The Hakawati

Sixteen

The best stories always begin with the appearance of a woman. The story of the family corporation does, and the woman in question is, of course, my mother. What did my father tell Hovik that day? How did he win my mother?

He saw her for the first time while she was walking with a friend on Bliss Street. He was twenty, working as a clerk in an import-export company on Bliss, and my mother was eighteen, attending the American University. He’d been hearing about the two girls, the blonde and the brunette, from his co-workers, who wouldn’t stop blathering about the pair of pretty university girls. The brunette was lovely, but the blonde was so lusciously sexy. My father had to endure his co-workers’ descriptions, in full, striking detail and with gestures, of what they’d like to do to the blonde. He heard how the rascally wind had blown her blouse open to reveal a spectacular cleavage. The brunette was pretty, really pretty, but the blonde showed mind-bending curves.

My father saw my mother, the brunette, and was smitten.

But wait. This is not that kind of fairy tale. He was smitten. Of that, there could be no doubt, but was it love at first sight? Was it love at all? Cynics dismiss love at first sight, saying that one person cannot possibly know another in an instant.

My father knew a number of things when he saw my mother. He knew she was a classic Lebanese beauty. That was obvious. He knew she was from an upper-class family — the way she dressed and carried herself was a giveaway. He knew that if he married her he would gain access to a world he could only dream about. He also knew that she would never give him a second look, not unless he became someone else, someone better, someone important.

My father also understood that my mother was smarter than all his co-workers combined. He instinctively knew that she wasn’t a woman who relied on accident or luck. Her choice of companion was well thought out. She and her blonde friend would certainly attract attention, and a lot of it. One of my father’s co-workers actually felt sorry for my mother because her beauty couldn’t match the blonde’s. He was terribly stupid.

The blonde’s beauty made you want to bed her. My mother’s beauty made you want to introduce her to your mother. That was precisely the contrast that my mother intended. The blonde distracted the riffraff and took them out of my mother’s way.

Years later, in 1992, one of the major newspapers ran various historical pictures of Beirut in hopes of inspiring readers to remember how good things were before the war. One picture was of the blonde and the brunette, wide smiles on their young faces, eyes brimming with dreams and curiosity, buns high atop their heads, stepping in unison. The caption said: “Madame Layla al-Kharrat (nee Khoury) in 1950 with unidentified woman.”

Upon seeing my mother that first time, my father became intoxicated.

The poet Saadi, my mother’s favorite, once told a charming personal tale of love and intoxication.

When Saadi was young, he cast his eyes on a beautiful girl who appeared briefly on a balcony as he was walking down her street. The day was torrid, dried the mouth, boiled the marrow in the bone. Unable to withstand the sun’s harsh rays, Saadi took shelter in the shade of a wall. Suddenly, from the portico of her house, the girl appeared. No tongue could describe her loveliness: an impossibility, like the dawn rising in the obscurity of deep night. In her hand she held a cup of snow water sprinkled with sugar and mixed with the juice of a grape. Saadi caught the scent of roses but was unsure whether she had infused the drink with the blossoms of the flower or those of her cheeks. He received the cup from her comely hand, drank from it, and was restored to healthy life. Yet the thirst of the poet’s soul was not such that it could be allayed with a cup of water — the streams of whole rivers would not satisfy it.

He who is intoxicated with wine

Will be sober again in the course of the night; But he who is intoxicated by the cupbearer

Will not recover his senses till the Day of Judgment.

Alas for poor Saadi, the winsome cupbearer was not destined to be his wife. Fate would never permit happiness to a man of such talent — a content poet is a mediocre one, a happy poet insufferable. Saadi married a Xanthippe, one who would make the original blush in shame for falling so short in shrewishness. And Saadi was forced to lay down the most exquisite poems bemoaning his matrimonial misfortunes and compose even greater lines insulting his wife.

The humble King al-Zaher Baybars entered his first diwan to the cheers of the adoring nobles and wise men of the land. He listened attentively to news of his kingdom and began to bestow titles and responsibilities upon his people. Aydmur became a prince and the leader of the kingdom’s army; Sergeant Lou’ai, the emir of the lands of the Levant. Baybars called on the Turks, the Kurds, the Turkomans, the Circassians, the Arabs, the Persians, and all the other nationalities to present heroes who were worthy of leading them, and he made these men the emirs of their tribes. The Uzbeks and the African warriors became his official companions and bodyguards. And all rejoiced — all except for Othman, who sat glum and morose. Baybars asked his friend why he was not in a happy mood, and Othman replied, “You gave all these men new robes and bestowed titles upon friends and strangers, yet you forgot your own brother.”

A shamefaced Baybars declared before the world that Othman was now an emir, and a smile crept over the new emir’s face. Othman returned home to Layla, who greeted him with “Welcome, my emir. I am glad it is only a minor title, because I would not want to deal with your big head had he given you a title of note.”

Othman said, “Emir is a title of great worth.”

“Of course it is, dear. How many men were made emirs today? And how many emirs were there before today? These are the lands of Islam. Kings, sultans, and caliphs are as common as camels. Emirs? There are as many emirs as there are males in these parts.”

The following day, Othman was even more glum and morose in the diwan, and King Baybars asked, “Why are you unhappy, my brother?”

“Because I am a trite emir.”

• • •

And what of Marouf? Have you forgotten him? Ma’arouf, who had been searching for weeks and months and years for his son all over the Mediterranean?

The nun — the nun raised the infant Taboush for two years in the palace of Thessaly. While carrying a large gift for Taboush’s second birthday, she slipped in descending the stairs, and her soul ascended to the Garden. “Oh well,” said King Kinyar. “I must assign someone to raise the boy now that the nun has betrayed us.” He picked one of his men at random. “You will be the boy’s guardian. Raise him and care for him. Teach him to be a man. If you fail, you and your descendants will be tortured to death.” The guardian raised Taboush and cared for him. Every day he took the boy for walks outside the palace, to the lovely hills and meadows of Thessaly.

One day, Marouf came across Taboush along the road, and the father’s heart fluttered and raced. Marouf greeted Taboush’s guardian and asked if the boy was his son, and the guardian informed him that the boy was the king’s son. And Marouf looked into the boy’s eyes and saw his father’s eyes and his grandfather’s eyes, and he said to himself, “This is my son. I know him as I know myself.” Marouf began to show up on the same road every day so he could play with Taboush. He brought him gifts and sweets, and Taboush began to love him. Marouf had a plan to take the boy with him off the island, back to Maria, and was waiting for the right opportunity. Marouf would whisper into his boy’s ears, “You are honor descended from honor. You are my son and the light of my eyes.”

The guardian grew suspicious and informed the king about the man who was befriending his son. The king ordered the guardian not to take the boy on his walk the following day and instead sent a full squadron of a hundred men. The soldiers attacked Marouf, beat him, and brought him to the king, who shackled Marouf and jailed him in an isolated cell of iron. “You thought you could take my son away from me,” the king said, “but I will take your liberty and pride. You will live here, beneath our royal feet, until you rot and decay. Meditate upon your folly, for you now have the time.” And when he was left alone, Marouf wondered what was to become of him, the chief of forts and battlements, without son, without wife, without honor.

To say that there was a class difference between my mother’s family and my father’s would be like saying that a Rolls-Royce is a slightly better car than a Lada. Even my grandmother’s family, the Arisseddines, sheikhs though they might be, were no match for the Khourys. Luckily for my father, she was from a small branch of the family that was not closely related to the first president of the republic. Still, a sensible man wouldn’t have undertaken to woo a woman who had the same last name as the man who was running the entire country.

Aunt Samia considered my mother’s family cursed. “It’s not your mother’s fault,” she’d say. “She never had a chance to understand family. The curse began long before your poor mother was born.” My mother’s father was an only child — probably the biggest curse, according to my aunt. He was both orphaned and widowed. My maternal grandmother died when my mother was only three, and my grandfather remarried a Belgian. “Could you have worse luck?”

My mother had two half-siblings. “But they don’t really count, do they?” my aunt would ask. “They visit the ruins of the Roman temples during a trip to Lebanon, and that makes them Lebanese? That’s not family.”

My grandfather was intelligent, educated, and successful, but if you pointed out to my aunt that he couldn’t have been cursed, what with having all those qualities and being an ambassador to boot, she replied, “True, but we’re talking an ambassador to Belgium.”

My mother grew up in Belgium, where her father emigrated. When she was fourteen, a cousin suggested that my mother should return with her to Beirut. My grandfather and his Belgian family stayed in Brussels, and my mother went with the cousin — my grandfather in essence admitting that his daughter would have a better chance of finding a suitable husband in Lebanon. My mother’s separation from her immediate family was fortunate. My father would have to persuade her to marry him — a ridiculous task to be sure, but not as impossible as persuading the rest of her family as well.

However, my grandfather the hakawati always said that my father and mother were fated to be married, and, of course, there was a story, one concerning an improbable nocturnal meeting between an Arisseddine and a Khoury in late June 1838 during the Battle of Wadi Baka.

In 1831, Ibrahim Pasha, the ruler of Egypt, temporarily liberated Greater Syria, including Lebanon, from the yoke of the Ottomans. At first the populace was happy to be rid of the corrupt and unjust Ottomans. But Ibrahim Pasha proved no better, and in 1838 the Druze revolted. At Hawran, site of the first battle, fewer than fifteen hundred Druze fighters defeated some fifteen thousand Egyptians. The Egyptians kept replenishing their forces, however, and the Druze couldn’t. What was left of the rebels retreated down to Wadi al-Taym, until only four hundred bunkered in Wadi Baka. Ibrahim Pasha himself led his army of thousands against those four hundred.

With the help of Emir Bashir of Lebanon, Ibrahim Pasha had forced Maronite fighters to help him against the Druze. Most refused the call and hid in the mountains. Those unable to disappear joined the battle but never took their swords out of their scabbards. One was a Khoury, my mother’s great-great-grandfather.

When the Druze rebels realized they could hold out no longer, they decided to wait for nightfall and attack. They would kill as many as they could before dying, and perhaps a few of them would be able to escape. One was an Arisseddine, my father’s great-great-grandfather.

The Druze attacked at night. Almost all of them were killed. Khoury saw a couple of riderless stallions trotting away from the battle and caught up to them and took their reins. Beneath the belly of one of the horses, a badly injured Arisseddine was holding on for dear life. Khoury unsheathed his sword for the first time, handed it to the rebel, and sent him on his way.

Their descendants were married one hundred and eighteen years later.

One day, a man walked into the diwan saying, “I have been victimized, O Prince of believers. I have been violated. Redeem my honor, my lord, I beg of you.” Baybars asked the man to tell him the story. “I am a merchant from Syria, and every year I travel to Egypt to trade. Usually, I avoid al-Areesh, because King Franjeel demands high toll taxes, as if the roads belonged to him and his foreign friends. This year, I was carrying perishables and had to travel the shortest route. I set money aside for the unfair toll, but when my caravan passed by al-Areesh, the king’s army confiscated my entire merchandise, including my camels, my horses, and my voluptuous Kazak slave, whom I had just bought only two days earlier. It is not fair.”

The story angered Baybars, who said, “I am not happy with these alien kings who do not respect treaties that they themselves forced upon us. Al-Areesh is Egypt. It is time we reclaimed our city. Prepare the armies.”

“No, no, no, no,” cried Emir Othman, and Layla said, “Of course I am coming.”

In the Crusader fort of al-Areesh, King Franjeel berated Arbusto. “Were it not for your holy robes, I would cut off your head right now. This is your fault. You tempted me with riches, and now Baybars the barbarian is coming for me.”

The unperturbed Arbusto replied, “Do not fret. You know this fort is impenetrable. Shut the gates and I will take care of the rest. I will call on the other coastal kings for help. I will speak first to the king of Askalan. Hold the fort and the slave army will be defeated.”

“I will come with you,” announced the cowardly king. “I will leave the commander of the fort in charge. Shut the gates.”

“There,” said Aydmur, pointing to the offending edifice a short distance away. “The fort of al-Areesh is secure and sturdy. Unless we get into the fort, we will lose many men. So far, no general has discovered a way of breaking into the fort of al-Areesh.”

“I am tired of this endless equestrian journey,” announced Layla. “Let us rest. When night falls, I will open the gates.” She dismounted from her mare and rubbed her sore behind. “I will give you a signal with my torch when it is accomplished. I have been talking to my people on the inside. It will not be difficult.”

“People on the inside?” Othman glared at his wife. “You will not be going. I will not allow it. No wife of mine opens gates. I will open them.”

That evening, with the help of his wife, Othman dressed in a priest’s robe, combed his hair in Arbusto’s manner, held a jingling censer in his hand, and walked to the gates. The guards, believing he was Arbusto, rushed to let him in. They bowed before him. Othman extended his hand and waited until each man had kissed it. “I am grateful for such a courteous reception,” he said. “In return, I offer my blessings.” He lit the incense — myrrh mixed with opium — and said, “Inhale my blessings, deeper and deeper.” Soon the guards were traveling on a different plane. Othman opened the gate and signaled the slave army. The fort of al-Areesh was vanquished before its defenders realized they were being attacked.

“Well done,” Layla told Othman, and Harhash said, “You inspire him to new heights.”

“The coward Franjeel is not here,” huffed Baybars, “and neither is Arbusto.”

“They left for Askalan,” Layla said. “They meant to raise an army to assail us while we laid siege to al-Areesh.”

“Their plan was foiled,” said Aydmur, “and the next will fail.”

“While you raze this fort,” said Layla, “I will ride ahead and uncover their next plan.”

“No, no, no, no, no.” Othman stomped his foot.

My mother’s first admirer was her second cousin Karim — his father and her deceased mother were first cousins. She was fifteen and enrolled at a Carmelite boarding school when he decided that she would make him a suitable wife. Karim had everything going for him, or at least he seemed to think so. He was twenty-three, the eldest son of a prosperous man, and had surprised everyone, himself most of all, by passing the baccalaureate. And since he graduated high school, his father began to groom him for a career in Lebanese politics.

He met my mother at a family gathering. My mother swore she didn’t say a word to him and he never noticed. She was busy eating while he regaled her with his stories and future plans. Since she proved to be a first-rate listener, Karim began to woo her in earnest by sending a single red rose and a box of Harlequin chocolates stuffed with almonds to her school every Wednesday. She didn’t care for him one way or the other, but her girlfriends loved the chocolates.

He wrote to her father in Brussels, who in turn wrote to my mother wondering what was going on. My mother put his mind at ease by saying she had no intention of marrying before getting a university degree. The young man courted my mother for four and a half months, during which she barely had to utter a single syllable. He visited her once and brought her a potted succulent, an asclepiad that had impressed him mightily. It was after his remarkable second visit that he received a call from Brussels telling him that my mother never wanted to see his face again, under any circumstances. It wasn’t the asclepiad.

He had arrived for the second visit, their third meeting, in his best gabardine suit, his mustache soldered with wax, his face flushed with pride. He showed my mother off to the woman accompanying him, a lady in her thirties, whom he introduced as his father’s first cousin’s young wife, a new aunt. “Isn’t she pretty?” he said of my mother. “And she’s smart, too. She’ll finish school.” My mother was about to tell him that she didn’t wish to be anyone’s exhibit, to be shown off like some antique carpet or fine embroidery, when she suddenly realized that she was the one he was trying to impress. The gloating smile, the studied placement of the hand around his aunt’s waist, and the forced coziness were meant to convey to the young beloved that her suitor was a man of the world, a man who had mistresses, a man who was desired. He wasn’t just anybody. He wanted to impart the idea that she, too, could aspire to be special because someone special wanted her.

My mother called her father. Karim stopped sending her Harlequin chocolates stuffed with almonds. Her girlfriends were miffed, and one actually wondered aloud why my mother couldn’t have waited till the end of term to break her suitor’s heart.

“I would have preferred to stay and watch the fort being pulverized,” Harhash said. “It is not as if one can witness total destruction every day.”

“Be quiet,” Othman said. “A friend would not complain. A good friend would support a man whose wife keeps shaming him in public. A good man would not concern himself with a fort when it is his friend’s honor that is being pulverized.”

“Will one of you wake me when this tired diatribe is over?” Layla said. “My husband is beginning to sound like a muezzin, repeating the same words five times a day. Shame, if you ask me. Whereas the blind muezzins are uniformly dull, my husband was once interesting, but he has been reduced to a single-whine conversationalist.”

After twilight, Layla knocked on the gate of Askalan. “Who’s there?” asked a voice.

“A luscious dove,” answered Layla.

The gatekeeper slid open the peek hole, and his mouselike face appeared in the aperture. “The luscious doves have repented and retired. Everyone knows that.”

“Do I look retired to your ugly eyes?”

“I have never seen a luscious dove before. Why should I believe you? Why would a luscious dove come to this city? I think—”

Quicker than the strike of an asp, Layla’s hand slipped through the viewer. Her fingers poked the gatekeeper’s eyes, squeezed his nose, and jerked his face forward, slamming it into the gate. She held on to the gatekeeper’s nose, and he screeched, “Ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch. I believe you. I will open the face — I mean the gate. I will open the gate. I swear.”

The three travelers entered the city. Layla spoke to the gatekeeper. “These two men are my personal physicians. Inform the working women of the city that I have arrived, and that I expect them to pay their respects in the morning.” The gatekeeper’s eyes were filled with lust and desire. She used only her third-best smile on him. “We need a place to sleep. Lead the way, and make sure my mare is fed and groomed tonight.”

Baybars and his slave army raised the kingdom’s flags outside Askalan. One of the African warriors asked permission to assume the duties of crier. “Hear me, foreigners,” the African bellowed. “The king of kings has arrived, and he demands your capitulation. Inform Brigitte, the usurper king of this city, that he is to abdicate. Surrender all and we will allow you to return to your countries. Resist and we will drop these walls upon your heads. Give up your arms or this fort will become a mausoleum interring your bodies for all time.”

“Well said,” Baybars cheered, and Aydmur added, “I am in awe.”

“I am dying, Egypt, dying of boredom,” cried Layla from the city’s parapet. “Will you not come in and conquer already?” As the gigantic metal gate slowly lifted, Othman appeared at the entrance, gesturing for the mighty army to invade. Baybars’s army entered Askalan, whose soldiers were surprised to find themselves fighting within the city walls. Swords hit their marks, and maces descended upon the heads of infidels, and Askalan fell quickly.

Baybars asked Othman where Arbusto and the kings were, and Othman said, “We are late. Arbusto decided to travel to King Diafil of Jaffa and ask for his assistance. King Franjeel of al-Areesh told King Brigitte about the size of our army, and both decided to join Arbusto in Jaffa.”

The victorious King Baybars said, “After razing this fort, we will head to Jaffa, the den of sin.” And Othman asked his wife, “Does that mean we ride ahead?”

The beautiful city of Jaffa had three glorious lighthouses, three anxious kings — Franjeel, Brigitte, and Diafil — three lust-stricken guards at the eastern gate swearing unwavering fealty to the luscious dove, but no Arbusto, who had left by sea, allegedly to fetch reinforcements from Europe. As the three kings prepared for a siege of their city, Layla prepared the three porters at the gate. “No, no, no,” she said. “Touch without permission and you lose the offending hand. I will come back one evening soon, and when I do, you will open the gate when I tell you. You will do whatever it is I tell you. Is that understood?”

King Baybars destroyed Askalan, and to this day, the city by the sea remains in ruins. He crushed the walls and led his army to Jaffa, where he received a missive from Othman. “The lettering is delicate,” said the king, “and the parchment is sweetly perfumed. He says the three kings are inside the city and advises us to approach the gate at nightfall and knock.”

“What kind of silly names are those?” asked Lou’ai. “Franjeel, Brigitte, and Diafil?”

When the sun had set in the Mediterranean, the king of Islam stood outside Jaffa’s gate with his hushed army, and knocked, and the gate opened to let him in. In the morning, Diafil’s soldiers woke to find Jaffa overwhelmed, swords upon their necks, and the city restored to its rightful ruler, King Baybars, who liberated the lands from foreigners.

Two days after my father noticed my mother and decided she was the woman he wanted to marry, she fell in love. Yes, it was love at first sight. His name was Khoury as well, Nicholas Khoury, though he wasn’t from the same family, not even Maronite, but Greek Orthodox. My mother was pleased that she wouldn’t have to change her name. They saw each other at a political youth meeting at the university, she a freshman, he a medical student. He dominated the gathering. He wanted to change the world. He wanted the new republic to be a beacon of liberty and justice to the rest of the Arabs. He wanted to spread literacy throughout Lebanon and the Middle East. He considered improving the plight of women the most important undertaking for a Lebanese man, and in keeping with that credo, he would specialize as a gynecologist.

My mother was impressed with his dedication, his earnest moral stance, and his height. In her, he saw an audience, a fan, and a pretty one at that. He was pleased to be the first man, other than her father, whom she looked up to. He believed she would be his perfect partner; she would help him soar. They began dating in earnest three weeks after they met. Within four months, he had formally proposed and she’d accepted. He wrote to her father for his blessing and introduced her to his family, and in the summer they flew to Europe together and visited her family in Brussels. They agreed on a long engagement, three years at least, until both graduated.

He couldn’t suffer being away from her, and involved her in all his social and civic activities. She attended political lectures, activist meetings, and long-winded café discussions. She volunteered once for a Palestinian relief organization but gave it up after about ten minutes and made him promise to stop working with organizations that dealt with suffering hands-on.

My poor father was crushed. Even though he had never spoken to my mother and she had yet to notice him, he firmly believed that she was to be his wife. He had already claimed her. But here was this other man who never left her side, who breathed her air, invaded her intimate space, and clamored for her attention. Although my father wouldn’t see her alone for a few years, he didn’t surrender. He formulated bigger plans.

Laylat al-Qadr, the Night of Fate, is better than a thousand months. It is said that the Holy Koran was sent down on the Night of Fate and was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad over a period of twenty-three years. During the Night of Fate, God listens to sincere supplicants, grants prayers, and forgives sins. The Night falls during Ramadan, the holiest of months, but God has not revealed its exact date, because He wants believers to worship Him during the entire month. Some say it falls on the night when the moon’s horns refill the circle, yet it is also said that the Prophet hinted that believers should seek it on the odd nights of the last ten days of Ramadan.

On an evening in 1953, Jalal Arisseddine had a dinner party — casual, forty guests or so. A few politicians were invited, some writers, friends. Nicholas Khoury had been begging a common acquaintance to introduce him to my well-known great-uncle and had finagled an invitation. And of course my great-uncle invited his brother Maan and his two nephews. Few of the guests were Muslim, and those that were wouldn’t have been considered observant. It was an evening in Ramadan, and none of the guests had been fasting or celebrating or praying. Still, considering the events that sprouted, we can safely assume it was an odd night.

It was undoubtedly the Night of Fate, because God heard my father’s pleas.

That evening, my mother met the man who would sweep her off her feet, dazzle her, bewitch and charm her. She met the man who would love her and adore her, who would become her steadfast partner. A man whose wit and light would dim her fiancé’s star, stub and extinguish it by the time dessert was served. Love at first barb. That night, my mother met Uncle Jihad.

A Swiss man with a ponytail who claimed to be Jean-Paul Sartre’s good friend offended almost everyone at the dinner party. The ponytail alone was shocking enough, but because of Sartre-said-this, Sartre-would-have-done-that, the party broke up into smaller groups to avoid him. Uncle Jihad inched slowly from group to group until he sat next to the bewitching girl who had been pretending not to notice his advance. Looking at the Swiss, whose audience had been systematically reduced to her earnest fiancé, she leaned toward my uncle and whispered, “I wonder why that braggart has to wear his hair like that.”

“So they can pull his head out of Sartre’s ass,” Uncle Jihad said.

My mother had found her soulmate.

