Chapter 33 A miracle stats in a Kiss
Chapter 33 A miracle stats in a Kiss
Let me describe the day I went to visit Dr. Shukri. It occurs to me now that he probably asked to see me one last time before he died, for he was elderly and more or less confined to his room.
I have vivid images of that meeting, though I was at most five years old, perhaps only four. I can still see him, a sick old man, so gaunt that his face looked triangular and his eyeglasses too big and too heavy. But he had a lively gaze and nimble hands. He was sitting up in a four-poster bed, his back against a large embroidered pillow. He had a balding head, with a crown of silky, tousled white hair. He made me sit in a wicker chair very close to the bed, and he taught me a conjuring trick that I can still perform. Having placed a soup plate in front of me, he filled it halfway with water, took a coin from the chest of drawers, and dropped it into the liquid. The point was to pick up the coin without wetting one’s fingers. “You’ll see, it’s very simple!” he said. He asked me to bring him an empty glass and an old newspaper; he tore off a piece of newspaper, crumpled it up, stuffed it in the glass, and set it on fire. Then he put the glass on the dish, rim down. As if by magic, the water immediately flowed into the blazing paper, and the bottom of the dish became dry. I marveled at this and never forgot my visit to Dr. Shukri’s.
He died a short time later, before I could see him again—at least I don’t remember any other meeting. He was often mentioned in my childhood as an erudite man with an adventurous mind, though no one ever went into detail, and when I got older, as far as I remember, he was never talked about anymore. Fortunately, The Tree gives him a comprehensive biographical note, but only up to the age of thirty-seven, when the book was published. I now know that he was born in 1871, attended his father’s school, and then pursued his studies, predictably, at the American school. He was well versed in various sciences, including astronomy, botany, meteorology, and toxicology, and he wrote dozens of articles in specialized journals. This was before he realized, relatively late, in his thirtieth year, that he was passionately interested in medicine. The author of The Tree was a friend of Shukri’s, and was very interested in his career. Issa writes:
He received his diploma from the Ottoman commission in 1904 and started his medical practice with success. But he was tempted by travel and set off for Egypt on February 23, 1906; there he enlisted as an officer in the army and was sent to Sudan, where he still is at press time.
In all likelihood his marriage to Yamna was celebrated between the two dates mentioned, in late 1905 or early 1906, in any case soon after Botros returned from his American trip. Right afterward, the newlyweds left for Khartoum, where Shukri had obtained a position as military physician with the British army.
This union between Tannous’s daughter and Khalil’s son brought the two families even closer, for now they were not just friends and neighbors with a vague common ancestry. Botros was surely delighted. Not so his brother Theodoros, who had been ordained as a priest shortly before his sister’s marriage and for whom this marriage into a family of “heretics” was mortifying, particularly since Shukri was a militant Protestant and virulent in his hostility toward Catholics. The fact that his own sister became the wife of this man and that they went to live among the English must certainly have distressed Theodoros. But he didn’t do anything to prevent its happening—or maybe he couldn’t.
Still other ordeals awaited my great-uncle the priest. For Gebrayel’s 1909 letter to Khalil also mentioned marriage, though allusively. Very allusively, you might say, since, in the very last lines, after writing about a thousand other things, Gebrayel requested that his former teacher “send his respects to his virtuous daughter, Miss Alice.”
Though this was not a formal marriage proposal, the sole fact of mentioning her separately instead of including her in his general greetings—when he hadn’t seen her since she was a little girl—was a way of sounding things out.
Khalil remembered his student Gebrayel as a cunning, resourceful boy, jovial, but too concerned with his appearance, impatient with academic work, and having no great interest in religious matters. Many years had gone by since then, and he had heard various rumors concerning Gebrayel’s true situation in Cuba. Like everyone else, Khalil had been told that Botros had gone to Havana to get his brother out of a tight spot. What exactly was that all about? Was it true that Gebrayel had had problems with the law? In what way? For a responsible father, these are questions that had to be clarified before he could consider marrying off his daughter …
Before answering the letter from Havana, the preacher opened his heart to Botros, who was very embarrassed by this mark of trust. On the one hand, he had been taught by his own experience not to take his brother’s promises at face value. He couldn’t very well conceal this from a person like Khalil; he couldn’t say to him, “You can give Gebrayel your daughter with complete confidence,” when he himself was still smarting from his Cuban misadventure. What if the unfortunate young woman ended up sleeping in an attic as he had? On the other hand, he couldn’t possibly betray his own brother by advising the preacher against giving him Alice’s hand in marriage.
None of the relatives still alive today know what the two men, both of whom died long ago, said to each other. Anyhow, they would probably have been uncommunicative on a matter like this. The fact is, after his conversation with Botros, Khalil decided to bide his time and not give an affirmative answer. He wrote Gebrayel a courteous, well-written letter, thanking him for his concern regarding the health of his family members, adding that he would like to inquire about his health and business and make sure that everything was now going well.