The Orphanage

 

I was in Lebanon, traveling from Damascus to Beirut, when one of the guides told me about a local storyteller in the back of a tea shop in the town we were passing through. 

            “He does a good version of Babar,” he said to me after dinner, “but he also does a story I think you’d like better.”

            After dinner, we left everyone else at the hotel to fan themselves to sleep, and twisted through the streets to a tea shop.  In a small room in the back the grey bearded storyteller nodded for us to come in without opening his eyes.  We sat and smoked in silence, the clouds of perfumed smoke crawled up from the hookah to the yellow ceiling.  Someone turned the single lamp down low, and the storyteller began to chant in a slow, raspy Arabic. 

The guide, perched on a stack of rugs, translated for me.  I draw deep on the pipe, pulling my traveling boots in tighter to me as I leaned against the rug hanging from the wall.

           

            Praise be to Allah, the Compassionate and Beneficent.  This is a story about a Sufi, who wanted to reach spiritual oneness with Allah and so took the advice of his sheikh to work in an orphanage.  He did so at a time when the infidel kings of Europe were pulling the hands of the Ottomans first one way, then another.  And the Pashas, turning away from Allah’s compassion, pushed many Armenians in their land to their death.  Although not believers, they are People of the Book, and so their spared children began to fill up the orphanages in Aleppo and her sisters. 

            This Sufi worked at one of these orphanages, cooking when there was food, washing when there was water, and teaching the young children about Mohammed (peace be upon him) and the Koran when there was light.  A local farmer would bring by apples and dates from his orchards every week, and this was the main staple at the orphanage besides donated rice or odds and ends from the bazaar.  The apples were usually rotten, but every now and then there would be a few that were ripe and not rotten. 

            Though the children listened to his recounting of Mohammed and Gabriel, and the hadith, and though some would sometimes pray with him during the day, none of them submitted to Allah.  It seemed, to the Sufi, that they were too preoccupied with food. 

            The children, everyday, would talk about food.  One day, when the Sufi was telling the tale of Mohammed’s first vision of Gabriel, a boy stopped him to tell him a story. 

The boy’s father would go to the tea shops and play backgammon.  Once, his father called him over and gave him a sip of his Turkish coffee.  His father was proud of his son, because the next Sunday he was going to be the Moses of the church picnic, the madakh, the one who was sponsoring the shish kebab and would ask for the food to be blessed. The men sitting around in their fezzes chuckled at the boy, their smiling lips twisting their mustaches.  Read his fortune, they called to the proprietor, a Greek named Nikos.  He called his Muslim wife over, who studied the grounds on the bottom of the porcelain cup and gasped.  ‘My dears,’ she said, ‘I hope you are hungry because the madakh is going to be the best you’ve had in a long time.’ 

            ’Do you not know,’ the Sufi asked of them, suspecting they were complaining of the apples and dates brought by a local farmer, and the donated rice or odds and ends from the bazaar, ‘that Allah will provide?  That His Truth and Love are greater than the greatest banquet you could eat at?  Look at the birds, does Allah not feed them?’

            ’Allah will provide,’ they said back to him. ‘We do not doubt.  He sends apples every day.’  This did not keep them from discussing food with the Sufi.  He went and asked his sheikh what to do, but the sheikh told him to be patient.  It was a test from Allah.  The Sufi didn’t tell his sheikh, but he had already suspected it was a test because the children’s stories were making him hungry all the time. 

            He also noticed the children were getting thinner and thinner, and begged the local merchants for more rice, but they told him to thicken the gruel with fat.  He tried this, and other things, but the children just seemed to get thinner, and lighter.  He read al-Arabye’s and Ibn Khaldun’s (as heretical as they were) prescriptions for healthy eating.  He even began to listen to their stories to see if there were dietary secrets hidden in them.

            ‘I am thankful for the rice you make us,’ one girl said, ‘but you do not make it how my mother used to.  She would take me to the market, and there we would search high and low for sweet powdered curry.  We could only get a small amount because of its price.  Then we would go home and she would show me how to cook the rice.  That and dolma, sarma, boreks and shish kebabs.  We would spend all day in the kitchen, sweating because it was so hot, with my aunts and sisters talking all the while about the hodja and who I should marry and other stories.’

            ’What else did your mother put in the rice?’ the Sufi asked.

            ’A little salt.  But she would save that for the yogurt she would make.  It was as white as her skin.  I remember she had big eyes, dark like eggplants.’

            This was all he could glean from the children when he started to ask for specifics about the secrets.  They could only tell him a little thing he already knew about cooking, then they would talk about their missing parents.

            ’My father had a long moustache, and when he would think hard he would push his eyebrows together and pull at the ends of his moustache.’

