Eight Eight And they all believed in fate. Do you think my grandmother would have married my grandfather were it not for fate? Do you not wonder how he won her?
It was destined. The tale was already told. Everything had been written.
He first saw her at the end of the Great War, in 1918, during the plagues, the lean times, when the infantilizing French occupation replaced the malicious Ottoman one. My grandmother was walking to school with a cousin. Najla wore a mandeel, but she didn’t cover her features. She draped it upon her delicate shoulders. There was a lot of talk at the time about mandeels, sheer or opaque, and whether women should wear them, but I don’t think she was making a statement. She enjoyed showing her face, her luxuriant hair, and my grandfather was lucky enough to catch sight of her. He was besotted. She was a mere fourteen. He was eighteen. He had seen pretty girls before. Yet she was beautiful and ever so graceful. He asked himself how he could make her remember him, and he thought, English. She was walking to the missionary school in the village. He said, in English, mind you, “Hello, my beautiful princess.”
She laughed and said she was a sheikha, not a princess, and the cheeky boy should have known that. She left him standing bewildered on the hilly path. She had said “cheeky” in English, and he had no idea what it meant. He didn’t know whom to ask. Because of his father, the doctor, he could speak some English, but because of the doctor’s wife, he couldn’t read that cursed language. He considered asking the bey, but my grandfather couldn’t risk embarrassing him if he didn’t know. He had to find an Englishman.
There were two of them trying to convert the village. My grandfather hung around the missionary school for two hours before he saw a foreigner exiting a building. My grandfather was polite but insistent. He said, “Pardon me, sir,” over and over, but the man paid no attention; the English never listened. Finally, he shouted, and the missionary stopped. My grandfather asked him what the word meant, and the missionary shooed him away.
Waiting for Najla the next morning, my grandfather sat on a rise above the street, for he did not wish to appear improper. When she approached, he confessed, in Lebanese Druze dialect, “I don’t know what the word ‘cheeky’ means. I don’t think my English is very good.”
My grandmother’s cousin kept pulling at her sleeve, trying to get her to move along. My grandmother replied, looking at her feet, “I don’t speak it well, either. I don’t know what that word means. Last week, they taught us a story about the problem of cheeky boys talking to nice girls in the city of London.”
And he knew she was the one for him.
You’d think there was no way. You might say, granted, this man was the bey’s hakawati, and the bey loved him, but he had no family. The story of his origins was murky. People knew that he was born in some village in the Matn, but no one had heard of the Kharrats. The discovery that the Kharrats didn’t exist wouldn’t happen till much later. How would my grandfather be able to marry a nice Druze girl—a sheikha, no less? Why would a respected family consent to such a marriage?
Well, my grandmother was not as nice as she appeared. Her family had issues.
You know that my father’s paternal grandfather was an English doctor, a missionary, and his paternal grandmother was the missionary’s Armenian servant. My father’s maternal grandparents were almost a carbon copy. My great-grandfather was a Druze doctor who many believed had become an English missionary, and my great-grandmother was his Albanian servant. Yes, it’s true.
Settle down. There are differences, and that’s what makes for a good story.
At five in the morning three days after my arrival, I received the dreaded call. Lina said my father was critical and I should come straight to the hospital. I was shocked and unnerved by the call, but not surprised. My father’s condition had been worsening. Yet, when the phone rang in the dark and I answered, the bed felt much too big.
My sister and her daughter stood weeping in the doorway, their arms intertwined. A multitude of doctors, interns, and nurses hovered above my father in his bed. They looked like seagulls hovering above food. I craned my head to look in, but a seagull closed the door. My sister gasped. One of the flimsy hospital fluorescents hiccupped. Salwa nudged me gently and pointed to the gurney along the corridor. I guided my sister to it and sat her down. Lina stared at an imaginary spot on the opposite wall. My feet felt unmoored, and the ground beneath felt soft. And yet I couldn’t move from my spot leaning against the gurney. I had to remain motionless, as if my soul could get seasick. “They think his lungs might have collapsed.” Lina wasn’t talking to me. She was staring ahead, speaking softly, as if in confession. Her priest, I didn’t look at her, either. “He had trouble breathing the whole night.” She sighed. “It got worse, until he couldn’t get any air in. He looked so scared. He’s probably terrified out of his mind right now.” The groans of a patient two doors away marked time. They were oddly comforting; I imagined their slow pace calming the frantic doctors behind the closed door. With every breath, fear seared my lungs.
Around the year 1880, the sultan pasha left Istanbul on the advice of his viziers. The effete Ottoman Empire had been gasping and wheezing for breath, and it was thought that a goodwill tour of his lands might remind his no longer so loyal subjects to pay their taxes promptly. During his stay in Lebanon, he spent one night in my great-grandfather’s village as the guest of the bey. The sultan was so impressed with the bey’s generosity that he decided to offer his host a remarkable gift, one of his own servants.
“Why is that brother of a whore offering me a maid?” the bey yelled the next morning. “Does he mean my service was lacking? Is he saying my mansion needs cleaning? And he expects me to send someone all the way to Tripoli to get her.” He fumed throughout the morning open-house. The daily visitors and supplicants drank their Turkish coffee in silence, too afraid to speak. It was at that inauspicious moment that my great-grandfather, the young Sheikh Mahdallah Arisseddine, arrived to pay his respects. The bey greeted him with “And you, my boy, will reward my faith by going to Tripoli and bringing me this girl.”
Mahdallah came from a titled family of sheikhs, not princes or beys, not even important sheikhs, but, still, an eminent, respected family of some consequence. He was the youngest of seven, and the first in the family, the first in the entire village, to attend university. His father, not well off to begin with, couldn’t afford to pay for Mahdallah’s college education after raising seven offspring. Wanting to have a Druze doctor in the village, the bey had stepped in. At the time that my great-grandfather was unceremoniously dispatched to fetch the servant, he was one year away from a medical degree from the Syrian Protestant College. He lived in a small hellhole of a room in Beirut; he visited his family—and paid his respects to the bey—in the mountain village whenever he had the chance.
There were many other reasons for the bey to fend for the Arisseddine family. The beys, in all their history and incarnations, were never altruistic. It was obvious while my great-grandfather was still in school with the missionaries that he was brighter than the other village boys. The bey wanted the most intelligent man beholden to him, so he paid for his medical schooling. The bey also hated the fact that someone was smarter than he was, which was why he never tired of having the young man run menial errands for him.
