The Story of “Hamdoun”

Mr. Gibran Massoud is an M.A. instructor at the American University of Beirut and one of those who have tried their hand at the story; he has more than one book in the form, and he is distinguished by his understanding of the man of the street and of that expressive class of people whom nobody heeds... Listen to him as he describes, and menaces, the wretched hopes!? We are pleased to present Mr. Massoud to the readers of “The Woman's Voice” in a story from the very heart of our life — “Hamdoun.”

From the day the “basket” mounted his back, and the two straps clutched at his shoulders, wrenching them backward while they sagged and hunched, terrified, over his chest, worries beset his head and set about rattling him, black and overpowering. Before long his world began to shrink and shrink — now taking the shape of a banquet, now the size of a bed, now dwindling to a mouthful — until at last it settled at the bottom of his basket: and behold, his basket was his life and his world, filling as it filled with people's purchases and people's bundles, and whistling hollow, bared like a grin, so long as it stayed empty. How many times, when no eyes were watching, he flung his basket to the ground and fell upon it with all his might, kicking and trampling, charging every blow with some of the storming hatred that beset his heart, and joining to it a sharp curse damning life, and everyone in life, and everything in life!

A serpent's life, his life! How wretched he was — he, Hamdoun — and how ignorant, the day he believed that the basket would put an end to his pains, and would spare him, as long as he lived, the humiliation of begging. He was a green boy then, who saw in the face of life nothing but comeliness, and glimpsed in the future nothing but a goodness that would prevail over every hardship. And so he said to himself one day: “Listen, Hamdoun, listen well. Enough of vagrancy and begging. A vagrant you are, Hamdoun; a Kurd you are; your mountains cast you out, from where there was no homeland to where there is no homeland. And here you are, roaming the streets of Beirut, head shaven, nose running, feet cracked, the sack your mother contrived into a sort of garment that barely covers your nakedness now in shreds, stretching out your hand to the passers-by, bending your head to one side in abjection and drawling your words like every little Kurdish beggar... Then your mother bought you a box of chewing gum — the earnings of fingers frayed by scalding water and potash — and behold, you were a beggar of a new type: an aristocratic beggar. People no longer toss you a ‘God will provide’; instead they grow weary of you. Did you not trail one of the young ladies one day from Burj Square all the way to the Old Serail Square, whining without tiring: ‘Lady, lady, do us a kindness’? They have a right to grumble. How many people you trail after, coaxing five piasters out of them, when they were only walking ahead of you to escape paying five piasters on the tram! And then... would you drive people to eat up their francs with nothing to fill them?... Leave the gum, Hamdoun; take the advice your mother gave you: get yourself a basket and hold fast to a stand, and you will be delivered from people's charity — and from the curses of the ticket-takers on the tram.”

Thus did Hamdoun address himself that day. Energy filled his frame, and hope rocked his soul with sweet wishes. He was fit to carry the whole world in his basket, to win the honorable morsel he could eat without its lodging in his throat like the burrs and thorns of human charity.

And how Hamdoun swaggered the day he carried the basket! It was, in truth, a basket and no basket like it: gleaming white wicker, worked with blue beads. And truth to tell, Hamdoun reaped from his first day in the new trade nothing but the admiration of some of his fellows and the disdain of the rest:

He was flighty, hopping about like a sparrow, going from Raef to Muhammad and skipping from Muhammad to Said, patting each of them on the shoulder, grinning into his face like a simpleton, then turning until the basket brushed the face of the one he addressed, and saying: “Look!” But his fellows did not always meet him with the acclaim he hoped for; indeed some of them met him with what he had never expected at all, planting on the back of his neck a kick that made his back shudder and made the new basket groan, as though the blow had touched it too.

But his joy in the basket soon melted away as time melted, and in its place a mean reality came to squat like a mountain upon his chest: he had fled from one begging only to fall into another, and scarcely escaped that before falling at last into a new and viler begging! At first he tried to make life come to him. He would fix with his eye the people carrying their bundles, without going near them, as though his eyes were saying: “That you are tired — that is obvious enough... but do not expect me to run to you as if I were a beggar. Here I am, if you wish... provided that it is you who come to me!” His comrades, meanwhile, never flagged: hustling, shouting, joking, cursing, running after this one, blocking the path of that one, patting a third on the arm so that he might take notice and load them with what he carried. And by sheer insistence they sometimes won enough to repay the face they had spent; and there they would be, carrying a load for ten piasters, or fifteen, or more, while Hamdoun stood fixed like a crag at the western entrance of the vegetable market, where the market meets Maarad Street. That was his stand, and he would not budge from it.

