The next day the bishop crossed the green line and came to the burial.
Alice told me that Father John al-Mazraani told her the whole story.
“Unbelievable. You know how it is. You must know. Things have a way of turning around with the passing of time. And this Russian woman was the turning point. Life didn’t turn around, she did. Oh, I don’t know.”
Alice said her friendship with Father John al-Mazraani began because she was concerned about the Reverend Amin during his last days. After she brought him to the nursing home in Ashrafiyyeh, Father John became her friend. She’d visit him in the late afternoon as he sat on the bench of Our Lady Church, drinking lemonade and telling her about Mary Magdalene. And she’d tell him about her life.
He asked her once why she didn’t come to church on Sundays.
“How can I, Father? I’m a Muslim.”
“A Muslim? I can’t believe it. You look like you could’ve studied at the nuns’ school.”
“I was a student of the whorehouse. It’s all the same, Father.”
The priest had become convinced that it really was all the same. There he was, living alone and isolated. His beard was going gray and the long hair he kept tied in a bun at the back of his neck was falling out. And the days passed, and the war took everyone away. There was no one left. They were all gone. Life now meant waiting for death. Father John, the priest of the Orthodox Church of Beirut, now felt that it was all the same in the end. Had he stayed in Hawsh Malab al-Salaam and become a soccer player, he’d have wound up exactly the same as he was now.
As a child he was ashamed of the “Hawsh” and he wasn’t really a Mazraani. It was the old senile Bishop Athanasios, God rest his soul, who stuck his family with the name “Mazraani” (Farmer). Father John, whose real name was Anwar Nasri, was born in Hawsh Malab al-Salaam. There he was born with hundreds of children, in stone shacks that were built next to the soccer field in Ashrafiyyeh in order to accommodate the Hurani immigrants who left the Suweida region in the 1920s during the great Syrian Revolution. People fled to Beirut. Women in long black robes, black headdress braided over their heads, tattoos covering their hands and chins, and behind them the children and the men. In Beirut, the men did construction work and the women worked as maids in people’s homes. They all lived in the Hawsh, which belonged to the Greek Orthodox Endowment Fund of the Beirut Diocese. Here Anwar Nasri was born and received a free education. His mother took him to the diocese because he had a beautiful voice. He lived in that luxurious building in the Sursuq Quarter of West Beirut. He ate like a king, studied theology, and carried the censer until he became a priest.
“I didn’t have the luck to become a bishop. Maybe it was because they saw me as just the son of a maid. Isn’t a maid a human being, too? Shame on them. But it’s better this way. My responsibilities are few, Alice. This way I’ll stand before Him with double the talents He gave me, and I won’t be scoffed at in the next world.”
From Ashrafiyyeh he went to Ras Beirut, and there he has lived for thirty years. He’d seen everything. He saw the city as it was being transformed into the Tower of Babel. He saw people speaking all languages, and he saw the faces as they turned into ruins of time. He’d seen it all, and now he sat on the stone bench, a glass of lemonade in his hand, aching with loneliness and listening to Alice’s memoirs and the stories of his neighbors, wanting a woman. Any woman. Our Father John had started confusing women in his mind, mixing names and faces, uncertain about who goes with what and where to begin. He’d see them before him like shadows coming and going, totally elusive to him. All the pleasures of this world had gone. Cholesterol and high blood pressure, there was only one pleasure that remained, words. Talking was the only delight Father John al-Mazraani couldn’t get enough of. He’d sit out in front of his church like a hunter waiting for his prey to be caught in the snare of his words.
That was how he told everyone the story of poor Vitsky, and each time he exaggerated the details a little bit.
When he told the story to Abu Saeed, he added the part about Vitsky’s infatuation with him, and how his priest’s habit prevented him from committing a sin. The priest was making things up of course, for Vitsky never met him at the diocese. The last time she visited the diocese, when the scandal with Bishop Athanasios took place, she was twenty years old. Father John was still a child playing soccer in Malab al-Salaam. He said she fell in love with him, and until this day he still has a special place in his heart for her. That’s why he insisted the bishop attend the funeral, even though Abu Saeed had seen him screaming at Lillian, telling her it would be impossible.
Father John was convinced of what he told. We’re all like that. We believe in what we say. And when I try to write what they told me, I discover that Alice was right.
“Memories are a disgrace, my son. Once you get to the point where there’s nothing left but your memories, it’s over. The mule has stopped pulling for you, and the lantern’s on its last drop of oil.”
Vitsky was scared when Simaan Fayyad drove her to Lillian Sabbagha’s house. Lillian was living with her daughter Sorayya and her husband, George. Vitsky agreed with Lillian to come every day to help with the housework, but she refused to sleep at the house. Mr. George helped her find a room to rent at the end of Makhoul Street, the very room in which the white princess died.
Vitsky was not a maid in every sense of the word. Actually, there was an elderly maid called Wadia at Madame Sabbagha’s house. Vitsky was the caretaker. She spoke only French. She decided which foods were to be cooked and would not tolerate anyone questioning her orders. She despised that Lebanese bourgeoisie, which could fathom only the outer skin of civilization.
After Mr. George died of leukemia, and the daughter was sent to a school for the handicapped in the village of Beit Miri, a strong friendship grew between the maid and the mistress. The mistress thrived on the past glories of the Sabbagha family, and the maid refused to tell anything about Russia and the czars. The maid was the true mistress. She acted as though the house belonged to her, and as though Madame Lillian was living in her house. The main thing that bothered Vitsky was her feeling that she’d come to Beirut against her will. She’d fled to Istanbul with her cousin Philip, who was an officer in the White Army. Vitsky always insisted on calling it Constantinople after the occupation of the family castle in Kiev. She fled with her cousin Without knowing anything about the true fate of the rest of her family. One of the emigrant White Russians who surrounded Istanbul told her they were all killed. From Istanbul they’d decided to immigrate to Alexandria. Her cousin made the decision, and she went along with it. Vitsky believed they’d get married in Alexandria. Her cousin disappeared. He left her in the small hotel on a street whose name she didn’t know. He left and didn’t come back. She waited ten days for him and then boarded the ship that took her to Beirut rather than Alexandria.
In Beirut she found nowhere to go but the diocese. There she found herself among a group of immigrants who’d been given makeshift accommodations. Vitsky lived there in a small room with no windows near Akawi hill and began giving private French lessons in people’s homes.