“Bring Bumper some lamb tongue, Barbara. What else would you like, Bumper?”
“A little humos tahini, Ahmed.”
“Right. Humos too, Barbara.”
Barbara smiled at me and said, “A drink, Bumper?”
“All right, I’ll have arak.”
“If you’ll excuse me, Bumper,” said Ahmed, “I’ve got to take care of the banquet room for the next hour. Then I’ll join you and we’ll have a drink together.”
“Go head on, kid,” I nodded. “Looks like you’re gonna have a nice crowd.”
“Business is great, Bumper. Wait’ll you see our new belly dancer.”
I nodded and winked as Ahmed hurried toward the banquet room to take care of the roomful of Arabs. I could hear them from where I sat, proposing toasts and laughing. They seemed pretty well lubricated for so early in the evening.
The appetizers were already prepared and the waitress was back to my table in a few minutes with the little slices of lamb’s tongue, boiled and peeled and seasoned with garlic and salt, and a good-sized dish of humos, which makes the greatest dip in the world. She gave me more humos than any of the paying customers get, and a large heap of the round flat pieces of warm Syrian bread covered with a napkin. I dipped into the humos right away with a large chunk of the Syrian bread and almost moaned out loud it was so delicious. I could taste the sesame seeds even though they were ground into the creamy blend of garbanzo beans, and I poured olive oil all over it, and dipped lots of oil up in my bread. I could also taste the clove and crushed garlic and almost forgot the lamb tongue I was enjoying the humos so much.
“Here’s your arak, Bumper,” said Barbara, bringing me the drink and another dish of humos a little smaller than the first. “Yasser says not to let you ruin your dinner with the tongue and humos.”
“No chance, kid,” I said, after swallowing a huge mouthful of tongue and bread. I gulped some arak so I could talk. “Tell Baba I’m as hungry as a tribe of Bedouins and I’ll eat out his whole kitchen if he’s not careful.”
“And as horny as a herd of goats?”
“Yeah, tell him that too,” I chuckled. That was a standing joke between Yasser and Ahmed and me that all the girls had heard.
Now that the starvation phase was over I started to feel pain in my leg and shoulder. I poured some water into the clear arak, turning it milky. I glanced around to make sure no one could see and I loosened up my belt and smiled to myself as I smelled the food all through the place. I nibbled now, and tried not to be such a crude bastard, and I sipped my arak, getting three refills from Barbara who was a fast and good waitress. Then the pain started to go away.
I saw Ahmed running between kitchen, bar, and banquet room, and I thought that Yasser was lucky to have such good kids. All his sons had done well, and now the last one was staying in the business with him. The Arab music drifted softly through the place and mingled with the food smell, and I was feeling damn warm now. In about an hour the band would be here, a three-piece Armenian group who played exotic music for the belly dancer that I was anxious to see. Ahmed really knew his dancers.
“Everything okay, Bumper?” Ahmed called in an Arab accent since other customers were around.
“Okay,” I grinned, and he hurried past on one of his trips to the kitchen.
I was starting to sway with the sensual drums and I was feeling much better, admiring the rugs hanging on the walls, and other Arabian Nights decorations like water pipes that kids used now for smoking dope, and the swords up high enough on the walls so some drunk couldn’t grab them and start his own dance. Abd’s Harem was a very good place, I thought. Really an oasis in the middle of a tacky, noisy part of Hollywood which was generally so phony I couldn’t stand it.
I noticed that Khalid, one of Yasser’s brothers, was helping in the bar tonight. I figured as soon as he saw me I’d get another big hairy kiss.
“Ready, Bumper?” said Barbara, smiling pretty, and padding quietly up to my table with a huge tray on a food cart.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, looking at the dishes of baked kibbi, kibbi with yogurt, stuffed grape leaves and a small skewer of shish kebab.
