The Hakawati

by Rabih Alameddine

  During his eighth-birthday celebration, Shams and his disciple were having laughing fits. It began innocently enough. The royalty and notables of the land lined up to offer the young prophet gifts and receive his blessing in return. Shams would whisper into Layl’s ear, and the two of them would giggle. The emir’s wife could hear what they were whispering, and she realized that the worshippers could as well: This one had a big nose. That one had body odor. The two red parrots were perched atop the throne, and the violet parrot, the one the emir’s wife hated most for his frequent use of obscenities, had settled atop the sun altar. All three were chuckling. But then the dark slave boy began to whisper into the prophet’s ear, and the prophet blushed and covered his mouth.

  “Give us a funny face,” Shams commanded the genuflecting matronly princess.

  “Funny face?” the confused princess asked. She nervously adjusted the sheer scarf covering her hair.

  “Yes,” said the prophet, grinning. “Give us a funny face. A good one.”

  “Now, dear,” the emir’s wife interjected, trying to appear calm, “you cannot ask such things of your wonderful supplicants. It is not mannerly.”

  “What is the point of being a fornicating prophet,” Adam said, “if you can’t command the faithful?”

  “No funny face, no blessing,” decreed the prophet.

  “I do not understand, my lord,” said the princess. “I will offer any gift that pleases you. I do not know what a funny face is, or else I would gladly offer it.”

  “This is a funny face.” Layl stuck his tongue out and pushed his nose up.

  “This is better.” Shams pulled his mouth wide and stretched his eyelids with his fingers. “You better give us your funniest face. No blessing if it is not your best face.”

  “You desire and I obey, my lord.” The princess jammed two fingers up her nose, stuck her tongue all the way out to the left, and surprised everyone by crossing her eyes. The boys screeched and buried their heads in the throne’s big pillow, their legs scissoring the air in delight. The princess smiled, proud of herself.

  “Wait,” said the beautiful prophet, settling down. He placed his palm atop the princess’s head, squashed the scarf into her jewel-adorned hair. The whole room saw her body shudder with ecstasy and glow with joy. After she kissed the prophet’s hand and stood up, everyone gasped. Ten years had disappeared from her face. The emir’s wife thrust a mirror at her, and the princess yelped. She turned back to the prophet and kissed his feet over and over. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she mumbled.

  • • •

  On his eleventh birthday, the beautiful prophet and his faithful companion faced the adoring horde. Every year, the number of pilgrims had increased, and when the emir’s wife spread the word that the prophet would be giving his first sermon, thousands upon thousands of devotees arrived from the four corners of the earth. They sat, they stood, they covered the land to the horizon, buzzing with anticipation and good cheer.

  “Blessed are you, my people,” Shams began. “Blessed are those of you who have traveled for weeks on your pilgrimage. I am grateful and not worthy of such devotion.” Shams hesitated, and Layl whispered into his ear. “Blessed are you who pray to God, but He demands more. From now on, you must pray eight times a day at least.” He nodded at his audience. “Yes, it is true. You must pray every three hours. Worry not. You will get used to sleeping in two-hour shifts. It is much healthier. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad. Oh, and bathing. You must bathe before each prayer, eight times a day. If we bathed more often, we would not smell so bad when there are a lot of us. Exult.” Layl nudged his twin, who rambled on. “And no farting.” Layl turned his head to hide his snickering. “I decree that if you have to fart you must fart downwind. Before you fart, make sure to gauge the wind’s direction. I decree further that silent farts are to be banned. Others must know who the guilty party is. And hear this, for I have a warning. If you fart silently upwind, a double transgression, there will be no absolution. You will not be able to wear my colors.”

  “Unless you get a doctor’s note,” chimed Layl.

  It took one devotee to laugh heartily before a few others hesitantly joined him. The emir’s wife chided her son: “You promised to stick to the script.”

  “Blessed are the poor,” Shams announced. “They do not have much.”

