Текст книги "Gate of the Sun"

Автор книги: Elias Khoury

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Текущая страница: 24 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

Umm Hassan said she thought Aziz Ayyoub had committed suicide. “A man all alone, afflicted by madness, what was he to do? But he was transformed into a sheikh, and they swear by his name and await his blessings. Poor humans!”

Even though Umm Hassan didn’t believe that Aziz Ayyoub had become a saint, in her last days, she’d swear by his name and ask me to tell her the story of how I’d stood with my father behind the donkey, and how Aziz grabbed the donkey’s tail and told my father to stand behind him. I’d describe the scene to her and she’d burst into laughter: “What was that? Did I think the donkey would act as a barrier and protect them from the bullets?”

As you see, dear master, things have become mixed up in my mind just like in yours. I had nothing to do with it: It was Yasin, my father, who stood behind the donkey. But, you see, I’ve been infected by Umm Hassan and have started talking about these people as though I knew them all personally. But Ayyoub did become a saint. What do saints do to become saints? Nothing, I suppose, because people invent them. People invent wonders and believe in them because they need them. True as that is, it changes nothing. Ayyoub’s a saint, whether we willed it or not.

Aziz was guardian of the mosque and the lotus tree and the cemetery. He’d inherited his profession from his father, who’d inherited it from his father, who’d inherited it from his father, who. . until you run out of fathers. Every day he filled his water jar, washed the graves, cleaned the mosque, walked around the lotus tree, and slept.

“A man who sleeps in a cemetery.” That was how Umm Hassan described him.

And the man who slept in a cemetery started curing the sick, helping women get pregnant, bringing back those who had gone away, and finding husbands for girls.

Ayyoub gave his name to the tree, which became known as the Tree of Ayyoub.

Now I understand why you get things mixed up, Father. I asked you about the lotus tree, and you answered that there was no such thing as a lotus tree in al-Ghabsiyyeh, and that the people of Deir al-Asad used to talk of a tree called an Ayyoubibut you didn’t know what kind of tree that was.

The tree, Father, is the lotus, and its guardian is Ayyoub – a man who hanged himself from its branches, so the tree proclaimed him a saint.

“Listen, Khalil,” said Umm Hassan. “It could be that he hung himself, or it could be that the man tied the rope around his neck and climbed onto a branch of the tree to put an end to his misery and loneliness, but the tree took pity on him and broke so as not to allow him to commit the defilement of suicide. The tree, which is ruled by a saint, proclaimed him a saint, so now it has two saints, the first one, whose name we don’t know, and Ayyoub, of our village, whose name was Aziz. The sheikh of al-Jdeideh has a different opinion. He believes the Israelis strangled him, then tied a rope around his neck to make people think he’d committed suicide. ‘Why should he commit suicide?’ the sheikh asked me. ‘The man chose to live alone in the service of God – they killed him. They killed him because they wanted to uproot the tree, but we’ll never let them do that. I’ll appoint a new guard, for the tree and the tomb.’”

The sheikh of al-Jdeideh didn’t appoint a guard as he’d promised Umm Hassan, and the tomb remained alone, but no one lifted a hand against the sacred tree.

Would you like me to make a vow to Ayyoub for your recovery?

I’m certain you know Aziz Ayyoub. You may not have liked him because he wasn’t a fighter. You told me you despised anybody who didn’t carry a gun: “The country was slipping away before our eyes, and they sat there doing nothing.” Aziz Ayyoub didn’t carry a gun, and he didn’t fight, but look what he became and what we’ve become. He’s now a saint to whom people make vows, and we’re on our own.

Leave Aziz Ayyoub in his tomb and come with me to look for Shahineh. We left her in front of her tent in Deir al-Qasi. She went into the tent and lay down next to her children after her long journey to al-Ghabsiyyeh. And before she fell asleep, she smelled her own sweat, left the tent and asked Munirah to help her bathe. Later she divided her wealth into two halves, and managed to live off it for more than a year.

From Deir al-Qasi to Beit Lif, from Beit Lif to al-Mansourah, from al-Mansourah to Qana. Shahineh told how the people were like locusts: “The Israeli planes sailed overhead while we scurried through the emptiness looking for a refuge, until we reached al-Mansourah. There we crossed the border, the noise stopped, and the terror was extinguished. We found ourselves in Qana, and there we rented a house from the Atiyyeh family. Yasin went to school, and the girls and I sat in the house, and I spent all my money. Qana was beautiful and quiet, like our village in Palestine.”

