Rabih Alameddine - The Hakawati

But before I forget, I want to tell you why all Mahdallah’s sons, my great-uncles, have short names (Aref, Jalal, Ma an).

On his first day of school, when my great-grandfather, a not very tall eight-year-old boy, met his teacher, she, in her prim, proper British manner, asked if he could speak English.

“Yes, madame. I can.”

She had her doubts, it seemed. She asked if he could read and write the language.

“Yes, madame. I can.”

In a firm, clipped voice, she demanded that he go up to the board and write his name.

He did:

MAHDALLAH ARISSEDDINE

“My dear young man,” the teacher said, “your name is longer than you are.”

And my great-grandfather was so shamed that he swore none of his descendants would ever endure such ignominy.

My niece was crying. My father had stopped responding to her. The technician nodded off next to the dialysis machine. The blood in the tubes looked more black than red, and it re-entered my father no redder. The ventilator inhaled and my father exhaled; he breathed in when it expired. Was that an inversely proportional relationship, or a direct relationship? My math failed me.

I wanted to pray but didn’t know to whom I should direct my pleading. There was no map to follow. My left hand caressed my father’s foot, came across moistureless crags. Lines forming unreal countries along his instep and sole. I walked to the nightstand and poured the verbena-scented lotion onto my hands. I massaged the moisturizer onto the arid skin of his foot. I loved the scent, my mother’s favorite. It made sense that he’d continue to use it. The miniature frame was still next to his bed. Her picture. She retained the same ageless look in every photograph, a regal amalgam of severity and benevolence. I wondered whether I was truly seeing the undersized photo or my memory was filling gaps where my eyesight failed.

Help me, Mother. He was your husband.

The technician opened his eyes. He looked dazed for a moment, stupefied. “Only a few minutes left,” he announced officially.

My niece and I could clearly see the time blinking two minutes, thirty-seven seconds, in big red digits. Thirty-six. Thirty-five.

Salwa gripped my father’s hand. “Everything will be all right, Grandfather.”

The machine beeped: a continuous high pitch that was surprisingly comforting. Pleased with himself, the technician restated the obvious: “It’s over.” He slid aside the single cotton sheet that was my father’s cover. He unhooked tubes from tubes, re-coiled the machine’s, opened a small trapdoor in the front, and put them in. He clamped shut the lonely tubes sprouting from the bloodstained, iodine-blotched skin of my father’s side. Medicinal smells.

“Are we going to remove the tubes?” I asked.

He stared back with confused and tarnished eyes. I wanted to relieve my father of some intrusion. If only I could pull out one tube — one single tube — we would all feel better.

The technician packed his machine more quickly. My niece watched everything in bafflement. We were strangers in a land where the natives spoke an incomprehensible language.

Mahdallah worked as a doctor for a year before he was approached by one of his old teachers. The Englishman made my great-grandfather a sweet offer. The Anglicans would send him to England to study further, to practice and learn in superior hospitals. The mission would pay for everything, for his entire family’s stay in England. The mission, however, could only make this offer to a member of its own congregation. To accept, Mahdallah had to be baptized.

My great-grandfather wasn’t religious. It was just that you didn’t change your religion. It wasn’t done. He may have become a Muslim, but he didn’t practice, didn’t take it seriously. He did it to get married. As a Druze, he couldn’t marry a Muslim or any non-Druze. All he did was state the Shahada, testify that there is no God but God and Muhammad is the Prophet of God. That was it. No big deal. Just a formality.

Baptism. Now, that’s a commitment.

The Anglicans had been trying to baptize Druze for years. The two groups were stuck with each other, like Nile crocodiles and plovers. Most of the infrastructure of the Ottoman Empire was in the cities and Muslim villages. The Catholic French and their charities directed their work at the Christian villages. The English and their missionaries couldn’t set up shop except in the Druze areas. The conversion rate was not very high.

An Englishwoman had pitched camp in the village in 1843. Her name was Helen Kitchen. With a seemingly endless supply of funds, she had a compound built, consisting of three impressive buildings, the first in the village with tiled roofs. There was already a school for boys, so she started one for girls. She made conversion a condition of entry. Girls wanted to learn. They made the sign of the cross, did their homework, left school, got married, and had kids, and no one remembered they were no longer supposed to be Druze.

After a few years, Mrs. Kitchen realized that the girls studied their Bibles and could sing hymns with the best of them but didn’t consider this a religion. When she attempted to make the ritual more serious (baptism?), the girls were shocked and embarrassed. Mrs. Kitchen stopped making conversion a requirement for enrollment. The girls still studied the Bible, sang hymns and Christmas carols, but there was no pretense anymore. Once, when a missionary confronted her, accusing, “But these girls aren’t Christians,” she replied, “Neither was Jesus.”

She educated thousands of girls, many from neighboring villages. She actually became a local. When she died, she was buried in a Druze cemetery. To this day, many Lebanese women, Druze and Christian, visit her grave and keep the site clean.

Mahdallah converted. He was watered. Secretly, though. He refused to baptize his son, Aref. No one suggested his wife convert. He would spend the rest of his life denying that deed.

The family spent four or five years in London. The gray weather didn’t suit them. They didn’t mind the cold — their village was colder — but the lack of sunshine ensured they would never settle in that city.

The village gossips said: The gray weather is making the harem girl barren.

The village gossips said: And God will never bless the betrayer again.

The village gossips were wrong on both counts. My great-grandparents had other children, but it took time — not as long as Abraham and Sarah, but long enough for gossip.

But here are two facts, documented and checked:

My great-grandparents Dr. Mahdallah and Mona Arisseddine and their son, Aref, around five years old at the time, boarded a Belgian-registered ship, the Leopold II , from England to the port city of Beirut, in June 1889.

My other great-grandfather, the esteemed missionary Dr. Simon Twining, accompanied by his recently betrothed, the heart of darkness, sailed from England to Beirut on the identical ship, the Leopold II , in June 1890.

The doctors would surely have met had they been on the same crossing. What would they have talked about, standing on deck, holding on to the railing, looking at the sun drowning in the golden Mediterranean? They wore similar cotton suits of Western cut, white shirts, ties. Their hats were also similar. Mahdallah would not wear his fez until he reached the village. They had countless things in common, or would have in times to come, and the conversation would not lag until, finally, Ah, sir, what say you we blend the seed of my loins with your seed and produce some exasperatingly strange characters: the wicked hag of the mountains, the naïve and haughty villager, the parsimonious simpleton, the talented, frustrated homosexual, and the sexual Sisyphus, who would betray his family over and over and over and over again?