“Blessed are you, my people,” Shams began. “Blessed are those of you who have traveled for weeks on your pilgrimage. I am grateful and not worthy of such devotion.” Shams hesitated, and Layl whispered into his ear. “Blessed are you who pray to God, but He demands more. From now on, you must pray eight times a day at least.” He nodded at his audience. “Yes, it is true. You must pray every three hours. Worry not. You will get used to sleeping in two-hour shifts. It is much healthier. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad. Oh, and bathing. You must bathe before each prayer, eight times a day. If we bathed more often, we would not smell so bad when there are a lot of us. Exult.” Layl nudged his twin, who rambled on. “And no farting.” Layl turned his head to hide his snickering. “I decree that if you have to fart you must fart downwind. Before you fart, make sure to gauge the wind’s direction. I decree further that silent farts are to be banned. Others must know who the guilty party is. And hear this, for I have a warning. If you fart silently upwind, a double transgression, there will be no absolution. You will not be able to wear my colors.”
“Unless you get a doctor’s note,” chimed Layl.
It took one devotee to laugh heartily before a few others hesitantly joined him. The emir’s wife chided her son: “You promised to stick to the script.”
“Blessed are the poor,” Shams announced. “They do not have much.”
The laughter rippled through the crowd. Devotees cheered and applauded. “What about marital decrees?” someone shouted.
“Well, you cannot marry your mother — or your father, for that matter. A wife must be no taller than her husband, and no more than a hand shorter. You must never use the word ‘ambidextrous’ when your spouse is in the room, or ‘hair.’ That is much more challenging. You can use the word ‘hair’ with strangers or with friends, but never with your wife.”
“What about diet restrictions?” another devotee yelled.
“Yes. You cannot cook a lamb in its mother’s milk. You cannot mix fruits in savory dishes, only in dessert.”
“And no broccoli,” said Layl.
“I am the prophet of these lands, and I am not going to eat any more broccoli.”
As the masses cheered, the emir’s wife pleaded with the prophet to end his sermon.
What was the reputation of Fatima’s sister? Who was Mariella, the great Mariella?
Rewind to January 1975, a few months before the civil war erupted. My class and the senior class took a ski trip to The Cedars. To break the monotony of the three-hour drive from Beirut, our bus stopped at Hilmi’s, a lemonade shop in the town of Batroun. It was a Sunday at six in the evening, and the shop was busy, filled with skiers on the way back to the city. With the influx of all the students, there was hardly a place to stand.
A threesome of seniors, the most popular boys in school, cut in before Fatima and me. One of the boys was the captain of the varsity soccer team. Fatima decided that maneuvering around a crowd for lemonade was too much trouble, and she walked outside. Her exit was fortunate, because she missed running into her sister. I heard Mariella’s laugh before I saw her. She held a translucent cup of lemonade with a lipstick-smeared straw sticking out. “If this place was such a secret,” she said loudly, “how come there’s an infestation of people?”
Her companion didn’t look amused. Tall and dark, he wore a grim face and a soldier’s uniform, but it was not that of the regular army. “So it’s not a secret, but it’s the best lemonade.”
“You obviously haven’t been to Rome.” Mariella walked toward the exit; she didn’t have to squeeze through the mob, which parted like Moses’s sea to make way for her. Her red wool dress would have been short on a ten-year-old. She noticed me in the crowd, and her eyes smiled an instant before her lips spread into an unequivocal grin. “Osama,” she squealed. “My darling.”
She tousled my hair and kissed my astonished lips. Esmeralda stunned Quasimodo. She winked to let me in on the silly game. “Where have you been hiding, you pretty thing?” she asked. I doubted anyone would believe her charade, but I assumed that wasn’t the point. “Will you come see me soon?” Her voice was coy and disarming. “I miss you terribly.” She walked away, still looking at me, and blew me a kiss once she reached the door. “Call me,” she yelled. Her companion glared. He was a good head and a half taller than I.
The soccer captain quickly positioned himself beside me. “You know Mariella Farouk?” His voice was surprisingly low and hesitant. “She’s hot, isn’t she?” His eyes were a light brown, possibly hazel, with three random flecks of maroon stationed differently in each. “Do you know her well?” he asked. “Umm, are you good friends? Have you known each other for a while? She’s going to compete for Miss Lebanon. I’m sure she’ll win.”
One of his friends jumped in. “They say she gives the best head, which is remarkable in a way. You’d think a girl who looks like her wouldn’t have to. You know, an ugly girl should try harder and all that, but, no, she’s gorgeous and she likes it. You can’t beat that.”
I shuddered and felt my face flush. “She’s Fatima’s sister,” I exclaimed.
The soccer captain shoved his friend. “Don’t mind him. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Let’s get some lemonade.”
As the bus climbed the mountain to the ski resort, a confused Fatima, in the aisle seat next to me, tried to make sense of why the soccer captain had rushed to a seat across from her and was trying to engage her in small talk. It took all of two minutes for her to grow bored and feign sleep, her head nestled on my shoulder.
A few months later, when the battles erupted in Lebanon, Mr. Farouk asked his wife to take their two daughters back to Rome, where she was from, to remain until the events in Beirut stabilized. Mariella refused to leave. She was having too good a time. She was an adult at nineteen. She had a life. No silly skirmishes were going to interfere with her plans.
Mr. Farouk was killed first, in 1976. He was kidnapped by one of the militias, tortured, and slain. His mangled body was found in a ditch on Mazra Street. He was the first person I knew who died because of the civil war. His death completely overwhelmed Fatima, but not Mariella. He was well loved and respected, which meant that quite a few people, including my father, worked for many a day and sleepless night to get him released, but it was for naught, since no one could figure out which militia had kidnapped him and for what reason. He was ostensibly an apolitical Iraqi Christian with no known enemies. Fear of the irrational, of the random, caused stories to bubble up in explanation. Mr. Farouk was actually a CIA operative. He was an Israeli spy. He was a Syrian spy. He was a journalist writing the only true story exposing the conspiracy of the great nations against Lebanon. He was an Iraqi royal. He was a once-famous Latvian actor who ran afoul of the Soviet propaganda machine. His death had meaning.
Even though her father’s murder should have offered Mariella an inkling of the dangers that could befall her, she was too involved to notice. Mariella would never have seen herself as a victim; she was a player. Like a lesser-stage Evita, she moved up the ranks, from one militiaman to another (Elie had been a practice run, a steppingstone). She was able to switch sides and back again a few times. The insignia on the uniform didn’t matter, the size of the gun did. Any other woman would have been terminated, but her talent made her untouchable, at least for a while.
Mrs. Farouk called my mother daily from Rome. She begged, whimpered, and pleaded with my mother to help Mariella, make her call Rome, make her stop the lunacy. Mariella didn’t want or need my mother’s help. In fact, she helped us. Once, when our family got trapped in Beirut, Mariella sent a jeep to pick us up and ferry us to the safety of the mountains — safe for us, but risky for the driver and the accompanying bodyguard. Fatima would call her sister constantly, but Mariella had stopped listening to anyone.