Jabbour Douaihy

June Rain

For Samir Kassir

Chapter 1

They didn’t tell us what happened until the next day. They let us sleep through Sunday night unawares — upstairs, on the top floor of the east wing, where the smell of the nearby river and the dawn calls of the muezzins entered through the wide open windows. There we distracted ourselves on hot June nights by watching the few cars that passed through the market streets and observing the arguing of the lazy, mischievous, loud-mouthed boys getting back at the diligent kids with thick glasses who teachers were always putting on a pedestal.

It was almost seven o’clock when the headmaster entered the classroom followed by the school doorman. Those of us who were fighting back sleep, and there were many on that Monday morning, lifted our heads. Frère Ambroise would not have brought in Jamil al-Raasi if this were about the poor results of the mathematics exam, or what he might have heard about our plans to mix pop lyrics into the Latin chants of the local Maronite and Catholic families who attended church at the school on Sundays. Those were the kinds of infractions the headmaster dealt with in that French of his, studded with the harshest words. His tone confused us, even more than the names of the tropical birds and desert reptiles he would dole out to us, in plural and in singular form.

Jamil, despite his slight build and silent nature, was the school’s eyes and its link to the outside world. He negotiated with demonstrators when their chanting leaders in the front lines pushed too close to the school gates across from the Coppersmith Souk in the hope that for once the school would be shut down and the students allowed to join in their angry protest against the Tripartite Aggression on Egypt. He lent money to students in emergencies and relayed brief messages to the boarders from their parents: ‘Eat well, Anise, and don’t sneak out of school to go and hang around in the streets. It’s not safe out there…’

When parents came to the city to shop or to pay their mortgages at the government offices, they would visit Jamil to give him things to deliver to us, like goat’s cheese or aniseed fritters. It was to him and him alone that such matters were entrusted, matters we felt were impossible to convey in French. That language, whose symbols we struggled to decipher in those books with the depressing illustrations and which rolled fluently off the tongues of the Frères in their black habits, referred, in our view, to things from another world that had no counterpart in ours. As for our own affairs and our own names, they had their own language that was part of them and came from them. And that is why it was Jamil al-Raasi who leaned back against the doorframe and said in a lifeless tone, ‘Barqa kids, pack your books…’

Those were the kinds of things he was entrusted with — announcing to the Muslim children an extra day of holiday just for them on Eid al-Adha, or to the Orthodox Christians at Easter, or to dismiss the kids from the snow-covered mountain villages two hours early. His announcements were met with shouting and whistling, as the teachers in charge momentarily relaxed their supervision. As for us ‘Barqa kids’ the news of our early dismissal struck the older ones among us speechless and the younger ones with a silent joy that the week had been messed up already, along with concern about the bad news that was no doubt going to sting us soon.

When we heard Jamil al-Raasi’s announcement, we didn’t rush around making a racket and collecting our things the way the recipients of such announcements usually did. Despite our silence, Frère Ambroise couldn’t help barking out his orders — ‘No noise in the stairwells!’ — mostly in French, confirming our suspicions that he only pretended not to understand Arabic to trick us.

The headmaster seemed to be trying to restore some of the school’s decorum, which had been compromised when he conceded to set us free, most likely after hearing how vitally necessary it was for us to leave. A sudden silence fell upon the hundreds of day students who were flooding into the school. They looked us up and down, as if seeing us for the first time as we crossed the playground with our belongings on our backs. We tramped past the little wooden stage, the place where Davidian the photographer had got us to line up alongside our teachers for our commemorative class pictures. We, the children of Barqa, wouldn’t be appearing in the end of year photos that ill-omened year of 1957. As he led us to the gate, Jamil remained silent, despite our impulsive questioning and our little hands tugging on his shoulders and nearly tearing his jacket, until finally, like someone ridding himself of a heavy responsibility, he said, ‘Ask Maurice.’ The bus driver.

Jamil was right to hand the matter over to Maurice, because the bus driver was from our village. Jamil, on the other hand, was from a distant village way out in Akkar, near the Syrian border. Maurice was the one who took us to our families, once a month at most, whenever the school was pressured to release us. The longer we stayed away from the vicinity of the town, the safer our parents felt we were. As Maurice sat watching us get on the bus, he gripped the steering wheel and stared into space.

‘Maurice!’

He too did not answer.

We called out to him, we questioned him using every tone of voice. Maybe he didn’t want to say anything within hearing distance of Jamil al-Raasi — a ‘stranger’ — who was supervising our departure and making sure we behaved as we crossed the few metres between the school grounds and the bus, parked beside the gate out in the nearby circle that Jamil was also in charge of supervising.

‘Maurice! What’s going on? Where have you come from?’

Twenty questions, each with its own particular urgency, failed to pry a single word out of Maurice, or even a wave towards the back of the bus or one of his usual glances in the mirror to make sure we were under control and all accounted for. It wasn’t until the last one of us had climbed aboard the bus that Jamil al-Raasi shut the rear door, repeating timidly to us like someone about to reveal everything he knew, or as if offering one final word of advice before saying his last goodbyes, ‘Take care of yourselves.’

The moment Maurice heard the door slam shut, he started the engine and took off, without making the sign of the cross. We didn’t fight over the window seats or push our way towards the long bench seat at the back of the bus where we liked to put our feet up and stretch out, trying to undo all those hours of sitting properly in the classroom.

At first Maurice was preoccupied with getting out of the city. He seemed to be using the difficulty of passing through the narrow streets as an excuse for not answering our incessant questions. Trying to justify not answering us, it seemed, he showed excessive agitation as he swerved to avoid hitting the fruit carts and liquorice juice vendors or the acrobatic delivery boys cycling through the traffic delivering orders of hummus or fava beans to their customers. That day Maurice kept quiet, didn’t gripe about all the chaos in the wheat market. Nor did he curse the porters who obstructed the road, heaving under their loads. He didn’t even lose his patience when a horse cart got stuck between the produce crates and blocked traffic. All of that, in his opinion, and as he so often preached to us about, was clear proof of the inability of Arabs to win wars, though he never indicated whether he was happy about their losing or pained by it. But that morning Maurice appeared unable to speak as he laboured with his short arms to turn the steering wheel around the successive sharp bends on our way up towards the American School. At any rate, we felt that, for the first time in the entire history of his driving us to our homes, Maurice was not in a hurry. Nor were we, as I recall.

We passed the last of the scattered buildings along both sides of Al-Arz Street and made a turn at the water storage tank. Now that we were on a flat road and the driving had become easier, the time had come for him to start telling us why he was taking us home on a Monday. But just as soon as the high mountains, still wrapped in a light morning fog, appeared, we heard his sobs. We suddenly realised that he was not going to talk, and so we stopped asking questions and began watching him in the rear-view mirror, usually his means for supervising us. His big green eyes were the colour of apples, the kind my grandfather wouldn’t let us pick, always telling us that they hadn’t ripened yet.

The plain leading to our village unfolded before us while Maurice wept. Those of us who were seated by the windows poked our heads out to catch the breeze and enjoy the view of the olive trees as they receded behind us, back towards the city, breaking the monotony of the plain. As the plain stretched before us, we looked around and counted each other. There were eighteen of us in various grades, but not all were from Barqa. Two strangers had slipped into the fold. Actually, their parents lived in our town, but they were still strangers. Jamil al-Raasi didn’t differentiate them from us. They lived in Barqa, but they were not Barqa kids. They chose to ride with us and risk facing whatever dangers were in store for us, rather than sit at those gloomy desks at school.

Maurice wept as if he were all by himself and not being watched by all our eyes, as if it were between him and himself alone. Our neighbour, Maurice. He hadn’t been blessed with children of his own. I used to see him after he dropped everyone off, sitting beside his wife on a wooden bench under a jujube tree, as if waiting for evening to fall, a small radio at their side blaring Mohammed Abd al-Wahhab songs. Maurice was the first person I ever saw cry with total abandon, never wiping his tears, letting them pour down his cheeks and drip onto the steering wheel. That kind of weeping only happened in romantic movies like the ones the older schoolchildren often skipped school to go and see at the Roxy Theatre. Maurice’s green eyes looked very big in the wide mirror. While he wept, we watched in total silence, discovering for the first time all the rumbling and hissing sounds that were usually muffled by our constant yelling as we rode in Maurice’s tottering bus.

The only thing that drew our attention away from Maurice was arriving at the steep mountain pass where the houses of the town, clumped together on top of the hill and still engulfed in the white fog rising from the river, came into view. After slowing a little before the final stretch, he drove us down with the brakes screeching until we could see the steel bridge and the crowd that had gathered around an army tank; a soldier wearing a helmet painted with camouflage colours peered out of the turret. There were only women and soldiers. I saw my aunt standing among them. She was wearing a red dress and her hair was dishevelled. Most of the women were dressed in black. I didn’t know why they had sent my aunt rather than someone else to pick me up. I assumed my mother and father were occupied with whatever was happening. I saw her from a distance, angrily shrugging her shoulders with her arms folded across her chest. There were around twenty women huddled together and a small band of soldiers scattered on and around the bridge. When we got off the bus, we heard one of the soldiers telling another, with their rifles strapped to their shoulders as they looked at the muddy water, how the snows had been late to thaw the year before and how the river had flooded, sweeping the stone bridge away, so a steel bridge had been built in its place. I tried to ask my aunt what was happening, but she shut me up. She put her hand on my mouth as if I had committed a crime. The women took off on foot, accompanying the schoolchildren to the town. It was a strange procession. My aunt took me by the hand and led me along. I remember I kept looking back, wondering what some of my schoolmates were going to do. They were still standing there waiting with the soldiers because no one had come to get them. No one had come for the two strangers. Perhaps their parents hadn’t expected their sudden arrival. I don’t know why I was worried about them, since, being strangers, they were not in any danger.

Strangers, al-ghirb in Arabic or al-ghurb in some dialects, is the plural of al-ghareeb, stranger. It stems from the word al-gharb with an ‘a’ meaning ‘the West’, the direction from where those who are not from among us — the outsiders — come. We often went on about that — with or without any prompting — saying that nothing pleasing to the heart ever came from them. Those intruders made their foreignness obvious the moment they opened their mouths. A stranger’s accent exposed him immediately, and was usually quite humorous. We found it strange when one of us, a cousin or neighbour, adopted one of those accents after spending a year or two at a school near the capital city. Their accent made them sound more like a Beiruti or someone from Kisrwan. Those were accents we couldn’t stand. We would try to imitate them and make fun of people who talked that way, adding ‘sh’ to the ends of words or pronouncing the letter ‘qaaf’ like the people from the Chouf region, who pronounced these words as they do in formal Arabic, rather than as a glottal stop as we do. It was as though these comical idiosyncrasies made the people who articulated them seem so stupid and idiotic we couldn’t bear it. If they came back at us, making fun of our own accent known for its preponderance of ‘u’ vowels — as for example when we pronounce the word for ‘my brother’ we say khayy-u instead of khayy-i and bayy-u instead of bayy-i for ‘my father’ — we would say we inherited this from Syriac, which we sometimes claimed was our original language and that there was no shame in that. Rather, it was a source of pride and a testimony to our deep-rootedness. We could also detect a stranger by the food he ate. ‘Strangers’ food’ was well-known, and strangers were easily discovered by the way they made their kibbeh; it always came out too thick so they’d have to add a lot of spices to make it taste better. There were other dishes we heard about, like arnabiyyeh and ablama, and so forth, but these never graced our dinner tables. And strangers did not get counted. For example, when certain events resulted in people getting killed and wounded, the strangers among them were neither mentioned by name nor counted among the casualties. And when there was a fatal accident or car crash, the best way to set everyone’s minds at ease was to say that the victim was ‘a stranger’. All the commotion and interest in the incident would suddenly come to a halt and everyone would go about their business as before. Also, if a man married a woman from outside the town, she remained nameless, ‘a stranger’. In general, that was not advisable, because such a woman would be a heavy burden on the husband since only a girl from his own village would know how to put up with him. ‘Strangeness’ was not measured in kilometres but rather in hundreds of metres outside the village, starting at the very first village which overlapped our own orchards. As for how long it took to become ‘naturalised’ there was no guaranteed timeframe. No one could be sure when people would stop whispering about a person and their family and referring to them as ‘strangers’. When we talked about Asaad Beyk bringing people from Akkar to build his house, for example, someone hearing this who wasn’t familiar with the history of that influx of labourers might think it took place yesterday. But a closer inspection of the biography of this eminent man, the son of that great family, would confirm that this influx happened before 1887, the year the house was constructed, when those strangers chiselled the stones and hoisted them into place.

I continued to worry about what would happen to those two strangers who had become part of our group, until the bus’s horn sounded, distracting me. While we were being divided up among the women who had come to collect us, Maurice sat waiting in the driver’s seat. His arms drooped over the steering wheel and his green eyes remained moist with his silent tears. It was because of the way he sat slumped over the steering wheel with his heavy arms that the horn sounded, startling the women who instinctively grabbed the little ones. I asked my aunt why Maurice didn’t drop us off near our houses like he usually did, but she scolded me, telling me to stop looking back and to move faster. When we reached a fork in the road, I could no longer see the bus, the soldiers, or the steel bridge over the river.

The crowd of women and schoolchildren dwindled as some of them left the main road and headed down side roads towards their homes as quickly as they could, the women’s eyes darting in all directions. We could hear the bells tolling from the Church of Our Lady down in the Lower Quarter. They were not the usual chimes for mass, nor were they the three tolls of mourning, but rather a single ring we’d never heard before. It rippled over the quiet of the town, followed by a long silence, then another ring, then silence… I noticed that every time we came close to one of the alleys leading to the main square, my aunt made me walk on the opposite side, trying to shield me with her own body whenever both of us were exposed. When my aunt moved me from her right side to her left side, I didn’t realise that she was putting herself in danger rather than exposing me to the gunfire that might be aimed at us from the depths of one of those narrow streets. She walked faster, pulling me along with her, until she took a turn downhill.

That is when the roles were reversed. Now it was her turn to keep looking behind her, making sure no one was within hearing distance. I had a strong feeling someone was following us, so I sped up without any urging from her this time. As soon as we had taken a few steps inside our quarter, she appeared more at ease. She started to talk. I didn’t know why she was going on about how the luckiest thing in her life was not getting married, despite all the eligible young men who had come asking for her hand, and whom she now began to name: Salman Abu Shalha, Saeed Antoun and a third who went to Mexico, became very rich, and donated to the building of the town’s new church. ‘I thank my lucky stars I refused to get married,’ she stopped to say with exaggerated disgust. She hated men with their crudeness and their stench, and the same went for children. ‘What’s the point of having children, anyway?’

When we reached an opening between the houses through which we could see the horizon, she stopped talking. She put her hand on my shoulder to stop me and pointed out the little village perched atop the crest of the mountain facing us from the east, and I understood her gesture meant that not a single stone there would be left standing. I wasn’t able to form a clear idea about what was happening, except that something calamitous had taken place, and even though the elders didn’t want to divulge the details, their faces and gestures gave them away and made us feel the world was crashing down around us. I didn’t understand exactly what was going on until I met up with one of my friends, from the Gang Quarter, who spoke to me in my own language. What he said to me, which was the first telling of the events I heard, has remained engraved in my memory.

As we entered the passageway, my aunt suddenly got the hiccups. The first hiccup was so sudden and strong that her whole chest jerked backward and her entire body shook. She stopped walking and was about to look around to see where the sound had come from. She didn’t stop talking, though, but talked faster and faster, talking to herself and not even addressing me anymore. I realised later that the closer we got to the church, the more agitated she became and the more she sped up and spewed out words in every direction. She cursed the damn humidity, the rheumatism that inflicted even the young among us, the lack of piety and the greed. She spouted off the names of people who had betrayed trust and others who had stolen and murdered… I told her she’d better stop talking like that or she would start hiccupping again.

That was the only sentence I’d uttered since she took me by the hand as I got off Maurice’s bus. But she didn’t pay any attention and continued her rant, cursing whoever had chosen that place for us to live. ‘Why didn’t they choose some other place, somewhere along the coast from where we could look across the sea and see the face of Our Lord? Why did they have to cram us here between the two rivers?’ We reached the gate of the convent and heard a woman wailing loudly. When my aunt heard that grating voice, she froze and began to lash out at her with cruel words.

‘The bitch! She’s been at it since six o’clock this morning. She hasn’t stopped to take a breath! She’ll be the death of us all!’

Then, hiccups punctuating her words, she asked me if I knew how to get home by myself. I nodded.

‘Tell your mother that your auntie has become utterly useless,’ she said before bending down and whispering in my ear that since yesterday she hadn’t gone into the church square where our house was, and that she’d spent all day and night going around it, peeking from behind the houses, not daring to look for very long, then shutting her eyes and running away.

I went the rest of the way home by myself, two hundred metres at most. Before the square came into full view, I spotted the ‘Poet of the Rose’ standing on the dome of the church. There he was — up high, where the swallows slept in the springtime, after swooping down in spectacular display and nearly brushing the tops of our little heads before the evening sunset — the Poet of the Rose, who built the nativity scene at Christmas time, placing the large statues inside it and redirecting the irrigation canals to create waterfalls; the one who made kites and covered the neighbourhood walls with charcoal graffiti calling for the unification of ‘the Fertile Crescent’ and glorifying the party leader, al-Zaeem, always signing with his pseudonym, the Poet of the Rose. I spotted him with his back against the bell, quietly swaying back and forth without allowing the bell to sound, peering down on the square from above. He was pointing to specific spots below while counting out loud, ‘One, two, three…’ all the way to ten and then he would pound hard on his chest with his fist, causing the bell to toll once. Then he would repeat the whole sequence again. ‘One, two, three…’

There were ten men stretched out on ten beds.

