Elias Khoury - The Journey of Little Gandhi

For two years Alice had been living in the Salonica Hotel. The Montana opened its doors after the Israeli withdrawal from Beirut, which led to the massacres of Sabra and Shatila, but Alice didn’t go back to the Montana. One of the Egyptian girls told her Zaylaa was asking about her. Alice said, “Forget it, I’ve retired, I’m going to stay in this hotel, and I’ll die in this hotel.” And she stayed in the hotel. When I went there to ask about her after the war broke out again in 1984, I didn’t find anyone. The hotel was in ruins, some armed men surrounded it. I didn’t ask the men about Alice, or Abd al-Hakim the Egyptian. I went home and decided to go and ask Zaylaa.

At the Montana, I didn’t find Zaylaa. I found a man that resembled him. Alice had described him to me. She said he was dark-skinned, had a broken front tooth, a thick neck, and a low, husky voice that seemed to come from deep down in his belly. At the entrance of the Montana I saw a man with this description, so I asked him about Zaylaa.

“Which Zaylaa?”

“Hasan Zaylaa, the tough guy, the one in charge of the Montana, isn’t that who you are?” I answered him.

“There’s no Zaylaa.”

“Please. I’m looking for a woman called Alice.”

“Alice what?”

“I don’t know. Alice, that woman who’s around sixty years old who used to work here selling flowers.”

“What flowers? We don’t sell flowers.”

“O.K. Husn, do you know Husn?”

“What are you, the police? Running an interrogation? This is a bar called the Montana, there’s no Alice, no Husn, no.flowers, there are whores, if you want one, we can arrange it, and we’ll give you a good price, too.”

Alice was lost, they were all lost.

Even Rima. I didn’t find a trace of her. They said they saw her once. She came to Spiro with the hat’s house to ask about Husn. He said he didn’t know.

Spiro was bedridden, in pain. They said he had lung cancer. He was always asking to see Little Spiro, whose name wasn’t Spiro. He moaned in bed, holding an icon of the Virgin Mary, and shouted “O, mother of light,” and mother of light didn’t answer.

Rima came once to visit him and ask about Ralph, but Ralph wasn’t there. Spiro didn’t know who this Ralph was, and when she called him by his other name, he shook his head and told her Madame Aoun had suffered a lot before she died. He said he saw her in a dream. She was standing under a shower with blood coming out of it instead of water. He started crying.

Rima left and didn’t go back. After that, no one in the quarter saw her again.

As for Habib Malku, he left the country. He disappeared from the quarter, then people saw the store open again, a new owner inside, and new goods. Malku sold everything and went to Sweden.

No one remained.

Little Gandhi’s house was returned to the property owner after he paid Zaylaa twenty thousand liras. Zaylaa took the money, sold Little Gandhi’s things, and gave the house back to the owner, who rented it out as a warehouse for pharmaceutical supplies.

Beirut was different that morning. Morning carried the smell of death. There were armed men everywhere, and commotion, as if those who had died never died, as if the war hadn’t ended, as if it had just begun.

Alice said he died.

“I came and saw him, I covered him with newspapers, there was no one around, his wife disappeared, they all disappeared, and I was all alone.”

Alice said she took him to the cemetery, and she saw the people without faces. “People have become faceless,” she told me. She spoke to them and didn’t get any response, then she left them and went on her way. That’s how the story ended.

“Tell me about him,” I said to her.

“How shall I tell you?” she answered. “I was living as though I were living with him without realizing it. When you live, you don’t notice things. I didn’t notice, I just don’t know.” She shook her head and repeated her sentence. “All I know is, he died, and he died for nothing.”

I recall Alice’s words and try to imagine what happened, but I keep finding holes in the story. All stories are full of holes. We no longer know how to tell stories, we don’t know anything anymore. The story of Little Gandhi ended. The journey ended, and life ended.

That’s how the story of Abd al-Karim Husn al-Ahmadi al-Mughayiri, otherwise known as Little Gandhi, ended.

During my last encounter with Alice she said she was going to leave the country. She was sad, and looked at things differently, as if she weren’t really seeing things, or as if things had slipped out of her hands, and out of her memory. She’d been drinking arak a lot, and quarreling with Abd al-Hakim and his hotel guests. She’d go out a lot to walk along the seacoast, near Haj Dawwod Cafe, which had become a heap of rubble. She’d come back in the evening and wouldn’t clean the rooms. She wouldn’t do anything.. Abd al-Hakim the Egyptian asked her to help him find some girls, and she laughed.

“Forget it, son, the girls are all with the soldiers, what do you take me for, the government?”

Alice wasn’t the government: She walked alone, without leaning on anything. She hardly slept. She’d get up at five in the morning, go out on the corniche, and walk. When she’d get tired, she’d sit on a rock, alone, and her eyes would travel far away.

What did she think about? Was she reliving the old days? Did she see herself with the eyes of her soul? Or did memory take her to eyes that didn’t see her, bringing back the fire of those long-gone days, and so ending with them the last drops of life?

Alice wasn’t thinking about anything, for she was lying. I told her she was lying. No, I didn’t tell her. When she said to me, “I’m full of lies,” it crossed my mind that she was lying to me, and I was sure she was lying when I found out everyone knew the story of “The Leader,” and they attributed it to more than one woman.

Alice knew, for when she took the Reverend Amin to the nursing home, she discovered things were fading away, as if they’d never been. When she got back she asked Little Gandhi about the Reverend Amin as a young man. Gandhi didn’t know how to answer. He responded with short phrases, as if he didn’t remember.

Did Amin exist, or not? Did she? What was the difference?

I asked her if she remembered any details. I asked about the stories, and I discovered she didn’t remember anything, as though she didn’t want to remember.

She said to me, “That ass Abd al-Hakim doesn’t know who I am. Yes, he does know, but he doesn’t know. Man is ephemeral.” She said man is ephemeral.

Ever since she saw Gandhi’s final hour, and the image of his wife and daughter leaving in the middle of that rain that scorched Beirut the morning of September 15, 1982, she changed. She saw things only at the moment they happened. By herself, she took him to the cemetery, as if he were a relative. There was no one with her. By herself she got the sheikh and the coffin and the shroud. She told the people at the Islamic Nursing Home to perform the ablution. They said no, they don’t wash martyrs, they are cleansed by their own blood. “But he is poor, he had nothing to do with it.” They said he was a martyr. She took him and buried him without the ablution, he was washed by the rain and the mud and the shots. As if he never was. Even his face was erased from her memory, all their faces were erased. She remembered nothing of them but small flashes that came and faded in her memory.

Alice didn’t go back to the Montana. She found out her feet couldn’t anymore, and that night was no longer night, it had been disclosed, like a broken watermelon. And days became filled with straw. What really bothered her was that the taste in her mouth had started to change. Before the taste in her mouth changed, she didn’t know the mouth was so important, and that when the tongue becomes stiff and thick in the mouth, it becomes a burden on the person. Her tongue was dry, and she was frightened by the taste in her mouth that gave her the feeling death was near.