  The laughter rippled through the crowd. Devotees cheered and applauded. “What about marital decrees?” someone shouted.

  “Well, you cannot marry your mother—or your father, for that matter. A wife must be no taller than her husband, and no more than a hand shorter. You must never use the word ‘ambidextrous’ when your spouse is in the room, or ‘hair.’ That is much more challenging. You can use the word ‘hair’ with strangers or with friends, but never with your wife.”

  “What about diet restrictions?” another devotee yelled.

  “Yes. You cannot cook a lamb in its mother’s milk. You cannot mix fruits in savory dishes, only in dessert.”

  “And no broccoli,” said Layl.

  “I am the prophet of these lands, and I am not going to eat any more broccoli.”

  As the masses cheered, the emir’s wife pleaded with the prophet to end his sermon.

  What was the reputation of Fatima’s sister? Who was Mariella, the great Mariella?

  Rewind to January 1975, a few months before the civil war erupted. My class and the senior class took a ski trip to The Cedars. To break the monotony of the three-hour drive from Beirut, our bus stopped at Hilmi’s, a lemonade shop in the town of Batroun. It was a Sunday at six in the evening, and the shop was busy, filled with skiers on the way back to the city. With the influx of all the students, there was hardly a place to stand.

  A threesome of seniors, the most popular boys in school, cut in before Fatima and me. One of the boys was the captain of the varsity soccer team. Fatima decided that maneuvering around a crowd for lemonade was too much trouble, and she walked outside. Her exit was fortunate, because she missed running into her sister. I heard Mariella’s laugh before I saw her. She held a translucent cup of lemonade with a lipstick-smeared straw sticking out. “If this place was such a secret,” she said loudly, “how come there’s an infestation of people?”

  Her companion didn’t look amused. Tall and dark, he wore a grim face and a soldier’s uniform, but it was not that of the regular army. “So it’s not a secret, but it’s the best lemonade.”

  “You obviously haven’t been to Rome.” Mariella walked toward the exit; she didn’t have to squeeze through the mob, which parted like Moses’s sea to make way for her. Her red wool dress would have been short on a ten-year-old. She noticed me in the crowd, and her eyes smiled an instant before her lips spread into an unequivocal grin. “Osama,” she squealed. “My darling.”

  She tousled my hair and kissed my astonished lips. Esmeralda stunned Quasimodo. She winked to let me in on the silly game. “Where have you been hiding, you pretty thing?” she asked. I doubted anyone would believe her charade, but I assumed that wasn’t the point. “Will you come see me soon?” Her voice was coy and disarming. “I miss you terribly.” She walked away, still looking at me, and blew me a kiss once she reached the door. “Call me,” she yelled. Her companion glared. He was a good head and a half taller than I.

  The soccer captain quickly positioned himself beside me. “You know Mariella Farouk?” His voice was surprisingly low and hesitant. “She’s hot, isn’t she?” His eyes were a light brown, possibly hazel, with three random flecks of maroon stationed differently in each. “Do you know her well?” he asked. “Umm, are you good friends? Have you known each other for a while? She’s going to compete for Miss Lebanon. I’m sure she’ll win.”

  One of his friends jumped in. “They say she gives the best head, which is remarkable in a way. You’d think a girl who looks like her wouldn’t have to. You know, an ugly girl should try harder and all that, but, no, she’s gorgeous and she likes it. You can’t beat that.”

 
I shuddered and felt my face flush. “She’s Fatima’s sister,” I exclaimed.

  The soccer captain shoved his friend. “Don’t mind him. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Let’s get some lemonade.”

  As the bus climbed the mountain to the ski resort, a confused Fatima, in the aisle seat next to me, tried to make sense of why the soccer captain had rushed to a seat across from her and was trying to engage her in small talk. It took all of two minutes for her to grow bored and feign sleep, her head nestled on my shoulder.

