At five in the morning three days after my arrival, I received the dreaded call. Lina said my father was critical and I should come straight to the hospital. I was shocked and unnerved by the call, but not surprised. My father’s condition had been worsening. Yet, when the phone rang in the dark and I answered, the bed felt much too big.
My sister and her daughter stood weeping in the doorway, their arms intertwined. A multitude of doctors, interns, and nurses hovered above my father in his bed. They looked like seagulls hovering above food. I craned my head to look in, but a seagull closed the door. My sister gasped. One of the flimsy hospital fluorescents hiccupped. Salwa nudged me gently and pointed to the gurney along the corridor. I guided my sister to it and sat her down. Lina stared at an imaginary spot on the opposite wall. My feet felt unmoored, and the ground beneath felt soft. And yet I couldn’t move from my spot leaning against the gurney. I had to remain motionless, as if my soul could get seasick. “They think his lungs might have collapsed.” Lina wasn’t talking to me. She was staring ahead, speaking softly, as if in confession. Her priest, I didn’t look at her, either. “He had trouble breathing the whole night.” She sighed. “It got worse, until he couldn’t get any air in. He looked so scared. He’s probably terrified out of his mind right now.” The groans of a patient two doors away marked time. They were oddly comforting; I imagined their slow pace calming the frantic doctors behind the closed door. With every breath, fear seared my lungs.
Around the year 1880, the sultan pasha left Istanbul on the advice of his viziers. The effete Ottoman Empire had been gasping and wheezing for breath, and it was thought that a goodwill tour of his lands might remind his no longer so loyal subjects to pay their taxes promptly. During his stay in Lebanon, he spent one night in my great-grandfather’s village as the guest of the bey. The sultan was so impressed with the bey’s generosity that he decided to offer his host a remarkable gift, one of his own servants.
“Why is that brother of a whore offering me a maid?” the bey yelled the next morning. “Does he mean my service was lacking? Is he saying my mansion needs cleaning? And he expects me to send someone all the way to Tripoli to get her.” He fumed throughout the morning open-house. The daily visitors and supplicants drank their Turkish coffee in silence, too afraid to speak. It was at that inauspicious moment that my great-grandfather, the young Sheikh Mahdallah Arisseddine, arrived to pay his respects. The bey greeted him with “And you, my boy, will reward my faith by going to Tripoli and bringing me this girl.”
Mahdallah came from a titled family of sheikhs, not princes or beys, not even important sheikhs, but, still, an eminent, respected family of some consequence. He was the youngest of seven, and the first in the family, the first in the entire village, to attend university. His father, not well off to begin with, couldn’t afford to pay for Mahdallah’s college education after raising seven offspring. Wanting to have a Druze doctor in the village, the bey had stepped in. At the time that my great-grandfather was unceremoniously dispatched to fetch the servant, he was one year away from a medical degree from the Syrian Protestant College. He lived in a small hellhole of a room in Beirut; he visited his family — and paid his respects to the bey — in the mountain village whenever he had the chance.
There were many other reasons for the bey to fend for the Arisseddine family. The beys, in all their history and incarnations, were never altruistic. It was obvious while my great-grandfather was still in school with the missionaries that he was brighter than the other village boys. The bey wanted the most intelligent man beholden to him, so he paid for his medical schooling. The bey also hated the fact that someone was smarter than he was, which was why he never tired of having the young man run menial errands for him.
The beys were uniformly unintelligent, probably because of inbreeding — there were only two other families that the men were allowed to marry from. According to my grandfather, inbreeding negatively affected the males, but the women in the family were exceptionally quick. Therefore, my grandfather insisted, the bey’s wife would have recognized that changes were afoot. The politics of the land would not remain the same, and, to maintain their power, the beys couldn’t rely solely on the blind support of the ignorant. They would need a new source of loyalty. Mahdallah Arisseddine and his family, particularly his second son, Jalal, would prove to be the bey’s boon in later years. But now I’m ahead of myself.
My father was drugged unconscious, his head slightly raised. He looked unfamiliar, his nose now enormous, the only part of him that hadn’t shrunk. The ventilator’s thick accordion tube forced its way inside his mouth to his lungs, coercing his chest into expansion and contraction. His chest, sparsely haired, dry, taut, looked like an Indian medicine drum. Thin, translucent ocher-colored tubes drew blood from his side into a dialysis machine, which pumped the cleansed blood back into his system. A catheter attached to a suction machine went up his penis, through the urethra, sucking out his urine.
Effusions of sound. My sister weeping in the corner, her sharp intakes of breath in discord with those of the ventilator. The chugalug of dialysis, the technician in charge of the machine seeming mesmerized by its churning liquid sounds. The metronomic beats of the monitor. Jagged Richter line in red, loopy one in white, a wavy yellow, and a green on a screen above my father’s head. Could Mesmer have ever envisioned the hypnotic movement and sound of these modern contraptions? I needed to slap myself, remind myself this wasn’t a dream, nor was it a repeat of an earlier scene. We’d huddled around a hospital bed for my mother years earlier, and now my father.
I stood at the foot of the bed, staring at him, my left hand touching his foot. My niece entered the room and waddled toward me, looking as if she might give birth then and there. She stood beside me and stroked my back. My sister turned around, wiped her tears with the back of her forefingers.
“One of you has to go out there,” Salwa said. “I need a break. There are a lot of people, and your aunt is driving me crazy.”
“I’ll do it,” Lina said. She moved to my father’s bedside, kissed his forehead. “Everything will be all right,” she told him, her voice breaking again. She covered her mouth, turned around, took out tissues from her bra. “Talk to him,” she said. “Tin Can says he can still hear us. Comfort him. You know how frightened he gets.”
Salwa took my father’s hand and squeezed it. “It’s me, Grandfather.” She looked at me, motioned with her head to the chair. I moved it for her, and she lowered her weight onto it. “Are you in pain?” she asked him. She sounded so mature, confident. “Can you hear me? If you can, squeeze my hand.”
He squeezed. My fingers twitched with a mind of their own.
“Are you in pain? Squeeze my hand if yes.” He squeezed again. “Is it the pillows?” Squeeze. On either side of the bed, Salwa and I raised him a bit by his shoulders. We fluffed the pillows beneath him. “Is this better? Do you need water?” Salwa dipped gauze in a cup and wiped it across his mouth, above and below the ventilator tube. He pressed his lips together, holding the gauze in place for a brief moment. “Your lips look very dry. Would you like me to run moisturizer on them?” He didn’t squeeze. “Do you still hear me?” She stroked his forehead. “Sleep now. I know the dialysis hurts, but it won’t last long. You’ll have new blood. The kidneys aren’t working, and that’s why you’ve been feeling awful. Don’t be afraid. We’re all here.”