They laid the dead men on beds they had brought out from the neighbouring houses. My mother gave them my brother’s bed. He was two years my senior, and this preferential treatment remained a point of contention between us throughout our adolescence. He would brag about the event and I would pretend to be disgusted with him. I was amazed that our next door neighbour insisted that her brother be laid out on her own bed and that she refused to wash the sheets afterwards in order to keep his smell in the sheets for her to sniff any time she wanted. The sheets became black and dirty and she stopped sniffing them, I think, but she never washed them, because every time she was about to do so, she would remember her brother.

The square was full of women and children, groups of them scattered among the beds — wives, mothers, sisters, especially sisters. The little girls who lived next door imitated the grown-ups by grabbing fistfuls of their hair and tugging their heads right and left. I spotted the hunchbacked fabric seller among them, the one with the high effeminate voice who always sang love songs in his broken French to little girls before pinching their bottoms whenever he got the chance. I also saw a priest crying. I didn’t see any men other than the ones stretched out on the beds in their Sunday best, their last expressions fixed for eternity. I saw a woman I’d never seen before in our neighbourhood. She was tall and fair-skinned, and she moved from one bed to another, sitting beside each one to straighten their ties and brush back the stray strands of hair from their brows, or to wipe away a spot of blood or dust, and to gaze for a moment upon each face before moving on to the next.

Chapter 2

Eliyya was one of us, born and raised in Harat al-Isaaba, the Gang Quarter, as it was called, or Horit l-Isaabeh, as we proudly pronounced it in our accent. It was also known as the Western Our Lady Quarter in reference to the Church of Our Lady, as was recorded on the identity cards of everyone who had lived there since the census of 1932. At that time some unknown employee of the Ministry of Interior divided the town into five quarters whose names we never remembered and whose boundaries we never knew except at election time. Eliyya enjoyed a certain immunity in the quarter that we all recognised, and knocking him to the ground during a fight or pelting him with stones from a distance had repercussions. The truth was he wasn’t the only one who enjoyed the immunity. A number of other kids were entitled to the special treatment, the sons of those said to have paid the price in blood. As for us, the ones who had not lost a family member and lived in the loving embrace of both our parents, we were held to the strict letter of the law. It was never unjust if we were cursed at or treated harshly, because our parents sat back and did nothing. But back then, if someone dared attacked Eliyya, fits and curses and stones would come flying in a heartbeat, which is why there was always a need to be strong and physically fit. The very moment Eliyya stopped crying and reluctantly divulged the name of whichever kid had dared threaten him, his mother Kamileh would hunt him down. Eliyya’s pride prevented him from telling on his assailant, though, until he had exhausted all means of revenge he was personally capable of first. He knew that if he were to overuse his ‘privilege’ he would not have a single friend or ally left. But when he did reach that point, Kamileh would charge out like a storm, with evil in her eyes and a hairpin between her teeth as she quickly pulled her hair up into a bun. We would shout and cheer her on after some of us had already spirited the culprit to safety down by the river. Kamileh would stand at the door to the boy’s house with her hands on her hips and yell to his mother, ‘You’d better discipline him, or I’ll be forced to do it myself!’

The mother would go along with Kamileh and threaten to punish that ‘little devil’ of hers, but the moment Kamileh turned her back, the mother would wink at her neighbour.

Eliyya was one of the few kids in those days in the late sixties who wore thick glasses.

‘He’s frail,’ his mother would claim, even though he never had any health problems worth mentioning.

Despite long protests from him, she would make him wear an extra jacket or wool turtleneck sweater that covered his neck all the way up to his ears, while his friends pranced around in short sleeves even when there was a chance of rain. On the rare occasions when Eliyya went outside, he loved to take part in fights, even if they were non of his business. The moment any tension flared up, he removed his glasses — afraid his eyes might get hurt, as his mother always cautioned — handed them over to a friend and charged into the brawl full of joy, not worrying in the least about the consequences. He always took sides with the weaker party, whoever was in most need of help. He wove between the legs of the older boys involved in the fight, scratched, pinched and bit them as he shouted war cries and insulted their parents and uncles. We never could figure out how he managed to come up with all those insults with such ease. But before they noticed him and had a chance to deliver his share of well-deserved punches and kicks for being an instigator, his mother’s roar would ring out, forcing Eliyya to grudgingly withdraw amidst the whistling of his peers, as if his mother’s interference prevented him from achieving sure victory and spared his opponents severe punishment.

The day Eliyya came home with his glasses broken and his face filled with fright, Kamileh had had enough. And this time she didn’t have to nag him to find out what happened, because he was in dire need of telling her. He began his story, panting. She put her hand on his chest feeling his heart beat as he told her how he had gone hunting with two mischievous boys up the hill near the old silk factory. They’d decided that day it was time to get rid of the dog that always followed them around because, according to what they said, he’d gone senile and for the past month the dog had been eating the birds they shot rather than retrieving them. As Eliyya spoke, Kamileh pounded her thighs, bracing herself for the worst. They lured the dog down the hill without telling Eliyya their plan.

‘Over there, over there, come see!’ Eliyya said to his mother, heading to the window. Near the fence, one of them pulled the clip off a hand grenade and threw the grenade for the dog to fetch. The dog ran after it, picked it up in his mouth and clamped down on the trigger, preventing it from going off, which meant that the moment he dropped it from his mouth, the grenade would explode. As Eliyya related the details, he relayed the fear that had gripped him there, and Kamileh squealed at the thought of her son being in such danger. She started patting him down, all over his body, fearing he had been hit somewhere but didn’t dare tell her. At any rate, contrary to his recent voracious appetite for birds, the dog decided — ‘Oh my goodness!’ — to bring the ‘prey’ back to the hunters. Everyone was terrified, and screamed at each other to spread out and go in different directions to minimise the danger. To everyone’s surprise, rather than heading after the two hunters, the dog followed the hunters’ incidental companion.

‘He followed me, Mother. He brought the hand grenade to me!’

Kamileh squealed again.

Fortunately, as he was running, Eliyya tripped and fell — which was how his glasses got smashed. Eliyya finished his story, panting, telling his mother how the dog suddenly and for no reason ran off in another direction. A huge explosion was heard and the poor dog’s body parts were strewn all over the branches of the Jaffa orange trees.

‘Come in and wash your face,’ Kamileh said. ‘And you stay away from those sons of bitches!’

With the neighbours as witnesses, she swore two or three times a day to get Eliyya away from the Gang Quarter, away from the whole town, once and for all. She contacted her cousin, a nun and member of the Sisters of the Cross, to help her register him in one of the boarding schools near the capital. Her cousin pulled strings with the school administration to allow Kamileh to come and inspect the kitchen and the dormitory. She went around sniffing the bed sheets and stooping to look under the beds to make sure there were no mice droppings. She opened the window to make sure there were no drafts that might expose Eliyya to bronchitis. During that period, Eliyya had already slipped out of his mother’s sight at least twice, once to participate in fishing for eels using sticks of dynamite, and another time to take part in a penis-measuring competition amongst the neighbourhood boys that involved standing in a long line on the roof of the flour mill in front of an older expert who chose which ones stood out, giving the winners a kind of pride and reputation that lasted for years.

Her only child, Eliyya, who had required so much time and effort to conceive, was now heading down the wrong path, right before her eyes. One had to admit that Kamileh was an able woman who succeeded in saving her son. Distancing him yielded quick results, perhaps quicker than Kamileh expected. If he had gone to some faraway country and come back, we would have said, as we always did, that the sea whisked him away. But he hadn’t gone beyond Beirut, a mere hour and a half by car. We didn’t know what happened to him at his new school. Perhaps after going to school and experiencing some of life’s trials, he had left his extended childhood behind and entered all of a sudden into a sad and repressed adolescence. We often talked about him, but most of all, this sudden transformation in him increased the already high esteem with which we regarded the schools in Beirut. Between Christmas and Easter, Eliyya had grown timid. The school had taught him manners. During an absence of three short months, he was transformed. On Holy Thursday he came back to spend a week with his mother.

He passed his time lounging on the balcony, content to sit in that cramped square surrounded by all those plants with their colourful early spring blooms. It was as though being there in his own house in the Gang Quarter was tantamount to temporary exile from his real home; he counted the days until he was to go back. He kept his head buried in a thick book. Kamileh threw a wool blanket on him the moment she felt the slightest draft, not wanting him to catch a chill, something he certainly could do without. He didn’t respond when his old friends happened to pass by, whether intentionally or by accident, and called for him. When they were sure Kamileh was occupied in the kitchen washing the dishes, cooking or fuming about something, they threw pebbles at him to attract his attention, or they whistled through their fingers to disturb him. But he paid no attention. It was as if he didn’t hear them, as if he was adrift in the world of his books. The boys exchanged looks of surprise, shrugged their shoulders and decided to leave him alone, because they had reached an age when they no longer begged for friendship.

On the following New Year’s Day, on one of his visits, he arrived with an accordion. The taxi dropped him off some distance away that day. Eliyya strapped the shiny wine-coloured instrument on his back and walked through the drizzling rain towards his house like a disciplined soldier carrying his gear, attracting a following of inquisitive young stragglers. In the afternoon, the rain stopped. The neighbourhood kids congregated near Kamileh’s porch as soon as Eliyya’s accordion belted out the first tune. They stared at him in silence as he stretched the bellows as far as they would open, the full length of his arms. He pulled them open only to push them back together again, at times bending over the accordion with his eyes closed as if feeling the pain of the sad tune or stamping his feet with joy when the rhythm picked up. He swayed along with the accordion, his fingers flying over the numerous black and white keys, drawing out a dazzling new sound never before experienced in those damp winding alleys of the neighbourhood. More and more people stopped to listen to him. At first he played a popular tune for the small baffled gathering, one they had all heard on the radio, Fayrouz’s ‘Zurooni Kulli Sana Marra’ (‘Visit Me Once a Year’) but soon they realised, as they listened along in astonishment, that he was now passionately playing Western tunes they didn’t recognise. They realised they were trying in vain to recognise the tunes, for Eliyya had abandoned their world. He had abandoned the riverbanks and the pilfering of plums and loquats in season, the games of daring and endurance. He had abandoned all of that for good. He had left for another realm they knew nothing about. Some of them felt he had even forgotten their names. It wasn’t that Eliyya had changed out of concern for his future as his mother wished, and it was not, as one might suppose, a matter of haughtiness on his part. Rather, it was as if he had suddenly become preoccupied with more important matters. They were unable, for example, to understand the talent that had enabled him to win first place in the school-wide French poetry competition. They saw his picture in the Telegraph, a shot of him as the competition organisers handed him the shiny metal trophy of a bird with outspread wings standing on one leg. They, on the other hand, persisted in the boorish ways of their ancestors, cursing the souls of the dead if they stumbled over a stone in the road, or aggressively asking bystanders who looked at them inquisitively what they wanted. They stopped inviting Eliyya to participate in their games. In fact, they stopped paying him any attention at all.

War broke out and Eliyya’s school was close to the green line. ‘We got clobbered once,’ Kamileh said. ‘We’ve had more than our share of it. No more!’

She tried to get her son out of Beirut temporarily by sending him to the mountains, to one of the summer resort towns in which her cousin resided, in a convent, and on their way up there they ran into an armed checkpoint. Amidst the commotion and because they weren’t familiar with the area they were passing through, they didn’t know if the armed men were stopping Christians or Muslims. It was enough of a scare for Kamileh to hand him over to the nun, but he didn’t last there more than two nights because the war was spreading up into the mountains and the bombs were falling close to the convent. The nuns prepared a bed for him down in the cellar, but soon Kamileh came scrambling back to retrieve him and take him all the way home to the Gang Quarter; to get there from Beirut they had to traverse tortuous mountain roads.

Back in our village, Eliyya was sentenced to house arrest. But again his imprisonment didn’t last, because it wasn’t long before the dangers caught up with us. Like water, the war seeped into all the regions it could possibly reach. It reached us at first in the form of incessant rumours about an impending attack for which the other side had amassed fighters from different nationalities and even different colours. When they started putting up barricades and young men started wearing battle fatigues and driving around in quasi-military style Jeeps on which slogans of old wars that had taken place a thousand years before were painted, Kamileh made a most difficult decision.

‘Out of the country with you, into God’s wide world. One has already died. We’re not losing another.’

She took advantage of a lull in the fighting to plan Eliyya’s trip. She packed his bags, stuffing them to the brim with wool sweaters, shirts and underclothes until they weighed twice the allowed weight. She had to seek the aid of the travel agent who in turn contacted the officials he knew at the airport to make sure she didn’t get charged for excess baggage. No one knew how Kamileh managed to accompany Eliyya into the passenger waiting area and from there through security where she quarrelled with the customs agents to make sure they didn’t throw away any of his things. Kamileh was accompanied by Muntaha, who told everyone in the quarter how Kamileh had been so preoccupied with Eliyya’s suitcases and provisions that she never had the chance to shed a tear over his departure.

Eliyya didn’t come back. His mother would receive a letter or two a year from him from New York City. A single page and a few lines, just enough to assure her that he was still alive. She also heard about him from returning students who had finished their studies in neighbouring US states. They had heard more about Eliyya than they had actually seen of him. In fact it was almost certain that all the young men of the village — there were approximately ten of them at the height of the war who formed a tight-knit community there — did not see him once at their regular meetings — not at Sunday mass at Saint Maroun Church, which no one could get out of, and not at the luncheons that followed during which they drank arak and made tabbouleh and became teary-eyed listening to Fayrouz. Some of them even flew in from other states in order not to miss these gatherings. They never saw Eliyya in person, but they did hear a lot about him. His name cropped up in the litany of people from the village who’d become prominent in some area, though the exact nature of his work remained obscure. Those who had seen him once or twice described him as if he were some other person — someone full of himself, preoccupied with his own intelligence, who spoke with a Midwestern accent and who scrutinised everything with his alert eyes. It was as if he were one of those Americans interested in the Middle East who pontificated in stiff language about structural reform in the Arab world on CNN in the late hours of the night or the small hours of the morning. He truly resembled them — tall, thin, a garish tie in colours made for television, eloquent, able to find just the right words with astonishing speed, as if reading his answers from a book.

Eliyya sank into that world until being discovered by someone from our quarter, from here, the Gang Quarter itself, one of the fellows Eliyya had turned his back on when he left for God’s big wide world. Eliyya couldn’t get away; they eventually caught up with him. It was one of those local young geniuses who found him on the internet one dull night in that early-to-bed town of ours. He searched him on Google — whose fame had just begun to spread — and Google led him to other sites, from one address to another, until he finally arrived at a private site he swore to his friends was Eliyya’s, even though it did not carry Eliyya’s name but rather a variation that by some stretch of the imagination could be the name of the Biblical prophet.

The young man passed the web address along to his friends, who began visiting it from time to time, in between visiting porn sites and chat rooms using fake names, an activity that quickly reverted to slinging cuss words back and forth using the few English expressions they had picked up watching violent American movies. They never found anything that pointed to Eliyya’s biographical information or his place of birth. Eliyya had done everything possible to make sure he didn’t leave any identifying traces — no proper name, no allusion to Lebanon or his town or even to the Arab world or the Arabic language. One day he uploaded a picture of himself to his site; he was half-naked, lying on the sand on some beach, staring passionately at a young blonde woman, also in a swimsuit, next to him. They could tell for sure it was him, even though he wasn’t wearing his glasses. From time to time, they would entertain themselves reading the quotes he posted with his daily blog entries. He had chosen one of these as his permanent motto: Here I will record my thoughts, not in any particular order, and perhaps with intended confusion. This is the real order that imprints my project with the stamp of chaos.

In the meantime, cataracts had rendered Kamileh nearly blind. Her world began to shrink, and the more it shrank, the easier it became to move around. She abandoned the bedrooms and the living room to spend her day standing at the sink in her dark kitchen or sitting on the balcony whose deep shade defied even August’s heat. She had green fingers, Kamileh. Every day she added a new planter. She said her favourite was zahrat al-mahkama, the court flower, which closed its petals at noon, the hour court is adjourned. She sat, not looking at anything. She recognised each of the neighbours by their footsteps: the school teacher who clicked her high heels, joyful for the new car she was able to buy after credit companies reinstated monthly instalment plans for customers on modest incomes; the blind singer whose daughter escorted him to the cafés along the river; or even the clip-clop of the donkey weighted down with a bundle of bamboo canes that his driver, in traditional baggy shirwal pants, would use to make baskets of all shapes and sizes. She detected strangers, too, from the sound of their footfall. She spoke to whomever she pleased and if anyone accused her of ignoring him or her, she blamed it on her failing vision. She sat there for hours by herself. At times it seemed that Kamileh lived the dimming of her eyesight the way a calm observer watches the light slowly fade at sunset.

One day, a letter arrived from Eliyya, as if at the wrong time, too soon after a previous letter, or perhaps after too long of a break. She had a strange feeling about the letter, but she wasn’t able to read anymore. She had to call Muntaha, her neighbour and life-long companion, to read the letter for her. Muntaha read the letter to herself first and then started telling Kamileh bit by bit. They were used to each other and to gentle banter. Kamileh smiled when she found out that her son was coming to visit, but she didn’t shout for joy over it.

Eliyya arrived at the Beirut airport on Sunday afternoon. Kamileh was waiting there for him with a group of her neighbours who accompanied her in two cars. They had convinced her after a long argument to end her mourning and wear the blue dress she had made for the day of her final exit. They accompanied her but did not realise until they were already there in the arrival hall amidst the crowd of all those people waiting to greet their returning relatives, that Kamileh could not actually see her son and they didn’t know him. Even if some of them had known him as a boy, they might not recognise him now after he’d gone grey and possibly lost his hair.

‘Well, he’ll recognise me!’

Putting an end to the confusion, Kamileh pulled out from her large bag a picture of Eliyya when he received his Baccalaureate with high honours. It was a large picture in a thick frame. She held it up above her head as her friends pushed her towards the front of the crowd. They waited, hoping he would be one of those arriving passengers pushing their suitcases and looking expectantly for their waiting relatives. Eliyya walked past them without turning his head, but then he heard someone calling.

‘Eliyya! Eliyya!’