“Yasser said to save room for dessert, Bumper,” said Barbara as she left me there. I could think of nothing at times like these, except the table in front of me, and I waged a tough fight against myself to eat slowly and savor it, especially the grape leaves which were a surprise for me, because Yasser doesn’t make them all the time. I could taste the mint, fragrant and tangy in the yogurt that I ladled over the grape leaves, pregnant with lamb and rice, succulent parsley, and spices. Yasser added just the right amount of lemon juice for my taste.
After a while, Barbara returned and smiled at me as I sat sipping my wine, at peace with the world.
“Some pastry, Bumper? Baklawa?”
“Oh no, Barbara,” I said, holding my hand up weakly. “Too rich. No baklawa, no.”
“All right,” she laughed. “Yasser has something special for you. Did you save a little room?”
“Oh no,” I said painfully, as she took away the cartload of empty plates.
Arabs are so friendly and hospitable, and they like so much to see me eat, I would’ve hated to do something horrible like upchucking all his hard work. My belly was bulging so much I had to move the chair back two inches, and my shirt was straining to pop open. I thought of Fat-stuff in the old “Smilin’ Jack” cartoon strip and remembered how I used to laugh at the poor bastard always popping his buttons, when I was young and slim.
A few minutes later Barbara came back with an oversized sherbet glass.
“Moosh moosh!” I said. “I haven’t had moosh moosh for a year.”
Barbara smiled and said, “Yasser says that Allah sent you tonight because Yasser made your favorite dessert today and thought about you.”
“Moosh moosh!” I said as Barbara left me, and I scooped up a mouthful and let it lay there on my tongue, tasting the sweet apricot and lemon rind, and remembering how Yasser’s wife, Yasmine, blended the apricot and lemon rind and sugar, and folded the apricot puree into the whipped cream before it was chilled. They all knew it was my very favorite. So I ended up having two more cups of moosh moosh and then I was really through. Barbara cleared the table for the last time and Ahmed and Yasser both joined me for ten minutes.
There’s an Arab prayer which translates something like, “Give me a good digestion, Lord, and something to digest.” It was the only prayer I ever heard that I thought made a lot of sense, and I thought that if I believed in God I wouldn’t lay around begging from Him and mumbling a lot of phony promises. This particular Arab prayer said all I’d say to Him, and all I’d expect of Him, so even though I didn’t believe, I said it before and after I ate dinner in Abd’s Harem. Sometimes I even said it at other times. Sometimes even at home I said it.
When the Armenians arrived, I was happy to see the oud player was old Mr. Kamian. He didn’t often play at Abd’s Harem anymore. His grandsons Berge and George were with him, and anyone could see they were his grandsons, all three being tall, thin, with hawk noses and dark-rimmed blazing eyes. Berge would play the violin and George, the youngest, a boy not yet twenty, would play the darbuka drums. It was just a job to the two young ones. They were good musicians, but it was old Kamian I would hear as he plucked and stroked those oud strings with the quill of an eagle feather. It’s a lute-like instrument and has no frets like a guitar. Yet the old man’s fingers knew exactly where to dance on that oud neck, so fast it was hard to believe. It gave me goose bumps and made it hard to swallow when I saw that old man’s slender, brittle-looking fingers dart over those twelve strings.
Once I was there in the afternoon when they were rehearsing new dancers, and old Kamian was telling Armenian tales to Berge’s children. I sat there hidden behind a beaded curtain and heard Kamian tell about the fiery horses of Armenia, and pomegranates full of pearls and rubies, and about Hazaran-Bulbul, the magic nightingale of a thousand songs. He made me feel like a
kid that day listening to him, and ever since, when I hear him play the oud, I could almost climb aboard one of those fiery horses.
Another time when I was here late at night listening to Mr. Kamian play, his oldest son Leon sat with me drinking scotch and told me the story of his father, how he was the only survivor of a large family which totaled, cousins and all, half of a village that was massacred by Turkish soldiers. Mr. Kamian was fifteen years old then, and his body was left in a big ditch with those of his parents, brothers, sisters, everyone in his entire world.
