GRANDMA WAS A PRESBYTERIAN, and, as far back as I can remember, she always started her day by reciting the Twenty-third Psalm. Every morning, rain or shine, she would throw open the French window in the east room, look up at the hills, and say, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. . . .” I used to stand by her side, hold her hand, and repeat after her, word for word. Then the sun would burst from behind the Monastery of Christ the Savior in Lebanon’s mountains of Joun, and the day would begin. Sometimes, before she went to the kitchen to make breakfast, Teta would stand there and look at the hills for some time, and then she would say, “The Lord God lives in those hills. He loves mountains, you know.” I had no idea how she knew where God lived, but that was what she told me, time and again.
Grandma taught me that God was accessible. She prayed to Him all the time, and not the way the preacher at church prayed, or the way other people prayed at mealtimes or funerals. They prayed as if God weren’t listening or were deaf or someplace far away, and they had to raise their voices to get Him to hear what they were saying. They begged and pleaded with Him as if He were reluctant to do anything for them. Grandma, on the other hand, talked to God as if He were standing right there in the room with her. She told Him things the way she would tell a friend. One day, I even heard her forgive Him. I did not know that you could forgive God, but Teta did. She forgave Him for letting her eye be taken.
Grandma had long been bitter over losing her eye when she was still young and attractive. One late-summer day, she’d been harvesting green olives for pickling when a leaf swooped down like an arrow from the top of a tree and struck her in the eye. The cut was tiny, barely visible, but it became infected, and her eye had to be removed.
It took Teta many years to sort that one out, but she finally did. I was there when it happened: she forgave God, put it behind her, and never mentioned it again.
Teta was very generous to the church. When her olives ripened in September and were taken to Im Yussef’s olive press, she made sure that at least one-tenth of her thick, green, virgin oil went to the church. She also gave the church almonds by the basket and wheat by the bushel, and pomegranates and fava beans and everything that the good earth produced. She never missed church on Sunday morning or Wednesday night. And she fed the preacher well. At our table, he ate many of her fat, tasty chickens stuffed with rice and almonds. Whenever my mother or father scolded her for giving away too much, she would wave her hand and say, “You don’t have it until you give it away.”
It was in the spring of 1948, my first year in school, that Grandma got “that disease.” Mountain folk in Lebanon called cancer that disease because they were afraid that saying the word itself would bring the sickness upon them. Early in the winter, Grandma began to complain to my mother about pains in her legs. She said sometimes her legs would go numb beneath her. Mama told her that she was probably overdoing it and reminded her to take it easy. But the first chance Mama got, she sent word to Uncle Wadi in Beirut, who made arrangements for Grandma to come down to the American University Hospital.
Grandma was gone for a week. When she came back, she had with her a bag of pills to help her die painlessly. The cancer in her spine was inoperable.
After a while, the pills stopped working. Grandma was a tough woman, but there were times when the pain made her scream the way a horse does when it breaks a leg. Within weeks, she was unable to walk and had to lie on a rubber sheet on a mattress on the floor of the west room. Seeing her suffer, I wondered why her God-friend — the one who lived in the mountains east of our house — wasn’t helping her. Sometimes I couldn’t bear to see her that way or listen to her scream and moan. So I ran away to the peace and quiet of my secret hideout, to be alone and think.
I’d discovered my hideout a few months before, when I chased a hare behind a mulberry bush at the foot of a large mound, about the size of a wheat pile at threshing time. Following the hare’s trail, I found a small hole in the rock, completely hidden from view by the bush. I went down on my hands and knees and stuck my head into the hole, and all of a sudden the world turned upside down. I felt as if my head were inside something as deep and wide as the night sky. It made me a little dizzy, the way I got on cool summer nights when I lay flat on my back and looked up at the stars until the earth turned over and the stars were below me and I had to close my eyes before I fell into endless space.