And so he turned back. Eliyya and his mother held each other in a long embrace. Kamileh inhaled the smell of his face and his clothes and touched him all over while the neighbours stood waiting. She caused a big jam in the airport reception hall as she held Eliyya’s head in her hands and showered him with kisses. He was only able to free himself from her grip when the oncoming travellers with their suitcases forced their way through the line. He backed away a little in order to take a good look at her and he could tell from her slow movements and the way she used her hands that she had lost her sight. His eyes filled with tears so much that the contact lens in his right eye nearly fell out. The whole way home in the car, he held her hand tight, all the way until they reached the town and night had fallen.

Two days after Eliyya’s arrival, some of the relatives reunited under the shade of Kamileh’s porch to celebrate his safe arrival and to catch up on his news. They had rarely come to visit her. They were afraid of her, because despite her advanced age, she still had sharp claws. Maybe Eliyya’s return would soften her temperament. Each one said his piece.

‘If you’re smart, Kamileh, you won’t let him leave again. Doesn’t he have enough diplomas to find work here?’

She seemed resigned. ‘If only he would! He only has one month’s vacation from his job. He has to go back,’ she lied and then let out a heavy sigh. ‘No matter. I’m nearing the end. Only a little time remains…’

They tried to raise her spirits by offering the perfect solution. ‘You have a big house, and if he wanted, he could add another floor to it. You could convince him to bear you two or three grandchildren, and you can start by having your eye surgery. It’s an easy operation, you know. They don’t even make an incision. They use lasers, and you’d only have to stay in the hospital one day.’

She got upset, as if they had stung her.

‘What do I need an operation for? I know all the scenery by heart. What do you want me to see from here, that cow, Ibrahim al-Halaby’s wife, hanging her underwear out on the roof and strutting around? Or the drab front of Abu Mansour’s house? I’m sure I won’t live to see the day they repaint it. They have more debt on their backs than the hair on two furry dogs!’

There she went again. As soon as she opened her mouth, bullets shot out in every direction.

It was no use. They changed the subject and began to think of excuses to leave for their homes or for work.

She seemed to sense she had disappointed them. She had to say something to make up for it. ‘I knew that Eliyya was coming this year, and specifically at this time.’

How could they believe her?

‘You said you received a letter from him saying he was coming back…’

‘Even before that letter arrived I was expecting him to come. I imagined him suddenly appearing without warning. And before Muntaha read me his letter, I was shouting “Who is it?” every time there was a knock at the door, hoping he would be the one to answer.’

‘How did you know?’

‘A mother knows.’

Exactly the type of thing she would say. She knew everything and no one could argue with her. Exasperated with her, they asked, ‘How so? He hasn’t come back once in twenty years.’

‘Because at the end of next April he will be the same age his father was when he was killed in the Burj al-Hawa incident…’ None of the relatives said anything further, did not even let out a sigh. They waited for a signal or a gesture to wink at each other and get up to leave.

‘Once again, thank God for his safe return.’

For some time now, Kamileh no longer got up to see her guests out.

Chapter 3

The day Farid succeeded in cutting the pattern of a pair of men’s trousers without seeking Master Tailor Boulos’s advice, and without damaging the fine wool fabric, he didn’t tell anyone. He didn’t boast about his achievement one bit. Silence was his idea of manhood, and in those days, being manly was big. But his ability to cut a pattern by himself did not earn Farid the title of Master Tailor. He still had a bit of a heavy hand when he cut into the fabric, and he had still not sat behind a sewing machine. Only time would bring him that title, when he opened his own shop and cultivated some customers of his own.

It was 1956 when Farid had that first success in tailoring, without guidance and without messing up, a time when thinly-pinstriped grey English wool was the pride of young men, along with Lucky Strikes, the soft pack proudly displayed and clearly visible through thin shirt pockets. That same year, Gamal Abdel Nasser was nationalising the Suez Canal, which he called ‘The International Suez Canal Company’ in his speech.

Farid Badwi al-Semaani

Age: 24

Registry No.: 65/124

Marital Status: Single

Mother’s Maiden Name: Susaan Wardeh

Occupation: None

Eye Colour: Hazel

Moustache: Thin

Hair: Curly, Black

Distinguishing Marks: Wart on Left Cheek

It was nearing election time. There were two open seats in the district and four candidates, four families. The competition was fierce. Farid would never leave his relatives in their time of need. They called him ‘Abu Ali’ from time to time, the kind of nickname given to tough guys. They depended on him. And the women — whenever he walked down the street past their open doors they ate him up with their eyes. He wasn’t going to let the women down, either. Everyone knew about his exploits; the stories circulated from one person to another, and he in turn obliged them with many more to talk about. Farid was a doer, not a talker. He rushed in headlong, without warning and without being asked.

Farid heard that the Mayor of Upper Almaat was threatening supporters of the Semaani candidate with dire consequences. The mayor was as enthusiastic in his support of the opposition as one of their own flesh and blood. Farid knew the mayor well. He went to the mayor’s house in the evening, all by himself. He asked one of his friends to drop him off at the entrance to the village and turn back.

The mayor was afraid the moment he saw Farid standing in the doorway. He was the same age Farid’s father would have been had his father still been alive. His wife and daughter cried and begged Farid to spare him.

‘Shave off one side of your moustache! Right now, in front of me!’

That was all Farid said. The man was nearly brought to tears with humiliation. The mayor’s moustache was famous. From the time his facial hair first started to grow, no one had ever seen him without the moustache. After much encouragement from his wife, he gave in.

The news reached Master Boulos. He warned Farid to stop. He went up to Farid and pulled the piece of fabric right out of his hands, forcing him to listen. ‘You come from a family of decent people, Farid…’ He meant his father, at least, his father and his paternal uncles. They were men who worked hard, who spent their lives rising before dawn and going to bed before sunset. They drove mules, hitting the trail day in and day out. Then his father sold the mules and worked in stonecutting — another decent profession, and a tiring one, too. His father’s tools were still at the house: the chisel, the pick and the hammer. Behind the door was his father’s greatest treasure: a mortar chiselled out of sumac-coloured stone.

‘…’ Silence.

‘That path won’t lead you anywhere, Farid.’

That same manly silence.

Farid often sat alone in his house in the room with no view. He would sit there in the afternoon facing the white wall, which aside from an out-of-date calendar, was completely bare. His mother would leave him to visit the neighbours and there he’d remain, sitting by himself, for an hour, two hours.

Likewise, in the coffee shop he sat away from others, choosing his wicker chair carefully. It had to be sturdy and clean, but even then he would wipe off what little dust was on it. People knew that about him. They knew how he liked to sit. When he sat in the chair, he always turned it around and rested his elbow on the chair back; he’d sit up straight, his back exposed, quietly toying with his amber worry beads, seeming to enjoy his own silence.

His hair was always neatly combed and shined with Brylcreem. That Farid sure was infatuated with himself.

Pictures of candidates began showing up on car windows and people’s caps. Some of the more fanatical supporters put them in gilded wooden frames and hung them in their homes next to pictures of the bleeding heart of Jesus. Farid loved his family’s headman, their ‘zaeem’, but he didn’t like the pictures. If ever he spoke, he called all that ‘mere appearances’.

Farid didn’t like appearances.

He was still concerned with himself, however, with his own appearance. Male fashion was going through uncertain times, the essential elements yet to emerge, since high boots, riding breeches and thin handlebar moustaches had gone out of style. He hesitated before buying an American hat, and only wore it tipped to the side, on Sundays. He started paying attention to details: plucking the hair from his ears, taking showers, choosing appropriate colours — acquiring the minute details of elegance a little at a time.

And then there was the revolver. Its Arabic name, musaddas or ‘sixer’, came from the six barrels the first models had when they came out. Then it spread like an epidemic, as did the terms for it and its varieties.

There was the fard or personal revolver, maybe meaning the weapon for one person, the kind you tucked into your belt on your right side, unless you were left-handed, and if it was too tight and you were worried it might dig into your skin, you could put it in your big jacket pocket and keep your hand on it. That is, before you discovered from watching American movies that you could keep it within easy reach, near your heart, or even tied to your leg for a quick draw when you needed it. You pulled it out, and if it was loaded or cocked, you shot point blank (at close range) or quick-draw (without taking aim through the crosshairs), otherwise your adversary would beat you to it and something regrettable might happen. They used bird metaphors such as al-deek (the cock) for the trigger, and called you ayn al-doury (sparrow’s eye) if you had good aim. They used plant metaphors such as al-qamha (the wheat kernel), the part on the top of the barrel used for aiming; animal metaphors such as al-booz (the snout); body parts such as al-qabda (the fist) for the handle, al-zifr (the fingernail) for the metal protrusion that distinguished old revolvers, and al-misht (the palm of the hand) for the cartridge clip. Al-bayt (the house) was the leather holster which in turn had two little ‘houses’ for the two clips. And from somewhere or another they came up with the term al-nishan (the medal) for the target. You insisted on getting several types of bullets to go with it — the kind that burned, the kind that penetrated, the kind that exploded — and you loaded it carefully, making sure none of the bullets went in crooked, which would cause it to jam when you tried to shoot. There were the nickel-plated (white nickel) or plain revolvers, the Abu Ukra (barellette), the 9-barrel, the Czech, the 12 and the 14 (referring to the Belgian Herstal make), and the American Colt, the best you could buy before the Smith & Wesson came onto the scene.

‘A Colt-9!’

‘But that one is too expensive for you, Farid. And besides, your gun is still new, hasn’t shot more than two cartridges. I would know. I’m the one who sold it to you.’

‘A Colt-9!’

‘The Herstal-12 is better than the Colt.’

Farid tapped his finger against his temple. ‘My mind’s made up.’

End of discussion. ‘You’ll have it tomorrow.’

‘How much?’

‘540 liras. I swear on my honour I’m only making a profit of 40 liras. I’ll split it with you. 520. My final offer.’

Farid smiled. He knew the man was a liar, but he liked him.

‘I’ll pay you half now. Give me another month for the rest.’

He wasn’t rich, Farid, but he always paid.

They always gave him time to pay.

His friends found out about it. They demanded to see the Colt-9. They enjoyed flipping it over in their hands and wrapping their palms around its wide handle and closing their fingers around it. Some of them would take aim at an imaginary target and then lower it, shaking their heads admiringly, without explaining the reason for that admiration. Farid never took his eyes off of the gun as it moved from one of his buddies’ hands to another, for fear it might get scratched or fall to the ground. He didn’t relax until he got it back and slipped it into the holster attached to his belt.

His toy. His work of art.

Badwi al-Semaani, Farid’s father, had made his work of art, with his own hands. With the help of two mules, he dragged the stone out from the Ayntourin quarry and plopped the stone down in front of his house, beneath the eucalyptus tree. He chiselled it after getting home from work on the construction sites or on rainy days and holidays. A whole year it cost him, chiselling and refining it. A mortar that was meant only to be seen with the eyes, as he used to say. He didn’t allow his wife to pound and tenderise meat in it, not even once. He made another mortar for her to pound meat and make kibbeh.

Farid, on the other hand, bought his work of art. The Colt-9. He deprived himself of everything for three whole months. Master Boulos gave him 200 liras a month, which Farid withdrew early, one lira after another, long before the end of the month.

Farid never tired of feeling the revolver at his hip every time he found himself alone behind the measuring table. It distracted him from his work. He would stop putting buttonholes in the shirt he was working on in order to polish the gun. He would take hold of the handle and raise the gun up above his face, letting it shine in the light coming in through the open window that overlooked the street. He wanted to make sure there wasn’t a speck of dust clinging to it. He would puff on it repeatedly only to shine it up again with the lining of his jacket, just as people do to clean their glasses.

Master Boulos was worried about him. When he entered the shop, signs of worry were all over his face. He grabbed the trousers away from Farid again, put the iron aside, and prodded him in the chest. ‘You were at Sheikh Melhem’s funeral at the Church of Our Lady yesterday, weren’t you?’

‘I was. He was one of my mother’s relatives.’

Master Boulos knitted his eyebrows in reflection. With a faint smile, Farid added, ‘Nothing happened at Sheikh Melhem’s funeral. People exaggerate. Who told you about it?’

Master Boulos simply sighed.

Nothing happened…

They had shown up with their family zaeem. No one knew who invited them to the funeral. Twenty men came, not more. They surrounded the zaeem the whole time, never taking their eyes off him for a second. They frowned as they walked, casting fiery looks at the others. Their elegance caught Farid’s eye immediately. The youthful zaeem was a lawyer who had recently graduated from the Jesuit University in Beirut. They said he had met with Sir Anthony Eden when he came to Beirut the year before as part of a tour of Middle Eastern capitals to drum up support against Abd al-Nasser. Farid had seen pictures of him pasted on the walls before, but this was the first time he had seen him up close. He never imagined him to be as short as he was standing there before him, wearing those brown and white shoes Farid hadn’t yet been able to afford. Farid would order a pair of those shoes one day, after the Colt-9 and the pure silk tie. Farid could recognise real silk from its sheen. Three or four of the young zaeem’s attendants sported sherwal trousers and wore fezzes on their heads. The weather was hot. It was the middle of May. Everyone was wearing a jacket. Some, who may not have owned a summer jacket, came wearing their winter suits, intensifying the heat and the nervous tension.

And so, upon every hip there was a gun.

Under each jacket, a gun.

And tucked into every sherwal’s cummerbund, there was a gun, too.

The same was true in the case of Farid’s cousins and their supporters. The Semaani clan outnumbered their enemies and were in their own neighbourhood, on the road to their church. If only those congregating around their young lawyer zaeem would make one mistake. If only they would.

The pushing and shoving started when the procession entered a narrow street. Shoulders bumped shoulders. All that was heard was the sound of feet hitting the newly applied asphalt on the church road. The zaeem’s attendants seemed to be trying to clear a path for him by shoving back all those bodies pressing against him in the narrow passageway. They were insisting on keeping a cushion of space around him.

People’s faces appeared more and more worried. Farid saw a number of men, those who were not relatives and had no need to be there, leave the procession. They scurried down the small narrow streets that branched off left and right from the main road. They ran off without looking back; peace-loving types who preferred to go back to their homes. The only thing that could be heard during that time was the singing of the hymns by the religious brotherhood as they carried the Cloth of Divine Mercy at the front of the procession.

Farid’s gun was loaded. The Colt-9. As soon as he felt threatened, he identified a target for himself. He knew at whom he would shoot and he planned out specifically how he would act — in which direction he should charge, what he would do with his left hand, and how he would not even give the young lawyer’s attendants enough time to protect him with their bodies. He would shoot him in the head. Three times at least, and the remaining shots he would use for cover as he withdrew. The zaeem was almost pushed along by them rather than walking unaided. The brothers finished their hymn as they led the way to the door of the church. There was a silence in which all one could hear was the heavy breathing of the men and the bustling of bodies. The crowd reached the church’s wide courtyard, which allowed people to spread apart, though the threatening looks continued even at a distance.

No, nothing happened at all.

Some of the women in the back rows had not even been conscious of the pushing and shoving; they carried on with their usual chatter as the procession spread out bit by bit along the road leading to the church.

Sheikh Melhem’s funeral was merely a rehearsal for what was going to take place in less than a month, in June, at another funeral in another village perched over one of the commanding heights of the nearby mountain.

Master Boulos had almost lost hope of putting Farid on the right path. The only thing left for him to do was to encourage him to emigrate.

‘Why don’t you go to Australia, Farid? You have lots of relatives there who are doing well, don’t you?’

The sewing pins in Farid’s mouth prevented him from answering.

‘Look at your brother Shafiq. He doesn’t get caught up in all of that.’

Farid smiled mockingly. No, Shafiq was not someone Farid wanted to emulate.

Master Boulos did not have any illusions concerning the future of the tailoring profession. It was not going to provide for any future generation after his own. What had happened to the shoemakers would happen to the tailors, too. The shoemakers went and destroyed the contents of the new ready-made shoe shop that opened on the main street of the town and the police escorted them to jail. But what good did that do? The shoemakers showed some bravado, but the tailors were much more cowardly. Master Boulos knew every single one of them. It was a difficult profession and Farid was not good enough at it.

‘They say Australia is really nice,’ Master Boulos added.

Many of Farid’s generation emigrated. Some of them suffered a lot. They went alone, putting their faith in God, without a single relative there to greet them. Some of them slept under the open skies during the first days, on church benches or in public parks. As for Farid, his trip would be guaranteed from A to Z. The program was all set:

He would leave Lebanon at the beginning of summer, or in October, as he wished.

He would board the ship in Beirut. A long journey, but enjoyable.

His uncle would send him travel expenses. He would pay the money back at his leisure once he was there, after he started working and getting paid. In Australia, people were paid weekly.

He had work waiting for him in the factory. There was demand for workers in Sydney.

He could go into tailoring if he wished, but they told him that over there it was considered a woman’s job, in general. Or into shoemaking if he wished, and when he was able to save up some money, he could open up a laundry or small grocery store of his own.

They had sent him a picture of all of them together, and a picture of their house with the white wooden railing, and also a picture of a kangaroo carrying its baby in its pouch. We live on the beach, they wrote him, in the Coogee suburb in Sydney. Sometimes the waves reach the front steps of our house. In the summer we sit under umbrellas sometimes while the waves splash over our feet.

They asked him to bring them a souvenir: a small stone from their house in the town.

The last letter he received contained a picture of his cousin. She had a wide face and a full figure; she was smiling. She looked like his mother.

She’s waiting for you, they wrote on the back of the picture.

He imagined her waiting for him, sitting on a rocking chair while the waves splashed over her feet.

They sent him the money from Australia, without waiting for an answer from him. They tried to encourage him that way.

His aunt bored everyone there, constantly showing his picture with his American hat tipped to the side and going on about how handsome he was.

‘I don’t like travelling by sea. Who would trust his soul to the waters?’ Farid said, after he had finished marking the pattern into the cloth with pins.

He was lying, and Master Boulos knew he was lying.

