A quawk here, said the parrot Isaac, and a quawk there.
And the hakawati parrot began telling the lovely wife this story:
Four men — a tailor, a jeweler, a carpenter, and a dervish — traveled together on a long journey. They camped for the night and took turns guarding their belongings. The carpenter stood guard first, while the others slept. He saw a big log lying on the ground, and to pass the time he carved a statue of a beautiful woman out of it. The tailor woke up, and as the rest snored, he admired the lovely form and decided to sew a glorious outfit for the lady. Out of divine cloth, he fashioned raiment fit for a queen. It was the jeweler’s turn next, and he created wonderful adornments for the statue with the most precious of gems. And the dervish saw the creation and was so enamored that he prayed to God with all his heart to make her real. When light rose, the four men beheld a breathing woman of such comeliness their hearts were infatuated. Each man claimed her as his wife. They fought, they argued, but they could not arrive at a mutually acceptable decision.
Finally, they saw a Bedouin riding by on his camel and asked him to arbitrate.
“I sculpted her out of wood,” the carpenter said.
“I clothed her.”
“I gave her brilliance.”
“And I gave her breath,” said the dervish.
The Bedouin said, “All four of you have a rightful claim, and I see no way of dividing this woman. I therefore claim her for myself. She was created in the desert, and these are my lands. She will be my wife.”
The five men quarreled and quarreled, but could find no solution to their dilemma. They rode into town, and asked the first policeman they came across to be arbiter. After each man laid his claim, the policeman said, “Each of you has a point, and I cannot decide for any of you, so I claim this charming woman as my own.”
The six men went to a judge and regaled him with their stories. The judge said, “We have a problem here. For the sake of fairness and impartiality, I claim this woman myself. She will be my wife so you can cease your fighting.”
The men squabbled into the night. Finally, the dervish said, “We can come to no resolution, because no man can arbitrate. None can resist the charm of our beloved. We must resort to an inhuman referee, the Tree of Knowledge.”
The seven suitors and the woman marched to the wise tree in the center of town. As soon as they approached the giant oak, its bark split open and the woman ran inside and the trunk closed back upon itself. The Tree of Knowledge said, “Everything returns to its first principles,” and the seven men were shamed.
Aunt Samia was twelve when Uncle Jihad was born. She attended the English missionary school in the mornings and helped her mother with household chores in the afternoon. Since my grandmother was busy with her newborn, Aunt Samia took a daily walk to the bakery of the neighboring Christian village, which the family felt was superior to the one in ours. The baker’s daughter was my aunt’s age, and they struck up a friendship. My aunt began to take the bread walk a bit earlier, visit with the baker’s daughter, and chat. My aunt taught her a song she’d learned at school, “There’s a Beautiful Land Far, Far Away,” and her friend taught her the “Marseillaise.” One day, after spending a week in song, Aunt Samia felt feverish and had problems urinating. My grandmother took her to a doctor in Beirut, and she spent two nights in the hospital. It was a minor infection. She returned to the village and spent a fortnight in enforced bedrest. She lost track of the baker’s daughter.
Unbeknownst to the family at the time, evil Sitt Hawwar started a rumor that my aunt had to have her uterus removed and that she could no longer bear children. Evil Sitt Hawwar didn’t exactly say that my aunt had had an abortion, but she left the suggestion dangling. Not one suitor approached when my aunt matured to marriageable age. As time passed, when a family or a man would ask about my aunt, the rumor would surface. She waited and waited for someone to choose her, wondered what was so awful about her that not one was willing to test a fish hook in her waters. She would not get married for a long, long time: not till three of her younger brothers had married, not till she had to live the ignominy of being a spinster, not till she was thirty-eight and had been lying about her age for some while, not till my grandfather finally intervened and found her the most inappropriate husband in history.
My aunt didn’t tell anyone about her friendship with the baker’s daughter for years. It seemed that, since the timing of her friendship and the ugly rumors seemed to coincide, she felt they were intimately related. She believed she was being made to pay for the crime of fraternizing outside of the alliance of family. She finally came clean to her youngest brother, Jihad, on a night in early 1976, when the war still raged but hadn’t yet forced the family to abandon the building. She confessed in the garage, which acted as our shelter when missiles cried havoc in our skies. Uncle Jihad tried to tell her that what she’d done was not a sin. He said that what happened to her was simply a common medical condition, and that she was a victim of the nastiness and naïveté of mountain people.
“Do you really think you’re being punished for singing songs with a nice girl?”
“It wasn’t about singing.”
“What? Did you do something else — maybe something inappropriate?”
“Of course not. How dare you? She was just my friend. We talked.”
“How’s that wrong? What did you talk about?”
“I don’t remember. We talked about our families, about our villages. We talked about the French and whether they would leave. I don’t really remember specifics.”
“You think you’re being punished with a horrible life because you talked to a girl for a week? That’s irrational and naïve. It doesn’t make sense.”
“You don’t understand.”
Uncle Jihad did not. After trying to reassure her for about a month, he called in the cavalry, my mother. At first, Aunt Samia was horrified that her secret was out. My mother told her she was being silly, something my mother told her on a regular basis. “How can you think that making friends with someone is wrong?” my mother said. “What happened to you was the work of a sinister woman and had nothing to do with any sins. Sitt Hawwar was an evil, despicable person. It wasn’t your fault. And look at you. You life isn’t miserable. You’re rich, you’re the matriarch of a great family, and, most important, your mother would be proud of you if she saw how successful you are. And you know who was punished? Don’t you remember how horribly Sitt Hawwar died? Who was at her bedside when she left this world? No one. Her children were nowhere to be found. Don’t you remember the gossip? She was in the hospital, and guests would pay a visit, and there were no family members around. Could there be a life worse than that? She died alone, and no one cared. Samia, you stupid, stupid girl. Sitt Hawwar lost. Her soul left this world unlamented.”
Aunt Samia felt better. After that day, she began to wear higher heels.
And when the hakawati parrot’s tale was over, Ezra the parrot said, the merchant’s wife retired to her chambers for the night, because it was too late to meet the prince. The following evening, she put on her best robe and demanded the parrot’s permission to leave. Let me tell you a story, the parrot said.
Once, in a land far away, there lived an old king who was terrified of dying. He sequestered himself in his chambers, refusing to see his viziers. He neglected affairs of state. His subjects worried. His attendants wept in private. The viziers had exhausted all options and plans to entice their king out of bed. The king’s glorious parrot spread his emerald wings and flew up to the skies. Higher and higher, into the heavens he soared. He reached paradise and descended into its garden. He picked a fruit that had fallen from the Tree of Immortality. He returned to his master and said, “Take the seed of this fruit and plant it in fertile earth. Feed it love and wisdom and the sapling will turn into a fruit-bearing tree. Old age will forsake whoever eats from the tree’s fruit, and vigor will revisit him.” And the king’s servants were surprised when their master called: “Plant this fruit’s seed in my garden. I wish to glimpse its crop in my lifetime.”