A MINOR SCANDAL
60S
through the doorway and asks me, in a small voice, what I propose to
do. Our son peeps around her skirts, meanwhile, piping one of his
rare words: pa-pa, pa-pa, pa-pa. I tell her I do not know, and they
both disappear. For a moment I wonder, idly, if the boy can say his
name.
Obsessive name! I push aside my notes and go to the windows of
the studio, which look out over the roof-tops of the northern fringe of
Montparnasse. Beyond Montparnasse is the Luxembourg, the Latin
Quarter and, further north, Saint-Germain de Pres. Just before I went
to the Lebanon I had finished a book, a kind of spiritual guidebook to
Paris for Americans. I had wanted it released immediately, so that my
father might understand why I tarried here so long. But the publisher
had excellent reasons for delay, and now it is too late. Now Paris, my
subject and my distraction, has disappeared, as it does whenever I try
to get to the bottom of my presence here. Or elsewhere in the world.
And my father, in any case, is beyond struggling with the stubbornly
unfamiliar language which he-how strange!-bequeathed me.
I turn away from the windows and stand again, shivering and
undecided, over my desk. Six weeks of mail and my notes; and a decision
to make. Only yesterday I stood shivering on the outskirts of Damascus,
watching the sun rise over those heartrending sand dunes, waiting for the
Dutch crew of the Skymaster to ready their plane for the flight.
It
seemed
to me then, already, that I had an enormously important choice to make,
and I saw myself solemnly announcing this event to--of all people-my
father, with whom I had had no correspondence for months. What
was it? The difficulty was to decide, then to formulate the emotion that
welled up so oddly; to get it all clear in my mind. But the night drive
over the Mountain from the coast had left me sore-boned and groggy,
aching for sleep.
That I should think of the old man at that very moment, when
he was dying in the Texas he had so rashly set out to explore, was not
due to some mysterious psychic intervention; nor even primarily to Iskan–
dar Riachy, my great Lebanese friend whose deep-lined, bristling, bright–
eyed face bore an astonishing resemblance to my father's. No, it was the
Lebanon itself, in the desperate intricacy of the Middle East, which con–
stantly spoke to me of this distant stranger, reminding me that he was
a Jew (my author and creator!), fleshing those ancient problems which
he and I had always, however obscurely, shared.
And so, standing on the edge of the Damascene oasis, not far from
where Saul stumbled and became Paul, I allowed myself to dream of
faces and things in Beirut. And here, of course, the mind was crouching