The hours were long, and tailoring work was slow. The only way to entertain oneself was with talk. Talk about girls and marriage, this time around.

‘Either travel or look for a nice girl…’

Nice girl? No. Farid was not good at that. Love required an eloquent tongue, and he was not good at talking.

Khawkh al-dibb, the Bear Plum. That was Farid Badwi al-Semaani. That was what he was called by people at the coffee shop. No one was spared their barbs. The sharp-tongued men goaded him, but they feared what he might do.

A bear plum looks appetising, light green with a tinge of pink, but no one would dare bite into one, because they’re far too bitter to eat.

‘Here comes Bear Plum!’ Sometimes they would say it loud enough for him to hear, when they spotted him coming out of one of the narrow streets leading to the coffee shop. ‘Welcome, Bear Plum,’ they would say and he would sit down with them, smiling without malice, so he could silently watch them play cards. They all played cards. They would lose and get angry, or win. Farid, however, remained a spectator. Someone said he didn’t know the rules of the game and just watched anyway. But he only acted as if he didn’t know how to play, so that he would be able to leave after a few minutes and go back to the tailor’s shop. Master Boulos accused him of always looking down at his shoes, then claiming he didn’t like the way they shined, an excuse to put his tailoring aside and go to the café. There he would whistle for the shoeshine boy who would follow him inside and start shining his shoes. Farid would demand that he use ample polish and brush well, especially at the heels.

Tailoring was a difficult art for him. All that concentrating tired him out. He would mark the material with tailor’s chalk, and put a stitch with needle and thread at the crease of the trousers’ hem. He used tricks, like making the buttonholes with extra fine thread. He had thick fingers that didn’t obey him. If he needed to thread a needle, he would try for a long time, and then call someone to thread it for him. Frustrated, he would go to the café while Master Boulos pretended not to notice.

Moving from one profession to another in the span of a single generation was not an easy thing for Farid to accomplish. First there had been the mules, with all the prodding and loading them up with heavy bundles, and lighting a fire under their tails if they lay down, or hitting them until their legs started to bleed, or even biting their ears as his uncle used to do, to force them to stand up. From there he went to sumac-coloured stone, and then to fine English wool, in one fell swoop.

Bear Plum didn’t care what people said.

He could take a joke, but he never lowered his eyes from anyone’s. Just looking at him seemed to him an attempt to intimidate him. He was easy-going but unemotional.

They tested him at Umm Raymond’s Restaurant. They were sitting at the next table drinking arak and eating: Saeed Ibrahim and Antonios al-Khoury. He and Saeed eyed each other. Saeed Ibrahim was dangerous. You couldn’t take him lightly. They stared at each other. Not the slightest blink. The dare dragged on. Farid would not look away. Impossible. The other customers left one at a time. No one wanted to die by mistake.

The President of the Republic was trying to renew his term. That was what was rumoured, even though he hadn’t announced his intentions yet. The tailor’s apprentice Farid al-Semaani supported the renewal, along with his whole family, including the zaeem. He’d heard the itinerant newspaper seller shouting out the day’s headlines as he walked through the alleys, and that was enough for Farid. He never bought the newspaper, because he could read only with difficulty.

The president’s opponents were losing in the regional elections one after the other. Cheating, pressure, and bribes — that’s what they said.

The North District still remained. Elections would take place in two weeks.

Farid was going to send the money back to his aunt with the first person travelling to Sydney. No. He didn’t beg anyone for money. He was satisfied with his situation. He would return the money because he was staying. Farid Badwi al-Semaani, twenty-four years old, mother’s name Susaan Wardeh, 182 centimetres tall, distinguishing marks: wart on left cheek. He was staying so he could sit in the evenings in a small restaurant owned by a woman in her fifties who still had traces of her beauty left. He would sit with a friend of his or a cousin before two skewers of grilled goat’s meat and a plate of hummus. They would clink their glasses before the first sip of arak mixed with water. They grimaced as they drank, each gulp of the 100-proof arak like bitter punishment. Farid didn’t eat and didn’t talk, and if he did eat after repeated invitation from his companion, it would be very little. A bite or two and that was it. At dinner, instead of eating he smoked many Lucky Strike cigarettes. By the third glass of arak, his face turned bright red, and he would withdraw deeper and deeper into himself. He would listen to his friend and not talk. Perhaps he was trying hard to listen to some buried voice inside himself that was saying obscure things to him. Beset by a strange feeling, he would raise his glass again and sail off into the distance.

Night time always brought him back to her.

Night was a pimp, no way around it.

He tried in vain to free himself, but she was his life’s joy.

The night, food on the table, Lucky Strikes, arak…

And her.

Farid al-Semaani was staying for his family’s sake, maybe, or maybe for the sake of his passion for fighting and the Colt-9. But he was definitely staying for her. He was staying in order to hum some ataaba verses quietly to himself at eleven o’clock at night and then excuse himself and walk away. His friends knew what he was up to. They wished him good luck with smiles on their faces. They knew.

He would walk through the darkness — the only thing he feared — worrying about the possibility of gunfire and getting shot. He would head towards the river, cross the stone bridge and walk along the dirt road adjacent to the monastery, next to the cactus plants that led to her small house, the one with the blue windows. Every night she left the back door open for him. The smell of cow manure reeked from a nearby yard. She would wait for him in her transparent pink nightgown, completely naked underneath. He loved to get there and see her totally naked under her nightgown. She didn’t like it. He insisted, though, and she never refused him any request.

She would hear the creak of the back door and know he had arrived, so she would hurry to take off her panties and bra before he came into her bedroom. Her only request was that he keep quiet so as not to wake the children asleep in the next room. He would remove his gun and the two clips, placing them on the chair next to the bed, and then he’d take her by the shoulders and she’d close her eyes, shuddering with pleasure. She didn’t dare demand he marry her, for fear that he might stop coming to her. He would gaze at her with a stern look that hid wild desire. With the 100-proof arak still lingering in his head, he would throw her onto the bed without taking off his clothes. Men didn’t take off their clothes. The first few times, she surrendered to him the same way she had surrendered to her husband. Then one of her neighbours who knew about her secret taught her to resist.

‘Men like to be resisted,’ she said. ‘Try it. Squeeze your thighs shut, flee from him. You’ll see.’

He would become aroused and roar out. He’d bite her and leave red marks on her back with his fingers. Another woman said she had cast a spell on him, that she had bewitched him. Some of his friends said she was the love of his life. He would hit her over and over again. He would lift her up high and throw her back down, then throw himself on top of her until she finally gave in and begged him to stop. He’d spend the whole night at her house there in the small neighbouring village, his gun always close at hand. His eyes would pop open and his ears would perk up the moment he heard the slightest rustle or meow. He loved the feel of her, couldn’t get enough of her, and couldn’t sleep.

He couldn’t imagine ever experiencing a greater pleasure in life than returning from the young widow’s house as the light of dawn began to shimmer. He walked along the road at a leisurely pace, embraced by the tall poplar trees that were engulfed in the transparent white mist rising from the river and etching designs on the trees reminiscent of the embroidered veils on the angels’ heads in the icon of the Virgin at church. He whistled as he walked, but the birds didn’t fly off or stop their chirping, as if they’d grown accustomed to him slowly passing through in the early mornings, his head held high as he passed the cactus plants and crossed the river over the stone bridge, a blissful mood ushering him into a new day.

Chapter 4

Eliyya left the house every day around ten.

‘Eliyya sleeps a lot. Why is that?’ they asked Kamileh, as though her son had no right to be lazy.

He walked along looking right and left like someone discovering the Gang Quarter for the first time. The youngsters in the neighbourhood whispered to each other whenever he passed by.

‘There he is.’ They knew him from his website ‘eliano.org’ where they had read a quote attributed to some German philosopher whose name they couldn’t pronounce, followed by a recipe for onion soup — and the right red wine to pair it with. The blonde American girl in the swimsuit wasn’t with him. They said she looked like Gwyneth Paltrow. They had hoped to see her.

He walked alone. He appeared lost, wandering around aimlessly.

They tattled on him to Kamileh the very first day.

‘Where have you been all this time?’ she asked him when he came back at noon.

‘I was walking the streets.’

She didn’t believe him. ‘You came all the way from there, from the other end of the world, just to walk the streets?’

He smiled.

‘What’s that you’re carrying on your shoulder?’

‘That’s the custom over there. Men carry handbags.’

‘What’s all that you’re drawing and writing down in the notebook?’

He laughed.

‘Why do you draw old houses and little kids?’

‘The news reaches you all the way over here?’

‘You’re lying to me,’ she said, getting more serious. ‘Why did you come back from America?’

‘I came back to see you,’ he said, trying to lighten things up. ‘Madame Kamileh.’

‘If you came back to see me, then sit with me here at home. You act like it’s not your house. This is your property. It belongs to the Kfoury family.’

He was unable to coax even the hint of a smile of satisfaction out of her.

Every morning she woke up at five and went to the balcony ready for battle. She paced back and forth as if on guard duty. She didn’t touch the flowers or pat the soil as she had been in the habit of doing, but rather whispered to the shouting children to move away from the window. Even though she was too far away for it to make any difference, her hand would go up in disapproval every time she heard a warning blast from a car horn down at the treacherous corner where there was at least one accident a week. If a neighbour asked her about him, she would put her hand on her cheek and close her eyes, signalling that he was still asleep, and motion to her neighbour to stop raising her voice.

She made him breakfast slowly. Coffee, orange juice and pear preserves. She remembered that before he left he had loved pear preserves.

‘You used to pick up a pear with two fingers and slip it into your mouth.’

He had forgotten that he had loved pear preserves so much.

Once he had woken up, he put his clothes on quickly, took a bite so she wouldn’t get upset and took off.

The next morning she would prepare a similar breakfast for him.

She would call to him, ‘Eliyya!’

He’d come back to her from the doorway.

‘At least don’t let them talk about you.’

‘Don’t worry.’

Kamileh’s concern was well-founded.

There was something in Eliyya’s gait and glance that drew attention. The first few days the greengrocer looked him up and down as he organised his produce, the colourful display extending into the middle of the sidewalk. The fat butcher eyed him as well as he sat out in front of his shop on Friday, slowly sharpening his knives in preparation for the next day’s slaughter. The bored policemen in charge of guarding the government house scrutinised him while making jokes they all hoped would not fall on women’s ears. Taxi drivers sought after him as they waited for passengers, standing in the square under the hot sun with their heads covered with baseball caps, which, at their age and with their flabby bodies, looked ridiculous.

His appearance was familiar — despite the American improvements on his attire — but his manner was strange. After a short while, they disregarded him. Either he must have changed his gait and increased his pace — while still not aiming in any particular direction — or they must have got used to him. He was just another Semite with his powerful nose and black hair.

He tried his best to stay on the pavement, as he did in the city he had come from. The municipality was in the process of repaving the old streets with black basalt cobblestones thanks to a no-interest loan from the World Bank. He wandered deeper into the streets. The roads became narrower and windier and the scrutiny increased, but Eliyya was not in the least bit concerned.

It was just before noon when he walked slowly by the houses. He stopped suddenly, looked into the open windows, into the rooms. The woman sitting in front of the door, as if to guard it, looked at him. She asked if he was looking for someone. He smiled, remembering.

He used to pass that way on his way home from school. From each of those low doors, a different aroma emanated, helping the children predict what was for lunch. At times they disagreed on what it was, but they always wrinkled their noses in disapproval of bean stew with rice, and held back their strong desire on Fridays to gobble down the fried fish, which their mothers forbade them to eat while it was still too hot. He smiled, trying again after thirty years to determine what was cooking. He stopped in front of a wide-open door, his nose leading him into the clean and tidy interior, and took in a big whiff. Nothing. The aromas must have been more intense when he was younger.

Lunch was always ready when he got home, his mother Kamileh’s lunch, which she spent the whole morning preparing. And preparing food meant cooking, over a continuous fire, cooking with yogurt and rice, because food, as far as Kamileh was concerned, was that which was slurped up hot, with a spoon. Everything else was snack food that didn’t satisfy the heart or fill the belly.

Eliyya would get upset and rebuke her with some sharpness. ‘You just do the cooking. I agreed to that because you’re stubborn. But you should wait for me to get home so I can set the table. That’s my job. You’re not to worry about it.’

Kamileh’s setting the table was something Eliyya just couldn’t tolerate.

He looked at the table.

The artificial bouquet of flowers that had lost its colour over the years was not in the middle of the table where Kamileh assumed she had put it. She must have hesitated over where to place it, feeling around for the right place without success. The plates and silverware were unevenly spaced, and the tablecloth had spots all over it from her missed attempts to fill the water glasses.

‘If I come back tomorrow,’ he threatened, ‘and find the table already set, I’m going to go and eat in a restaurant.’

The boy knew how to hurt his mother when he wanted to.

The next day Eliyya tried to set the table. From the kitchen Kamileh heard the clinking and clanging of the glasses and the spoons. ‘What are you doing?’ she shouted.

He didn’t pay any attention to her. ‘How do you manage to cook?’ he asked her.

‘I know it all by heart. The taste of my cooking hasn’t changed since I began cooking, even after I started losing my vision. You’ll taste these dandelion greens with sautéed onions which I’m sure you haven’t had in twenty years, and you’ll see they taste exactly the same.’

After being cut off from Eliyya all those years, Kamileh could not find a way to demonstrate her motherliness except to treat him as if he were still a child. She behaved as if her son were still the same boy who couldn’t get into a car without her giving the driver an earful about going slowly. And every time Eliyya started to taste a spoonful of his yogurt and kibbeh stew, she warned him it was still hot and to be careful not to burn his throat.

She sat with him at the table without eating.

‘I’ve already eaten,’ she would say if Eliyya asked her to join him.

‘When?’

‘When I was tasting the food as it cooked.’

‘I went to America believing that you never eat.’

Kamileh crossed her arms and listened. Her questions were specific. ‘Is your house there big?’

He smiled.

‘How many rooms?’

‘One room.’

‘One room?’

‘One big room.’

‘Who washes your clothes?’

‘The laundromat.’

‘…’

‘The machine…’

‘Do you eat well?’

‘Just don’t worry about me.’

‘Who cooks for you?’

‘Le Relais d’Arcachon,’ he said laughing.

She didn’t understand, nor did she ask.

That was just about everything. The rest was minor detail. She didn’t ask him about marriage.

Now it was his turn to ask questions.

After much hesitation and careful strategising, he posed the question as if it had just come to him.

‘Mother, do we still have anything of my father’s?’

‘Of your father’s?’

‘A picture. Things of his…’

He failed to surprise her. She had been expecting the question, probably from the moment he had returned. She didn’t say a word. Instead, she got up from her chair and went to her room. There was no hesitation in her step. She knew exactly the way to her room, even if she did worry Eliyya’s presence in the house might have caused a piece of furniture to be moved from its place or a chair to be pushed into the hallway. She was afraid she would fall, break some bones and have to depend on others, on some young girl to look after her. She didn’t want anyone staying with her.

She came back with a round wooden box. ‘Here you are,’ she said standing before Eliyya. ‘These are what we found in your father’s pockets when I went with my mother, Muntaha and Hamid al-Semaani to the hospital for him. Take them, they’re yours. Take them with you to the United States if you like.’

‘And the rest of his things?’

She had given his father’s clothes to the poor as everybody there did with the clothes of the deceased. He also had had a deck of cards and some poker chips from the casino which she sent to Fuad and Butros al-Rami, his two gambling partners.

Eliyya was surprised he hadn’t been able to find the box himself. He went into the bedroom and opened it up. There wasn’t much inside: some money, a set of worry beads they’d been told were genuine amber, some papers, among which was a small card with the name of a travelling photographer on it: Nishan Davidian.

He asked about the photographer and was told he had moved to the city a long time ago.

At the café people didn’t ask him much. He sat with them, their faces frowning as if they’d been born that way. They were unemployed, yet some of them wore fancy clothes and Parisian ties. Their cell phones were placed in front of them on the table as they drank coffee and smoked incessantly. They asked him only about his mother’s health and his long stay abroad. Every once in a while he would get a glimpse of a gun at somebody’s waist as they were straightening up or taking some money out of their pocket to pay the shoeshiner who came in to shine their shoes.

They talked about him as soon as he left through the glass door after a useless attempt to pay the tab. They had winked to the waiter in advance not to accept any money from him. Their words were few but their opinions were final. They lived there, in houses they’d inherited from their ancestors. They rarely went into the city, because they had no business there, they would say. And if they decided to go anywhere, it would be only once and to a faraway place, to some town on the banks of the Orinoco River where they would open a shop and sell ready-made clothes and get involved with local women without getting married. It was either live in Karm al-Teen Quarter among brothers and cousins, or in San Felix City near the equator.

Eliyya joined them because someone had told him that the man sitting with them, the one who looked like Luca Brasi in The Godfather and the darkest and grimmest looking one among them, had been with his father when he was killed.

Once when the group parted company, Eliyya managed to corner him. He started at the beginning. ‘I was told you know what happened… Why did they kill my father?’

‘They killed him because he was standing there. Bad luck.’

‘Standing there?’

‘Yes. He was standing next to me in the square.’

‘You mean they killed him by mistake?’

‘No. They didn’t kill him by mistake.’

‘They meant to kill him?’

‘I don’t know if they meant to kill him. I know that they saw him, recognised him and shot him. They shot him in the back. Two bullets. I was told he didn’t die right away.’

‘Was he shooting?’

‘No. He was in the line of fire.’

‘How so? I don’t understand.’

‘He was in the middle of the battle although he didn’t intend to be. He was not one to rush into battle, your father. He was kind. He used to joke with everybody and put up with everybody’s jokes. When we used to count the men we could depend on in a fight, we never counted him in, nor did he want to be counted in.’

‘Did some innocent people get killed?’

‘Yes. Many.’

‘What made them innocent?’

‘They were strangers, had nothing to do with it. Their only crime was that they were attending the mass.’

‘Was my father carrying a weapon?’