The beys were uniformly unintelligent, probably because of inbreeding—there were only two other families that the men were allowed to marry from. According to my grandfather, inbreeding negatively affected the males, but the women in the family were exceptionally quick. Therefore, my grandfather insisted, the bey’s wife would have recognized that changes were afoot. The politics of the land would not remain the same, and, to maintain their power, the beys couldn’t rely solely on the blind support of the ignorant. They would need a new source of loyalty. Mahdallah Arisseddine and his family, particularly his second son, Jalal, would prove to be the bey’s boon in later years. But now I’m ahead of myself.
My father was drugged unconscious, his head slightly raised. He looked unfamiliar, his nose now enormous, the only part of him that hadn’t shrunk. The ventilator’s thick accordion tube forced its way inside his mouth to his lungs, coercing his chest into expansion and contraction. His chest, sparsely haired, dry, taut, looked like an Indian medicine drum. Thin, translucent ocher-colored tubes drew blood from his side into a dialysis machine, which pumped the cleansed blood back into his system. A catheter attached to a suction machine went up his penis, through the urethra, sucking out his urine.
Effusions of sound. My sister weeping in the corner, her sharp intakes of breath in discord with those of the ventilator. The chugalug of dialysis, the technician in charge of the machine seeming mesmerized by its churning liquid sounds. The metronomic beats of the monitor. Jagged Richter line in red, loopy one in white, a wavy yellow, and a green on a screen above my father’s head. Could Mesmer have ever envisioned the hypnotic movement and sound of these modern contraptions? I needed to slap myself, remind myself this wasn’t a dream, nor was it a repeat of an earlier scene. We’d huddled around a hospital bed for my mother years earlier, and now my father.
I stood at the foot of the bed, staring at him, my left hand touching his foot. My niece entered the room and waddled toward me, looking as if she might give birth then and there. She stood beside me and stroked my back. My sister turned around, wiped her tears with the back of her forefingers.
“One of you has to go out there,” Salwa said. “I need a break. There are a lot of people, and your aunt is driving me crazy.”
“I’ll do it,” Lina said. She moved to my father’s bedside, kissed his forehead. “Everything will be all right,” she told him, her voice breaking again. She covered her mouth, turned around, took out tissues from her bra. “Talk to him,” she said. “Tin Can says he can still hear us. Comfort him. You know how frightened he gets.”
Salwa took my father’s hand and squeezed it. “It’s me, Grandfather.” She looked at me, motioned with her head to the chair. I moved it for her, and she lowered her weight onto it. “Are you in pain?” she asked him. She sounded so mature, confident. “Can you hear me? If you can, squeeze my hand.”
He squeezed. My fingers twitched with a mind of their own.
“Are you in pain? Squeeze my hand if yes.” He squeezed again. “Is it the pillows?” Squeeze. On either side of the bed, Salwa and I raised him a bit by his shoulders. We fluffed the pillows beneath him. “Is this better? Do you need water?” Salwa dipped gauze in a cup and wiped it across his mouth, above and below the ventilator tube. He pressed his lips together, holding the gauze in place for a brief moment. “Your lips look very dry. Would you like me to run moisturizer on them?” He didn’t squeeze. “Do you still hear me?” She stroked his forehead. “Sleep now. I know the dialysis hurts, but it won’t last long. You’ll have new blood. The kidneys aren’t working, and that’s why you’ve been feeling awful. Don’t be afraid. We’re all here.”
She reached out to me. I moved to her side, took her offered hand. She directed me to her shoulders, and I massaged them. “The anesthesiologist said the drugs make him forget everything,” she told me. “I don’t think he’s really awake, do you? It’s probably better that way.”
The story of how my great-grandfather fell in love is relatively well known, so I won’t get into it here. Just think Tristan and Isolde on a train from Tripoli to Beirut, without the deaths or whale weights. There was singing, though, of a different kind.
Who am I kidding? I have to tell you the story, at least the highlights. I can’t help myself. Besides, you might be one of the few people who haven’t heard it.
The Ottoman sultan must have been trying to impress the bey, for the gift was notable, even though it went unappreciated by its recipient. My great-grandmother Mona was more than a maid, not simply a housekeeper. She was an entertainer; she played the oud, had a delightfully soft voice, and knew more than one hundred songs, including some folk melodies from her native Albania. Because she performed the songs of praise well, she was one of the sultan’s favorites, which was why she had remained a virgin in his harem.
I believe she lost her virginity on the train trip.
My great-grandfather must have cursed his luck and the bey’s entire family while he made the long and tiring journey to the northern city. But then he arrived at the sultan’s ship to claim her. He stopped cursing his luck when he saw her walk down the plank with her small oud and her belongings in a satchel. And he thanked God when, four hours later, she sang a story of love that night on the train, sweet chords, dulcet tones. As for my great-grandmother: she had never met a soul who looked at her so adoringly. Hope flowered in her heart, hope of being seen as someone different, someone better, hope of being seen.
“I can’t let you clean house for the bey,” he told her. “I just can’t.”
“I do what I must.”
“I’ll not have you sing for another man.”
At the village, my great-grandfather didn’t go directly to the bey’s mansion. He stopped at his parents’ house, dropped off the oud, and walked to the mansion, with my great-grandmother a step behind. He made the introductions and said, “I beg your indulgence, O Bey. This maid would be of great value to me. I live alone, with no one to take care of me. My room needs a woman’s touch. I can’t have guests since I don’t know how to brew coffee. If you can spare her, I’d love to own her.”
The bey laughed. “You think me a fool. She’ll be doing more than brewing coffee for you. She’s not much to look at, but she’ll do. I don’t need her. Take her. We can’t have the village’s future doctor remain inexperienced in the ways of the world.”
My great-grandparents walked out together with the bey’s blessing.
And my great-grandfather said, “I wish to spend my life with you.”
My great-grandmother said, “I will be your family and you will be my man.”
And my great-grandmother never played the oud for anyone else again.
Years earlier, when the bey married, twenty-one village women cooked for two whole weeks, and the wedding lasted six days. When Mahdallah’s brother married, his wedding lasted three days. My great-grandparents’ wedding lasted all of one hour.
Mahdallah had to state the Shahada and convert to Islam. His first conversion.
Mona brewed coffee for his guests in the small room. They were happy and content, took care of each other, and began to consider a family. Their first son, my great-uncle Aref, was born in Beirut before my great-grandfather returned to assume his rightful duties as the doctor of his home village.
But before I forget, I want to tell you why all Mahdallah’s sons, my great-uncles, have short names (Aref, Jalal, Ma
an).
