“If anyone comes, tell them there’s no one here, we’re closed. Got it?”
“Got it, Ma’am,” Gandhi would say, looking down at the floor, because he was too shy to look that woman in the eye.
Then Mr. Spiro would come. Gandhi called him Spiro with the hat, because he never took off his blue beret, in order not to show his bald head. Mr. Spiro would come, go up to the attic, and downstairs Gandhi would sit, glued to his chair, listening to their sighs and moans.
Um Hasan would ask him to do the mopping when Spiro came. Gandhi would roll up the bottoms of his pants, put the chairs up on the tables, and mop. Then, when the sounds would start, he’d feel as though his back would break in two. He’d lean up against the wall and listen, imagining the scene as he pleased, Um Hasan’s large breasts between Mr. Spiro’s hands, Spiro’s bald head under her breasts, twinkling with sweat. And he’d remember his father’s Gypsy wife and the sting of his stick against his face, back, and thighs. He’d lean against the wall holding the world between his hands and groaning loudly. But Um Hasan wouldn’t hear him, and Spiro was nonexistent, high in ecstasy, deaf to everything.
Little Gandhi would go on mopping the floors as he watched Spiro leave. Then Um Hasan would come downstairs without looking at him. She’d glance aside as if she were saying good-bye. Then the darkness of the streets would swallow her up, leaving Gandhi all alone to wash the empty plates that had been piled beside his bed, and he’d sleep on the odor of Spiro’s sweat, Um Hasan’s perfume, his own sighs buried in the silence of drowsiness.
Little Gandhi was afraid of this man Spiro. He owned a bicycle rental shop and Gandhi didn’t like bike riding. He’d heard that Spiro had some dubious relationships with the kids who rented bikes from his shop. And that day, when Little Gandhi was put in charge of cleaning the streets in the quarter, he saw Mr. Spiro, hardly able to walk, his grandson Nabil walking beside him.
The Reverend Amin said that Spiro almost collapsed when his son, a graduate of AUB and an employee in an advertising agency, refused to name his son Spiro after his grandfather.
“You want people to laugh at the boy?” his son asked.
“Laugh? Why should they laugh? Is Spiro such a horrible name?”
“No, Dad, not horrible, but it’s not for a little boy.”
“What, was I born old? Wasn’t I a little boy once? I was, and my name was Spiro, and I was proud of my name.”
“It’s up to me to call him what I want.”
“You’re not my son, that’s for sure. Your mother must’ve gotten you somewhere else. Is Spiro such a shameful name? It’s after Saint Spirodonius the Miraculous. Your generation is full of shit.”
Spiro warmed up to this grandson. He started teaching him prayers and would read him the “synaxarion.” He’d bribe him with money and chocolate to get him to listen to the stories of Saint Spirodonius the Miraculous, whose saintliness was heralded by donkeys. They slaughtered the two donkeys in the middle of the night and ran away. Saint Spirodonius got up and put their heads, which were dripping with blood, back in their places. In the morning the people believed it was a miracle when they saw the white donkey’s head on the black donkey’s body and the black donkey’s head on the white one’s body. The boy would fall asleep next to his grandfather, and the grandfather would try to read from this ancient book, which he inherited from his grandmother Hanna. He’d put on his spectacles over his large black nose and read the stories of “Ireni.”
“His daughter’s name was Ireni, and he made her speak after she was dead.”
The grandson seemed doubtful and Spiro would read alone, hearing his own voice as it metamorphosed into a voice resembling his grandmother Hanna’s. The same intonation, the same “ahems,” the same grandson, but this one’s name was Nabil, not Spiro. And Spirodonius the Miraculous would be ticked off and would no longer be interested in forgiving the sins of this blasphemous family.
Spiro walked, leaning on the cane in his right hand, with his grandson Nabil walking beside him. He’d walk up and down Hamra Street mumbling in a muffled voice, his grandson unable to hear him. He stood in front of Little Gandhi and spoke with him. The war had wiped out the differences between people, and Spiro with the hat increased his visits and conversations with Little Gandhi. And he didn’t stop visiting him until after they discovered the body of Madame Nuha Aoun the night of September 15, 1980. When it happened, the Assyrian storekeeper Habib Malku said, “They’re murderers and we can’t do anything about it.” But Malku didn’t agree that the situation had anything to do with sectarianism or the feast of the cross. Malku was the one whose grandfather fled from Marsin in 1918 by foot during the massacres in Turkey. He still remembered his grandfather with his swollen feet, speaking in Turkish, his head wrapped in a black cloth. He remembered how he’d sleep sitting up in the bamboo chair.
Malku, unlike his grandfather, never stopped talking. He was the most popular guy in the quarter. He’d roll his r’s and swallow up half of his l’s as he bragged, saying, “We’re the real Arabs. Al-Akhtal8 was Assyrian. He used to enter upon the Umayad Caliph with wine dripping from his beard … the greatest Arab poet was from the tribe of Taghlib, and the tribe of Taghlib was Assyrian.”
The Reverend Amin, who avidly studied the Ghassanid roots of the Greek Orthodox sect, to which he no longer belonged thanks to his father the cobbler who’d become a Protestant at the hands of the American missionaries, used to make fun of Malku and the way he talked. “The members of the tribe of Taghlib were Arabs, and this guy’s Assyrian. What do you mean, did al-Akhtal recite his poetry in Arabic or Syriac? What, is Syriac Arabic? The world’s gone mad. We are the Arabs. We fled when the Marab Dam collapsed and we came to Huran, and we made a kingdom and allied ourselves with the Muslims. But look at this end we’ve reached. The kingdom has become a dump. Hamra Street has become a dump, and the Assyrian has become the descendent of al-Akhtal!”
Gandhi liked Habib Malku, but he didn’t know how to befriend him. This man, who was one of the best watch repairmen in Beirut, and owned a store in Bab Idriss, wound up buying that store near his house after he lost his eyesight. He turned it into a shop that sold everything from fresh produce to notebooks. The back of the store was filled with old utensils and small kerosene stoves. It became his hobby to collect these antique kerosene stoves that people no longer used and carefully line them up on the shelves in the back of the store.
The night before he died, Gandhi stood for a long time in front of the store, where the old Assyrian was rubbing his hands together and saying, “The war is over. Damn the Jews, but now the Jews are here — who’d have said the Israeli army would reach Beirut. What do we care. Jews? Fine. The important thing is it’s all over.”
Gandhi left the store because he didn’t know what to say. He left the store and walked alone on his final journey, where he met Alice at the Montana. That day Alice didn’t talk much. No one knew what she would’ve said. She was worried about the owner of the Salonica Hotel — that white Egyptian who couldn’t find anywhere except downtown, which was on the verge of destruction, to buy a building and turn it into a hotel. And Alice, who understood the male psyche, figured it out in a flash, from the outset, that this man was running a whorehouse and trafficking hashish. But with the deterioration of things, the hotel became something of a shelter house, a place to sleep for what was left of the Egyptian barmaids, lots of soldiers, and herself. Alice used to say these soldiers are nothing like the soldiers she used to know. She was worried the Israeli soldiers would do something to the hotel owner, and she told the story of Lieutenant Tannous.