“The thing that saved him that day was the smell of death,” said Leon, who spoke five languages, English with only a slight accent, and like all Armenians, loved to tell stories. “As he lay there, my father wanted to be dead with the others. It wasn’t the sight or idea of death that made him drag himself up and out of that ditch, it was the smell of rotting bodies which at last was the only unbearable thing, and which drove him to the road and away from his village forever.
“For almost a year he wandered, his only possession an oud which he rescued from a plundered farmhouse. One night when he was huddling alone in the wilderness like Cain, feeling like the only human being left on earth, he became very angry that God would let this happen, and like the child he was, he demanded a sign from Him, and he waited and listened in the darkness, but he heard only the wind howling across the Russian steppes. Then he wondered how he could ever have believed in a God who would let this happen to Armenia. His tiny Christian island in a sea of Islam. There was no sign, so he strummed the oud and sang brave songs into the wind all that night.
“The very next night the boy was wandering through a village much like his had been, and of course he passed hundreds of starving refugees on the road. He took off from the road to find a place to sleep in the trees where someone wouldn’t kill him just to steal the oud. There in the woods he saw a black sinister shape rising from the ground, and the first thing the boy thought was that it was a dev, one of those fearsome Armenian ogres his nany used to tell him about. He raised the flimsy oud like it was an ax and prepared to defend himself. Then the dark form took shape and spoke to him in Armenian from beneath a ragged cloak, ‘Please, do you have something to eat?’
“The boy saw a child in the moonlight, covered with sores, stomach bloated, barely able to walk. Her teeth were loose, eyes and gums crusted, and a recently broken nose made it hard for her to breathe. He examined her face and saw that at no time could that face have been more than homely, but now it was truly awful. He spoke to her a few moments and found she was thirteen years old, a wandering refugee, and he remembered the proud and vain demand he had made of God the night before. He began to laugh then, and suddenly felt stronger. He couldn’t stop laughing and the laughter filled him with strength. It alarmed the girl, and he saw it, and finally he said, ‘The God of Armenians has a sense of humor. How can you doubt someone with a sense of humor like His? You’re to come with me, my little dev.’
“‘What do you want of me, sir?’ she asked, very frightened now.
“‘What do I want of you?’ he answered softly. ‘Look at you. What do you have to offer? Everything has been taken from you and everything has been done to you. What could anyone in the world possibly want of you now? Can you think of what it is, the thing I want?’
“‘No, sir.’
“‘There is only one thing left. To love you, of course. We’re good for no more than this. Now come with me. We’re going to find our Armenia.’
“She went with the half-starved, wild-eyed boy. They survived together and wandered to the Black Sea, somehow got passage, and crossed on foot through Europe, through the war and fighting, ever westward to the Atlantic, working, having children. Finally, in 1927, they and five children, having roamed half the world, arrived in New York, and from force of habit more than anything, kept wandering west, picking up jobs along the way until they reached the Pacific Ocean. Then my mother said, ‘This is as far as we go. This ocean is too big.’ And they stopped, had four more children, sixty-one grandchildren, and so far, ten great grandchildren, more than forty with the Kamian name that would not die in the ditch in Armenia. Most of his sons and grandsons have done well, and he still likes to come here sometimes once a week and play his oud for a few people who understand.”
So that was the story of old Kamian, and I didn’t doubt any of it, because I’ve known a lot of tough bastards in my time that could’ve pulled off something like that, but the thing that amazed me, that I couldn’t really understand, is how he could’ve taken the little girl with him that night. I mean he could’ve helped her, sure. But he purposely gave himself to her that night. After what he’d already been through, he up and gave himself to somebody! That was the most incredible thing about Mr. Kamian, that, and how the hell his fingers knew exactly where to go on that oud when there were no frets to guide them.
“You eat plenty, Bumper?” asked Yasser, who came to the table with Ahmed, and I responded by giving him a fat-cat grin and patting him on the hand, and whispering “Shukran” in a way that you would know meant thanks without knowing Arabic.
“Maybe you’ll convert me, feeding me like that. Maybe I’ll become a Moslem,” I added.
“What you do during Ramadan when you must fast?” laughed Yasser.