On his first day of school, when my great-grandfather, a not very tall eight-year-old boy, met his teacher, she, in her prim, proper British manner, asked if he could speak English.
“Yes, madame. I can.”
She had her doubts, it seemed. She asked if he could read and write the language.
“Yes, madame. I can.”
In a firm, clipped voice, she demanded that he go up to the board and write his name.
He did:
MAHDALLAH ARISSEDDINE
“My dear young man,” the teacher said, “your name is longer than you are.”
And my great-grandfather was so shamed that he swore none of his descendants would ever endure such ignominy.
My niece was crying. My father had stopped responding to her. The technician nodded off next to the dialysis machine. The blood in the tubes looked more black than red, and it re-entered my father no redder. The ventilator inhaled and my father exhaled; he breathed in when it expired. Was that an inversely proportional relationship, or a direct relationship? My math failed me.
I wanted to pray but didn’t know to whom I should direct my pleading. There was no map to follow. My left hand caressed my father’s foot, came across moistureless crags. Lines forming unreal countries along his instep and sole. I walked to the nightstand and poured the verbena-scented lotion onto my hands. I massaged the moisturizer onto the arid skin of his foot. I loved the scent, my mother’s favorite. It made sense that he’d continue to use it. The miniature frame was still next to his bed. Her picture. She retained the same ageless look in every photograph, a regal amalgam of severity and benevolence. I wondered whether I was truly seeing the undersized photo or my memory was filling gaps where my eyesight failed.
Help me, Mother. He was your husband.
The technician opened his eyes. He looked dazed for a moment, stupefied. “Only a few minutes left,” he announced officially.
My niece and I could clearly see the time blinking two minutes, thirty-seven seconds, in big red digits. Thirty-six. Thirty-five.
Salwa gripped my father’s hand. “Everything will be all right, Grandfather.”
The machine beeped: a continuous high pitch that was surprisingly comforting. Pleased with himself, the technician restated the obvious: “It’s over.” He slid aside the single cotton sheet that was my father’s cover. He unhooked tubes from tubes, re-coiled the machine’s, opened a small trapdoor in the front, and put them in. He clamped shut the lonely tubes sprouting from the bloodstained, iodine-blotched skin of my father’s side. Medicinal smells.
“Are we going to remove the tubes?” I asked.
He stared back with confused and tarnished eyes. I wanted to relieve my father of some intrusion. If only I could pull out one tube—one single tube—we would all feel better.
The technician packed his machine more quickly. My niece watched everything in bafflement. We were strangers in a land where the natives spoke an incomprehensible language.
Mahdallah worked as a doctor for a year before he was approached by one of his old teachers. The Englishman made my great-grandfather a sweet offer. The Anglicans would send him to England to study further, to practice and learn in superior hospitals. The mission would pay for everything, for his entire family’s stay in England. The mission, however, could only make this offer to a member of its own congregation. To accept, Mahdallah had to be baptized.
My great-grandfather wasn’t religious. It was just that you didn’t change your religion. It wasn’t done. He may have become a Muslim, but he didn’t practice, didn’t take it seriously. He did it to get married. As a Druze, he couldn’t marry a Muslim or any non-Druze. All he did was state the Shahada, testify that there is no God but God and Muhammad is the Prophet of God. That was it. No big deal. Just a formality.
Baptism. Now, that’s a commitment.
The Anglicans had been trying to baptize Druze for years. The two groups were stuck with each other, like Nile crocodiles and plovers. Most of the infrastructure of the Ottoman Empire was in the cities and Muslim villages. The Catholic French and their charities directed their work at the Christian villages. The English and their missionaries couldn’t set up shop except in the Druze areas. The conversion rate was not very high.
An Englishwoman had pitched camp in the village in 1843. Her name was Helen Kitchen. With a seemingly endless supply of funds, she had a compound built, consisting of three impressive buildings, the first in the village with tiled roofs. There was already a school for boys, so she started one for girls. She made conversion a condition of entry. Girls wanted to learn. They made the sign of the cross, did their homework, left school, got married, and had kids, and no one remembered they were no longer supposed to be Druze.
After a few years, Mrs. Kitchen realized that the girls studied their Bibles and could sing hymns with the best of them but didn’t consider this a religion. When she attempted to make the ritual more serious (baptism?), the girls were shocked and embarrassed. Mrs. Kitchen stopped making conversion a requirement for enrollment. The girls still studied the Bible, sang hymns and Christmas carols, but there was no pretense anymore. Once, when a missionary confronted her, accusing, “But these girls aren’t Christians,” she replied, “Neither was Jesus.”
She educated thousands of girls, many from neighboring villages. She actually became a local. When she died, she was buried in a Druze cemetery. To this day, many Lebanese women, Druze and Christian, visit her grave and keep the site clean.
Mahdallah converted. He was watered. Secretly, though. He refused to baptize his son, Aref. No one suggested his wife convert. He would spend the rest of his life denying that deed.
The family spent four or five years in London. The gray weather didn’t suit them. They didn’t mind the cold—their village was colder—but the lack of sunshine ensured they would never settle in that city.
The village gossips said: The gray weather is making the harem girl barren.
The village gossips said: And God will never bless the betrayer again.
The village gossips were wrong on both counts. My great-grandparents had other children, but it took time—not as long as Abraham and Sarah, but long enough for gossip.
But here are two facts, documented and checked:
My great-grandparents Dr. Mahdallah and Mona Arisseddine and their son, Aref, around five years old at the time, boarded a Belgian-registered ship, the Leopold II, from England to the port city of Beirut, in June 1889.
My other great-grandfather, the esteemed missionary Dr. Simon Twining, accompanied by his recently betrothed, the heart of darkness, sailed from England to Beirut on the identical ship, the Leopold II, in June 1890.
The doctors would surely have met had they been on the same crossing. What would they have talked about, standing on deck, holding on to the railing, looking at the sun drowning in the golden Mediterranean? They wore similar cotton suits of Western cut, white shirts, ties. Their hats were also similar. Mahdallah would not wear his fez until he reached the village. They had countless things in common, or would have in times to come, and the conversation would not lag until, finally, Ah, sir, what say you we blend the seed of my loins with your seed and produce some exasperatingly strange characters: the wicked hag of the mountains, the naïve and haughty villager, the parsimonious simpleton, the talented, frustrated homosexual, and the sexual Sisyphus, who would betray his family over and over and over and over again?
Then there was the evil Sitt Hawwar.
