The Hakawati

by Rabih Alameddine

“He’s dying,” she said, her voice noncommittal. A thick growth of weeds covered the house’s garden. Tall fronds of wild thistle, a few of the tips flowering yellow. “We’re all dying,” I said. “It’s just a matter of when.” “Don’t start with your American clichés, please. I can’t deal with that now.” She shook her head, her black hair covering her face for an instant. “He’s dying. Do you hear me?”

I, on the other hand, inherited my teeth from my mother, not her height. We both had two crooked upper front teeth. She never fixed hers, because they accentuated her beauty, the flaw making her appear more human, accessible, more Helen than Aphrodite. She didn’t fix mine, thinking it would also work for me. It didn’t. Alas, unlike her, I had quite a few other flaws.

“And al-Mutanabbi left Kafur’s court and mocked him, immortalized him in verse so expressive it has been known to make snakes recoil in horror for not matching its venom.

So the poet tried to return to his Iraq, but was waylaid and killed by brigands along the way. He was the man who in his prime said: The stallions, and the night, and the desert know me, And the sword, and the spear, and the paper, and the pen. But had to say before his death: I am nothing but an arrow, shot in the air, Coming down again, unheld by its target. And he was killed just north of Baghdad, where all poets go to die.”

You have deprived me of everything that gives me comfort. You have turned me into a prisoner in the jail of your obsession.

He wanted to sound mature, but it was difficult since he looked like a marionette.

Ah, my grandfather, the progenitor of this mess we called family.

Lucine felt the first pang of pain; a wave of nausea swept through her. She breathed deeply, dismissing the pain as transitory, because the baby had one more month to go. She steadied herself, felt grateful that the stool was four-legged. The doctor believed three-legged furniture to be the work of Satan. It was unstable and mocked the Trinity.

Just at that instant, as Abraham walked into the blazing fire, Lucine’s scream was heard throughout the valley. Water spread beneath her four-legged stool, on the scrubbed stones, collecting in the grooves that acted as miniature Roman aqueducts. A hakawati’s timing must always be perfect.

He walked to the stove, opened the top, and threw his cigarette in. “You play like a donkey. What has that idiot of a musician been teaching you? Who listens to all that Iraqi crap?” “People love what I play. Everybody says I play like an angel, like a sweet angel.” “You play like a donkey angel.”

Someone had placed the evil eye on the baby. It wasn’t only that he was a bastard, tiny, and not very healthy. He was an ugly baby and would grow up to be an ugly child, an ugly adolescent, and an ugly man. There was no escaping that. But, of course, his mother loved him.

Look at the great one, Umm Kalthoum. She was born into the poorest of families in a remote village of the Nile Delta in Lower Egypt. Umm Kalthoum should have been married off at twelve or thirteen. She would’ve remained unschooled and mothered a dozen kids: Muslim girls weren’t allowed to be educated in that part of the world. But here’s the gift, you see. At a very young age, girls are taught to read the Koran and nothing else. It gets hammered into them every day. For a singer, that’s the greatest of gifts. She learned tone and rhythm, learned perfect enunciation and breath, voice projection, inflection—you name it. She never mumbles. One can understand every word she utters. She mastered the witchcraft of voice. When the time was right, she opened her mouth, unleashed her soul, and helped all of us get closer to God. It was a gift, I tell you.

“He is awful at accents. You knew I’d say that, because it’s true. He’s Egyptian. They wouldn’t know any accent other than theirs if it kicked them in the ass.