The winter had lasted years and years, but the bees in their blissful hive were mostly awake now, the workers made heat by whirling their butter-color wings, the queens lounged about demanding to be serviced, the cold in the air eased, almost disappeared, in floated the fragrance of leaves, of early flowers and fruits. Some bees went to work, filling their bodies with sweetness, some of the small creatures danced and danced, how could we not moan in happiness? Then the black bear woke, much too hungry after hibernating for so long, not a delicate thing that bear, how large a body it carried, hunger demanded destruction. Smack, the hive was torn apart, crack. What could we do? Our stings were as nothing, our resistance flicked away with a mere gesture. We disappeared in his fur, we dissolved under his breath, vanished into the curl of his tongue.
Some survived, befuddled we flew away and flew, we no longer noticed how warm the still-rising sun was, how lovely the shape of clouds, how white the daisies, how unsteady blossoms broke into flames, how swaths of fierce lilacs released bewildering sirens of scent, that stupefying smell of spring. How could we?
Sorrow makes for lousy honey.
Tears do not make good ink.
Let winter return.
About a year before the latest Egyptian revolution, Auntie Badeea wrote me a long letter describing many of the changes in the city. She had been keeping me abreast of the goings and comings of her world, about one letter a month for as long as I could remember, and even though I had been e-mailing my replies for years, she preferred old-fashioned epistolary pen and paper, not because she was a Luddite, far from it, but because like most Egyptians, she was a romantic. Naguib Mahfouz once wrote that it was a most distressing affliction to have a sentimental heart and a skeptical mind. What was different about that letter was the exasperated tone in which she chronicled what was happening in Cairo and, more important, at the house with its new clientele of upscale Egyptians. She had always paid protection money to the double mafia, police and army, she’d bribed politicians, but it seemed a new breed of ill-bred idiots were coming to power and coming to her whorehouse, entitled bastards she called them to their face. Apart from protection and bribes, these new boys demanded a cut and an ownership stake, and as part owners, they no longer felt the need to pay for what they fucked. One of the boys was the president’s grandson.
When he and his sycophantic entourage first appeared at the house, the workingwomen were all atwitter, how wonderful, how fabulous, they would climb one or two rungs up the ladder of desirability, if not respectability. Auntie Badeea, however, was not impressed by the boy, like his grandfather, she wrote, that boy doesn’t have enough blood coursing in his veins to sate a mosquito, which alarmed me, since no Egyptian who valued her skin should insult the president, and the aunties were quickly disabused of their infatuation, the president’s grandson was no Uday or Qusay Hussein, he did not torture any of the girls for pleasure, he was just a brat, and worse, a bore, and worst, a tightwad. Once the boys even brought an Israeli in young and trendy civilian garb with a not-so-subtle military demeanor, they preened more than usual, look at how modern we are, the boys declaimed, grandstanding, showboating, and flaunting, the Israeli humored them, seemed amused, and he certainly tipped his girl more than any of them, and they all departed into the late night laughing.
Auntie Badeea had had enough, but what could she do, she asked, not much, she wished to kill them with her bare hands, risking her manicure. The ubiquitous Arab shame, she called it, having to endure eternal humiliation in your own home. When the boys appeared next, she prophesied the end of their empire, Fools, she told them, your time is nigh, and they laughed. They shouldn’t have.
Not too long after I received that letter, a bereft young fruit peddler in Tunisia doused himself in paint thinner and set himself on fire. On that day, Auntie Badeea sent me an e-mail, it was time, she wrote. It took a while for a demonstration to get organized but it did, I was late getting to work the day it started, I swear, Doc, it was the first time I was late in years, but I couldn’t tear myself away from the wavering transmissions on the television, I switched from CNN to BBC to ABC, I had Al Jazeera blaring on my computer screen, that first day, Doc, that first day was miraculous, pride pricked every morose cell in my body, dignity filled my soul, I knelt by the chair in the living room and wept until I laughed and laughed until I wept.