            ’My mother had large, soft arms.  They were strong, though, lifting huge pots of rice, or helping the neighbors push up the lattice to grow grape vines on.’

            ’My father would take me up in the mountains to hang the cured meat and dried fruits for the winter.  He taught me the mountain paths, and the ways animals would make their paths to the storehouse, but how we designed the lock and door so they couldn’t get in.’

            ‘My mother would smile all the time, unless she was chastising me for not praying, or telling me not to talk to the Turkish soldiers.’

            He tried all these secrets, including a few from his sheikh and the mothers in town that he ran into while on his way to get a ration of rice or a generous gift of vegetables.  Nothing was working.

            One day he noticed some of the children had small bumps on their backs.  He called in the doctor, who looked at them and said there was nothing he could do.  They didn’t seem to be harmful, the doctor said, but they were on the children’s shoulder blades so if they had trouble moving their arms that he should call the doctor again. 

            Having grown attached to the children, the Sufi could hardly bear the thought of them having some illness.  He knew Allah was compassionate, and in His compassion wouldn’t allow these children to suffer more than they already had.  He also knew that Allah rewarded those who were wise and productive.  So he had the children help out now with their hands and arms: folding, knitting, lifting, anything to keep their arms from sitting idle and possibly becoming useless.

            Instead of the exercise helping, more children started to grow bumps on their backs.  And the bumps grew bigger and bigger, and longer down their back.  The Sufi tried harder to get them to pray, but instead of praying they would tell more stories of growing up in the villages.  They even started to sing the songs and dance the dances of the Armenian tradition in the orphanage yard.  This worried the Sufi, for it was dangerous to promote an infidel culture.  Not only would people not want to take the children from the orphanage, but they would also chastise him for not being able to teach them the ways of the Prophet. 

            His sheikh warned him that not everyone enjoyed dancing as Sufis did, and that he must be careful with this.  Immediately he went back to the orphanage and found the children dancing and singing in the orphanage yard.  He shouted at them, pushing them into the orphanage and shutting the door, telling them he wouldn’t open the door to the yard or let them out again until they promised to start praying and stop singing. 

            The children hung their heads for the rest of the day, but the next day the Sufi was woken by singing.  He leapt out of bed and looked outside, but they weren’t there.  The children were all gathered in the kitchen, singing and dancing an ancient Armenian folk song.  This day was the Holy Day, and people from the outskirts of town were passing the house on their way to the mosque.  On these days, the Sufi would try and get the children to go to the mosque.  But today, heeding the warnings of his sheikh, he was trying his hardest to get the children to stop singing.  He grabbed a switch and slammed tables and chairs until they were silent.

            But before he could begin to punish them, there was a loud knocking sound at the door.  It was the farmer who donated the dates and apples.  He was demanding why there was infidel singing going on inside the orphanage. 

            ‘It is the children,’ said the Sufi, ‘but it is okay, I am punishing them.’

            ‘Let them come out,’ shouted the farmer. ‘We will punish them!’

            The Sufi looked behind the farmer and saw that a large crowd had gathered.  They started to call for the children to come out.

            ‘Brothers! Sisters!’ the Sufi called out. ‘I have it all under control, they are to be punished in strict accordance to the hadith and Koran.’

            ‘You have failed us, Sufi,’ the crowd shouted back. ‘The doctor also tells they are sick!  Send them out, that we might teach them the holy wrath of Allah!  Let them fear Him and death!’

            ‘What do they want?’ the children called from behind the Sufi.

            ‘Silence!’ the Sufi called back. ‘The crowd wants to punish you harshly.’

            ‘Let us outside!’ they called back, coming up to the door. ‘Let us show them the good of our singing and dancing.  Do you not understand?  Allah has provided!’

            ‘What are you talking about?’ the Sufi asked as they pushed past him.

            ‘Here come the little brats now!’ called the farmer to the crowd. ‘Let us teach them a lesson.’

            The children poured out into the orphanage yard, all the while the Sufi called to them to stay in the house.  But he saw something that alarmed him.  The bumps that had been growing on their backs were pushing out and cutting their shirts.  Once the last child had passed out into the yard, they started to sing and dance in a large circle.  The crowd shouted back, but dared not touch the children, for brilliant, white feathered wings were pushing their way out of their shirts.  One by one, the children stretched their wings. 

            ‘Sufi! Sufi!’ they called. ‘Do you see now?  Allah has provided!’

            And as they sang, they started to flap their pure white wings and ascended into the air.  The crowd screamed and cowered from what they called a work of Shaitan.  The children started to laugh, and ascended higher into the pale Syrian sky.”

 

            The storyteller coughed, and then chanted a final line.

            “The last thing the Sufi saw,” said the guide, letting the smoke crawl up from out of his mouth, “were pure white feathers on the ground.  Then the crowd seized him.”

 

 

 

 

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