  A few months later, when the battles erupted in Lebanon, Mr. Farouk asked his wife to take their two daughters back to Rome, where she was from, to remain until the events in Beirut stabilized. Mariella refused to leave. She was having too good a time. She was an adult at nineteen. She had a life. No silly skirmishes were going to interfere with her plans.

  Mr. Farouk was killed first, in 1976. He was kidnapped by one of the militias, tortured, and slain. His mangled body was found in a ditch on Mazra Street. He was the first person I knew who died because of the civil war. His death completely overwhelmed Fatima, but not Mariella. He was well loved and respected, which meant that quite a few people, including my father, worked for many a day and sleepless night to get him released, but it was for naught, since no one could figure out which militia had kidnapped him and for what reason. He was ostensibly an apolitical Iraqi Christian with no known enemies. Fear of the irrational, of the random, caused stories to bubble up in explanation. Mr. Farouk was actually a CIA operative. He was an Israeli spy. He was a Syrian spy. He was a journalist writing the only true story exposing the conspiracy of the great nations against Lebanon. He was an Iraqi royal. He was a once-famous Latvian actor who ran afoul of the Soviet propaganda machine. His death had meaning.

  Even though her father’s murder should have offered Mariella an inkling of the dangers that could befall her, she was too involved to notice. Mariella would never have seen herself as a victim; she was a player. Like a lesser-stage Evita, she moved up the ranks, from one militiaman to another (Elie had been a practice run, a steppingstone). She was able to switch sides and back again a few times. The insignia on the uniform didn’t matter, the size of the gun did. Any other woman would have been terminated, but her talent made her untouchable, at least for a while.

  Mrs. Farouk called my mother daily from Rome. She begged, whimpered, and pleaded with my mother to help Mariella, make her call Rome, make her stop the lunacy. Mariella didn’t want or need my mother’s help. In fact, she helped us. Once, when our family got trapped in Beirut, Mariella sent a jeep to pick us up and ferry us to the safety of the mountains—safe for us, but risky for the driver and the accompanying bodyguard. Fatima would call her sister constantly, but Mariella had stopped listening to anyone.

  The soccer captain was right—she was crowned Miss Lebanon, but she was shot before she could make it to the Miss Universe contest. By the time she entered the Miss Lebanon competition, her reputation was such that a vote against her meant a judicious end to a judge’s life. She won even though she wasn’t a Lebanese citizen. More astonishing, she won even though she had bypassed the talent competition.

  It is said that she retained her temper and her tantrums. The story of her death became infamous. She had survived dumping power-hungry militia leaders; she had survived crossing from east to west and vice versa; she had survived a lover’s discovering her in bed with his underling. (The underling was more respected and promptly replaced the jilted man. Was Mariella an expert at leadership assessment, or was the mere fact that the underling bedded his superior’s girlfriend a cause for immediate respect? One wonders.) What proved fatal was accusing her last lover in front of other fighters of having an inadequate dick.

  Over the years, Fatima had expended great energy in debunking theories that she was who she was in response to her older sister. She called all such talk psychoanalytic psychobabble, and irrelevant to boot.

  But once, when we were kids, Mariella showed me a pendant she’d received for her birthday. “It’s a real emerald. My birthstone, and it matches my eyes.”

  Brown-eyed Fatima had an indecent fondness for emeralds.

  The boys began to spend more time in the world. They played in the grand garden, accompanied and watched over by the colorful parrots. The emir’s wife could see them throwing stones at an old elm tree’s trunk. She called to Shams from her balcony, but he pretended not to hear. She, on the other hand, could hear their joyous shrieks quite well. She called again, but her son only glanced up at her and returned to his playing. He threw a stone at the trunk, and from out of nowhere, a devotee jumped in front of the target and the stone struck her forehead. She covered her wound with both hands, bowed down before her prophet, and repeated, “Thank you, thank you,” before running away with the injurious stone in her possession.