‘Yes. To protect himself. We were all carrying weapons. He had bought his revolver only a few days before.’

‘Had he ever fired it?’

‘No. Your father was a good man…’

The conversation paused a little. Then the man continued. ‘Why did you come back?’

‘To visit my mother. I’ve been away for twenty years.’

‘Good for you. Want my advice? Don’t listen to anyone.’

‘I had thought that when I came back here from America I would be able to see the white almond blossoms. I remembered this is their season.’

‘Spring came early this year. The blossoms fell before you arrived. Say hello to Kamileh for me.’

Eliyya went back to the streets. He tried to remember where the boundaries were and to draw them again.

He wrote in his notebook: The places are the same… The people are the same… the women’s eyes… the men’s silence. In our childhood we played and wandered within our quarter, and here I am now doing that same thing, down towards the river. Not one house has changed. The adults used to shop in our quarter’s shops, pray in its church, and grind wheat in its mill… We used to hear about our enemies’ neighbourhoods, but we never saw them. Before I left for New York, I had never set foot in their quarter. We passed through it by car only twice. I dreaded even that quick crossing, dreaded that they would stop us, make us get out of the car, line us up against a wall and shoot us. That’s how I used to think, even though I used to see them walking in the streets, talking to each other, not paying any attention to the cars that passed by or the passengers inside. We never set foot in their quarter. When out on a stroll we knew that once we reached the crossroads we had left the safe zone, so we would turn back without discussing it, without warning one another. I will visit their quarter now, but I’ve lost track of where the boundaries are… Maybe I’m walking there now without knowing it.

Eliyya drew a compass rose at the top of the page. He sketched the main street and some of the side streets. He marked where the houses of the family headmen were located and drew crosses for the churches. Every neighbourhood had a church and a priest and a butcher and a shoemaker. When the people from the Lower Quarter were no longer able to bring their dead to the public graveyard, they resorted to using a small grove that was easier for them to get to. Eliyya went away, but kept coming back to the almond grove. His father was buried there. He thought about having a private grave built for him, but he knew his mother would object. They must stay together. They died together and should stay together, Kamileh said. And so did everyone else.

He took pictures of the headmen’s houses and the churches. He stopped a passer-by to ask him about the green line. He wanted to know where it had been.

‘Which one?’

‘1958.’

The man’s eyes nearly popped out of his head in shock, having suddenly been thrown decades into the past. Before answering he decided to ask, ‘Who are you? A journalist?’

‘Eliyya al-Kfoury.’

The man hesitated. ‘Where do I know you from?’

‘You don’t know me.’

‘Whose son are you, then?’

Eliyya was not going to get a single word out of the man before he knew whose ears the information might fall upon.

‘I am the son of Yusef Farid Mikhail al-Kfoury.’

That was a complete answer that went back four generations. The man knew who he was. He warmed to him and his expression lightened.

‘Are you Kamileh’s son?’

‘Yes, I’m Kamileh’s son.’

He gave Eliyya a hug. He had known him as a child. The man forgot Eliyya’s question and began asking how he was and how his work was going. Eliyya tried again, and so the man pointed right and left.

‘The barricades were set up on the roof of the olive press. Right there.’

‘Where does the Lower Quarter end?’

The man was confused. He knew where the Lower Quarter ended, but he didn’t know how to show him. He pointed with his hand, drawing a straight line through the houses. He found it difficult to talk, and he didn’t have anything to say. He knew what had occurred. He had either been there or had heard about it but he didn’t see any point in recounting the details. He changed the subject.

Eliyya completed his tour, followed by some children curious about his camera and the bag on his shoulder. He arrived at the church courtyard. His tour had to end there in those humid alleys. He entered the Church of Our Lady through its back door, the women’s door, just as he used to when he was little. An old woman kneeling in the middle of the church with her arms lifted towards the heavens glanced at him. He dipped his fingers into the font of holy water and looked at the little angels surrounding the Virgin. He made the sign of the cross, exaggerating his motions, and knelt at one of the pews in the front row, bowing his head in contemplation.

He wrote in his notebook: My town is full of icons of saints and statues painted in bright colours and small shrines on the roadsides. The icons have happy colours and are full of details. There are lots of animals in them, like Saint George’s frightening dragon spewing red flames and the peaceful farm animals surrounding Saint Anthony, looking at the worshippers. But there’s always a tinge of sadness on the faces of the saints.

He went back to the coffee shop. They filled his ears with generalities.

‘That’s the way we were, one heart, one God,’ one of them said.

The man who looked like Luca Brasi in The Godfather addressed Eliyya directly, as if picking up a previous conversation. ‘We arrived together, your father and I, in the same car. A taxi. The driver dropped us off and turned back. We were planning to find a lift home with some of our friends. We didn’t go towards the church. We stood in the doorway of one of the shops in the square. We didn’t want to go into the church. Your father couldn’t stand going to funerals. We stayed outside the church while they did the funeral prayers and when it was over we edged closer to offer our condolences. It was hot. We were all drinking Cokes when we heard the first shots. When the bullets started raining down on us I lost him. He disappeared. I didn’t know how…’

He was tossing words like bait. He knew other things of course, which he might tell Eliyya about, but not in the café where everyone else could hear.

Eliyya had been away from the house for hours. On his return he discovered that Kamileh had taken advantage of his absence to put everything back where it belonged. It was as if the whole time he was at home she was recording his every move and every mess he made, and as soon as he picked up his bag and went down the few steps between the house and the main road, she went about shutting every window he had opened, opening every door between the rooms he had closed, and putting away all the china teacups, the ones with the Romeo and Juliet design, that he had taken out and put on the table. She reopened the curtain half way. Early on, Eliyya had chosen to sit in the same chair every day from which he had a view of the mountains and the clouds high on the horizon. But there was a gloomy building that ruined the view to the left, so he always slid the curtain over a little when he sat there in order to limit his view to the natural scene. Every day when he came home and sat down, he would look out the window and see that building with its dreadful faded colours blocking the view all over again. Then he would realise that his mother had pulled the curtain back to its original place. It was the same with the picture that he took down to get a better look at, the one of him dressed in a Maronite Patriarch’s habit on Palm Sunday which had been taken as he was being carried on people’s shoulders, his eyes brimming with tears. She always put the picture back up on the wall, even if it took a long time and exhausted her with all the standing and straining to feel for the nail to hang the picture on. Kamileh knew her house by heart. She couldn’t rest unless she was sure everything was as it should be, not a single thing out of place, exactly as it had been throughout all those years of living alone. If Eliyya came home in the evening and shut the front door without locking it, she could not sleep a wink. She would wait until he went to his bedroom, then she would get up, walk slowly to the door, and turn the key two full turns plus once extra until she could hear the click of metal against metal. Only then could she sleep.

As soon as he had arrived from America, whenever Kamileh wasn’t paying attention, Eliyya went around opening dresser drawers, ones that squeaked from lack of use. He opened the wardrobe to find only her clothes, and his from before he left. Although the walls were covered with pictures, there wasn’t a single one of his father. No shoes, no ties. He searched everywhere for his father but found only traces of himself. His mother never threw a single thing of his away. Two school uniforms, books, toys… and the accordion. She was quite proud of her collection. His first rocking cradle, which she turned into a planter for flowers and plants, his report cards, his diplomas and the shiny metal bird standing on one leg that he won in the French poetry competition.

Outside the town, heading where his mischievous friends used to take him, he wrote in his journal: I walk along a red dirt road that ripples through the ancient olive trees with their twisted and tangled branches that sometimes appear to be praying and other times rebelling. A moment ago, a man riding a donkey passed me. He was making special sounds to spur the donkey on or make him slow down, but I wasn’t able to get my camera out before he disappeared around a corner, so I couldn’t get a picture of him. An old woman wrapped from head to toe in tattered clothes was collecting dry branches, perhaps to start a fire. Or maybe she was one of those poor gleaners who comb through the olive groves for stray olives left under the trees after harvest. Around here they have a saying that the son of the king would get down off his horse to pick up a stray olive. That was in the past. Today olive oil is cheap and the competition is as fierce as ever, and more and more doctors advise people to stay away from the local oil because of its high acidity. An endless herd of goats passes by, led by a shepherd who can’t be more than fourteen years old. He is waving his broad staff as he makes his way up towards the nearby mountains. The sound of a bell around a billy goat’s neck can be heard. It’s the time of year when the flocks migrate up into the high mountains. It feels ancient and shallow at the same time. As if things pile up here in time but not in place. The place is the same as it was at the beginning of time. It doesn’t bear the stigma of the passing of years. In the background are high mountains spotted with remnants of snow gleaming in the spring sun. This land truly reminds one of the New Testament, as if just around the bend is Peter denying his master Jesus Christ, right there at the entrance to the Mount of Olives.

That evening, he asked his mother, ‘Was Elias al-Semaani telling the truth?’

She blew up at him. ‘You’re listening to that coward? He ran away. He left his friends and his cousins and he was so scared that he ran off the road down into the rugged terrain. They lost track of him. They thought he was killed. I wish he had been killed. He’s a burden to his family. But he reappeared two days later totally humbled. He started telling tall tales about himself and those he abandoned in the middle of the whole mess.’

She got all wound up and then suddenly calmed down and got back to the heart of the matter. ‘Your father was killed forty-three years ago. What more do you want?’

He smiled.

He’d been smothering his mother with smiles ever since his arrival.

Chapter 5

The voice came from outside the front door.

A stern voice.

My mother was a stranger. She taught us many things and still does so today.

She taught us, for example, to shake hands with our elders rather than let them grab our shoulders or lovingly touch our faces; she taught us not to offer our cheeks to be kissed by anyone.

She taught us to turn off the lights when we left a room and to shut the door behind us whenever we entered the house. She was the only one in the neighbourhood who locked the door.

‘This is a house,’ she used to say.

My father was inside shaving, enjoying every movement, taking his time, going after the little hairs inside his nose without touching his moustache. He was good at everything he did.

My father didn’t hear the man calling at the door.

It was Sunday, roughly the middle of June. Every day of the week had its agenda in my mother’s calculations and plans for our upbringing. We were waiting for my father, all bathed, dressed, and ready to go, having already worked out the seating arrangement for the back of the blue Chevrolet.

That’s how Sundays were in the spring. As we waited, we imagined how he would drive the car, tilting his head to the left and whistling around the difficult bends. Whenever he whistled, we would laugh secretly and wink at each other, my sister and I. On Sundays we would visit the Grotto of Qadisha. We would touch the stalactites that hung down like icicles from the cave’s ceiling. We would yell to each other and wait for the echoes to reverberate from its deep recesses. We would have lunch at the restaurant and my father would order a glass of arak along with the food. Once we came back with a picture frame made of cedar wood in which we put a picture of the four of us standing in a line, from tallest to shortest. The two daughters first and after us, a boy and then another boy, to make sure that the first boy wasn’t left by himself, as my father would say.

The man called again, louder this time. We heard him calling out without knocking on the door.

Strange. I remember how visitors often used to call from outside rather than knocking on the door if the door was shut, perhaps to object to our door always being shut.

My mother was standing in front of the mirror putting the last touches of red on her lips and examining the skin under her beautiful eyes. My mother used to worry a lot about wrinkles. She looked at us, her index finger pressed against her pursed lips to warn us not to respond or make a sound. Perhaps the man calling from outside would leave.

She was worried about the Sunday plans she had promised us, and she was worried about the plans the men had in mind.

My father appeared with all his gear: straight razor in his hand, towel on his shoulder and half of his face covered with shaving cream. He was wearing only his white undershirt, the ‘cotton shirt’, as we used to call it.

‘Who’s there?’

‘Us.’

Two voices. Two men.

He recognised them. He looked at my mother.

Our relatives never forgave my mother for being a stranger, never got over her accent or her cooking or her insistence on red lipstick and being fashionable. She was married after all, so what did she need red lipstick for? Nor did they forgive her for always keeping the door shut. As if she was shutting it in their faces.

The two men were also dressed in Sunday clothes, as best they could. That is, the stocky one with the thin moustache, whom we knew and whose name was Ayyoub, was wearing a grey suit that time had left its mark upon, and sweat stains blotched his unbuttoned white shirt, even though it was still early in the morning.

The other one was tall. He was wearing a tie and an American hat tipped to the side. He had a cigarette between his lips and a wart on his left cheek. We were seeing him for the first time as he peered inside our house in a strange manner. Later on we would find out that his name was Farid Badwi al-Semaani.

‘Get dressed. We’re going to the funeral, Moussa,’ the fat one said.

‘What’s going on?’

‘A funeral.’

‘Whose funeral?’

‘…’

‘…’

It was the first time we had ever heard of Burj al-Hawa.

‘Is that village far away, Mother?’

‘Yes. It’s far and the road to it is difficult.’

Worried and embarrassed, my mother stopped putting on her make-up. She listened carefully to what the two men were saying.

‘Is it further than Al-Mazraa?’

‘Yes. Further than Al-Mazraa.’

Al-Mazraa was my mother’s village.

We could see it from our house, there at the foot of the mountain opposite us, that fiery mountain that was said to have been a volcano at one time. My mother’s village was just a cluster of trees and houses, more like a small oasis people had built with patience and care in the middle of that barren mountain. The day my father bought us the binoculars, the first thing we aimed them at was Al-Mazraa. Suddenly and by mere coincidence, my grandfather and my uncle appeared before us picking apricots from the Umm Hsayn apricot tree. They had white cloths on their heads tied at the corners, to protect them from the sun.

The conversation at the door was in whispers.

‘…’

‘…’

‘The Bey is going,’ Ayyoub said definitively, leaving no room for argument.

The one with the tipped hat looked inside the house. Actually, he had been looking more at our clothes and our furniture than at us, while his friend tried to persuade my father.

Ayyoub, the gregarious one, and his silent friend.

My father didn’t invite them in. He stayed at the door speaking to them, his face covered with shaving cream, the straight razor in his hand, his shoulders covered with thick black hair. The stocky one talked about the upcoming elections, how the campaign was serious and how they had to assert their presence, which he said with a wave of his right hand. He stopped talking, waiting for my father to respond, as if he had just recently learned the term ‘presence’ or had heard it from someone he considered knowledgeable and was trying to test out its impact every time he had a chance to speak.

Ayyoub spoke at great length, elaborating and preaching about the necessity of safeguarding our ‘essence’ and being wary of ‘them’. He had proof they were backstabbers. He also had a predilection for using classical Arabic expressions, which my mother had learned to decipher. That was why the more he spoke, the more my mother frowned. She knew my father and his cousins well, and if she kept quiet they would take him with them and if she interfered she would embarrass him in front of them.

As he listened, my father used the towel in his hand to wipe the shaving cream off his face a little bit at a time. That was his way of drawing out the pleasure of his shave, and it would also give him time to think.

Suddenly Ayyoub stopped talking, as if he had exhausted all his arguments and his entire dictionary. He waited for my father’s answer, but it didn’t come. Silence hung in the air. We felt my father’s silence to be a sign he would choose us over the two men.

It was now the man with the tipped hat’s turn. ‘If you don’t want to come with us, give us the car. There are many young men but very few cars…’

‘No!’ the four of us shouted in unison from inside the house without even looking at each other.

Our father quietened us down without responding to them. It was another meaningful silence that wasn’t difficult for the men to understand, and so they turned around and walked away.

My father shut the door, still holding the open straight blade in his right hand. He wasn’t himself. We surrounded him, the four of us, and showered him with kisses. Giving kisses on all sorts of occasions was one of my mother’s innovations, just as the girls’ baths every two days and the boys’ twice a week were also imported by her. Our father tried to escape our attack on him.

‘No, no. Get away. I still have shaving cream on my chin.’

He wouldn’t be kissing us then and not in the days and months that followed, either.

‘Get away from your father!’

My mother understood he was under a lot of pressure and kissing us meant confirmation he was abandoning his relatives.

He went back to the mirror in the bathroom to finish shaving. From the living room we heard him whistling intermittently just as he did while driving the Chevrolet around dangerous bends in the road. This whistling was his way of unburdening himself.

‘Hamid!’

We trembled a little. It was the voice of the eloquent stocky man again. They had both come back to the door. They weren’t going to let my father off easily. My mother made the sign of the cross and we all went back to our battle positions.

‘Yes?’ my father said in a dry tone as he opened the door for them. This time his face was clean-shaven and his shirt was buttoned all the way up to his neck.

The two men stammered. Each was nudging the other to speak first.

‘You say it.’

‘No. You say it.’

My father raised his voice. ‘What’s going on? Speak!’

My father rarely raised his voice. Getting angry exhausted him. If ever he shouted at us, he was quick to make it up to us with a joke or a kiss or some money.

The man with the tipped hat took the initiative. ‘Give us your gun.’

The gun or fard (personal) was the same thing as the musaddas (sixer) or the revolver… you pulled it out and if it was loaded or cocked you shot, either point blank or quick draw, otherwise your adversary would beat you to it and something regrettable would happen. They used bird metaphors and hand metaphors and ‘sparrow’s eye’… You insisted on getting bullets to go with it, bullets that burned and bullets that penetrated…

My father had bought it two or three months earlier from a weapons merchant. He had brought it home, laughing as he told us how after the seller carefully organised the bills my father had paid him and put them in his pocket, satisfied with such a profitable deal.

‘God willing you’ll only use it on live flesh…’ the gun merchant had said to my father wistfully.

My father didn’t tell us why he had bought a revolver he wasn’t going to use. Most probably the time had come when he could no longer say to his family and cousins that he didn’t own a weapon.

On the Feast of Holy Transfiguration, he tested it out but stopped after the third shot because it jammed.

‘Lack of practice!’ shouted one of his friends standing next to him, jokingly. That joke was suited to my father more than anyone else. He wore the gun at his waist for less than a week and then he hid it somewhere in the house. Probably because the gun tired him out, its weight on his waist tired him out. We knew there was a gun in the house, but didn’t know where it was. Every house had a hiding place for guns, because at any time the government might resolve to confiscate all the weapons from people’s houses.

