“You are fatigued,” said Taboush.
“And you are not yet ready for Aydmur. I will not have my son unprepared.”
“Stop,” Taboush commanded. “You are my father.”
Marouf wept in joy at hearing his son’s words.
“Wait for me,” Taboush said. He went back to Kinyar’s army and stood face to face with his false father. “I am returning to my family,” the hero announced. “I will fight alongside my people. Go home, or be prepared to die at my hands. Pack your meager possessions and leave. You are not welcome on our lands.”
Taboush returned to his father and accompanied him back to a grateful Baybars.
Marouf told the warrior Taboush about his mother. “She is a Genovese princess. Her father had her kidnapped and brought her back to that cursed city, where he holds her prisoner. She refused to be set free until the day I found you. I will sail today and bring her back.”
“You will not sail alone,” said the son, and the two heroes sailed to Genoa.
Taboush and Marouf faced the king of Genoa in the royal hall. The king inquired who they were. “I am your son-in-law,” said Marouf. “I intend to reclaim my wife.”
“You are not part of my family,” snapped the king. “Whatever wife you seek does not reside here, for I do not recognize your marriage.”
Marouf’s face and ears colored with rage. “I have come for my wife, not for your permission or approval.”
“You insult us in our court? Not only an unbeliever, but an obnoxious and dimwitted one. Your breath shall leave our port city before you do.” The king turned to his guards. “Throw these imbeciles in the dungeon. I never want to hear of them again.”
The soldiers took a step toward the heroes but stopped upon hearing Taboush’s voice. “Any man who comes within the range of my sword will have to search for his head, after which my sword will divide him in two. Save your life and save our time. Release my mother.”
“Are you afraid of one man?” the king berated his soldiers. “Are my guards cowards? This man is nothing but—” He stared at Taboush, his eyes widening. The king saw the brow and cheeks of his father, and his father’s father. “This man is nothing but my blood. Be afraid. My grandson. Why was I not informed my daughter had a son? Prepare a banquet. Light the lamps of Genoa. Light the fires of joy.”
“Release my mother,” commanded Taboush.
The virtuous Maria entered her father’s royal hall, her head high and proud. She refused to bow before the king. “Why do you call for me after all these years?”
“My grandson asked for your release,” replied the king, gesturing toward the hero.
Maria stared at the visitors. “Time has been unkind to both of us, but still I know you, my husband.” And Marouf said, “I bring you the end of your sorrows, my wife.”
“How do I know he is my son?” Maria approached Taboush. When she stood before him and saw his eyes, she said, “It is you,” and fainted.
Taboush did not allow his mother to fall. He caught her and carried her to a divan.
Baybars offered Marouf, Maria, and Taboush a royal welcome upon their return. The sultan decreed, “Taboush is a king descended from kings. Let all who know him accept this.” A tired Baybars lay on his outdoor divan, surrounded by his friends, and watched the youngster disarm every rival he faced. “A magnificent warrior,” Baybars said. “You should be proud.”
“I am,” replied a glowing Marouf. “A son that brings joy to any father’s heart.”
And Taboush became a hero of the lands.
Twenty
Sitting on the recliner close to my father’s bed, Lina was crying so much she seemed almost happy, relieved to be discharging her sorrows temporarily—in the midst of swimming across the ocean, a few minutes on a raft. “Are you all right?” I asked.
“Not really.” She sighed wistfully. Fatigue hunched and curved her. “Why don’t you go home and rest for a bit?”
“I think I will, but when I come back, you’ll take a break. You’ll go home and take a bubble bath. I’ll take a drive. I need to see the old neighborhood again.”
“Why now? There’s nothing there.”
I shrugged. “It was Hafez’s idea. I want to remember.”
“And I want cigarettes,” she said.
