Moving the Palace

by Charif Majdalani

  *

  And so he greets them and says a few words in apology. But the four girls do not make a move, they respond with a very discreet greeting and wait to see what he will do next. Samuel then asks if this is the right way to Rashaya. Two of the young women—the one who was used as a headrest, and the one who emerged from behind the bush—ask him whom he’s looking for in Rashaya. Talal mentions his cousin, Fayyad al-Atrash. The girls recognize the name, and naturally the mood relaxes, such that the young woman with the hat, my future grandmother, is then able to inquire about where these gentlemen came from, and she deftly uses the word khawaja, which might seem ironic, for no one would call an adventurer who turns up out of the blue in the hills of lower Hermon khawaja, not even if he is wearing a city dweller’s hat. But above all what Samuel hears in this word is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the accent of a daughter of the Beirut bourgeoisie, for in Rashaya as in all mountain regions, the first vowel is most likely elided: khwaja. Moreover, everything about the young woman confirms this impression—her hair swept back like earflaps from her temples, her dress and the white stockings she alone wears, her low-heeled shoes. She also gives off an impression of cleverness, though she remains guarded, and her eyes are limpid as the early autumn light. All in all, she is quite pretty, as her photos from the time attest, and Samuel replies that he has come from far away, from the Sudan, Egypt, and Arabia across the desert. She gives him a quick, intent stare and declares that he looks neither like a Bedouin nor a caravaner. Still mounted, Samuel launches into the same old story: that he is a merchant bringing goods to Beirut. But my grandmother—according to what she told her daughter, my mother, who told me the whole story much later— did not believe a word of it. A trader from Arabia doesn’t gallivant about in a military uniform, with an aristocrat’s mustache, treating himself to a day in the country, followed by a fierce bodyguard. It occurs to her that he may be a British agent, guided by a Druze resistance fighter, or something just as intriguing or romantic. But she doesn’t say a thing, just watches with her fluid gaze, the twinkle in which she has completely mastered, and so it falls to my grandfather to ask what the situation is like in Rashaya.

  As she answers, she opens one of the wicker baskets and takes out bread wrapped in thick cloth napkins, jars of olives, and small cucumbers. As if this were a sign, her three friends, who are undoubtedly local girls serving as traveling companions, see to the other baskets, unfurling a tablecloth on the ground, clearing away old walnuts fallen from the branches, and all of this seems a silent, indolent invitation to the two men to share their breakfast. After a moment’s hesitation, Samuel dares to dismount at last, followed by Talal, the swaggering hero who hasn’t said a single word since he mentioned his cousin and who seems oddly shy and embarrassed. They both approach, then sit down—not, in theory, to eat, not at all, just to keep the conversation going. But finally they do the meal justice and eat the labneh, the black olives and the green, the sheep cheese and the goat, reaching out, serving themselves with their fingers even as they speak. To one question about the goods he’s bringing from so far away, Samuel replies that this is an Arab palace in a thousand pieces and marble deities. The girls laugh, the pretty city dweller declares she would have liked to see that, Talal grins under his mustache, and Samuel reflects that there are two ways of entering the promised land: the first consists of mounting an assault and slaughtering its inhabitants, and the second of having, upon arrival, a picnic just as in paradise.

  After an hour, he has learned about the young bourgeois girl everything he will later have all the time in the world to come to know in greater depth, which is to say—her name is Émilie, she is the daughter of a rich Beiruti doctor, and she spends her every summer in Rashaya, including this one, which is drawing to an end since she is leaving for the capital the next morning. Shelling walnuts on a rock in front of him and passing the meat to the four young women, he brings up the automobile parked a bit farther off, and now a minor feminine commotion ensues. The four pretty women trade knowing glances, murmur things from which Samuel deduces that they were unaware of the nearby car, and Émilie announces that obviously her uncle has had her followed again; he is always afraid for her no matter what, he is responsible for her in the absence of her father, who has been stuck in Alexandria for three years and so has her kept under close watch at all times. “Not as close as all that,” Samuel says, and so to prove it to him—or so Émilie will tell her daughter, my mother—she calls out toward the surrounding trees and now a small man appears, embarrassed, discreet, and slightly amused, in European shirt and slacks, with a smart bushy mustache; he comes forward, apologizing, it’s not my fault, I had my instructions, you must believe me, ya sitt Imilie, ya sitt Imilie. Émilie smiles, shrugging, the other young women invite the bodyguard to sit down and eat, Samuel hands him a walnut, but the man politely declines, wishing only to withdraw, to go and hide again, for lack of a door to close behind him and leave this gathering to its privacy. But he has broken the spell, and they decide to pack up. After which, it is an odd group indeed that heads for the automobile: four young women with parasols, two horsemen leading their mounts behind them, and a bodyguard-chauffeur out in front, as if to blaze a trail, or else show the way, who winds up going ahead to warm up the engine.

