The Hakawati (62 page)

“Not to brag,” Uncle Jihad said, “but I was good even then. I remember the first story I told the pigeons. I was in one of the two better cages, where all the Rashidis, Sharabis, and black Bayumis were. Those were some of the birds that Ali would hate to lose, so I told them this story from the
Tales of the Homing Heart
.

“There was once a poor shepherd from a village in the mountains. He was so poor he couldn’t feed his children, and the family slept hungry
more often than not. One night, he was so hungry that he dreamed of Beirut, the city of prosperity and bread. He decided he’d go to the city and make his fortune. He didn’t even wait a minute, but packed a small satchel and walked all the way to Beirut. He looked for work, talked to every merchant, builder, baker, cook, and watchmaker in the city. He begged to be hired, but no one wanted him. He tried the following day, and the following, but he couldn’t find any work. How was he to make his fortune? A week later, and he still had found nothing. He was hungrier than he had ever been, and lonelier than he could have imagined. He was tired, and when night fell, he went into a mosque and lay down on the carpet to sleep. But in the middle of the night, policemen woke him up and beat him and took him to jail. He stood before a judge, who asked why he broke into the mosque. The shepherd told about the dream, but the judge was not impressed and sentenced him to three days in jail. ‘Dreams are for fools,’ the judge said. ‘Only last night, I dreamed of a treasure buried in the mountains, in a field where two sycamores, two oaks, and a poplar cast shadows that moved like dancing men. Do you see me leaving my job to chase after the treasure of dreams?’ The shepherd spent three nights in jail. When released, he ran all the way back home and sought the familiar field where two sycamores, two oaks, and a poplar cast shadows that moved like dancing men—the field where he had been allowing his sheep to graze for all those years. He dug out the treasure and became rich and fed his family and was able to sleep every night sated and content.”

Jake or Jack or John or Jim and his roommate asked me over a week later. They brought the weed, I brought my guitar. We smoked so much, so quickly, we were floating in bliss in minutes. “Let me see your guitar,” Jake said.

I was so stoned that I could barely stand up, but I managed. I sat next to him with my guitar, and he looked at the instrument with awe, stroked the neck with his hand.

“That’s so beautiful,” he cooed.

“It’s a J200.”

“What’s that?” Blank eyes looked up at me.

I wanted to tell him it was a brand, a name, but words wouldn’t leave
my lips. I played a note; it plunked, because his hand was still on the neck. I moved away from him and played a few chords. The roommate asked to borrow my guitar. He held it briefly, and then strange sounds shot out: fast strums of inexplicable chords that had no rhythm or reason. He shook his head punkishly, like a pendulum on methamphetamine. He sang hoarsely, off-key. “I like to play with passion,” he said. “And I love your guitar. I felt great playing it. I felt real.”

“Real,” I repeated. I tried to think of something to add, to make an impression.

“Where are you from?” said Jake.

I wondered if he was making fun of me, but he was too stoned. “I’m from Beirut,” I said.

“Beirut.” Jake closed his eyes. “That’s in Latin America, right?”

“Right,” I said.

“Can you play something from your country?”

“Tango or salsa?” I chuckled at my own joke. I took a long drag and allowed the smoke to percolate in my lungs. My brain was grateful. “How about something from Baghdad?” I began a maqâm for the first time in years, clumsily in the first few bars. The guitar’s sound proved awkward, and my pick had to strum harder. My fingers still remembered how to play, but the frets got in the way. I had to improvise. I slowed down, allowing myself more time to adjust. Count Basie and not Oscar Peterson. I switched to Maqâm Bayati, which had the fewest half- or quarter-notes. Images of the great desert seared the back of my eyelids. The notes seemed so naturally logical. My fingers played with a tarantulan languor.

I opened my eyes to see Jake gawping, his expression tinged with shock and wonder. His roommate looked dazed. “That was different,” Jake said.

“You shouldn’t play anything but that,” the roommate said. “It had soul.”

The hairs on my arms rose for an instant. I began another maqâm, trying to lose myself in the essence of the music, in its passion. Played for about ten minutes before I paused and noticed that my discriminating audience had passed out. I resumed the maqâm, but I couldn’t make the guitar produce the sounds I was hearing in my head. Finally, it came to me. I knew what was wrong. I walked out of the room and into the common kitchen. I unstrung my guitar and put it on the
Formica counter. I searched the drawers for the right tool, but could come up with nothing better than a steak knife to defret my J200. The steak knife was too flimsy, so I tried a bread knife. Without its frets, my guitar would sound better, more me. The bread knife didn’t work, either. I plugged in the carving knife, and the current jerked it into life. I went to work. The sound of the knife’s tiny motor grew deafening, but I persisted. I went too deep with the first fret, not so much with the second. I’d figured out how to operate by the third and fourth, but I stopped at the fifth. I stared at the dying instrument before me and left it. I returned to my dorm room and lay down, my head buzzing.

“I was with Ali for years, through school, through college,” Uncle Jihad went on. “And you should know, those wonderful pigeoneers had a lot to do with our family being where it is today. There was another one as well. Let me explain. Ali abhorred this one pigeoneer, Mohammad Be
aini. They were mortal enemies, and not simply because the Be
ainis were Sunni and the Itanis were Shiite. It seemed that Ali’s father had once insulted Mohammad’s, and the bad blood festered. Ali and Mohammad had never actually spoken to each other. They grew up with the feud, and each assumed the other was evil. One day, two or three years after I started with Ali—maybe it was 1948—one of Mohammad’s pigeons landed on our roof. Ali recognized it immediately and held his tongue. The bird seemed lost, so I approached it from behind, netted it, and carried it to the small cage, but Ali said, ‘No. Wring its neck. Mohammad won’t ask for it, and I won’t return it.’ I was flabbergasted. I refused to do it. ‘It’s for the bird’s own good,’ Ali said. ‘It’ll suffer away from home. We can’t keep it. It’s the humane thing to do.’ I held it out to him. If he wanted it dead, then he’d have to kill it. Kamal came to my rescue. ‘You can’t make the young man do your work. Either kill it yourself or return it.’

“ ‘I won’t return it,’ insisted Ali. I told him I would, and he replied, ‘He knows you work for me. I won’t have it.’ Well, I knew about saving face. ‘I’ll take it back and tell him you weren’t here when it landed.’ And relief blushed Ali’s face. Even Kamal smiled. I walked the bird to Mohammad Be
aini’s. The look on his face was priceless when he recognized me. I told him that Ali hadn’t been there, but he didn’t believe me. He took the bird back and thanked me.

“Now, in a great story, Ali and Mohammad would become great friends, and their grandchildren would marry each other, and they would have offspring that were family, but that wasn’t the case. Mohammad simply stopped talking badly about Ali and refused to be anywhere near anyone who would. And whenever someone complimented Ali on his magnificent coop, he said, ‘I wish my pigeons were as lovely as Be
aini’s.’ They both passed away without having spoken a word to each other. So, you ask, why am I telling you a story without a great ending? Because, as in all great stories, the end is never where you expect it to be.