The Hakawati (49 page)

The dialysis machine chugalugged my father’s blood and regurgitated it back into him. Could a scene be déjà vu if it was truly repeating itself? This was another day. Salwa sat on the bed and held my father’s hand. “This won’t take long,” she told him. “Only another forty-five minutes.” My sister, on the rust recliner, leaned back and covered her eyes with her forearm. The narcoleptic technician’s head rested on his chest. I stood at the foot of the bed, counting off red time with the dialysis machine.

There was a knock on the open door. I was the only one who could see out, and my sister waved for me to send whoever it was away. A beautiful woman of indeterminate age stood in the doorway in an extravagant sable coat and stiletto heels. She wore stylish, heavy makeup, which made her face look as white and pure as a cake of halloumi. Her short bouffant hair was dyed a chestnut brown with precisely equidistant blond streaks. I recognized her after she smiled a childlike smile yet terribly saucy. I hadn’t seen her in over twenty years.

“Nisrine,” I said softly as I walked toward her. I surprised myself by using her first name. How old was she? She kissed me, cheek to cheek, three times. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to go in,” I said. “He doesn’t like to be seen when he’s sick.”

She kept her hand on my cheek. “I knocked only to make sure he’s decent.” She strolled in and stopped as if she had encountered an invisible electric fence, as if she were face to face with death’s scythe. A tiny cry escaped her lips, and her face crumpled. Her first tear carved a furrow in her foundation. Nisrine’s hand went to her left eye, and her finger
removed one contact lens, then the other. She cried, holding her tiny lenses in the palm of her hand as an offering to the gods of grief.

Nisrine and Jamil Sadek moved into the third floor of the building behind ours in 1967. In no time, they had established themselves as the most popular couple in the neighborhood. She was beautiful, witty, and flirtatious, and he was a delightful drunk. Few remembered she was a mother of three, for she was rarely seen with her children in public. Fewer still could help enjoying the misshapen, congenital liar she was married to. Captain Jamil was the only man in the neighborhood I was able to look down on, literally and figuratively. He was shorter than many children, but not exactly a dwarf. His huge paunch always seemed about to topple him. He canted his side hair like a sheaf over the top of his bald head. And he was no captain.

Stories about him were legion, but none were as famous as the one about his repeated failures at being promoted to full-fledged pilot. He made sure that all called him Captain Jamil. He was the oldest copilot at the airline and flunked every captain exam, but you’d never know it from talking to him. He told tall tales of saving flights from sure disasters, of passengers writing him sheaves of letters detailing their gratitude. He told of the other captains’ looking up to him and pleading with him for flying lessons. None of his listeners believed him, and all pretended they did.

One day, he arrived at our house for lunch. As a gift, he brought a bottle of blended scotch whisky in a yellow box sporting pictures of affluent, well-dressed men. “This whisky is called House of Lords,” he announced. “It’s specifically made for English royalty and nobles. A member of the British Parliament who happens to be the queen’s best friend presented it to me on my last trip to London.” This was the only time anyone unraveled his lie publicly. Uncle Jihad drove to Spinneys, the supermarket, while lunch was being served, and returned within half an hour with another yellow box of the cheap brand. He placed it on the table and announced that the queen herself had given it to him, but on one condition. “The queen told me, in her perfect British accent, of course, that she loved me and considered me worthy of such a perfect bottle of whisky, but that this magnificent brew should be served only to the best of men, to the greatest of friends.” And he poured a glass for Captain Jamil.

It was the captain’s young wife, though, who ensured that the couple
received an invitation to every event. She was a bon vivant, and bright, if not too cultured or sophisticated; an uneducated Sunni from Tripoli who realized that she had to rely on her piercing wit and charm to overcome being married to a parody and get ahead in life. And did she ever get ahead. At every gathering, men roamed her summers like fireflies. She amused them, teased and cajoled them. Told the best dirty jokes and the funniest bawdy tales. She was the only woman who could turn our neighborhood militiaman, Elie, into an ogling, trembling teenage boy who desperately tried to cover his excitement every time she walked by. She and Uncle Jihad formed a mutual-admiration society. They would sit in the corner and make fun of everybody else. He once asked her why she married her husband when she could have done so much better. She replied that she’d been young. Captain Jamil had appeared at her doorstep in his sports car. She was blinded by the pilot’s uniform. He spoke to her of flying, what it felt like to be up in the air, the freedom, the glory, the escape from the mundane. She dreamed of magic carpets.

One day, Uncle Akram made the mistake of hinting to my father and Uncle Jihad that he had slept with Nisrine. At an evening gathering on our balcony, as Nisrine delicately puffed her hookah, my father said to her, “Nisrine, my dear, Akram is telling quite a few people that he has bedded you.” She cracked up and crackled, smoke sprouting from her mouth like the sudden eruption of a mountain hot spring. I could see the unadulterated glee in Uncle Jihad’s brown eyes. “Hey, Akram,” she shouted across the balcony. “Come over here and entertain me for a minute.” He hurried over like a child called by his favorite teacher to the blackboard. “Tell me, dear,” she cooed. “I hear you have a wonderful story, and I love stories.” She smiled, batted her eyelashes a few times, and took a long drag from the hookah. She blew the smoke seductively into his eager face. “I hear that you fucked me, and I want to know whether I was good.”