I pulled my head out, took a deep breath, and waited for everything to stop spinning. Then, as soon as my head cleared a little, I stuck it back into the hole to take another look. A strange feeling came over me. I felt old, or, rather, ancient — as ancient as the cedars of Lebanon, as ancient as the rock itself. I could hear my heart pounding in my ears. I did not know what to make of this odd sensation, so I just sat there at the mouth of the cave and waited for it to go away. Thoughts began leaping about in my head like grasshoppers. My first and foremost concern was whether anybody else in the village knew about the cave. I reasoned that no one did, because I had never heard anybody say anything about it — not even old-timers like Abu Wajeeh, the gunsmith, or Abu George, the farrier, who were given to spinning yarns and knew all there was to know about the village. The fact that I had discovered a cave that no one knew about gave me a sense of power and made my heart swell.
Then paranoia set in. I felt like a prospector who pulls a two-pound gold nugget from a riverbed only to discover he is standing among a bunch of cutthroats. What to do? But resolution came to me like God’s word, swift and nonnegotiable: no one was to know, not even Albert, my cousin and best friend. And that was that.
The following day was a Sunday. I had neither the patience nor the appetite to eat the usual Sunday breakfast of fried eggs, labneh (homemade cream cheese), olives, and hyssop tea. I hurriedly made myself a labneh sandwich and grabbed a candle and a box of matches and stuck them in my back pocket. I was off to explore my cave.
I got there in the time it took to eat the sandwich. The mouth of the cave was small, but I was small, too, and had no trouble crawling through the opening. Once inside, I struck a match and lit the candle and took a look around.
The cave was huge, about three qamats deep (a qamat is the height of a man) and two qamats high. The ceiling and the back wall were covered with a wet, shiny substance that looked and tasted like salt; when the candlelight fell on it just right, it made little rainbows like those I had seen in the kaleidoscope my second cousin Emile had brought back from Africa. The floor was soft reddish brown earth. It looked as if someone had mashed up a lot of crayons with a roller, like the one we used to pack limestone on our roof to keep it from leaking. Here and there lay dead dry leaves and twigs, blown in by the Gharbia (the west wind). Fortunately, there were no bats living in my cave. It was, however, the home of a little brown spider and a colony of big black ants, but I did not mind sharing my cave with them.
The first thing I did was to set the candle on a ledge and, with a small branch that I had cut from the mulberry bush, sweep the leaves and twigs into a corner. I thought that someday, when the weather turned cold, they would come in handy. With the candle in place and the floor clean, my cave was ready for me to move in. It was just the place to hide my belongings from the other kids, who were not above taking them if they wanted them badly enough. So I gradually brought over the following treasures: a cardboard box full of empty shotgun shells that my father had spent hunting quail; a handful of copper coins that were no longer in circulation; my slingshot, which my cousin Albert had made for me from an oak branch and a red inner tube; and the storybook that my uncle had given me for my birthday. It took me three days to transport these items to the cave; I didn’t want to move them all at once, for fear of attracting suspicion.
Right from the start, my cave became the center of my world. Sometimes I went there to get away from my little sister; she expected me to play with her while my mother did her housework or drank coffee with women from our neighborhood, who came by to talk about other women in the neighborhood. Sometimes I had to get away just to think. It seemed there was always something keeping me busy: either my mother wanted me to go to the dikkan (the country store) to get her a bag of salt, or my father wanted me to get him a pack of cigarettes or a fifth of arrack (a strong liquor), or my grandmother would ask me to fetch her a drink of water or her fly swatter or her bedpan. There was always something to keep me from thinking a problem through. In my cave, though, I could pick up a thread and follow it, without interruption, all the way to Damascus, if need be.
That day, when I ran to my cave to be alone, the problem I puzzled over was Grandma’s sickness, her impending death, and how her God fit into all of that. What I couldn’t understand was why God, who was Grandma’s friend, would let her suffer the way she did, why He wouldn’t lift a finger to help her. After all, she loved Him and sang psalms to Him and gave lots of goods to His church and fed His ministers. But He didn’t seem to remember any of that. He wasn’t there for her, as if she didn’t matter, or else He didn’t care.
