Alice used to say that his eyes oozed innocence despite his pale coloring and half-shaven beard, and his constant bragging about his criminal record. And in this bar Alice would meet Gandhi regularly, when he came almost every evening and drank a glass of brandy before going home. Alice couldn’t forget Gandhi. “Even my own father I’ve forgotten, but not Gandhi. He was something else. He was a man … but somehow not a man … a man as if, how can I put it, as if you yourself are standing in front of a mirror. I know all kinds of men, from my father to those I met dancing in bars at age twelve, to that White Russian, what’s his name? The one who used to sniff cocaine and dance on the table like a king, and he was a king, but they said he was an Israeli spy, these days everyone is an Israeli spy, but it’s okay. And then there’s the Lieutenant Tannous and his wife, and Abu Jamil the impresario, who bought and sold us, and then ‘The Leader.’4 I won’t tell you about ‘The Leader,’ because you’ll think I’m lying. Do I lie, my friend? After all, you’re like my own son, and Gandhi, God rest his soul, was like my own son. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Even The ‘Leader,’ when I grabbed him between his legs and he screamed, I thought of him as a son to me. I don’t have any children, but when I remember them, I feel the milk is going to leak from my breasts. But the Reverend … the Reverend was different, he was a religious man, and with him I was different. I slept with him, the poor man forgot everything, imagine, he forgot he was a Reverend. He told me, Alice, my wife’s name is Alice, but I didn’t believe him. I took him through all the checkpoints to the nursing home in Ashrafiyyeh, and there the impossible happened, I’ll tell you about that later. What was I saying? I was telling you something. I’m always talking about something. That’s what the Lieutenant Tannous used to tell me, but he turned out to be a coward. Anyway, my son, what do you want me to tell you about?”
I’d listen to her and see her in front of me, but it was as though she weren’t really there. She’d fade away into her words, as though her body vanished while the stories transformed into stories.
“Kamal al-Askary was a man, may God protect his honor, may God protect our honor. No one dared get close to him, that’s why they killed him. They all killed him, left him there squirming in the bar. But poor Gandhi, or poor Abd al-Karim, I don’t know why he had two names, as if he were more than one man. He was like a mirror. When he died, I felt as though the mirror had smashed to the ground, and it truly has fallen. And now, as you can see, flower selling is over for me. The owner of the Salonica Hotel is a disgusting man, I can’t stand him. What have I become? A maid. If you only knew, my friend, how I used to be, but you don’t know. You think that now is now, but it’s not true, my son.”
Alice ended her story with the scene of the dead man.
They found him lying on the road with the shoe-shine box next to him. They said he’d gotten scared. He heard the Israelis were arresting everyone, he was afraid of going to jail, he was afraid of going back to the cave they jailed him in a long time ago. He was afraid he’d be accused of cooperating with the freedom fighters, through his work in keeping the quarter clean. He was scared. He carried his shoe-shine box, hung it around his neck, letting it swing by its old leather strap, and he walked. And they were everywhere. They shouted at him to stop, or they didn’t shout, no one knows. But they fired. They left him to fall on top of the box, his neck hanging from the rim, and his body slumped over.
Alice came and covered him with newspapers. She came from the bar where she’d slept that night. She’d heard the shots and came running. She saw him and saw the water that was falling on the city. She covered him. The salt that was spreading through the city melted in the raindrops, and the papers covering him got wet and wrinkled. And Alice stood there in her long black dress, the rain pouring down on a city worn out by the siege.
“Everything that was, was a long time ago,” Alice said. “You think I’m Alice, but it’s not true, my son. Alice was, now means what was, and what was means a long time ago. And everything was a long time ago. There’s no such thing as now.”
Alice didn’t say, she would disappear into streets littered with death. I searched for her a long time but didn’t find her, as though she’d gone and entered into the destruction that had taken her.
3
Alice said he died.
“I came and saw him, I covered him with newspapers, there was no one 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 was born, he doesn’t remember how, his father named him Abd al-Karim because he was called Husn, and his father had been Abd al-Karim, and his grandfather was Husn, and great grandfather was Abd al-Karim, and so on all the way back to Noah’s Ark. But Noah, who fled to his ark, had no idea what might become of his descendants. You see, Noah and people like him who were able, and are able, to escape, have no idea that the real story is the one about those who couldn’t escape. And since we all pretend to be runaways, for fear of being gobbled up by death, the stories about those who couldn’t run away strike us as very odd, totally unbelievable. The stories seem distant, and we don’t want anything to do with them, except merely as stories. Maybe this is what led me to my friendship with Abd al-Karim Husn al-Ahmadi al-Mughayiri, alias Little Gandhi.
I was standing in front of him with my shoe up on the footrest of his wooden box, thinking to myself, when I asked him what his name was.
“My name is Gandhi,” he said.
“Welcome, Mr. Gandhi!”
I figured he must have been the son of an educated man from late Ottoman times, who lived during the days of the mandate and hoped to make his son a great leader for independence.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” I said to him, and then asked him where he was from.
“From Akkar.”
“And was your father a shoe shiner, too?”
He smiled. “No. My father owns a store in the village, and he has some land and some goats.”
I remembered the real Gandhi, and the goats with which he began his revolution against the British, and the stories of Haj Amin al-Husayni5 when Gandhi presented him the goats as a gift. Everyone rejoiced then and said Palestine was liberated.
But Gandhi dashed all my hopes. His father didn’t name him Gandhi, he named him Abd al-Karim, and he didn’t call his son Nehru, instead he named him Husn. And his son didn’t even like the name Husn, so he took the name Ralph when he was working in the barbershop, and with the onset of the war, he was confused about what he should do, so he called himself Ghassan, but the name didn’t stick, so he went back to Husn and everyone laughed at him. Finally, he gave up and just let people call him whatever they wanted.