He had no idea she was my father’s infatuation, and, surprisingly, they hadn’t met before, although they attended the same university, were in the same department, and were the same age. They had similar interests but took classes at different times. Uncle Jihad didn’t mix in her social circle. He wouldn’t have had the time in any case, since he still managed both his and Ali’s pigeon coops. My mother and uncle talked and talked, and grew so engrossed that my father’s heart filled with hope and her fiancé’s filled with panic. Nick sidled to my mother, put his arm around her. My mother closed her eyes for a moment so as not to show her frustration. When she opened them, she noticed Uncle Jihad’s face momentarily and impolitically express shock.

“This is my fiancé,” my mother said.

“I figured,” Uncle Jihad replied.

My mother, knowing that his smile belied his disapproval, shuddered. She tried to banish the color of embarrassment from her cheeks.

That was one story my mother loved to tell, but her version of the events of the evening was slightly different from Uncle Jihad’s. According to Uncle Jihad, my mother fell in love with him, but he knew instantly that she would be a wonderful wife for his brother. My mother would smile and shake her head when the story was told in her presence. She said that she adored him that evening but she wasn’t in love. She didn’t believe in love at first sight.

The last time the subject came up, I was with my mother during a healthy respite about six months before she died. She lay propped against her pillows, and I was sitting on her bed. She had been quite ill for a week, but suddenly she looked rejuvenated. Gauntness and pallor had temporarily departed, and the wrinkles of strain had been filled with new flesh. Hope, the great deceiver, seduced her that morning. “I remember that evening as if it were yesterday,” she said. “The candles, the guests, the foreigner with a horrible ponytail. Can you imagine how appalling that was in those days? How insufferable that man was, and how embarrassing that the only one who fell for his asinine chatter was poor Nick. That evening, I was horrified that I didn’t know who this man I was supposed to marry was. The scrim that had been hanging before my eyes was raised. The look on Jihad’s face when he realized that I was with Nick rattled me. He probably would’ve been less surprised had I told him I was engaged to the water closet. He disapproved of my choice, and I realized I did as well. What was even more terrifying was that I didn’t have the courage to admit my mistake. I knew that night that I’d never go through with the marriage, but I couldn’t bring myself to admit it to anyone, not even poor Nick. But my epiphany had nothing to do with being in love. Do you think for a moment that Jihad fell in love with me or I fell in love with him? Please. No matter what Farid and Jihad might have ardently wished to believe, no one was ever fooled. I recognized — oh, what shall we call it? — his special ability to be best friends with women, the instant I saw his impish grin from across the room. My God, how could I not, given the way he crossed his legs or what he did with his hands? No one would talk about it, but that didn’t mean anyone was fooled.”

• • •

Nick wouldn’t leave my mother’s side for the rest of the evening, and the Swiss was forced to follow his remaining audience across the room. The two men’s discussion bored my mother and uncle until the Swiss asked a question: “Will there ever be an Arab Sartre?” My mother rolled her eyes, and Uncle Jihad tried to control his chuckling. Nick commenced a monologue explaining the impossibility of such a phenomenon: the subordination of content to the aesthetics of language in Arabic literature, the dominance of panegyrics and eulogies as an art form, etc. “All you have to look at,” said Nick, “is the deification of a loser like al-Mutanabbi. Writers try to emulate him, penning pretty little verses that mean nothing and affect nothing. He sold his services to the highest bidder, and his poems ended up being paeans to corrupt rulers. Things haven’t changed much. Until the day arrives when we’re no longer dazzled by glitter, we’re stuck with the banal beauty of al-Mutanabbi.”

My mother’s groan startled her fiancé. Confounded, he stared at her, mouth agape.

“Beauty is never banal,” my mother said.

“Al-Mutanabbi is one of my heroes,” Uncle Jihad said. “Such a romantic fool.”

“Romantic?” my mother said. “Are you sure you’re not thinking of Antar? I’ve never heard of a love story associated with al-Mutanabbi.”

“No, no. It isn’t a love story. It’s a death story. A glorious death story.”

“Do tell,” my mother exhorted.

“You want me to tell you the story? Here? Now? I’m not sure I can.” My mother arched her eyebrows. “You must ask again.” My uncle cracked a grin. “Please, make me feel important.”

My mother’s hand went to her chest. She batted her eyelashes. “Please, sahib. Tell me a story and enliven my evening.” She smiled. “How was that?”

“Just the right touch,” Uncle Jihad said. “Let’s see. In the glorious days when poets were heroes and men were valiant, when the sun shone brighter and lies were never spoken, there lived, and died, the greatest of all poets. I’ll leave the stories of his tragic life for another sitting, for tonight I’ll relay the story of his death. Al-Mutanabbi died on his way to Baghdad, but he didn’t die alone. He wasn’t what one would call a well-adjusted individual. He knew he was a genius and was obsessed with his immortality. Few put anything down on paper in those days. All poems were memorized, all stories, even the Koran. Well, al-Mutanabbi would have none of that. He wasn’t going to rely on others’ memories when it came to his work. He wrote everything down, every single word, leaving nothing to chance. We’re talking papyrus, large rolls of papyrus. He rode to Baghdad with his son, two slaves, and eight camels loaded with his life’s work. Of course, you cross the desert with laden camels and you’ll attract the attention of brigands. Thieves attacked the convoy thinking they were about to strike the mother lode and would soon be in possession of treasures. The poet died defending his work, and with his last breath begged his killers not to destroy it. The only one who escaped was the poet’s son. He saw his father expire and rode away, but he didn’t get far. Guilt over abandoning his father’s poetry overpowered him, and he returned to the scene to fight. But the robbers were enraged at finding nothing of value, and they tortured the son and killed him.”

“Ah,” my mother sighed. “To die for banal beauty. What happened to the manuscripts?”

“Funny you should ask. Al-Mutanabbi was of course a penniless poet.”

“Is there any other kind?” My mother clapped her hands once and laughed.

“They unloaded the camels and discarded the valueless poetry, but, as it happened, one of the nasty brigands had an unexplored sensitive nature.”

“And he just happened to be able to read?”

“Of course. He read and was entranced and bewitched. He repacked the poems and kept them for years, had them copied and distributed. One would hope he was able to repack all the poems without losing any to the harsh desert winds.”

“But what if he wasn’t able to,” my mother said, “and some of the papyrus flew away?”

“Imagine. Poetry still hovering over the skies of Baghdad.”

“Or buried under the desert sands,” my mother said. “Someone drills a well in Iraq, and out gushes poetry instead of oil.”

“But will the discoverers understand Arabic or appreciate poetry, for that matter?”

“Al-Mutanabbi’s basic problem to begin with.”

Nick shook his head. “I know that sounds romantic, but what was the point of al-Mutanabbi’s death? Has his poetry saved a single life?”

My mother sank into a chair, closed her eyes, and sighed softly.

“Let me introduce you to my brother,” Uncle Jihad said.

So what happened to Nick, and how did my mother end up not marrying him if she was unable to say no? My sister, who had met Nicholas Khoury, believed that he and my mother didn’t marry because a voice inside her must have been issuing warnings, if not outright curses, the whole time. Lina couldn’t imagine my mother ever caring for anything political. That my mother would have committed herself to a man who believed that opposing Zionism was not just a worthy goal but a way of life, a prerequisite for being human, was unthinkable to Lina. My mother, who had transformed being apolitical into an art form, could never have completely submerged who she was for the sake of a man. “I know that a discussion about art and poetry was the puff that brought down the house of cards,” Lina once told me, “but how could the house have stood for so long, given his views? This was a man who believed in didactic art, for heaven’s sake. Novels should uplift the people and guide them to a better understanding of how persecuted they were. He saw Trotsky, Sartre, Lenin, Orwell, and Huxley as models to emulate and wasn’t bright enough to perceive a contradiction. Mother was getting a degree in liberal arts while she was with him. This was a woman who wore mourning black for forty days when Calvino died. Everyone kept asking her which member of the family had passed away. She went to her deathbed sincerely believing Anna Karenina was mankind’s greatest achievement. That idiot told her that Tolstoy was the epitome of the spoiled bourgeoisie. He told her not to listen to violin concertos because the best violinists were Jews and therefore probably supporters of the terrible policies of Israel. Told that to my mother? She mentioned it to me in passing, and I practically fainted. She may have agreed to marry him, but even if he hadn’t spun right into disaster head-on, she wouldn’t have. She knew he was a tragedy.”

The disaster occurred on the day of Nick’s commencement. My mother attended his ceremony, sat in the audience with his family. Nick’s mother couldn’t contain her pride. His father had desperately wanted to see his son’s graduation but was unable to leave his sickbed. At the end of the ceremony, my mother faked a headache and left the happy party to be on her own. She didn’t want to discuss the future.

Nick, wearing his cap and gown, returned home to check on his father, who felt such pride that he volunteered to be Nick’s first patient. Nick’s father had been complaining that day of dizziness, lethargy, and digestive problems. Nick treated him by setting up a glucose intravenous tube. His father died before he had a chance to sneeze, a tragedy and a scandal. Nick locked himself in his room for two weeks after the funeral. His entire family grieved.

The human soul is resilient; Nick did recover emotionally and psychologically.

Human societies are less resilient; the dishonor would not be easily forgotten.

Two months after he had killed his first patient, Nick understood that he wouldn’t be able to work in Beirut. No one would consent to be his second patient. He would have to go far away, to a place where no one had heard of his misdeed. Nick asked my mother to go with him to Kirkuk. She refused, of course. And my father began his wooing in earnest.

My father set out to make himself someone else, someone better, someone important. He persuaded his brother to give up his pigeons so they could set up a business. To do that, they needed money. Following their mother’s footsteps of long ago, my father and Uncle Jihad walked the same hill to the mansion of the bey, who was always claiming to be our family’s benefactor. The bey greeted my father and uncle warmly and called for coffee to be served, but he also called his servant, my grandfather. What insidious thought could have been going through the bey’s head no one knew, and this was one story that neither my grandfather nor my uncle nor my father wished to provide theories for or elaborate on.

Before his own father, my father had to ask the bey for financial help. The bey said, “Isn’t that too grand a project for you? You don’t know the first thing about automobiles. How can you sell cars when you don’t even have one of your own?”

Dispirited, my father returned to a rainy Beirut, and for the first time it was Uncle Jihad who had to remind him of the dream. “You’ll see,” Uncle Jihad said. “In every story, when things are at their most dire, an angel comes and helps the hero.”

“But this is no story,” replied my father.

“Of course it isn’t. This is life. In real life you get more than one angel. You get two or three. Hell, you get an army of angels.”

My grandfather quit that day. He was so embarrassed for his sons he told the bey he could no longer work for him. The bey asked how he would survive without his entertainment, and my grandfather said, “All you have to do is ask, my lord, and I will come running to entertain you. Yet I’ve worked for you for so long that my stories have become aged and corroded. I cannot in good faith take your money and pretend I’m offering anything in return.”

That night, my grandmother berated her husband. How would they be able to support themselves? They still had an unmarried daughter. The bey gave my grandfather two days of rest before calling him to the mansion. “Tell me a story,” the bey commanded, and my grandfather did. “You have served my family well,” the bey said, and resumed paying him his weekly salary. And my grandfather remained at his master’s beck and call until the day he died — my grandfather, that is, not the bey, for when the master dies his son takes over his possessions.

The al-Kharrat Corporation was birthed officially in 1955. Like most newborns, it began life small and odd-looking. My father had asked his old Iraqi school friend Khaled Mathaher, an up-and-coming businessman — or, as Uncle Jihad used to call himself when he started out, a businessboy — for advice. The reply had come in a letter from Baghdad that became a family keepsake. “Automobiles!” it shouted. “Sell automobiles. Cars are the future.” The Mathaher family had a Renault dealership in Baghdad, and Khaled would help my father obtain one for Lebanon. And the story began.

Listening to the advice of my grandmother and not my grandfather, my father registered the corporation as a family business, with the four brothers, Wajih, Halim, Farid, and Jihad, as partners. The fact that my father listened to his mother and not his father wasn’t surprising — my father didn’t get along with his father, was embarrassed by him, and rarely if ever listened to him. He should have on this occasion, because my grandfather’s counsel proved to be prescient. My grandfather told my father that his two older brothers shouldn’t be part of the corporation. My father could hire them or help them, but if they were partners, he and Uncle Jihad would have to work around their incompetence for years to follow. My father not only ignored the advice, he convinced Uncle Jihad that Uncle Wajih should be president of the company, since he was the eldest. My grandmother brimmed with joy as she saw her family reunite.

My great-uncle Maan offered his two charges a final gift, two small plots of land in Beirut. One would become the family workplace, the first dealership, and the other the family home, the building that would be erected not long after as one of the pledges my father made my mother if she married him. The army of angels, friends of my father and Uncle Jihad, provided loans — with no interest, of course. The dealership building was one shoddily built room that barely had space for six clean desks. In its lot, the company opened its doors with three cars, which were sold the first day. “A bang,” Uncle Jihad used to say. “We opened with a bang.”

Within a year, they added the Fiat dealership, and then the exclusive Arab-world Toyota and Datsun dealership a few years later. On the day the Japanese contracts were signed, my father and Uncle Jihad bought their first custom-made Brioni suits, and my mother received a diamond necklace whose price no one talked about publicly.

My father did accept my grandfather’s advice on one thing, the poetic choice. Yes, my mother was seduced with poetry. My mother was a romantic but not a fool. In the two years during which my father pursued her, after he had declared his intentions to Uncle Jihad and her, she had made a point of objectively gauging whether he would make her a good husband. She studied him, found out almost everything there was to know about him: where his career was going, how he treated his family, his level of education or lack thereof, his womanizing. She claimed to have kept a notebook of checks and balances. She tested him. She misbehaved in public to observe his reaction. She made him wait when he picked her up. She interviewed him endlessly.

For his part, my father interviewed Uncle Jihad. What would she like? He never bought flowers that weren’t approved by my uncle. My mother kept no secrets from Uncle Jihad, and she soon found out that he kept none from my father. My mother would point out a wonderful dress to Uncle Jihad, and the next day a package would arrive at her house. My father knew who her favorite singers were, what her favorite food was, and of course, who her favorite poets were. My father sent her poems, and my mother adored that. He sent her poetry she knew well. Whether it was Rilke, Dickinson, or Barrett Browning, she knew the Westerners. She loved the old Arabs, al-Mutanabbi or the Muallaqat—Amru al-Qais and Zuhair in particular. My father worked hard.

One day, my grandmother asked him when he intended to marry, and he told her about my mother even though she hadn’t consented to marry him yet. He confessed his entire seduction scheme. And my grandfather, in his usual obstreperous manner, interrupted, “But you’re no poet.” When no one understood what he meant, he elaborated. “Only a poet can sing a familiar poem and make it sound as if it has never been uttered before. Only a hakawati can bewitch with a tale twice-told. You have to dazzle her with something she doesn’t know, a poet like Saadi. Lovers flock to lesser poets, but few are better than him.”

When my grandfather recited some lines from Saadi, my father wasn’t impressed, but later, when my mother sat him down to talk, he could come up with nothing else.

“I know you could make me happy,” she said. “I know you would take care of me, but we’re such different people. That could be hell for the both of us.”

And my father replied, “It is better to burn with you in hell than to be in paradise with another. The scent of onions from a beautiful mouth is more fragrant than that of a rose held by an ugly hand.” Stunned, my mother searched for a translation of Saadi seemingly forever. He became one of her favorites. Even on her deathbed, she quoted him to the nurses.

My mother agreed to marry my father if he pledged three things: to become more successful, to buy her a better home, and to stop his womanizing. Two out of three.

Back in Cairo, Othman lay on the sofa and admired his wife as she undressed. By the light of a dozen candles, she rubbed a concoction of olive oil and verbena onto her arms. Othman said, “I am pleased that bedtime modesty is not something you insist upon.”

She raised her gaze slowly, looked into his eyes to gauge his meaning, but he lowered his quickly in embarrassment. Though she returned to applying the lotion, pretending nonchalance, they knew each other too well. He saw her ears were pricked. “I have been thinking,” he said.

In the glow of candles, she massaged the lotion onto the two expansive worlds of her breasts. She discreetly made sure he had the appropriate reaction before moving to her neck. He blinked rapidly. “I have been thinking that we cannot go on like this. A pre-emptive strike is needed.” He tried to clear his retinas of the delicious impression, tried to clean up his mind so he could complete a lucid thought. “I have been remiss, my wife. I have not been myself lately. Arbusto has been allowed to roam free, creating trouble, for much too long. He is my enemy, and I have not dealt with him. It is time.”

“Yes, he is a rogue worthy of your time.”

“I will capture him and drag him on his knees before the king.”

“A most noble goal, to be sure.”

“Will you help me?”

She did not look up from the task at hand, but it was of no avail. He had seen surprise and delight flush her face. “You never have to ask, my husband.”

“I want to hunt the villain, who must be causing trouble somewhere in the coastal cities. We will not return to Cairo without Arbusto enchained and on a leash.”

“We?”

“I need your help.” He smiled at his wife. “You do have so many leashes.”

“You and I?”

“Partners.”

“And my husband’s enemies will rue the day they were born.”

Naked, she climbed atop Othman, and kissed him. “Say it.”

“We leave tomorrow,” he said, laughing.

She kissed him again. “Say it.”

“We should start packing.” His eyes sparkled like diamonds along a riverbed.

She kissed him once more. “Say it.”

“You are my wife.” He took a deep breath and returned her kiss. “I would rather live for eternity as your slave than spend a single moment without you.”

Seventeen

The first bullet bored through the passenger door of one of the dealership’s cars, a blue Toyota, in April 1976. The war — or “skirmishes,” as everyone called it then — had begun a year earlier, but the company still hadn’t been severely affected, since its customers, like the rest of the Lebanese, foolishly assumed that the trouble wouldn’t last long, the Palestinians and the militias involved were simply letting off steam. As a matter of fact, some in the family considered the war further proof of the blessed luck of the corporation and my father’s inspired business acumen. Hadn’t my worrywart father bought insurance coverage for almost every conceivable disaster, including war? Blind luck wasn’t responsible for this decision. My father had imagined that he would one day be so successful that the Israelis would blow up his company in a fit of pique. (They actually did, in 1982, but it wasn’t in a fit of pique.) Uncle Jihad drove the blue Toyota home as a keepsake. Insurance would pay for it.

Until the day of his death in 1974, Uncle Wajih was president of the corporation, with the problems predicted by my grandfather. Uncle Halim was not a problem, though. He worked for the company from the beginning, did whatever he was asked, and didn’t care to make decisions. As a brother and a full partner, he was included in most discussions and was happy to go along with whatever was happening. He bragged to anyone who listened that he was the company’s dynamo, but even he didn’t believe himself. Uncle Wajih, on the other hand, believed himself. My father and Uncle Jihad must have forgotten to mention he was supposed to be president in name only.

The bigger the company grew, the bigger his head. By the seventies, when the company was outselling all other Lebanese dealerships combined, he had become so arrogant in his dealings with strangers as to be unbearable. Uncle Jihad and my father had to work around him. He was agreeable most of the time, but every now and then, he made sure to stand against his younger brothers to prove his worth. My father and Uncle Jihad had to find ways of outmaneuvering him. In the early days, they sought my grandmother’s intervention. They had to drive up to the village and persuade her to drive down with them and talk to her eldest.

When the Japanese arrived, all were ecstatic except for Uncle Wajih. In order to raise the money to sign the Japanese contract, the company had to sell its rights to Fiat. He decided to put his foot down and refused to budge. He even insulted the Japanese executive visiting Beirut. My grandmother wasn’t able to persuade him to change his mind. Uncle Wajih insulted her as well, by suggesting that she knew nothing about the corporate world. Of course, my grandmother was horrified. Everyone assumed Aunt Wasila was pulling his strings. Aunt Samia swore it was so. No brother of hers would ever insult his mother unless his wife put him up to it.

At their wits’ end, Uncle Jihad and my father sought Aunt Wasila’s help. They explained the situation and were able to convince her easily. She took care of the rest. Uncle Wajih left the office for home, and returned the following morning to yell at everyone to work harder so they wouldn’t wreck his Japanese contract.

While Uncle Wajih was alive, not one Lebanese — or Arab, for that matter — ever thought twice about having an incompetent man as president of a successful family company. Whenever buyers or suppliers needed anything, they asked Uncle Jihad or my father. It was the non-Lebanese who had trouble understanding. The baffled foreigners considered the time spent listening to Uncle Wajih a waste.

The business went from success to success under my father and Uncle Jihad. It would take a couple of years of war for the Lebanese division of the company to grind to a temporary halt, but even then there was hardly a financial ripple, because the company had dealerships doing good business in twelve other countries. There was more than a ripple emotionally, though, since by then the Lebanese dealership was essential to how my family defined itself.

It was in 1977, after the death of Uncle Jihad, that the company began to lose focus. His loss was demoralizing, and particularly devastating to my father, who would never really care about the company again. Neither he nor Uncle Jihad had prepared anyone to take over. After all, in 1977, my father was only forty-seven. No one else could do his job, so he showed up at the office when the bombs took a rest, but he didn’t do much.

Again, however, the corporation was blessed. Ten days after my sister’s wedding, when Lina finally grasped that her life wasn’t going to be anything like she’d imagined, that she was probably never going to see Elie again, nor did she want to, she decided to reinvent herself. She would get her first job. Pregnant and feeling slightly bloated, she showed up at the dealership and began her conquest. Within a couple of years, she was running the corporation.

Othman, holding the reins of two horses, scanned the vast skies. “Where is he?” he asked his wife.

“There.” She pointed toward the north. “You will see him as soon as he crosses below the white cloud.” The pigeon’s red color deepened under the cloud. The bird circled twice before landing on her hand. He cooed to his mate and entered his cage. “ ‘We have a destination,’ ” Layla announced, reading the pigeon’s message. “ ‘The nasty one is in Antioch.’ ” After receiving the message, the couple ran across an envoy from Aleppo carrying a letter to the sultan in Cairo. The messenger refused to divulge the content of the missive, even to an emir.

“Trouble in Antioch?” Othman asked the messenger.

“How did you know? The mayor of Aleppo is begging the king to send an army to help him fight King Fartakamous of Antioch, who is laying siege to Aleppo as we speak.”

“Our army will soon be on the move,” Othman said to his wife. “Where do you think we should go, Aleppo or Antioch?”

“Antioch. Combat is not the best use for our talents. Let us leave that to the warriors.”

Othman and Layla entered Antioch easily. The city was almost empty — armyless, kingless, and Arbustoless. “Now to work,” Othman said.

That evening, a pretty boy from Shiraz visited the couple. He stood by the door and bowed before Layla. “A luscious dove commands and I obey. I understand you seek information. This humble yellow rump is at your service.”

Noticing Othman’s confusion, Layla explained, “ ‘Yellow rump’ is what unscrupulous men call the boys they abuse for pleasure, an insult referring to the use of saffron as lubricant. In some cities, the boys have begun to form cadres and are claiming the name.” She returned to the boy. “Sit, sit. Tell us what happened here.”

The boy nodded and said, “The priest Arbusto tried to persuade our king to declare war upon the sultanate. Fartakamous declined, saying that the great sultan had been collecting Crusader kings like a child collects insects. He had no wish to be crushed.”

“A wise king,” interjected Othman.

“But not as wily as Arbusto, who befriended the king’s son, Kafrous, my master and owner. A few days ago, Arbusto accompanied Kafrous on a ride and returned bedraggled with a corpse. He claimed to have been attacked by a garrison from Aleppo. The king led an army to crush Aleppo while Arbusto went to get reinforcements from King Francis of Sis.”

“For your help,” Layla said, “we will free you once our army liberates Antioch,” and she sent the boy on his way. “Let us be off to Sis.”

