Baptism. Now, that’s a commitment.
The Anglicans had been trying to baptize Druze for years. The two groups were stuck with each other, like Nile crocodiles and plovers. Most of the infrastructure of the Ottoman Empire was in the cities and Muslim villages. The Catholic French and their charities directed their work at the Christian villages. The English and their missionaries couldn’t set up shop except in the Druze areas. The conversion rate was not very high.
An Englishwoman had pitched camp in the village in 1843. Her name was Helen Kitchen. With a seemingly endless supply of funds, she had a compound built, consisting of three impressive buildings, the first in the village with tiled roofs. There was already a school for boys, so she started one for girls. She made conversion a condition of entry. Girls wanted to learn. They made the sign of the cross, did their homework, left school, got married, and had kids, and no one remembered they were no longer supposed to be Druze.
After a few years, Mrs. Kitchen realized that the girls studied their Bibles and could sing hymns with the best of them but didn’t consider this a religion. When she attempted to make the ritual more serious (baptism?), the girls were shocked and embarrassed. Mrs. Kitchen stopped making conversion a requirement for enrollment. The girls still studied the Bible, sang hymns and Christmas carols, but there was no pretense anymore. Once, when a missionary confronted her, accusing, “But these girls aren’t Christians,” she replied, “Neither was Jesus.”
She educated thousands of girls, many from neighboring villages. She actually became a local. When she died, she was buried in a Druze cemetery. To this day, many Lebanese women, Druze and Christian, visit her grave and keep the site clean.
Mahdallah converted. He was watered. Secretly, though. He refused to baptize his son, Aref. No one suggested his wife convert. He would spend the rest of his life denying that deed.
The family spent four or five years in London. The gray weather didn’t suit them. They didn’t mind the cold — their village was colder — but the lack of sunshine ensured they would never settle in that city.
The village gossips said: The gray weather is making the harem girl barren.
The village gossips said: And God will never bless the betrayer again.
The village gossips were wrong on both counts. My great-grandparents had other children, but it took time — not as long as Abraham and Sarah, but long enough for gossip.
But here are two facts, documented and checked:
My great-grandparents Dr. Mahdallah and Mona Arisseddine and their son, Aref, around five years old at the time, boarded a Belgian-registered ship, the Leopold II, from England to the port city of Beirut, in June 1889.
My other great-grandfather, the esteemed missionary Dr. Simon Twining, accompanied by his recently betrothed, the heart of darkness, sailed from England to Beirut on the identical ship, the Leopold II, in June 1890.
The doctors would surely have met had they been on the same crossing. What would they have talked about, standing on deck, holding on to the railing, looking at the sun drowning in the golden Mediterranean? They wore similar cotton suits of Western cut, white shirts, ties. Their hats were also similar. Mahdallah would not wear his fez until he reached the village. They had countless things in common, or would have in times to come, and the conversation would not lag until, finally, Ah, sir, what say you we blend the seed of my loins with your seed and produce some exasperatingly strange characters: the wicked hag of the mountains, the naïve and haughty villager, the parsimonious simpleton, the talented, frustrated homosexual, and the sexual Sisyphus, who would betray his family over and over and over and over again?
Then there was the evil Sitt Hawwar.
Upon deciding to return to the village of his birth, Mahdallah, while he was still in London, commissioned the village builder, a man by the name of Hawwar, to put up a house. Hawwar charged the young doctor an exorbitant amount of money. One of Mahdallah’s brothers was supposed to oversee the building and its financing, but he must have been distracted, for when the young doctor returned, he found a windowless skeleton of a house with patchy cement floors and only an undercoat of paint.
Mahdallah complained. Hawwar promised to finish the job quickly, before the winter snows. Mahdallah and his family could wait out the house at his parents’. But the wife, the harem girl, the Albanian, insisted the bare-bones house was her home. She moved her family in, shaming the builder into working harder and faster.
That was a mistake. And she compounded the mistake. She didn’t know any better — she was a foreigner. Mona Arisseddine told her neighbors the truth. She said they could have built three houses for what they paid. She mentioned how much her husband paid for each material. The stove wasn’t even new: you could see it was used. “Look,” she kept saying, “look.”
Sitt Hawwar, the builder’s much younger wife, became Mona Arisseddine’s enemy.
Mona Arisseddine told people the builder was a crook.
Sitt Hawwar told people the doctor was a Christian.
Three Druze men showed up at Mahdallah’s clinic one morning to kill the good doctor. The only thing that saved him was a heavy patient load that day. The men walked into the clinic and asked to see him. They were told they would be next. A parent with a sick child entered, and the men decided to let the doctor help the child before they murdered him. Then came an elderly woman, a man with a broken foot, another sick child, and so on. At the end of the day, the sister-in-law of one of the would-be slayers arrived with her ill daughter. She asked her relative what he was doing there, and he replied that he was waiting to exterminate the doctor.
“Are you crazy?” she yelled. “This man is treating my daughter and you want to kill him? Why don’t you go kill a government official or something?”
The three embarrassed killers left, and a village story was born. And the bey warned that he would personally torture and kill anyone who attempted to injure the Druze doctor.
“If that woman hadn’t shown up,” my grandfather said, “you kids wouldn’t be here. Think about that. It was fate. Mahdallah had converted, so he had insulted their faith. Neighbors had killed neighbors before. Why wasn’t your great-grandfather killed? You ask me and I’ll tell you. It was because I was meant to marry your grandmother, of course. Do you see that?”
“No,” I said. The other kids didn’t even hear him. Anwar was too busy pummeling Hafez. Lina, who had been sitting next to me, had disappeared with my other cousins. Little Mona was in Aunt Samia’s arms, fidgeting.
“Stop it, Baba,” Aunt Samia said. “It’s Eid al-Adha, no time for your crazy stories. You’ve no idea what a bad example you set.” She stood up, put her daughter down. “And you,” she admonished me, “why do you just sit there and listen? Why don’t you get into a fight with your cousins? You want people to think you’re a coward? Get in there and smack one of them.”
I jumped off the sofa and ran out of the room, looking for my mother. She wasn’t in the dining room, where the rest of the family was yelling. I sprinted to the terrace. Every apartment in the building had a large balcony, but Aunt Samia’s penthouse had a terrace encircling it. I envied Anwar and Hafez for being able to run around whenever they felt like it.
My father said Aunt Samia got the biggest apartment because she was the eldest.
My mother said Aunt Samia got it by whining for ten whole days that she deserved it because she was married to the most helpless man in the world.
I ran almost all the way around the terrace before I found my mother leaning against a wall, smoking a cigarette. My father was talking, gazing warily at her. She stared out toward Beirut’s dappled rooftops, distracted, as if counting the tines of each television antenna on every roof in the city.