“You see how big Abd’s kids?” said Yasser, lifting his apron to reach for his wallet, and laying some snapshots on me that I pretended I could see.
“Yeah, handsome kids,” I said, hoping the old man wouldn’t start showing me all his grandkids. He had about thirty of them, and like all Arabs, was crazy about children.
Ahmed spoke in Arabic that had to do with the banquet room, and Yasser seemed to remember something.
“Scoose me, Bumper,” said the old boy, “I come back later, but I got things in the kitchen.”
“Sure, Baba,” I said, and Ahmed smiled as he watched his father strut back to the kitchen, the proud patriarch of a large family, and the head of a very good business, which Abd’s Harem certainly was.
“How old is your father now?”
“Seventy-five,” said Ahmed. “Looks good, doesn’t he?”
“Damn good. Tell me, can he still eat like he used to, say ten, fifteen years ago?”
“He eats pretty well,” Ahmed laughed. “But no, not like he used to. He used to eat like you, Bumper. It was a joy to watch him eat. He says food doesn’t taste quite the same anymore.”
I started getting gas pains, but didn’t pop a tablet because it would be rude for Ahmed to see me do that after I’d just finished such a first-rate dinner.
“It’d be a terrible thing for your appetite to go,” I said. “That’d be almost as bad as being castrated.”
“Then I never want to get that old, Bumper,” Ahmed laughed, with the strength and confidence of only thirty years on this earth. “Of course there’s a third thing, remember, your digestion? Got to have that, too.”
“Oh yeah,” I said. “Got to have digestion or appetite ain’t worth a damn.”
Just then the lights dimmed, and a bluish spot danced around the small bandstand as the drums started first. Then I was amazed to see Laila Hammad run out to the floor, in a gold-and-white belly dancer’s costume, and the music picked up as she stood there, chestnut hair hanging down over her boobs, fingers writhing, and working the zils, those little golden finger cymbals, hips swaying as George’s hands beat a blood-heating rhythm on the darbuka. Ahmed grinned at me as I admired her strong golden thighs.
“How do you like our new dancer?”
“Laila’s your dancer?”
“Wait’ll you see her,” said Ahmed, and it was true, she really was something. There was art to the dancing, not just lusty gyrations, and though I’m no judge of belly dancing, even I could see it.
“How old is she now?” I said to Ahmed, watching her mobile stomach, and the luxurious chestnut hair, which was all her own, and now hung down her back and then streamed over her wonderful-looking boobs.
Laila had worked as a waitress here for a few years, even when she was much too young to be doing it, but she always looked older, and her father, Khalil Hammad, was a cousin of Yasser’s, who lingered for years with cancer, running up tremendous hospital bills before he finally died. Laila was a smart, hard-working girl, and helped support her three younger sisters. Ahmed once told me Laila never really knew her mother, an American broad who left them when they were little kids. I’d heard Laila was working in a bank the last couple years and doing okay.
You could really see the Arab blood in Laila now, in the sensual face, the nose a little too prominent but just suiting her, and in the wide full mouth, and glittering brown eyes. No wonder they were passionate people, I thought, with faces like that. Yes, Laila was a jewel, like a fine half-Arab mare with enough American blood to give good height and those terrific thighs. I wondered if Ahmed had anything going with her. Then Laila started “sprinkling salt” as the Arabs say. She revolved slowly on the ball of one bare foot, jerking a hip to each beat of the darbuka. And if there’d been a small bag of salt tied to the throbbing hip, she would’ve made a perfect ring of salt on the floor around her. It’s a hot, graceful move, not hard at all. I do it myself to hardrock music.
When Laila was finished with her dance and ran off the floor and the applause died down I said, “She’s beautiful, Ahmed. Why don’t you con her into marrying you?”
“Not interested,” said Ahmed, shaking his head. He leaned over the table and took a sip of wine before speaking. “There’re rumors, Bumper. Laila’s supposed to be whoring.”
“I can’t believe that,” I said, remembering her again as a teenage waitress who couldn’t even put her lipstick on straight.
The Blue Knight Page 24