28. Nature’s Servant

Ḥannā Marqus emigrated to America before the age of twenty. He learned broken English by selling first with a pack, then with a satchel, and finally by displaying his goods in hotels.

At the beginning he was shy. He saw everything as larger than himself and every person as more learned. Once he could come and go in the city streets and travel from one town to another, however, his nose reached the highest summits of heaven. With the hundred dollars he had saved in the government bank, he became one of the greatest of the rich.[96] With his English expression—mixed with Arabic words that resisted his English, but that he threw in laughing so they seemed to issue from his mouth as deliberate jokes—he became one of the luminaries of the globe. He became one of the people most capable of entering the human arena, because he could place one foot in New York and the other in San Francisco.

When he sat in a Syrian restaurant, his fork remained clean, for he replaced it with the fingers of both hands. He made each mouthful large and often packed it into his mouth with a finger, forcing it to enter despite the limits of the opening.

In an American restaurant, however, he would eat even fish only with a fork. Many times he left a roast chicken on its plate after merely scratching it, because extracting the meat with a fork proved impossible. His eye remained fixed upon it, his stomach rising and falling with longing to swallow it, but he did not dare attack, because he knew perfectly well that he was in an American restaurant.

He shaved every morning, cursing the country that forced him to do so and longing to return to his village, where he would not have to sweep the hair from his face more than once every two weeks.

He tended his dress and appearance and bought himself a flower on Sundays. Whenever he sat on a bench or chair, he pulled up his trousers to preserve the crease at the knees. Yet he always preferred the qumbāz because wearing it involved no such burden, although he dared not say so before other people.[97]

After spending his first two years in this country, he began entering the society of foreigners. Before five years had passed, he had become an American citizen, voting for candidates for office and taking some candidates’ side against others. Yet before he entered the world of dreams each night, his eyelids remained open and his thought flew in the heavens of longing. He wished to return to his village and sleep beneath a tree, with the sky as his blanket, the meadow his mattress, and a small woven-straw stool his pillow.

Such was Ḥannā Marqus. He had two faces: an outwardly American face and another belonging by nature to the old country. So long as he remained in America, acquired habit prevailed over him, but he longed and yearned to free himself from its yoke and let his nature rule. Ah, if only Ḥannā Marqus could return to his village of Kafr Baṭṭa, cast off the European coat, and save several curses upon religion and damnations while he arranged his tie, pulling it back and forth.

Very well: the time came when Ḥannā Marqus’s steps were directed toward the homeland. The road between the New World and Old had reopened after the war closed it for a long while. With the utmost effort he obtained a passport from the American government so that he might return to his old mother’s embrace and oversee with his experience and knowledge the vineyard and land he had inherited from his late father.

He told his friends he did not intend to return to America. He possessed much money and abundant commercial experience; his country was newly opened, and before him the future held wide the door to great success.

Ḥannā Marqus reached home. He wrote a friend that he no more thought of staying than he thought of returning: Syria did not suit his taste. He had supposed the country had changed, but in truth it had not. Tailors did not know how to cut and sew according to the latest styles. Houses had no bathrooms. If he wished to shave each day, he spent at least two hours waiting for water to heat in a pot. If he wished to promenade in the parks, he found no benches to support him and protect him from dampness. Finally, the field of trade in the homeland seemed narrow: people there spoke in piastres, while in America they spoke in dollars.[98]

In America, Ḥannā Marqus had seen himself bound by the chains of American civilization. Once in Syria, when he found himself free of those bonds, he longed to return to America. “May God preserve America,” he said. “It is a country fit to live in—the people’s country, as they call it.”

Ḥannā Marqus returned to New York, “raising all ten fingers” against ever again entertaining the thought of returning home. He told himself that it was better for a person to make America his homeland and stop at that limit.

Scarcely had he spent a month in America when his yearning returned for the inward freedom he enjoyed in his country. This time, however, he forced himself to hate the desire, because the money he had gathered through the sweat of his brow over many years had nearly reached the bottom of his final pocket.

He no longer knew what he loved. Was it America, with innovative tailors, parks furnished with benches and splendid prospects, bathrooms, and hot water for shaving every day—things that wear a person down and bind him with strong chains of customs upon which humankind has agreed? Or did he love his homeland, which lacked these bonds even though they were among the things necessary for human life?

Before he resolved the struggle between the two opposing forces—hatred of America for its constraints and hatred of Syria for lacking such American constraints—he picked up an issue of al-Sāʾiḥ. In it he read Mīkhāʾīl Nuʿayma’s poem “The Cord of Wishing.” He reread it several times in order to saturate himself with its meanings, and mastered himself with the line:

I wish that I did not wish.[99]

He prevailed over himself after a fashion, saying, “My market goes with the market—and peace.”[100]

NOTES

[96] The ‘government bank’ probably means the United States Postal Savings System, created in 1911 and especially attractive to immigrants who distrusted private banks.
[97] The qumbāz is a traditional Levantine long-sleeved robe or coat, looser than a Western suit and without trouser creases to preserve.
[98] The Ottoman qirsh (piastre) was a small unit of account. Speaking in piastres rather than dollars becomes Ḥannā’s measure for the homeland’s smaller commercial scale.
[99] Mīkhāʾīl Nuʿayma (Mikhail Naimy, 1889–1988) was a leading mahjar writer and a member of al-Rābiṭa al-Qalamiyya. The line is from his poem Ḥabl al-Tamannī, ‘The Cord of Wishing.’
[100] Arabic maʿa al-sūq sūqī wa-l-salām, literally, ‘my market goes with the market, and peace’: Ḥannā resigns himself to following prevailing circumstances instead of resolving his contradictory desires.