Naturally, the great slave army defeated King Fartakamous of Antioch, and he joined his brethren, Kings Louis IX, Franjeel, Brigitte, and Diafil, as Baybars’s prisoners. And Baybars crushed the walls of Antioch. The hero of a thousand tales received another flowery letter from his friend Othman. “Lead your army to Sis,” it began, “and may its fort crumble upon your magnificent arrival. The mellifluous evil one convinced King Francis of the lie that the sultanate wished to murder the innocent monarchs. The gullible king shut the gates of Sis and declared war upon you. That was his last decree, for he soon found himself unable to forswear slumber. He will continue to sleep until your advent, because his wakefulness bores my charming wife. His guards have been searching the fort; they seem to have misplaced the king. My dutiful wife, and not I, will greet you and open the gates. The unhappy news is that Arbusto fled before our arrival, and therefore I have gone south to Tripoli. King Francis and a dozen of his sleeping officers await you with bated breath. Do hurry, for my wife wishes to rejoin me as quickly as possible.”

A few weeks later, Layla and Harhash rode through the Lebanese mountains above Tripoli. As the city’s fort came into view below, twelve mean-looking riders blocked their way.

“Usually, I kill my victims instantly and relieve the corpses of their possessions,” said the leader, “but I have never encountered beauty unprotected on these roads before. I could be persuaded to delay your death.”

“Oh, how silly.” Layla unleashed her nail-studded whip, striking from nine paces away, and the brigand flew forward off his horse and landed dead at her horse’s hooves. She turned to one of his men, who looked less stunned than the rest. “What are you doing here?”

“What? How did you recognize me? I am in disguise. I just infiltrated this group.”

“Infiltrated?” asked one of the brigands, but that was the last word he uttered, for Othman struck him down. Harhash shook his head in confusion. “Why would you want to infiltrate an incompetent band of amateurs?”

“Amateurs?” asked another of the brigands, but Layla had only to feign a whipping motion and the brigand turned and fled in terror, followed by his companions.

“I had to,” Othman said. “Arbusto could not persuade King Bohemond of Tripoli to declare war, so he is recruiting brigands to cause trouble and force the sultan to attack. I hoped to come across Arbusto if I joined them. But why did you ride with my wife?”

“She needed protection,” Harhash said. Layla and Othman stared at him. “Well, I was bored. One battle, two battles, they all begin to look the same. I prefer your adventure. I was crushed that you left Cairo without me. Shame. I thought I meant something to you; I thought I was your friend.”

“We wanted to be together,” Othman said, and Layla added, “This is our honeymoon.”

We wished for a bigger storm, more powerful, more destructive, strong enough to get the combatants to take a break from the fighting. In the winter of 1976, the rain was soft, the shelling wasn’t. The underground garage muted the sound of the bombardment. The fighting was in a different part of town, but my mother was worried enough to take us to the shelter. Light from a couple of kerosene lamps and infinite candles threw flickering shadows across the unwashed walls. My mother lit a cigarette. “I’m dying, Jihad, dying of boredom.” She turned off the transistor radio, interrupting the voice of the BBC anchorwoman in mid-sentence. “Entertain me or suffer the consequences.”

“Me?” Uncle Jihad said. “Why don’t you tell us a story? Tell your children about the greatest love, how you picked their father out of all your suitors.”

Lina picked up the transistor and moved two plastic chairs away to Uncle Akram’s parking space. His car must have been leaking for quite a while, since there was a large oil stain resembling the dark continent of Africa. Lina sat down, tuned the radio to a rock station, and put her legs on the second chair. Her butt hovered over Libya and Tunis, and her feet dangled over the southern tip of the horn. “Lina seems to be entertaining herself,” said Uncle Jihad. “Wouldn’t it be nice to tell your son about you?”

“You’re supposed to entertain me,” my mother said. “Don’t fail me, mister.”

“Relentless woman.” Uncle Jihad laughed. “All right. I’ll tell you a story about my mischievous youth, but I don’t want you to get any ideas, Osama. Let’s see. Where does one start? In the early days, before I was born, that’s when we’ll start.” He tapped out a cigarette and took his time lighting it, had two long puffs before beginning a third. “During the early 1900s, there was a Druze brigand, Yassin al-Jawahiri, who terrorized the mountains. Well, ‘terrorize’ might be too harsh a word. He was a card who fancied himself a Druze Robin Hood. He stole from the Ottoman Empire and its officials and shared some of his bounty with the Druze villages, and in return the villagers sheltered him, even against the wishes of their leaders, the princes and sheikhs of the mountains. He was a hero to the Druze, this Yassin al-Jawahiri.”

“Al-Jawahiri?” my mother interrupted.

“One and the same.”

“This isn’t fair,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You know the Jawahiri family,” my mother said. “Jihad is going to tell us how they became our friends.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because it’s a great story,” Uncle Jihad said. “Now, let me tell it. This Yassin was a clever fellow and became so popular that there was a song written about him. It went like this:

Ya Yassin, Ya Jawahiri

Your rifle slung on your shoulder,

becomes snug on that shoulder

Before your enemy blinks.

Vultures and foreigners behind you

Turn, turn, and shoot them.

Ya Yassin, Ya Jawahiri

Return to us our hero.

“That’s a stupid song,” I said.

“I learned it as a little boy. You know my father. He probably knew every song sung in the mountains. When he told the Yassin story, I remembered the song. Anyway, Yassin caused havoc for many years, but then the First World War started and the French arrived. Well, the French were more ruthless than the Ottomans. They caught Yassin and executed him.”

“How does one capture a villain as wily as Arbusto?” asked Harhash.

“How does one woo evil?” asked Layla.

“We set a trap,” said Othman. “We seduce his greed.”

“We seduce his ego,” added Harhash.

“And top it with lust,” said Layla. “A powerful brew indeed. We send a message that a luscious dove has arrived in Tripoli, enamored of his infamous reputation, infatuated by his power. She wishes to be his slave and answer his bidding, do anything he desires.”

“She will help him bring the sultanate to its knees,” said Othman. “She is able to seduce any man, including the virtuous King Baybars.”

“She is able to relieve men of their reason,” said Harhash. “She can open any door.”

“He will come running. I will spread the rumor among the city’s thieves.”

“I will inform the pleasure-givers,” said Layla.

“I will take the bandits and highway robbers,” said Harhash.

And Layla vowed, “I will drain him dry as hay. Sleep shall neither night nor day hang upon his penthouse lid. He shall live a man forbid.”

“Let us begin,” said Othman. “When shall we three meet again?”

• • •

Layla waited in her room. When the knock came, she lay on the divan while Othman and Harhash hid behind the curtains. “Come in,” Layla called. “Come sit next to me. I have admired you from afar for so long, and I yearn to see you up close.”

Arbusto entered the room wearing his best robe and a scent of jasmine, trying to appear magisterial, but his nerve failed him. He sat at the end of the divan, beside her bare feet. “I thought your kind had repented.” He pulled his miter to make sure his clipped ear was covered.

“I retired from public service, not private.”

“That is a good distinction in your profession,” Arbusto said.

“I have waited for this moment.” Layla kept her eyes fastened on her prey, whose gaze darted about to avoid hers. “Every time I heard stories of your exploits, I shuddered in secret joy. I was first intrigued, then enchanted, then infatuated. I kept hearing more and more stories. You have done some terrible things.” She winked, and he flushed. “You have been a bad boy.” She rose from the divan slowly, making sure her curves were highlighted. “Have you not?”

“Yes, I have.” A nervous laugh escaped his lips.

“And you must be punished. Give me your hands.”

Arbusto extended his hands meekly. She tied them and secured him to the divan. His lustful eyes followed her every movement. She turned her back on him, and an astonished Arbusto heard her talk to the draperies, “Do you want him awake or unconscious?”

“Is that it?” asked Harhash, coming out. “The evil Arbusto captured so easily? I had expected more twists and turns, more excitement.”

“I would have dragged it out had I known,” said Layla.

Harhash slapped Arbusto’s face. “You disappoint me. You are a bad boy? You need to be punished? You fell for that?” Smack. “You did not even make her work. Come sit on my divan and let me tie you up? Shame on you. I had expected so much more.”

“The important thing,” said Othman, “is that we have captured this villain.”

“True, but there are conventions,” replied Harhash. Slap. “This thief has stolen the thrill of capture from me.”

“Oh well,” said Othman. “Reality never meets our wants, and adjusting both is why we tell stories.”

“Hmm, so I was ten,” Uncle Jihad said. “I know it’s difficult to believe, but I was still a fairly reticent child. Beirut and the school proved to be overwhelming. I wasn’t unhappy by any means, but I was a lonely boy. I spent all my time reading books and watching the world. Uncle Maan and his family tried to draw me out at first, but their hearts weren’t in it. And after all, they had enough troubles of their own. Uncle Jalal was spending more time in jail than out of it. In 1942, the war was raging in Europe, and the streets of Beirut were boiling. The Arisseddines had time for nothing but Uncle Jalal’s problems with French rule. My grandmother was spending most of her time in Beirut, but I hardly ever saw her. I rarely saw any of the family. Only after independence, the following year, did the family return to anything resembling normal.

“My blossoming began one day when I was standing under the oak tree Charlemagne, trying to understand how a yo-yo worked and singing the Yassin al-Jawahiri song to myself. A boy asked me how I knew the song, and I replied that I’d known it since I was born. I boasted that I knew everything there was to know about the man.”

“Was that boy Nasser al-Jawahiri?” asked my mother.

“The one and the same. Nasser went home for the weekend, and on Monday a horde of Jawahiris descended upon the school. There were about a hundred of them, men and women, geriatrics and children, religious and secular, all one family. It was a big commotion, and I was surprised to discover they had come to talk to me. I was taken to a hall and interviewed. They asked if I was Druze and were very happy to find out my mother was an Arisseddine. They asked me about Yassin al-Jawahiri, and I answered. My father had told me the story, so I knew quite a bit, and I could see the astonishment on their faces with each of my responses.”

“Tell me you didn’t,” my mother said.

“I was as innocent as a lamb of God. I swear. In any case, it took me a while to figure out what was happening. I didn’t understand, so you can’t blame me for the beginning. I was answering their questions. I loved the attention. I knew each correct answer would get more.”

“Oh, Jihad,” my mother said. “You bad boy.”

“What happened?” I asked. “Tell me.”

“The Jawahiris would have come to the conclusion that your uncle was the reincarnation of Yassin al-Jawahiri,” my mother said. “The family had come to investigate, and Jihad was a very bad boy.”

“And your mother is a harsh judge,” Uncle Jihad said. “They didn’t come to investigate, but to confirm. If it had been an investigation, a much smaller number would have come. They wanted to meet the great Yassin. I simply answered their questions.”

“You could have told them where you got the information,” my mother said.

“They didn’t ask. They never once asked how I came to know. They believed.”

“What would they ask? Hey, do you have a crazy hakawati for a father, and does he know the most minute detail of every story ever told, and has he repeated them all to you over and over and over?”

“Harsh woman. Harsh, unforgiving woman. I didn’t do anything wrong. I was lonely. When they told me I was Yassin al-Jawahiri, I couldn’t have been happier. They introduced themselves one by one. ‘I’m your nephew so-and-so, but of course I’m much older now than when you left.’ What did you expect me to do? I was the centerpiece of a magnificent epic. Stories swirled around me. More, I became what I’d always daydreamed of being, a hero whom people looked up to, and I did it without having to display a smidgen of courage. In one instant, I had acquired a new story, a new family, a new identity, and gifts, many gifts. Nothing expensive, but nice things like hand-knit vests and caps, and lots and lots of food. I was invited to their houses for meals. I never had to eat school food. They sent morning pies, savory pastries. They created a space for me in their hearts.”

“And you created a space in your stomach,” my mother said as Uncle Jihad patted his ample belly. “I presume you didn’t horribly abuse their gullibility, since Nasser is still a friend.”

“Abuse? Sweetheart, I was the joy of their lives. Nasser did become a good friend. The Jawahiris loved me. As I said, our family was busy. No one paid much attention to my comings and goings even though I was so young. Things went on like that for about a year and some, until the day Uncle Maan discovered what was going on. He was very angry. He put on his best suit and his fez and took me to the Jawahiris to apologize for my bad behavior. I had to sit there and look contrite, head bent, while everyone glared. Uncle Maan went on about what a scamp I was. He told them I wasn’t Yassin and there was no way I could be. He explained that I had been born many years after Yassin died — reincarnation is instantaneous. If they could find it in their hearts to forgive me, he would make sure I’d never disturb them again. I wasn’t a bad boy. I was from a good family. I just didn’t know any better. He actually said I was his favorite nephew, that this was his fault: he’d been busy and hadn’t been paying proper attention to my upbringing. It was Nasser’s mother who saved me. She said that, even though I wasn’t Yassin al-Jawahiri, she’d grown to cherish me, and I was welcome at her house at any time. Things settled down a bit, and a fortnight later, Nasser said that his mother wanted me to come to a big lunch for a nephew who had just gotten engaged. I couldn’t say no. After all, she was an astonishing cook. At the lunch, I felt awkward, and so did most of the Jawahiris. It was a celebratory feast, yet the mood was somewhat gloomy. I missed what we had before. I was among the Jawahiris, but I missed them. I longed for the way I had felt when I was around them, how special I was. I didn’t know how to make things better or what to say. Nasser’s mother served the lamb, and it was almost eerily quiet. There were people talking, but it was relatively hushed. When Nasser’s mother, bless her, offered me dessert, she patted my head and told me not to be too upset with Uncle Maan. She said he was a great man but he could be a bit rigid. And this was where I was bad.”

My mother gasped and broke into a wide grin. “No. You didn’t?”

“I’m afraid I did.”

“What?” I demanded.

“Al-Jawahiri is a common family, not titled,” my mother explained. “Maan Arisseddine was a sheikh.”

“I wanted to make everyone happy. I told Nasser’s mother that Uncle Maan was a great man, honest and honorable. Just as she had said, he was also rigid about principles when it came to his family’s social position and obligations.”

“You didn’t leave it at that,” my mother said. “That would have been too subtle.”

“I didn’t. I added that I’d heard him say that a sheikh should guard his position in society at all costs, that one’s family name is all one ever has. I didn’t make that up, he’d said it often. I just made sure to mention it at the right time. Nasser’s mother stood up straight. Her face lit up. She yelled to the entire room, ‘Of course. That makes sense. The sheikh would never want to admit that his nephew was reincarnated from a commoner. The fact that the boy’s father isn’t a sheikh would make the man even more insistent that his nephew had nothing to do with us.’ The family exploded into a cacophony of joy. Even Nasser’s cousin, the future groom, stood up and shouted, ‘I knew you were one of us. I always knew. My heart never lies.’ The feast turned raucous. Everyone began to sing. Everyone was happy.”

The cigarette in Uncle Jihad’s hand was more ash than filter. He dropped it on the ground and stomped on it. He had been carpeting the floor with cigarette butts. He lit another, signaling the end of the tale.

“How long did it go on?” my mother asked.

“Quite a while, I’m afraid.”

“You never told them?”

“No, there was never any need. For a couple of years after that lunch, I was back to being family. Then I started to work, and I also got more serious about studying. I didn’t get to see them as much, and I drifted away, but then the relationship changed, and we became friends. Our families are very close. You know that. Hell, they came with us to pick you up for your wedding. We’ve been together for so long that I don’t think anybody remembers who Yassin was, let alone that I’m supposed to be him. We owe them much, and we try to pay our debt.”

I looked at my mother, and she saw I was confused.

“More than half the people who work for the corporation are Jawahiris,” she explained. “Whenever a Jawahiri needed a job, your father found a place for him. Now we know why. I always assumed it was because they were friends of the family.”

“It’s a bit more than that,” Uncle Jihad said. “We don’t usually like to talk about this. We had no money to start the company, and we had to borrow. A lot of people helped. Quite a few, but not the people you would have expected.”

“I know,” my mother said. “Farid calls them the army of angels.”

“Yes, I do, too.” He chuckled, then sighed. “The Jawahiris were part of the army of angels. They didn’t have much money, but I had to ask. I was desperate. If we hadn’t come up with the money, Farid would have killed himself. I went to them, and they all loaned me money, they dug into their savings. I didn’t know at the time, but Nasser’s mother sold her jewelry to loan me the money. I was family. They believed in me. We paid them back, of course. We paid everybody back a lot more than they gave us. If that delightful buffoon Nasser came down these steps right now and said he needed a heart, I would tear mine out and gift it.”

Cairo’s jails were crowded with Crusader kings, and the Crusader cities were returned to the people. The great Baybars had liberated the lands.

The queens of the captured Crusader kings begged King Flavio of Rome to intercede on behalf of their husbands. King Flavio sent an emissary to Baybars offering two treasure chests for each of the released kings. He also asked for Arbusto’s release. “No,” said Baybars. “I agree to release the kings, for they are of royal blood and were deceived into treachery. Arbusto, however, is the father of lies. When he lies, he speaks his native tongue. I will not let him go.”

“Your Majesty,” said the Roman emissary, “King Flavio will free six thousand Muslim slaves in good faith if you can find it in your heart to release the priest.”

And Baybars searched his heart, nodded his assent.

That evening, Layla asked her husband, “Arbusto released? What kind of an exchange rate is that? Is one European life worth six thousand of ours?”

“Will they ever stop?” my mother said. The shelling had been going on and on, and we were all getting tired. “This infernal night is never ending. Make it pass, Jihad. Make it pass or make those bombs stop. Those are your options.”

“Shall we play cards?” Uncle Jihad asked.

“No. Tell me another story. Entertain me once more.”

Uncle Jihad turned to me and winked. “Why don’t you tell us a story, Osama? It’s time you contributed to our lore.”

“Yours are so much better,” I said, “and she asked you.”

My mother stretched her back. “I’d love to hear a story, Osama. Really, my dear, any story is good. Anything is better than this boredom.”

“I can tell the story of Baybars,” I said. “It used to be one of Grandfather’s favorites.”

“Baybars?” My mother turned to Uncle Jihad. “The Mamluke? Is there a story about him that I don’t know about?”

“The story is a classic,” Uncle Jihad said. “One of the standards.”

“Why?”

Uncle Jihad laughed, and I said, “Because he’s a hero.”

“Actually, Osama, that’s a great question,” Uncle Jihad said. He took a deep breath, searched his pockets for a cigarette, which basically meant that he was going to tell a tale, not I. “I’m laughing because your mother has a talent for getting to the crux of an issue. I’m assuming she knows who the man is.”

“Of course I do.”

“What she’s asking is why there’s a story about him. You see, the story of the story of Baybars is in some ways more interesting. Listen. Contrary to what my father and most people believe, the only true event in that whole story, in all its versions, is that the man existed. Everything else has been distorted beyond recognition. Al-Malik al-Zahir Rukn al-Din Baybars al-Bunduq-dari al-Salihi owes his fame to his talent for public relations, without which his reign might have been reduced to a historical footnote.”

“Wait,” I said. “At Ain Jalut he—”

“Listen and learn, Osama,” my uncle interrupted. “Though it’s true that Baybars defeated both the Mongols and the Crusaders, it actually was a victory for the Mamlukes. He wasn’t the best general among them by any means. And his victories over the Crusaders, like Saladin’s, were temporary, for whenever ferment spread in Europe, nervous kings and popes called for new crusades. There were so many crusades. You know, when the knights of the First Crusade landed on our shores, they massacred the entire population of Beirut without showing mercy on a single soul before heading toward Jerusalem — all of Beirut, every citizen was killed. And after the Great War, in 1918, when the French arrived with their fleet of innumerable warships, the first governor, General Henri Gouraud, announced upon landing in Beirut, ‘Saladin, we have returned.’ Believe me, Baybars did not defeat the Crusaders. No one did. But he also wasn’t a decent ruler. His subjects despised him, because he was a ruthless, fork-tongued megalomaniac who rose to power through treachery and murder. Quite a few sultans followed his mentor, al-Saleh, but their reigns were shortened when the ambitious slave killed them. He murdered two openly, Touran Shah and Qutuz; the death of Qutuz was Baybars’s springboard to power, since he insisted on applying an old law of the Turks stipulating that he who killed the ruler should take his place. He was also despised because he was born with blue eyes and developed cataracts in one. One blue and one white meant an evil eye.”

“So he wasn’t a hero?”

“He was in a way,” Uncle Jihad went on. He laughed when he saw my face. “Don’t be so disappointed. He was definitely a marketing hero. Baybars consolidated his power and created a cult of personality by paying, bribing, and forcing an army of hakawatis to promulgate tales of his valor and piety. These days, few can discern historical accounts from the stories of the hakawatis. He was the precursor to all the Arab presidents we have today.” He reached out and stroked my chin, lifted it up so my mouth closed. “Here’s a fun fact, in almost all the remaining versions of the story, none of them are about Baybars. You see, the hakawatis’ audience is the common man who couldn’t really identify with a royal, almost infallible hero, so early on the hakawatis began to introduce characters that their audience could empathize with. The tale, even during its inchoate years, was never about Baybars, but those around him. The story of the king is the story of the people, and unfortunately, to this day, no king has learned that lesson.”

In 1982, a couple of months after the infernal Israelis blew up the dealership during an aerial bombardment, and after their siege of Beirut, I went home for Christmas. The city was mired in civil war and occupied by Israeli troops, but that didn’t stop my mother from asking me to take four-year-old Salwa for a walk while she got a manicure and pedicure. A week of calm had inspired courage in the city’s denizens, but not in me. Whether that was because courage was never my forte or because I was no longer a denizen of Beirut, I couldn’t tell. A few months earlier, the Israelis had bombed the city incessantly. A few months earlier, the Syrians had assassinated the Lebanese president. A few months before that, the militias had massacred thousands of Palestinian civilians in the camps. Today, my mother wanted a manicure.

“At least the PLO is gone,” she said. “It’s safer now, in principle.” The Israeli invasion had incapacitated her for quite some time, but recently she’d been reclaiming her normal life.

It wasn’t as if my mother were the only crazy one. The Lebanese took advantage of every lull. The blare of car horns as I pushed Salwa’s stroller along was deafening. Military jeeps drove by and honked their way past civilian automobiles. The Corniche was filled with promenaders.

I stood in front of the building where my mother was having her nails done. She was somewhere on the second floor. The manicurist usually came to the apartment, but today my mother had wanted an excuse to go out. I considered pushing the stroller across the boulevard to the Corniche, but I felt paralyzed. The people enjoying their walks didn’t inspire any confidence in me. I felt safer standing close to the building, and my napping niece didn’t seem to mind.

In the midst of my passive panic attack, I heard a hissing sound coming from behind the war-damaged green wall separating the building from its neighbor: “Psst, psst.” I began to back away slowly, pulling the stroller. My blood was rushing so fast I almost blacked out. I was twenty-one, too young to die, much too young. “Over here,” the voice behind the wall said, quietly and urgently. I couldn’t tell who was stupider: the man who was hiding and expecting someone to respond to his call, or me for not running into the building screaming my terror out. “Osama,” the man called. A bearded face appeared from behind the wall. “It’s me, Elie.”

I barely recognized my brother-in-law, although he had the same features, the same nose and mouth and brow. It wasn’t the beard or the gauntness that made him unrecognizable and disturbing. It was the eyes, brimming with the brilliance of insanity. Elie’s most distinctive feature had been his swagger, but he wasn’t able to exhibit any as a disconnected head.

“Hey. You look different.” I backed up another step. “I can’t stay, because I have to take Salwa inside.”

“No, wait,” he pleaded. He didn’t move from behind the wall. Only his angled head with its crown of untrimmed hair showed. “I can’t stay, either — too many traitors around — but I want to talk to you. I saw you from two buildings away and ducked over here; it’s too dangerous. We must meet at a secure location.”

“A secure location?”

“Where no one will kill me. Meet me at Trader Vic’s tonight at eight. I have many things to tell you. Don’t stand me up, I beg you. Promise me.” He withdrew his head without waiting for my agreement. I looked around, wondered why the air didn’t feel different, why there wasn’t some form of proof that Elie had been there. Salwa stirred in the pram. I checked, but she was still napping. Elie hadn’t even asked who she was.

