The Book of Khalid (35 page)

He goes into Najma’s tent. The mother and her child are sound asleep. He stands between the bed and the cot contemplating the simplicity and innocence and truth, which are more eloquent in Najib’s brow than aught of human speech. His little hand raised above his head seems to point to a star which could be seen through an opening in the canvas. Was it his star—the star that he saw in the sand-grave—the star that is calling to him?—

But let us resume our narration.

A fortnight after Mrs. Gotfry’s departure Shakib leaves the camp to live in Cairo. He is now become poet-laureate to one of the big pashas.

Khalid is left alone with Najma and Najib.

And one day, when they are playing a game of “donkey,”—Khalid carried Najib on his back, ran on all four around the tent, and Najma was the donkey-driver,—the child of a sudden utters a shriek and falls on the sand. He is in convulsions; and after the relaxation, lo, his right hand is
palsied, his mouth awry, and his eyes a-squint. Khalid finds a young doctor at Al-Hayat, and his diagnosis of the case does not disturb the mind. It is infantile paralysis, a disease common with delicate children. And the doctor, who is of a kind and demonstrative humour, discourses at length on the disease, speaks of many worse cases of its kind he cured, and assures the mother that within a month the child will recover. For the present he can but prescribe a purgative and a massage of the arm and spine. On the third visit, he examines the child’s fæces and is happy to have discovered the seat and cause of the affection. The liver is not performing its function; and given such weak nerves as the child’s, a torpid liver in certain cases will produce paralysis.

But Khalid is not satisfied with this. He places the doctor’s prescription in his pocket, and goes down to Cairo for a specialist. He comes, this one, to disturb their peace of mind with his indecision. It is not infantile paralysis, and he can not yet say what it is. Khalid meanwhile is poring over medical books on all the diseases that children are heir to.

On the fifth day the child falls again in convulsions, and the left arm, too, is paralysed. They take him down to Cairo; and Medicine, considering the disease of his mother, guesses a third time—tuberculosis of the spine, it says—and guesses wrong. Again, considering the strabismus, the obliquity of the mouth, the palsy in the arms, and the convulsions, we guess closely, but ominously. Nay, Medicine is positive this time; for a fifth and a sixth Guesser confirm the others. Here we have a case of cerebral meningitis. That is certain; that is fatal.

Najib is placed under treatment. They cut his hair, his beautiful flow of dark hair; rub his scalp with chloroform; keep the hot bottles around his feet, the ice bag on his head; and give him a spoon of physic every hour. “Make no noise
around the room, and admit no light into it,” further advises the doctor. Thus for two weeks the child languishes in his mother’s arms; and resting from the convulsions and the coma, he would fix on Khalid the hollow, icy glance of death. No; the light and intelligence might never revisit those vacant eyes.

Now Shakib comes to suggest a consultation. The great English physician of Cairo, why not call
him
? It might not be meningitis, after all, and the child might be helped, might be cured.

The great guesswork Celebrity is called. He examines the patient and confirms the opinion of his confrères, rather his disciples.

“But the whole tissue,” he continues with glib assurance, “is not affected. The area is local, and to the side of the ear that is sore. The strabismus being to the right, the affection must be to the left. And the pus accumulating behind the ear, under the bone, and pressing on the covering of the brain, produces the inflammation. Yes, pus is the cause of this.” And he repeats the Arabic proverb in broken Arabic, “A drop of pus will disable a camel.” Further, “Yes, the child’s life can be saved by trepanning. It should have been done already, but the time’s not passed. Let the surgeon come and make a little opening—no; a child can stand chloroform better than an adult. And when the pus is out he will be well.”

In a private consultation the disciples beg to observe that there was no evidence of pus behind the ear. “It is beneath the skullbone,” the Master asserts. And so we decide upon the operation. The Eye and Ear specialist is called, and after weighing the probabilities of the case and considering that the great Celebrity had said there was pus, although there be no evidence of it, he convinces Khalid that if the child is
not benefited by the operation he cannot suffer from it more than he is suffering now.

