The Hakawati

by Rabih Alameddine

  “You don’t have to come if you’re tired,” I told her. We sat in my kitchen, midafternoon. “It’s a casual dinner. Clark only wants to meet you. I can ask that we do it later.”

  In the fifteen years since I’d lived in Los Angeles, my parents had visited me three times, but this, in 1992, was the first since I had bought my new house. My father had met Clark, my supervisor. He had wanted to. Since he didn’t understand much about computers, he equated programming them with magic, and he wanted to meet the arch-magician, the high priest of binaries. And now Clark had suggested he give a dinner for my parents in order to meet my mother, whom he had heard so much about.

  “Don’t be silly,” she said. “I’ll be fine after a nap. He’s your boss. It can’t be that casual.”

  I chuckled. “It’s different over here, very laid-back. They don’t take their dinners that seriously. I’m not sure they take anything seriously.”

  She finished her coffee. “Well, we have to.” She stood up and began walking to the bedroom. “After all, I’m getting old, and I want to spend more time with my son. So I’m going to insist that your boss, what’s-his-name, give you more time off. You’ll visit Beirut more often. We’ll do all that after my nap.”

  I expected my father, who watched her get up, either to mention his concern for her or to make a quip about my infrequent visits, but he did neither. He followed her into the room.

  While my parents napped, I stayed in the kitchen reading The Handmaid’s Tale. I noticed a sputter of movement outside. A second glance showed a brown falcon on one of the branches of my avocado tree. Its beak was a striking, unnatural red, but then it bent its expressive head and tore off a sliver of flesh and feathers. The falcon had caught a city pigeon. Blood dripped from the carcass onto a lower branch. Momentary bright red streaked before the wood sucked the color in, turning it into a darker brown. A few drops fell on a leaf—poinsettias and Christmas.

  I didn’t know what to do. Wake my parents? I wanted to call someone, Fatima or Lina: Look. I can see a falcon having a pigeon feast in Los Angeles. Who would have thought? I called Animal Control. “Hi,” I said. “This might sound strange, but I have a falcon in my yard.”

  “So?” replied the Animal Control operator.

  “I don’t know. Doesn’t it seem strange that there’s a falcon in my yard?”

  “There are hundreds of falcons in L.A.,” she said.

  Once, when I was a young boy—I must have been six or seven—my father took me on a business trip to the United Arab Emirates, where the corporation’s partner was one of the ruling princes. On the third and last day, the prince drove us out of the city for an excursion. That was my first encounter with the desert. Sand dunes everywhere; no plant could survive, no living thing should in that barrenness. Giant oil fires billowed black smoke that mocked the heavens. We rode for a few hours, until we reached a cluster of tents that had been set up to host us. An impressive meal was served, and my father glared at me to ensure that I wouldn’t slip and ask for utensils. I didn’t eat much, because I couldn’t figure out how to scoop the rice into my mouth with just my fingers, much to the amusement of our hosts. After lunch, as the scorching sun cooled, the prince decided to show off his falconry skills. He perched one of his three falcons on his leather-laden arm. Even blindfolded, it looked proud and regal. His servants unleashed a pigeon into the skies, and the prince unhooded his falcon. The predator took off and majestically dived into his prey’s path. Claws dug into the helpless pigeon. The prince asked me, “Would you like to feel what it is like to have a bird of such magnificence on your arm?”

  I was frightened. My father suggested I was too young. The prince boasted that he was younger when he flew his first falcon. One of his servants put a long, fingerless leather glove on my right hand. It was much too big and loose. The prince coaxed the falcon onto my forearm. The falcon’s eyes were mean and menacing. I shivered. The falcon dug in his claws, and the glove offered scant protection. I felt a sharp pain. The falcon jerked and flew off, screeching as it ascended. The prince couldn’t catch the leather leash in time. The falcon soared high and far.

  The servants panicked, running around on the desolate sand with no apparent purpose. The prince shouted loudly and incomprehensibly. My father bent on one knee and removed the ineffective glove. Bright red bubbled from three punctures in my arm.

  “Your son frightened my falcon,” the prince said.