I poured myself a glass of fresh grapefruit juice as my father read the morning paper. Melanie was already dressed in a light-green summer suit. She was standing by the tall windows. “Looks like it’s letting up,” she said. “Might turn out to be a nice day. We can probably walk.”

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Shopping,” my father said. “I should get your mother something.”

My father went to his room to get dressed, and I sat down and phoned my mother. I had forgotten to call when I first arrived, as I had promised. She wanted to talk. “I miss you already.” I grunted acknowledgment. “Will you make sure to take care of yourself?” I looked around the room. “You will call me once a week?” I watched Melanie light a filtered Kool cigarette and drink her coffee. I used the word “mama” to make sure she knew who I was talking to. Melanie turned around in her chair, crossed her legs. “I don’t care how old you are, you’ll always be my baby.” A lipstick stain appeared on the filter. Melanie used her forefinger to flick the ash dramatically. “I don’t know what I’ll do without you here.” Smoke curled out of her mouth. The lipstick was pink this morning. “You’re your mother’s only son.”

When I hung up, Melanie smiled at me tentatively. “Aren’t you a little young to be going to college?”

“I’m terribly smart.”

“I can see that.” Her laugh included an unattractive snort.

My father wanted to take our rented Cadillac to Rodeo Drive. Uncle Jihad wanted to walk, since it was only across the street from the hotel. The doorman suggested we take the hotel’s car, which dropped us off at Giorgio’s, two blocks away. The four of us must have appeared quite a tableau to passersby, a hodgepodge family of sorts.

The salesman zeroed in on my father, ignoring the rest of us. It must have been the Brioni suit. My father explained what he wanted. The salesman, an attractive young man, looked normal below the belt, but his torso leaned back at an almost unnatural angle, his left arm draped across it, and his right hand seemed to tweak an imaginary string of pearls. All of a sudden, both forefingers pointed at my father. “I have something that may be just perfect,” he said, and scampered across the floor, disappearing from sight. He returned with bundles of cloth in delectable colors, reds, variegated greens, yellows from lemon to ocher. He put them on the counter and spread one out. “Cashmere shawls,” he said. “No woman can resist.” His hand smoothed the fabric in a wide arc. “You just have to pick the color.”

“What do you think?” my father asked. I wasn’t sure which of us he was asking, Melanie or me.

I stepped forward, touching the fabric in the same wide arc. “This is beautiful.”

“I think so, too,” Melanie said.

My father went through the pile, picked a deep-sienna shawl. “You think your mom will like this?” I nodded. He handed the shawl to the salesman. My father kept looking, picked up a blue-green shawl, and held it next to Melanie’s eyes. “And this one, too,” he told the salesman. Melanie blushed.

“I want you to know something,” my father said in Arabic. “She’s not a prostitute.”

I stammered something unintelligible. I didn’t know what to say.

“I’m not paying her.” He was staring at a far corner of the store.

“Okay.” I stared at the other corner.

“She wants to be a singer. I can’t tell if she’s any good. I don’t understand this music. She sings a lot, so listen and tell me.”

It began to rain softly. Uncle Jihad carried a bottle of cologne and whistled a Lebanese tune. He picked up a loud yellow scarf, flicked one end over his left shoulder, examining the effect in a full-length mirror. Melanie looked at a dress on a hanger, fingered the material. “Why don’t you try it on?” my father suggested.

“He is loved,” I said above the dins of the room.

My sister had taken Nisrine to the visitors’ room. Fatima had returned and claimed my sister’s seat. The diminishing red numbers of the dialysis machine entranced her, as they did me. Twenty-two minutes, thirteen seconds. Salwa held my father’s hand.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“It’s so obvious Nisrine loves him,” I replied. “You can’t fake that reaction. It broke my heart watching her.”

“Yes,” she said. “They were lovers once.”

“No,” I blurted. “No. It only seemed that way because they both loved to flirt.” My niece just looked at me, her eyebrows forming the top halves of question marks. “How would you know anyway?” I said. “You weren’t even born.” My voice faltered. “It can’t be. He flirted with her in front of my mother. He wouldn’t have done that if it were for real. They were friends.”

Fatima raised her arms in despair and sighed.

Salwa looked at me with my mother’s eyes, brown and wide. In a steady voice, she said, “She was one of his many mistresses.”

“How can you be sure?” I asked, my voice much weaker than hers.
“I’m not saying I don’t believe you, but all you’re going by is what Lina tells you.”

“He paid for her eldest son’s schooling. You know that.”

“Of course,” I replied. “They were friends of the family.”

“Stop, Osama,” Fatima ordered, loud enough to shock the technician awake. “Take our word for it. If you want me to list all his mistresses, I will. Maybe it’s time you talked to your sister and compared notes.”