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Alice said he died.
“I came and saw him, I covered him with newspapers, no one was around, his wife disappeared, they all disappeared, and I was all alone.”
Alice said she took him to the cemetery, and she saw the people without faces. “People have become faceless,” she told me. She spoke to them and didn’t get any response, then she left them and went on her way. That’s how the story ended.
“Tell me about him,” I said to her.
“How shall I tell you?” she answered. “I was living as though I were living with him without realizing it. When you live, you don’t notice things. I didn’t notice, I just don’t know.” She shook her head and repeated her sentence. “All I know is, he died, and he died for nothing.”
I recall Alice’s words and try to imagine what happened, but I keep finding holes in the story. All stories are full of holes. We no longer know how to tell stories, we don’t know anything anymore. The story of Little Gandhi ended. The journey ended, and life ended.
That’s how the story of Abd al-Karim Husn al-Ahmadi al-Mughayiri, otherwise known as Little Gandhi, ended.
Little Gandhi woke up. Little Gandhi didn’t sleep a wink that night. It was unlike any of the nights of that strange summer. Beirut woke up as though it hadn’t slept. There was salt. Everyone said the white salt had been sprinkled onto the streets, as though it had rained salt. But it hadn’t rained, and the city was drowning in silence. Beirut was swimming in darkness and drowning. Little Gandhi felt as though the city was drowning. Silence climbed up the neck of the small man sitting alone in his usual corner in the cellar of the Burj al-Salam1 building, which had been his home for the past six years. Little Gandhi was scared. Not the kind of trembling fear that pounded his back when he listened to the sounds of the planes attacking the city, a different kind of fear. Fear that seals your eyes shut, as if with two big stones. The small man couldn’t open his eyes, but he didn’t sleep. He’d see what looked like the shadow of his short, plump wife, pacing around the room as though she wanted to speak and didn’t.
Suddenly it started, that roaring sound that tears door hinges apart.
Dozens of airplanes were circling low, sucking up the air and nearly touching the tops of the buildings. Little Gandhi didn’t move an inch. It appears as though he did sleep, even though he thought he didn’t. Sleep came to him in the middle of feeling wide awake, so he no longer knew whether he was seeing reality or dreaming. He opened his small eyes and didn’t see anything. He found himself sitting in the corner of the room, right where he began. Fear devoured him. He leaned against the wall, and the wall felt like it was about to fall down. He opened his eyes and didn’t see anything. He slept and didn’t see anything. The darkness pierced by the whiteness of early dawn gave things a strange color. As he licked his lips with his tongue, his mouth filled with the taste of salt. Yesterday it rained salt. Little Gandhi saw the salt on the streets, saw that whiteness spread out as if it were the tongue of some dead animal stretching out into the streets.
“You are the salt of the earth,” he said to the old Assyrian when he was at his store the night before. That was the fourteenth of September, 1982. The Israeli army was on the outskirts of Beirut, and the explosion in Ashrafiyyeh made him feel as though the city were going to fall into the sea. And he remembered the Reverend Amin, he remembered him as a young man standing in front of him with his white-and-brown shoes ready for polishing. Gandhi was confused about how to polish the perforated leather without upsetting the Reverend. He remembered the shoes and the Reverend’s sallow, tawny face and white teeth as they spat out that expression he repeated endlessly: “You are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted?” The Reverend spoke with his teeth clenched. How will he speak later on, when he becomes senile and his teeth fall out? Little Gandhi saw the Reverend go senile and stop talking. He saw him in front of Our Lady of Lamentations Church, standing like a madman, saying nothing but Greek prayers. He remembered the Reverend and forgot his own name. He forgot why they named him Gandhi, for he didn’t know who this man called Gandhi was. When the tall American professor told him Gandhi was a leader of India, and was a hero, Little Gandhi exploded with concealed laughter. Ever since he began working at Salim Abu Ayoun’s restaurant, he didn’t dare laugh, his laugh had become something like a yawn. The day before, when he heard the news of the explosion and the death of the president of the republic,2 this very laugh came back to him. He left his laugh in front of Spiro with the hat’s store and ran home.
The store owner, in his sixties, who always sat behind his desk swatting flies, was talking about the end of the war. And the old Assyrian was agreeing with him. Gandhi hated that Assyrian with the big nose, who bowed down to everyone. It’s true he used to shine his shoes, and his childrens’ shoes, but that all ended a long time ago. Little Gandhi had left the shoe-shining business five years earlier. It wasn’t the first time he’d left his profession; he’d done so before when he opened a restaurant at the expense of the American dog. He talked about what happened with Mr. Davis, professor of philosophy at the American University of Beirut, who introduced him to the Reverend Amin and invited him to come pray at the church. Gandhi went only once to the church, but he became friends with Mr. Davis’s dog, and through that friendship he became a restaurant owner.
Mr. Davis came to him once and asked him to help him feed his dog. “I don’t have anything, all I have is shoes,” Gandhi said.
But the American professor, who spoke Arabic with a real Beiruti accent, told him to get a burlap bag and follow him.
Gandhi followed him to the restaurant. He’d take the leftovers, put them in the bag, and then take them to Mr. Davis’s house. And from this bag he got his idea. He started bringing lots of bags with him. He’d give one bag to Davis’s dog and take the rest to his house in Nabaa. There, in front of his house, he opened a restaurant. Labneh,3 cheese, meat, kebab, hummus, vegetables, whatever. A plate of labneh, ten piasters, a plate of meat, half a lira, by God he actually opened a restaurant. Gandhi lived off of Mr. Davis’s dog. When the dog died, he offered to buy Mr. Davis another dog. But Davis was very sad. They said he was going to divorce his wife, they said his wife killed the dog because she was jealous of him. But that didn’t stop Gandhi from buying a German shepherd puppy and taking care of it in his house, causing the problems that almost drove his wife crazy and made Suad scream. And all of it for nothing, because Mr. Davis left, and the Reverend refused to take the dog, and the dog became attached to Gandhi, and Gandhi was forced to kill the dog and go back to shining shoes.
This time around, he left the business for good and got himself a better way to make a living, as the man responsible for keeping the quarter clean. Fawziyya, his wife, said he’d gone from being a shoe shiner to being a garbage collector. But that wasn’t true. Now he was responsible for something; a garbage collector isn’t responsible for anything. He sweeps the streets and picks up the trash and goes on his way. Little Gandhi, on the other hand, was responsible for the trash from A to Z. He had to distribute the plastic bags, pick them up, throw them away, and make sure no one violated the system.