‘You want me to give you my gun?’

The request had surprised him, despite his distaste for weapons.

‘We’ll give it back to you this evening or tomorrow morning… We may need it.’

The fellow with the wart on his left cheek added, ‘You can spare it. Nothing bad will happen to you as long you’re staying here with your wife.’

He didn’t say, ‘As long as you’re staying here with your wife and children.’ He seemed to be trying to insult my father that way. We hadn’t noticed that detail but my mother explained it later, on our way to the Grotto of Qadisha. And truly something stirred inside my father, but not in the expected direction.

He passed by us, red in the face, walking steadily towards the kitchen with signs of a difficult decision written in his eyes. We watched him from where we had gathered to wait for him in the living room. He opened the bread bin, reached deep down to its base, and pulled out the gun in its black leather holster. A hiding place so obvious you’d never think of it. If we had ever used up every last loaf of bread, we would have discovered it.

He came back with the same steady walk. We could see him from behind as he stood at the door.

‘Here you go!’

Later, images that we came across — like those officers in World War II movies who’d been stripped of their ranks by the military court, or the picture in our history book of the French general (who we later found out was Jewish) dressed in colourful clothing as he handed over his sword to another officer to be broken over his knee — these images and many others would remind us of our father as he stood there in the doorway handing over his revolver with one hand to the stocky man and the two clips to the man with the tipped hat with the other, while the bright light of day streamed over the three men and flooded into the living room.

But we children won out. We went on our Sunday outing. It was a warm and sunny day. I have no idea where the rain that fell at the time of the incident came from.

My father drove in silence. Every once in a while, and without realising it — as he said when my mother alerted him to it — he would start going too fast, and so my mother would remind him that all the children were in the back seat. He would slow down a little, only to press down on the accelerator again a little later.

At lunch, too, my father barely said a word. He would let out a boisterous laugh for no real reason and then plunge back into a long silence. Later on he told us he had had a bad feeling that day. When we coaxed him, he would laugh or play with one of us, look at his watch, stop eating, only to become distracted once again.

We came home in the evening. But Farid Badwi al-Semaani, the man with the tipped hat, my father’s paternal cousin who we’d seen standing in our doorway that Sunday morning for the first and last time, did not return. They covered him in a shroud and laid him out in the church courtyard, right in front of the main gate to the Girls’ School. His mother stooped over him, grieving. She waved his silk shirt in the air at times and later wore it herself. Having lost her voice, she began opening her mouth and moving her lips without making any sound. Nazha Murad elegised him, calling him the best tailor that ever was, the maker of the finest suits.

The stocky eloquent Ayyoub is still alive today. He had been shot in the mouth and thigh and was counted among the casualties in the Telegraph newspaper that came out the next day. He passed out for a few hours from loss of blood, but then he came round. Ayyoub was also my father’s cousin, but he only dropped by our house from time to time.

At any rate, they all became cousins after the incident.

As for us, the news about us spread quickly. Us, meaning my father. His sin was the outing to Qadisha. And my mother.

We girls — my sister and I — kept the harsh words that were sometimes slung at us to ourselves. My ten-year-old brother couldn’t bear those sharp arrows. He didn’t understand. One day he came home early, before sunset — his usual curfew. He slammed every door to express his anger.

‘Open the door, Munir.’

We gathered in front of the bedroom door. He had locked it with the key from the inside. We could hear nothing but pounding on the walls, either from his fists or his head. We were worried about him. We threatened to break the door down if he didn’t speak.

But in the face of his stubbornness we chose to keep pleading with him and questioning him until he finally came out with a question. ‘I want to know…’

We seized the opportunity and encouraged him. ‘What do you want to know?’

‘Tell me now, right now. Where is my father’s gun?’

When we weren’t able to answer him, he stamped his feet. ‘Who took it?’

My father’s gun hadn’t returned that day, and no one asked to have it back, out of embarrassment. My father had been told that whoever had been using it tossed it onto the ground when it ran out of bullets, in order to pull out his second gun, and then it got lost. Then later someone came and told him that his gun was not actually lost but was still with one of his relatives. He didn’t think anything of it. Of course, the suspicions surrounding Ayyoub continued, but Ayyoub was immune to questions because of the wounds he suffered: three bullets to the body.

At any rate, my father was willing to forfeit his gun as the price for his absence.

Munir resumed his pounding on the wall. We found out that his friends didn’t want to play with him. They wouldn’t let him play war, the only game they knew and which they played with weapons made out of reeds and gun sounds made with their mouths. They wouldn’t allow him to be a soldier, of course, or even an outlaw, on the basis that his father was scared to shoot his own gun. He even begged them to let him be a guard at the prison they made for outlaws trying to escape justice, but they were adamant. He stamped his feet in anger, burst into tears and hurried home to take it out on us.

We girls, in turn, divulged everything that had happened to us. They had accused my mother of ceasing to wear black mourning clothes after only three months of bereavement and they complained that none of her daughters wore mourning clothes at all, even though we were mature ‘young women’, as they would say.

My father came home a little later. We told him Munir had locked himself in the bedroom. He smiled and went to the door.

‘Munir?’

‘What’s my name?’

My brother’s question surprised us all. My father laughed and answered him pompously, ‘Munir Hamid Jirjis al-Semaani.’

‘No it isn’t…’

‘What do you mean, no it isn’t?’

‘No it isn’t.’

‘What’s your name, then?’

‘They say we are not Semaanis…’

That particular accusation had not been levelled at Munir that same day. He was unburdening himself of all the insults he’d been subjected to.

‘Who says that to you?’ my father asked him with the tone of a vanquished man. He quickly understood what was happening.

‘My friends…’

‘They said this to you today?’

‘No. They say it every day.’

‘Which children?’

‘The first one is George, my cousin.’

‘And what do you say back?’

‘I don’t know.’

My father got upset, but his anger didn’t last long, as usual.

‘How could you accept that? How could you say nothing? Didn’t you tell them that you were a Semaani before any of them?’

‘They say we follow the milk,’ he said, sobbing and giving up. ‘We’re from Al-Mazraa.’

‘What else do they say?’

Munir was silent. It was as though he’d got enough off of his chest. But my father wasn’t satisfied.

‘What?’

‘They say you’re not a man.’

He pronounced the word rijjaal, the Arabic word for ‘man’, with a double ‘j’ of course. The plural of rijjaal is rjaal, with no vowel after the ‘r’ and a long ‘aa’ vowel after the ‘j’. It takes a common masculine plural form, as opposed to the plural of abadaay (tough guy) which takes the common feminine plural form that ends with ‘aat’, abadaayaat. The word for ‘men’, rjaal, is also pronounced rjayl, again with no vowel after the ‘r’. The word is open to several derivations and has various related verbs, among which are the verbs rajjala (to take on manly characteristics) and tamarjala (to act tough).

Some of those men who enthusiastically accompanied their headmen to the anniversary mass commemorating that ill-omened event were suited to the verb rajjala very well. The sudden and the unexpected have a way of revealing people’s true mettle. However, those men who participated in the Burj al-Hawa incident did not deserve the same title of rjaal (men) that their ancestors who fought with Yusuf Bey Karam against the Turkish Army had earned. Perhaps that was because their ancestors who fought against the Turkish Army had confronted strangers rather than firing their bullets at one another. Or, as people like to boast, ‘Jails were made for men,’ but it should be pointed out that while the incident sent a lot of people to the grave, it sent hardly anyone to jail.

The etymology goes even further. Another plural form, rjaalaat (men), was also used but these men were few and far between. The term referred specifically to the men who had fought for Lebanese Independence fourteen years earlier.

For every man who rajjala (took on manly characteristics) there was one who ajbana (behaved like a coward). That is, he had the opportunity to destroy the enemy but did not. And also, there were men who tahaayadu (remained neutral), meaning they chose not to participate in wielding their weapons and firing them because their familial blood-solidarity was weak, in the sense that they did not belong to the heart and soul of the family but rather to its extremities. It goes without saying that ibn al-‘aa’ila (the true son of the family) cannot be neutral because his neutrality would be interpreted as defeat. The epitome of manliness is expressed in these homonym verses:

Neither behind me nor in front of me nor next to me (hadd-ay)

The dust of horses’ hooves gives me pleasure and so do heroic verses (al-hid-ay)

O saddleback, you are my cradle and my grave (lahd-ay)

Whenever my country is threatened

As for the regression of the era of manliness, that can be summed up by saying that men themselves turn into women, are infected with the feminine ‘adwa al-mu’annath’ when they lose their manliness. Some might say that the era of manliness disappeared with the expansion of the state’s influence and military power which caused the appearance of al-frari, plural frariyyeh, meaning fugitives, also referred to as tuffaar, in nearby areas. These were the clever tough men running from the law. Others say that the revolver, or even the automatic version of it, had not threatened the existence of the rijjaal (real man) even if it had opened the door to attacks from behind and cowardly ambushes, up until the hand-held automatic rifle appeared. No one could act tough around the Kalashnikov with its thirty rounds, and that was the primary cause for the waning of the age of tough guys. The final word now belonged to guns rather than men.

My father smiled bitterly and said, ‘OK, so I’m not a man. It’s OK. Open the door, son. Open it!’ He went on with a muffled voice as if talking to himself, ‘Put your mind at ease. You won’t hear that kind of talk after today…’

Exactly two months later, my father picked us up and brought us here. We took every precaution to leave without making any noise or raising any suspicions. To avoid people’s stares, we moved our furniture at night. Getting out of there was my mother’s dream come true and our second betrayal of our relatives. My father rented this house for us because it overlooks the bay. We were able to buy it after a number of years. When we first arrived we used to sit here on an old squeaky porch swing that the former owners had left behind. The four of us would sit on it, side by side, watching the fishing boat lights as the moon glimmered on the surface of the water on those warm summer evenings. And if for some reason we woke up in the middle of the night, we would always find our father standing outside, seemingly counting the stars as he smoked.

We made a lot of friends here, but every time we were asked where we were from and we told them from there, our new friends would open their eyes wide in disbelief. How could we be from there and have such a refined demeanour and hardly any accent?

My father opened a small shop that carried carpentry and painting necessities. He made a lot of friends here and our neighbours were always very nice, but my father continued to pine for his cousins and his hometown. The moment one of them turned up, he rushed up to them. He ran after them. Sometimes he recognised them by their features and would call them by their family names; their blond colouring and tall stature gave them away. He would accompany them to wherever their errands led them — to government offices or the Australian consulate to apply for immigration visas. He would go with them to Beirut, where they would have been lost without him, and he would help them with their transactions. He’d invite them to lunch at the Qubrusli Restaurant where he’d order his favourite meal — kefta, hummus, and two glasses of arak. He’d sit with them, tête-à-tête, and never allowed them to pay for anything from their own pocket. He told them he didn’t want to impose on my mother by inviting them to the house. He warmed up to asking them for news about everyone by name.

My father is dead now. One afternoon, he went into his room to take a nap, taking the newspaper with him, and didn’t wake up. We took him up there in a small procession of cars and after praying over him in the church, buried him under the first cypress tree to the right of the cemetery entrance. They congregated around us — relatives we had stayed in touch with and people we didn’t know who never missed a funeral or reception for condolences. The women were covered in black out of respect for my father. They sat next to us, asked about us, invited us to their homes. I felt we were indebted to them. From that day on, if I came across any of them lost in the city, I would rush after them and do everything to help them and invite them to visit us. I used to say to my mother that I sometimes longed to go to the town. That didn’t surprise her; she felt my feelings were normal. As for her, I think we were her hometown.

We sold our house there, the same house whose door my mother always insisted we close behind us when we came in. But under that first cypress tree to the right of the cemetery’s entrance, we still have a place, a place to which I bring a bouquet of flowers at least once a year, a place I don’t think anyone can buy from us.

Chapter 6

Ever since Muntaha read me your letter, going on and on and getting on my nerves before I cursed her and she finally came out with it — that you were coming to visit me — I’ve been scared to death about your return. Nothing gets past me, Eliyya. I’ve been onto you from the start, from the moment we drove back from Beirut airport and you sat beside me in the back seat of the car doting on me like a little child, patting my cheeks and wrapping your arms around me the whole way. When I asked you what you were planning to do now that you had come back, you changed the subject. You asked me about the accordion, as if to mock me. But I went along with you and we reminisced about how for three years you had been in love with that instrument of yours and rarely took it off your shoulders, and how you hadn’t wanted anyone to touch it, fearing it would get scratched. And as you see, I kept it for you, hanging on the wall there in the living room, despite my getting fed up with all the stupid neighbours, especially the women, who came in and out of the house asking what that instrument was, of what use was it, why had I hung it on the wall, and was it worth a lot of money…

It’s true that I can barely see my hand in front of my face anymore. All I know is that daylight starts flickering from behind the high mountains, and so I make myself a cup of coffee to drink with the morning. I can sense when darkness starts to come from the direction of the sea and envelops the world. But I am not stupid. That’s right, not stupid. People say that you’re smart. You got this from your mother, not from the Kfoury family. Ask about me. If you love your mother, why don’t you ask about her? Ask all the people in town. They all know me and know my story. They’ll tell you as much as you want to know about me. And if you press them, they will fabricate some preposterous stories about me. Any story they can weave together will fit me well, my son. Stories become me. Stories seem to become some people, and I’m one of those people.

My father took me out of school against my will. One day I lifted my head from my Arabic language book, and there he was, all of a sudden, standing in the classroom doorway. I don’t know why he removed his red fez as if entering a church. He called to me, after seeking permission from the teacher, and told me to get my school bag and follow him. Just like that, out of the blue. He put his fez back on his head and started walking, so I walked behind him along the road, my feet reluctant to go forwards as I looked back, crying. When we reached the house, he kissed me. He kissed me maybe for the first time in my life. He kissed me on my forehead and said in a sharp tone, ‘That’s enough. From here on, education becomes harmful to girls. Tomorrow you help your mother with the housework.’

I didn’t sleep that whole night. In the morning I begged my mother to ask the nun to persuade my father to change his mind. My school was run by the Lazarite nuns and the headmistress was a French woman named Mother Angele. She had asked her noble and rich family to send her share of her inheritance so she could finish building the school in our town. She loved me very much. She spoke to my father but didn’t get anywhere with him. Rarely did my father make decisions. He left all the decisions about household matters and children up to my mother. But if he did ever make a decision, he would stick to it to the end, as if his whole life depended on it.

That’s right, I’m not stupid. I know you’ve been going around asking people questions and recording what they say. Don’t laugh. Tape recorders have become so small nowadays you can put them in your shirt pocket. No, I don’t want to search through your clothes. Record as much as you want. I myself have a tape recorder here in my room, next to my pillow, that I turn on when I’m having trouble sleeping. There’s only one tape in it, of my own voice. My voice is still as beautiful as it was years ago. I recorded some Baghdadi mawwaals. It is said that prisoners used to sing those mawwaals to cheer themselves up.

I raised you as a child, why have you left me?

Is this the reward of a good deed, O light of my eyes?

As you can hear, my voice is still beautiful. I learned those mawwaals from my mother. I’ll let you hear them if you wish. I play the tape over and over until I’m able to fall asleep.

I like to sleep to the sound of my voice.

If I had been more determined, I would have written down my story myself when I still could. And I tried after you left. I bought a new copy book and sat at the table. I remembered the school desks and it made me so sad and sorry for myself again that I almost cried. On the first page I wrote one sentence: This is the story of Kamileh al-Hajj Abayd… I like to use my family name. We’ve always been known to be either very intelligent or crazy. They say that one of our ancestors in the distant past was returning from Jerusalem to his town in Syria when he happened upon a girl whose beauty enchanted him, and so he spent the night in that town hoping to see her the next day. He couldn’t bear to be without her, and he stayed there for days on end until he married her and people gave him the name ‘Al-Hajj’, the pilgrim. On the first page in my copy book I wrote: This is the story of Kamileh al-Hajj Abayd, starting with the day she left her father’s house wearing her bead-embroidered wedding dress and, for good luck, they lifted her up to stick a ball of dough over the door of her husband’s house, which didn’t stick well, up until the day her only son boarded a plane to America and didn’t return. But writing that sentence tired me out. It took me half an hour, which is why I have it memorised. I reread it and said to myself, ‘It’s a difficult task for you, and at any rate who will even care about your story, Kamileh? Your problems are nothing compared with other people’s problems. No one wants to burden himself with other people’s problems. It’d be better to stop.’ I often thought about doing it afterwards as I sat here by myself on the porch. When the day came when I could only hear people and not see them anymore, I thought about telling it out loud, just like I’m telling it to you now, and I would ask Muntaha to write it down for me. Muntaha is all I have left. My companion and my neighbour who comes to visit me almost every day. She never married, and I had become a widow so young.

Go ahead, record if you want. Why would you ask Elias al-Semaani and not your own mother? What is Elias al-Semaani going to tell you besides lies? You say that you’re going to meet friends. How did you manage to make friends here so quickly? People told me you went to visit Salim al-Aasy’s son. What have you got to do with Salim al-Aasy’s son? He’s sick. God help us, son. His father went to his grave sick with worry about him. Everyone knows that. But before we get to all that, tell me, aren’t you going to get married? The neighbourhood kids saw you on the computer with a pretty blonde girl. Is that true? Is she American or Arab? The important thing is that she’s beautiful and Christian. Is it true what they say, that there aren’t any Christians in America anymore? Why are you laughing? She’s too Christian? How so? Her father’s a priest? Their priests get married, too? And why am I asking you if she’s Christian? What’s the difference? We’re all God’s creatures. I personally don’t like praying and I don’t like priests. I never go to any of them for confession. If I wanted to confess I would tell my sins to God, and when I die, I will request a priest who is a stranger. Anyway, I don’t go to church anymore unless it’s necessary. I pray from right here, from my house.

