Jabbour Douaihy - June Rain

Then came another type of dog, which made its way into the homes of the spoiled daughters of dignitaries who attended the elite nuns’ school in Beirut. When they first appeared, they were small and could be held and patted, and there wasn’t anything surprising about the matter until the big shock we had the day we saw a young man from our town walking down the main street. We knew the young man was one of us and it was clear he resembled us, and even if he had been away from the town a little while, he was still one of us. We saw him walking down the street leading a strange-looking dog on leash. It was a miniature dog one might say, and he had stitched a little embroidered harness for it and attached something that dangled from its neck. Some of the young men whistled at him disapprovingly, but what made the shock an even bigger blow was that he didn’t show the least bit of concern. Actually, and perhaps in an act of bravado, he motioned to the little doggie and it jumped up into his arms. He picked him up and walked away while the dog looked in wonder at us with his little eyes from over his owner’s shoulder, protected by him from the harm he instinctively felt we might inflict on him. From that day forward we had our suspicions about that man’s manhood, considering his preference to befriend a little dog over us, but a much deeper feeling struck us even if we didn’t reveal it, which was that the world was changing and there was nothing we could do to stop it.

Eliyya set out into the streets of New York and, for more than twenty years, never slowed down. Like a toddler he discovered the pleasure of walking by himself and savoured it, the way a swimmer savours plunging into water. No wonder he didn’t last more than a month in the mechanical engineering course that, in accordance with his original plan, he registered for the moment he arrived. Those dust-ridden professors’ lectures soon reminded him of dull physics lessons from high school. So he quit the university and though he didn’t need the money, he answered a classified ad he saw in the subway and took a job in a fast-food restaurant in one of the city suburbs. In the backroom bathroom there, he experienced his first kiss. He kept his eyes closed while kissing one of the waitresses, who told him that she preferred to see his eyes open when he kissed her, because that excited her more.

After learning how to make every kind of pizza, he decided he’d had enough and started taking German lessons from a blonde American teacher he dreamed of dating. He tried every trick in the book, but in vain. At his first lesson she asked him in English why he had chosen to learn the language of Goethe, so he told her he was preparing himself to major in philosophy and made a facial expression suggesting that was understandable. That spontaneous answer of his may actually have driven him to attend lectures on Hegel’s philosophy he otherwise never would have dreamt of attending. He stuck with it despite not understanding much, or rather without understanding anything, though he refused to admit he hadn’t been able to grasp concepts like Begriff or Aufhebung . He stayed put as if nailed to his chair, not understanding a thing and making sure not to give the impression that he did understand, in case the lecturer asked him a revealing question he couldn’t answer. After a month’s time, however, he was able to pick up some imperfect expressions and ideas that reverberated in his head and enabled him to pretend he was an expert in German philosophy.

To compensate for the theoretical imprisonment that nearly sucked out all his emotions, he joined the New York Knicks basketball team fan club with a sweeping and excessive enthusiasm that was comical coming from a newcomer to the giant city. For an entire season he didn’t miss a single game, sometimes travelling with the Knicks to whichever state their schedule took them. A deep-seated desire to learn began to consume him again whenever he became idle for any period of time, as though his life had come to depend on resuming the lifestyle of the Gang Quarter kids balanced with a desire for every aspect of knowledge, the one making amends for the other in one way or another. And so Eliyya headed back to the university, but primarily as an auditor, convinced from the outset that his stay there would not be long.

His languages, or half-languages, became quite numerous, infringing on each other and getting all tangled up. He realised how strange his condition was when ideas and questions started coming to him in French while other ideas enticed him in English or even in German. And he embellished these languages with some phrases in Latin, too, while little by little the influence of Arabic began to diminish. He was happy with this polyphony and actually worked as an interpreter for the scientific delegations that never stopped coming to New York. He also worked as a security guard at an amusement park and as a taxi driver in order to gain life experience, as he said, referring to a scene in a movie he saw three times but whose title he didn’t know, having arrived too late to the cinema each time to catch the opening credits.

Likewise, he constantly changed his residence. He moved from one apartment to another, taking some paintings, two boxes of books — mostly dictionaries — and a basketball signed by Magic Johnson with him. He changed his residence as often as he changed his glasses, tiring of the wide frames in favour of thin lenses and dark sunglasses before settling on contact lenses. Public libraries, especially university libraries, never failed to provide him with the perfect backdrop for his activities. It did not take him long to discover that he had a quality that girls found comforting. He always found himself surrounded by humanities students who were more attracted to a man’s intellect than his broad shoulders. Eliyya went overboard with alluring talk and whenever he discussed any topic, he was a master in the art of suggesting he knew more than he was saying. To this end he resorted to embarrassing others with statements like, ‘You must know, of course, that Picasso was stingy’ or ‘Soon the neo-Trotskyites will rule the United States, as you well know,’ leaving them with a blank stare of ignorance and in awe of Eliyya’s unquestionable superiority.

Early on he began collecting literary and philosophic quotations. Short sentences he picked up here and there, from Saint Augustine to Jacques Derrida, and wrote down in a notebook and tried to memorise for future use, things that would have a strong impact when needed and give the impression he had a saying for every occasion. That was one of his methods of seduction. And during that period, before he went to sleep each night, he always wrote down at least one sentence he dug out from his personal feelings, even if it had become difficult to distinguish his own thoughts from those he’d memorised from the geniuses of the world. He promoted the idea sometimes that he was the last of the romantics and other times the first of the numerologists, publicising his preference for French surrealist painting by dropping the names of obscure artists and poets as if they were his close friends.

At the other end of the spectrum of human desire, cooking was his chosen method of seduction. He learned how to cook from books and practised preparing dishes with a high level of patience that always rewarded him. He studied food in books and if the topic was brought up in conversation he shocked anyone listening with his uncanny ability to differentiate between the ingredients used in Thai cuisine and the basic ingredients in Korean cooking. He memorised a long list of the names of gourmet restaurants in all the New York neighbourhoods. But despite all that, he remained a lone performer who had happily left his family only to tumble all alone into the very place his ancestors had landed a century before him and where their names are still recorded in the register at Ellis Island.