My grandmother didn’t tell me much about Qana because she believed her exile only really began when they gathered everyone together in the camps around Tyre.

“In Qana, we weren’t in exile, or refugees. We were waiting.”

Do you know what waiting, and the hope of return, meant to these people, Abu Salem? Of course you don’t. However, the story of the buffalo of al-Khalsah astonished me. When my grandmother told me the story, I thought she was telling me something like the stories grownups tell children that they don’t expect them to believe. The story concerns a man called Abu Aref, a Bedouin of the village of al-Khalsah, belonging to the tribe of Heyb. He came to Qana along with everyone else and stayed there with his wife and five daughters. And he brought his buffalo. Seven buffalo cows, God protect them. “We all drank their milk, for the man used to give it away to everybody. He refused to sell it, saying the buffalo were an offering to al-Khalsah – ‘When we go back, we can buy and sell.’ He was generous and stubborn, like all Bedouin. When spring came, the season when buffalo become fertile, people saw the man leading his herd toward the south. His wife said he was crazy because he believed the buffalo could only conceive in al-Khalsah, and he’d agreed with a cousin of his to hand the buffalo over to him at the Lebanese-Palestinian border on the condition that he return them two weeks later. The man set off for the border, and his wife stood in the square at Qana to bid him farewell, mourning him and mourning the buffalo, but the man would have nothing to do with her. Then the buffalo disappeared from view, and everyone forgot about the matter.”

My grandmother said Abu Aref returned alone, cowering, his spirit broken. He wouldn’t speak. “He was bathed in tears, and we didn’t dare ask him anything. He returned alone, without the buffalo.”

“We’ve lost everything,” said Umm Aref.

Abu Aref drove his buffalo to al-Khalsah because he was convinced the buffalo could only conceive on the land where they were raised, and, at the border post, the firing started. The buffalo sank to the ground, their blood splashing the sky, and Abu Aref stood there in the midst of the massacre.

He told his wife he was standing at the border making signs to his cousin when the firing started.

He said he ran from buffalo to buffalo. He said it was all blood. He said he raised his hands and screamed, but they were killed anyway.

He said his dog of a cousin never turned up. He said he’d taken off his white kufiyyehand raised it as a sign of surrender, then started running with it from buffalo to buffalo, trying to staunch their wounds, the kufiyyehbecoming drenched in blood. He said he raised the stained kufiyyehand shouted and begged, but they didn’t stop. “The ground was covered in blood, the buffalo were dying, and I was weeping. Why didn’t they kill me too? I wiped my face with the blood-soaked kufiyyehand sat down among the buffalo.”

The man returned to his wife cowering, frightened. He returned without his buffalo, carrying the blood-stained kufiyyehand the marks of despair.

That was Qana.

My father went to the school, and my grandmother got out her Palestinian lira and spent them one by one, then sold her gold bracelets and her necklace; she didn’t, however, sell the signet ring, which remained on her finger until her death. I think my aunt Munirah took it. I don’t know. She sold everything and then started working with her daughters crushing stone in the village. Waiting was no longer viable. The borders were closed; people had entered a labyrinth. The Lebanese police came and said they had an order to gather the Palestinians into the camp at al-Rashidiyyeh. This was when the agony began. They drove Abu Aref, tied up with ropes, whipping him while he bellowed that he couldn’t bear to be taken away from his buffalo.

They brought everyone together in the village square, put them onto trucks and trains, and moved them away from the borders of their country.

My grandmother said the agony started in the camp. “They dumped us on the seashore in winter. The wind blew hard from all directions, and we were left in the dark.”

She said she couldn’t remember daylight. “During those days, everything was black. Even the rain was black, Son.

“We drowned in the mud. Your poor father, God rest his soul, was only knee-high. Afraid for him, I told the girls to watch out for Yasin because he’d drown in the mud. I’d yell and hear nothing; my voice flew away in the wind. God, what terrible days those were!”

How can I tell you of those days, Father, when I didn’t experience them myself and my father never spoke of them? My father died before we reached the age when fathers tell their sons their stories.

They were known as “the banana days.”

The only shelter people could find was under big, dry banana leaves. They’d buy ten leaves for five Lebanese piasters and make roofs for their tents and spread the leaves on the ground.