The dank fog of smoke forced what dim light there was to scatter randomly. Elie was sitting on a high stool at the bar, and seemed about to tip over. The bartender, a bald, muscular man in a colored polyester shirt, leaned across the bar surface and whispered something into Elie’s ear. When the bartender pulled his head back, I could see that he wasn’t exactly sober, either. The room groaned and sweated, feverish amid an infestation of bamboo. I shuddered. The bartender noticed me and arched his eyebrows. I sat next to Elie and ordered a beer.

Elie discovered my existence when the bartender placed the bottle in front of me. “My mother won’t talk to me anymore,” he said.

He exhaled a dragon’s worth of smoke. I wiped the irritation from my eyes and took a sip of beer. “How are you doing?” I asked.

“My mother won’t talk to me,” he repeated. “I’ve been trying to get in touch, but she won’t even open the door. I might get murdered any minute and she doesn’t care.”

I felt as if I were stuck in a portentous Godard movie. “Tell him why,” the bartender said as he cleaned glasses with a dingy towel. He looked like a wrestler flexing before a match.

“I threw an ashtray at her.”

“And he’s surprised she doesn’t talk to him,” said the bartender.

“I didn’t hit her, did I? I threw the glass ashtray at the door to get her to move. She didn’t want me to leave. She argued and argued and then threw herself in front of the door, as if that was going to stop me. She can’t tell me what to do.”

Not a Godard movie, a Hollywood B-movie. An abrasive Don Ho was actually singing in the background. “She can’t tell you what to do,” said the bartender, “and now she won’t talk to you. You can’t have it both ways.”

“Hey,” called Elie, “whose side are you on?”

“Your mother’s. I’m always on a mother’s side. She raised you better than this. And you know she’d do anything for you. Tell him.” The bartender jerked his head toward me and flicked his towel at Elie, who turned his back and almost fell off the stool.

The bartender sighed and told me the story himself. When the Israelis laid siege to Beirut, the Palestinians and the Lebanese leftist militias hunkered in for the last stand. The city was shelled by battleships in the west, tanks and rocket launchers from the mountains in the east, north, and south, and jets from above. Elie didn’t return home for two weeks, remaining in the bunker and dozing whenever he could on the beach, where he was launching ineffective rockets at Israeli gunboats. For a fortnight, his mother, the concierge’s wife, worried to the point where she pricked her arms with darning needles in order not to think of her son. Finally, after midnight on a night of heavy shelling, she left her house and walked the two miles to the bunker. Her son was sleeping on a raffia mat, shoeless but fully clothed under a single blanket.

He opened his eyes and saw his mother glaring at him. “I only wanted to make sure you’re all right,” she said, turning around to go home.

Elie’s gaze was fastened on the label of his beer bottle, which he was systematically tearing to shreds. “It’s the Christians,” he said out of nowhere. “They betrayed us all.”

I wished he would look at me when he talked, but, then again, it was probably just as well that he didn’t. “But you’re Christian,” I said.

“I mean the Maronites. Don’t pretend you’re a foreigner with me.”

“Elie. My mother is a Maronite.”

“I don’t mean all of them, just most of them. You can’t deny it. They’re going to kill all of us. If they don’t shoot us, they’ll slit our throats. If they don’t slit our throats, they’ll poison us. If they don’t poison us, they’ll run us over with their Range Rovers one by one and break our bones and watch us bleed to death on the road.”

“Elie. My sister — your wife — is a Maronite.”

“No, she’s not. I don’t care what she thinks. She’s not. She would take after your father, not your crazy mother. You don’t get to choose. And she was baptized Orthodox to marry, so she can’t fool me. I know better now, and I knew better then. I’m in control. Did I tell you my mother isn’t talking to me? Can your mother talk to her?”

“Elie.” I repeated his name in hopes of calming him. “Have you been sleeping all right?”

“What a stupid question. I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in years. Do you think it’s easy? You escaped. You ran away. The rest of us can’t. We’re not all like your family. When things get rough, they go to the mountains — or, better, they go to Paris. Your house gets destroyed, you buy another, or two. All I can do is kill, kill, kill.”

I drank the rest of my Heineken in one long gulp. “Have you run over someone with a Range Rover lately?”

“Two of them, ran over them twice, but I wish I had a Range Rover, because then they’d be dead instead of in the hospital. If I had a four-wheeler, everything would run smoother.”

I slid off my barstool and started to leave, but Elie grabbed my arm. “Wait,” he said, “I have a good story for you,” and he plunged off into uninterruptible jabber territory. “We weren’t ready. In principle, we should have been. We used to use it as a threat: The Israelis are going to invade. The Israelis are going to invade. We didn’t really believe it. We also thought that if they did the Syrians would stand in their way. After all, that was why they were here. But the second the invasion began, the Syrians started running and hiding like the dogs they are. It was left to the Palestinians and us to fight. The glory of the left. For Trotsky, Che, and all that. My men ended up on the beach trying to stop the Israelis from landing troops there. There were so few of us compared with them. We had to do it in six-hour shifts. It was exhausting. Having to be one hundred percent on your guard for six hours was deadly.” I pulled my arm away, and he panicked. “Wait, wait, I’m getting to the strange part of the story. So, one day — we’ve been doing this for about a month, everyone was exhausted and psychotic — I finished my shift at noon and was going to take a shower and force myself to sleep, but then a jeep full of Palestinian commandos stopped next to me, and a friend of mine tells me to get in. I tried to tell him that I wanted to shower and sleep, but he wasn’t buying it. They were going to see a movie, and I was coming with them. A movie.

“Well, the only working movie theater, running on generators, is the Pavilion, which was showing nothing but porno. My friend even bought my ticket. We walked in, and the theater was completely full of guys with rifles and machine guns. The ones in the seats had theirs leaning against the seats in front of them, and there were probably a hundred guys standing with their weapons propped against the walls. There must have been more than six hundred fighters in that theater, all completely engrossed in four couples fucking around a pool in Beverly Hills. All of them, and I mean all, had their pants open, their dicks out, whacking off to the unfolding American dream on the screen.”

I closed my eyes and shook my head.

“I need money,” Elie said.

“I figured,” I replied, but he wasn’t listening.

“I want to get out of here. I want to have a family, kids. You know, the normal life. I can’t do it in Beirut now, so I have to go away, maybe the Gulf or Brazil or Sweden, somewhere nice. I need money. Can you get me some? Ask your father. Tell him for old times’ sake.”

“For old times’ sake?”

“Yes,” he said. “I always respected him.”

“It wouldn’t do any good. I’d have to ask Lina. She’s the one who’s in charge now.”

“Oh.”

“She’s the one who runs the company.”

“Oh.”

“Do you want me to ask her?”

“No. I don’t think that’s a good idea, definitely not. I’m not crazy.”

By the time my sister began work, the dealership had moved to the safer suburbs — safer, but not safe. The danger was not a physical one. The company was apolitical, and even militias needed cars every so often. What was unsafe was that the company was profitable, maybe not as much as it was in the years before the war, but enough to tempt a few unscrupulous mafiosi, otherwise known as Lebanese political leaders. For a while, cuts had to be paid to various powerbrokers for every car that was sold. During one of the numerous peaks of the war, the bey walked into the company’s offices and offered protection. In exchange, he would buy into the firm for 20 percent of the net profits. Of course, he couldn’t pay anywhere near full price for his share, what with the country’s precarious financial situation and all. The bey became a partner in the Lebanese dealership. Had my father still cared about his company, that fact alone would have killed him. Unfortunately for the bey, it wasn’t a successful investment. By the time the current bey succeeded his father, he was the main shareholder in a company that wasn’t the cash cow it used to be. Their family had spent a fortune investing in the corporation, and our family had long ago sold out of it. A bad deal.

My sister was a good businesswoman, but her true talent lay in understanding human hunger. Everyone in the family had become rich, which meant there was no one left who had the drive to keep the company successful. Slowly, she began to disinvest, breaking up the various dealerships and selling them. She sold the last dealership, the one in Kuwait, four months before the Iraqis invaded. There were many good reasons for selling off the company bit by bit. My sister correctly understood that other companies would mimic the Nissan and Toyota plan, and the market would soon be glutted with competition. The gold mine of my father’s day had turned silver in hers. And she quickly got tired of constantly having to pay people off so she could do her job. In essence, she had to bribe partners to let her make money for them. It wasn’t just the bey. She considered him small change. In every country, the company had to have a local partner who did nothing but sit back and rake in money.

“Look,” she once said, “I’m not averse to bribing, but after a while, you have to say enough is enough. I decided that when I turned forty I wanted to look in the mirror and not feel any guilt or remorse about the way I’d lived my life. I know it sounds silly, but I felt that running the company was nibbling at my soul. I waited for the right time for each division and found the buyers. On my fortieth, I’d been free for years, and I ran to the mirror to check. And you know, I wish I’d seen guilt or remorse. They would have distracted me. On my fortieth birthday, looking in the mirror, I couldn’t see anything but goddamn wrinkles.”

Eighteen

Two days after her arrival and my mother still looked tired; jet lag did not become her. To the uninitiated eye, she looked well enough, maybe needing a bit of rest, but one had only to look at the weary eyes, the dollop of extra foundation under them, to see that she wasn’t as robust. My father’s gaze fixed upon her as she poured herself a glass of water. And we had a dinner to go to.

“You don’t have to come if you’re tired,” I told her. We sat in my kitchen, midafternoon. “It’s a casual dinner. Clark only wants to meet you. I can ask that we do it later.”

In the fifteen years since I’d lived in Los Angeles, my parents had visited me three times, but this, in 1992, was the first since I had bought my new house. My father had met Clark, my supervisor. He had wanted to. Since he didn’t understand much about computers, he equated programming them with magic, and he wanted to meet the arch-magician, the high priest of binaries. And now Clark had suggested he give a dinner for my parents in order to meet my mother, whom he had heard so much about.

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “I’ll be fine after a nap. He’s your boss. It can’t be that casual.”

I chuckled. “It’s different over here, very laid-back. They don’t take their dinners that seriously. I’m not sure they take anything seriously.”

She finished her coffee. “Well, we have to.” She stood up and began walking to the bedroom. “After all, I’m getting old, and I want to spend more time with my son. So I’m going to insist that your boss, what’s-his-name, give you more time off. You’ll visit Beirut more often. We’ll do all that after my nap.”

I expected my father, who watched her get up, either to mention his concern for her or to make a quip about my infrequent visits, but he did neither. He followed her into the room.

While my parents napped, I stayed in the kitchen reading The Handmaid’s Tale. I noticed a sputter of movement outside. A second glance showed a brown falcon on one of the branches of my avocado tree. Its beak was a striking, unnatural red, but then it bent its expressive head and tore off a sliver of flesh and feathers. The falcon had caught a city pigeon. Blood dripped from the carcass onto a lower branch. Momentary bright red streaked before the wood sucked the color in, turning it into a darker brown. A few drops fell on a leaf — poinsettias and Christmas.

I didn’t know what to do. Wake my parents? I wanted to call someone, Fatima or Lina: Look. I can see a falcon having a pigeon feast in Los Angeles. Who would have thought? I called Animal Control. “Hi,” I said. “This might sound strange, but I have a falcon in my yard.”

“So?” replied the Animal Control operator.

“I don’t know. Doesn’t it seem strange that there’s a falcon in my yard?”

“There are hundreds of falcons in L.A.,” she said.

Once, when I was a young boy — I must have been six or seven — my father took me on a business trip to the United Arab Emirates, where the corporation’s partner was one of the ruling princes. On the third and last day, the prince drove us out of the city for an excursion. That was my first encounter with the desert. Sand dunes everywhere; no plant could survive, no living thing should in that barrenness. Giant oil fires billowed black smoke that mocked the heavens. We rode for a few hours, until we reached a cluster of tents that had been set up to host us. An impressive meal was served, and my father glared at me to ensure that I wouldn’t slip and ask for utensils. I didn’t eat much, because I couldn’t figure out how to scoop the rice into my mouth with just my fingers, much to the amusement of our hosts. After lunch, as the scorching sun cooled, the prince decided to show off his falconry skills. He perched one of his three falcons on his leather-laden arm. Even blindfolded, it looked proud and regal. His servants unleashed a pigeon into the skies, and the prince unhooded his falcon. The predator took off and majestically dived into his prey’s path. Claws dug into the helpless pigeon. The prince asked me, “Would you like to feel what it is like to have a bird of such magnificence on your arm?”

I was frightened. My father suggested I was too young. The prince boasted that he was younger when he flew his first falcon. One of his servants put a long, fingerless leather glove on my right hand. It was much too big and loose. The prince coaxed the falcon onto my forearm. The falcon’s eyes were mean and menacing. I shivered. The falcon dug in his claws, and the glove offered scant protection. I felt a sharp pain. The falcon jerked and flew off, screeching as it ascended. The prince couldn’t catch the leather leash in time. The falcon soared high and far.

The servants panicked, running around on the desolate sand with no apparent purpose. The prince shouted loudly and incomprehensibly. My father bent on one knee and removed the ineffective glove. Bright red bubbled from three punctures in my arm.

“Your son frightened my falcon,” the prince said.

“Damn your falcon to eternal hell,” my father replied. “My son bleeds.”

When my father woke up from his nap, I told him about the falcon and wondered whether he remembered the one in the Emirates all those years ago. He couldn’t recall a thing. I brought up all my markers — the desert drive, the grandiose flames of oil rigs, hands forming rice balls and flipping them into open mouths — but he dismissed my recollection. “I’d have remembered something like that,” he said. “Your arm was hurt?”

Uncle Jihad used to say that what happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of those events affect us. My father and I may have shared numerous experiences, but, as I was constantly finding out, we rarely shared their stories; we didn’t know how to listen to one another.

“It is time.” The woman sat under the second willow. “We must act without delay. Are you ready?” The emir’s wife lowered her voice so she would sound serious and resolute. “Of course I am. The dark one and his evil mother must disappear.”

“So they shall. Tomorrow, when the sun extinguishes itself in the sea, invite Fatima to tea. If you are able to remove the amulet from her person for a moment, I will make sure she never plagues your life again.”

“What about the boy?”

“The boy will be no trouble. I can handle him easily.”

“All you ask of me is to invite Fatima to tea and remove her amulet?”

“You must invite me as well.”

“I do not understand.”

“Invite me.”

“Will you join me for tea tomorrow evening?”

The woman smiled, and even though her face looked like that of an ordinary peasant, the emir’s wife was frightened.

I was wrong. The dinner party wasn’t exactly casual. Joyce and Clark had invited three other Ellisen employees and their spouses for dinner in their yard. Joyce, a good chef, had gone overboard. When she told us we were to sit outdoors, my mother announced, “Dinner in the garden. How lovely!” After which everyone referred to the yard as the garden.

A damp warmth soaked the evening air. Clark wiped his brow and moved his chair next to my mother’s. Usually, at any social event with my co-workers, we relied on Joyce and the other spouses to provide a spark. We, programmers all, weren’t known for our conversational charm. Tonight, though, my mother, still dazzling at sixty, held court. My parents’ aging had shifted their party roles. My mother, who used to be more reserved at social gatherings, had become more vivacious; my father, more reticent. Women used to fawn over him at get-togethers; he showered them with attention and listened rapturously to their concerns. He no longer listened as much. At some point, my mother had decided to make this evening memorable, and she was well on her way. As it had always been, gay men — in this case, Luis and his boyfriend — fluttered about her radiance like moths, and she basked. The women fawned over her now, while their husbands pretended to hold themselves back. I gave them until the third glass of wine before they unleashed their adulation.

The evening light dropped an octave lower, and my mother went into high gear, without budging from her throne. Her idiosyncratic laugh — a noisy, sharp aspiration — filled the night.

Megan, one of my co-workers, was thrilled when she tasted the soup. “Potato-and-leek,” she exclaimed. “My favorite.”

“Vichyssoise,” corrected Luis. “You know how the Eskimos have a million words for snow. Well, Joyce has a million words for potato-and-leek soup.”

“That’s an urban legend,” my mother said. “English probably has as many lexemes for the word ‘snow’ as Inuit. French has more.”

“Really?” said Luis. “I always thought it was true.”

“We all do, because it has a nice ring to it.” My mother put her soupspoon down. “The legend began in 1911, when the anthropologist Franz Boas — aren’t they always the troublemakers? — wrote that the Inuit had four words for snow. In each retelling, as with any good story, the number increased, until one newspaper mentioned four hundred.”

“Speaking of four hundred,” Clark said. “Now that I have you here, Mrs. Kharrat, I have to ask. Is it true that Osama has hundreds and hundreds of cousins? It’s always ‘my cousin did this’ or ‘my cousin said that.’ He’s always talking about some cousin or other.”

“I don’t think he has that many,” my mother said. “He certainly doesn’t have many on my side of the family.” She held my father’s hand. “He does have a few on his father’s side. But I can see why it can be confusing for you, because in English they’re all cousins. You can’t even differentiate by gender. In Lebanese we have different words for each kind of cousin, pinpointing each family relationship.” She chuckled. “This isn’t urban legend. You can say that Lebanese has hundreds of lexemes for family relations. Family to the Lebanese is as snow to the Inuit.”

Carol, another of my co-workers, had been quiet for a while, staring at my mother. Finally, she said, “I’m so envious. I don’t know how you European women do it. You’re always elegant without even trying.”

“I work hard at it,” my mother replied. “It only looks like I don’t.”

“No, please. Just look at you right now. I couldn’t carry that off in a million years, and neither could any of my friends.” She looked at Megan, who nodded in agreement. “You have very little makeup on. If I wore your blue dress, it would look silly on me. I think it’s the way you carry yourself. I wish I knew how. I’m just a fuddy-duddy.”

I could see my mother hesitate, surprised by the illusory intimacy. She glanced at my father and then at me, and I discreetly shook my head no. “You’re not a fuddy-duddy, darling, whatever that means,” my mother said. “You’re very pretty, very pretty.”

Carol lowered her head, as if talking to herself. The wine had infected both her diction and her loquacity. “I’m not talking about that. It’s class. It’s the look. It doesn’t matter how expensive a dress I wear or how I do my hair. I bet you look stylish and chic in a nightgown.” She paused, sank even lower in her chair, and whispered, “I want that.”

Her husband swallowed a bountiful gulp of Cabernet. “Well, how about if you stopped looking like a girl? She’s a woman, a lady.” His third glass of wine?

The look of horror on Carol’s face was no match for the ones on the hosts’. My father couldn’t mask his surprise.

“Now, now. That was rude.” My mother turned her full attention to Carol. “Now, dear, do you really want to hear some advice?” My mother must have had three glasses of wine, but her eyes were alert, and her gaze was ever devoted and fixed.

“Yes, definitely.” Carol slapped her husband’s hand.

“Do you want practical or philosophical suggestions?”

“Both.”

“Get your colors done. You have to know what looks good on you.”

“But I have,” whined Carol.

“Oh, heavens. That’s surprising.” My mother put her palms on her thighs. “Well, get them done again, dear, and not at a department store this time. The Versace sweater doesn’t suit you. You only wear him if you want the greasy gutter boys of Milano to hoot and whistle when you walk by. The color is wrong, wrong, wrong. You can’t carry off that orange; few people could. Frankly, I don’t see why anyone would want to. It’s such a repulsive color, so Dutch. Get your colors done, darling. Promise me.”

I knew what was coming next and could probably have repeated it verbatim.

“Now, when my son was younger — when was it, darling, ten years ago?”

“Twelve.” I closed my eyes.

“Well, we got together in Paris. He was still at university and he arrived looking so bedraggled and shabby. I wanted to buy him something nice, so I took him to Boss. He loved a lot of the things, but he refused to try on most of them. I kept pestering him, and finally he said, ‘It doesn’t matter what I wear, I’ll never look like him,’ and he pointed to the delicious blond Boss model. So I told him, ‘Big deal. I don’t look like Catherine Deneuve, either, but that doesn’t mean I have to look like that dead singer’—what’s her name?”

“Janis Joplin,” I said.

“Yes, her. So my boy comes up with the wisest thing. He said, ‘Everything here is too big for me. I couldn’t grow into it.’ At first, I thought he was talking about his physical size, so I tried to reassure him — it can’t be easy being small. But then I realized he was talking about something else. He really couldn’t make those clothes fit him. In his mind, the Boss suit was made for that blond model, not him. And that’s the secret. Never wear clothes that are bigger than you are unless you intend to grow into them. If you want to wear a great suit, either you believe it belongs to you or you’ll look like you’re thirteen and wearing your mother’s clothes. Doesn’t that make sense? It’s the same in life. Never live a life too big for you. You either grow bigger to encompass it or shrink it to fit you. I wonder which country invented shrink-to-fit. Oh boy, I’m not making sense, waxing philosophical. Just call me Nietzsche — no, not him. Who’s the one who wrote about aesthetics?”

“Hegel,” I said, knowing full well that she knew the answer to every question she had asked me.

“Yes, call me him.”

The emir’s wife poured a cup of tea for Fatima, who was leery of her hostess’s intentions. “Why am I here?” Fatima asked.

“I thought we should start afresh,” replied the emir’s wife. “I know we have not always seen eye to eye, but I was hoping we could work on our issues, woman to woman.”

“How do you propose we do that?”

“By being civil first. We get to know each other as friends, no longer mistress and slave, but equals.”

“But I have not been your slave for years.”

“See?” The emir’s wife poured herself a cup. “Our relationship is already improving. We can do what civilized women everywhere do, drink tea, chat, gossip, discuss important topics.”

“If you are trying to make peace, there is no need to work so hard. I have nothing against you. I am willing to give you what you want without having to drink tea.”

“I want us to be friends. We can talk about what friends talk about, the weather, fashion.”

“But you only wear one thing.”

“I can compromise. I can also admire beautiful things. You wear the nicest robes, and that amulet on your neck is utterly wonderful. May I see it?”

Fatima hesitated and tried to gauge what the emir’s wife was up to, but she figured she was aboveground and indoors. She unclasped the necklace and handed it to the emir’s wife. And the room rocked and filled with smoke and the stench of rotted flesh. A giant blue monster with three red eyes and four arms held a sword, a cudgel, a cup, and the head of a man by its hair. A necklace of skulls was her naked body’s only adornment. “Fool, what have you done?” Fatima screamed at the emir’s wife. “You invited a demon into your home?” She reached out to grab her talisman but was too slow. The monster unleashed a fire upon her, and she disappeared.

“You can give humans many gifts,” the demon Hannya said, “but they never seem to be willing to give up their naïve humanity. One should never be allowed to be invulnerable. It is unhealthy.” She extended her sword and used it to move Fatima’s hand along the emir’s wife’s trembling lap. “This is useless now. You can wear it since you think it lovely. You had better be ready for tonight. I will not have you fail me.”

One day in February 1993, my mother developed a severe backache and then even worse abdominal pains. Her symptoms were difficult to diagnose in the first two days, but when jaundice made its portentous appearance, a histopathology was performed. She was offered a diagnosis: pancreatic cancer, stage IV B, and a life expectancy of two months at best. When the doctors told her, my mother didn’t cry; she did what absolutely no one had expected. She walked out on my father.

After thirty-seven years of marriage, she packed a small bag — a very small bag; “I won’t be needing much,” she told Lina — and left. It didn’t occur to her until she stood on the doorstep to wonder where she would go. She had no close family in Lebanon, and no friends, either, since they had all left during the war and had yet to return. On the spot, she made another decision that shocked everyone who knew her. She took a cab to Aunt Samia’s apartment and moved into her guest room. One could say that no one was more surprised than the hostess herself.

My mother’s parting words were “Let him get used to my not being there.”

Was it a scandal? Not as much as one would have thought. Few people outside of family knew about it, and for those who did, Aunt Samia had her lines prepared. “But Layla is at her own home, of course,” she would say. “I can take care of my sister better than anyone. It was easier to move her than for me to move in. The whole family is at my house now anyway.”

