had no choice.”

  “Of course you did. We’ll ask Maan.”

  “He has enough to worry about.”

  “Everyone has enough to worry about. This is family.”

  One more story from the lore of the beys. This one was about a woman.

  In the late eighteenth century, the bey married a woman
of great prominence. As usual, she was much smarter than he was. Her name was Amira, which means “princess,” and it was a most appropriate name, not in the sense of a pretty girl waiting to be rescued, but in that of a woman destined to rule directly and not by proxy. Her husband was a fair bey, as fair as a feudal lord could be in those days, but there was never any doubt as to who governed. Internecine fights were all but eliminated during his years in power, taxes were paid on time, bandits disappeared from the mountain, all because he had begun executing people who didn’t follow his commands. His wife was merciless. The bey died suspiciously early, leaving behind three sons. Sitt Amira informed the elders and sheikhs that she would rule until her sons were of age. The elders and sheikhs judiciously agreed, even though records showed that her eldest son was nineteen. Sitt Amira was the bey for twenty years. She sat with the sheikhs and village officials and commanded them, though when supplicants paid her a visit she followed tradition, more or less: she sat behind a gossamer curtain and settled disputes with her voice alone.

  She was not well liked. It is said that half the people dislike their ruler, and that’s when the ruler is just. She was not just. She played the various factions in Lebanon off against each other. She lured the Ottomans into a war with the pasha of Egypt. She allied herself with the winner of every battle, but only after the battle was won. She disposed of anyone who displeased her. By 1820, she had become so powerful that the Ottoman Empire had to take action, sending an army to depose her. Sitt Amira was a superb politician and as wily as a jackal, but she couldn’t fight a whole army. She fled into the mountains and disguised herself as a shepherdess to await the army’s departure. Unfortunately for her, shepherdesses of the mountains walked around barefoot. On the first day, a shepherd boy saw her creamy white feet, returned to his village, and boasted of having seen the most beautiful feet in the whole world, not one callus. The Ottomans arrested her on the spot, and she was never heard from again.