“They were the banana days,” said Shahineh.

When Shahineh spoke about those days, you had the feeling that she wasn’t telling of the past – it was as though time had stopped. She told of the crowded buses, of the wooden pattens they wore as protection from the hot sand, of the tents in which the wind was a permanent occupant, of the rain that penetrated the bone.

She told of moving from Qana and of how the Lebanese officer came, surrounded by his men, and ordered the Palestinians to congregate in the square, of how he whipped Abu Aref until he was soaked in blood.

“We only had banana leaves,” she said.

“We spread the leaves over the ground and covered the roofs and the sides of the tents with them, and lived with the rottenness. The leaves rotted, and we rotted beneath them and on top of them.”

It was then that Shahineh decided Yasin’s schooling was over, and it was time for him to work.

“No, that’s not true,” she said. “I begged him not to leave school. I said we’d live off the rations we were allotted with the relief card.” But he refused. He found work in the sheet-metal factory at Mina al-Hesn, which landed him in prison, though that’s another story.

Shahineh told of three months in the camp before their departure to Beirut. She and her children lived for about two months in an old Beirut house that had belonged to the Hammouds – a family of fighters from ’36 – before moving to the camp at Shatila.

Shahineh met Ahmad Hammoud in the Rashidiyyeh camp. He was one of a group of young men who came from Beirut to distribute relief supplies to the refugees, and when he found out that she was the daughter of the ’36 fighter Rabbah al-Awad, he bent down and kissed her hand. Two days later, he returned with his father and asked Shahineh to come to Beirut.

“So we went to Beirut, and lived about two months in their beautiful house, but, it must be said, people get on each other’s nerves.”

My grandmother never told me about her stay in that house or why people get on each other’s nerves. She simply said she’d taken her children and gone to Shatila, set up her tent there, and lived. From the tent, to the concrete room roofed with canvas, to the corrugated iron roof, to the “roof of the revolution” – she had to wait twenty years, until ’68, to get a concrete roof. The concrete roof came with the revolution and the fedayeen. Only then was the woman able to get any sleep. She said that until then, she hadn’t been able to sleep at night because she felt she was sleeping in the open.

My mother told me nothing.

She moved within her silence, which she wore like a cocoon. When I remember her now, I see her as an evanescent phantom.

She was there and not there, as though she weren’t my mother, as though she were a stranger living with us. She disappeared and left the story to my grandmother.

I wasn’t very interested in the story. You might think that to gather the stories of al-Ghabsiyyeh, I had to search and ask around, but it’s not true. The stories came to me without my having to chase them. My grandmother used to drown me in stories, as though she had nothing to do but talk. When I was with her, I’d yawn and fall asleep, and the stories would cover me. Now I feel that I have to push the stories aside in order to see clearly, for all I see is spots, as though that woman’s stories were like colored spots drifting around me. I don’t know a whole story; even the story of Abu Aref’s buffalo I don’t know entirely – why did the Israelis open fire on the buffalo and leave the man alone; why did they leave him standing in the midst of the carnage?

My grandmother said his wife didn’t believe him. “He disappeared for a month and then returned saying they’d killed his buffalo! Abu Aref lied to us because he didn’t dare to tell the truth of his disgrace. He said he wanted his buffalo to conceive in al-Khalsah, and his cousin would meet him at the border and take them from him, then return them after a week. Fine. But he didn’t come back after a week, or after the massacre. He was away for a month. Then he came back carrying his kufiyyehand saying the Israelis had killed them.”

“I’m certain the Jews didn’t kill them,” said his wife. “Why would they kill them? They’d take them. And how could they have killed the buffalo and not him with them? I would have been rid of him! No, the Jews didn’t kill the buffalo. I’m certain his cousin stole them. Took them and disappeared. The man must have waited a month at the border, then despaired and had no choice but to make up the story of the buffalo massacre. Everything foolish we do, we blame on the Jews. No, the Jews didn’t kill them. And all of this for what? We could have sold them and lived off the money.”

My grandmother said Umm Aref grieved for her buffalo as much as if her husband had died. She’d insult him and grieve at the same time, weep and get furious, while the man behaved like an imbecile, carrying his kufiyyeharound and showing it to people in Qana. Everyone believed him and cursed the times. Everyone believed him except his wife, who knew him better than anyone else.