To this day, none of us can figure out why my mother did it. The assumption at first was that she meant to punish my father, and her leaving did overwhelm him, but that was much too simplistic. He rarely left her side while she was at my aunt’s. In the first few days, he pleaded with her to come back home, but soon yielded to her obstinacy. In some ways, she allowed him more access to her than she ever had, but she refused to return. He became her manservant in an unfamiliar home. Early on, while she was still mobile, but doped up on painkillers and exhausted from chemotherapy, he wouldn’t allow anyone else to help her get around. He arrived every morning at seven, waited for my aunt’s maid to bring the tray of coffee, and took it in himself and woke her. He would stay with her until she kicked him out, which she apparently did only when she thought he needed a break. Even when she became completely infirm and a nurse was brought in, he remained her primary caretaker. She triumphantly exceeded the doctors’ expectations by living for nine and a half months. And she died in the hospital with her family around her, and her husband crying and kissing her hand, swearing upon his mother’s grave that she was the only woman he had ever loved.

While the twins slept in their bed, millions of black ants crept into the room and carried the dark boy out the window and onto the balcony, whence he was flown off by fifteen young jinn. Still asleep, Layl was delivered to the monster sitting under the second willow.

Much to the emir’s wife’s horror, the monster did not hesitate. Hannya raised the arm carrying the sword and cut off Layl’s head. She proceeded to cut off his arms and legs, then dug out his heart and cut off his testicles.

The head she gave to ten hyenas. “Take this to your den. Guard and protect it, for by its power you will produce the sturdiest of offspring.”

Twenty eagles received the arms. “Take these to your nest. Guard and protect them, for by their power your wings will increase in strength and your feathers will decrease in weight.”

The legs she gave to thirty monkeys. “Take these to your trees. Guard and protect them, for by their power you will grow more nimble.”

The torso she gave to the lions. “Take this to your lair. Guard and protect it, for by its power you will be the most powerful of beasts.”

The heart she kept for herself. The testicles she gave to the emir’s wife. “Destroy these, for as long as they exist the demon king can resurrect himself.”

The emir’s wife stared aghast at the bloodied testicles in her hand. “How can I destroy them? I have no experience with such things. I am naught but simple royalty.”

“Destroy them as you wish,” hissed the monster, “but do not fail me.”

The emir’s wife swallowed the testicles in one gulp. The monster smiled.

And the scream of Shams was heard round the world.

I stood at the door of the hospital room with my carry-on strapped on my shoulder, hesitating as if I needed permission to enter. On the plane, I had visualized many different scenes, but none matched the sight of my dying mother unconscious, or the despair planted on my father’s face. Reality always flabbergasted me.

My father moved from despair to fury as soon as he caught sight of me. He couldn’t speak, simply glared, angry and teary. Now, that was a scenario I had pictured. He considered it egregious that I would be anywhere but at his side during troubled times. When I saw Fatima in the visitors’ lounge, she told me to be strong, and I knew she wasn’t only speaking of my mother’s decline. He sat on my mother’s left side and Lina on the right. When she looked at me, I realized I was late. My sister’s face was the tuning fork that forced induction. My knees buckled and I stumbled like a newborn foal. The metronomic beats of the monitor, the jagged peaks of colored lines on the monitor nauseated me. My mother’s timed breathing.

I wanted to say that it wasn’t my fault, that I’d taken the first flight out and made good time. Nothing would escape my lips. My sister hugged me, and my head nestled in her bosom. I squeezed my eyelids shut so I wouldn’t have to look at her breasts, at my father, or at my mother.

My father hadn’t shaved in at least four days, and his face seemed to grow a fresh wrinkle with each beep of the monitor. He stooped over the bed, sheltering my mother.

“She won’t make it through the night,” Lina whispered in my ear. When she felt me shudder, she added, “She knew it. She said goodbye.” She massaged my shaking shoulders, and then led me out to the balcony for her cigarette. “She knew you were coming,” she said, raising her voice a bit to contend with the traffic below. “Don’t worry. It wouldn’t have mattered. She’s been on heavy morphine for a week, didn’t understand much, and didn’t really try to make sense. But she knew, so she kept saying goodbye while reciting stanzas.”

A cleansing breeze whipped around the small veranda. I could hear the distinctive whooshing and popping sounds of two plastic bags being kited by the wind. “I should go back in,” I said.

“Wait,” Lina said. “Give him a minute.”

“I didn’t do anything wrong.” I couldn’t look at her, but heard her tears. I stared through the picture window at my Hermès-turbaned mother and my father at her side. “What did she say?” I asked.

Lina put her arm around me. “She hasn’t been able to speak clearly for a while.”

“You should’ve called me earlier.”

“Don’t do that,” she said. “I’ve kept you updated. It just happened quicker than I’d expected.”

“What did she say?”

“How much she loved us, how much she loved you.”

“Be more specific.” I shook my head. “Please.”

“I don’t know, she was rambling in three languages. It wasn’t clear or uplifting or anything. She recited poetry that made little sense. She mixed lines and made some up, I think. She was smiling the whole time. She said she loved you, I swear.”

My body slumped. “I want to go back in.”

“She thought the male nurse was our father. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She looked at the nurse and offered him the Saadi line ‘I’d rather be shackled to you in hell than stroll in the Garden with another.’ Well, our father tried to get her to repeat it to him.”

A graceless laugh escaped her lips.

Shams’s sorrow was so deep that his wail of lament lasted one incessant week. He did not sleep or eat, and none could console him or interrupt the howl. His cry of sadness forced every creature that heard it to shed tears. The imps tried in vain to comfort him, pleading with him to help them search for his twin, but he could not hear them. They wept and begged, but Shams wailed on and on.

“Go,” Isaac told his brothers, his cherubic cheeks waxy wet. “Ishmael and I will watch over him. The rest of you must find our sister and nephew. Ask every human, every jinni, every beast and insect. North, south, east, and west, search every crevice of the world. Find them.”

The emir’s wife knocked on her son’s door, knocked again and again. The wailing broke her heart, and she wanted to mother him. She opened the door, gingerly and shyly, and entered. In the middle of the room, her prophet hugged himself, formed an orb upon a chair, his face buried in his thighs. The howl poured from his body. Isaac and Ishmael — brother demons, not parrots — each on one knee, each redder than blood, stroked Shams’s head and kissed it.

She waited, crying, hoping Shams would acknowledge her. She took a deep breath to calm her soul. She cleared her throat, but the sound she made could not compete with that emanating from her prophet. “Shams,” she called. “My son.”

Isaac and Ishmael glared at her, but Shams — Shams looked at her with loathing, his eyes redder than the two demons. He raised his arm, his palm facing her. “Blood be upon you.”

Out of nothing, out of the immediate air, blood soaked her. First her hands dripped; strings of blood fell from her fingers to the floor. She thought she was wounded, but it was not so. Her hair felt sticky. She looked at the floor, where a large puddle of blood had formed. Ecru turned to red, and her robe became soaked and clung to her body. Her legs felt viscous and clammy, and her vagina felt full. She desperately wanted to lift her robe and examine her privates but was unable to do anything other than scream and run for help.

By the time my mother’s funeral ended, my father looked as if he had been through wash, rinse, and spin-dry cycles in one of those tiny washing machines that fit under the kitchen counter. Still, he had to find the energy to be with all who came to offer him obsequies. He was so tired by the end of the day that he fell asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow. In the morning, we had to prepare for visitors. The day following the funeral, our house was full of people, hundreds, until bedtime — the post-death rituals meant to exhaust one out of grief. The second day, repeat.

I walked into his room the third day after the funeral. My sister was fixing his tie, getting him ready for another day of condolences. My father looked up and saw me, and his face clouded once more, a confusion of ire and despondency. “Happy you could join us,” he said, as if I had been somewhere else for the previous three days.

“I’m sorry.” I waited, then decided to put everything on the table. “I’m going to leave this morning. I have to get back to work.”

“But you just got here,” my sister said.

“You’re not leaving,” my father fumed.

“I have to.” I clasped my hands behind my back. “I really have to.”

“Why did you even bother to come?” my father snapped.

“Look. I’m very sorry, but I have to leave. I’m needed at work. You don’t need me for the condolences.”

“We need you,” my father said. “Your place is here.”

“I was here. But I also have commitments.”

“If you leave, I’ll never speak to you again. I’ll disown you.”

“No, you won’t,” Lina interrupted. “You’ll not do that. You don’t mean that.”

“If you leave now,” my father said, “you are not my son.”

“I am your son,” I said.

“No son of mine abandons his father.”

Nineteen

One day, a bizarrely dressed man walked into the diwan. He spoke a language that the court’s translator did not understand. Surprising everyone, Baybars replied to the stranger in his language and treated him with the utmost respect and hospitality. The sultan read the letter the messenger had brought and began to weep. Othman rushed to his friend’s side. “What is it, my lord? Tell me and I will realign the sun and the moon to ease your sorrow.”

Baybars handed the letter to Othman, who could not read it. “I can barely read Arabic, my king. Why would anyone send you a letter in this strange language?”

“To test if I am the one,” Baybars said, “and this is not strange. It is my native tongue.”

One of the Uzbeks took the letter. “Shall I translate? This is one of the many languages of the vast province of Khorasan, which means where the sun rises, where bakhshis play the oud and sing the great glory of God. The letter is from Shah Jamak of Samarkand, addressed, he hopes, to his lost son: ‘In the name of God, the compassionate and the merciful. To our son, the prince of believers, sultan of Egypt and Syria, whose name is Mahmoud ben Jamak and whose mother is the Lady Heather. Know, my son, that, from the moment God decreed that you leave us, your mother and I have been unable to enjoy food or slumber. Your mother grieves, and I comfort her and tell her God cannot allow her suffering to go on forever. A few days before this writing, your mother found a coin embossed with your image on the obverse, and she fainted, knowing that her son lived and had become the sultan of Islam. I write to inquire whether this is true. Tell me, I beg you. Are you my son?’ ”

Baybars wept, and his friends joined him. “Deliver a letter to my parents. Inform them that I will be arriving soon.” He stood up, holding the royal scepter close to his heart. “Tell my father who I am.”

It took me a few minutes to realize what my sister was up to. She wanted me to understand, but I was missing the clues she was throwing out. Breadcrumbs are harder to see along phone lines. She was entertaining herself at my expense and my father’s. We had our trivial talk — I was doing fine, she was as well — before the vicarious seduction began.

“Come home for Christmas,” she said. “We miss you.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” It had been eleven months since I had been to Beirut, since my mother’s death.

“Don’t be silly. Of course it’s a good idea. It’s always a good idea.”

She went on to tell me about all the crazy family goings-on: how Uncle Halim had flipped completely, the stories he was telling, the scandals he was unleashing; how Aunt Samia hadn’t talked to her youngest son for a month because she told him she didn’t want a birthday present, and he believed her. “You don’t know what you’re missing,” she added.

“Well,” I said, “you always keep me informed.”

“It’s not the same as being here. Come home.”

“I can’t. I’m too depressed.” I sighed, and, as usual, the instant I uttered those words, gloom filled me.

“We’ll take care of you. You need to be with us.”

“I don’t think I can deal with things now.”

“Yes, you can,” she insisted. “Hold on a minute.” She didn’t cover the mouthpiece, and I heard my father pleading in the background. All I could decipher was “Tell him. Tell him.”

I felt the eight tentacles of an octopus squeeze my marrow.

“I’m not taking no for an answer,” my sister said. “We’ll even pay for the ticket. You’re coming home.”

“He’s telling you what to say.”

“The weather has been wonderful. We’re thinking of going to the mountains for a few days.”

“He’s furious with me.” I heard the embarrassing whine in my voice, but I couldn’t stop. “He hasn’t been able to speak to me for almost a year. The last words he said to me were that I’m not his son. I know he didn’t mean it, but still, he shouldn’t have said it.”

“We miss you terribly,” she said. “I’m glad you’re coming.”

“Why is he doing this? This is going to be hell.”

“Oh, yes,” she said, laughing. “It most certainly will be fun. And I’m going to enjoy it.”

Baybars prepared for the trip to Khorasan and Turkmenistan. “It behooves us,” said Layla, “to ask your mother, Sitt Latifah, to join us, my king. Family should meet family.”

“Of course,” cried Baybars. “Brilliant.” He turned to Sergeant Lou’ai. “Ride forth to your hometown, and inform my mother that I am in need of her wisdom.”

The convoy set forth. An impeccably outfitted battalion of the slave army rode the best Arabians of the lands, and a thousand slaves in most exquisite dress accompanied them. The king had filled a hundred treasure chests with textiles from Egypt and Syria, some embroidered with silver and gold, others of pure silk. He brought with him trays of silver, antiques of gold, and brilliant jewels from the southern lands of Africa. They left the land of the Nile and crossed the Jordan, the Euphrates, and the Tigris. They reached the lands of Persia and the mountains of Khorasan. Baybars rested in the holy city of Mashhad and sent Othman ahead to Samarkand. “Ride ahead, my friend, and inform my father that his son is near.”

And when the shah heard of his son’s arrival, he said, “What glorious news. Let us ride out and greet the sultan. Announce to my wife that her son arrives.”

When Baybars saw his father’s convoy approach, he and his companions climbed on their horses and set out to meet it. The great warhorse al-Awwar trotted toward the shah, and father and son hugged while still atop their steeds. The men in both convoys were touched by the unfolding scene before them, father and son brought together again, and expressed their appreciation by raising their swords, shouting, and cheering at the sky.

My father didn’t stand up to greet me, nor did he utter a word. He simply nodded in acknowledgment. I said hello and asked how he was doing. He nodded once more. He slouched a bit and extended his fingers to stare at them. “Hope you’re feeling better,” I said.

He nodded. I looked at my sister and arched my eyebrows. She led me into my room, where my suitcase was already open on the settee but not yet unpacked.

“He’s very happy to see you,” Lina said. “He’s just sleepy.”

“He couldn’t even look at me,” I said.

“Don’t be daft. Of course he looked at you. He doesn’t want you to know he did.”

In the palace of Samarkand, Queen Heather ran to Baybars and nearly toppled him. She kept hugging him and squeezing him and kissing him. “You are Mahmoud, my son. I would swear to it on Judgment Day, before God the Divine.” She kissed him so many times that she grew dizzy. “Wait. Let me rest.” She sat on her cushions. “My eyes have seen the impossible sublime. My son, the sultan of Islam. While I carried you, I knew God had great plans for you.” Baybars knelt before her and kissed her hands. “A mother knows,” she added. “The king of kings even I did not imagine, but I knew you were chosen. I was pregnant with destiny.”

“Be joyful, Mother. Your son bows before you. To help assuage your past sorrows, I offer you this.” And Baybars opened the chests of dazzling gifts. “More important, this is the honorable Sitt Latifah. She adopted me when I had nothing and offered me all that is hers. She raised me and taught me to care for God.”

The queen leapt to her feet and kissed Sitt Latifah. “My son has two mothers, further proof that he is blessed. Come sit beside me and regale me with stories of what he was like away from me.” The two women talked of their son and told stories of former times.

“I, too, had two mommies,” said Queen Heather. “My mother had a twin sister, and no one could tell them apart, not even my father. They raised me as one.”

I tried to force myself back to sleep. Not a dash of light penetrated the rolled-down shutters. The nightstand clock read four-eleven. I shut my eyes and hoped. I rolled over, but the mattress didn’t seem to want to readjust, as if it knew what was best for me and was waiting for the end of my silly experiment. I resigned myself to its will. In the silent apartment, I could hear the movement of warm air within the heating system. The vents would expel the air with a sound like the long harrumph of an ogre. I could also hear my niece’s aged hamster running its wheel in her room — a hamster that had been around forever, apparently immortal.

I rose with the emergence of first light and had to remind myself to put on shorts and an undershirt. I left my room, not having to tiptoe — bare feet on marble barely made any noise — and walked through the corridor, the den, the main living room, and into the kitchen. I opened the fridge and couldn’t figure out how anything was arranged. Soft light suddenly seeped from under the maid’s door. I heard faint rustling before Fely opened the door, still adjusting her uniform, which looked like polyester pajamas.

“Please, sir,” she said in Filipina English, smiling as if her life depended on it.

I smiled back. “I’m trying to get juice.”

“Please, sir,” she repeated, and turned on the kitchen lights. “Orange juice, coffee, every morning, five minutes.” She brushed past me and reached for an untouched crate of freshly picked blood oranges, her fingers navigating the fleshy globes, choosing the best ones. The air burst with orange perfume. “Please, sir.”

Fely had been the family maid for at least ten years, trained by my mother. The soft, smiling exterior belied a willful, controlling woman who ruled her domain, exactly the kind of maid my mother, and my sister, grew to love. The kitchen belonged to her. She would do all the work. I was to return to my place and would be taken care of. I went back to the den, turned the television to the satellite news, and waited. Fely came in with a silver tray, Turkish coffee, kettle and cup, large glass of red juice, and two madeleines. “Good morning, sir,” she said, and retreated before I could reply. I heard the toilet flush in my father’s bathroom.

He walked out of his room in morning attire, pajama bottoms and his plaid dressing gown, which didn’t cover his undershirt or the dozens of chest hairs poking through the fine cotton. He stopped briefly when he saw me. “Good morning,” I said.

He only grunted. He sat on the other sofa — he, CNN, and I formed an equilateral triangle. He wouldn’t look at me. I stared at the television, as did he. Fely brought him his coffee and newspaper. He surreptitiously sneaked a look before unfolding the newspaper and burying his face in it. I stood and went back to my room. I didn’t re-emerge until Lina woke up.

Jamak and Heather held a weeklong feast to honor their son, the sultan. Samarkand rejoiced in the royal happiness. There was an archery competition on the first day, a horse race on the second. And on the eve of the return to Cairo, a dream appeared.

Layla sat up in bed in the middle of the night. “Wake up.” She nudged her husband. “Wake up. I had an awful dream.” Othman sat up beside her and hugged her and eased her shuddering. “The dream began wonderfully. You and I were in a bucolic meadow in a flowering springtime when, all of a sudden, an ugly crone appeared and announced that I had forsaken a friend. ‘His time is up,’ she said.”

“Worry not, my wife. Return to sleep; perchance your dream will unfurl further.”

And she did. In her dream, she looked out toward a sickle-shaped bay with two arms extending out to sea. She stood on a solid shore where footprints left no trace; the sand was free of seaweed and firm to walk on. She was thirsty, standing by a well. “Have you forgotten me already?” a voice said. “Has it been so long?” She turned around but saw no one. “You were my friend, and my sword was yours. Whenever you called, I ran to you. I have been calling for fifteen years and no one has heard. I have been erased from the stories of my friends.”

“Marouf,” Layla cried. “Forgive me, for I thought you were dead. Show yourself, and I will ride the stormy clouds to bring you home.”

She gasped as a naked Marouf, emaciated and riddled with disease, appeared before her, shackled to the wall of a dark cell, his unkempt white beard almost reaching the floor. “Save me,” he said. “I am about to fade away.”

“Wait for me,” she said. “I am coming.”

And in the morning, husband and wife prepared for travel. “Are you sure we know where to find him?” asked Othman. “Hundreds of his relatives from the sons of Ishmael have been searching unsuccessfully.”

“He is in Thessaly,” Layla replied. “I described my dream to various seamen. All agreed that I saw Thessaly and its sickle-shaped bay, and that is where we are bound.”

“So it shall be.”

• • •

“I told you we should have left quickly and more quietly,” said Othman.

“I did not think it necessary,” said Layla. “I assumed that men have some dignity. If someone told me he did not wish my company, my dignity would forbid me to tag along. I thought dignity was a common human trait.”

“Not so, my darling. Dignity is the rarest of man’s characteristics.”

“Funny that you should be talking of dignity,” Harhash said. “Need I remind you of your previous adventures? Does anyone recall being strung up in a stable and whipped? Does anyone remember being brought into town without a headdress, tied up with his butt in the air?”

“Does anyone recall being bonked on the head as he walked through a gate?”

“I never claimed to possess any dignity,” Harhash said. “I will do anything for a good story, including befriending ingrates like you two. One day, when I am old and weathered, I will be able to sit down with my friends and tell our great tales. A good storyteller can never afford the luxury of being dignified.”

“Well said, my Harhash,” Layla replied. “Now, what of those stories you mentioned? We have days left before we reach Thessaly. Tell me more about my husband tied up.”

“What is our plan?” asked Harhash once the three friends landed in Thessaly.

“Wait,” said Layla. “Look.”

An ornery-looking old lady was walking along the street, bent and leaning on a sturdy cane. Every person she encountered greeted her, and she cursed them all. “Good morning to you, Old Sophia,” a man said, and she replied, “A pox upon your house.”

“She is our ticket,” announced Othman.

The threesome followed Old Sophia into her cottage, and when she realized she was not alone, she said, “A plague upon all of you. I have nothing for you to steal, you vagabonds.”

“Curses upon your head, evil-tongued woman,” Layla replied. “Be quiet or I will break your jaw.”

“You ill-mannered harlot.” She raised her cane to strike, but Layla took it away from her and knocked the old woman unconscious. “Harlot?” asked Layla. “You think me cheap?”

Layla, disguised as Old Sophia, walked to the palace, with Othman and Harhash a discreet distance behind. Passersby greeted her, and she uttered curses in reply. While her friends waited outside, she entered the palace and came across a servant carrying a tray of food in one hand and a candelabrum in the other. The servant greeted Old Sophia, who replied, “May your home crumble upon itself and your thighs remain spread for eternity. Where are you going, my girl?”

“If only I could die and finish with this chore,” the servant said. “I have been carrying food to the prisoner for fifteen years. He should expire and save himself the agony. He rots in his cell, and I rot with boredom carrying his food every single day.”

“Let me help you. May you be sodomized by an incontinent mule.”

“That is so kind of you. Here. Take the candelabrum and follow me.”

Inside the cell, Layla saw an unconscious Marouf hanging from chains. The servant began to curse and yell at him to wake up. Layla silenced her with a quick punch. She took her keys and left the cell to fetch Harhash and Othman. In the corridor, one guard said to another, “Do you think this old hag belongs here?”

Layla sighed. “You were supposed to wait for me outside,” she said. “Come.”

When Marouf heard the voices of Layla, Othman, and Harhash and not that of the servant, he thought they were jinn. “Are you going to break our pact?” Marouf said. “You promised you would leave me to my misery.”

“It is I, Layla. We are here to rescue you.”

“If you are not a jinni,” said Marouf, “stand on my right and speak to me.”

And into his right ear Layla whispered, “We are taking you home, my friend.”

Othman unshackled Marouf, and Harhash carried him. “Take him to the ship,” Othman said. “I have but one more task. I will meet the two of you on board.”

King Kinyar’s guards drank wine as if it were cool water, and Othman helped them along their journey by adding opium to the vat. Soon the guards were swimming in the intemperate sea of drugged sleep. Othman sneaked into the king’s chamber and found Kinyar snoring in his canopy bed. Othman unsheathed his sword and whispered, “For all the suffering and anguish you have caused an honest man.” He raised his sword and struck not flesh but another sword, in the hand of a young warrior. Othman thrust at the young man, who parried easily. “I do not partake of wine,” he said. “Your unmanly wiles are worthless against me.”

Kinyar opened his eyes to see swords clashing above his head, and his mouth dried up and would not release his voice. He pulled the covers up and groaned. The warrior’s blows were heavy and insistent, and none of Othman’s sword tricks were working. “Kill him, my son,” said a suddenly vocal Kinyar. “Avenge the effrontery upon my person.”

Taboush, the warrior who was not Kinyar’s son, redoubled his attack, and his sword cut Othman’s arm. And Kinyar commanded, “Finish him.”

The sound of a whip sliced the air, and the sword flew out of Taboush’s hand. Layla’s second strike forced Taboush to retreat a step, but he drew two daggers from his belt.

