The Hakawati (100 page)

And the lovely face of fate appeared in Baybars’s dream. “My son,” it said. “You have fought your last battle. The time has come to fulfill your life. New heroes must flourish, new stories must be told. Come home.”

At the diwan, Baybars announced, “My friends, I need rest. I wish to travel to Giza.”

“Your desire is our command,” replied Othman. “I will make the arrangements.”

“I wish my friends to travel before me. I wish to sleep in the pavilion my friends painted for me so long ago, in order to remember the best moments of my youth.”

And Baybars’s friends and companions traveled to Giza and erected the great tent with its quiltlike paintings. They cooked a grand feast and waited for the hero to arrive.

Baybars saddled al-Awwar himself. “It is time, my friend,” he whispered into the great warhorse’s ear. “We shall have our last adventure together. I am as grateful as ever for your company. With you, I am never alone.”

Baybars and al-Awwar headed to Giza. Yet, as soon as the great city of Cairo disappeared behind them, Baybars asked al-Awwar to turn right into the welcoming desert. And the great king, the hero of many a tale, rode toward the immortal sun.

“Do you hear me?” I asked my father. “Do you hear me?” I tried to concentrate on his eyelids and not on the breathing tube taped to his mouth. “I don’t know which stories your father told you and which you believed, but I always wondered whether he ever told you the true story of who he is, or the one that seems most true. Did he? He must have, but, then, maybe not.” I glanced up at the monitor, hoping it had registered some change, any sign that he might be listening. “Your grandmother’s name was Lucine. It’s true. I checked it out. Lucine Guiragossian. Your grandfather was Simon Twining. She worked for him. See, you have English, Armenian, and Druze blood. Oh, and Albanian, too. You’re a man of the world. We always knew that.” I gently held his hand.

“Your grandmother died while your father was still a baby. Another woman raised him, Anahid Kaladjian. Your father loved her most of all, and she sacrificed everything for him. He used to say that she was his first audience, that she was the only one to laugh at his jokes. She sent him away when he was eleven. He used to say that all he remembered was that she told him to go south, hide in the mountains of Lebanon, stay with the Christians. That was before the Turkish massacres of the Armenians. He left before the great Armenian orphan migration to Lebanon. Did you know that?” There was no reaction from my father, but my niece reached across the bed and held my hand briefly.

“Listen. Here’s a story you’d like. Your father was born tiny, as tiny as a rat, a jardown. No one gave him any hope of living. His mother, Lucine, concerned that he was so small, took him to the Armenian quarter of Urfa on her day off. She talked to people, interrogated, pleaded, until she was sent to a great fortune-teller called Shoushan. Lucine begged Shoushan for help, but she couldn’t afford to pay her. The fortune-teller said that she could do nothing without pay, because if word got out no one would ever pay her again. Lucine swore she’d never tell anyone. Shoushan said, ‘You think you can walk out of here without having paid and people won’t recognize you got something for free. No, no, anyone can tell when something is free. You must pay me something. Let me think of a form of payment. Wait here while I pray and ask the Virgin what I should collect from you.’ ”

Lina sat down on the bed behind me.

“After praying, Shoushan asked, ‘Do you have someone in your household who knits?’ Lucine replied that her mistress did. Shoushan said she wanted Lucine to bring her one of those knitting needles. That would be a fine payment. In her prayers, Shoushan had heard the Virgin say that a devil lived in Lucine’s household and knitted every night. Shoushan could do some things with a devil’s knitting needle. Would Lucine know if the devil also had a darning needle? That would be a princely gift. Shoushan could perform magic with a devil’s darning needle. Lucine promised to get her one of each.”

Lina settled her head between my shoulder blades. I felt the rhythm of her breathing, solid and tired.

“ ‘I’ll tell you how to make sure your son becomes a giant of a man,’ Shoushan said, ‘so listen. For seven days and seven nights, you must bathe your son in warm wine. That will nourish him and make him grow. But here is another secret: heat the wine by placing a red-hot horseshoe in it. He’ll grow to have the subtlety of wine and the endurance of iron. You must then cool him off by placing him in the shell of an unripe watermelon. The bitterness will make him wise. Go now, and make sure to bring me back a knitting needle and a darning needle.’

