It was a minor crisis admittedly-but any crisis would have served. It began simply. One day, Roger, the six year old, said “ibn sharmuta” to Louise. Roughly translated, this means “your mother’s a whore” (or, by extension, “you’re a bastard”) and however you translate it, it is the insult of insults in the Middle East.
Louise had been trying to give Roger a bath and he had been screaming. Meanwhile Pierre was arguing with Randy, saying that only Americans had the crazy notion of taking a bath every day. that it wasn’t natural (his favorite word), and that it dried up all your wonderful skin oils.
Randy yelled back that she didn’t want her son to stink to high hell like his illustrious father, and she pointed out that she wasn’t fooled by his dirty habits.
“What the hell dirty habits do you mean?”
“I mean I know perfectly well that when I say I won’t sleep with you unless you take a shower, you go into the bathroom and turn on the water and just sit there smoking a cigarette on the goddamned toilet seat.” She said this very bitchily and it touched off a real brawl.
Roger naturally understood what the argument was about and refused to let Louise corner him in the bathroom until this case had been appealed and the verdict handed down. But Louise was very persistent, and in a rage, Roger threw a wet washcloth in her face, yelling “ibn sharmuta!”
Of course, Louise began to cry. Then she said she was quitting and went to her room to pack. Pierre put on his French movie-star manners and tried to sweet-talk her into staying. But to no avail. This time she was adamant. Pierre promptly took it out on Roger-which really wasn’t fair, since Roger hears Pierre veiling “ibn sharmuta” constantly whenever they go out driving. (There are no traffic regulations in Beirut but lots of cursing.) Besides, Pierre usually thinks it’s very cute when the kids curse in Arabic.
Naturally the afternoon wound up with everyone yelling or crying and water all over the floor, and once again we did not go sightseeing or even to the beach. The incident, however, provided us with a mission. We had to take Louise back to her village in the mountains (Pierre’s “ancestral village,” as he called it) and find a still more naive mountain girl to replace her.
The next morning, we put in the obligatory few hours of yelling and then piled into the car and headed along the Mediterranean for the hills. We stopped at Byblos to admire the Crusader castle, reflected torpidly on the Phoenicians, Egyptians, Assyrians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Crusaders, and Turks, ate at a nearby seafood restaurant, and then proceeded into the sun-baked mountains along a road which looked and felt like another archaeological find.
Karkabi, Pierre’s much-vaunted “ancestral village,” is a town so small you could easily pass it without noticing. The town only got electricity in ’63 and the electricity tower, in fact, dominates the village. (It is also the point of interest which the villagers are most avid to show you.)
When we arrived in the main square (where a skinny donkey was pulling a stone around in a circle to grind wheat), everyone practically fell over themselves touching the car, breaking their necks for a look at us, and being generally depressingly obsequious. You could tell Pierre loved this. It was his car, and he probably also wanted everyone to think we were his four wives (though, of course, they knew we weren’t). All this seemed even more depressing when you considered that nearly everyone in town was Pierre’s cousin at least and that they all were illiterate and went barefoot-and what the hell was so difficult about impressing them?
Pierre slowed the ridiculous tank of a car to a crawl as we drove past (to let all the rubberneckers get a good look). Then he pulled up in front of the “ancestral home”-a small, white-washed adobe house with grapes growing on the roof and no windowpanes or screens but only small square windows with wrought-iron grills over them (and flies zooming freely in and out-but inevitably more in than out).
Our arrival sent everyone into a frenzy of activity. Pierre’s mother and aunts began preparing tabuli and humus with a vengeance and Pierre’s father-who is about eighty and drinks Arak all day-went out to shoot birds for supper and nearly shot himself. Meanwhile Pierre’s English Uncle Gavin-a displaced cockney who married Aunt Françoise back in 1923 (and has been in Karkabi regretting it ever since) -produced a rabbit he’d shot that morning and started cleaning it.
Inside the house, there were only about four rooms, with whitewashed walls and crucifixes over all the beds (“Pierre’s family are Maronite Catholics) and kissed-over pictures of various saints ascending to heaven on slick magazine paper. There were also numerous tattered magazine photos of the Royal Family of England; and then there was Jesus Himself, wearing a toga, his face barely visible under a hail of kiss-prints.
While supper was being made, Pierre led us out to show us “his domain.” Randy insisted on staying in the house with her feet up, but the rest of us trooped obediently over the rocks (followed by an entourage of barefoot cousins who kept pointing enthusiastically to the electricity tower). Pierre snapped at them in Arabic; he was after something more pastoral. And he found it, just over the next rocky hill, where a real live shepherd was guarding real live sheep under a wormy apple tree. That was all Pierre needed to see. He began spouting “poetry” as if he were Kahlil Gibran and Edgar
Guest rolled into one. A shepherd! Sheep! An apple tree! It was charming. It was pastoral. It was Homer and Virgil and the Bible. So we walked over to the shepherd-a pimply kid of about fifteen-and found him listening to a little Japanese transistor radio which played Frank Sinatra followed immediately by a bunch of singing commercials in Arabic. Then saftig seventeen-year-old Chloe took out one of her menthol cigarettes and offered him one-which he accepted, trying to look as cool and sophisticated as possible. And then this charming shepherd reached into his charming pocket and pulled out a charming butane lighter. When he lit Chloe’s cigarette, you just knew he had spent practically his whole life at the movies.
After supper, all the relatives in town (i.e. practically the whole town) came over. A lot of them came over to watch TV (since Pierre’s aunt is one of the few people in Karkabi who has one) but that night they came over to watch us too. Mostly they stood around and stared at us and looked embarrassed, but sometimes they’d touch my hair (or Chloe’s or Lalah’s) and make noises to indicate that they were really crazy about blondes. Or else they’d pat us everywhere as if they were blind. God-there’s nothing to compare with being patted by a dozen two-hundred-pound Lebanese women with mustaches. I was panicky. Could they tell by patting that we were Jewish? I was sure they could. But I was wrong. Because when it came time to give us presents, I got a silver rosary, a hand-knitted pink angora sweater in size 46 (it came down to my knees), and a blue bead on a chain (for the old evil eye). I wasn’t about to turn down any amulet at that point. All intercessions with all deities were gratefully accepted.
When the gift-giving was over, everyone sat down to watch television-mostly reruns of ancient American programs. Lucille Ball batting her false eyelashes, Raymond Burr as Perry Mason, and the whole screen a blizzard of subtitles. You could hardly see the actors for the letters.
It really made you believe in the universality of art to see all these pastoral types loving Lucille Ball and Raymond Burr. I was looking forward to the day when America extends its glorious civilization to other solar systems. There they’ll be-all those intergalactic types-watching Lucille Ball and Raymond Burr in rapt attention.