I thought about all the reasons why He would do nothing for her. Finally, I came up with only two possible answers: either He couldn’t, or He wouldn’t. I understood the first reason: her God couldn’t help her because cancer was too big a problem for Him to handle. But if that were so, then He would not be the Almighty, as I’d heard Grandma and the preacher say He was. Rather, He would be just one more sorry, powerless god, like the idols that the Phoenicians worshiped in the surrounding hills.
The other explanation for God’s doing nothing was just as troubling. If He could help, but refused to, that meant He didn’t care. If that was the case, then Grandma had been duped; she’d let herself be fooled into believing that He was her friend. This thought made me furious. I was so mad I couldn’t sit still, so I decided to go back home and eat.
As I neared the house, I heard Grandma shouting. I walked up to the door of the west room, where she was lying. It was slightly ajar, and through the crack I could see my mother and Im Saleem, the woman Uncle Wadi had hired to help, standing over Grandma, chattering like two excited squirrels. They were trying to get her to stop doing something because, they said, it was improper. They wanted her to quit before she hurt herself. I opened the door a little wider. Grandma was lying on her side with her fanny exposed. She was wiping some wet brown stuff off her hand with a towel. My mother and Im Saleem kept hovering and twittering. Then I heard Grandma say that it had to come out; it was poisoning her. Her bowels would not move now that she was paralyzed from the waist down. She had to help herself the only way she knew how.
Grandma was very indignant, too. She was madder than I had ever seen her before. And I heard her say to God, “This is what You do to me, after all we have been through together? You forsake me in my hour of need? You let me be humiliated before my family and the whole village? Is it because I did not do right by You? Have I not fed Your ministers and given Your church aplenty? Is this how You repay me for trusting You and believing in You? And now that I am in despair, You are nowhere to be found, You son of a bitch!”
Both Mother and Im Saleem begged Grandma to stop saying these blasphemous things, but she paid them no mind. I rushed into the room to tell them to leave her be, but my mother ran me off; she didn’t want me to see what was going on in there.
I stormed out and went to the patch of earth where Grandma grew her fava beans. There, I filled my pockets with rocks, then went to throw them at the mountains, where Grandma’s God lived. I threw them as far and as hard as I could, and I called Him “son of a bitch,” just as I’d heard my grandma do as she lay in shit on a rubber sheet on the floor of the west room. I felt righteous because my grandma and I had been wronged, and we were not going to take it lying down, like the bleating sheep Saad, the butcher, bled to death in the village square on Saturday mornings.
Throwing rocks at the Lord God and calling Him names left me exhausted. It was getting dark, too, so I went into the east room and lay down on the hard couch. I was so tired, even the hard couch felt good, and I lay there for a long time, looking up at the ceiling and listening to Grandma’s moans. Then I went out like a light.
My sleep was troubled by horrible nightmares. In my dreams, Wadi, the madman who lived next door, chased me around, terrifying me with his crazy blue eyes. Sometimes he became the God of my grandmother. I screamed and screamed, but no sound came out. The people in my dream walked by me as if nothing unusual were happening. And they smiled.
The next day, I woke up stiff and feeling terrible — because of the nightmares, and also because of the things I had said and done the night before. I sat there on the edge of the couch and thought for a while. Then it hit me: all this time we had been talking to Grandma’s God, but maybe He did not pay much attention to the words people spoke. After all, people were always talking to Him, always wanting Him to do this or give them that or take care of this other thing — no wonder He ignored their words. But how many of them were writing to Him? How many of them were using the power of the written word to get Him to see what they wanted Him to see, and hear what they wanted Him to hear? None, I was willing to bet. Not one. So that was exactly what I was going to do. Right there and then, as the sun rose from behind the Monastery of Christ the Savior, I made up my mind to write a letter to my grandmother’s God.