In yet another letter, Auntie Badeea told me she was doused with a water hose, not paint thinner, but aflame she was, in her seventies and no longer wishing to bow or kowtow, The police wanted to stop this body with a measly water cannon, she wrote, this body had endured Suleymah’s massages at the hammam, believe me, the water barely made my fat jiggle, let them come with bullets. They did the next day, they shot at the crowd and the crowd grew bigger, from thousands to millions, we had ourselves an honest-to-goodness revolution.
An Arab is an Arab is an Arab, Satan said, such a sucker, you fooled yourself once more, didn’t you? O Satan, take pity on my long misery.
Within a few weeks of the beginning of the Egyptian revolution, Auntie Badeea began to tweet, every demonstration, every arrest, every shot, every beating she shared with the entire universe and its foreign constellations, the revolution got rid of one president, then another, but the arrests kept on, the tortures never abated, A permanent revolution is what we need, tweeted Auntie Badeea, quoting Trotsky. She still had not given up hope, but I did. Revolutions are a Lernaean Hydra, Satan said, why do you think Death likes them so much, you cut off one head and two take its place, when you’re getting fucked over, it matters little if it’s the president or the general, you can throw as much tea as you want into the harbor, you’ll still have to bend over, baby, eternal justice for the rebellious.
I gave up hope, I gave up, when Mubarak was pardoned by the military government, with each bomb that Assad dropped on his people, with each suicide bomb in Baghdad or Benghazi, in Barca or Cyrene, a razor blade cut through another vein. I bled whatever pride the revolution had engendered. Hope might be the thing with feathers but in the Middle East we hunt those birds for sport.
I could have saved you so much trouble, Satan said, but you never listen to me.
I know thee, stranger, who thou art, how great my grief, my joys how few, since first it was my fate to know thee.
I dream of him, Doc, I do, Procrustes, do you remember what I told you about him? The Greek who waylaid travelers—well, he offered his hospitality to passing strangers, come in, come in, join me in a meal and rest your weary legs, I have a special mattress, no, an iron bed, one that fits the exact measurements of every man, magical, yes. Once the guest was in the bed, if he was too short, Procrustes took out his smith’s hammer and stretched him to fit, if too tall, he chopped off the excess length. He had the bed for the perfect man, searched for such a one to fit, why bother with a glass slipper, I ask you, Doc, he was an anthropometrist, just like you. We, your boys, had to be a certain height and weight, never varied, one size fits all, you were a specialist.
In this morning’s dream I’m back at l’orphelinat de la Nativité in the infirmary iron bed surrounded by white, including the hood and wimple of the nun nurse except she was an unshaven man under the garb, obviously Procrustes himself since he carried a silver smith’s hammer, bang, bang, he’d make sure I was dead, except his thick Greek lips were trembling, just like my mother’s when she had a decision to make, should she put on the red dress or the green dress for this evening’s entertainment. Around his neck, the only color in the room, hung a long coral necklace that reached below his belt and swung like a pendulum. When I woke up, I wondered why the school’s infirmary, I fit that bed, the one that was unlike the others at school, I felt comfortable there.
We slept in school beds that were all the same and I used to look forward to being ill in the infirmary because no one troubled me much, except for the nun nurse with the slightly ducklike nose who checked on me twice a day at most, but I could not remain there for long, as I was always sent back to my hard bed with everyone else. The nuns, those learned torturers with shrill instruments, had rules and laws and regulations that all us boys had to follow in order to make perfect men out of us, they taught us to add and subtract and sing French, to read French history and literature, and à la Yeats, to be neat in everything in the best modern way. Ye sons of France, awake to glory—well, enfants de la Patrie manqués we were, all of us, bottomless crucibles of sin, they would bleach our tawdry hearts, blanch our sooty souls, they would scour away the lees and dregs of barbarism, lest we thought we could someday return to our aboriginal ways. The collars almost choked us as we matured, but it was for the best, all agreed, because truly, who would not want to be civilized, we dressed alike, walked alike, studied alike, and when the civil war started most of us joined fascist militias in order to keep Lebanon pure and not Arab. The French still sing about spilling impure blood in the “Marseillaise.” Most of the other boys joined militias, but not me, the militias would not have accepted me, you know, Doc, every now and then I may have been able to pretend that I fit the bed, but I was never able to sustain the deceit.