Upon deciding to return to the village of his birth, Mahdallah, while he was still in London, commissioned the village builder, a man by the name of Hawwar, to put up a house. Hawwar charged the young doctor an exorbitant amount of money. One of Mahdallah’s brothers was supposed to oversee the building and its financing, but he must have been distracted, for when the young doctor returned, he found a windowless skeleton of a house with patchy cement floors and only an undercoat of paint.
Mahdallah complained. Hawwar promised to finish the job quickly, before the winter snows. Mahdallah and his family could wait out the house at his parents’. But the wife, the harem girl, the Albanian, insisted the bare-bones house was her home. She moved her family in, shaming the builder into working harder and faster.
That was a mistake. And she compounded the mistake. She didn’t know any better—she was a foreigner. Mona Arisseddine told her neighbors the truth. She said they could have built three houses for what they paid. She mentioned how much her husband paid for each material. The stove wasn’t even new: you could see it was used. “Look,” she kept saying, “look.”
Sitt Hawwar, the builder’s much younger wife, became Mona Arisseddine’s enemy.
Mona Arisseddine told people the builder was a crook.
Sitt Hawwar told people the doctor was a Christian.
Three Druze men showed up at Mahdallah’s clinic one morning to kill the good doctor. The only thing that saved him was a heavy patient load that day. The men walked into the clinic and asked to see him. They were told they would be next. A parent with a sick child entered, and the men decided to let the doctor help the child before they murdered him. Then came an elderly woman, a man with a broken foot, another sick child, and so on. At the end of the day, the sister-in-law of one of the would-be slayers arrived with her ill daughter. She asked her relative what he was doing there, and he replied that he was waiting to exterminate the doctor.
“Are you crazy?” she yelled. “This man is treating my daughter and you want to kill him? Why don’t you go kill a government official or something?”
The three embarrassed killers left, and a village story was born. And the bey warned that he would personally torture and kill anyone who attempted to injure the Druze doctor.
“If that woman hadn’t shown up,” my grandfather said, “you kids wouldn’t be here. Think about that. It was fate. Mahdallah had converted, so he had insulted their faith. Neighbors had killed neighbors before. Why wasn’t your great-grandfather killed? You ask me and I’ll tell you. It was because I was meant to marry your grandmother, of course. Do you see that?”
“No,” I said. The other kids didn’t even hear him. Anwar was too busy pummeling Hafez. Lina, who had been sitting next to me, had disappeared with my other cousins. Little Mona was in Aunt Samia’s arms, fidgeting.
“Stop it, Baba,” Aunt Samia said. “It’s Eid al-Adha, no time for your crazy stories. You’ve no idea what a bad example you set.” She stood up, put her daughter down. “And you,” she admonished me, “why do you just sit there and listen? Why don’t you get into a fight with your cousins? You want people to think you’re a coward? Get in there and smack one of them.”
I jumped off the sofa and ran out of the room, looking for my mother. She wasn’t in the dining room, where the rest of the family was yelling. I sprinted to the terrace. Every apartment in the building had a large balcony, but Aunt Samia’s penthouse had a terrace encircling it. I envied Anwar and Hafez for being able to run around whenever they felt like it.
My father said Aunt Samia got the biggest apartment because she was the eldest.
My mother said Aunt Samia got it by whining for ten whole days that she deserved it because she was married to the most helpless man in the world.
I ran almost all the way around the terrace before I found my mother leaning against a wall, smoking a cigarette. My father was talking, gazing warily at her. She stared out toward Beirut’s dappled rooftops, distracted, as if counting the tines of each television antenna on every roof in the city.
“You’ve been spending too much time alone,” my father said, “and that makes it harder for you to tolerate other people. It’s a family get-together, Layla. You can’t leave before lunch.”
After each drag on her cigarette, my mother moved her hand to cup the bun at the back of her head, as if doubting its existence. The smoke would circle the bun for an instant before dying.
“If those children were mine,” she said, “I would short-circuit them. Poof. Clack. Everything tumbles. The motor sputters, rumble-rumble, dies. No more noise.”
My father’s face tightened in shock. “That’s an awful thing to say, even for you. How could you?”
My mother noticed me. Her lips curled into a smile. “Osama, I don’t want you hanging around your cousins too much. Too many bad habits.”
I knew she’d want me to ask this now, at this moment. “Is it true they kill Christians in the village?”
My father looked at me in horror. “Of course it’s not true. Who told you that?”
“Grandfather said the village men almost killed your grandfather because he was a Christian.”
“How many times have I told you not to believe any of my father’s stories? He’s a hakawati. He makes things up. My grandfather wasn’t Christian. He was a Druze. You know that. If anyone tried to kill him, it was about something else.”
“Yes,” my mother said. The sun struck her face, and she looked brighter. “It was probably about something like an elevator. You know how the Druze are. They’re hospitable, and they take care of their own. Mind your seventh neighbor and all that.”
“Don’t do this,” my father said. “The old man’s tales are more than enough. Let’s not confuse the boy with more, I beg you.”
My mother straightened. “You’re right.” Her crisp voice melded with the sound of approaching steps. “No one tried to kill any Christians in the village. Your grandfather makes things up.”
Lina turned the corner, followed by Anwar, who was always trying to engage her in some convoluted game. “They kill Christians in the village?” she asked.
“No,” my father said. “No, they don’t.” He turned around and faced the railing.
“If it’s true,” Anwar told Lina, “I’ll have to slit your throat with a knife.”
“And before you do,” Lina replied without missing a beat, “I’ll take that knife and shove it up a place that will surprise you.”
Anwar gasped. My parents both yelled Lina’s name. “I have to go talk to that loon,” my father said. “Things can’t go on like this. He’s a menace.”
“Don’t.” My mother held out her hand. “You’ll only upset yourself, and you’ll regret it later. Let it go. Nothing can be done. Not now. Not here.” He took her hand. “Family,” she said, and pulled him to her. She dropped her spent cigarette.
“Oh, no,” Anwar said. “Mother gets upset if anyone leaves cigarettes on the terrace.”
“I’m sure she does.” My mother stepped on the cigarette with her stiletto heel, her calf tensing. She twisted the ball of her foot to the right, to the left, to the right. She took my father’s arm and walked away, leaving a trivial stain of ash, mashed filter, and loose tobacco in her wake.
About the elevator. When Mahdallah returned from London, he was asked by the villagers what he had seen in the great land of abroad.
