“The crazy girl ran away to Nabaa by herself.” Gandhi said this was God’s mercy; if it hadn’t been for that mercy, she’d have gone and died in her shame. “The medicine was no longer available,” Gandhi told Alice. “She became, I don’t know how, she’d walk around and bang on the walls, and then she just disappeared. I said to myself, it’s all over for you, Gandhi. The girl won’t be crazy anymore, but she’ll die. If they haven’t killed her, you will.”
Gandhi didn’t kill his daughter. Suad came back three days later looking exactly the same, as though nothing had happened. Maybe if they’d raped her she’d have gotten better, Gandhi thought. She came back home as though she’d never left. Only she stuttered a little more and spoke incomprehensibly.
“She speaks like a lunatic, come and hear her,” Gandhi said to Ralph.
Ralph wasn’t interested. He’d come home tired. He sat next to his sister and listened to her, then started laughing. The young girl told her story to everyone, but no one understood a word. Was it true they took her to a garage and tried to rape her, but one of them started vomiting and trembling, so they left her and ran away? Or is the real story that Tino, that was the leader’s nickname, it seems, Tino told them to leave her alone because she was crazy and she’d give them God only knows what kinds of diseases? Or was it that Michalany, “what the heck is his name — the one who saved me — Shali, yes, Shali,” was it Shali or Michalany who started banging his head against the wall and shouting, “Leave her alone, I won’t allow it, I …” and took her out of the garage and brought her to Museum Square?
No one really knew what happened to the girl when she fled to their old house in Nabaa, in East Beirut, and came back the same way she left.
“Even those armed men, those sons of bitches, didn’t touch her. I told my cousin, please take her, take her for one day, and then if you don’t want her, send her back. The only thing that can cure her is for a man to sleep with her and make her bleed. But the son of a bitch refused. I told him, you can send her back, no questions asked, I’ll pay. But he was afraid. He, too, was afraid. And what’s wrong with the girl, she’s beautiful. He’s a son of a bitch, he smells, and he refused. He said he didn’t want to get married, does anyone refuse marriage? He said his wife won’t allow it. Does anyone refuse to marry a second wife?”
The girl returned, and Little Gandhi returned from his attempts to find a cure for her, void of all hope. His wife said, “This is our fate, my dear, we have to be content with it. Contentment is a treasure.” And so Gandhi was satisfied with his treasure and stopped searching.
Gandhi told the Reverend Amin the story, but he didn’t understand any of it. He looked at Gandhi with clouded eyes and snored, as though he were asleep. Gandhi felt sorry for the Reverend. He’d pass by him at his house on the second floor of that building, which was painted purple like a piece of hard candy. Those days Gandhi would go to the Reverend and give him bread, and some money. And the Reverend seemed to be unconscious; if it hadn’t been for Alice, he’d have been left to die, paralyzed on the steps of the Church of the Virgin on Makhoul Street.
Gandhi could remember the Reverend in his younger days. That was just after he’d come to Beirut, in the middle of the crisis with the dog. After Mr. Davis’s dog died, Gandhi went back to his original profession. He got the shoe-shine box and sat in front of the American University. He took the Reverend’s advice on his new plan and bought a dog to replace Fox and named it Fox. He tried to persuade Mr. Davis, but Mr. Davis just couldn’t understand. He’d walk all alone on Bliss Street, in front of the university, unable to speak.
John Davis said his mission in Lebanon had failed.
He said he came and became a real Arab, he loved the people, loved Beirut, loved fried fish and cauliflower with tahini sauce, he loved them and became one of them. But it was impossible. The East is barbaric; if not for India and the real Gandhi, the East would’ve remained barbaric.
John Davis couldn’t understand how that man had laughed at him as he knelt trembling over his dead dog.
“It’s a dog, sir, just a dog,” the man said, and then he spit.
It wasn’t enough that he’d killed the dog, the man had to spit on him, because dogs are filthy.
It was then that Davis cut off his relationship with the Reverend Amin. The Reverend tried to lessen the blow for Davis by helping Gandhi raise the dog for the sake of his American friend, and for the sake of their friendship, but the American professor couldn’t take the shock, and couldn’t understand how the Reverend had spoken in defense of the Arabs and rejected what he’d said. Their friendship was famous. The Reverend Amin would speak to him in English, with a New York accent that he didn’t really know, and Davis would respond with his own unpolished Beiruti Arabic. Davis was studying moral philosophy at the American University, and the Reverend Amin was in charge of the Beirut parish of the Episcopal church. Both were Protestants. The Reverend Amin believed that America was the heart of civilization and progress and freedom, and Mr. Davis detested New York, where he’d lived and taught in its universities, and loved the East and spices and Arabs. Mr. Davis’s story is unusual, especially when he tells how he learned Arabic from Mustafa Ghalayini, the barber, before studying it in Shimlan, at the school that was founded solely for teaching Arabic to foreigners. Mr. Davis, who’d lived alone with his wife, with no children, left Beirut seven years before the beginning of the civil war in 1975. And it appears that the murder of his dog was decisive in deciding his future. Mr. Davis told the Reverend Amin that he felt extremely lonely, and that all his work in Lebanon was a complete loss.
“Suddenly I feel like a stranger, I feel that no one, no one in the world cares for me. And my wife, who’s constantly sick, wants to go back to the States. This is my country, but I’m going. All has failed. I’m not upset about the dog, but how could he have spit on him? How?”
The American professor bent over his dog, who was in the throes of death in the middle of the street, and the driver who’d run over him with his car got out of the car and spat. The professor felt that everything had come to an end, and nothing the Reverend Amin tried did any good, including helping Little Gandhi take care of Fox’s replacement, which Gandhi bought, making sure it was of the same breed as the original Fox.
When the professor refused to take the dog and Gandhi wanted to get rid of it, Lillian suggested killing it. And it was the Reverend who went to the drugstore and bought the poison that Gandhi put in the dog’s milk.
Little Gandhi didn’t like the Reverend Amin, for, in spite of his kindness and that of his parishioners, he was haughty. He spoke with a low voice and used a dialect that was a cross between Beiruti colloquial Arabic and classical Arabic, and he was always shaking his head to give the impression he was trying to understand others. But then he’d turn around and do whatever made him feel good. The smell of whiskey was always on his breath, and the stories of his adventures with Lillian Sabbagha were well known, or they’d become well known, after Madame Sabbagha disclosed them during one of her crazy spells. That was when her Russian maid Vitsky Novicova died. She stood in front of the maid’s room with a handkerchief over her mouth and started screaming. Then she cursed the Reverend Amin and divulged all their secrets.