Arab Americans -- Fiction; Immigrants -- New York (State) -- New York -- Fiction
Here is another bubble of retrospective analysis to which we apply the
needle. It is asserted as a basis for another astounding deduction
that Khalid used to sleep in the ruined Temple of Zeus. As if ruined
temples had anything to do with the formation or deformation of the
brain-cells or the soul-afflatus! The devil and such logic, we repeat,
had once a charm for us. But this, in brief, is how it came about.
Khalid hated the pedagogue to whom he had to pay a visit of courtesy
every day, and loved his cousin Najma whom he was not permitted to
see. And when he runs away from the bastinado, breaking in revenge the
icon of the Holy Virgin, his father turns him away from home.
Complaining not, whimpering not, he goes. And hearing the bulbuls
calling in the direction of Najma's house that evening, he repairs
thither. But the crabbed, cruel uncle turns him away also, and bolts
the door. Whereupon Khalid, who was then in the first of his teens,
takes a big scabrous rock and sends it flying against that door. The
crabbed uncle rushes out, blustering, cursing; the nephew takes up
another of those scabrous missiles and sends it whizzing across his
shoulder. The second one brushes his ear. The third sends the blood
from his temple. And this, while beating a retreat and cursing his
father and his uncle and their ancestors back to fifty generations. He
is now safe in the poplar grove, and his uncle gives up the charge.
With a broken noddle he returns home, and Khalid with a broken heart
wends his way to the Acropolis, the only shelter in sight. In relating
this story, Shakib mentions "the horrible old moon, who was wickedly
smiling over the town that night." A broken icon, a broken door, a
broken pate,--a big price this, the crabbed uncle and the cruel father
had to pay for thwarting the will of little Khalid. "But he entered
the Acropolis a conqueror," says our Scribe; "he won the battle." And
he slept in the temple, in the portico thereof, as sound as a
muleteer. And the swallows in the niches above heard him sleep.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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