Many wonders. Strange inhabitants. There were buildings in London where people did not use stairs. A room moved, carried passengers from floor to floor. Moved up and down. Buildings had many floors. Visitors didn’t have to tire themselves by walking up stairs. Why, in the great city of New York, buildings were even higher. Twenty stories or more.
The villagers went away shaking their heads. Should such a foolish man be allowed to walk the streets of the village? Was he dangerous? Should a madman be allowed to mingle with the innocent? A committee was sent to interview the doctor subtly. Luckily for our family, Mona was there. The committee said some villagers had the notion that buildings in the land of the foreign had mobile rooms within them. How exactly did Londoners move between floors?
Before the doctor could reply, his wife jumped in. Why, they ascended and descended stairs, of course. Climbed the stairs when they wanted to go up. Most stairs were made of cement and stone, some of wood, and the latter were often rickety. The doctor stared at his wife, uncomprehending. The committee waited for him to add something. There were great banisters, he said. Beautifully carved. Some staircases were marvelously ornate. Some buildings had a flight of imposing stairs on each side, complete with balustrades and carved mythical animals.
The committee apologized to the doctor. The villagers were simple folk, they said. They always misheard or misunderstood what was being said. The committee begged forgiveness and left the well-grounded doctor to his own devices.
Finally, my great-grandparents had their second child. Jalal Arisseddine was born in 1891. His brother, Aref, was eight then. Mona might have hoped that with Jalal’s arrival people would stop referring to her as the harem girl, since she was now the mother of two sheikhs.
Jalal would grow up to be an important personality in Lebanese history. He was an attorney, a keen student of letters, possessor of a piercing intellect, a man worthy of admiration. Even his critics, and he had many because of his writings rejecting pan-Arabism, respected him. He was jailed three times by the French colonial government. His last internment coincided with the end of Vichy rule in Lebanon. He was released in November 1943, on Independence Day.
Every day he spent in prison, his aged mother brought him food, though she fasted in protest. She could barely walk, but she refused to have anyone carry the meals for her. She waited outside the prison doors on the day of his release.
He came out a hero. She remained that harem girl.
My great-uncle Maan Arisseddine was born in 1894. My father loved him deeply, for he was the man who gave him his early breaks. In the grand scheme of stories, he was nothing, almost an unmentionable, for he was not an odd character or an interesting one. He was a thread, one of many, without which the tapestry would crumble, the yarn fray, and the tale unravel.
But I know of another thread.
Even though the evil Sitt Hawwar loathed my great-grandmother, or probably because of it, she showed up to congratulate the new mother when baby Maan was born. She dragged along her husband, the builder, who was wearing a robe of Chinese silk. She made her husband walk around the small living room. The villagers oohed and aahed, admiring their first view of foreign silk, ignoring the newborn. Now, the proverb was that one should look after one’s seventh neighbor, and Sitt Hawwar was Mona Arisseddine’s second neighbor on the right, so Mona should have treated her even better, or at least been more circumspect. But, then, there was history. And Mona Arisseddine asked her neighbor how much that robe cost.
This story about neighbors arrives from far away, so listen. The parable is Iraqi, all the way from the ancient city of Baghdad; it flew here on waves of air, needing to alight in cavernous ears. Long ago, in a time long past, there lived an honorable Bedouin who was so hospitable and charitable that he was known as Abou al-Karam, Father of Generosity. One day, a poor man raised his tent pole next to the Bedouin’s, and of course Abou al-Karam made sure his neighbor lacked nothing, offering him food, water, and clothing. For seven years, whenever the tribe traveled, their tents remained adjacent. The neighbor became known as Bin al-Kareem, Son of the Generous One. After each of the tribe’s raids, Abou al-Karam would share the spoils with his neighbor: horses, mares, camels, food, slaves, the enemy tribe’s possessions.
By the end of those seven years, Bin al-Kareem and his sons had become wealthy. By the end of those seven years, Abou al-Karam’s youngest daughter had become a desert beauty, lithe and tall as a poplar, graceful as a doe. And Bin al-Kareem’s younger son wanted her. He courted her. He sang verses for her, followed her when she went to the well, knelt outside her tent when she tried to sleep, whispering endearments. The beautiful girl refused him. He stalked her wherever she went, made it impossible for her to move freely. And the girl told her father, who said, “One night more and you will not have to worry about this nefarious boy.”
That night, when the girl went to bed, the boy appeared outside her tent and began whispering to her. “Wait but one more night,” she said, “and you shall receive your just reward.”
At dawn, Abou al-Karam gave the order to break camp. Later that morning, the camels and pack animals were laden and the tribe began to march. For all of the previous seven years, wherever Abou al-Karam pitched his tent in a new camp, Bin al-Kareem pitched his right next to it. That day, arriving at a suitable pasture, Abou al-Karam searched until he found a spot next to a teeming anthill. There he made his home. When Bin al-Kareem arrived to pitch his tent, he said, “O dear neighbor, there is an anthill on my site.”
“So there is,” replied Abou al-Karam, “and God’s earth is wide.”
Bin al-Kareem said nothing further. He drove his family and his belongings away from the tribe, up north, far away from his once-beloved neighbor. But his heart ached, and his mind was troubled. He relived the insult over and over in his head. Why? he asked himself. Why did his friend betray him? One night, he had a dream. He saw Abou al-Karam’s daughter walking in the desert, followed by wisps of clouds, and he divined what might have happened. The next morning, while hunting with his elder son, he said, “What a shame we had to leave our good neighbor. And that daughter. What a beautiful girl. Our family is inferior to hers and there was no hope of matrimony between us, but, still, what a gorgeous lass. A shame we left before you had a chance with her.”
“Shame?” the son yelled. “You call that a shame? Shame on you for uttering such words. Was she not my sister? Did we not eat of the same food? Did we not share the same honor for seven years? Only sons of whores and sons of shame would consider what you’re thinking.”
“Forgive me, my son,” the father said. “The sorrow of parting must have clouded my judgment. Let us return to our tent and forget we had this conversation.”
The next day, while hunting, Bin al-Kareem said to his younger son, “What a shame about that adorable girl.”
“Shame?” sighed the boy. “One night more, Father, and she would have been mine. One night more.”
And the father unsheathed his sword and cut off his son’s head.
And the father wound woolen thread around his son’s head, and wound, and wound, until he had a large ball of yarn. He waited until he met a traveler heading south, and he asked, “Will you carry this gift to my friend Abou al-Karam?”
