Simaan Fayyad really was a nitwit. Everyone treated him like one and he couldn’t do anything right. He wasted his father’s fortune with the stroke of a pen after one of his uncles convinced him to take him as his partner in the silk business. The business evaporated and along with it the fortune. Simaan Fayyad then became a sexton in Saint George’s Cathedral in the middle of town and put in time every evening at the diocese doing nothing.
It was Simaan Fayyad who told Vitsky that Russia was the salt of the earth. He told her the story of his grandfather. Prince Alexander, the czar’s brother, visited Beirut in 1896 and roamed around in the Sursuq Quarter, where his grandfather Fayyad Fayyad lived and worked as a silk merchant.
He told about how the czar’s brother rode around Beirut in a carriage drawn by six Arabian horses. When he got to the Sursuq Quarter he saw a strange thing. There was a mound of salt on the side of the road roughly five meters long and two meters wide. Hundreds of lighted candles had been placed on top of it. And Mr. Fayyad Fayyad stood there next to it wearing his red fez and his white silk gown with the striped belt. He stood in front of the candles, waiting, as though he were guarding them.
The czar’s brother stopped the carriage, which was being pulled by six pure-bred Arabian horses, got out, and saw Fayyad.
“What is this?” asked the blond Russian prince with the gleaming blue eyes.
Fayyad Fayyad bowed down so low his tarboosh nearly touched the ground and said, “This is for His Highness the Prince.”
He asked the interpreter accompanying him what it meant.
Fayyad stood up straight and said, “Salt. Salt means Russia is the salt of the earth.”
The interpreter translated Fayyad’s words into Russian. The czar’s brother approved with a big smile that made his whole face shine.
“And the candles?” the prince asked.
“The candles, Your Majesty, the candles symbolize Russia as the light of the world,” Fayyad said without waiting for the interpreter to translate the prince’s question into Arabic.
After the interpreter translated Fayyad’s answer into Russian the prince approached this Lebanese man, placed his hand on his head, and said, “Demand whatever you want, I speak on behalf of the czar of Russia. The czar of all Russia takes you under his protection, and is ready to grant all your requests. Demand whatever you want. All your wishes will be granted.”
Fayyad Fayyad listened to the prince’s words through the voice of the interpreter, his eyes watching the prince and not believing what they saw.
The old man with the wrinkled face couldn’t decide what to ask for, and so he stood there silently, as though he hadn’t heard the Russian prince’s words.
“Say something, Uncle,” the interpreter said.
Fayyad Fayyad said he had one request.
“What is your request?” the interpreter asked, as though he were trying to get Fayyad to hurry up and say something.
“My request, my son, tell His Highness, tell him, I don’t want them to tell me ‘Throw the rope down, Fayyad’ anymore.”
“What do you mean?” the interpreter said.
“You tell him that every evening, this guy who lights up the streets comes. I’d be sitting in my house on the first floor and he comes and says, ‘Throw the rope down, Fayyad’ and I throw it down. I fill the lantern with oil, raise it back up with the rope, hang it up, and light it. I don’t want anyone to tell me, ‘Throw the rope down, Fayyad’ anymore.”
Fayyad Fayyad didn’t know what the interpreter translated to the czar’s brother. All he saw was the prince’s smile beaming on his face. His face twinkled like an icon. The czar’s brother got in his carriage drawn by six pure-bred Arabian horses and left Fayyad and his candles lighted all night long.
Vitsky asked if Fayyad stopped letting down the lantern, and Fayyad the grandson answered, “I don’t know. The Turks left and then came the French, and under the French everything changed. The Jesuits took over everything and we no longer knew in which country we were living. One minute the state of Beirut, the next Greater Lebanon, the next Syria, and the next I don’t know what. The French are like priests; no one understands them.”
Simaan Fayyad was trying to explain to the Russian princess that the French mandate was the cause of all the problems. But she didn’t quite understand his position, for he loved France and loved to sleep.
Vitsky no longer saw Simaan Fayyad after her arrival at the Sabbagha family house. But she used to say that all the Lebanese are like Fayyad, they don’t know what they’re asking for and they don’t know what they want. She especially hated the Reverend Amin and refused to talk to him. She’d look at him with disgust when he’d come to visit Madame Sabbagha. She’d go into a small room next to the kitchen and turn on the television.
The Reverend Amin didn’t try to speak to her. He knew she hated him, and he didn’t like her either. He saw her as the main obstacle in his new relationship with Lillian Sabbagha.
The Reverend Amin was lonely. From the time his wife left he felt sad, and as if the world were slipping out from under him. His church had become empty; no one came to it anymore. He, too, decided not to pray there. He’d pray in his house, all alone. He’d read the Bible but wouldn’t give any sermons. He felt his throat was dry and he needed a lot of whiskey. He’d find himself alone in front of Our Lady Church, and Father John would drive him home.
Gandhi told Alice senility had eaten up the Reverend Amin’s brain, that he could no longer speak normally. He spit more than he talked.
And Alice would smile. “That’s life,” she’d say. “Who’d have said that all glory reverts to clay in the end.”
No one remembered how the Reverend Amin used to be, how he opened his church and built his parish singlehandedly.
The Reverend Amin told her, and Alice believed him.
He said he’d lost hope when he wasn’t elected to be pastor of Beirut after the Reverend Fuad Tahhan’s death. It was then, in 1963, that Alfred came. Alfred was an eccentric man. They said he’d been involved with the unsuccessful military coup attempt undertaken by the Syrian Socialist Party in 1961, and that after a year in prison he worked as an officer in the Secret Service (Deuxième Bureau). Alfred wanted to marry the Reverend Amin’s daughter Samia, but she refused because she was in love with an American student with a red beard who was planning to marry her and take her to California. Alfred was the one who encouraged the Reverend Amin to establish an independent church in Ras Beirut. He rented the house and gathered the parishioners and convinced Dr. John Davis to be the first. Alfred Sawaya was in his forties, bald, with protruding eyes and protruding red lips.
Alfred came to the first church meeting and said a pastor must be elected. He announced his own nomination and started campaigning about his virtues, and about his grandfather who was the first in Lebanon and Syria to embrace the Protestant faith.
The church would have slipped out of Amin Aramouni’s hands had John Davis not settled the matter. The tall American stood up in the middle of the small hall, which was full of men and women, and spoke in Arabic.
“It’s not right,” he said. “You are an officer, Mr. Alfred, and an officer doesn’t have the right to be a pastor. We want Reverend Amin.”
Amin expected Alfred to defend himself, but he didn’t speak. He left the church and didn’t come back. And from that day on the Reverend Amin became the respected and cherished pastor of the Presbyterian Church of Ras Beirut.
Amin never forgot that he began his life as a missionary and that his duty was to minister to non-Christians. And so he found in Little Gandhi what he’d been searching for.
Gandhi had closed his restaurant for good after the death of the dog and went back to the shoe-shine business. He’d put his box in front of Faysal’s Restaurant and start working at six in the morning. He was, with his loose-fitting clothes and his head bent over his box, the main guidepost in the street. He was the shoe shiner everyone went to. He worked quietly and carefully; you could barely hear his voice. When he spoke, he’d whisper and wave his hands, as if he thought his voice came out of his hands. His customers didn’t understand a word he said, but they came anyway. Business was booming for him, especially after the Reverend decided to include him in his little church and the whole congregation started going to him.