“So what do think, my boy?” asked my grandmother.

I said I didn’t know because I’d only seen buffalo in Egyptian films and didn’t know we’d raised them in Palestine.

“Did we raise buffalo?” I asked her.

“Us, no. We raised sheep, cows, and chickens. The people of al-Khalsah are Bedouin, they raise buffalo, not us.”

And she started telling me the story of Abu Aref again.

“You told me that story, Grandma.”

“So what? I told it to you, and I’ll tell it again. Talk is just flapping the lips. If we don’t talk, what are we to do?”

“The man was a pain in the ass and a fool. Wouldn’t it have been better to slaughter them and eat them? In those days we were dying for a bit of meat. All we had to eat was midardara– lentils, rice, and fried onions.”

“But I like midardara, Grandma.”

What did they eat, there in their village in Palestine? I’m convinced midardarawas the only thing they ate. But my grandmother always had an answer “under her arm,” as they say. Over there everything had a different taste. “Our olive oil was the real thing. You could live on it and nothing else, and there were so many things you could use it for.”

Have I told you what Shahineh did to my father on their wedding night? She made him drink a coffee cup full of olive oil before going in to my mother. “I made him drink oil. Oil’s good for sex. One day soon, Son, God willing, one day soon, at your wedding, I’ll give you oil to drink the way I did your father, and later you’ll say, ‘Shahineh knew, God rest her soul!’”

Father, I don’t know Shahineh’s story well enough to be able to tell it to you. The stories are like drops of oil floating on the surface of memory. I try to link them up, but they don’t want to be linked. I don’t know much about my aunts. All I can tell you about is the husband of one of them, the one with the bald patch that looked like it was polished with olive oil. I’ve already told you about him, so there’s no point in repeating it. I hate things that repeat, but things do repeat, infinitely.

Would you like to hear the story of my father and the Jew?

I’ll tell it to you, but don’t ask about the details. You can ask my grandmother tomorrow – I mean, a long time from now when you meet over in the other world. You should ask her because she knows it better than I do, she’ll tell you the story of the rabbi with all the details. All I know are the broad outlines, which I’ll try to tell you.

^*One dollar is equivalent to approximately 1500 Lebanese lira.

^*Head scarf, usually black and white.

^*On the night of April 9, 1948, Begin’s Irgun Zvei Leumi and the Stern Gang surrounded Deir Yasin. The residents were given 15 minutes to evacuate before the village was attacked. Approximately 250 people were killed.

^*Aziz literally means beloved, or dear.

I APOLOGIZE.

Again, I return to you with apologies. I’ll give you your bath now and feed you, and then I’ll tell you the story of the rabbi. Tell me you’re comfortable – your temperature’s gone down, and everything’s back to normal; all that’s left is this small sore on the sole of your left foot.

Tell me, what do you think of the waterbed?

If Salim As’ad, God send him good fortune, did nothing else in his life but come up with this mattress for us, his heavenly reward will still be great.

I was apologizing because I had to attend to other matters. I just witnessed a sad scene, but instead of crying I burst into laughter. Something like tears were flowing inside me while I was laughing, and I could only settle the matter the way Abd al-Wahid al-Khatib wanted it settled.

Do you know him?

I doubt it. I didn’t meet him until his son put him in the hospital a month ago. He arrived in a bad state; he was suffering terribly. I examined him along with Dr. Amjad and suggested having him transferred to al-Hamshari Hospital in Ain al-Hilweh so he could have X-rays taken. We don’t have any equipment here – even the lab has closed. We’re more of a hotel. The patients come, they sleep, and we provide them with the minimum of care. Nevertheless, we continue to call this building suspended in a vacuum a hospital.

So Abd al-Wahid came, and I examined him. My diagnosis was liver cancer. But Dr. Amjad disagreed, as usual. He said the man was suffering from the onset of cirrhosis of the liver and prescribed some medication. I suggested to his son to take him to al-Hamshari to be sure. Father and son left with Amjad’s prescription and my advice, and it seems that after a few days of Amjad’s medication, they decided to go to al-Hamshari Hospital. There the man underwent exams that showed he was suffering from liver cancer. They came back to me carrying the report. They’d undoubtedly read the report and discovered the case was hopeless, since it ends with the recommendation that the patient be taken home to rest with strong painkillers.

I read the report while the two men sat in my office, their eyes trained on my lips. People are strange! They think doctors are magicians. What was I supposed to do for them?

