The Hakawati Read Online Free Page B

But he was family, Aunt Nazek’s brother, my father’s brother Halim’s wife’s brother, and that to my father was more valuable than credentials or prestigious alma maters. In the last few years, he had refused to travel for medical attention and sought only the family doctor.
    I heard my voice speak. “And the doctor told the poor father, ‘The only way to heal your son is to take his heart.’ ”
    Their voices joined mine. “ ‘For the evil jinni has made himself a home there.’ ”
    My father laughed. “Don’t do this to me.” He clutched his heart, pretending pain. “My evil jinni doesn’t like to be amused.”
    “You’re still ever so strange,” my sister said. “What possessed you to think of that? How long has it been since you’ve heard that line? Thirty years?”
    “More than that,” my father said. “My father died thirty years ago, and he wasn’t telling those stories of his by then. It must have been thirty-five, maybe thirty-seven years.” He took a raspy breath. “God, Osama, you were such a young boy then.”
    My grandfather actually told me those stories of his until the day he died. He was a storyteller after all, in spirit and in profession. My father tried at different times to get him to stop filling my head with fanciful narratives, but he never succeeded.
    “What are you staring at?” Lina asked me. “Turn around and look at us.”
    “Look,” I said. “Look here. March has come in.”
    The sky was a perfectly cut aquamarine. As in most Mediterranean cities, Beirut’s late winter can be either stormy and brumal or magnificently clear, smelling of sun-dried laundry.
    “It’s still February, stupid boy,” Lina said. “It’s just a break. The storms will come back.”
    “A glorious break.”
    She came up behind me. “You’re right. It is glorious.” Her arms encircled me, and I felt her weight upon my shoulders.
    “I want to see,” my father whined from his bed. “Help me up. I want to see.” We moved to the bed, helped him sit up, turn around, and stand. He leaned on my sister, the tallest of us three. I dragged the intravenous stand with its deflated balloons behind him as he shuffled the eight steps to the balcony. The cheeks of his rear end jiggled and seemed to droop a little lower with each step. On the balcony, the three of us lined up to admire the false spring and the sun that bathed the sprawling mass of rooftops.
    My father catnapped on the hospital bed. Outside, Lina inhaled each puff of her cigarette as if it were her last. She smoked so rapidly that the tip of the cigarette burned into a miniature red coal. She leaned back against the balcony railing, stared up at the sky. I stared down. Onthe third floor of the hospital, where illnesses were less grave, two women whispered to each other on their balcony like two pigeons cooing. Across the street, in the distance, stood a house that showed severe signs of aging. From where I stood, its shutters looked rotted.
    “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 hear you.” Just then, a car trumpeted its horn, one long uninterrupted burst. My sister jumped to check that the sliding door was completely shut. “What makes you think this time is different?” I asked. “He’s been dying for so long. He always pulls through.”
    “He won’t always pull through. It gets more difficult each time.”
    “I know that. But why this time?”
    She took a deep breath as she faced me. I could see her chest expand and deflate. My sister was much taller than I. It was with her height that she took after our mother, but Lina