When the traveler arrived at Abou al-Karam’s camp, he found him in his tent, sitting with guests. The traveler placed the gift before Abou al-Karam, who asked, “Who sends this gift?”
“A man who called you his friend and brother,” said the traveler.
Abou al-Karam summoned his slaves to unwind the yarn. As they unraveled it, they uncovered the son’s head. And Abou al-Karam beat his chest in sorrow, sighed the breath of remorse. He understood that his neighbor of seven years was as true as a brother and as jealous of his name. The guests demanded the tale, and Abou al-Karam told it. The guests all said in one voice that he must marry his daughter to his neighbor’s elder son, which would make Abou al-Karam and Bin al-Kareem brothers.
And so it was. Two neighbors, one superior and one inferior, but equals in honor and pride, became one family, and lived long to take pleasure in their children.
And Mahdallah Arisseddine worked hard. He became a well-respected doctor in the region. Patients arrived from all over. Yet he couldn’t increase the size of his family by much.
Finally, ten years after his third son was born, Mona got pregnant again. This time, everyone knew it was a girl. They had waited long enough. The eldest, Aref, was already twenty-one years old. When Mona was in her eighth month, the doctor was asked to trek to Aleppo to heal a man from the al-Atrash family, a prince from Jabal al-Druze in Syria who had fallen gravely ill while traveling. Mona objected, but Mahdallah said he would be back before she gave birth. She said she didn’t believe him. He said he had never lied to her. She let him go.
Her last words to him were “I’m calling her Najla, after my mother.”
For, although the doctor healed the prince, the doctor died. He spent his last few days away from his family, wasting away in a strange bed, trying to medicate himself, alone, in a city farther north than Tripoli, where he met his wife, a much longer journey.
Like my great-grandmother Lucine Guiragossian, my great-grandfather Mahdallah Arisseddine died of amoebic dysentery. His death in 1904 came four years after hers; his was in the city of Aleppo, a little bit farther south than Urfa, the city where she died.
He died a Druze, but he was buried in a Christian cemetery, since there were no Druze cemeteries in Aleppo. God rest his soul.
This would not be Mona’s only tragedy. My great-uncle Aref was a wild young man. While his father was still alive, he managed to keep himself under some semblance of control. His father’s influence was such that the boy graduated at the top of his class and enrolled in medical school at his father’s alma mater. Mahdallah rented him a small room in Beirut. Aref studied hard, but he also played hard. Rumors of his mad conquests trickled to the village.
To his impressionable teenage brother, Jalal, he said, “All women are different. A Druze woman tastes like half-cooked lamb with rosemary and peppers, a Maronite tastes like beef marinated in olive oil, a Sunni girl like calf’s liver cooked in white wine, a Shiite like chicken in vinegar with pine nuts, an Orthodox like fish in tahini sauce, a Jewish woman like baked kibbeh, a Melchite like semolina stew, a Protestant like chicken soup, and an Alawite like okra in beef stock.”
And Aref tasted them all and more. He wanted a bite of each sect of his land, and that desire developed into a gastronomical obsession. The Sunni (university girl), Maronite (housewife in Sinn el-Fil), Orthodox (housewife in Ain el-Rumaneh), and Druze (maid in Beiteddine) were not difficult to obtain. The Jewish wife of Mr. Salim Kuhin wasn’t hard, either; he met her outside the downtown synagogue. For the Melchite, he had to travel all the way to the Bekaa Valley, to Zahlé, and find Mrs. Ballat, the manager of the pension where he stayed. The Shiite was difficult. He traveled to the south and met a number of girls, but Sidon didn’t open its gates for him. Tyre resisted him as it did Alexander the Great. He had Alexander’s moxie and cunning, but he lacked Two-Horned’s patience and resources. Tyre defeated Aref. He was lucky enough to find a Shiite prostitute in a nightclub near the port of Beirut.
Three days after Aref’s twenty-first birthday, his father died. Aref shook off whatever constraints he may have had. The Protestant was his biology professor, an Englishwoman, but then he decided that, as a nonnational, she wasn’t a representative morsel of the delicious sectarian spectrum. He had to search for three months, fail one class, and barely pass another before he found an appropriate Lebanese Protestant. He rode the train north to Tripoli to savor an Alawite, had to live there for two months before the seduction was complete. He made love to an Armenian in Bourj Hammoud on the way back to Beirut.
When he finished the entire menu, he celebrated with a drunken, boastful evening with friends, and then he returned to the village for a few days, his medical education all but forgotten. Those days dragged into a few more, and those into a few more still, as he grew fond of a married woman, Sitt Yasmine, whose husband was a farmhand for the bey.
Every morning, Aref hid behind the village’s great oak tree, waiting for the farmhand to leave. Then my great-uncle would ride his horse to the house, tie the reins to the window shutter, and entertain himself with Sitt Yasmine. If only he had tied the horse to the back window. The neighbors told the husband he was being cuckolded, but he didn’t believe at first. One morning, a friend took the farmhand by the arm and brought him back to his house. “See,” his friend said, “there’s the horse.” The farmhand yelled, screamed, “O Sheikh, get out of my house now or I will commit murder.” Aref escaped out the back. The farmhand and his friend gave chase, intending to do him harm with a rake, a hoe, and an empty bucket between them. Aref laughed, tried to tie his belt while running. He reached a cascade of olive orchards, the silver-green trees in rows that stretched to the bottom of the hill. He jumped across into the lower orchard, landed on the soft earth, ran a little more, and jumped again, but this time his foot caught in an olive branch. He spun in midair like a tetherball and shot headfirst to the ground. He died on impact.
The farmhand returned the horse to my great-grandmother. She must have opened the door for him with my grandmother Najla in her arms.
Miraculously, Sitt Yasmine remained unharmed. It is said the farmhand was so shocked by witnessing the demise of a sheikh that he forgot his wife’s betrayal and didn’t remember to beat her.
When my grandfather decided he wanted my grandmother for a wife, he sent word to her brother Jalal, already a respected family man at twenty-seven. Jalal had left the confines of the village for a more cosmopolitan life in Beirut. Since Ismail al-Kharrat didn’t have a family to represent him, he sent one of his admirers, a charming but not very gifted fellow, a sheikh himself, and the first cousin of the bey on his mother’s side. My great-uncle received him as a good host should, but when the guest requested his sister’s hand for the hakawati, Jalal said a simple no. My great-uncle would have laughed, but, as an Arab intellectual, he lacked a sense of humor.