“You must take the medication regularly,” I told the sick man.

I told the son he could phone me if there were any developments.

The son made a move to go, but Abd al-Wahid didn’t budge and asked me, with trembling lips, “Aren’t you going to put me in the hospital, Doctor?”

“No,” I said. “Your condition doesn’t warrant it.”

As he spoke, he bit his lower lip; he was wrung with pain, and his eyes were tearing. I don’t know what the eyes have to do with the liver, but I could see death like a bleariness covering his eyes. And the man with his red face, his little potbelly and his sixty years didn’t want to leave the hospital.

“I don’t want to. No. I’ll die,” he said.

“How long we live is up to God,” I said. I didn’t hide it from him that his case was serious because I believe the patient has a right to know.

“How much time do I have?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Probably not much.”

“Why won’t you treat me here?”

I explained that we didn’t have the means to treat him and that, anyway, his case didn’t require a hospital.

He said he didn’t want to go home: “You’re a hospital, and it’s your duty to treat me.” He looked at his son for support, but the son stood in silence and looked at me with complicit eyes, as though. . I won’t say he was glad his father’s end was near, but he was indifferent.

I stood up to mark the end of the consultation, and then, without any preamble, the son began abusing me. He said he wouldn’t take his father because it was the hospital’s duty to care for difficult cases, and he threatened me, saying he’d hold me responsible for any harm that might come to his father.

I had to explain our situation again and tell him how, since the Israeli invasion of ’82 and the massacres, blockades, and destruction that had come with it, we no longer had the necessary equipment.

“Why do you call it a hospital?” screamed the son.

“You’re right,” I told him. “But do you want to change the name of the place now? Go and take care of your father.”

The son took his father and left, and I forgot about the incident. I didn’t even tell you about it.

Yesterday there was a surprise. I was in your room when I heard Zainab scream. I went out and found myself face-to-face with Abd al-Wahid. He had come to the hospital barefoot and in his pajamas. I saw the man standing there and Zainab on the ground, pulling her skirt over her thighs while he mumbled incomprehensibly.

Zainab said he’d shoved her and tried to go up to the rooms.

From where he drew the strength when he was already in the jaws of the angel of death I don’t know. I only know he ran into the hospital and started climbing the stairs to the rooms. Zainab, running after him, tried to ask him what he wanted, and he responded with an incomprehensible babble, almost a howling, and when she tried to stop him he shoved her to the ground.

When he saw me, he ran toward me shouting, “I beg you, Doctor, put me back in the hospital.” He grabbed my hand and tried to kiss it, saying he didn’t want to die.

“Don’t treat me if you don’t want to,” he said. “But I don’t want to die. People don’t die in hospitals. I implore you, Doctor, for pity’s sake, don’t send me to die at home.”

It was then, Father, that I burst into tears inside but started to laugh. I was laughing, Zainab got up, and the man was trembling. When I asked Zainab to prepare him a room, he seemed to fly with joy. I saw him climbing the stairs behind Zainab, in his dirty white pajamas, his feet hardly touching the stairs, as though I’d saved his life or promised him a place in Paradise.

Believe me, I never saw such joy in all my life. Naturally, nothing changed. His joy disappeared when he lay down on the bed and the pain renewed its onslaught. His son’s wife came to be with him. I think he heard his wife ask me when he would die and then start grumbling when she heard me say she had to take care of him and give him his painkillers regularly.

“Regularly!” she exclaimed, not having expected to hear this word. “You mean I have to stay here all the time?” she said, gesturing in my face.

“Of course,” I said. “Everyone knows that here it’s up to the family to look after the patient.”

“We’ll take him home,” she said. “Home’s better.”

When the man heard the word home, he started to cry.

I said, “No. Abd al-Wahid has to stay in the hospital.”

Hearing my reply, he relaxed on the bed and eased himself into his pain, as though he’d found comfort.

Abd al-Wahid, Father, will die in flight from his death. He’ll die without knowing it. He didn’t want to stare death in the face; he came here so he could close his eyes before dying.

No, please.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I just wanted to apologize because I neglected you for a while, and I don’t mean to compare you to him or to my father. I don’t know if my father saw his death in the muzzle of the gun or whether he shut his eyes before he died. I told you, I don’t know much about the man. My mother said one thing and my grandmother another, and I’m not that interested in the subject. I just want to know why my mother ran away.