“Kill them,” yelled Kinyar. “I want both of them dead.”

“Run,” said Othman. “We cannot defeat him.”

“But we can delay him.” Layla struck the bedpost, and the canopy came tumbling upon the king’s head. She and Othman escaped as Taboush was forced to untangle the screeching king from under the covers, canopies, and falling drapes.

I lay on the couch reading, engrossed in The Quiet American. As the afternoon light faded, I switched on the lamp behind me. I felt myself sinking into both the novel and the couch. My father, up from his nap, walked into the den and sat on the opposite couch. He didn’t say anything. I expected him to turn on the television, but he just sat there silently, his head bowed, his hands folded.

I couldn’t concentrate on the novel. I lay on the couch pretending as the treasure-colored light of afternoon deepened. I kept sneaking looks and catching him averting his eyes. He sat before me, a despondent thinker, involved and disengaged.

In an older time, in a different room, my grandfather used to sit that way. When he was lost and the world befuddled him, when life refused to bow down before his desires and kowtow to his wishes, when my father and Uncle Jihad dismissed him as inconsequential, he sat among us separate and mute, downcast and downhearted, like a punished little boy facing the corner.

I sat up and fiddled with the lamp, a relic once belonging to my grandmother, once adored by my mother. I shifted it back and forth, pretending to be concerned with its inadequacies. I shut my book, stood up, and went out to the veranda. I leaned on the railing, admired the tangerine hues of the sky, watched the sun wilt into the sea, which was dotted with an archipelago of small motorboats and smaller row-boats searching for fish. The sun’s sultry reflection on the water triggered all kinds of emotions. I got lost in myself, the Mediterranean as my madeleine.

My father came out on the veranda. He stayed behind me and sat on the deck chair. I didn’t look back, but I felt the skin on my neck prickle. My hands were restive, and my sweatpants had no pockets to moor them. I waited a few uncomfortable minutes and slowly walked into the living room, turning on the stalactite lights of the chandelier. I lay on the big couch, my socked feet burrowing under the tessellated cushion. I reopened my book and counted the minutes. Four and a half and my father mutely settled in the living room, across from me.

Over my twelve days in Beirut, my father joined me in every room, moving when I did, following step for step, irate and cheerless, sluggish and pensive, and not speaking.

Othman, Harhash, and Layla returned with Marouf to the forgiving lands, much to the joy of the great sultan and his people. But back in Thessaly, there were angry calls for revenge. “I will destroy their lands,” cried Kinyar. “This is all Baybars’s doing. I will not rest until he lies dead beneath my feet. I will call on the French, the English, the Genovese and the Venetians, the Spaniards. We will create a new world order. I will lead the invincible army — no, my son, Taboush, the great champion, will command, and I, his father, will follow. He is a man now.”

The calls went out, promises of incredible riches were made, fighters swarmed from all across the continent, and an army of fifty thousand hungry men was birthed. An army that size could never escape the notice of the invidious Arbusto, and he traveled for days to reach it. He sought King Kinyar, who treated him with the hospitality and respect the evil one was used to receiving from fools. As soon as Arbusto saw Kinyar, he understood that Taboush was not his son, for no loaf of such sturdiness could have risen from the king’s yeast. Arbusto said, “I wanted to offer my help, for I have spent years in the land of false believers.”

Kinyar invited him to ride to war as his companion and counselor.

Taboush saw great minarets rising in the distance and ordered his army to halt for the day. “What city is this?”

“This is the city of Aleppo,” Arbusto said. “Not only are we going to thrash them here, we are going to Damascus and Homs and Hamah, and we are going to Baghdad and Mosul and Jerusalem, then we are going to Cairo to take back the sultanate. Yeeeeaaaah.”

“We camp here,” announced Taboush. “Send a letter to the ruler of this city and inform him that we declare war upon the sultan. If he opens the city’s gates, none will be harmed. If not, we will besiege the city until the sultan arrives.”

Baybars received the news within three days and set out with the slave army to Aleppo. The heroes arrived to find the foreign army encircling the great city. Marouf entered the sultan’s pavilion and bowed down before his lord. Baybars begged his friend to sit beside him. Marouf said, “My king, the warrior who leads this army is none other than my son, Taboush.”

Baybars said, “Glory be. May God gift him with wisdom to help us against His enemies,” and he dictated a letter to Taboush: “It has come to our attention that you are not the son of infidels. Your father is Marouf ben Jamr, a hero and the epitome of nobility and courage. Leave your enemies and ours and return to your father’s house and ask for his blessing.”

Taboush read the letter and passed it to Kinyar and Arbusto, who said in one voice, “The man is a liar and says these things because he fears you. Reject his deceit and call him to battle.”

“I will take the field at dawn and throw down my challenge,” Taboush said. True to his honest word, Taboush’s sword greeted the rising sun upon the field of battle, and his cry sent a shiver through all who listened. One Uzbek warrior rode out to meet him. The fight lasted for two hours, until Taboush finally landed a blow and the Uzbek fell to the ground. On his back, he looked up at the great Taboush, who said, “You fought well. Return to your sultan, and tell him to send out someone stronger.”

The Uzbek mounted his stallion and sought Baybars. “That warrior is not the son of the king. A hyena begets not a lion. He is inexperienced in the art of battle because of his youth. If he gains the wisdom and wiles of age, he will be indestructible.”

Baybars called on the best fighter of all. “Aydmur, my friend and conqueror. This boy is a great warrior and must be dispatched. Rid me of him so I may launch this war.”

Marouf knew that his son would not do well against a veteran hero like Aydmur. With each joust, his son would get stronger and smarter, and he would mature to be Aydmur’s equal if not his superior, but he was not yet. Marouf approached Aydmur as he prepared for battle. “I beg you, friend,” Marouf said. “Cede your place to me. I fear for my son and wish him not to suffer.”

“How can you fight if you do not wish him harm?”

“I will speak to him,” said Marouf. “Delay but for a minute, and I will ride to meet Taboush. I chose to disobey the sultan, not you.” And father and son met on the battlefield.

“This was a waste of time,” I said to my sister as she watched me pack.

“You’re so insensitive,” she replied.

“He couldn’t talk to me. Why did he want me here?”

“He’s upset and distraught. It’s only been eleven months. What did you expect?”

“A ‘good morning.’ ”

“Well,” Lina said, “the next time you’re here, he’ll be able to say good morning, and the visit after that, he might be able to form a full grammatical sentence.”

“I’m not coming back anytime soon.”

“Of course you are. Why do you keep lying to yourself? You’re coming back in two months, for a longer stay. Fatima will be here. He needs to go through this, and you have to be here to allow him to.”

“Does the sultan mock me by sending out an old man?” Taboush asked Marouf.

“Look. Open your eyes, see with your heart. Before you stands your father.”

“You are the father of lies. My father is Kinyar. Draw your sword and fight.”

Marouf sighed. “Do you believe cowardice could beget courage? Kinyar hides in his pavilion and risks your life. Shed my blood and you shed the blood of your father, and your grandfather, and your great-grandfather before him.”

Taboush raged and struck with his sword, but the old warrior was ever quick and parried with his sheathed sword. “Wait,” Marouf said, holding out his palm. “If you are to fight, you must learn the skills. I face you because the sultan wished to send the Azeri. You are strong but inexperienced, not yet a match for the slave general. The first blow should never be predictable. How you open a fight is of utmost importance. It must surprise your enemy, frighten and worry him. Begin.”

Taboush stared at his father. He struck.

“No,” said Marouf. “Still unsurprising. Try again. You rely much on your muscle.” And father began to teach son the art of survival. Both armies watched in amazement at the sight before them, lessons being taught and learned. Taboush landed a fierce blow across his father’s sword. “Much better,” said Marouf, pulling himself off the ground and remounting his horse.

“You are fatigued,” said Taboush.

“And you are not yet ready for Aydmur. I will not have my son unprepared.”

“Stop,” Taboush commanded. “You are my father.”

Marouf wept in joy at hearing his son’s words.

“Wait for me,” Taboush said. He went back to Kinyar’s army and stood face to face with his false father. “I am returning to my family,” the hero announced. “I will fight alongside my people. Go home, or be prepared to die at my hands. Pack your meager possessions and leave. You are not welcome on our lands.”

Taboush returned to his father and accompanied him back to a grateful Baybars.

Marouf told the warrior Taboush about his mother. “She is a Genovese princess. Her father had her kidnapped and brought her back to that cursed city, where he holds her prisoner. She refused to be set free until the day I found you. I will sail today and bring her back.”

“You will not sail alone,” said the son, and the two heroes sailed to Genoa.

Taboush and Marouf faced the king of Genoa in the royal hall. The king inquired who they were. “I am your son-in-law,” said Marouf. “I intend to reclaim my wife.”

“You are not part of my family,” snapped the king. “Whatever wife you seek does not reside here, for I do not recognize your marriage.”

Marouf’s face and ears colored with rage. “I have come for my wife, not for your permission or approval.”

“You insult us in our court? Not only an unbeliever, but an obnoxious and dimwitted one. Your breath shall leave our port city before you do.” The king turned to his guards. “Throw these imbeciles in the dungeon. I never want to hear of them again.”

The soldiers took a step toward the heroes but stopped upon hearing Taboush’s voice. “Any man who comes within the range of my sword will have to search for his head, after which my sword will divide him in two. Save your life and save our time. Release my mother.”

“Are you afraid of one man?” the king berated his soldiers. “Are my guards cowards? This man is nothing but—” He stared at Taboush, his eyes widening. The king saw the brow and cheeks of his father, and his father’s father. “This man is nothing but my blood. Be afraid. My grandson. Why was I not informed my daughter had a son? Prepare a banquet. Light the lamps of Genoa. Light the fires of joy.”

“Release my mother,” commanded Taboush.

The virtuous Maria entered her father’s royal hall, her head high and proud. She refused to bow before the king. “Why do you call for me after all these years?”

“My grandson asked for your release,” replied the king, gesturing toward the hero.

Maria stared at the visitors. “Time has been unkind to both of us, but still I know you, my husband.” And Marouf said, “I bring you the end of your sorrows, my wife.”

“How do I know he is my son?” Maria approached Taboush. When she stood before him and saw his eyes, she said, “It is you,” and fainted.

Taboush did not allow his mother to fall. He caught her and carried her to a divan.

Baybars offered Marouf, Maria, and Taboush a royal welcome upon their return. The sultan decreed, “Taboush is a king descended from kings. Let all who know him accept this.” A tired Baybars lay on his outdoor divan, surrounded by his friends, and watched the youngster disarm every rival he faced. “A magnificent warrior,” Baybars said. “You should be proud.”

“I am,” replied a glowing Marouf. “A son that brings joy to any father’s heart.”

And Taboush became a hero of the lands.

Twenty

Sitting on the recliner close to my father’s bed, Lina was crying so much she seemed almost happy, relieved to be discharging her sorrows temporarily — in the midst of swimming across the ocean, a few minutes on a raft. “Are you all right?” I asked.

“Not really.” She sighed wistfully. Fatigue hunched and curved her. “Why don’t you go home and rest for a bit?”

“I think I will, but when I come back, you’ll take a break. You’ll go home and take a bubble bath. I’ll take a drive. I need to see the old neighborhood again.”

“Why now? There’s nothing there.”

I shrugged. “It was Hafez’s idea. I want to remember.”

“And I want cigarettes,” she said.

Once upon a time, I was a boy with potential. I roamed the streets of this neighborhood. Once upon a time, this was a neighborhood with possibility. Now it lay decrepit, dying. A couple of buildings were being erected. A few people walked here and there. Hope, however, was nowhere to be found. Once upon a time, I used to play in these streets, scamper between these buildings. This used to be both my sanctuary and my mystery zone. Under garden shrubs, in concrete nooks, behind ivy-covered metal railings, I hid and observed the world around me. Now everything seemed wide open. The neighborhood had developed new habits. Still, I wanted to find my way home. I wanted to walk through the lobby, take the stairs — not the unreliable elevator — go up past the apartment with the fig tree to the fourth floor, and be there, exist.

But my knees were weak. I stood outside the building leaning against my father’s black car, as I had been a few days earlier, staring, lost in a world I knew nothing of. I was a tortoise that had misplaced its shell. The same old man was sitting on the same stool in the same spot. His white hair was still upright, and he still stared through me as if I didn’t exist.

I always imagined depression as necrotizing bacteria, and I felt flesh-eating gloom approaching. Think pleasant thoughts.

The tangy, sweet taste of freshly picked mulberries on my tongue.

Maqâm Saba.

Fatima holding me. The light on Lake Como. Fatima in a veil.

The noise on Via Natale del Grande. Beirut in April.

Uncle Jihad walking into a room. Uncle Jihad telling me stories. My grandfather drinking maté next to his stove.

Mr. Farouk in the bathtub, the oud on his dry, round stomach, playing his homeland’s maqâms because the acoustics were delightful in the bathroom, playing them by the light of candles floating in the tub, playing them to seduce me into playing again.

The Arab voice of Umm Kalthoum.

My father’s black hair, thick enough for fingers to hide in. My mother’s beehive. The acidic smell of her hairspray. Her ruby ring.

On the seventh day, Shams stopped howling, though he kept weeping. He stood up, stormed out of his room with Ishmael and Isaac keeping pace, and opened every door in the palace. “Layl,” he cried, “where are you?” He walked in on the emir’s wife admonishing a servant for forgetting to dust under the bed. “Layl, where are you?”

He walked in on the emir lying fully clothed on a bed, berating a naked maid. “How can you not know what Layla does to her husband, Othman?” the emir asked. “Have you not been paying attention to the story? I want you to do to me what Layla does to Othman.”

“Layl,” Shams cried. “Where are you?”

In the kitchen, he saw the staff preparing meals, but no trace of his twin. In the halls, viziers and ministers ran around chiding their attendants. In the dining room, thirteen servants polished silverware, gossiping and mocking their patrons. Grooms fed horses in the stables, yet there was no trace of his beloved. He ventured out of the palace and into the garden. The line of waiting worshippers remained as long as ever, all weeping and commiserating, thousands of humans, but no Layl. Their idol and his guardian imps broke through the line, back and forth, and none dared reach out to him or utter a word. Shams entered his temple, gawped at the throne. Standing before his altar, he unleashed another howl and was joined by Isaac and Ishmael.

He returned to the palace and retraced his steps, opening every door, checking every room, until he was back at the shrine howling again. For forty days and forty nights, he repeated the faithful process, a ritual of anguish, his feet landing in the same marks each time.

The fall from the worshipped to the mocked is a short one. Those who once prayed to him began to poke fun at him. The idol had become a joke. No longer the prophet or Guruji, he became Majnoun, the crazy one.

The emir’s wife woke up feeling light and cheerful. She touched her husband gently, and he jolted up in bed, shouting, “Taboush, hero of the lands.” He looked right and left to gauge where he was.

“I feel wonderful this morning,” his wife said.

“You are hot,” the emir said.

“Really?” She put her hands to her cheeks.

He raised the sheets and looked under. “Your hand is hot. Look.”

She tilted her head. “Not now, dear. I am feeling good this morning.”

“But look at my member’s tumescence. It has never been this big. You are hot.”

“Oh,” she exclaimed as waves of heat shimmered up from her body.

Majnoun opened the bedroom door. “Layl, where are you?” He walked in, followed by the two red imps, tears trickling down his face. He looked under the bed, behind the curtains, behind the two chairs. He walked out.

“A momentous change has come upon me,” said the emir’s wife, “and I do not mean menopause.”

Needing to be distracted, the emir rose and went off in search of his hakawati. The emir’s wife called her maid. “Dress me in my finest.” The maid stared hopelessly at the rows and rows of ecru robes. “That one,” the emir’s wife said, pointing. “And bring out my diamonds.”

The line of devotees had not moved for days and days, but when the prophet’s mother entered the sun temple, a twitter rose among the believers. The emir’s wife sat on the throne, smoothed her robe, patted her hair into place. “Next.”

• • •

As the tales of Majnoun traveled the land, so did those of his mother. He did not sleep, they said, he did not eat, but kept searching for a love long vanished. Demons of love tortured his restless world. His turquoise eyes had turned ruby.

His mother — his mother, though, was astonishing. She was not the bearer of miracles her son had been, but she gave better advice. She was, after all, more devout. “My child,” the emir’s wife said to a young woman who was problematically hirsute. “Pluck, pluck, pluck. Never shave. God does not bless those who avoid hard work. You are still young; you do not want stalks of wheat growing there when you are forty.” The line grew, and the seekers returned in force.

And on the fortieth day, Majnoun left the palace. In the inhospitable desert where little lived, Majnoun wandered night and day. Every rootless tribe he encountered along the way began by mocking him.

“There walks Majnoun, the insane one. He fell in love with a boy.”

“There goes Majnoun, the madman. He fell in love with his brother.”

But the desert Bedouins wept upon first sight of Majnoun’s unrequited grief.

With each step, Majnoun tore out a clump of his beautiful hair, throwing it behind him. The hair grew back instantly, only to be clutched and torn once more, and again. Following the forlorn one, Isaac and Ishmael walked a trail of sun-colored hair that snaked across the desert. Wind could not move the trail or change its direction, and all the weeping creatures of the desert began to follow the march of grief. Shams roamed until the trail was two hundred and forty-nine leagues, and then he collapsed upon the sand and buried himself underneath.

“Come out, my nephew,” said Ishmael.

“Rise, my hero,” said Isaac.

The old man leaned forward on his stool and squinted at me. “I know you,” he suddenly said. His hand infiltrated his sparse, spiked hair. “I know who you are.”

And I awoke from my stupor.

“You don’t recognize me,” he said, not sounding offended. When he spoke, it seemed only his mouth moved, while the rest of his face remained still. “I remember you as a boy. I remember most of the children of the neighborhood, everyone who used to play on this street. You didn’t play much.” The neighborhood was eerily quiet. The cars on the main street, three bullet-ridden buildings away, seemed to be running noiselessly, images of cars instead of real. “No one plays on the street anymore.” The old man stated the obvious. Anyone not interested in a mud bath would avoid walking on the street, let alone playing on it. “No one cares anymore.” He paused briefly. “I didn’t really live here then, which is probably why you don’t remember me. My sister did. You’d know her. My name is Joseph Hananiah.”

I wanted to say, “And I’m Osama al-Kharrat, your relative,” but he wouldn’t have understood. No one remembered the story of Hananiah anymore. Fewer still would recognize the word “Ananias.” Kharrat, Hananiah, liars of the world, unite.

“You don’t remember?” he asked. “My sister was Hoda Salloum. The concierge’s wife. Elie’s mother. Remember?”

Just what I needed. More family.

“My father isn’t doing well,” I exclaimed, not knowing why. “He’s dying.”

“I’m sorry,” old man Hananiah said.

“I’m sorry, too,” I said. “I just had to take a break from the hospital.”

“I didn’t know him well, but we all respected him. A good man, and decent. He didn’t deserve what my nephew did.”

“Elie was a good man as well. They were difficult times.”

“Elie was a good-for-nothing fake-idealist bastard,” the man went on, “bringing disgrace to us all, forcing his parent into an early grave. Even his death did nothing to ease their shame.”

“I didn’t even know he’d died,” I said, and I tried to change the subject. “I wanted to come back here to see, to go up those stairs.”

He continued to stare at a point in the distance. “Why?”

“I have never been good with answers,” I said. I could tell stories, but explanations always eluded me — an observer, not an expositor, a chronic coward. I paused, felt awkward. I took a deep breath. “Forgive me. I’m just babbling.”

“You call that babbling?” He chuckled. “You don’t talk much.”

I sat down on the sidewalk next to the old man. It was noon now, and the saffron sun stood equidistant from its goals. The world was echoing in my ears, and I had to look up at the old man when he spoke. “There’s a nice family from the south living in your apartment. I think the wife and kids are up there, but I wouldn’t disturb them if I were you. What’s the point?”

“I have to leave anyway. I should go back to the hospital.”

From a distance, a muezzin called in his faint megaphone voice, sounding like a boy reciting a lesson. I couldn’t lift myself off the sidewalk. A black Toyota Camry parked right in front of us, and Hafez, ever the company man, got out of it. His dark sunglasses made him look like a blind man missing his accordion. “Hello, Joseph. How are you today?”

The old man’s face lit up. “Hafez, I have a complaint to make. Your cousin didn’t remember me.”

“Forgive him, Uncle,” Hafez said, sitting on the pavement next to me. “He’s been living abroad. He doesn’t remember much. That’s what we’re here for.” He put his hands behind him and leaned back. “Did you see your home?”

“No,” I said. “I’ve just been sitting here for a while.”

“Come.” He stood up and stretched, like an athlete before a run. “Let’s go look.”

And Isaac commanded the desert’s red scorpions to disinter Majnoun. From under the shifty sands he was lifted. Atop thousands of stingers he floated, and upon the trail of sun-hardened hair he was placed.

“Rise, my nephew,” spoke Isaac. “Rise and greet the changing landscape.”

“Rise, my hero,” spoke Ishmael. “Rise and meet the new world order.”

Majnoun opened his eyes and moaned. “I long,” he said hoarsely, “to see his face once more, to touch his dark and barklike skin, to rake my fingers through his coarse hair. I sigh for what once was and will never be again. I am no longer one who holds the thread to my fate. Longing is full of unmanageable distances. Thus, my life is forfeit.”

Majnoun and Isaac and Ishmael wept, as did all the animals gathered round them, the desert swallowing the falling tears, leaving their salt to mix with sand.

The desert snakes lifted their heads into the parched air, and one of them said, “Let it not be forfeit. Consider all pleasures life can offer, those that were and those yet to come.”

“Pleasures?” cried Majnoun. “Lewd visions of my pleasures with Layl have collared my wretched soul. My eyes see nothing but his lust, and I wish for nothing but his wantonness.”

“Wait,” begged a camel. “God rewards the patient.”

“Rediscover the enjoyment of eating,” cried a vulture. “Think of what it felt like to contemplate a great meal before you, how it felt to be sated.”

“Food?” wailed Majnoun. “His skin was what I tasted upon waking, and his flavor was what put me to sleep. I hunger for nothing but him.”

“You are power descended from power,” announced a lion of the desert. “You are the mightiest creature of above and below. You can rule us all. We will worship and serve you. Does that not entice you?”

“Power?” moaned Majnoun. “I would rather live life on my knees before my beloved than become the master of all realms. For one more kiss of his lips, I would let the Furies torture my soul for eternity. The tiniest kernel of my being has no desire but Layl, for he has melted into my heart. Power means naught if it cannot fulfill my one desire.”

“I beg to differ,” interrupted the owl.

“About time,” said Ishmael.

“Do you remember how Psyche regained the love of Eros after all hope was gone?” said the owl. “How she survived Aphrodite’s wrathful vengeance and triumphed?”

“But I am not a helpless little girl,” responded Majnoun.

“You are,” said the owl. “You are both Psyche and Aphrodite; both the falcon and the partridge. You are Eros as well. You are the demon king.”

“That was Layl, not me.”

“You are Layl as well,” counseled the owl. “Surrender. Pain is proportional to wanting the world to be other than it is.”

Majnoun’s sun-colored hair rose and burst into flame, his skin darkened and burst into life. “I know you,” he said.

“Of course, you do,” sneered Isaac. “Of all things, he chooses an owl — in the desert, no less.” And Ishmael said, “At least it was not a waterfowl.”

“Remove your mask, Uncle,” Majnoun said. “I see you.”

“And I see you,” responded Jacob the yellow owl.

“Rise, my nephew,” said Isaac.

“Heed your destiny, my hero,” said Ishmael.

“End your sorrow,” said Jacob. “Your mother calls.”

The emir’s wife concentrated on her intention and directed her energy from her stomach up through her right hand to the hairy mole on the supplicant’s upper lip. “Heal,” she cried. She raised her eyelids discreetly, gently tried to sense with her hand whether the hateful mole was still present, then dramatically swung her arm back, announcing, “Behold!”