The surgeon comes with his assistants. Little Najib is laid on the table; the chloroform towel is applied; the scalpels, the cotton, the basins of hot water, and other accessories, are handed over by one doctor to another. The Cutter begins. Shakib is there watching with the rest; Najma is in an adjacent room weeping; and Khalid is pacing up and down the hall, his brows moistened with the cold sweat of anguish and suspense.

No pus between the scalp and the bone: the little hammer and chisel are handed to the Cutter. One, two, three,—the child utters a faint cry; the chloroform towel is applied again;—four, five, six, and the seventh stroke of the little hammer opens the skull. The Cutter then penetrates with his catheter, searches thoroughly through the brain—here—there—above—below—and finally holds the instrument up to his assistants to show them that there is—no pus! “If there be any,” says he, “it is beyond the reach of surgery.” The wound, therefore, is quickly washed, sewn up, and dressed, while everybody is wondering how the great Celebrity can be wrong.…

Little Najib remains under the influence of anæsthetics for two days—for two days he is in a trance. And on the third, the fever mounts to the danger line and descends again—only after he had stretched his little arm and breathed his last!

And Khalid and Najma and Shakib take him out to the desert and bury him in the sand, near the tent round which he used to play. There, where he stepped his first step, lisped his first syllable, smacked his first kiss, and saw for the first time a star in the heaven, he is laid; he is given to the Night,
to the Eternity which Khalid does not fear. And yet, what tears, Shakib tells us, he shed over that little grave.

But about the time the second calamity approaches, when Najma begins to decline and waste away from grief, when the relapse sets in and carries her in a fortnight downward to the grave of her child, Khalid’s eyes are as two pieces of flint stone on a sheet of glass. His tears flow inwardly, as it were, through his cracked heart.…

Like the poet Saadi, Khalid once sought to fill his lap with celestial flowers for his friends and brothers; and he gathered some; but, alas, the fragrance of them so intoxicated him that the skirt dropt from his hand.…

We are again at the Mena House, where we first met Shakib. And the reader will remember that the tears rushed to his eyes when we inquired of him about his Master and Friend. “He has disappeared some ten days ago,” he then said, “and I know not whither.” Therefore, ask us not, O gentle Reader, what became of him. How can
we
know? He might have entered a higher spiritual circle or a lower; of a truth, he is not now on the outskirts of the desert: deeper to this side or to that he must have passed. And passing he continues to dream of “appearance in the disappearance; of truth in the surrender; of sunrises in the sunset.”

Now, fare
thee
well in either case, Reader. And whether well or ill spent the time we have journeyed together, let us not quarrel about it. For our part, we repeat the farewell words of Sheikh Taleb of Damascus: “Judge us not severely.” And if we did not study to entertain thee as other Scribes do, it is because we consider thee, dear good Reader, above such entertainment as our poor resources can furnish,
Wassalmu aleik
!

IN • FREIKE • WHICH • IS • IN • MOUNT • LEBANON SYRIA • ON • THE • TWELFTH • DAY • OF JANUARY • 1910 • ANNO • CHRISTI • AND • THE FIRST • DAY • OF • MUHARRAM • 1328 • HEGIRAH THIS • BOOK • OF • KHALID • WAS • FINISHED

The Book of Khalid
, the first Arab-American novel, stands as the foundational text of Arab-American literature, despite having been out of print in the United States since its first publication in 1911. Wholly unique and difficult to classify, the novel contains diverse political and philosophical themes, including Arab immigration to New York City, Arab-American relations, the politics of the Ottoman Empire, sectarianism and universal spirituality, and the experimental combination of Arabic and Western literary forms.

Its author, Ameen Rihani, was the most versatile and widely respected of a talented group of Arab writers working in New York City in the early twentieth century. An Arab-American innovator and trailbreaker, Rihani significantly influenced other slightly younger figures, including Mikhail Naimy, author of
The Book of Mirdad
, and Kahlil Gibran, whose extraordinarily popular work
The Prophet
shares key themes with
The Book of Khalid
.

