“He’s not crying,” his mother said. “Why isn’t he crying?”
The midwife held the hakawati as if he were a dead ferret. She was about to shake him harder when the doctor admonished her. “Give him to me,” he said. Ismail began to cry the instant he landed in his father’s arms. The doctor passed him right back to the midwife.
Someone had placed the evil eye on the baby. It wasn’t only that he was a bastard, tiny, and not very healthy. He was an ugly baby and would grow up to be an ugly child, an ugly adolescent, and an ugly man. There was no escaping that. But, of course, his mother loved him.
“Let me see him,” Lucine said. She reached out her arms for the crying baby. She did not recognize anyone in his face. “What an angry boy.”
Oh, and he also had colic.
“Should I try to feed him?”
The doctor thought there was no point yet, but the midwife disagreed. “Feed him. Feed him. Train him to eat. It’s never too early. You have no milk yet, but all the activity will get you milky. He will probably get nothing but glue first, but it’s all good. He’s so small that he needs every drop of food. If you don’t produce milk, there’s Anahid, but I think you’ll cow fine.”
Lucine unbuttoned her blouse and took her left breast out. The doctor gasped involuntarily, stared indelicately. The hakawati took to the breast as a hummingbird takes to the air. The breast provided no milk, so he began to cry again. He cried for an hour, for two, for three. The house didn’t sleep. The doctor’s wife went in to look at mother and child but could offer no solace. She sent her husband.
“I don’t think I have any milk yet,” Lucine said. In the flickering light of the one candle, she showed him her breast, pushed her chest out toward him, squeezed her nipple. “Look,” she said. “Look.” He looked. “No milk yet.”
He cupped her breast, held its weight in his palm. “Lucine,” he whispered, “I can see now why your name chose you.” He brushed a callused finger across her nipple. “Lucine, my moon.” He bent down and licked it. Milk flowed. She moved his head gently, brought her son’s mouth to it. The hakawati suckled.
Do you know the story of the mother of us all?
“Hagar” comes from the Arabic word for “emigrate,” and Hagar did so a number of times. She was a princess in the pharaoh’s court. A beauty promised to the pharaoh at a young age, she had her own rooms and a coterie of slaves at her command. The pharaoh had decided to save her for a rainy night, and drought still reigned over Egypt. Her master-to-be, Abraham, was in Egypt with his wife, Sarah, whom he was trying to pass off as his sister. She was sixty-five and beautiful. Abraham was afraid that if the pharaoh knew she was his wife he would kill Abraham and take her. The pharaoh, besotted with Sarah, took her anyway. The pharaoh prepared himself for an evening of pleasure. He had Sarah wait for him in the palace’s red room, which he reserved for his most special assignations. He walked into the luscious room and found Sarah already naked on red satin. But God made His presence felt again. Suddenly all the pharaoh could see was an old hag, with wilted eyes, withered skin, frizzled gray hair, bosoms like drained yogurt bags. He covered his kohled eyes in horror and disgust and anguish. “Your face has more wrinkles than my scrotum,” he said. “Acch. Get out of this room and leave my sacred realm.”
However, Hagar, enamored of Abraham’s faith, begged the pharaoh to give her to the God-fearing couple before they were forced to flee. The pharaoh asked her why she’d want to leave such luxury. She stood before him, demure, eyes downcast. “Because I believe,” she said.
The pharaoh was horrified, confused by this encounter with a faith he didn’t comprehend. He wondered whether Hagar would turn into the repulsion that was the other one. “Go,” he commanded in an angry voice for all to hear, all including their strange god. “Leave this world and follow your new masters out of my Egypt.”
Abraham took her as a slave, a handmaid for Sarah. Hagar left Egypt, becoming rootless, torn, living wherever her master staked his tent. An emigrant.
• • •
The hakawati cried and cried. “That makes for strong lungs,” Zovik said.
He cried, he suckled, he shat, he slept, he cried. By the third day, after the excitement of the new birth had evaporated, Lucine felt the family’s tension. The doctor’s girls no longer wanted to see the baby. The wife walked more heavily in the house. The baby’s lungs grew stronger. His mouth grew stronger as well, hurting her nipples. The baby sucked until her breasts emptied, then screeched for more.
“I think I should bring Poor Anahid,” Zovik said. “She can feed him as well.”
Anahid’s son, ten days old, had died the morning of the hakawati’s birth. Anahid’s husband, who couldn’t afford mosquito nets, had gone to the Harrar Plain to find work. Anahid had gotten up that morning later than she would have expected. It took a moment to register that her baby had not woken her up. When she rose up from the floor where she slept and looked at her baby in his basket, her first reaction was to weep. Crimson welts, rashlike bumps, and minute pink protrusions covered his entire body. She carried her only son, his breathing labored, and left her house, calling for help. But by the time others arrived, her son had taken his last breath.
The gathering crowd discussed who would have been able to place such a powerful curse. Nothing else could explain the number of mosquitoes required to drain all of an infant’s blood. There must be more to it. Look, some said, look at this. Some bites were different from others. Someone lifted the blanket from inside the baby basket. At least three heads stared at the straw within. White lice. Anahid remembered that she had brought the straw the day before. She fainted. No one had heard of lice killing a baby, or of mosquitoes killing a baby. Was the combination fatal? Was such a loss of blood possible? What would Anahid’s husband say when he came back? Did he have a powerful enemy?
Her husband arrived in the afternoon, heard the news, went into his house, and beat Anahid unconscious. He didn’t unpack. He left and wasn’t heard from again.
Afterward, Anahid walked out of her house in a daze. When the residents of the Armenian quarter of Urfa saw Anahid — childless, with her two black eyes, swollen lips, the hair on the right side of her head more sparse than on the left — they were no longer able to call her by her first name only. She became Poor Anahid.
And Poor Anahid became the hakawati’s wet nurse. Yet four milky breasts weren’t enough. Ismail ate and ate, and when there was no more milk, he cried.
“That boy is not human,” the wife told the doctor.
The days grew warmer in Urfa. The skies became less dark and menacing. Spring approached. Yet the hakawati still couldn’t get enough. His wails kept everyone in the neighborhood awake. He cried, he suckled, he slept, he cried.
Pregnant, tired, and frightened, Hagar lumbered across the bleak desert. She had fled. Earlier that morning, Abraham had kissed her sweetly, left a tingle in her soul. She blushed, returned the kiss, and watched him leave. Content and hopeful, she resumed her chores.
Sarah decided to sharpen the cutlery. She fetched the knives and flint stones. With each stroke, she looked up at Hagar; sparks flew. Hagar was not stupid.
In the desert, she came across no one. The ripening sun dried her throat. She stopped, wiped the sweat out of her eyes. When she reopened them, lo and behold, God stood before her.
“Hagar, servant of Sarah,” God called out to her, “where have you come from and where are you going?”
“I am running away from my mistress, Sarah.”