I, the Divine Read Online Free PDF Page B

him to a Greek restaurant across the street. We sat outdoors because I wanted to watch. He ordered pizza, the only thing he ate those days. Within five minutes of sitting down, we saw Janet walk back into the apartment building.

This, I learned from my father: “I don’t think any man ever loved a woman as much as I loved your mother. But it faded, eroded slowly. One day I woke up and I was not in love. There was nothing I could do. We did not have enough in common to have a comfortable life together, not like Saniya and I. Once the love was gone, your mother got on my nerves. With Saniya, I don’t love her as much as I loved your mother, but she makes me happy. Your mother made me crazy.” There you go. My father divorced my mother and sent her packing, not because she could not give him a son, not because she was a terrible mother to his girls, but because he fell out of love.
    In my family, love, like religion and politics, was to be avoided, a passion that vanquished reason and caused endless pain and heartache. I grew up angry with my father because he destroyed the fairy tale. My parents, Mustapha and Janet, their glorious love had not ended up happily ever after; it withered and faded. Unlike Amal and Lamia, my older sisters, I never heard them tell their story lovingly, since I was two when my parents split up, never as the grand affair. I was told the story, but only as a didactic fable of the folly of youth, the craziness of passionate love.
    Janet arrived in Beirut in 1955, an independent woman of twenty, wanting to explore the world, picking the American University of Beirut to finish her bachelor’s, which she never did. Fate intervened in the form of a medical student at the university, my father. My mother was a beauty and, according to her, had had a number of beaus after her in New York, but my father had an irresistible charm.
    The story goes like this: On arriving in Beirut, Janet went to a Lebanese fortune-teller who read her coffee cup. The fortune-teller saw the man who was to be the love of Janet’s life. She told her the man was Lebanese, a healer who would save her from certain death, falling in love with her after curing her illness and then marrying her. They would live happily ever after.
    Janet met Mustapha at the beach of the American University of Beirut (technically not a beach since there is no sand, only large rocks and cement walkways, making it a poor beach by Beirut standards). At the time, my father had a habit of walking around with a stethoscope, which identified him as a medical student and helped him talk to girls. Years later, he would apply the same principle when he put the stethoscope on his car’s sun visor, thereby avoiding serious trouble or minor inconveniences when stopped at the checkpoints during the war. Whether Syrian soldiers, Christian soldiers of the Lebanese Forces, or the Druze militiamen, when they saw the stethoscope they did not ask for his ID, opting instead for a diagnosis of their ailments.
    My mother was swimming that day. She was trying to climb on one of the rocks to rest when a sea urchin’s spine inadvertently pricked her ankle. She screamed, but apparently had enough composure to swim back to the cement platform. People called to the man with the stethoscope to come look at the ankle. The stories differ here. My grandmother says the bleeding was so profuse, it took a heroic effort on my father’s part to halt it. My father says there was no blood at all, and the prick was barely noticeable. My father examined the ankle and told my mother the only way to save her foot was for him to suck the poison out of the most beautiful ankle in the world. He then lifted her ankle and kissed it.
    Their love affair was torrid and scandalous. They embarrassed the university by kissing publicly. The Druze community felt it was losing one of its brightest men and my grandparents were horrified. They objected to everything about Janet. They did everything they