From May to Rihani

Cairo, August 15, 1939

My dear friend, neighbor of the valley and its lord,

We are now on the eve of the Feast of the Virgin — I mean the feast of the assumption of Our Lady Mary into heaven — and the bell of my neighbors the monks has begun to peal and chant, calling to the evening 'zayyah.' But its chant is a Frankish, civilized, aristo-cratic one, that reaches its end after a minute or two.

How far it is from the singing of the Lebanese bells — that Eastern, homespun, democratic singing that breaks out from every quarter, in the heights and in the low places, and sweeps through every reach of the horizon's compass, mingling the echoes of the summits with the echoes of the valleys, until it fills the air with humming and longing for long hours, and weaves from its scattered strains a Lebanese symphony — and never mind the symphonies of Beethoven!

And how can I, here in Egypt, help being stripped at this hour — despite myself — of the sense of my presence here, to feel that I am dwelling in your immortal 'Freike,' sitting on the terrace of Uncle Abu Salmon, my back to Sannine and the highlands before me, watching from there the sun's farewell to this corner of the earth, to the ringing of the bells.

I am truly there now, living those seconds at leisure; and in every second there is enough artistic delight and freedom of movement to fill a whole year — in my reckoning, I who have drunk the bitterness of prison and known the misery of constraint and captivity.

It is true that I spent three years in my dear, beloved Lebanon, and that I suffered from it what I suffered — and from whom I suffered, and how I suffered it — and that the rescuers then rescued me? And that I stayed months in Ras Beirut and summered months in 'Freike,' tossed about in all manner of overwhelming floods, till it was as if I were on a surging sea. Now, when I have not yet finished with those fearful wonders, now I doubt at certain moments that all of that certainly happened. Could all of that happen to me — what my friends witnessed and what they did not witness — and I neither die, nor does anything of me whiten but my hair? Could all of that happen, and I come to know of the nature of evil in man its blackest, most hideous, most devious sides — and yet remain as I am, trusting in the nature of good in man, at peace with the justice of life, in love with every sort of life, striving toward every lofty ideal, as if my life and my energy were renewed every morning with the rising of the sun?

Have you ever in your life seen a human being of such foolishness as mine? And yet there are things that have changed in me, or I have changed in certain things: I can no longer bear that anyone should hurt or trouble me, and I no longer grant people my confidence as I did before. And this is proof that inside my soul, too, there is something of white hair... No matter.

I congratulate you on your great Don Quixote, and thank you for favoring me with his miniature likeness

and his firm threefold motto. As for your saying that politics in those lands is sentimental, quixotic — that is very witty, and meaningful in a far-reaching way. But it brings back to me the memory of our conversation — the memory of an incident that befell our ancient Egyptian grandmother, Queen Hatshepsut.

You know that the archaeologists who conduct the excavations in these lands had found, among their finds, a very beautiful head of this queen who was very beautiful; and between one evening and the next morn-ing the beautiful head disappeared, and not one of the Egyptologists in Egypt knew how it had disappeared or whither it had flown. A little time passed — and behold, the queen's head was in the Berlin Museum! The Egyptian press rose up crying at the top of its voice, demanding that our ambassador in Berlin bring back the queen's head through official channels. The German government asked us for a few days' grace, until Chancellor Hitler could visit the museum and pay his dues of homage to the head of the Egyptian queen before her departure from the soil of the Reich. The date of that visit was fixed within a week, and the visit took place at its appointed time — but the head remained where it was. Why? Because the great Chancellor is a man of art, taste, and sentiment: hardly had his eye fallen upon the beautiful queen than he fell madly in love with her. And who is there whose heart is so stony as to part these two lovers?

And so she is still where she was, and her lover will not give her up.

I surrender to the pleasure of writing to you, forgetting that you are pressed for time and burdened with work; so I stop here, on condition that I take up the talk again at another opportunity. My greetings to Sitt Saada, and to our brother Alberto — or Albertos, as you please — and to all the Sadrs, and to all my friends, and to Abu Salmon and Sitt Nawafil and Usta Salmon and the people of Freike, men and women, old and young, and children... mercy on us! My warm thanks to our brother Signor Albertos for his kindness in sending the picture of Freike. Many are his kindnesses, and this is one of them; and thanks of the same degree of warmth, or rising higher, to our gifted friend Bino Howayek — has he changed his name? Glory to his brush, which has set the scenes of Freike standing before me in this study of mine. And I hope to write soon to the village headman, Albertos.

I wished I could describe to you the measure of the gratitude I feel for what I witnessed of your zeal and your generosity of spirit in rescuing me, in comforting me, and in heartening me throughout that whole ordeal; but my thanks to you all is the very air that surrounds me, and the spirit that dictates every word I set down, and the hymn in which my days and my nights are steeped — merciful and all-embracing, like your succor of me. Remain as you are, O brother of high resolve, and farewell, with all the good and happiness I wish for you and for all whom you love.