On that morning, people said, the voices of the muezzins were different. In Beirut, as is the case in all the cities of this region, the muezzins no longer climbed up the minarets to sound the call to prayer. They replaced this with recordings connected to loudspeakers. As for that morning, things were different; they weren’t recordings, they were the real voices of the muezzins, piercing the city sky. They were like wounds rising up in the middle of a silence that made it seem like gunfire, and faces like masks peered out from the windows. There was nothing left but the quick steps of the soldiers and the sound of their random firing, and the black fear drawn on the lines in their faces. The moans of the wounded dying in the streets of the abandoned city trailed off, with no one to hear their final cries for help.
This is how endings are. A rattling in the throat, voices calling out to come to prayer, and faint moaning covering the streets of an abandoned city.
Gandhi’s mother didn’t tell him she didn’t hear his very first cries, because they came with the dawn prayers. The voice of Sheikh Khalil, the muezzin of Mashta Hasan, was echoing between the walls of the black clay houses. That’s how Little Gandhi was born, after six sisters and prayers and solemn vows taken by his mother, Nafisa, the daughter of Haj Mahmoud al-Khayyat. Her prayers didn’t do any good. Husn bin Abd al-Karim, Gandhi’s father, married three other women under the pretense that his wife was infertile. The last of them was that Gypsy with the long black hair that led Gandhi to the cave of escape.
Nafisa had been married to Husn for seven years and hadn’t gotten pregnant. After the first year he married a second wife, and two years after that a third. The night of Little Gandhi’s birth he was contracting marriage with the Gypsy woman. But his wives gave him only girls. The day of the birth of his sole heir he was sleeping in a hut in a remote village with his Gypsy and no one dared to tell him. When he found out the next day and came to Nafisa, his eyes sparkling with happiness, he found she was unable to talk. She was flushed with fever from her head to her toes, delirious words dribbled out from her lower jaw. Her head was wrapped in a white cloth and Husn’s wives were standing all around her. Husn took his son into his arms and said “Abd al-Karim, Abd al-Karim has come” and prayed over his head. Then he leaned over Nafisa and said something to her the other women didn’t hear. He asked the midwife to rub kohl on the baby’s eyes, then he returned him to his mother. Forty days later the mother died. People said that the Gypsy woman had cast a spell on her. The mother died and Abd al-Karim nursed from his father’s second wife and lived among women and girls in a little village, in an ordinary family with nothing special about it except the image of this father who traveled a lot and beat up his wives.
Abd al-Karim didn’t remember how he lost his left eye. He got used to living with only one eye, to seeing everything, without ever feeling that his left eye was blind. His aunt said his eye bled when he was forty days old. The mother died, and blood gushed from the baby’s eye. His aunt took him to Sheikh Ibrahim, the village doctor who squeezed an herbal mixture into his eye, but it never got better. It became inflamed and covered with black spots. She took him to a bedouin who was known for treating incurable cases. He said the eye should be cauterized and so he heated a nail, cauterized it, and blinded it.
“I’ve spent my whole life with only my right eye. I see everything from the right. I’m used to that, and it’s all right. I don’t know why God created two eyes, it must be His wisdom, but as for me, it’s all right this way.”
That’s what Little Gandhi said to Doctor Atef, many years after that incident, when he suggested Gandhi see an eye specialist at American University Hospital.
“Forget it, Doctor,” Gandhi said and went on shining his shoes.
Gandhi didn’t remember his childhood, for childhood in Mashta Hasan passed by as if it had never happened at all. He knew he was born around 1915, and that he went to the village Qur’an school, where he memorized the Holy Qur’an at the age of seven under the supervision of the blind teacher Sheikh Zakariyya Hamid. Then he went to the nuns’ school for a couple years and then had to quit and stay at home when his father stopped paying his tuition. He didn’t know why his father never took him to work with him. He used to leave him at home as if he were one of the girls. He remembered squatting for hours in front of his black house in Mashta Hasan. He remembered the great cliff that separated Mashta Hasan from Mashta Hammoud, and the green cornfields that stretched for miles.
Little Gandhi didn’t eat at home. Most of the time his father’s wives and daughters would send him out of the house. His father had only one son, and the house was full of wives and daughters. His father was always depressed and mean. He’d hit his wives and laugh out loud. Gandhi remembered those loud laughs that sliced through the thin curtain separating the room from the rest of the house. But he didn’t remember his father’s words.
Gandhi didn’t remember much about the village he fled from, narrow roads, dirt, pebbles, freezing cold that made his teeth chatter. It was as though he never lived in that village, or as if he’d slept through it all. He’d mention how his greatest pleasure was to sleep. Their house consisted of a big room and a small room separated by a brown curtain. Everyone slept in the big room, which doubled as a living room for welcoming guests during the day. His father was the only one who would sleep on the brass bed in the small room with one of his wives.
Gandhi remembers sleep meant women. He’d sleep in a big room filled with women, with voices and arguments and shouting all around him. The floor of the big room was covered with mattresses, and on them slept the women with their daughters all around them, and he slept all alone in the southern corner of the room. He savored his aloneness. There Gandhi discovered pleasure, in the southern corner, all alone, and where he saw with one eye. Gandhi discovered the shadows of the women as they got undressed and laughed, and the smell of perfume that wafted out from their nightgowns.
Gandhi lived alone in the village. His father wasn’t poor, but he didn’t own any land; he sold it in order to get married. He owned a store in Arida, a village about a halfhour walk from Mashta Hasan. His father would go there every day riding on his donkey and come back in the evening with food.
Gandhi ate only at night, when his father returned. They’d sit alone in front of the tray of food placed on the floor and eat, the women coming and going around them without sitting down to eat. Gandhi would’ve preferred eating after his father finished, when the tray of food transformed into a party with the women and their daughters fighting over the pieces of bread and chick-peas planted on top of the cooked wheat. When Gandhi would sit with his father around the somber tray of food he had no desire to eat, for eating with his father was a sad, silent ritual, where all he heard was lips smacking over the food. But he was not allowed to eat with the women. The Gypsy woman his father married the moment of his birth would kick him out. He’d see the whites of her eyes as she motioned for him to go, and so he’d get scared and leave. He’d go to the courtyard near the door, squat down, listen, and take the leftovers of bread and food from one of his sisters, and then he’d go off on his daily excursion through the black dirt roads.
Gandhi had no recollection of his sisters; in his mind he pictured them all as one. When he returned to the village for his father’s burial, he didn’t recognize any of them. He embraced them and their husbands, but he didn’t feel as though they were his sisters. Only the Gypsy woman was part of his memory of white eyes. He felt a special affection for her. With her worn out clothes and face covered with pimples, she reminded him of the beggars he met every day in the streets of Beirut. She asked him for money, so he gave it to her. She told him his aunt Khadija, who had nursed him as a baby, had been dead for two years, and that they sent for him to come, but he never came.