  “Damn your falcon to eternal hell,” my father replied. “My son bleeds.”

  When my father woke up from his nap, I told him about the falcon and wondered whether he remembered the one in the Emirates all those years ago. He couldn’t recall a thing. I brought up all my markers—the desert drive, the grandiose flames of oil rigs, hands forming rice balls and flipping them into open mouths—but he dismissed my recollection. “I’d have remembered something like that,” he said. “Your arm was hurt?”

  Uncle Jihad used to say that what happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of those events affect us. My father and I may have shared numerous experiences, but, as I was constantly finding out, we rarely shared their stories; we didn’t know how to listen to one another.

  “It is time.” The woman sat under the second willow. “We must act without delay. Are you ready?” The emir’s wife lowered her voice so she would sound serious and resolute. “Of course I am. The dark one and his evil mother must disappear.”

  “So they shall. Tomorrow, when the sun extinguishes itself in the sea, invite Fatima to tea. If you are able to remove the amulet from her person for a moment, I will make sure she never plagues your life again.”

  “What about the boy?”

  “The boy will be no trouble. I can handle him easily.”

  “All you ask of me is to invite Fatima to tea and remove her amulet?”

  “You must invite me as well.”

  “I do not understand.”

  “Invite me.”

  “Will you join me for tea tomorrow evening?”

  The woman smiled, and even though her face looked like that of an ordinary peasant, the emir’s wife was frightened.

  I was wrong. The dinner party wasn’t exactly casual. Joyce and Clark had invited three other Ellisen employees and their spouses for dinner in their yard. Joyce, a good chef, had gone overboard. When she told us we were to sit outdoors, my mother announced, “Dinner in the garden. How lovely!” After which everyone referred to the yard as the garden.

  A damp warmth soaked the evening air. Clark wiped his brow and moved his chair next to my mother’s. Usually, at any social event with my co-workers, we relied on Joyce and the other spouses to provide a spark. We, programmers all, weren’t known for our conversational charm. Tonight, though, my mother, still dazzling at sixty, held court. My parents’ aging had shifted their party roles. My mother, who used to be more reserved at social gatherings, had become more vivacious; my father, more reticent. Women used to fawn over him at get-togethers; he showered them with attention and listened rapturously to their concerns. He no longer listened as much. At some point, my mother had decided to make this evening memorable, and she was well on her way. As it had always been, gay men—in this case, Luis and his boyfriend—fluttered about her radiance like moths, and she basked. The women fawned over her now, while their husbands pretended to hold themselves back. I gave them until the third glass of wine before they unleashed their adulation.

  The evening light dropped an octave lower, and my mother went into high gear, without budging from her throne. Her idiosyncratic laugh—a noisy, sharp aspiration—filled the night.

  Megan, one of my co-workers, was thrilled when she tasted the soup. “Potato-and-leek,” she exclaimed. “My favorite.”

  “Vichyssoise,” corrected Luis. “You know how the Eskimos have a million words for snow. Well, Joyce has a million words for potato-and-leek soup.”

  “That’s an urban
legend,” my mother said. “English probably has as many lexemes for the word ‘snow’ as Inuit. French has more.”

  “Really?” said Luis. “I always thought it was true.”

  “We all do, because it has a nice ring to it.” My mother put her soupspoon down. “The legend began in 1911, when the anthropologist Franz Boas—aren’t they always the troublemakers?—wrote that the Inuit had four words for snow. In each retelling, as with any good story, the number increased, until one newspaper mentioned four hundred.”

  “Speaking of four hundred,” Clark said. “Now that I have you here, Mrs. Kharrat, I have to ask. Is it true that Osama has hundreds and hundreds of cousins? It’s always ‘my cousin did this’ or ‘my cousin said that.’ He’s always talking about some cousin or other.”

  “I don’t think he has that many,” my mother said. “He certainly doesn’t have many on my side of the family.” She held my father’s hand. “He does have a few on his father’s side. But I can see why it can be confusing for you, because in English they’re all cousins. You can’t even differentiate by gender. In Lebanese we have different words for each kind of cousin, pinpointing each family relationship.” She chuckled. “This isn’t urban legend. You can say that Lebanese has hundreds of lexemes for family relations. Family to the Lebanese is as snow to the Inuit.”