The line of seekers gasped and oohed. The supplicant’s hand raced to her lips. “It is gone,” she yelled, and the line broke into applause. The emir’s wife beamed, bowed — she had spent a few hours just that morning practicing her appreciative bows — and sat back on the throne. She waited for the clapping to quiet before calling, “Next.”

A full-figured man genuflected before her and kissed her hand. “I am regaining weight, exalted lady,” he said. “It is not yet a crisis, but it will be soon. I do not wish to regress to where I was before your remarkable son touched me. I would not be able to bear it. I was hoping your gloriousness could give me a booster.”

“But of course.” The emir’s wife slid forward, moving the ostrich-feather cushion halfway beyond the edge of the throne. “Come closer. I do not bite.” She laughed at her joke but then sat bolt upright. A sudden current of heat had shot down her spine, from the top of her head to her behind. “Did you do that?” she asked the man.

“Did I do what?”

She hesitated, looked about her. No one in the temple seemed to have felt what she did. She shut her eyes, recaptured her serene self, and wore her gracious smile once more. “Where were we? Yes, come closer for your booster.” She felt it again, stronger, more delicious, more disconcerting. She shivered in momentary glee, considered whether she was having another pleasant metamorphosis. Would that not be delightful? But what if it were not? She had to go on.

“We strive for perfection,” she advised the attendees, “to reflect God’s. It pleases Him mightily when we achieve our ideal shape. Fat people will always earn lower wages, and they are not pleasant to look at. It is God’s plan. To avoid weight gain, you must look to God and worship. He will teach you to love yourself, and love is the cure for obesity.”

The line hummed in appreciation. The emir’s wife glanced to her left to make sure the scribe was writing down every wise word of her short yet exquisite sermon. An unfamiliar movement in the line caught her eye. She glanced up and noticed a man and his wife raising the robe of the man standing in front of them — thirteenth in line — and fondling his genitals. Before she could open her mouth to demand that they stop, she was struck once more with the surge. This time, she felt her soul shake. This time, she knew it was not going to be pleasant. This time, she was not the only one who felt it. The line was no longer straight; some supplicants looked confused, others terrified, still others lustful. One woman turned toward the temple gate and exposed her plentiful breasts. The floor rumbled, the pillars shimmied, and the emir’s wife felt two more surges rush through. Her skin tingled and her vagina buzzed and the temple gate burst into an infinity of tiny shards and toothpicks.

She wanted to exhort her seekers to calm down. She wanted to shout out a warning. Her lips moved of their own accord, and she heard herself whisper, “He comes.”

And into the diwan came a messenger bearing a letter from the emir of Bursa to the illustrious Baybars. The emir wrote that the Mongol queen of Kirkuk, a sorceress and half-sister of Hulagu Khan, had threatened to destroy his city if he did not comply with the outrageous duty payments she was demanding. “Let us return that barbarian to the hell from which she came,” decreed Baybars. “Taboush will lead an army against her. I pronounce him king of Kirkuk, with all the attendant duties and honors.”

The messenger cleared his throat. “Your Majesty, courage and valor may not be a match for this wily queen’s witchcraft.”

“Then we must certainly send her someone wilier,” Baybars said. “Othman, would you be so kind as to ask your charming wife to attend the diwan?”

Taboush led a few battalions of the slave army out of Cairo, accompanied by a most unwarlike-looking group: Othman, Harhash, Layla, and seven of her luscious-dove friends.

“Why are they traveling with us?” asked Othman.

“I do not know much about witchcraft,” Layla replied, “so I thought I would ask Maysoura, whose tea-leaf reading is unsurpassed. However, she refuses to be anywhere that Lama is not, and hence I had to ask both. Rania thinks she communicates with the spirits of her deceased paramours, and that might come in handy, although it is hard to imagine what use dead philanderers might be. Umm Jihan says she can conjure jinn, but only on full-moon nights and not during Ramadan. Roubaia can do astonishing card tricks, and she has studied necromancy. Soumaya vows that she can change the position of weightless objects with her mind, and Lubna works with potions. I do not know if any of their powers will be helpful, but they are good company, and Lubna brews a marvelously refreshing drink using fermented hops and water.”

“Should I start worrying now?” asked Harhash, and Othman replied, “Why wait?”

The witch queen’s mighty army laid siege to the fort of Bursa. Upon hearing Taboush’s war bugle, the enchantress turned her attention to the slave army. The Mongolian queen babbled, cursed, gestured wildly, and sent forth one of her soldiers to challenge the heroes. The Mongolian’s reek preceded him by a hundred meters. Layla held her nose.

“None of them bathe,” explained Othman. “They mean to frighten enemies with the stench.”

Taboush nudged his horse toward the Mongolian fighter. “I will answer the call. Let us end this quickly.”

“Wait,” cried Layla. She searched through the saddlebags and brought out a jar. “Allow me.” She ran her forefinger inside the jar and dabbed cream beneath Taboush’s nose. “A mix of cucumber, lavender, verbena, and rose petals. You will smell nothing but this.”

Taboush trotted toward the Mongolian. The barbarian was quick and strong. His arms moved like palm fronds in a swirling sandstorm. But Taboush was a great warrior, a scion of great warriors trained by great warriors, and he parried every stroke the maniac attempted. After an hour of sweat and blows, Taboush saw his opening and with one stroke decapitated his enemy. The Mongolian’s head alit five horse lengths away.

“I do not like the looks of this,” said Othman.

“That foreigner was not human,” said Harhash. “Had I not seen blood spurting, I would have sworn he was a jinni. We must find out how this is accomplished.”

Taboush roared victoriously, and another of the witch’s men, a Chechen, trotted out to fight him. The joust followed a similar pattern. An exhausted Taboush returned to his army dragging the two corpses behind him.

“If he goes out tomorrow,” said Harhash, “they will wear him down and kill him.”

“Both fighters fought the same way,” said Layla, “with unusual strength and quickness.”

Othman walked over to the corpses. “I will sneak into their camp,” he said, sounding nasal because he had his nose covered. “I will be a Chechen.”

“His clothes are too bloody,” said Layla. “You will have to wear the Mongolian’s.”

“But I do not look like a Mongolian.”

“Who is going to look at your face when your odor is so sickening? You think you will suffer? I am sending my pigeon, who has to endure being hidden on your person.”

And Majnoun stepped through the temple he had once possessed. Coral eyes flaring, hair afloat and aflame, he moved across the hall like a lion surveying his realm, like a tiger stalking his prey. His iridescent robe shone and shimmered with the many colors of fire. Three fire-breathing imps walked on his left, three on his right, one before him, and one behind. Neither violet Adam, indigo Elijah, and blue Noah on Majnoun’s right, nor green Job, yellow Jacob, and orange Ezra on the left, looked impish. Isaac and Ishmael, sizzling and smoking, carried their agate-and-gold swords. And when Majnoun halted before the emir’s wife, every ecru robe in the temple turned an inimitable bright color.

“The prophet returns,” the line of seekers said.

“Son,” the emir’s wife said. “You have returned.”

“I am not your son,” Majnoun said, “and never was. You never carried me.” He snapped his fingers. The emir’s wife screamed as Ezra, Jacob, and Job jumped upon her and searched every inch of her body. Job raised his arm triumphantly, clutching Fatima’s hand. Majnoun turned around and strode out of the temple with his fighting imps. The emir’s wife tried to compose herself. The searching, the touching — she had had a divine orgasm, stigmata.

My feet felt heavy upon the broken and jagged stone of the stairs. Hafez bounded up two at a time, but I could barely manage one. Vigor filled his body — even in repose, as he stood waiting for me on each floor.

“We’ll only go to your home,” he said. “I don’t like the squatters in ours, and they don’t like me much, either. The wife in your home is quite nice and will let us in. She’s trying to be accommodating, hoping we’ll let her stay once the courts start dealing with this neighborhood.”

I caught my breath. “Will we?”

“That depends on you. It’s your apartment. You decide.” He turned, climbed the next flight of stairs, and waited on the third floor. “I’m kicking the bastards in our place out.” He lowered his voice as if the walls had ears. “They’re insufferable ingrates. I’ve tried talking to them a few times, but not once have they invited me in. They probably think I’ll steal something. They won’t allow me to see my own home.”

I hesitated on the last step to the fourth floor, but Hafez was already knocking. A young woman opened the door, a colorful scarf hastily wrapped about her face. She held a crying baby in her arms, a toddler clung to her left thigh, and a girl of about four studied us from a few steps away. The woman seemed perplexed but offered Hafez a wan smile. No one moved, and for a moment the family looked as if they were posing for a Diego Rivera mural.

“My husband is away,” she said softly, a southern lilt to her accent.

“That’s quite all right,” Hafez replied. “I apologize for disturbing you. This is my cousin who’s visiting from America. I don’t mean to inconvenience you, but I was wondering if I could bring him in for a few moments. This is the home he grew up in.”

She hesitated, seemed even more perplexed. “I have very little to offer guests,” she said. “I haven’t been to the market in several days.”

“No need to offer us anything. We can’t stay long, for we have to return to the hospital quickly to be at his father’s bedside. My cousin wishes to recall good memories before he departs.”

“Yes, of course,” she said, opening the door wider. “Come in.”

The foyer was no longer a foyer. It had become a storage room, with cartons piled up. A cheap runner probably covered the absence of marble tiles, which had always made a distinctive clack when my mother’s heels stepped on them. The woman led us to a living room that contained nothing but three wooden dining chairs and a rusty metal garden table with a stained-glass top. No curtains covered the windows, which were cheap aluminum-framed sliders. Outside, the balcony no longer had a railing, no whorls of metal roses, nothing to protect one’s heart from falling overboard. I hesitated to look at the dining room, where Lina used to practice her piano daily. In what world would the piano exist now?

“Please, sit,” the young woman said. “I’ll make some coffee.”

“No, please,” said Hafez. “Allow us a few minutes to look around, and we’ll soon leave you be. Don’t trouble yourself.”

Her face reddened. “Do you intend to look at the back rooms?”

“Not if it’ll disturb you. We don’t have to go back there. How about the first room here? That’s his bedroom. Can we go in there for a moment?” When she nodded, Hafez took my arm and dragged me out of the living room, back through the foyer, and into my bedroom. He closed the door behind him. “Do you remember now?”

We were surrounded by crates piled floor to ceiling. There was nothing else, barely a walkway between them. Spiders had spun intricate webs of desolation in three of the ceiling’s corners. I edged to the window. Two bullet holes in each of the top corners radiated jagged scars. Hafez followed me, the crates forcing us closer than I would have liked. I was ill-at-ease and off-kilter, made uneasy by either Hafez’s behavior or the past.

When we were boys, Aunt Samia used to force Hafez to spend time in my room so we’d get closer. “He’s your brother,” she used to admonish him whenever he complained, “your twin.”

“I wonder what’s in those crates,” I said to Hafez. “There sure are a lot of them.”

“Toilet paper,” he said. “That’s what’s in all of them. I checked the last time.”

He seemed so proud, and it confused me. I didn’t know whether he was happy to be back in the old days, or to have known something I did not, or simply to have discovered that a family was storing thousands of rolls of toilet paper in my room. He glowed. “Strange,” I said. The skin on my arms itched.

“Isn’t it, though?” He held both my hands. “You’re upset.” He leaned forward and hugged me. I stepped back and banged my head against one of the toilet-paper crates.

“What are you doing?” I whispered.

“I don’t know.” He didn’t seem nervous, let alone guilty. “I’m happy.” He smiled and hugged me once more. “Don’t worry. It’s nothing. Come on, let’s get back to the hospital.” He led the way out of my room.

“And where is the lair of the monster Hannya?” asked Majnoun.

“I know not,” said Adam. “I searched the world, its attic and its basement, but found no trace of her cursed lair.”

“And I asked every human, demon, and beast,” said Ezra, “but none seemed to know.”

“Or was willing to divulge what they knew,” said Noah. “A Bedouin tribe gathered at an oasis thirteen leagues away seemed terrified when I asked about Hannya, and their camels shunned me.”

“I will crush them,” yelled Majnoun. “I will char their flesh, and their bones will speak.”

“Wait,” said Ishmael. “Gold may get us the information.”

“No,” said Isaac. “Lust will, with just a touch of the devout. I will announce to the tribe that the fine-looking prophet will offer the informer seven kisses and one lick of the teeth.”

A boy and a girl were willing to inform. “A day’s camel ride due northwest,” said the boy, and the girl said, “You will come across a giant crater. Look for eight palms set in the shape of two diamonds.”

“May I have my kisses?” asked the boy.

“May I have my lick?” said the girl.

At the entrance to the lair of Hannya, the imps stood in a circle around Majnoun. Each placed his left hand upon his brother’s shoulder and his right hand upon Majnoun’s body. “We are with you,” they said in unison. “Once and forever.”

“There will be seven gates, each guarded by a demon,” said Ishmael. “You cannot enter without payment.”

“Here are seven gold coins,” said Noah. “Give one to each demon.”

“And here are two diamonds,” said Adam. “Just in case.”

“Here are two date cakes,” said Elijah. “We need one to get by Cerberus, the three-headed dog, and another to distract him on our way out.”

“Be patient,” said Job.

“Be wary,” said Jacob.

“Be amazing,” said Ezra.

And Majnoun, blood and fire shining in his eyes, descended into the crater followed by the imps. Daylight faded with each step, and a flame rose out of Majnoun’s hair and lit their way.

The first gate was agate and guarded by a red demon in the shape of a gargoyle with a wolf’s head. “Hackneyed,” muttered Isaac.

“I seek payment,” said the guard, in a voice that sounded like a lap-dog’s yelp.

Majnoun took a gold coin. He paused for an instant. “No, I will not pay.” He raised his hands, and a gush of fire shot out of them, blasting the gate.

“But that is not allowed,” whimpered the trembling guard as Majnoun walked by. “You cannot enter without permission. You must surrender something.”

Isaac smacked the demon and followed the rest down the path.

“Your style is so different from your mother’s,” said Elijah. “More Vesuvian, if one were to hazard a description.”

The demon of the second gate was not so lucky. He took the form of a giant snake, coiled behind his emerald gate, and hissed poison at the invaders. Majnoun roasted him and pushed through. The bats attacked after the third gate. Elijah swung his arms in the air to unleash his own bats, but Majnoun was much too quick. He exhaled, and the bats fell dead in mid-flight. He shattered the fourth gate with a snap of his fingers. The crows and ravens appeared after the fifth gate. Every one of them exploded when he looked in their direction. Majnoun and his company of imps moved through a cloud of black feathers. When the hordes of walking dead came after the sixth gate, he dispatched them with a flick of his wrist.

After the seventh gate, the fierce Cerberus blocked the path. He was massive, bigger than any demon. “Date cake?” asked Elijah, holding the gift out.

One of the heads snarled, baring its teeth, and the other two barked. Majnoun yawned, and the dog was reduced to ashes. The company followed the path.

“I would like to know who taught you all this,” said Isaac. “I certainly did not.”

“Nor did I,” added Ishmael.

“I surrendered,” said Majnoun.

Hannya towered in her underground lair in her most menacing guise. “Swear that you will not attack me,” said the monster to Majnoun. “Swear that you and yours will leave me alone for now and forever, that none of you will molest me — not you, not Fatima, not Afreet-Jehanam, and certainly not those silly dolls you travel with.” The monster, inhabiting her largest size, was surprised that Majnoun had entered her lair in his awkward human teenage form. Her hair grazed the ceiling, and her arms reached from one end of the cave to the other. Dozens of demons of various shapes and kinds, frozen and imprisoned in translucent egg-shaped crystals, cluttered the lair. Majnoun’s mother, Fatima, was in a half-shell, a sword hanging over her unconscious head.

“If you do not swear,” the monster said, “she dies. If you swear, she lives. Give me your word that none of you will try to kill me and I will release your mother. All of us can go on as we were before, pretending that nothing happened.”

The imps could not keep still. Isaac chomped his teeth. Ishmael cracked his knuckles. Job snarled.

“Release my mother,” said Majnoun.

“Leave me,” roared the monster. “It is enough that I will not set eyes on any of you again.”

The red pigeon circled in the dark sky until he saw his mistress lounging around a campfire with her seven friends. “What does the message say?” asked Maysoura.

“Every evening, the witch brews a potion that gives her fighters inhuman strength,” Layla said. “The men line up at the cauldron in the morning.”

“What are we to do?” asked Soumaya.

“Well,” said Lama, “we do have a potion expert. What do you think, Lubna?”

“Me?” asked Lubna. “How would I know what to do about a potion like that? If I did, I would be wealthy. The one thing I do know is that if a potion is to succeed, all the ingredients must be mixed exactly right. If Othman can throw something into the brew, it will be ruined.”

“He cannot get close enough,” Layla said. “Maybe we can — or at least our pigeons can.”

“Brilliant,” cried Umm Jihan. “I have trained my pigeons to be strong. They can even carry a small olive branch.”

“What should we add to the brew?” asked Rania.

“We cannot drop anything large,” said Layla, “or it will be noticed. No olive branches.”

“I have sage,” said Soumaya, “and coriander.”

“I have a better idea,” said Lubna. “My pigeons will hate me, but I do know how to make one special potion. It comes in handy every now and then.”

“Inspired,” said Layla. “That is positively inspired.”

“My poor pigeons,” said Lubna. “I will try to explain to them that the effect will not last long and their bowels will settle in time.”

In the morning, the Mongolian queen’s men drank the odd-tasting potion out of the cauldron. As soon as the first was within range of Taboush’s sword, his severed head lay on the dry earth with an immortalized look of shock. The second soldier to accept Taboush’s challenge fared no better and was dispatched in seconds. The sorceress cursed her cauldron. “Have you nothing better?” cried Taboush. “Is there no warrior worthy of being killed by my sword?”

Layla mounted her mare and descended to the jousting field. “Allow me,” she said to Taboush. She sat up in her saddle and let out a cry. “You ignorant barbarian. You are nothing but an amateur, a pretender, not a queen. I heap insults and curses upon you. If you have any honor, heed my call. Your minions are not worthy of our warrior and never will be. I proclaim you to be as insignificant as your underlings. Come out and prove me wrong.”

The witch queen fumed. “A kingdom that sends its whores to defend its honor has none.” She turned to one of her Mongolians. “Come with me. I must prepare. I will teach that scarlet harlot a lesson that will serve her well when she arrives in hell.” She entered her yak-skin tent, followed by the Mongolian. “She calls me a pretender? I will show her what a real queen’s wrath looks like. I will bring down the force of thunder upon her head. By the way, I do like all that blood around your collar. I shall have all my warriors follow your sartorial example.”

When the queen rode out to meet her challenger, Taboush warned Layla, “Be careful. She is a mighty witch. How are you going to fight her?”

“I can tell by the way she holds her head that she is not a sorceress, let alone mighty. She is my beloved.”

Othman, dressed in the Mongolian queen’s garb, trotted up to them. “The wicked witch no longer breathes. I do not think her men will offer much resistance now.”

Taboush blared his war horn, and the army of innocents attacked their enemy. The battle was short-lived, for the barbarians surrendered quickly, having lost the will to fight. The hero of the lands traveled to Kirkuk, where he was to rule, and Othman, Layla, and their friends returned to Cairo.

Fatima’s eyes sprang open as she was being carried aloft by Noah, Elijah, Ezra, and Jacob. She saw the mossy cave with shards of marble embedded in the ceiling, the remnants of a shattered gate. “Stop,” she demanded, still groggy. “Put me down.” She looked around and directed her question to Majnoun, “Where is your brother?”

“My brother is no more.”

Fatima disentangled herself from the arms of the imps and stood up. She measured her surroundings and held out her hand, and Job placed her talisman in it. She marched back down the path, followed by the imps and her son, who kept staring at the ground before him.

She stormed into Hannya’s lair, and the ground shuddered with each step, the walls quaked with her rage. “Explain yourself before you die,” Fatima commanded. “Why did you kill my son? Did you not consider the consequences?”

Hannya let out a long, loud sigh. “We do what we must. Does the extinguished candle care about the darkness?”

“Your time has come,” Fatima cried.

“No, it has not. You are bound by your son’s word not to harm me. Begone. You and your son may be mightier, but you no longer have dominion over me.”

“Foolish, foolish woman. You should have killed me when you had the chance.” Fatima raised her arms in the air. “Death will expiate death.”

The monster rolled her three eyes. “Useless theatrics. You can cast no spell against me.”

“What you have fed upon,” Fatima declared, “will now feed upon you,” and she unyoked Hannya’s imprisoned demons and watched the monster’s gigantic face blanch.

“Wait,” screeched Hannya. “Wait. Let us bargain. I have something to offer you. I have something you need. I have the—” But the demons, set free from their shackles, descended upon their torturer. Hannya fended off the first three, and the fourth, and the fifth, but she was shortly overwhelmed, was slowly devoured. Her dying scream vanished first, and then her hands and arms, her legs, her head, until naught but space was left of her.

Twenty-one

In the early morning, before it was light enough to tell a white thread from a black one, Beirut was pristine and shockingly loud — two apparently interrelated phenomena. The streets were empty except for gigantic green garbage-trucks, and I got stuck behind a particularly noisy one. There were many strange differences between my two homes, Los Angeles and Beirut, but for some reason none seemed more telling than garbage-collecting: in L.A., garbage was picked up once a week; in Beirut, four times a day. Farting and chugging, the truck stopped every few meters and wouldn’t let me pass. Finally, when the dark-skinned garbagemen jumped off to the right to empty the next building’s Dumpster, I steered left onto the curb and passed the truck. The driver seemed despondent and oblivious.

The hospital’s main entrance was still locked. Around the corner, the emergency-room entrance sucked me in with a barely audible hum. The hum of the fifth floor’s low fluorescent lights was more than audible. I followed the crayon lines along the floor, past the visitors’ lounge, past the unmanned guard’s desk, into the cardiac unit, past the rooms with their aquarium-window exhibits of aged, frightened patients.

No one would have recognized my father. What I remembered of him was nothing like what lay before me. I wanted to slap myself, wake up. I stroked his forehead. Fatima was snoring on the gurney. My sister was awake on the recliner, staring at my father’s prostrate form.

I went to her, touched her shoulder. “I couldn’t sleep,” I whispered.

“Neither could I.” She reached for my hand, either as a comfort or to comfort me. “Every time I dozed, I dreamed he and I were having a big fight. He was angry and unforgiving.” She leaned into my arm. “I’m terrified of sleeping.”

“Now that Hannya is no longer in this world,” said Majnoun, “I will make her world mine. Her lair will be my home.” He began to sweep the floor with a makeshift broom while humming a dirge.

“Your son has not been well,” Isaac said to Fatima.

“But he is getting better,” said Ishmael. “Night and day.”

“He will soon be healthy and thriving, if incomplete,” said Jacob.

“It would have grieved me,” said Fatima, “had he been anything but devastated. With the aid of time we shall heal him. Yet we must also find his brother.”

All eight imps stared at their hooves.

“We have been trying,” said Noah. “We have searched everywhere.”

“That fornicating demon Hannya cut him up,” said Adam, and Fatima wept.

Majnoun swept his broom into a corner and felt a prickle travel up through the handle. He bent and picked up an obsidian box the size of his hand. “Mother,” he called across the commodious cave. “I have found him.” Fatima and the imps ran toward him. She stared at Layl’s heart, lifted it, held it to her own. She let out a piercing wail and was joined by the imps. But grief, the vampire, did not overcome Majnoun. His face shone red, and his hair burst into flames once more. He reached for his lover’s heart, took it from his mother. Coddled in the palm of his hand, the heart glowed and pulsed.

“We can rebuild him,” said Elijah. “We have the ability.”

“Resurrect him,” said Adam.

“In our nephew’s hand, the heart lives,” said Job.