You don’t know a thing about my mother, so listen at least to what I’m about to tell you. My mother ran away because she’d gotten into a bad marriage, because of a certain Jew. This is how my grandmother told it – my grandmother who seemed somewhat pacified after my mother ran away. From then on, my father’s horrendous death no longer constituted the mainspring of her life. From then on, she relaxed, tenderness softened her face, and she never stopped abusing this Jew. I was young and incapable of making sense of things, so I didn’t understand that when she abused “the Jew” she was talking about a specific person. Later I discovered that “the Jew” was the catalyst for my father’s marriage to Najwah, my mother.

My grandmother said my father had to go to work young. His sisters were married and the UNWRA assistance wasn’t enough, not to mention that he hadn’t done well at school. So he started work at Shukri’s pharmacy in Bab Idris. Then he found work in a sheet-metal factory at Mina al-Hesn that belonged to two Jews, Aslan Durziyyeh and Sa’id Lawi. That was where the scandal occurred.

My grandmother said they arrested my father and threw him in jail for more than two weeks. “Poor thing, he was just a child. True, he was tall and mature, but he was only sixteen. He liked reading a lot but was a troublemaker at school, so he went to work. At the pharmacy, his wages were a joke: seven lira a week, and he worked from dawn to dusk. I asked him to put up with it so he could learn something useful.”

The young man who was my father was fascinated by Beirut, especially by Abu Afif’s restaurant on al-Burj Square, not far from where he worked. He’d leave the camp at six in the morning, walk from Shatila to al-Burj Square, and arrive at work at half past six. Then he cleaned the shop before opening for customers at seven.

On the way, he’d pass in front of Abu Afif’s, which was at the intersection, and the smell of beans, onions, oil, and mint would make him feel hungry. He’d sit on the edge of the pavement opposite, spread out the food he’d brought with him and wolf it down. The food his mother had prepared was divided into two, half for breakfast and half for lunch, and consisted of squares of bread baked and sprinkled with thyme or pounded spices, three boiled eggs, two rounds of pita bread, and a tomato. But the young man seated on the pavement in front of the restaurant would smell the food and see the men sitting at the small tables inside devouring their meals, and he’d finish off all the food he’d brought with him. He’d eat breakfast and lunch together and would never feel satisfied. And when he went back to the house, at seven in the evening, he’d be overcome by hunger again, he’d gulp down his dinner quickly so he could go out into the alleys of the camp.

My grandmother didn’t know that my father longed for a dish of beans, but when she found out, she orchestrated a surprise. She woke him at five one morning, after laying out a special table with beans, mint, onions, tomatoes, and a pitcher of tea. The boy got up and looked at his mother’s table with neither hunger nor appetite. He ate to please her, telling her the smell over there was different. Then he took his picnic and left. When he came back that evening, my grandmother discovered that he hadn’t touched his food. He confessed that he’d eaten beans at the restaurant. He said he hadn’t been able to resist. He’d gone into Abu Afif’s at ten in the morning and had eaten two plates of beans and paid a whole lira. He said his stomach hurt, and he felt guilty, but the restaurant beans were tastier than the ones she made at home. “Then he started eating beans at Abu Afif’s every Friday morning, and he remained faithful to his dish of beans until the day he died, God rest his soul.”

But it wasn’t really the dish of beans that fascinated my father, it was the city. A new world stood before him, anonymous. And he wanted to know everything. I don’t know about how well educated he was, but in his room I found a box full of books. There were novels by Jurji Zeidan on the history of the Arabs, and the books of Taha Hussein, as well as a collection of yellowing Egyptian magazines. My grandmother said that if my father had finished his education, he’d have been a great scholar. But all mothers say the same, right? I’m the only one who has none of that self-confidence mothers can give.

I won’t talk to you about my mother now but about why my father married her. What happened was that after about a year of working at Shukri’s pharmacy, my father left to work in the sheet-metal factory at Mina al-Hesn.

After Emile Shukri threw him out for being rude to the customers, the young man roamed the streets of Beirut. My grandmother said he denied the accusation and said he’d never pestered customers for tips, and she believed him because he never came back at the end of the week with anything but the six and a half lira, his wages minus the cost of the weekly dish of beans.

“But he smoked,” I told her. “Where did he get the money to buy cigarettes?”