Rihani was born in Freike, a small town in Lebanon, in 1876. He emigrated at age eleven with his uncle to Manhattan; the rest of his family followed a year later. The Rihanis were part of a late-nineteenth-century migration of mostly Christian Syrians and Lebanese from the Ottoman Empire that was triggered by a decline in the silk industry and by
fears of religious conflict. In New York, Rihani’s father, Ferris, who had owned a silk factory in Lebanon, became an importer-exporter of jewelry and other products. The family first settled on Washington Street in “Little Syria,” the colorful Syrian Quarter on Manhattan’s lower west side that Rihani would describe in
The Book of Khalid
.

A precocious reader of Shakespeare, Thoreau, Emerson, Carlyle, and Washington Irving, the young Rihani rebelled against clerking in his father’s store and, at the age of eighteen, ran away to join a traveling Shakespearean theater company called the Henry Jewett Players. He returned to New York the same year, and, after discussions with his father, he entered law school. But in 1897, after only a year of study, Rihani withdrew and returned to Lebanon—purportedly to rest because of a lung illness, though it is clear that a law career did not suit him.

In Lebanon, Rihani taught English at a Maronite Catholic seminary and studied formal written Arabic, awakening an abiding respect for classical Arabic poetry which took its place alongside the Western literature that he prized. He returned to the United States in 1899 and began to establish himself as a provocative intellectual within the budding Arab-American cultural scene, commenting on political, religious, and social questions—for example, religious reform, Arab nationalism, and even feminism—in speeches, pamphlets, and newspaper articles. His 1903 Arabic-language critique of religious institutions and sectarianism,
The Triple Alliance in the Animal Kingdom
, was burned after its publication and led to Rihani’s excommunication from the Maronite Church.

Still in his twenties, he published poetry in both English and Arabic. And he introduced free verse poetry into Arabic
in 1905, especially influenced by the work of Walt Whitman. In 1903, he published his first book in English, a translation entitled
The Quatrains of Abu’l-Ala
, selections from the work of the tenth- and eleventh-century blind Syrian skeptical philosopher and poet Al-Ma’arri. Translating this Islamic advocate of reason and skepticism into English was a bold start to Rihani’s lifelong public project of bridging East and West and of subverting and merging their literary forms and conventions.

In 1905, Rihani returned to his family home in Freike for an extremely productive period of several years, during which he wrote
The Book of Khalid
, as well as a collection of Arabic essays called
Ar-Rihaniyyaat
, or “The Rihani Essays,” that was published in 1910 and deals with many of the same themes as
Khalid
in a more programmatic way. For example, Khalid’s “Great City” passage parallels a speech Rihani gave in 1909 that he included in the essay collection.

Since
The Book of Khalid
was written in Lebanon during a period of Arab protest against the Ottoman Empire, it is not surprising that the work veers away from New York into the politics of the Arab world. In the years immediately following the publication of the novel, political issues precipitated by World War I and the decline and collapse of the Ottoman Empire increasingly consumed Rihani’s energies. He became an increasingly well-known public intellectual in the United States, writing about Arab politics and culture for major American periodicals and developing political contacts. And although he criticized American materialism, he was optimistic about America’s potential role in the world. Rihani felt, like his character Khalid, that becoming “100% American” allowed him to engage the problems of the Arab world without guilt or feelings of divided loyalties.

After World War I, Rihani merged his political and creative impulses and undertook an extraordinary journey through the Arabian Peninsula in 1922, where he met all of the emirs and other major leaders and subtly advanced his own vision for Arab national unity. These travels provided the content for a series of published travelogues in both Arabic and English, and the books became his most commercially successful. Until his untimely death in 1940, in Freike, following a bicycle accident, Rihani alternated between New York City and his home in the mountains of Lebanon, remaining an influential presence in both worlds.