“I swear I don’t have a piaster, Aunt, I’m broke.”
Abd thought she was going to attack him to search through his pockets, but she didn’t. She smiled, showing her yellow-black teeth and the gap that was left after two decayed teeth were extracted. “You’re a son of a gun,” she’d say to him. From that day on Gandhi was convinced he was a son of a gun. Otherwise, how would he have survived? No one could live in this country except a son of a gun.
He took a matchstick and struck it against his matchbox and began to whistle.
“It’s ten piasters for an order of labneh, or there’s no labneh,” he said to the customers in his restaurant who were sitting on a stone bench in front of the door. He’d set down a glass of arak in front of him in his house in Nabaa, while around him sat a group of Kurdish and Hurani workers who’d become regular customers of this thirdclass restaurant Gandhi opened at the expense of Mr. Davis’s dog. It had become very popular. The stone benches transformed into a real restaurant with cushions all over the floor.
“Those were the days,” Gandhi said to the Reverend Amin, who stood before him like a statue, with his black shoes up on the shoe-shine box.
“Keep polishing, my son. God love you. You’re a good boy. Why don’t you come to church?”
“God forbid, Reverend. I believe in God,” Gandhi would answer.
“Isn’t the Church the house of God? Don’t you know your Qur’an? ‘And nearest among them in love to the Believers wilt thou find those who say “We are Christians” ’ Come and take a look. What have you got to lose?”
And because Gandhi was a son of a gun, he decided to go and take a look.
The Reverend Amin wasn’t a pastor of the formal and dignified Evangelical church located in Zuqaq al-Blat; rather, he led the parish of a small church on Makhoul Street. It was more like a house that had been converted into a church. The story of the Reverend Amin and his church was complicated. He was a real Reverend. He became one after studying history and theology at the American University and was appointed an itinerant pastor by the evangelical synod. Amin was a zealous young man. He took this appointment as being called on a mission for Christianity. He saw himself as one of Jesus’ disciples, traveling throughout Lebanon and dying like the first martyrs. And so, on his way from Sidon to Beirut, Amin Aramouni discovered that the world belonged to him, and that he belonged to a future constructed out of knowledge and faith. That’s what the American evangelists taught him with their wisdom and kindness. He came to the church from the depths of poverty. He believed that Christ’s salvation meant the salvation of the whole world, and that America was the model of this new world that Christ had saved. He was twelve when famine struck Sidon during the First World War. The Reverend Amin didn’t remember anything from those difficult years except the famine. He used to go with his father the cobbler to buy bread. He’d hold his father’s hand firmly, because he was afraid his fast-paced father would leave him to the famine and have one less mouth to feed. On the sides of the streets of Sidon he’d see men and women with bloated bellies, screaming with hunger. That is when he learned not to give to anyone. He wasn’t stingy, but he never gave. He learned you can’t share your food with anybody, or you’ll die. And when the Reverend Amin became a pastor in Ras Beirut, after the small schism that took place in the church of Beirut, he continued to feel that he had to hold on to each mouthful and couldn’t share it with anyone. His wife, Eugenie, the Reverend Nabil Khoury’s daughter, couldn’t understand his stinginess. He was frugal about everything in the house except his whiskey. The children’s clothes were the subject of many an argument. He’d travel through the various districts and come to Beirut at the beginning of the week to stay with his wife for a couple of days.
“I’m like a fisherman,” he’d say to his wife. “I’m the fisher of souls. I go to locked-up churches and open them. I heal the sick, make the lame walk, and preach.”
He’d take a bath and sit down with a bottle of whiskey, and he wouldn’t get up until it was empty. His wife couldn’t understand how a preacher could get drunk, for she was the daughter of a preacher and grew up inside the church. She never witnessed such drunkenness except in that house. But she didn’t say anything. She saw in her husband the ghost of his father. She’d visited him once at their house in Ashrafiyyeh, before he died. She understood they belonged to a different milieu and a different world. Amin’s father, Tannous al-Aramouni, was a tall man who limped and was cross-eyed. He lived in a country home in Ashrafiyyeh. surrounded by China trees and a garden filled with loquat and almond trees, and one lone lemon tree and a tall palm tree. He was the only middle-aged man with no relatives, because his cousins, who lived in the village of Aramoun in the Aley area near Beirut, decided to cut off ties with him when he became a Protestant. But he had been forced into it. He told his wife if he hadn’t become a Protestant he’d have died of starvation during World War I. But his wife went along with everything and went to that church that looked nothing like the churches she was accustomed to — there was not a single icon. She’d shut her eyes from that picture that made her want to laugh, and she’d pray like the others. At home, in a corner of her room, she kept a box of Byzantine icons. In front of the icons was an oil lamp whose wick burned night and day. She insisted on christening her children in the baptismal font at the monastery of Saint Elias Btina in Beirut. She brought the children one by one, all the way from Sidon to Beirut and immersed them in the font. She believed it would cure all illness and cleanse body and soul. Amin’s mother hated Sidon and she couldn’t understand how they got to be like that, but she was obedient to her husband. When he told her he’d changed his religion, she went along with it. He said she had to learn the new religion. She said she didn’t have to, because all religions were the same to her. Whatever you want, she told her husband, is fine with me.
Her husband changed. Actually, nothing changed in him except the way he talked. Um Amin said to her halfsenile mother-in-law that he’d started speaking Arabic with a quasi-classical manner, like the Palestinian Protestant pastor of the church in Sidon.
“If it hadn’t been for my job at the American School I’d never have been able to send my kids to school. And if it hadn’t been for this new Christian denomination, we’d have died of hunger, like dogs.” Um Amin believed that all religions were similar, and she got used to the new one, but she never gave up making the sign of the cross like an Orthodox.
During her husband’s last days, when Amin went to the American University to study theology and her second son, Nicholas, got a job in one of the hotels on Lake Tiberias, Um Amin went back to Beirut, leaving the rest of the family in Sidon. In Ashrafiyyeh, in the house she inherited from her father, Um Amin resumed her old relationships with family and neighbors. Abu Amin Aramouni’s health deteriorated quickly and he became senile. He used to get lost in the streets of Ashrafiyyeh, thinking it was Sidon. He’d go to the coastal town of Dowra and sit for a long time thinking he was sitting at the port of Sidon. The woman was afraid her husband would get lost in the streets of Beirut, and Amin couldn’t care less.