Once upon a time, I was a boy with potential. I roamed the streets of this neighborhood. Once upon a time, this was a neighborhood with possibility. Now it lay decrepit, dying. A couple of buildings were being erected. A few people walked here and there. Hope, however, was nowhere to be found. Once upon a time, I used to play in these streets, scamper between these buildings. This used to be both my sanctuary and my mystery zone. Under garden shrubs, in concrete nooks, behind ivy-covered metal railings, I hid and observed the world around me. Now everything seemed wide open. The neighborhood had developed new habits. Still, I wanted to find my way home. I wanted to walk through the lobby, take the stairs—not the unreliable elevator—go up past the apartment with the fig tree to the fourth floor, and be there, exist.
But my knees were weak. I stood outside the building leaning against my father’s black car, as I had been a few days earlier, staring, lost in a world I knew nothing of. I was a tortoise that had misplaced its shell. The same old man was sitting on the same stool in the same spot. His white hair was still upright, and he still stared through me as if I didn’t exist.
I always imagined depression as necrotizing bacteria, and I felt flesh-eating gloom approaching. Think pleasant thoughts.
The tangy, sweet taste of freshly picked mulberries on my tongue.
Maqâm Saba.
Fatima holding me. The light on Lake Como. Fatima in a veil.
The noise on Via Natale del Grande. Beirut in April.
Uncle Jihad walking into a room. Uncle Jihad telling me stories. My grandfather drinking maté next to his stove.
Mr. Farouk in the bathtub, the oud on his dry, round stomach, playing his homeland’s maqâms because the acoustics were delightful in the bathroom, playing them by the light of candles floating in the tub, playing them to seduce me into playing again.
The Arab voice of Umm Kalthoum.
My father’s black hair, thick enough for fingers to hide in. My mother’s beehive. The acidic smell of her hairspray. Her ruby ring.
On the seventh day, Shams stopped howling, though he kept weeping. He stood up, stormed out of his room with Ishmael and Isaac keeping pace, and opened every door in the palace. “Layl,” he cried, “where are you?” He walked in on the emir’s wife admonishing a servant for forgetting to dust under the bed. “Layl, where are you?”
He walked in on the emir lying fully clothed on a bed, berating a naked maid. “How can you not know what Layla does to her husband, Othman?” the emir asked. “Have you not been paying attention to the story? I want you to do to me what Layla does to Othman.”
“Layl,” Shams cried. “Where are you?”
In the kitchen, he saw the staff preparing meals, but no trace of his twin. In the halls, viziers and ministers ran around chiding their attendants. In the dining room, thirteen servants polished silverware, gossiping and mocking their patrons. Grooms fed horses in the stables, yet there was no trace of his beloved. He ventured out of the palace and into the garden. The line of waiting worshippers remained as long as ever, all weeping and commiserating, thousands of humans, but no Layl. Their idol and his guardian imps broke through the line, back and forth, and none dared reach out to him or utter a word. Shams entered his temple, gawped at the throne. Standing before his altar, he unleashed another howl and was joined by Isaac and Ishmael.
He returned to the palace and retraced his steps, opening every door, checking every room, until he was back at the shrine howling again. For forty days and forty nights, he repeated the faithful process, a ritual of anguish, his feet landing in the same marks each time.
The fall from the worshipped to the mocked is a short one. Those who once prayed to him began to poke fun at him. The i
dol had become a joke. No longer the prophet or Guruji, he became Majnoun, the crazy one.
The emir’s wife woke up feeling light and cheerful. She touched her husband gently, and he jolted up in bed, shouting, “Taboush, hero of the lands.” He looked right and left to gauge where he was.
“I feel wonderful this morning,” his wife said.
“You are hot,” the emir said.
“Really?” She put her hands to her cheeks.
He raised the sheets and looked under. “Your hand is hot. Look.”
She tilted her head. “Not now, dear. I am feeling good this morning.”
“But look at my member’s tumescence. It has never been this big. You are hot.”
“Oh,” she exclaimed as waves of heat shimmered up from her body.
Majnoun opened the bedroom door. “Layl, where are you?” He walked in, followed by the two red imps, tears trickling down his face. He looked under the bed, behind the curtains, behind the two chairs. He walked out.
“A momentous change has come upon me,” said the emir’s wife, “and I do not mean menopause.”