I only want to know if your girlfriend has a mother waiting for her there in her hometown in America as I have waited for you here. Does her mother wake up like a madwoman at night? Does she run to the door barefoot because some voice called to her to wake up, a voice saying that her daughter has returned from her long journey, and is sitting on the threshold, dying of thirst, waiting for someone to open the door for her? Does her mother open the door the way I open it every night, with her hands trembling, only to find no one there and in turn sit on the doorstep peering into the darkness, broken hearted, listening for the slightest movement, hoping it might be an indication that her daughter has arrived? Does she run barefoot every night to open the door, hoping that the voice is real for once and that she will get to embrace her daughter in her arms until daylight? Does she have, this girlfriend of yours, a mother like me who has not seen her, not even once, for twenty whole years? And in spite of that she begins every day by kissing and sniffing her old clothes? Your clothes have become so funny looking, Eliyya. And your shoes so small. Does she make candied pears for her on Saturday afternoon? Her day off from school when she was still in primary school… does she only like candied pears? Does her mother prepare them for her and place them prominently in the middle of the table, looking at them and waiting? Then at the end of the day does she give them to one of the poor neighbour kids, because her daughter doesn’t come to eat them? Does she do it every Saturday afternoon? Yes, for ten years I kept on preparing candied pears for you, every Saturday, because I was afraid that if I missed one, something bad might happen to you and you’d never come back to me again.

Don’t worry about me, Eliyya. I will not cry. I stopped crying a long time ago. But give me your hand, my son. Give it to me so I’ll be encouraged to keep talking. I will not cry. Why should I cry over your absence? Wasn’t I the one who cleared the path for you to go? That is the true story of your mother Kamileh: her only child, who she fashioned with her own hands — yes I fashioned you with my own hands — she let him go, willingly. Don’t you remember that I said to you one day, ‘Things have gone awry, my son. This country is in shambles. Pack up your suitcase and go. You’re not staying here one more day!’

I asked you to leave the country after having begged thirty different saints to conceive you. There wasn’t a single corner in Lebanon that I didn’t visit, from the Church of the Virgin in Qbayyaat to an abandoned monastery in the furthest reaches of the south, near the Israeli borders. They unravelled the written amulet for me for fear someone had invoked evil against me to prevent me from having children, and they taught me all the right formulas. ‘Add extra salt to your food, Kamileh,’ they advised. ‘Sleep with your husband five days in a row.’ ‘Stay on your back and lift your legs up high.’ They taught me how to count on my fingers and to use the lunar calendar…

I walked barefoot to Saint Anthony of Quzhayya, down that long and difficult road overgrown with thorns. I arrived with my feet bleeding and with two gold pounds in my hand which I placed on the altar for him. I said to Saint Anthony, ‘Give me a son and you’ll be pleased with me. I won’t be stingy with you.’

Go ahead, laugh at me, Eliyya. You don’t believe in these superstitions. Whoever said I believe in them? But if I hadn’t done it, I would have kept on thinking I hadn’t fulfilled my duty. I lay down flat before the altar of Saint Anthony, inside his church, the one hewn out of the rocks. I spent the whole night there, until dawn. I almost died from the cold, and ever since that day my stomach starts to hurt with the first hint of cold weather.

I knelt a thousand times before the icon of the Virgin in the Lower Quarter and I beseeched her to give me you. Yes, the same old church. You went to visit it again, right? I knew you were going to go there to look at the icon and the little angels surrounding the Virgin. I used to go there at night, at a late hour when there was no one around, and I would close the outside gate so I could be alone in the church and raise my voice. I would cry and beseech her, ‘Why are you so selfish? Are you in need of all those little angels around you? Why don’t you be generous and give one of them to me?’ I would point to the little angel rising up with its wings over her right shoulder. I liked that one more than the others. Sometimes she would smile at me. I knew she wouldn’t forsake me.

I visited Saint Panteleimon in the Miryata region. He’s one of the Orthodox saints whose church is guarded by Muslims. I even secretly sought one of the Muslim sheikhs, but the neighbours found out and laughed at me. Your father never accompanied me, but when Saint Elias’s turn came, we were told that the saint only accepted visits from a man and woman together, and so I begged Yusef until he agreed. He was very embarrassed about these things. He agreed to accompany me, but only at night, so he wouldn’t be seen by anyone who knew him. He was afraid of their tongues. Saint Elias was the last saint we visited before your father was killed. That is why I decided to call you Eliyya. I feared for you. If I hadn’t named you Eliyya, I was convinced I would be exposing you to danger…

Deep down you’re laughing at me. Go ahead, laugh, but I don’t wish my life on anyone. The doctors got tired of me. I used to go on my own to see them. At Hôtel Dieu Hospital the French doctor made fun of me and said the same thing as Saint Elias. ‘Don’t come back here without your husband, because he also has to undergo medical tests. And if he’s already convinced you that the problem is you, tell him that men can be sterile, too…’

I didn’t go back to that doctor. The worst times for me were when I’d go out on the balcony and see the laundry hanging out on rooftops and balconies, especially when I caught sight of baby clothes, their little coloured shirts and little socks hanging there, each with its own clothes pin, and also their little towels and cloth diapers. In those days they used to wash the diapers and hang them to dry, not throw them away like today. Those were days of poverty and suffering.

Before I got pregnant, and when your father was still alive, I went down to the souk in Tripoli. I bought diapers and hid them well so no one could see them and make fun of me. Yusef was afraid I was going crazy. I bought baby clothes, little shoes and all the necessities. I had everything I needed for a baby. Sometimes when I was alone I enjoyed taking them out and looking at them. I would spread everything I had bought all over the bedroom and gaze at it. Finally I insisted on buying a cradle. I said to myself, if I don’t buy a cradle I won’t have a baby. It had to be a genuine wooden rocking cradle. It was difficult getting it into the house secretly because my husband didn’t want people to gossip, and so we waited until night to bring it in from the car. There it is right over there. Look. Near the door. You’ve grown up now, Eliyya, and you don’t have any need for it anymore, so I planted flowers in it.

My life became very difficult. I would pound my belly in anger. I would go crying to my mother and she told me stories about women who got pregnant after they had lost hope. This one was in her forties, and this other one was forty-five. ‘Don’t give up, Kamileh. Don’t let your husband run away from you.’

I started hating other people’s children, hating even the mention and the sight of children. My women friends, little by little, started avoiding all talk of children in my presence. Previously they would go on and on with anecdotes about their little ones whenever they came over. Funny stories about them at school and the difficulty of bringing them up, their first words, their many sparks of intelligence. They’d say all this as if they were upset. ‘No soul is brought to life unless another soul dies!’

The thing that hurt me most was their complaining about the difficulty of raising children. They must have sensed my annoyance whenever the topic of children came up, and so they stopped counting how many of our friends were pregnant and stopped telling stories about cravings and weaning and so on. I would see them sometimes winking at each other to change the subject out of consideration for me when the talk even accidentally turned to stories of pregnancy and giving birth or christenings and first communions. After a period of time, they stopped even bringing their children with them, and finally they stopped coming to visit me at all. Being around me became difficult. People know these things. They knew that talking about children hurt me, suffocated me. What was worse was that I started consoling myself with news of tragedies. Even tragedies that befell people I knew. But my mother always remained optimistic that I would have a child and she would cite examples and scores of stories about late pregnancies. She kept saying for years, ‘You’re still young, Kamileh,’ and she would encourage me to sleep with my husband.

The truth was that we had grown lazy about sleeping together. You’re a man now. Why shouldn’t I tell you all this? Your father used to stay out late at night. His whole life he loved staying up late while I went to bed early. Someone came to tell me that he was womanising. I loved him and I didn’t care. I’d say to myself, as long as I don’t give him children, he has the right to take up with someone else. Don’t be surprised. That’s the way I am. I was convinced of this idea. Your generation certainly doesn’t think that way. I don’t know whether I made it up on my own or if someone convinced me of it. I kept quiet about his relations with other women. I never made him feel that I was jealous, and the truth was I didn’t really feel jealous. I knew that he loved me, and that feeling was enough for me. Until that one day when I saw him cleaning his revolver, spreading the pieces out in front of him on the table and polishing them with oil and fiddling with them. I asked him what he was doing. He said he was getting ready to participate in the next day’s memorial service for the bishop’s brother in Burj al-Hawa.

‘Why the gun, if you’re going to church for a change?’

‘This is our way of doing things around here,’ he answered, smiling.

‘Do you have to go?’

I had a dark feeling. At that time I was trying very hard to prevent him from participating in gatherings. I was more comfortable when he went gambling and womanising.

I remember I asked him that day, ‘Are Fuad al-Rami and his brother Butros going to the service?’

You know them, Eliyya, your father’s friends from his youth. Despite tensions between our families he still liked them and associated with them. He invited them to dinner sometimes on the balcony right here, and I would serve them until late into the night. They would play cards and I think he went womanising with them, because they were well-to-do bachelors who loved to gamble and drink and womanise. He hesitated a little when I asked about them and said he didn’t know whether they were going to accompany the family’s zaeem. They didn’t like trouble.

‘You know how they are, they love life,’ he said to me. So I asked him if he were to confront them one day, would he shoot at them? He laughed at the possibility. ‘Fuad and Butros al-Rami? How could I ever fight them?’

I was worried about him anyway and said to myself that if he died I would die too. I figured the easiest way would be poison. I’d drink some poison and be done with it. I imagined how I would kill myself, but no one really dies for someone else.

Early that night he combed his hair and shaved for the second time that day, the way he always did when he intended to stay out late. He poured half a bottle of cologne on himself, went towards the door, opened it and walked out without even saying goodbye to me. But I stood in his way.

‘Tonight I want to get pregnant,’ I said to him.

He laughed at me and tried to push me out of his way. ‘If it was going to rain, we’d have seen some clouds by now…’ He used to say that despairingly every time I brought up the topic of getting pregnant.

I begged him. He also loved me. He agreed. It’s true he used to make fun of me and my attempts, but his heart was sad. I don’t know why he wanted to appear to be above having children. He’d say things to make us both feel better. People and friends used to console him with sayings like ‘Children are nothing but worry, and the older they get, the bigger the worry’ or ‘This is God’s will…’ He went with men of his family to that memorial service for the soul of the bishop’s brother, may God dig him a deep hole in hell. He had died a year or two earlier. What devil suggested to the bishop that he should hold a service for him and invite all those people to it one week before the general elections? Ever since that day I can’t stand priests or anything related to priests.

Yusef left at one in the afternoon. They met somewhere and went up to the church in one procession. At five o’clock, he came back with the dead. They put them all in a small truck. They were tall young men and their feet stuck out the end. He had been shot in the back: two bullets. One pierced his heart. They shot him from behind.

No, I never told you this before today. I never told you anything at all. Before you left, you were young, I felt you were too young to know. You heard about it from people, from here and there. And now I know that you’ve come back to ask, but you don’t want to ask me personally. You visit the widows of the Burj al-Hawa incident and you don’t ask me. People will say anything. You won’t get anywhere with them. They will lie to you. The ones who lost a relative up there will try to make a hero out of him, saying he paid the price of having held his head up high. And the ones who were there and got out of it alive don’t know what to say. They prefer to say nothing. Either way, if they chose to run, they’re not going to talk, and if they shot an adversary, they still won’t talk.

I know. I asked the doctor, ‘How was my husband shot?’ He said, ‘Look here,’ and I looked. ‘The two bullets entered here through his back. The opening here is narrow. And they exited from here, from his chest. The opening here is wide.’ Yes, your father had heart. He knew how to shoot and how to position himself in a battle, but they got him from behind. I heard all the stories. I was bombarded with all kinds of names, but after forty years, who cares?

I’m not going to give you advice about what you should do, because I don’t have a say. But if you get married, I insist that your wife give you a son right away. I’m sure it will be a boy. Handsome, blond, with blue eyes like yours. Don’t be afraid. Don’t laugh. Don’t be ashamed of yourself. People assured me she is beautiful. God’s best gift to a woman is the gift of beauty. Believe me, she won’t be worth much without her beauty. Have a child with her. Wrench him out of her and tell yourself this is the greatest blessing God can give a person.

Chapter 7

The shopkeeper was in his seventies, dark brown complexion, thin, sitting there behind the scales, looking like an old wretch. He rested his hands on the table and looked out. The ancient stone arch protected him from the heat.

From where he was, he could see a few metres down the road and had a view of part of the square and the western gate to the church. The passing cars stirred up the dust. The square was drenched in sunlight that accentuated the darkness inside, where the man sat waiting for his lunch.

His wife would bring it soon: okra with rice, olives, two hot green peppers and a glass of arak to help wash it all down. He liked all kinds of hot and spicy food, faithful to his birth place: São Paulo. His wife tied a polka dot scarf around her head, carried the plates over to the shop and placed them on the table next to the old scales without talking to him, and went back home. They’d been together a long time, and there weren’t many words left to exchange.

His shop was never the same after the incident. It had deteriorated along with his health. The first products to go were yogurt and cheese and anything else that needed refrigeration, after power cuts became more frequent and the refrigerator broke down and he gave up trying to fix it. Next he gave up anything that might wilt — vegetables, fruit, bunches of bananas, and boxes of oranges. He kept only those colourful bags of potato chips and two or three brands of cigarettes which he stored in empty glass containers, the kind one might imagine having once been filled with grains, and a hanging metal basket in which his wife put spare fresh eggs from her own chickens.

Despite everything, he didn’t close his shop. He didn’t know what had happened to the other shops. There had been four or five of them around the square that started closing down, one after the other. The owners’ children went off to school or went abroad in order to secure a comfortable retirement for their parents. He had been the only one to persevere. He arrived at seven in the morning and left at eight in the evening. He sat all day looking out onto the square.

People said the shopkeeper saw everything. But which shop? When the battle began, a number of men took refuge in one of the shops, according to the magistrate’s report.

Eliyya obtained a copy of the report and set off in a taxi — a Mercedes that was old, like its driver, who kept glancing up at him in the rearview mirror. The bends were frequent and the road was narrow. There was a huge quarry machine chipping away at the mountain. They both felt ill.

Houses began to appear on both sides of the road. Scattered villas, copies of homes of the American South with grand entrances, a façade that reminded one of a Roman temple, various types of Swiss chalet, and between them, here and there, a few modest houses. All of a sudden there appeared a building made of white stone in Japanese architectural style, or something like it.

‘Who designed those houses?’ Eliyya exclaimed when he saw them. ‘How can they live in them?’

‘They’re from diamond money and commerce… the owners got to Africa early on,’ the driver explained with a tinge of envy.

He meant that they had emigrated to Africa and amassed huge fortunes when it was still easy to take advantage of the native black population there.

The car reached the Old Quarter — a conglomeration of houses all stuck together.

‘There’s the church, there’s the square and the shops,’ the driver said.

The driver didn’t ask Eliyya who he was. He simply tossed his cigarette butt out of the car window and asked, ‘Where should I drop you?’

‘In front of the church.’

The driver mumbled something and swerved the car, parking it under the shady eucalyptus tree and said he would wait for him there.

‘Take your time. The church is over there.’

The driver walked over to the shop to ask for a drink of cold water. Eliyya saw him from a distance chatting briefly with the man sitting there eating okra and rice. He kept his eyes on his passenger to see when he would come back to the car. Perhaps he would slide the driver’s seat back and seize the opportunity to take a little nap. Under the shade of the eucalyptus tree, the breeze was soothing.

Eliyya began taking pictures immediately, as if he were stealing them and there was only a short window of time before someone discovered what he was doing and tried to stop him. It was a labyrinth of alleyways and houses. Eliyya gazed at the square. It was the first time he’d ever come to this town. In the past, he could never get anyone to come with him. He shaded his face from the strong sun with his right hand.

The shopkeeper had grown accustomed to journalists. They had come in large numbers at the beginning, some the very next day, on the Monday. At the time, the exact number of dead and wounded hadn’t been determined because they’d been taken to several different hospitals in the city. The magistrate’s report listed the names of twenty-four dead including four women, and twenty-eight wounded including seven women and a nun. There were also a large number of wounded who ran off and were not included in the investigation. The journalists continued to come throughout the summer of 1957, until the beginning of the ‘revolution’. There were journalists from Beirut and foreign correspondents from Europe taking pictures of people and the square. They stopped passers-by, asking all kinds of questions, and went around the church noting down in their little notebooks their first impressions, which they then incorporated into their articles.

The most famous of them was Aline Lahhoud, who, despite her experience in journalism, could not help resorting to naïve metaphors. She was constantly trying to cover up the gaps in her spoken Arabic with French expressions like déjà or somme toute and affectionately holding people’s hands or clothes as she spoke to them, both men and women, in order to facilitate communication. Three days after the incident she visited the crime scene, accompanied by the photographer Fuad Haddad. Contrary to her usual practice of flaunting the physical gifts God had endowed her with, and of which she was well aware, she chose to wear a modest grey outfit. Half-mourning, as they say, out of respect for the dead. And in line with her usual practice, before writing her article, before even arriving at the scene of the events, she chose the title: ‘When the Gods Nodded Off’. She kept repeating it to Fuad Haddad using a variety of intonations until she settled on it. At that point, she began writing an article to match her title. She embellished her lengthy investigation with a particular picture. No one knew how she had managed to obtain it. Later, people said that she confused the magistrate investigating the incident and drew his attention to the presence of photographers at the funeral, whose witnessing of the events and whose pictures could be useful, especially since the name of one of them appeared among the names of the wounded: Nishan Hovsep Davidian, age 26, a bullet wound to the lower right leg.