“And that bastard just said no,” my grandfather said. “He didn’t elaborate, felt no need to explain his position. I had my guy prepared with all kinds of wonderful things to say about me and why I’d make a good husband for your grandmother, but the bastard didn’t have the courtesy to let my guy speak. Just no.”
“You can’t call him a bastard, Baba,” Aunt Samia said. “He’s my uncle. He’s the children’s great-uncle. You can’t just curse him like that.”
“The man was a bastard,” Uncle Halim insisted. Already drunk, he sipped his arak delicately. He took another sip and then gulped down the rest. “It’s not like Baba is adding anything new to the equation.”
“You’re taking his side?” Aunt Samia said. She stood up, handed Little Mona to her bewildered husband. “Of all people, you have the gall to say something like that?” Uncle Akram held the girl with his arms straight and outstretched, as if she were smelly locker-room laundry. “In my house?” Mona’s legs dangled in midair. Her father turned his head left and right, hoping someone would rescue him. “You choose to do this in front of all these kids? Do you care if they all grow up to be gypsies with no morals? Maybe you want them to grow up to be Kurds?” She walked toward the kitchen, pivoted, returned to take her daughter. “And you,” she admonished her husband, “you sit here and listen to him insult the family and you do nothing.”
“But it’s not my family.” Uncle Akram looked to my father for support.
“You always resort to that, don’t you? Whenever I need you, you hide.” She took a deep breath, raised her voice. “Uncle Jalal was called a bastard. What are you going to do about it?”
“But he’s not my uncle,” her husband said.
“And he is a bastard,” Uncle Halim said, snickering.
“No,” Aunt Samia said. “No, no, no.” Her daughter began to pout and whimper.
Lina grinned. My mother looked at her and winked. Uncle Jihad, who was sitting on the corner couch, entered the winking fest. Then he nodded at my mother, as if agreeing to something, and threw his contribution into the ring.
“Osama,” he called loudly, “what happened to the money you borrowed from me?” I didn’t understand. “Did you spend all of it?” His voice didn’t match his face. My mother was trying to catch his attention. She nodded to Little Mona and raised her eyebrows. “Samia, my dear,” he said, “why don’t you give me the precious darling?” Aunt Samia, still staring at Uncle Halim, handed her daughter over distractedly. With the little girl in his arms, Uncle Jihad returned to me. “Did you think I’d forget the money, Osama?” He waited a few breaths before adding, “Did you waste the money”—breath—”or did you hide”—breath—”the money?”
My mother grinned, shook her head slowly from side to side in admiration, as if telling Uncle Jihad she was in awe. He shrugged, as if replying it was nothing.
You could count. One. Two. And the jinn of hell broke their chains.
“You stole my money,” Aunt Samia shouted at Uncle Halim, who recoiled visibly. Her face was as red as if dunked in tomato paste, and her eyes were as white and wide as saucers.
“Samia, no,” my father yelled, but she was off in her outraged world.
“It was my money. It was mine. My mother wanted to give it to me. To me. My money.”
“Samia,” my grandfather pleaded, “stop it.”
“The neighbors, Samia,” my father added. “The neighbors will hear.”
Anwar and Hafez pushed all the way back in their chairs. Lina sat forward. Uncle Jihad seemed to have lost interest. He tried to distract Little Mona, who was staring at her livid mother.
“You hate Jalal because he wanted you to give the money back to Mama. But you hid it. He isn’t the bastard. You are. You’re a lowlife.”
“If it weren’t for the children,” Uncle Halim yelled back, “I’d smack you from here to the village, you big-mouthed idiot.” Aunt Nazek moved closer to him, tried to calm him, but he stood up. “I returned the money. I didn’t hide it. You’re a big fat liar.” He shook his finger at her. “You’re lucky the children are here.”
“This is unreal,” my grandfather said.
“I’m not a liar. You hid it. You hid the money.”
My father stood up. From the look on his face, you could see it was over. He seethed. “Everybody just eat shit and shut up,” he screamed. Quiet. My father sighed. “Samia. He was eight years old. You were—what?—twelve? What’s the matter with you? You were children. What the hell does it matter what he did then? How much did he hide? Was it one quarter or two?”
“I don’t care,” she said, but we all heard the defeated whine creep back into her voice. “He stole my money.” Her rapid breathing slowed. “He stole my money again. I can prove it.”
“Eight?” my mother asked Uncle Jihad.
“Yes.” He nodded, stroked Little Mona’s hair. “I was about as old as this one here. I was traumatized, I tell you.” He blinked once, twice. Looked up to the ceiling in mock sorrow. “That incident scarred my life.”
“And you.” My father turned to his. “Why do you keep telling my kids these stories?”
“They’re not just your kids,” my grandfather replied. “And don’t blame me for this one. I was telling how I married your mother. An old man has a right to reminisce, and children need to know where they came from.” He refused to look at my father.
“Every time you tell one of your stories, something horrible happens.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the story of how I met your mother.”
My mother sat up, stretched lazily, smiled beatifically at my grandfather. “You know, Uncle Ismail, the story might not be appropriate for the children. You see, if you tell the story, they’ll grow up believing that the whole family, almost everyone in this room, wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the bey.”
“That’s not true,” both my father and grandfather said.
“And we wouldn’t want that, would we?” she asked.
The hospital kept to a Mediterranean schedule: visiting hours after siesta were from four till eight. Evening had blued the room. I was tired, yet an orderly was just beginning the dinner round. He wouldn’t enter my father’s room. I nestled next to Fatima on the recliner; her arm swallowed me up. “I’m scared,” I whispered.
“You know, grief feels very much like fear, almost interchangeable,” she said. “You’d think we’d get used to grief, but we never do.” She stroked my hair gently, scratched my hair, clicked her fingernails together. We called that “cleaning lice.” Fatima’s Italian mother used to do that. I’d loved it as a child, and I loved it now.
Lina trudged into the room, looking like she was about to disintegrate—eyes puffy, skin dark beneath them. She acknowledged Fatima and me but went directly to my father’s bed.
“Have they all left?” Fatima asked. My sister nodded in between heaves and tears. Fatima waited. “What about Salwa?”
“Hovik took her home,” Lina replied.
“Good. She looked exhausted. Not as exhausted as you, though. You’re going home. Sleep in your bed tonight.”
“No. It’s quite all right. I’ll stay here.”
“No, I’ll stay. You go home. You can’t keep sleeping on the recliner. I’ll take over.”
“I’m not going home,” my sister said. “He wants me here. I’m used to the recliner. If he wakes up and doesn’t see me here, he freaks. I have to.”