  The green parrot squawked a warning, and the boys left the garden quickly. Three ecru-clothed devotees popped out from behind the hedges, too late to catch a glimpse of their adored.

  And, for the seventh time that morning, the emir’s wife wished her son’s dark slave an ignominious death. Tear him into a hundred pieces and roast the parrots and eat them all. One of the handmaids cleared her throat, interrupting the sumptuous reverie, and offered a letter once her presence was acknowledged. “Who is this from?” asked the emir’s wife.

  “I do not know, mistress,” the servant replied. “The letter appeared on a silver tray placed upon your bed.”

  The emir’s wife blanched upon reading the unsigned note: “What you desire can be accomplished with patience and my help. If you wish annihilation of the dark one, seat yourself beneath the third willow at midnight of the seventh night of the moon’s pregnancy.”

  • • •

  Under the third willow, the emir’s wife sat anxiously, her head covered with her cape. She glanced at the moon for the umpteenth time to make sure this was the proper night. Why was she always early? Royalty should make others wait. The night was still, not a breath of wind, yet the willow’s leaves rustled with a will of their own. She inhaled deeply and felt faint. The world shimmered, and a cloaked woman of manly size sat facing her beneath the second willow. Though the mooned night was bright, the cloak’s shadows hid the stranger’s features.

  “Royalty deigns not to speak to a supplicant with a hidden face,” the emir’s wife said.

  The woman chuckled and released her cloak, revealing a head and face wrapped in an unnatural haze. “What are you?” the emir’s wife asked. “Trickery does not impress me. I command you to show me your face.”

  “Which face would you like to see?” The woman’s voice was as deep as her laugh, throaty and rough. She snapped her fingers and the haze thinned. Her face was atrociously ugly and deformed.

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “Of course you do.” The woman snapped her fingers once more and her face transformed into that of the emir’s wife.

  “You are a witch.” Horrified, the emir’s wife covered her own face. “Remove that visage at once.”

  “As you please.” The woman changed her face into that of an ordinary peasant with unexceptional features.

  “Are you a witch?”

  “Of a kind. Are you interested in what I am or what I have to offer? I can help you get rid of your nemesis and mine, in time.”

  “I do not see how. I have tried everything. I have tried poisoning him, at least a hundred times, used every poison known to man, but the boy does not get so much as an upset stomach. I have hired killers to get rid of him and his mother, bird catchers for the parrots. They mock me. Last month, I had ten archers shoot at Fatima, and the arrows fell short of their target, who simply laughed.”

  “Mortal schemes will not injure her, and none will wound him, for he is a demon.”

  “Oh, come, come,” the emir’s wife scoffed. “He is an ugly brat, but a demon?”

  “He is not just a demon; he will rule their world. He is the king of jinn. Killing him will
not be easy, but it can be done. Is it what you desire?”

  “Of course it is. Kill him and I will reward you with whatever you wish. My son must be freed from his shadow.”

  “I cannot kill the dark one without your help. Throughout the ages, it has been so. To obliterate a demon king, his mother must destroy his life organs.”

  “Fatima could never hurt him.”

  The woman stared at the emir’s wife and hesitated. “But you can. Consider this: since he and your prophet are inseparable, fate considers him your son. When the time comes, will you have the courage to follow through?”

  “Yes. I will destroy his heart.”

  “Not his heart. He is a jinni. To kill him, his mother must destroy his testicles.”

  “Oh my.” The emir’s wife turned ashen. “He is still only eleven. They are not even functioning yet.”

  “Then we must wait until they are.”

  More on Fatima: Fast-forward to October 1990, I was twenty-nine, employed, a productive member of society, and Fatima was thirty, on her third marriage, a citizen of the world. Comparing her with my sister once more: After Elie, Lina gave up on marriage, or, really, never thought about it. She actually never thought about Elie, either, never saw him again after the wedding, which she claimed woke her up. On the other hand, after her first marriage, Fatima chose a different track. She upgraded, traded husbands in for better models.