“Lucine left Shoushan’s house, and on the way home she found an abandoned horseshoe on the road. ‘My luck is about to change,’ she thought. That evening, she searched for wine, but the doctor had been on a binge and there was none in the house. She took her baby out to the garden, filched an urn being used to make vinegar. She put the almost-vinegar in a stone mortar used to grind meat. She heated the horseshoe over a fire, and when it turned red, she doused it in the sour wine. And she placed her crying son in the mortar bath. But then she had no watermelon, ripe or unripe, so she cooled her baby in a tub of cold yogurt.”

I heard Fatima let out a short laugh. My sister moved her head along my back in response. I tried to ignore the consistent beeping of the monitor.

“Of course, the prescription worked—up to a point, that is. Your father survived, but he didn’t grow up to be a giant of a man, now, did he? Like all of us, he wasn’t even very big. He didn’t inherit the subtlety of wine, but the volatility of vinegar. The yogurt gave him not a bitter wisdom but a sour disposition. And the horseshoe turned out to
belong not to a horse but to a mule—Lucine couldn’t tell the difference. So he did end up with the endurance of iron, but also with the stubbornness of a mule. That’s your father.”

Sunlight crept along the floor. The room lit up, but my father’s face did not take on any color. I took a deep breath.

“Your father told me that story—one of his best, if you ask me. He also told me how you were born. Do you want me to tell you? He told me all kinds of incredible things about you. He told me how you used to steal meat as it was being fried, how you used to sneak by your mother, grab the lamb from the frying pan, and run.” I checked his face for a reaction. “Can you hear me?” I closed my eyes briefly. “I know your stories.”

His chest kept rising and falling mechanically, systematically.

“And I can tell you my stories. If you want.”

I paused, waited.

“Listen.”

NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

By nature, a storyteller is a plagiarist. Everything one comes across—each incident, book, novel, life episode, story, person, news clip—is a coffee bean that will be crushed, ground up, mixed with a touch of cardamom, sometimes a tiny pinch of salt, boiled thrice with sugar, and served as a piping-hot tale. A brief list of sources that provided the most beans:
A Thousand and One Nights
(uncensored), Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
, the Old Testament, the Koran, W. A. Clouston’s
Flowers from a Persian Garden
, Italo Calvino’s
Italian Folktales
, Kalila wa Dimna (uncensored), Ahmad al-Tifashi’s
The Delight of Hearts
, Ibn Hazm’s
The Ring of the Dove
, Mahmoud Khalil Saab’s
Stories and Scenes from Mount Lebanon
, Homer’s
Iliad
, Jim Crace’s
The Devil’s Larder, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise
, Ida Alamuddin’s
Maktoob
, Shakespeare’s plays, numerous Internet folktale sites, and quite a few books of Syrian and Lebanese folktales bought for pennies from street vendors.

This is a work of fiction. It might sound redundant, stating the obvious, but it does bear repeating. Nothing herein should be considered fact or biography. The character of Baybars has little to do with the historical one, the character of the bey doesn’t represent any real clan leader or family, and the religion in the piece was invented to fit a better narrative (to the best of my knowledge, Zainab doesn’t appear at shrines, nor does anyone worship a Lady Zainab in blue). The tale of Baybars is based on oral stories as well as an actual hakawati’s book given to me by Maher Jarrar of the American University of Beirut (a princely gift). Readers who wish to study the history of Baybars might consider
The Lion of Egypt: Sultan Baybars I and the Near East in the Thirteenth Century
by Peter Thorau.

I am indebted to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
for a most timely and generous grant. Thanks to my editor extraordinaire, Robin Desser, ever tireless and fervent; to Joy Johannessen, who kept shaking the tree till all the rotten fruit had fallen; to Asa DeMatteo, Barbara Dimmick, Jim Hanks, and William Zimmerman, readers who didn’t shy away from pointing out the inadequacies of my writing. I wish to thank Lily Oei, Carlo Togni, and Eric Glassgold for making life easier.

Everything I know about pigeons I learned from Beirut pigeoneers who were gracious enough to tell me their stories. Everything I know about guitars I learned from George Peacock of Peacock Music in San Francisco. Everything I know about maqâms I learned from listening to the inimitable Munir Bashir.

And, finally, this book wouldn’t be what it is without the input of almost every Lebanese I know, and even those I don’t know so well. Lebanon is a nation of hakawatis, and none had to be asked more than once for a story. Actually, most never needed to be asked.

I heard you’re looking for stories. Let me tell you
.

You want stories about pigeons? I got pigeon stories
.

I’ll tell you a story. You can put it in your book, but you can’t tell anyone. It’s private
.

You have to write about my crazy aunt. You just have to. Listen
.

Thank you.