But Hamdoun soon understood that this stand he was taking was certain to drive him to utter ruin. His mother — pity her — was selling her heart and her lungs for piasters, sweeping here, scrubbing there, washing yonder; and in her hut she had taken to watering the earth with blood that the coughing wrung from her chest. And she had sworn by the mercy of his dead father never to show him a piaster again: he was fifteen — was it not time he ate of the toil of his own right hand? So Hamdoun found nothing for it but to comply. The people before him preferred almsgiving to the granting of justice: they hurried to the abject one, the one who moans, and turned away from the proud man who expects from life a right and not a charity. And since such was the way of men, and such the way of his comrades, why should he hold to his plan, like some beast of the wilderness the fates had flung out — no water, no pasture, no companion? By God, he would whine, the whole day long; he would din the abject tune into men's ears; he would crawl before them — for that was the sure way to move the hearts of those who believe in abjection and moaning and crawling. And Hamdoun set to whining. Hamdoun set to chasing people, greedy and voracious, wishing he could carry them along with their bundles and toss them into his basket for piasters... His comrades kept shoving him aside, envious of his gleaming basket, and time after time they made off with the livelihood. And there came a day when an old woman approached Hamdoun to have him carry her vegetables; but one of his fellows, Saber, shoved him violently and snatched the bundles from the old woman's hand, saying: “I always carry for you, lady. This one is my ‘ghlouji.’”

Hamdoun did not know what to do. Should he fall upon his rival and knead him to a pulp, or leave him his livelihood, lawful and blessed? To fall upon him was a matter that called for serious thought, for Saber had two hands like pitchforks: had they closed upon Hamdoun, they would have flung his ribs into the belly of his basket! But he could not sit quiet under the insult. His very stomach told him so: for some time now Hamdoun's food had been no more than a portion of bizri fish bought for five piasters and one orphan scrap of bread — so much so that Najm al-Maghribi, the owner of the eating-house, had nicknamed Hamdoun “the five-piaster customer.” But how was Hamdoun to get the better of his rival now? He must be strong — strong, yes! Life, as he saw it, belongs to the strong! He must be strong!

The next day Hamdoun went out to his work as though he had become two Hamdouns, and the first thing he did was to fall upon Saber unawares, throw him to the ground, and rain blows upon him, while their fellows looked on agape, so stunned by the event that it nailed them where they stood. Hamdoun never knew where that strength had come from, nor how it was granted him to rub Saber's nose in the dust; but he grasped one thing fundamental to his life, and it warmed his heart: from that moment he had imposed his authority upon the company — an authority that grew every time he threw one of them to the ground, or every time he bent his brows in anger.

Hamdoun's income grew, until he turned up his nose at al-Maghribi's eating-house and made for the falafel shop with the two wide doors, where he took to paying twenty-five piasters for a loaf stuffed with a mixture of falafel, tomato, radish, and parsley, all swimming in a pool of tahini! Before long he was one of the shop's steady and respected patrons: he would no longer consent to eat standing, but took to sitting at a table, and the waiter would bring him the stuffed loaf and a bottle of iced water; and when he had finished eating he would toss down thirty-five piasters before the owner of the shop and go his way. Nor did he always go in alone. Often he would bring along one of his fellows and buy him a loaf; and often he would come out of the shop with a stuffed loaf in his hand, walk up to Saber, and hold it out to him, saying:

— Saber, take it. Eat.

But Hamdoun's fists — though they were the best argument for persuading his fellows to keep clear of his stand — could not persuade the customers of the soundness of that logic. Many turned away from our friend when they saw that roughness in him, and inclined with their bundles away from him toward someone else; and he would choke down his rage with an effort and wait for another chance to take his due from the competition. One day he fell upon one of these rivals, striking him and striking him, in a kind of trance of hatred. He was roused from his stupor by a jolt that shook his very marrow; he looked up, and there he stood before a municipal policeman who was trying to bring his truncheon down on his head a second time. At that Hamdoun sprang at the policeman, the spittle running down his chin, and sank his nails into his face, then fell to tearing at his hands and his feet and his clothes with a mad speed — as though he were rending not merely the policeman before him, but injustice, and life, and everyone who set himself between him and his right to an honorable living.

*

And on one of the evenings of Ramadan, when the heat scorched men's bodies and the sweat streamed down their backs like insects creeping, vexing and tickling, the fasters had risen to break the fast. And there was Hamdoun — the term in the reformatory having eaten away at his face and his body, his hands and his feet, his heart and his eyes — rising heavily from his stand and making his way to al-Maghribi's eating-house, where he tossed five piasters in coin down before its owner, and stared long into his face without uttering a word.