Rima called him Ralph, and his father called him Husn, and Madame Nuha called him Ghassan, and he responded to all three. As for Gandhi, it was Mr. Davis who gave him that name. He said he resembled Gandhi, and all the faculty from the American University started coming to take a look at him, and his name became Gandhi. If you ask him, he prefers people to call him Abu Husn, but no one calls him that. Even his wife, Fawziyya, doesn’t call him anything but “man.” Then he accepted the name when they added on the “little.” That was thanks to the Reverend Amin. So then there was Gandhi of India and Little Gandhi, who was known to all the Ras Beirut locals by his sloppy gait and the wooden box hung around his neck. He was the only shoe shiner who hung his box from his neck. “It’s like a noose,” the Reverend Amin told him once. Gandhi laughed, or smiled, to be more precise, because he’d learned to conceal his laughter. He thought that death by hanging wouldn’t be so bad. It wouldn’t hurt, that’s what Dr. Atef told him when he was asking him about it after witnessing the public hanging of Tannir. Now, this Tannir was known as a tough guy, but he made a mistake. He threw acid in the face of the woman he loved and then killed her husband. Her husband was a very well known lawyer, and so he was sentenced to death by hanging. How different he was from al-Askary, who was famous for his gallantry and high moral character. The problem wasn’t with morals, it was with the rope. The difference between Tannir and al-Askary was that the first died by hanging, with everyone watching while he screamed and cursed everyone, saying that the woman had been cheating on him and her husband was an ass, and that he was the real victim. Whereas al-Askary died sprawled out on the floor of the Blow Up, left to squirm, no one bothering to pick him up. And when someone did pick him up, that was the end of it.
When Gandhi died, it was as though he’d been hanged by the strap of his shoe-shine box. Alice didn’t dare untie the strap from his neck, because his clothes were drenched with water and were about to burst. Alice was afraid to go near him. She went and got some old newspapers, wrapped him in them, and began to scream.
Gandhi didn’t remember many things about his childhood. When he tried to remember, standing next to his cousin at his father’s funeral, he discovered he couldn’t remember much about his village. To him, the village was a group of clay houses covered with white stuff. He came and didn’t see the white stuff, all he saw were narrow, winding roads and faces he didn’t recognize. But he cried anyway. He broke into tears while people looked on, watching him, as though the weeping of a son for his dead father had become something strange. Gandhi cried and didn’t see anything. His cousin talked to him about how he should get married and Gandhi agreed, and decided he’d marry his cousin Fawziyya, and then he went back to Beirut. Gandhi wasn’t sure how his relatives discovered Salim Abu Ayoun’s restaurant, where he was working. He’d made up his mind to leave the restaurant, and the smell of dirty dishes, and the sound of Ms. Najat’s moans, to work some other trade in which he could be free. His cousin came and took him to the village and back he came with Fawziyya. The moment he returned, he bought a shoe-shine box and sat near Jarjoura’s Restaurant across from the American University and, with God’s help, started to make a living.
Right after the burial, Gandhi went to the cave. He saw a small opening and smelled the scent of rotting barbecued meat. He tried to go in, but he couldn’t, because of the rocks and thorns and the stench. Here, in this cave, began his family history. How often he thought about taking his daughter Suad there to bury her. But he feared God, he wasn’t like Mr. Husn, who took him, grabbing him by the shoulder as if he were holding some mangy dog, and threw him there. Gandhi knew he’d made a mistake, but he never expected this kind of punishment. He was scared to death, and he discovered what it is like to have your feet become paralyzed and your tongue feel like a piece of rubber in your mouth. Here, in this cave, his grandfather’s father died, and here he, too, was going to die. Everyone knew the story of his great grandfather, that’s how the family name became “al-Mughayiri,” “the Caveman.” The crazy grandfather, whose name was Husn, went crazy in the cave and died there. The story goes that he went into the cave to kill the hyena that used to scare the villagers on winter nights. The hyena would come to this cave and sleep. The caveman grandfather entered, after swearing to all the young men in the village that he wasn’t afraid. He waited for night to come and went in. They were watching him from the distance. Everyone said they didn’t hear a sound from the cave, the man disappeared. He went in and didn’t come back out. Three days later, he came out with his head crowned with white hair, his eyes were white, and he spoke without making sense. Everyone said Husn had gone mad, that the hyena terrified him, drove him crazy. After that the man stopped sleeping at home. Abd al-Karim, his son — that is, Little Gandhi’s grandfather — told him that his father no longer slept at home, he slept out in the wild and howled like some rabid dog. A few months later, they found him dead in front of the entrance to the cave.
To this cave Husn took Abd al-Karim, his eleven-year-old son, and dumped him there.
“How can a father kill his own son?” Gandhi asked the Reverend Amin, who’d been trying to convince him to come to church and join in prayer.
“A father cannot kill his own son,” the Reverend said. “He takes him to kill him, but there’s always the lamb. Abraham took his son Isaac, you say Ismail, whatever, he took him because the lamb was there.”
“And without the lamb?” Gandhi asked.
“Without the lamb, the world would’ve come to an end,” he said. “Without the lamb, the father would’ve killed his son, and killed himself. God created the lamb for this purpose, the lamb is necessary for the existence of the father and the son.”
“I get it, I get it, without the lamb it doesn’t work,” Gandhi said, getting back to work on the Reverend’s shoes, which were full of brown holes.
“Of course, my son, you must come to church.”
Gandhi didn’t want to hurt that woman. He hated her, but he didn’t really care. His father had come home, and she was with him. She had black hair, big eyes, she looked around as though she were frightened. People said his father had raped her in the woods and brought her to marry her. They said she was one of the nomads scattered around the Qummua forest, and the man had gotten involved with her and was afraid of her relatives, so he married her. She was the fourth wife, but she was number five, because Abd al-Karim’s mother had died immediately after giving birth to him. Then he was unable to conceive anything but daughters from his other wives. Girls that filled the big house, and a sad man who didn’t know what to do. Even this gypsy girl, who came from God knows where, gave him nothing but daughters.
Abd al-Karim was the only boy. He was sent to Qur’an school and learned the whole Qur’an by age seven. After that his father put him in the nuns’ school in the village of Mashta Hammoud, an hour away from their village. Gandhi walked to Mashta Hammoud every morning, and when he returned home he was always afraid of the glances he would get from that woman who never stopped conceiving girls.
Gandhi didn’t mean it, but she saw him. He’d swear today on the Holy Qur’an that he didn’t mean it. But he didn’t know why he froze in his place. He went to the fields to urinate, then he started. The sun was starting to go down, and the scene of the yellow fields in summer blocked the horizon with piles of wheat waiting to be threshed, and Gandhi stood, imagining the scene of the nun bending down in front of his desk to pick up the chalk that had fallen on the floor. His eyes disappeared behind his eyelids and his hand began to roam around the nun’s black robe, and he lost himself inside her dress, not wanting to come back out. Along came that woman, she appeared out of nowhere, and started hitting him with a long olive branch. As she was hitting him, he held onto his penis with a strange ecstasy, as if his body no longer belonged to him. Little Gandhi didn’t know why he didn’t stop. He tried to turn around so the woman couldn’t see what was in his hand, while she kept circling around him, hitting him. And when the world crumbled between his hands, he saw her standing there in utter shock, the branch in her hand, staring with two huge eyes and her mouth half open. All of a sudden, she threw the branch and ran away. He, too, ran off to the house and sat alone, trembling. She disappeared.