  Carol, another of my co-workers, had been quiet for a while, staring at my mother. Finally, she said, “I’m so envious. I don’t know how you European women do it. You’re always elegant without even trying.”

  “I work hard at it,” my mother replied. “It only looks like I don’t.”

  “No, please. Just look at you right now. I couldn’t carry that off in a million years, and neither could any of my friends.” She looked at Megan, who nodded in agreement. “You have very little makeup on. If I wore your blue dress, it would look silly on me. I think it’s the way you carry yourself. I wish I knew how. I’m just a fuddy-duddy.”

  I could see my mother hesitate, surprised by the illusory intimacy. She glanced at my father and then at me, and I discreetly shook my head no. “You’re not a fuddy-duddy, darling, whatever that means,” my mother said. “You’re very pretty, very pretty.”

  Carol lowered her head, as if talking to herself. The wine had infected both her diction and her loquacity. “I’m not talking about that. It’s class. It’s the look. It doesn’t matter how expensive a dress I wear or how I do my hair. I bet you look stylish and chic in a nightgown.” She paused, sank even lower in her chair, and whispered, “I want that.”

  Her husband swallowed a bountiful gulp of Cabernet. “Well, how about if you stopped looking like a girl? She’s a woman, a lady.” His third glass of wine?

  The look of horror on Carol’s face was no match for the ones on the hosts’. My father couldn’t mask his surprise.

  “Now, now. That was rude.” My mother turned her full attention to Carol. “Now, dear, do you really want to hear some advice?” My mother must have had three glasses of wine, but her eyes were alert, and her gaze was ever devoted and fixed.

  “Yes, definitely.” Carol slapped her husband’s hand.

  “Do you want practical or philosophical suggestions?”

  “Both.”

  “Get your colors done. You have to know what looks good on you.”

  “But I have,” whined Carol.

  “Oh, heavens. That’s surprising.” My mother put her palms on her thighs. “Well, get them done again, dear, and not at a department store this time. The Versace sweater doesn’t suit you. You only wear him if you want the greasy gutter boys of Milano to hoot and whistle when you walk by. The color is wrong, wrong, wrong. You can’t carry off that orange; few people could. Frankly, I don’t see why anyone would want to. It’s such a repulsive color, so Dutch. Get your colors done, darling. Promise me.”

  I knew what was coming next and could probably have repeated it verbatim.

  “Now, when my son was younger—when was it, darling, ten years ago?”

  “Twelve.” I closed my eyes.

  “Well, we got together in Paris. He was still at university and he arrived looking so bedraggled and shabby. I wanted to buy him something nice, so I took him to Boss. He loved a lot of the things, but he refused to try on most of them. I kept pestering him, and finally he said, ‘It doesn’t matter what I wear, I’ll never look like him,’ and he pointed to the delicious blond Boss model. So I told him, ‘Big deal. I don’t look like Catherine Deneuve, either, but that doesn’t mean I have to look like that dead singer’—what’s her name?”

  “Janis Joplin,” I said.

  “Yes, her. So my boy comes up with the wisest thing. He said, ‘Everything here is too big for me. I couldn’t grow into it.’ At first, I thought he was talking about his physical size, so I tried to reassure him—it can’t be easy being small. But then I realized he was talking about something else. He really couldn’t make those clothes fit him. In his mind, the Boss suit was made for that blond model, not him. And that’s the secret. Never wear clothes that are bigger than you are unless you intend to grow into them. If you want to wear a great suit, either you believe it belongs to you or you’ll look like you’re thirteen and wearing your mother’s clothes. Doesn’t that make sense? It’s the same in life. Never live a life too big for you. You either grow bigger to encompass it or shrink it to fit you. I wonder which country invented shrink-to-fit. Oh boy, I’m not making sense, waxing philosophical. Just call me Nietzsche—no, not him. Who’s the one who wrote about aesthetics?”

  “Hegel,” I said, knowing full well that she knew the answer to every question she had asked me.

  “Yes, call me him.”