The sound of the machine—inhale, exhale—echoed inside my skull. Aspiration, beep, beep, expiration. My head seemed to melt upon itself. I heard myself say, “No, you both go home. I’m staying.” They gawked as if I were a poltergeist. “I need time with him, and you need the rest.”
Fatima blew kisses my way. She hurriedly collected my sister’s belongings.
Lina wouldn’t take her eyes from mine. I blinked. “You sure?” she asked.
Fatima picked up my sister’s overnight bag, kissed me, and dragged my sister toward the door. Lina disentangled herself and came over. “Go to the nurses’ desk and they’ll give you a pillow and blanket.” She hugged me. “Call me if anything happens.” She squeezed me tight. “It was always just you and me, stupid. Always was, always will be.” And she kissed the top of my head. The sound of the kiss echoed in my skull.
When my grandfather discovered he’d been rejected, he pleaded his case to the bey. This was the girl for him, he said. He loved her. No other would do. If Najla wouldn’t marry him, who else would? Could the bey intercede on his behalf? And the bey did. He called Jalal Arisseddine, asked him to reconsider. The hakawati was his protégé, a decent fellow. The bey himself would make sure the girl was taken care of. The girl wouldn’t find a better husband, after all. She was an orphan of impure parentage, and had a disreputable deceased brother—three strikes.
The girl’s brother agreed to marry her to the bey’s hakawati. The girl’s mother did not.
And the bey called Mona Arisseddine. She put on her mandeel and trudged up the hill to the mansion. The bey gave her the same spiel, and she said no. He repeated the same words, and she said no again. He repeated them once more, and she rejected his offer a third time. She left the befuddled bey and returned home.
The bey called his mother. His mother said, “I am ashamed to have raised such a fool.”
And the bey’s mother put on her mandeel and trudged down to visit Mona Arisseddine in her home. The mothers discussed the hakawati. Mona said he had no family. The bey’s mother reminded Mona that she didn’t, either, and she’d turned out to be a wonderful mother. Mona said the man was an entertainer. The bey’s mother ruminated on how quickly we forgot.
Could he make her happy? The bey’s mother told Mona to ask her daughter.
The mothers asked Najla if she thought the hakawati could make her happy.
Najla looked at both women and said he made her laugh.
Wedding torches would flare.
Mountain weddings were known for many things: the feast and the accompanying feeding frenzy; the dancing, the Lebanese dabké and the dances of the swords and shields; the rites of riding to collect the bride; and most of all the zajal, the poetry duels.
At weddings, poets competed in praising the bride, the groom, luminaries attending the wedding, and matrimonial traditions in general. They also dueled, entertained the crowds by engaging in boasts and insults, composing verses on the spot. A poet was guaranteed an invitation to every wedding. A good one was even paid. At some weddings, amateurs joined in, tried their luck in verse. My grandparents’ wedding became famous for a verse.
A tasteless, reprehensible quatrain uttered by none other than the evil Sitt Hawwar.
A groom with a huge mouth filled with many needless words,
Yet no incisor and no molar,
Married a girl with a bigger mouth,
Whose teeth entered a room before her.
I followed the aromas emanating from the kitchen, but knew better than to go in. I stopped in the prep room. Aunt Samia was complaining to someone, most probably Aunt Nazek. “I can’t take it anymore,” she was saying. I grabbed a piece of bread from the table and bit into it. “I don’t know why she thinks she needs to keep her nose so high up in the air,” I heard her say. “It’s not like she produced a bushel of sons, just a toad of a girl and a gnat of a boy.” I bit into the bread again and again.
My grandfather came up from behind and covered my eyes. I knew it was him because of his smell, but I couldn’t tell him I knew, because my mouth was too full. “It’s only me,” he said, chuckling. “And don’t eat the bread by itself when there’s so much food around.”
As noiselessly as possible, he moved a chair next to the table, motioned for me to stand on it. He uncovered a deep bowl in the middle of the table, moved it closer. I could see the stew inside. “The secret,” he whispered. He tilted his head, and I did the same. I saw soft steam churning upon itself, imagining a porcelain cover no longer there. “The bowl has lips,” he said, “and can tell you stories, if only you allow your ears to hear or your nose to smell.”
“Or my lips to kiss,” I said softly. I bent, and the steam caressed my lashes, licked my lips. I stuck out my tongue and licked right back.
Aunt Samia walked in. “Put that filthy tongue back where it came from.”
I jumped off the chair and ran out as fast as I could. I heard her ask, “How could you let him do that, Baba?” but I didn’t hear his response.
He found me on the terrace, leaning over the railing, staring at the rosebushes in the gated garden below. “That was fun,” he said. “I bet you don’t know what was in the pot. I know you think it’s chicken stew, but it most certainly is not. It’s imp stew. You have to catch those little devils, no bigger than chickens but very hard to trap. Killing the imps is never easy. You have to find them at the right time of the year and freeze them. That’s how you do it. Not easy.”
“Oh, come on.”
“It’s true. And you have to blanch them to get rid of their red color, so no one can tell that it’s imp stew. You don’t want your guests to throw up, now, do you?”
“But the guests would taste them.”
“Oh, no, imps taste like chicken. Samia is just trying to trick us.”
I didn’t say anything. I heard his breath.
“Does your father still like his meat?” my grandfather asked.
“Ask him,” I said.
“He’s not here, is he? So—I’m asking you. Does he still sneak into the kitchen and eat the aliyeh when no one is looking?”
“What’s aliyeh?”
“It’s the fried lamb and onions and garlic and salt and pepper. What you need to prepare to add flavor to the stew. When your grandmother would cook, she’d have the best aliyeh—well, she had the best everything. She was the best cook ever to walk this cursed earth.”
“Our cook is probably better. That’s what everyone says.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. No one will ever be as good as your grandmother. Her cooking woke the dead and the gods. Where was I? Your father. Well, your devious father would crawl into the kitchen on his hands and knees, holding a piece of bread between his teeth so it wouldn’t touch the floor. He’d get to the stove, stand up quickly, and dip his bread into the aliyeh while it was still frying, pick up as much as he could in that morsel, and run out before his mother caught him. He’d run, blowing on the food in his hand to cool it. Blow, and duck to avoid your grandmother, who ran after him. It was a game they played, and he had to stuff the bread in his mouth or she’d take it from him. He must have been your age, or maybe a little older. We couldn’t afford much meat when he was younger. We couldn’t afford imps, either.”