Needing to be distracted, the emir rose and went off in search of his hakawati. The emir’s wife called her maid. “Dress me in my finest.” The maid stared hopelessly at the rows and rows of ecru robes. “That one,” the emir’s wife said, pointing. “And bring out my diamonds.”
The line of devotees had not moved for days and days, but when the prophet’s mother entered the sun temple, a twitter rose among the believers. The emir’s wife sat on the throne, smoothed her robe, patted her hair into place. “Next.”
• • •
As the tales of Majnoun traveled the land, so did those of his mother. He did not sleep, they said, he did not eat, but kept searching for a love long vanished. Demons of love tortured his restless world. His turquoise eyes had turned ruby.
His mother—his mother, though, was astonishing. She was not the bearer of miracles her son had been, but she gave better advice. She was, after all, more devout. “My child,” the emir’s wife said to a young woman who was problematically hirsute. “Pluck, pluck, pluck. Never shave. God does not bless those who avoid hard work. You are still young; you do not want stalks of wheat growing there when you are forty.” The line grew, and the seekers returned in force.
And on the fortieth day, Majnoun left the palace. In the inhospitable desert where little lived, Majnoun wandered night and day. Every rootless tribe he encountered along the way began by mocking him.
“There walks Majnoun, the insane one. He fell in love with a boy.”
“There goes Majnoun, the madman. He fell in love with his brother.”
But the desert Bedouins wept upon first sight of Majnoun’s unrequited grief.
With each step, Majnoun tore out a clump of his beautiful hair, throwing it behind him. The hair grew back instantly, only to be clutched and torn once more, and again. Following the forlorn one, Isaac and Ishmael walked a trail of sun-colored hair that snaked across the desert. Wind could not move the trail or change its direction, and all the weeping creatures of the desert began to follow the march of grief. Shams roamed until the trail was two hundred and forty-nine leagues, and then he collapsed upon the sand and buried himself underneath.
“Come out, my nephew,” said Ishmael.
“Rise, my hero,” said Isaac.
The old man leaned forward on his stool and squinted at me. “I know you,” he suddenly said. His hand infiltrated his sparse, spiked hair. “I know who you are.”
And I awoke from my stupor.
“You don’t recognize me,” he said, not sounding offended. When he spoke, it seemed only his mouth moved, while the rest of his face remained still. “I remember you as a boy. I remember most of the children of the neighborhood, everyone who used to play on this street. You didn’t play much.” The neighborhood was eerily quiet. The cars on the main street, three bullet-ridden buildings away, seemed to be running noiselessly, images of cars instead of real. “No one plays on the street anymore.” The old man stated the obvious. Anyone not interested in a mud bath would avoid walking on the street, let alone playing on it. “No one cares anymore.” He paused briefly. “I didn’t really live here then, which is probably why you don’t remember me. My sister did. You’d know her. My name is Joseph Hananiah.”
I wanted to say, “And I’m Osama al-Kharrat, your relative,” but he wouldn’t have understood. No one remembered the story of Hananiah anymore. Fewer still would recognize the word “Ananias.” Kharrat, Hananiah, liars of the world, unite.
“You don’t remember?” he asked. “My sister was Hoda Salloum. The concierge’s wife. Elie’s mother. Remember?”
Just what I needed. More family.
“My father isn’t doing well,” I exclaimed, not knowing why. “He’s dying.”
“I’m sorry,” old man Hananiah said.
“I’m sorry, too,” I said. “I just had to take a break from the hospital.”
“I didn’t know him well, but we all respected him. A good man, and decent. He didn’t deserve what my nephew did.”
“Elie was a good man as well. They were difficult times.”
“Elie was a good-for-nothing fake-idealist bastard,” the man went on, “bringing disgrace to us all, forcing his parent into an early grave. Even his death did nothing to ease their shame.”
“I didn’t even know he’d died,” I said, and I tried to change the subject. “I wanted to come back here to see, to go up those stairs.”
He continued to stare at a point in the distance. “Why?”