  Next, it is the two riders who take off at a gallop, leaving the car to crawl along cautiously behind, as there is no road for it, only hills of gravelly dirt sown with holm oak and pines in which it seems to have lost its way. By afternoon, Samuel and Talal are back at their camp, along with Fayyad al-Atrash. At dusk, instead of giving the signal to depart, Samuel sends his men off to sleep, announcing that they will leave at dawn, despite incomprehension from Talal and his cousin, a big strapping lad in a sirwal, with a grating accent. And indeed, they set out shortly before dawn, such that they reach the valley floor by midmorning. Then, instead of staying among the hills, as prudence demands, Samuel has the caravan hug the track toward Zahlé, just behind a curtain of small mountains that hide it from view. He himself, accompanied by his puzzled Druze abadays, remains on the ridge above the fields of mown wheat and the road on which only lazy mule-drivers and goatherders are to be found in the morning calm, letting out odd harmonics and clicks of the tongue to keep their animals from straying. But to the south, the automobile appears at last, in a cloud of dust that haloes it and betrays its presence from a distance like a banner. There can be no other automobiles in the area, and so Samuel hurries down to meet it, followed by his companions. The car, topped by a load of three trunks that crown it with a kind of top hat or stovepipe, rolls along at a brisk pace despite the road’s rocks and ruts, which send it leaping and dancing. In a few minutes, it draws abreast of the riders who surround it and escort it, spurring their mounts ever faster so the car does not outpace its joyful honor guard. In the car, Émilie has immediately figured out who these men are, but she lets the race go on, laughing, delighting, and clapping like a child who has finally spotted the friends come to free her from the yoke of her bodyguards and tutors. Such that at the moment when her chauffeur finally slows so as not to hit one of the riders, then prudently comes to a halt as the dust settles and the sound of the motor dies away, Samuel Ayyad leans through the window and greets Émilie, doffing his hat, and she declares with a broad smile that she is really very happy to see him again.

  On her way back to Beirut, Émilie is accompanied by her driver, one of the three girls from the day before, who seems to be officially in her service or her family’s, and a gentleman who seems like a tutor or a secretary, in a European suit, a subject of her empire who dares not confront her and make her hear the voice of what he believes is reason or proper conduct. And as Samuel is now playing the role of a highwayman intercepting a car on the open road, he, too, will be someone who speaks against reason and what might pass for proper conduct—which is doubtless why she will love him. When she sets foot on land, a bit unsteady as if stepping from the deck of a ship after a stormy crossing, h
e tells her that he has been waiting to show her his famous cargo, much like a charmer who proposes in some suggestive way that a conquest come see his collection of prints or idols. She gladly agrees and takes a horse from one of the Druze abadays from the Hauran, who shows courtesy for the occasion despite the fierce air about him, his billhook mustache, and his necklace of rifle cartridges. She mounts quite nimbly, despite her flowered dress which she lifts to straddle her mount and sit on a saddle rug decorated with virile amulets. Five minutes later, from atop a hill, she spots the endlessly unreeling line of animals with their burdens. Next Samuel leads her along the caravan, then gives the order to stop and, right there, amidst the dry hills dotted with sturdy little trees, unwrap the thousand pieces of the palace as well as the pantheon. And with her on foot now, the secretary who has caught up with them following a polite three paces behind, they stroll through the display of fragmented splendors, frescoed walls, mirrors, chimneys, Oriental glories mingling with the backsides of mules and horses growing impatient and men shouting conflicting orders as they unload. After a moment, she winds up asking him what he will do with these treasures once in Beirut, and unhesitatingly he replies, with a shiver at his own audacity, that he will reconstruct the palace so he can live in it with her. Dumbfounded, Émilie turns what she hopes is a mocking face his way, but blushes as she meets his eyes, looks away and, laughing, incredulous, continues her stroll, dragging him along as if nothing had happened. On the hills all around, like lookouts, the Druzes have dismounted and are waiting, sitting cross-legged while the mule-drivers and the peasants finish unwrapping. A shepherd off to one side stares at all the bustle, chin resting on his staff, letting his goats run about as he no doubt does when they graze in the ruins of ancient temples, leaving their droppings on the mosaics of flora and fauna.

  *

  When she has seen it all, Émilie, instead of returning to her car, bids it follow and for the rest of the day—that is, till Zahlé, the caravan’s final stop before Beirut—she rides on horseback beside Samuel. And once again Samuel feels that his wanderings are over, that he has truly come home. This fills him with tremendous relief, and at the same time the barest hint of melancholy, a feeling of abiding friendship for the memory of the wanderers and nomads with whom he has shared his life, for the caravaners with eyes weathered from scanning distant horizons, for the women in their bobbing palanquins and the ones walking beside their men, arms and ankles ringed in golden bracelets, whose skirts the wind sometimes lifts, making them laugh, for the wind that puts fires to sleep and swells tents by rushing shamelessly into them, for the indigent tents of minor chieftains and the brocaded, stately tents of patriarchs, for feasts of greasy rice and meat, for the sentinels who keep watch by doused fires beneath the cold embers of the night sky, for the umbrella-like trees of the savannah, for the desert’s mountainous sculptures, for your shadow which walks between your feet, for the meals of dates and nauseating boiled camel, for the lukewarm well water which must be drunk despite its metallic taste, because there is no choice, but also for dawns clear as spring water and the days’ sweltering heat, for crimson dusks and for the night that falls so swiftly on the great book of sand of the deserts and savannahs of forgetful memory.

  CHARIF MAJDALANI, born in Lebanon in 1960, is often compared to a Lebanese Proust. Majdalani lived in France from 1980 to 1993 and now teaches French literature at the Université Saint-Joseph in Beirut. The original French version of Moving the Palace won the 2008 François Mauriac Prize from the Académie Française as well as the Prix Tropiques.

  EDWARD GAUVIN has received prizes and fellowships including those awarded by PEN America, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright program. His work has won the John Dryden Translation Prize and the Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award. He has translated over 200 graphic novels.

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