It was summer, through the infirmary window I saw the Mediterranean, the blue in the west unraveled the luminous threads of saffron signaling the descending night, but I wished to stifle the beauty of the world since my head throbbed with delicious pain, hark, hark, the lark at heaven’s gates shrieked, hark, hark, my soul, and the saints appeared before me at the end of the bed, all haloed and incandescent. I believe it is time you met us, Saint Catherine said, all of us in glory, she sat next to me, held my hand, and began the introductions, one by one, as if they were the von Trapp children saying good night at the Nazi party. This is Saint George, born in Lod, Palestine, the city of Zeus, he defeated the dragon of the lake in Libya, at first my idiot heart was terrified and I remained as still as a lizard, and this is Saint Blaise, the Armenian bishop with his crossed candles, he was tortured, scourged, and beheaded, he had the face of a generous accountant, Saint Erasmus loved Lebanon because that was where he hid from Diocletian for a while, except he made my stomach cramp since his intestines were wound around a windlass, Saint Pantaleon in a checkered doctor’s coat who survived burning, a molten-lead bath, forced drowning, and stretching on the wheel, until he was finally beheaded, and then the Sicilian Saint Vitus with his palm leaf, and the giant Saint Christopher who looked even taller because of the child with the coral necklace on his shoulder, and Saint Denis carrying his own head, and Saint Cyriac who had conjunctivitis in both eyes, Saint Agathius the Greek wearing his soldier’s vest, Saint Eustace who saw a shining cross nestled in a stag’s antlers, Saint Giles of Athens who suckled on the milk of a hind, Saint Margaret of Antioch who conquered Satan in the form of a dragon, and last, though by no means least, we have the beautiful maiden Saint Barbara, beheaded by her own father, Dioscorus, who was immediately struck by lightning, fire from Heaven.
My migraine, soft sift in an hourglass, dissipated. The saints and I chatted, shreds of conversation, scraps of poetry, fourteen saints they were, twenty-eight healing hands that touched me when I needed solace, help me, Doc. But no traveler fit the bed of Procrustes, he adjusted them all to death, and the secret as to why not a single man had the right measurement was that he had two iron beds, not one, he placed each traveler in the bed that did not belong to him, and do you think the nuns had just one bed? Of course not, they slept on different beds from ours, but we must pray to the same God. Liberté, egalité, fraternité, ce n’est pas sérieux, we’re only kidding, allez-y, you boys must pursue civilization, not that you could ever attain it, bitch, please, the endless pursuit is where thou shalt remain, look up to us, lift up your eyes and look to the heavens for it is there that you will find us. And then the gargoyle nuns gave me my own ill-fitting bed.
Querulous skylarks settled their squabbles in the bamboo grove right outside my window, in my neighbor’s yard, Behemoth on his haunches on the duvet watched with unrestrained longing, desire full of endless distances, tremors of his mouth, spasms of his jaw, whispery wistful meows. I ached for him, damn you, feathered things, frolic elsewhere, end his torture. On the screen of my laptop, I read the last words of a three-year-old Syrian girl, mortally wounded, besmeared with immortal blood, I’m going to tell God everything, she said. Wonderful, I said to the Facebook news-feed, just wonderful, make sure to tell that son of a bitch his firmament of Hell still stands, still spouts cataracts of fire upon his unchosen people while his privileged practice yoga asana, the forgotten suffer their drones and missiles, unrespited, unpitied, unreprieved.
As it was in the beginning, said Satan, lying on my bed, so shall it be in the end, so shall it be first, last, midst, and without end, basically you’re screwed, Jacob, you know, the supremacy of Western civilization is based entirely on the ability to kill people from a distance.
I could not bear it anymore and jumped Satan, wanted to pummel him, but who was I kidding, I had never thrown a punch and never would, he laughed as I struggled to hold the angel of light. Next to us Behemoth watched us instead of the birds, imperturbable, refusing to budge. In one swift motion, Satan turned me over, sat on my midriff, held my arms down next to my head on the pillow, brought his face down next to mine, You can never win, Jacob, he said, and kissed me. Call me Ya’qub, I told the Devil Iblis.