“Layl will rise once more,” said Ezra.

“We will need all of him,” said Fatima, “as well as a miracle.”

With his beloved’s heart close to his, Majnoun said, “I know where my adored is.”

When Baybars was informed that Othman and Layla were almost at Cairo’s gates, he announced, “It is time for our city to honor my friends. Let us celebrate their victory over the Mongolian queen. Taboush has to deal with the affairs of Kirkuk. We will have another celebration when he arrives. Let us surprise Othman and his wife.” Cairenes clogged the streets; shouts of joy and ululations erupted throughout the city. Before thousands, Baybars lauded Othman and Layla for their victory over the witch queen and for their longtime service to his kingdom. He covered their bodies in gold and covered their heads with turbans of valor.

“I do not understand,” said Taboush as he sat in his diwan in Kirkuk. “Why does the sultan choose to insult me so? He honored the face-cream woman for my victory. Am I not deserving? Have I not served faithfully? How can I show my face in public after being shamed? I led the army. I am the war hero. Why honor his friends at my expense? This cannot be.”

And the steward opened the doors of the hall and announced, “There is a priest by the name of Arbusto who begs a moment of your time.”

Wan and serene, Aunt Samia appeared in the visitors’ lounge, flanked by two of her boys, Anwar and Munir. Salwa, sitting on my right, looked as if she would sacrifice her firstborn to be back in my father’s room, or anywhere but the visitors’ lounge. Hovik had his arm around her shoulders. She reached out and held my hand. I lifted hers to my lips and kissed it.

“He’s coming soon,” she whispered. “I can feel it.” She mistook my incomprehension for shock and concern. “Don’t worry. There’s nothing wrong. He’s just kicking. He wants out.”

“But you’re not due for another week, are you?”

She shrugged. “I know when I’m due. I’m not saying he’s coming this minute. Soon.”

“She would know,” Aunt Samia interjected. “I always knew, long before the pain.” She paused, looking at no one in particular. “What are you going to call him?”

Hovik started to answer, but my niece was quicker. “We’re not sure yet,” she said.

“Call him Farid,” my aunt said. “That would be such a nice gesture. Your grandfather would be so pleased.”

“I don’t think I can do that,” Salwa said. “I don’t see how. I’d never be able to yell at him. How could I punish my child if he was named Farid?”

Aunt Samia looked confused. “Another name, then. Keep it in the family. ‘Jihad’ wouldn’t be good. ‘Wajih’? You didn’t know him, so that shouldn’t be a problem.”

Hovik decided that was the moment to begin participating in the family sport: teasing Aunt Samia. “We’re thinking of calling him Vartan, after my father,” he said.

“Oh,” she exclaimed. “An Armenian name. Is saddling your son with such a burden a good idea?”

“It’s a great name,” replied Hovik. “It means ‘the one who brings roses.’ ”

“In what language?” asked Aunt Samia.

“In the grammatically incorrect one,” I heard myself say.

Hovik leaned forward to see if I was channeling a spirit. He chuckled. Salwa smiled. Her turn — she brought my hand up to her lips and kissed it.

“I think it’s a good name,” Hovik said.

“Isn’t the first son supposed to be called Antranig?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I wasn’t.”

“And you weren’t called Hagop or Zaven. I thought all of you were called either Hagop or Zaven.”

“That’s bad,” Hovik said, laughing. “That’s so unfunny.”

Salwa seemed about to break into grateful tears. She brought my hand to her stomach and covered it with her own. “We’re going to call him Murad,” she told my perplexed aunt. “I’ve always loved the name. When I was a little girl, Osama used to tell me stories when he came to visit.” She paused to settle her voice. “A lot of them were your father’s stories.”

“And none of my father’s stories were true,” my aunt said.

“It doesn’t matter. One story was about a gorgeous dervish boy called Murat. I swore I would name my son Murat so he would grow up to be handsome and loved.”

“We can’t use the Turkish form of the name,” explained Hovik, “because I have relatives who’d slit my throat for even considering it. We’re going with a beautiful Arabic name. Murad.”

Aunt Samia clasped her hands around the purse on her lap and said, “And may he grow up to be handsome and loved.”

“From your lips to God’s ear,” said Hovik.

“Help me up,” said Salwa. “We should go check on him.”

She was so surprisingly heavy that I almost tumbled on top of her as she stood. As soon as we cleared the doors, she began to weep. “You will be Murad’s storyteller, won’t you?”

First the torso. Up in the sky, upon the carpet, Majnoun said, “I will deal with the lions.”

“They are mighty beasts,” said Jacob.

“Do not be excessively cruel,” suggested Isaac. “They did not kill your brother.”

“And in your time of need,” said Ishmael, “they were a comfort.”

The cave was in a rocky oasis in the middle of the desert. It was guarded by seven lions that roared as soon as the company alit in their midst. The rest of the pride dribbled out of the cave one by one, a solid fifty strong. The king of the beasts announced his arrival by unleashing a forceful roar. “I am here for my son,” Fatima said.

“You might as well have stayed at your lair,” the king of lions said. “I will not give up our treasure, whose presence has increased our strength a hundredfold.” And those were his last words. Majnoun held the heart before him, and the king of beasts exploded into nothingness.

“I will recover my love,” said Majnoun, walking toward the cave.

And then the legs. Into darker Africa they traveled, along the Nile and beyond its seven mouths. “Be wary,” warned Ishmael. “The monkeys are tricksters, and Hanuman is their god. We cannot allow ourselves to fall for their wiles.”

Majnoun pointed toward a dense carpet of sausage trees and baobabs. Upon landing, they were beset by a large band of monkeys, who tried to appear threatening but could only manage irritating. They floated between branches with ease and grace and jumped impossible distances.

“All travelers who pass through my realm must answer my riddle or die.” The monkey king’s voice, like its master, traveled from branch to branch.

“You said they followed Hanuman,” Isaac told his brother, “not the Sphinx.”

“I will reduce you and yours to ashes,” said Majnoun, “and char your timber into ember.”

“Ask now,” commanded Fatima.

“Riddle me this,” said the monkey king. “What has one voice, is four-footed at dawn, two-footed at noon, and three-footed at dusk?”

“Oh, please,” said Job.

“Not that again,” said Isaac.

“Who cares?” said Elijah.

“Now give me what belongs not to you or your kind,” warned Fatima.

“I will do no such thing,” said the monkey king. “Solving the riddle only wins you safe passage. I will not—” The monkey king was no more.

I would be Murad’s storyteller, and I hoped he would one day hear me. My grandfather told stories to his children, but only Uncle Jihad heard him, and even he stopped listening by the time he became an adult. My father pointedly refused to listen, neither to his fairy tales nor to his family stories. “I have very little interest in lies and fabrications,” he used to say.

A week before he died in that awful spring of 1973, my grandfather told me a story in my room, a tale he hadn’t told me before. Maybe it was because he’d thought I had finally reached an age, twelve, when I could understand more, when I could listen better. Maybe he knew he was dying. He was in a good mood, though — ebullient, the corners of his lips pointing toward the ruffles of hair in his ears. His version of the death of Abraham he told me that day.

“And the end approached,” he began, “as it always does. Nearer and nearer it came. Abraham, one hundred and seventy-five years old, knew the signs, for his wife had passed away before him. On his deathbed, he whispered to his son, ‘I need your health, for mine is fading. I beg you to search for your brother. I promised your mother that I would never try to see him, but I wish for him to see me.’ Isaac saddled his horse and rode out to find Ishmael.

“And in a different land, Hagar consulted her heart and knew that her beloved was leaving this world. She woke her son and said, ‘Rise, Ishmael, rise, and seek your father, for he will soon be welcomed within God’s bosom.’ Ishmael sat up and said, ‘Come with me, Mother, and we can both say our farewells.’ And Hagar declined. ‘I have spent lifetimes away from home. My heart has been immured for much too long. Even a hint of what might have been is unbearable.’

“As she bade Ishmael farewell, Hagar wondered, ‘Had I done the right thing?’

“And when Isaac came across Ishmael in the desert, he recognized him, for, even though his brother was exiled when he was a baby, Isaac saw his father in his brother’s eyes. Ishmael recognized his brother, for he saw his father in Isaac’s eyes. And the brothers embraced, for each saw himself in the other, and they rode home to their father.

“But they were not in time, because Abraham had kept his promise to his wife and died before he could see his son. Ishmael and Isaac, kneeling before their father, wept and lamented their destinies. And Isaac said, ‘I regret so much,’ and Ishmael said, ‘I as well,’ and Isaac told him, ‘Your father wished you to see him,’ and Ishmael held his brother’s hand. The brothers mourned and grieved together, and comforted each other, for their loss was one.

“Ishmael and Isaac buried their father in the Cave of Machpelah, in the field that Abraham had purchased from the Hittites, what is now the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron.”

The arms. The carpets soared above the mountains of Lebanon, past the great cedars, atop which the eagles had their nests. The birds flew in a threatening formation, their king in the lead.

“Return whence you came,” cried the eagle king. “Demons are not allowed in our skies. Begone or die.”

“Their skies?” asked Job.

“I loathe eagles,” said Isaac. “Prissy and pretentious creatures.” A popping sound, and Isaac disappeared, and reappeared riding the eagle king’s back. He began to pluck feathers one by one. “This little eagle is prissy,” Isaac sang, “this little eagle is not going to fly, this little eagle thinks it rules the world, this little eagle shall die.” Isaac did not stop until nary a feather was left in its place. The eagle king fell to his death, and Isaac popped back onto his carpet.

And then the head. The hyenas’ den was located in a soft desert between the Euphrates and the Tigris. When the company reached the den, not one hyena was to be found, and Majnoun retrieved his brother’s head.

“The sultan is a pretender,” Arbusto said. “An honorable man metes honors to the deserving, not to his loved ones. The sultanate is being run by whores and thieves and begs to be rescued from its rulers.”

Taboush sat upon his throne and pondered the appalling plight of the world. “I do not know what to do. I do not think warring against one’s people is either auspicious or admirable.”

“A true sultan can distinguish right from wrong,” said Arbusto, “an undeserving one cannot. He dishonors you because he fears you. You are a hero descended from heroes, a king descended from kings. He is but a slave whose luck lifted him to the throne, and the throne weeps while it waits for a worthy occupant. Rise, my lord, and claim what is rightfully yours, if for nothing else than to offer the faithful a commendable leader and a righteous example.”

“I do not know what to do,” said Taboush.

“Call your army. Begin with the city of Aleppo. Once the people see the sultanate’s honest hero, they will declare their allegiance to you. If they do not, we will raze their walls as an example to other cities.” His eyes lit up, and his pupils moved in every direction. “Not only are we going to thrash them in Aleppo, we are going to Damascus and Homs and Hamah, and we are going to Baghdad and Mosul and Jerusalem, and then we are going to Cairo to take back the sultanate. Yeeeeaaaah.”

Taboush did the honorable thing. He wrote a letter to the mayor of Aleppo, warning him of the imminent arrival of the army of Kirkuk. Taboush asked the Syrian city to surrender to his rule, for he did not wish to shed blood. And the mayor of Aleppo sent a message to King Baybars. “Prepare the army,” commanded the sultan. “Black days are upon us. Sons will fight their fathers, and brothers will fight brothers. Dispatch a letter to the Fort of Marqab, since the sons of Ishmael are the closest fighters to Aleppo. Inform my brother Marouf of this calamity.”

And when Marouf read the letter, he smote his head. “The Day of Judgment nears.”

“My heart aches.” Taboush stood with his army before the gates of Aleppo.

“The honorable course is rarely easy, and a hero always suffers,” said Arbusto.

The defenders of Aleppo cheered as the sons of Ishmael appeared on the horizon, trumpeting the songs of war. The warriors lined up, and their hero rode out toward the invading army and cried, “Return to your homes. I will defend this faithful city unto my death.” And Taboush recognized the voice of his father.

“Send a warrior to kill him,” said Arbusto.

“None but I will stand before my father,” said Taboush, as he jumped on his stallion.

“What are you doing, my son?” Marouf asked.

“I seek to displace a usurper,” said Taboush.

“The suit of the dupe does not become you. The honorable sultan is our rightful lord.”

“Move aside, Father, for I have no wish to fight you.”

“I shall not,” replied his father. “No one passes while I still breathe.” And neither father nor son moved, but stayed face to face for hours and hours, neither looking away nor surrendering, until the sun finished its daily pilgrimage, for no day is so long that it is not ended by nightfall.

Back in Hannya’s lair, Majnoun, Fatima, and the imps put Layl back together. Adam laid the torso down, Elijah fastened one leg and Noah the other, Job and Jacob secured the arms, and Ezra attached the head. Majnoun returned the heart to its place and watched it glow and glimmer before tuning itself to a normal pulse. Fatima closed the wound and cleaned it.

“Something is missing,” said Ishmael. “He is not whole.”

Elijah said, “He has his penis but no …”

“Testicles,” said Majnoun.

“Bring me that sycophant,” ordered Fatima. “It is time to deal with the mother of betrayal.”

Taboush polished his swords.

“You must kill your father,” said Arbusto. “You cannot fulfill your destiny otherwise He is as stubborn as you are. You are both cut from the same inflexible cloth.”

“I will not.”

During the dark night, Arbusto infiltrated the camp of the sons of Ishmael disguised as a Muslim cleric, and in the morning, he approached Marouf as the hero mounted his horse. Arbusto offered him a cup of soup and said, “Drink this, my lord. It will give you strength.”

“I have the strength I need,” replied Marouf.

“Then drink this because it tastes good.”

And Marouf drank the poison before riding to meet his son.

“Move aside, Father,” his son said.

“You will have your wish.” Marouf swayed upon his horse. “I have been poisoned. Soon I will breathe no more, and you will be able to pass.”

Taboush watched his father collapse off his horse and die. Grief and guilt, the inseparable siblings, blighted the son. He rued his stupidity, his pride and impetuousness, and the day he arrived in this world. He wailed, mourned, and suffered.

“Bring me the evil one,” Taboush commanded.

When Baybars arrived, he did not find an invading army or a raging battle. He found a contrite hero genuflecting, the corpse of his father on his right and Arbusto in chains on his left. “I have committed sins,” Taboush said.

The chief of forts and battlements was buried with full pomp and colors. The funeral lasted three days. After the mourning, Baybars called on the diwan.

“I can no longer be king,” Taboush said. “I should not exist among the living. I have failed my father. Justice must be served. I cannot walk among honorable men any longer. I will leave the lands of the faithful and seek exile until my soul is cleansed.”

“Stay not away for long,” said Baybars. “Your home always beckons.”

And Taboush walked away. East was his direction; forgiveness and exculpation, his goal.

The emir’s wife no longer dared to set foot in the sun temple proper. She was not afraid of violence or violation — her people were too sweet — but she was terrified of being seduced into the bacchanal. When the prophet made his glorious appearance in the temple, a multihued orgy had erupted, and it had not stopped or decreased in intensity since. The liveliness, the combinations, the positions. The emir’s wife had tried to stop it the first day, but as she began to talk to the seekers, one handsome supplicant, in the throes of receiving oral pleasures, touched her calf, and the bliss was so intense she felt her robe slowly slip off her shoulders. She had rushed out of the temple, and had spent every waking second since peeking from behind the sun altar. Her prurience was in full flowering bloom. The liveliness, the combinations, the positions.

That morning, she woke and did not bother to wash. She rushed to her favorite position in the temple, where she had a full view yet was unseen, to begin her new daily ritual. She watched, entranced, and slowly her molten insides built up the delicious pressure.

And the colored imps burst in on her secret. Elijah, Ezra, and Job grabbed her, and she felt herself fading, only to re-emerge in a cave, on her knees before her nemesis.

She could not tell at first what frightened her most. Was it a furious Fatima wearing an obvious intent to harm? Was it her almost unrecognizable son, whose red eyes glared with loathing? Or was it the sight of the murdered one sleeping, obviously no longer dead, still as horrifically ugly as ever? It had to be Fatima.

“I did not mean it,” the emir’s wife sobbed. “I did not know.”

“You forsook your son,” chided Ishmael.

“You killed your son,” said Adam.

“And gloried in the killing,” said Jacob.

“Your flesh and blood,” said Ezra.

“The fruit of your loins,” said Elijah.

“For that and more,” said Noah, “you must die.”

“But it is not yet my time,” said the emir’s wife.

“I will retrieve my beloved.” Majnoun’s hand stabbed the emir’s wife. Into her stomach his hand penetrated, and retrieved Layl’s testicles. The emir’s wife breathed no more.

Fatima knelt before her dead double and touched her wound, healing it. “In death, you are complete.”

And Majnoun made his love whole.

Tin Can could not mask his concern. “The dialysis hasn’t helped,” he said, “and his liver seems to be failing.”

My sister shook her head. She looked as if she wanted to say something but had no idea what. My tongue exploded with the taste of tin and aluminum.

“And what shall we do with the odious one?” asked Baybars.

“Let me kill Arbusto,” said one of the Africans, “for all the pain he has caused.”

“I will cut off his head,” said one of the Uzbeks, “for his betrayals.”

“I will hang him,” said Aydmur, “for all the deaths he has caused.”

“I will burn him,” said Othman, “and leave not a trace of him on this earth.”

“And what would you do?” asked Baybars.

“I?” said Layla. “I would whip the skin off his body and crucify him in the harsh desert, so that his ignoble soul departs in agony.”

“So it shall be,” decreed Baybars.

The skin around my sister’s eyes was slate-colored, and streaks stained her cheeks. Her world seemed to include not one inch more than my father on the bed, a reverse pietà. Her breathing was a tobacco-raspy susurration.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

She nodded an indifferent assent. Fatima, on the other side of the bed, whispered, “No, she’s not.” My sister looked at us finally, and infectious desperation and pain flared out of her eyes. “I can rest after,” she said, and then, more softly, “It won’t be long.”

“Go out on the balcony,” my niece said. “Smoke. Get out of here.” She crooked her head in my direction, then toward the glass door.

“I’ll come with you.” I took my sister’s hand.

Layl opened his eyes.

“My love,” cried Majnoun. Layl moaned. He took a deep breath, and his face turned pale. He rolled on his side and began to retch, nothing but spittle leaving his mouth.

“Are you all right?” asked Majnoun, holding Layl.

“Calm yourself,” said Fatima. “Take your time.”

“I am in pain,” Layl said. “I do not belong here.”

“Of course you do, my darling,” Majnoun said. “You have been away for a while. It will take some getting used to.”

“I do not wish to be here.”

“Have patience.”

“I should not be here,” said Layl.

“Of course you should. I have brought you back. Your place is with me.”

“No.” Layl lifted his head off the floor, and then his torso. He paused on all fours, could not raise himself any more. “I must go.” He crawled seven paces in one direction, turned around, and crawled back.

“He is not himself,” said Ishmael.

“He will get better,” replied Majnoun. “He has to.”

Layl crawled in a widening spiral. Majnoun walked behind him step by step, his arms reaching out. Fatima’s hands covered her mouth. “I want you,” said Majnoun.

Layl crawled and crawled until he was suddenly atop the naked corpse of his mother. “What?” he asked.

“Beloved,” Majnoun begged, “you will get used to life.”

Layl bent his head and kissed the emir’s wife’s lips. “Wake,” he told her. He kissed her once more. He ran his hand across her forehead, smoothed the hair off her face.

“No,” cried Majnoun.

And Layl made love to his mother.

“No,” cried Majnoun.

And Layl gave himself to his mother.

“No,” cried Majnoun.

The emir’s wife opened her eyes, and Layl closed his and died once more.

A solitary pigeon settled on the railing of a balcony a floor below us. Lina lit her cigarette. She looked glum and dignified. She coughed and cleared her throat.

I waited for her to say something. The morning sun bathed our skins in tawny hues.

“I haven’t been able to stop thinking of funeral arrangements all morning.” She began to cry. “I don’t want to go through this now. Not now.” She shook her head, wiped her tears with a used tissue. “I’m at a loss. What should we tell people? He’s not going to make it through the day. Should we tell Samia? Should we bring her in to see him?”

I grabbed her cigarette pack and lit one. “Let’s wait.”

“He’s not responding to anything. He seems weaker than even an hour ago. He looks like he’s in a deeper sleep. We have to talk to him.” She sighed. Her hand traveled to my neck and drew me closer. “We have to say goodbye. You should do it. You didn’t get to talk to Mom, and you know how that made you feel.”

“You do it,” I said. I couldn’t remember what my father’s last words to me were. “I wouldn’t know what to say. You’re better at this than I am.”

“What makes you think I’m better at this?” Lina smiled weakly, childhood shimmering on her mouth for a moment. “You don’t have to say the perfect thing. You just … just … just tell him you’re here, that you care for him. It’ll be good. Come on. Let’s do it now.”

After a day in the ripe sun, even moonlight scorched Arbusto’s skin. Yet hope entered his heart when he realized that the guards assigned to him were gone. If only he could disentangle himself from the cross, he would have a chance, but the nails dug too deep, and the ropes were too snug. He prayed for rescue, and his prayers were answered.

A trader appeared in the night, riding a pale horse abreast of seven camels, his beasts of burden, who carried their weighty loads with dignity and grace. “Help me,” cried Arbusto. “Rescue me and I will cover you with more gold than you can imagine.”

The trader contemplated the suffering man. “I have a wild imagination.”

“And I deep gratitude and pockets,” replied Arbusto.

“Then this is a most promising night.”

The trader dismounted and climbed the cross. He cut off the binding ropes.

“Be careful with the nails,” said Arbusto.

“I will be ever careful with you.” The trader used both hands to pry out the first nail.

“But …,” stammered Arbusto, “but you are not hanging on to anything.”

“Have you still not recognized me? I have been looking for you, and you have not been easy to find.”

“You are not human,” gasped Arbusto.

“Is anyone?”

“O jinni. Do not take me. I can make you the richest demon in the world.”

“That I already am. I am so rich I can afford to unburden my camels, laden with the souls of all those whose deaths you have caused.”

“You are Afreet-Jehanam.”

“I am known by many names. Jehanam is my domain, and it is where I will take you.”

“Hell will be my home.”

“Most assuredly.”

“Death, the scourer, has come for me.”

Majnoun held his head and wept. Fatima embraced him and tried to comfort him. The imps surrounded mother and child.

“I cannot bear it,” Majnoun said.

“I cannot, either,” said Fatima. “Yet we will manage.”

“We are with you,” said the imps.

“I feel refreshed and rejuvenated,” the emir’s wife said to herself. “I am so alive.”

“Even among you,” said Majnoun, “I am so alone.”

“Grandfather,” my niece said, “can you hear me? We’re here.” Four of us surrounded his bed. I sat on his right, Salwa and Fatima on his left. Lina stood behind me, her hand on my shoulder. The machines were still going strong. The ventilator inhaled at the same clip. Lina gripped my shoulder.

“Father,” I said, “it’s me, Osama.” I was disappointed, unreasonably so, by the absence of any reaction. I glanced back at my sister, who was crying and smiling at the same time.

“Grandfather,” my niece said, “can you squeeze my hand?” She shook her head, then glanced at me. “Grandfather,” she said, “do you remember how Osama used to tell me stories when I was a girl? I was talking to your sister a few minutes ago, and I remembered. Do you? During the war, I used to get so nervous, and he told me stories about your father.”

Fatima was trying to cry silently, and failing. Lina kept nudging me. “Yes,” I said. “I used to tell her stories. I was there.”

“They were wonderful stories,” Salwa said. “I always felt that I knew your father, that I was alive when he was. The same for Uncle Jihad. They were odd characters, but I knew them. I’m going to make sure my son gets to know everybody just as well. Do you hear me?”

“The whole family is odd,” Lina said, squeezing my shoulder once more.

“I remember a lot,” Salwa continued. “I remember that Osama used to say you never listened to your father’s stories. Do you know how he came here? It’s a wonderful story. Osama should tell you. Let him tell you.”

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.”