  The emir’s wife poured a cup of tea for Fatima, who was leery of her hostess’s intentions. “Why am I here?” Fatima asked.

  “I thought we should start afresh,” replied the emir’s wife. “I know we have not always seen eye to eye, but I was hoping we could work on our issues, woman to woman.”

  “How do you propose we do that?”

  “By being civil first. We get to know each other as friends, no longer mistress and slave, but equals.”

  “But I have not been your slave for years.”

  “See?” The emir’s wife poured herself a cup. “Our relationship is already improving. We can do what civilized women everywhere do, drink tea, chat, gossip, discuss important topics.”

  “If you are trying to make peace, there is no need to work so hard. I have nothing against you. I am willing to give you what you want without having to drink tea.”

  “I want us to be friends. We can talk about what friends talk about, the weather, fashion.”

  “But you only wear one thing.”

  “I can compromise. I can also admire beautiful things. You wear the nicest robes, and that amulet on your neck is utterly wonderful. May I see it?”

  Fatima hesitated and tried to gauge what the emir’s wife was up to, but she figured she was aboveground and indoors. She unclasped the necklace and handed it to the emir’s wife. And the room rocked and filled with smoke and the stench of rotted flesh. A giant blue monster with three red eyes and four arms held a sword, a cudgel, a cup, and the head of a man by its hair. A necklace of skulls was her naked body’s only adornment. “Fool, what have you done?” Fatima screamed at the emir’s wife. “You invited a demon into your home?” She reached out to grab her talisman but was too slow. The monster unleashed a fire upon her, and she disappeared.

  “You can give humans many gifts,” the demon Hannya said, “but they never seem to be willing to give up their naïve humanity. One should never be allowed to be invulnerable. It is unhealthy.” She extended her sword and used it to move Fatima’s hand along the emir’s wife’s trembling lap. “This is useless now. You can wear it since you think it lovely. You had better be ready for tonight. I will not have you fail me.”

  One day in February 1993, my mother developed a severe backache and then even worse abdominal pains. Her symptoms were
difficult to diagnose in the first two days, but when jaundice made its portentous appearance, a histopathology was performed. She was offered a diagnosis: pancreatic cancer, stage IV B, and a life expectancy of two months at best. When the doctors told her, my mother didn’t cry; she did what absolutely no one had expected. She walked out on my father.

  After thirty-seven years of marriage, she packed a small bag—a very small bag; “I won’t be needing much,” she told Lina—and left. It didn’t occur to her until she stood on the doorstep to wonder where she would go. She had no close family in Lebanon, and no friends, either, since they had all left during the war and had yet to return. On the spot, she made another decision that shocked everyone who knew her. She took a cab to Aunt Samia’s apartment and moved into her guest room. One could say that no one was more surprised than the hostess herself.

  My mother’s parting words were “Let him get used to my not being there.”

  Was it a scandal? Not as much as one would have thought. Few people outside of family knew about it, and for those who did, Aunt Samia had her lines prepared. “But Layla is at her own home, of course,” she would say. “I can take care of my sister better than anyone. It was easier to move her than for me to move in. The whole family is at my house now anyway.”

  To this day, none of us can figure out why my mother did it. The assumption at first was that she meant to punish my father, and her leaving did overwhelm him, but that was much too simplistic. He rarely left her side while she was at my aunt’s. In the first few days, he pleaded with her to come back home, but soon yielded to her obstinacy. In some ways, she allowed him more access to her than she ever had, but she refused to return. He became her manservant in an unfamiliar home. Early on, while she was still mobile, but doped up on painkillers and exhausted from chemotherapy, he wouldn’t allow anyone else to help her get around. He arrived every morning at seven, waited for my aunt’s maid to bring the tray of coffee, and took it in himself and woke her. He would stay with her until she kicked him out, which she apparently did only when she thought he needed a break. Even when she became completely infirm and a nurse was brought in, he remained her primary caretaker. She triumphantly exceeded the doctors’ expectations by living for nine and a half months. And she died in the hospital with her family around her, and her husband crying and kissing her hand, swearing upon his mother’s grave that she was the only woman he had ever loved.