“Zeki ended his story when his audience ran out of tears. I felt bereft and alone when he left, but I wasn’t alone, because all his audience felt the same way. I tested every hakawati in Urfa. I even saw a Kurd, and though I didn’t understand any of the words he said, I liked the way he said them. But I didn’t do that for long, because Serhat Effendi expected me at his table. He told me, ‘You can search far and wide for the great stories, but in the end, the best ones come to you.’
“I practiced. I spun yarns for Zovik and Poor Anahid. I told stories to the uncaring pigeons as they mated. I spoke to trees, flowers, sticks, and stones. One morning, I began to tell a tale to Hagop, and he smacked me. ‘I don’t care about what you have to say,’ he yelled.
“I practiced singing like Zeki. Whenever there was a song in the story, Zeki sang it. I was happy. I had a job. I had a passion. But I had no family, and that would be my curse. You see, the family I was part of was beginning to crumble like moldy Bulgarian cheese.”
The first time I saw a real hakawati perform was in the spring of 1971, after I had just turned ten. My grandfather had come down from the mountain unannounced to visit Uncle Jihad. Lina and I were in my uncle’s living room with the two of them. Lina was there to study the paintings in Uncle Jihad’s monographs, and I was there because I had nothing better to do. There were dozens of books and monographs strewn all over the place — on the coffee table, the floor — but I was more interested in the conversation between my uncle and his father.
“I don’t want to go alone,” my grandfather said, in a tone that was both pleading and astonished that he had to restate his wish. His fingers counted worry beads.
“I can’t,” Uncle Jihad said. “I have to look after the boy.” That was a lie. I didn’t need looking after.
“We’ll bring him.” My grandfather’s gestures were becoming more expansive. “It’ll be better that way.” His hair seemed to shoot out in at least eleven different directions. “We can take Lina, too.” He looked strange. He wore the traditional Druze trousers — black, with a billowing pouch below the crotch that could hold a small goat. The religious Druze wore them, and he certainly wasn’t religious. I had never seen him dressed like that before.
“No,” Lina declared, without removing her eyes from the pictures she was perusing on the coffee table. She had her arms crossed in front of her. “I’m not going to some cheap café in some ugly neighborhood. And you,” she said to me, “stop staring at my breasts.”
“I’m not,” I replied too quickly.
Uncle Jihad grinned. “A girl after my own heart. My darling, you can’t control the entire world.”
“I’m not trying to control the world,” she said, still not moving her head. “Just him. I get enough stares from other people. I don’t need it from him, and he’ll stop if he knows what’s best for him.” She contemplated a Brueghel painting of a woman who descends into hell and fills her basket with goodies. Uncle Jihad loved Brueghel.
“Sweetheart, it’s because they’re new,” Uncle Jihad said. “In a couple of months, everyone will get used to them.”
“Why are we talking about the girl’s tits?” my grandfather yelled. “We were talking about me. I come down to the city to visit my children, but my children pay no attention to me.”
Lina looked like a colorful statuette, immobile, trying hard to stifle a laugh.
“Goddamn it, Father,” Uncle Jihad said. “Watch your mouth. Let’s stop talking about the café. You know that Farid will be furious if you go there, more so if you take his children with you. Why don’t we do something else? We can visit your in-laws. You haven’t done that in ages.”
“Damn my in-laws,” my grandfather replied. Lina’s lips curled into a full smile. “And damn Farid, too. Who’s the father of whom here? He should be worried about my getting angry, not the other way round. I want to go. I’m seventy-one years old, and I’m dying soon. This could be my last chance. Don’t you have any compassion?”
“What’s the point, Father? You know they’ll kick you out the minute they see you. They always do.”
“No, no. Not this time. That’s why you have to come with me. They’ll think we’re a family, and they won’t recognize me, because I’ll be going incognito.” From his vest he took out a white Druze skullcap and a large pair of eyeglasses that made his eyes balloon like the eyes of a goldfish in a tiny bowl. “See? I look like a peasant from the mountain.”
Lina and I doubled over laughing. As I tumbled on the sofa, my head banged hers. My grandfather looked at his hysterical audience and began dancing and twirling around for us so we could admire him in full regalia. One of my hands rubbed the bump on my head, and the other wiped the funny tears from my eyes.
“Come on. Let’s go,” my grandfather said. “Please take me.”
“I want to go,” I said. I sat back up on the sofa. Lina studied me from her prone position. “I want to see the storyteller.”
“That’s my boy.” My grandfather beamed.
“Oh, shit,” Uncle Jihad said. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
And on a clear April morning in Beirut, the four of us — my grandfather, Uncle Jihad, Lina, and I — drove to hear the hakawati.
“Time was much longer then,” my grandfather said, “in the old days.”
We drove in my uncle’s Oldsmobile convertible. My father called it the problem car, but he couldn’t convince Uncle Jihad to get rid of it. Since we owned the Middle East’s exclusive Datsun and Toyota dealership, my father expected everyone in the family to drive one or the other. The business had begun as a Renault dealership, but the family had sold those rights to be the exclusive retailers of the Japanese cars.
“You could tell a story for a whole month then, but now who’d listen? Everyone wants it quick, as if life itself was quick.”
My mother drove a Jaguar. My father overlooked it, because she’d always driven Jaguars. She complained that the Japanese cars were horrible, that the back ends slid sideways on mountain curves like a belly dancer’s fat butt. She drove incredibly fast and claimed she needed a car that handled well. My father insisted the Japanese were consistently improving their cars, which would soon become the most reliable cars around, not simply the cheapest.
“Mind you, it’s not that this hakawati isn’t a fool,” my grandfather said. “He’s an incompetent dimwit who wouldn’t be able to talk himself out of his execution, but we can’t blame him in this case, can we? We’re lost, I tell you.”
My father persuaded Uncle Jihad not to drive the Olds to work, which wasn’t a problem, since the dealership was a distance of four blocks from our apartment building. My father wasn’t able to persuade him to stop calling the car Hedy, after an American actress my uncle considered “the most divinely beautiful creature on this blessed earth.”
“And then there was radio,” my grandfather said. “A curse.”
“And television,” my uncle added.
“Double curse. But who watches those ugly French and English stories?”