Gandhi was alone among them. He gave the Gypsy some money and decided to go back to Beirut. And in those fields that he did not recognize, he remembered only that smell. When he walked in the village at night, after the mourners left, nothing drew him to the place except that smell. Only the smell itself remained from his childhood, for childhood is a world of smells, and the world we leave behind we never go back to, because we don’t know it. Gandhi knew nothing.
In the village he married his cousin.
His uncle sold lupine beans from a pushcart in the streets of Tripoli. He saw him at the wake but didn’t recognize him. Poverty had devoured his eyes, and age had transformed him into the remnants of a man. The Husn Ahmad family, which traced back its roots to the sheikhs of the Akkar region, had lost all their property to time, fear, and marriage. Gandhi’s father sold the land in order to support his wives, and his uncle was forced to migrate from the village after he divorced his second wife, the daughter of Saeed Zahraman. Her father came and told him to pay ten times the amount he owed him according to the marriage contract. He was accompanied by a group of armed men from his tribe and said he’d destroy Mashta Hasan and everyone in it. So his poor uncle was forced to sell the last two remaining pieces of land he owned, and paid, and took his wife and children and fled from the village. He went to live in Tripoli and never went back to the village except for brief visits.
And that day, during the burial of Husn, Little Gandhi’s father, the uncle came to Gandhi. He was sitting beside him, scratching his nose and blowing it. Then he turned toward him and discussed his daughter with him. Gandhi agreed to marry her. He was twenty years old and wanted to start a new job. He came back, married the girl, and took her to Beirut.
The first day he was afraid of her as they rode in the taxi that took them to Halba, on the way to Beirut. He saw the whites of her eyes. He remembered the whites of the gypsy wife’s eyes. He said to himself she’d kill him, and he’d be better off if he divorced her. But she stayed with him and gave him seven children. They all died before she had Husn and Suad. She wore him out with hospitals and the fear of her dying.
She was a silent woman. When he’d come home she’d sit quietly and not ask anything. She’d cook and clean, but she didn’t care about anything. And Gandhi alone took on the difficult burden of their daughter.
Gandhi didn’t remember much about Mashta Hasan.
“We don’t own anything there,” he said to me. “When you don’t have any land, it doesn’t have any meaning. Mashta Hasan is nothing to me. Even the house, we found out my father had mortgaged it … I don’t know about the women, they went back to their villages, and the daughters got married, and I’m here.”
Gandhi said he went once to the village after his father’s death. “I went to see a distant cousin of mine, and there I found out the world had changed. The smell of apples filled the place. They stopped planting corn and wheat and planted apple trees. It was late August and the apples dangled from the trees, and their aroma wafted in the plain. From that day on I started loving apples, before then I didn’t like them, to me they tasted like potatoes. I couldn’t understand that American professor. I never saw him without an apple in his hand, chomping on it, while his books and notebooks nearly fell from his other hand. Now I love apples, the smell of them on the tree slices into your heart.”
Gandhi remembered the story of the lira.
He remembered when he fled from the cave, that black night, and threw himself into the cornfields and walked, he remembered that he stopped in front of Haj Ismail’s store and stole a lira from his cash register. Haj Ismail was a strange man. When he’d take the money from his customers, he’d tear the bills in half and put them in two separate piles on two sides of the register. That way no one could steal from him. When he wanted, he’d tape two halves back together. And so all the liras in the village had a piece of tape down the middle. The cash register was full of half-liras. Little Gandhi took two halves. He wasn’t sure they were the same one; he was afraid to make sure and have Haj Ismail catch him as he fiddled with the register. And then again, how could he make sure when he couldn’t even tell the face of the lira from the back side. He took the two halves and ran. He stuck them together with some glue he plucked from an almond tree and stopped a truck on the road to Halba. He waved the lira and the driver stopped. He let him ride in back between the sheaves of wheat and took him to Tripoli.
There, in the port, where the truck stopped, Gandhi saw the sea and was frightened. It was the first time in his life he saw something so huge, surging as it did, blue and colorful. He stood in front of the sea like an idiot, barely moving.
“Where are you headed?” the driver asked him.
“I don’t know. Here.”
“I’ll take you to Rashid. You can work for him as an errand boy in the bakery.”
Gandhi nodded his head in agreement and went to work there for four years. The first few months he slept at the bakery, then he moved to a room at Um Omar Hisiyyeh’s house. He paid her ten piasters and two loaves of bread every day. Um Omar was deaf, but she never made a mistake counting her money and hid it in a place only she and God knew about. There were about ten young men who slept in that room.
Gandhi found work in Tripoli thanks to that glued together lira. The driver was from the nearby village of Mashta Hammoud, and there was no question he’d told his father where he was. In the early days Gandhi was scared to death his father would come and kill him.
Master Baker Rashid’s wife, Rashida, as Gandhi used to call her, put him at ease.
“Don’t be afraid, you’re with me, if he dares come I’ll break his legs.”
Gandhi was afraid, but his father didn’t come and Gandhi didn’t die. He stayed at the bakery for many long months, four years or more, and it was there he learned about life.
Master Rashid, the dark-skinned, gray-haired, slender man, looked like a key. That’s what his wife, Um Jamal, used to say, the one Gandhi called Madame Rashida.
Madame Rashida was everything. She was in complete charge, while her husband the key did nothing. He’d sit in front of the oven, puffing away at the water pipe in front of him. Then he started running away from the bakery and going to the glass coffeehouse in Meena, where he’d spend the whole day puffing away and saying, “God help us.” He talked a lot, and only about politics. He’d talk about the Ottoman sultans as though they were his own relatives. “How great was Sultan Abd al-Hamid; but they stabbed him in the back, woman.” And the woman would sigh and tell him to worry about the price of flour. “Flour? What flour? You call this flour? You call this a country? You just don’t understand.” Then he’d go to his coffeehouse and wonder about this “Grand Liban” that was ultimately put together.
“Grand, my foot. May God make it smaller. What’s so grand about it? We didn’t want it that way. But what do we want anyway?”
That’s what he did all day at the coffeehouse; he’d sit with a group of men puffing away at the water pipe and talking about how things had been turned upside down. They’d end up fighting over checker games, and when he’d return to the bakery tired at three in the afternoon, when Um Jamal was giving out the work orders for preparing the flour to make the night’s dough, he’d come out of the blue with a question about political events and she’d shut him up with a wave of her hand. She’d dish out a plate of food for him. He’d eat in the bakery, sweat dripping from him, and then he’d go home to sleep. And Um Jamal ordered everyone around. Gandhi, who wasn’t called Gandhi at the time (actually, they called him Abd), would stand there like a slave at her command. Abd would come hungry and exhausted after he finished delivering the packages of bread. She’d give him one loaf filled with yesterday’s leftovers and two loaves for the deaf woman, and his daily earnings of half a lira. “Get going, God be with you, son,” she’d tell him. Then she’d repeat the story of her son Jamal. “He’s a loafer. He hates to work. But you, you’re a real hard worker. I love you like a son. You’re a little rascal.” She’d look him up and down, as if she were trying to find out how much he made in tips from the houses he delivered bread to.