I found a pencil and a piece of paper in the chest of drawers in the east room. Then I filled my pockets with almonds and headed back to my cave. When I got there, I lay stomach down on the floor and rested my paper on my storybook. As I started to write, another idea, even better than the first one, flashed in my head. I thought the best way to get to God was through His son, Jesus. And the surest way to get to Jesus was through his mother, Mary. Jesus would have to do whatever his mother told him to do, as any good son would. So I would write a letter not to my grandmother’s God, but to the Virgin Mary. The fact that I was a Presbyterian did not matter. Our Lady knew that I’d loved her since the day I’d first seen her picture in the Catholic church, when I’d snuck in to watch Abuna Hanna, the priest, chanting by candlelight.
I began by telling the Virgin that I loved her. Then I asked her to talk to her son, Jesus, and get him to talk to his Father, who lived in the hills east of our house. I begged her to tell her son that my grandma was in a lot of pain and that it wasn’t fair to abandon her like that. Then I asked her to do all she could to help Teta. I also promised her I would try to be good and wouldn’t throw rocks at God anymore. Finally, I thanked her for her kindness and wished her a long life.
I had to wait a few minutes for the words to dry, because the pencil I was using was unlike any I’d seen before. I had to lick it to get it to write, and it tasted funny, like the milk that oozes out of fig-tree bark when you cut it with a knife. It also made my tongue purple. But the good thing was, the words you wrote with that pencil could not be erased.
When my writing had dried, I folded my letter and took it to the Catholic church to deliver it to the Virgin. I squeezed in through a vent in the back of the sanctuary and headed for the altar, where I had seen my Catholic friends, dressed in white, sing to Mary during Sunday Mass as Abuna Hanna swung his censer. The church was so quiet that the silence felt heavy on my ears, as if I were underwater. But I continued on to the pulpit and carefully placed my letter on the large open Bible. Then I turned around and waved at Mary, the mother of God, and sneaked out the same way I had come in.
For the first time since Grandma had gotten that disease, I was at peace. And for the next three days, Grandma lay quietly on her mattress without pain. Then, on the third day, her fingernails turned blue and she died.
Grandma was laid to rest in the family cave in her olive grove by the village spring. Her coffin was placed between that of Grandpa Hassan, who died long before I was born, and that of Aunt Julia, who burned to death when she was seventeen. At the funeral, I felt alone. My mother was too busy with her own grief to notice mine. But I was tough, like Teta, and I could make it on my own. Besides, I had my hatred for her God to keep me going.
Afterward, I went to the house and changed out of my Sunday clothes. Then I filled my pants pockets with dried figs and almonds, packed some bread and cheese in a bag, and quietly headed for my cave. I did not even have to be secretive, because nobody was paying me any attention.
I wasn’t being as careful as usual when I crawled through the entrance, and I snagged the web of the little brown spider that shared the cave with me and tore it to shreds. But I did not give a damn. The spider did not matter, and neither did the black ants that lived in the hole in the floor. I had once brought them bread crumbs and crushed wheat, and after that they were happy to see me. But the day Grandma was buried I felt mean because I saw I was only a thing, a creature like the ants, the spider, and Abu Asaad’s mules. I hated the idea that I was just like them. It made me furious to think that the power over life and death was in someone else’s hands, and He was immovable and refused to do the right thing. My anger got the best of me, and I kicked the anthill and stomped the ants with my foot. They scurried around aimlessly, scared and confused. Then I sat down on the floor and looked at what I had done. Here and there, mangled ants were trying to drag themselves back into their ruined home, and ants missing legs or antennae were lying on their backs, kicking their feet in the air. Some were cut in half but still moving around, not knowing that they were already dead.
I was ashamed because I had inflicted pain and death on little things that had caused me no harm. I realized I was no better than my grandmother’s God who lived in the hills east of our house. Like Him, I had shown no mercy to my little friends. But I was sorry for what I had done. And I hoped He was, too.
“The Cave” is reprinted with permission from the forthcoming memoir The Boy from the Tower of the Moon, by Anwar F. Accawi. © 1999 by Anwar F. Accawi. The book will be published in May 1999 by Beacon Press.
— Ed.