“I have never been good with answers,” I said. I could tell stories, but explanations always eluded me—an observer, not an expositor, a chronic coward. I paused, felt awkward. I took a deep breath. “Forgive me. I’m just babbling.”
“You call that babbling?” He chuckled. “You don’t talk much.”
I sat down on the sidewalk next to the old man. It was noon now, and the saffron sun stood equidistant from its goals. The world was echoing in my ears, and I had to look up at the old man when he spoke. “There’s a nice family from the south living in your apartment. I think the wife and kids are up there, but I wouldn’t disturb them if I were you. What’s the point?”
“I have to leave anyway. I should go back to the hospital.”
From a distance, a muezzin called in his faint megaphone voice, sounding like a boy reciting a lesson. I couldn’t lift myself off the sidewalk. A black Toyota Camry parked right in front of us, and Hafez, ever the company man, got out of it. His dark sunglasses made him look like a blind man missing his accordion. “Hello, Joseph. How are you today?”
The old man’s face lit up. “Hafez, I have a complaint to make. Your cousin didn’t remember me.”
“Forgive him, Uncle,” Hafez said, sitting on the pavement next to me. “He’s been living abroad. He doesn’t remember much. That’s what we’re here for.” He put his hands behind him and leaned back. “Did you see your home?”
“No,” I said. “I’ve just been sitting here for a while.”
“Come.” He stood up and stretched, like an athlete before a run. “Let’s go look.”
And Isaac commanded the desert’s red scorpions to disinter Majnoun. From under the shifty sands he was lifted. Atop thousands of stingers he floated, and upon the trail of sun-hardened hair he was placed.
“Rise, my nephew,” spoke Isaac. “Rise and greet the changing landscape.”
“Rise, my hero,” spoke Ishmael. “Rise and meet the new world order.”
Majnoun opened his eyes and moaned. “I long,” he said hoarsely, “to see his face once more, to touch his dark and barklike skin, to rake my fingers through his coarse hair. I sigh for what once was and will never be again. I am no longer one who holds the thread to my fate. Longing is full of unmanageable distances. Thus, my life is forfeit.”
Majnoun and Isaac and Ishmael wept, as did all the animals gathered round them, the desert swallowing the falling tears, l
eaving their salt to mix with sand.
The desert snakes lifted their heads into the parched air, and one of them said, “Let it not be forfeit. Consider all pleasures life can offer, those that were and those yet to come.”
“Pleasures?” cried Majnoun. “Lewd visions of my pleasures with Layl have collared my wretched soul. My eyes see nothing but his lust, and I wish for nothing but his wantonness.”
“Wait,” begged a camel. “God rewards the patient.”
“Rediscover the enjoyment of eating,” cried a vulture. “Think of what it felt like to contemplate a great meal before you, how it felt to be sated.”
“Food?” wailed Majnoun. “His skin was what I tasted upon waking, and his flavor was what put me to sleep. I hunger for nothing but him.”
“You are power descended from power,” announced a lion of the desert. “You are the mightiest creature of above and below. You can rule us all. We will worship and serve you. Does that not entice you?”
“Power?” moaned Majnoun. “I would rather live life on my knees before my beloved than become the master of all realms. For one more kiss of his lips, I would let the Furies torture my soul for eternity. The tiniest kernel of my being has no desire but Layl, for he has melted into my heart. Power means naught if it cannot fulfill my one desire.”
“I beg to differ,” interrupted the owl.
“About time,” said Ishmael.
“Do you remember how Psyche regained the love of Eros after all hope was gone?” said the owl. “How she survived Aphrodite’s wrathful vengeance and triumphed?”
“But I am not a helpless little girl,” responded Majnoun.
“You are,” said the owl. “You are both Psyche and Aphrodite; both the falcon and the partridge. You are Eros as well. You are the demon king.”
“That was Layl, not me.”
“You are Layl as well,” counseled the owl. “Surrender. Pain is proportional to wanting the world to be other than it is.”
The Hakawati Page 56