In the picture there were five young men looking anxiously at the camera. Happy to be together, they huddled close to each other to make sure no one was left out of the picture. Aline Lahhoud’s caption read, ‘The last picture. Only a few short minutes after posing for this picture, these five men would meet their death. The bullets of betrayal would mow them down the moment they parted after the picture was taken.’ It was easy to confirm that the young man wearing glasses and standing furthest to the right, the only one of them who had graduated from high school, and who was interested in journalism, actually came out alive. He hadn’t been harmed at all during the exchange of gunfire, but in general it is preferable for this kind of news to be all-encompassing; best to leave out the exception that might reduce its impact on readers. Fuad Haddad took other pictures of the main street in Barqa. Because it was noon, it had been completely deserted except for a woman clad in black walking close to the wall. The first time she ‘listened to silence (that way)’, Aline Lahhoud wrote, ‘in that bereaved town — the silence of the men and the silence of things… and of silence itself,’ as she added, ‘it resonated like a taut string’. From there she moved abruptly from ‘silence’, which she mentioned in her article fourteen times to be exact, to ‘glances’, without so much as a comma. This was a stylistic choice that was expected in such cases since ‘glances’ articulated what a tied tongue could not: dry eyes burning with tears that wouldn’t flow, lying in ambush behind the windows, and looking askance from behind the metal helmets of the soldiers deployed on every corner. Going off on a tangent, she went to Corsica and Sicily in order to suppose that ‘the daggers fashioned especially for revenge that were hanging like relics next to icons of the saints were unsheathed and ready for the right moment to attack’. The final touches were being put on the second chapter of the tragedy. All that was left were the three shots announcing the lifting of the curtain. Who would fire them? And then, using a common metaphor, the elegantly dressed journalist brought out the old cliché of the literary character of Mediterranean violence by stating that ‘the doors were closed and the hearts were closed, too, while pain wore the mask of hatred and the perfume of spring flowers mingled with the lingering scent of anger…’ and persevering, adding in all the elements of her epic…‘the sun was burning and the sky was at its wits’ end after it tried so hard in Burj al-Hawa to stop the tragedy by sending a torrent of rain that was totally unexpected in the middle of June’. She went on to add that the smell of the soil, ‘which was redolent after a long drought, could not stop those men from settling their accounts. It wasn’t the time for being inspired by life’s aroma; it was an ostentatious push towards the precipice.’ Not a single line of Aline Lahhoud’s article was devoid of poetic artifice and no telling of the events of the Burj al-Hawa incident left out the rain. Even if the flirty veteran reporter from the French-language journal Magazine, saw in that downpour some kind of warning or omen of what was to come and proceeded to attribute it to some god from Greek mythology, eyewitnesses confirmed that the heavy rain began to pour down after the outbreak of gunfire, not before. Their explanation for the rain’s timing was that the rainmaker wanted to separate the combatants and limit the harm they inflicted on each other. Others simply deduced that the rain that came pouring down (though one of them insisted what fell was actually the kind of large hail that is rare not only in June but in any month of the year) was nothing short of an expression of God’s wrath over what was transpiring before Him in and around His own house. Or to use lighter terms, the word ‘anger’ would suffice. The deadly incident occurred just two weeks before the legislative elections, which were fraught with warnings that opposition candidates would fail in their run against supporters of the president who was seeking renewal of his term and was using all kinds of pressure for that purpose. Taking a metaphysical approach, Aline Lahhoud turned to Thornton Wilder, the American novelist, and his The Bridge of San Luis Rey: ‘Some say that… to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer day, and some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.’ Was it divine intervention or divine negligence? Reading Aline Lahhoud’s investigation might lead one to imagine the church massacre as a painting belonging to a naïve style, done in bold colours and divided into two tiers. The ones spraying bullets at each other at the Burj al-Hawa church and in the church square would be on the lower tier and above them a mélange of Greek gods and angels. The Christians would be sitting on their little blue clouds smiling — inadvertently or cunningly — before pelting the fighters with rain to separate them.

Even the sixteen-foolscap-page report about the incident that came out on 27 July 1957 did not omit this contrast. In fact, it appeared right in the introductory description of the events. ‘Just as the hour 3:30 drew near and the skies sent down drizzling rain, the procession started moving from the house of the Al-Abd family towards the church, a distance of approximately 200 metres, led by the bishops, monks and nuns. To get out of the rain, people started entering the church from its side doors on the north and south sides. The rest of the procession entered through the western door opposite the town square. No sooner had the procession started entering the church, than a commotion broke out; a bullet was fired outside the church which was the signal and the spark…’ And so it was that the examining magistrate at the Beirut Appeals Court — the investigator in the matter of the breach of internal state security that took place on 16 June 1957 ‘which led to the murder and attempted murder of numerous people, and all the issues that accompanied it or branched out from it, as well as the individuals who participated or interfered in any manner’ — the examining magistrate did not resist his desire to speak about the rain, even though there was no need to mention it in the context of his court brief. At the end of the report, the magistrate, Adib al-Ashqar, asked for the death sentence for a long list of men, some of whom came with witnesses who stated that at the time of the incident the men were at a location far away from the town. Al-Ashqar, signatory to the incident’s sole remaining official document after the participants benefited from a general amnesty that relieved the judicial system of a matter whose events were of the utmost difficulty to reconstruct, repeatedly resorted to a somewhat sentimental style in his comments on ‘the breach in security for the sake of satisfying whims and ambitions’ and in his detailed description of an armed confrontation ‘on the steps of God’s altar’. These introductions were followed up with ratiocinations denoting a suppressed literary style belonging to the writer of the indictment who traced the start of the dispute back to ‘some forty odd years’ during which ‘the animosity buried deep in the breasts grew and intensified over time, waiting for the slightest spark that would set off a civil war and a frenzy of killing…’ Al-Ashqar miraculously escaped unharmed from an assassination attempt when a car on the Beirut highway passed by him and shots were fired at him, because of what was considered bias on his part against one of the parties.

The reporters circled the church, recording their initial impressions before approaching the door, only to find it locked. They looked right and left and then headed towards the shop. In that square, buckling under the hot summer sun, the only populated place was the shop.

‘Hello, Uncle.’

The shop owner stopped eating as soon as Eliyya came near. Okra was not his favourite dish, but if he were to object he’d end up with no food at all. His wife would not change her cooking no matter what. The arak helped. He already had the church key in his hand, having taken it out from the drawer the moment the taxi pulled up and Eliyya stepped out of it. He could tell beforehand which visitors were coming to pray and which were not.

‘Please lock the door when you’re finished and bring the key back to me. We worry about theft. A lot of strangers pass this way.’

Eliyya took the key and looked around the shop. He looked at the few items for sale. He opened his notebook and tried to sketch the place: the crime scene.

The shop owner refused to take any money for the chewing gum and the dusty package of cookies, despite Eliyya’s insistence. The donation was a good lead-in for conversation.

‘They repainted the church a while back. An emigrant in Nigeria subsidised the whole project. They completely refurbished it… Please come, join me for lunch.’ An invitation straight from his heart.

‘I’ll take a look around and come back.’

It was a church like any other church. Lots of statues and icons. A predominance of gold paint. New pews. An old church that resembled the nouveau riche. The men in the front pews and the women in the back.

He photographed everything.

More than a thousand bullets had been fired inside the walls of the church, people said.

Everything had been repaired.

Eliyya entered the sacristy. Many had taken cover there it seems… people on both sides. It was said that they didn’t fire a single bullet at each other. The sacristy had remained neutral…

Rays of the noon sun entered through the glass of the high round windows.

The sun shone, oblivious to what had happened here. It shone and its light came through the same round windows the day after the incident.

Eliyya sat in one of the pews at the back as if he were praying.

The townspeople did everything they could to wipe out the memory of the killings that had happened there. So there wouldn’t be anything left to suggest any bullets had been fired or any damage had been done, so no one could tell that all that blood had been shed there, inside the church.

They restored it to a normal village church whose walls reverberated with Syriac hymns and the whispers of old women as they knelt recounting their sins into the ears of a half-asleep priest trying to keep his head up.

Eliyya stood up. He couldn’t relax.

He went back to the shop.

‘It didn’t take you very long,’ the man said. Then he added, as if he had come to know exactly what this type of visitor was looking for, ‘They erased everything… except for two bullet holes no one besides me knows where to find.’

Eliyya smiled and asked him, ‘Do you mind if I take your picture?’

He stood up from his chair while he spoke, introducing himself. ‘I was born in Brazil and returned to Lebanon when I was ten years old, before the Second World War. My father was a peddler in the Amazon forest. He carried his wares on his back and sold relics from the holy cross and soil from Jerusalem to the local people. They were devout Christians in those lands, and the Indians were much more fanatic about their Christian faith than the whites. Most of the whites were lacking in morals…’

He laughed, revealing what remained of his teeth. As he went to stand in front of the door he continued, saying, ‘My father gave me the name Pedro like people over there. He had two wives — one in the countryside and one in São Paulo. I’m from the countryside wife, a Brazilian woman. He tore me away from her and brought me here…’ He burst out laughing once again.

‘One day he came from the city to the countryside with a parrot. I remember that parrot very well, before it died. He brought it to my mother and the parrot started calling my father’s other wife, as it was used to doing in São Paulo. “Margarita… Margarita… Ti amo…”’

Eliyya asked him to move to one side a little so his shop front would be in the picture. Eliyya called to a young man who was standing nearby, lighting a cigarette. He asked him to take a picture of him. The shopkeeper gave him a strange look and went on, even though no one was listening to him anymore. ‘My mother became suspicious of my father. She asked him who that Margarita was he was so in love with. He told her the parrot was senile. So without his knowledge, she followed him back to São Paulo, all the way to his second house, and there a battle broke out between the two wives…’

‘What did you see the day of the incident?’ Eliyya interrupted, but in a calm voice.

‘… I was little, and I don’t remember anything, but my mother told me how she grabbed Margarita by her hair and threw her to the ground…’

The mix-up between the two events made Eliyya smile.

The man began another inventory of news about Brazil that was as colourful as the parrot’s feathers. Eliyya raised his voice a little to express his displeasure, laughing about the deliberate misunderstanding.

‘The incident, here, what did you see? Where were you? I’m told you saw everything, is that true?’

The shopkeeper tried to gain some time. He stopped telling his story about Brazil and the parrot.

‘Come inside, please. It’s cooler inside the shop.’

He went back to his place behind the scales. He felt secure behind his barricade.

‘Saint Michael’s wing was hit by a 14-caliber bullet, and Saint Joseph got a bullet in his eye. Another bullet hit the prayer book, which saved the life of Father Antonios who was holding the thick book in his hands. The bishop’s staff was thrown to the floor and we only sent it to him two days later, when the bishop’s steward came looking for it. Whoever tells you the Eucharist holder was hit, you tell him he’s a liar. I saw it with my own eyes. It’s true that the confessional was riddled with bullets, and they say there was someone hiding in there who started firing in all directions…’

Eliyya was unconvinced.

The man jumped to his feet. ‘Come.’ He asked Eliyya to come inside.

‘Here, sit in my place.’

Eliyya hesitated.

‘Sit here on the chair.’

Eliyya sat obediently, crossing his arms.

‘I was sitting right here on that damned Sunday. What can you see?’

Eliyya looked outside. The church door and the middle section of the square. That was all.

‘Everyone said, “Oh God, help me!”’ the shopkeeper said.

‘Who was standing here in the shop?’ Eliyya asked suddenly.

‘Your father was here with another young man from your family…’

Eliyya interrupted him abruptly. ‘How did you know who I am?’

‘I’m more than seventy years old, my son…’

‘So…’

Eliyya was alarmed for a moment. It was as though there was an eye from above watching him and following him. Soon, however, he became aware of the presence of the taxi driver. He was asleep, stretched back in the driver’s seat, snoring under the shade of the eucalyptus tree. The discovery made Eliyya feel at ease.

‘The taxi driver must have told you…’

The shopkeeper continued without commenting, which confirmed Eliyya’s suspicion. ‘There was a photographer who approached your father and his friend and offered to take their picture. I remember that your father put a cigarette in his mouth to pose for the picture. It was the fashion in those days. Young men always posed for pictures with cigarettes dangling from their mouths. I’m not hiding anything. I’m telling you what I saw. But a few minutes later the bullets started to fly and so I hid behind the shop front and when I looked up the shop was empty…’

There are some stories you listen to and you can tell they’re missing something and that whoever is telling them knows more than he is letting on. Hand gestures and eye movements. The shopkeeper, born of a marriage-happy father and a Brazilian mother, loved to spice up his stories. That was part of his nature.

‘My son, there were people who were killed by their own relatives’ bullets…’ Then he added with a whisper, ‘or their friends’ bullets…’

Eliyya turned towards him, and so the man continued. ‘At any rate, don’t believe everything you hear.’

That was what everyone advised.

The shopkeeper finished eating the okra and rice and drank the last sips of the glass of arak on the table in front of him while Eliyya cast a last glance at the square.

On the way back, the taxi driver stayed silent, but he kept glancing up at Eliyya in his mirror every time he rounded a sharp bend or had to stop.

Chapter 8

The houses of the commoners, who were the vast majority, were small and poor, mostly consisting of one or two rooms and an outhouse. They were piled up on top of each other in cramped neighbourhoods, low, damp houses with adobe roofs that required flattening with a stone roller in the winter to prevent leaks and on which springtime grass sprouted up in the month of May.

At the turn of the twentieth century, one of the notables built a three-story house out of sandstone, which he was able to pay for, most probably, from money he earned when he first emigrated. The family, rather self-importantly, called it Al-Amaara (The Edifice). They had owned another spacious and imposing house before that which they called Al-Kubra, (The Grand). Built by one of their elders more than a century before, it had high arched ceilings, and in the 1940s the government could not find a more spacious accommodation for its head office.

In the family’s view, the great houses were not just a matter of chiselled stone, double and triple archways and arcades, and French Honeybee red tiled roofs that were added later on. That style was imitated by anyone who managed to amass a small fortune either through emigration or by smuggling hashish across the roads of the Beqaa Valley that led to the sea, or by those who were contracted by the post-Independence government to do public works. Rather, a great house meant a high, open door, a generous meal, and a willingness to put up with the commoners and their ignorance, rough appearances, naïve questions and endless exuberance, simple folk who were content to sit in the presence of those families, simply listening to what they said and watching the little things they did.

These houses were an unavoidable stop for literati or pilgrims who were sent to the East from Europe. If they worked for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, they would include in their report a special reference to them, or highlight them in literary accounts of their trip telling of the hospitality and generosity of the house’s family and how they used gold-plated forks and knives when they ate, a rarity in the East.

The owners of these great houses also had Ottoman titles, the most important of which was ‘Bey’ and the rarest, ‘Pasha’. They were granted these titles through a decree signed by Moulay Sultan Abdel Hamid and were required to meet with a minister from Istanbul to receive them. They were kept in a locked drawer along with property deeds and money, which was sometimes rumoured to have come from extortion payments or loan repayments. Some of these monies were later donated to the Maronite Charitable Endowment in a moment of weakness or out of gratitude for being healed of an incurable disease.

An oilpainting of the house’s patriarch and founder was prominently displayed in the main part of the house. He had tender features and was wearing a city suit, which looked more like a coastal city businessman’s suit than that of a notable. On either side of the big painting were photographs of women sporting stylish hats and playing tennis when the game had first been introduced into the country. Also hanging on the wall was the family tree which extended into a past so distant and glorious it was implausible, a family tree which some Maronite monk who was a friend of the family had worked tirelessly to construct and revise.

The great house also meant a vast tract of land and threshing floors for wheat and an olive press and a foreign nanny for the children. And sometimes, a small church where they celebrated mass on Sundays with friends and where they were buried. And wives, beautiful or otherwise, but always rich, from other notable families in Mount Lebanon that were no less important and wealthy. Naturally, it was only a matter of time before disagreements between the wives’ brothers cropped up, over how to divide up the inheritance in light of the great families’ determination to exclude daughters from inheriting in order to restrict ownership to males.

The visitors who frequented the house did not speak Arabic. It must have been the case, therefore, that one of the young men of the house worked as a translator at the French Consulate in Beirut where he made a wide circle of acquaintances. Or maybe the oldest son had started but not completed his studies in Ayntoura under Father Sarloutte of the Lazarean Order, who in his turn recommended him to the French High Commissioner for one of the deputy positions allotted to the mandate power in the newly established Parliament. Or possibly as Education Minister in a cabinet that didn’t last more than two months. And maybe his father had been appointed as head of a county at a time when Wasa Pasha, the Governor of Mount Lebanon, had a weakness for gifts and invitations to banquets graced with beautiful, flirtatious ladies.

The great families didn’t like to be too numerous. They would give derisive nicknames to cousins who held the family name and tried to make the nicknames stick, singling themselves out as the only pure and unadulterated holders of that name, as a way of proving their true nobility and God-given right to its sole ownership. If any relatives stood beside them to accept condolences for the loss of a member of the family, the esteemed member of the family would yell at them disapprovingly and tell these cousins — ones the general public didn’t recognise as family members — to back off and stay clear of the right side of the church door, which was only for ‘me, my brother, and my nephew’. He would say this in an accent so foreign to them they wondered where the elder had got it from, or thought perhaps he was putting on the accent to distinguish himself from them. It seemed their preference for small numbers and their desire to limit ownership and influence to only a few heirs made them hold back from having many children as well. And so these great houses were always under threat of extinction, as they say.

The symbol and luminary leader of the great house was forever memorialised in a sculpture of him riding a shiny bronze horse, by the famous sculptor Yusef Hwayyek. The day it was unveiled a select group of Lebanese poets and poet singers who hailed from the furthest reaches of the country were in attendance, and at the base of the statue an anonymous line of poetry was inscribed: You filled their hearts with so much fear… They thought the earth had sprouted men. The patriarch also appears in a huge oil painting that carries the signature of Daoud Qurm, the famous artist who did not leave a single church without adorning its saints in the most magnificent vestments inspired by the Italian Renaissance. In the painting, which hangs above the altar in Saint George’s Church, the patriarch brandishes his sword high, his eyes peeled to the horizon, in front of the church courtyard. Saint George also appears, riding on horseback with his spear held high.

The statue is not of a man dead and buried, for the corpse of the patriarch is still there inside the church, preserved without embalmment in a glass box. Yes, they all insist it was not embalmed. For more than a hundred years the line of visitors passing before his corpse has not stopped, and it was as though he never died. His name was at the top of the list in the census taken just after the Great War, even though he had died at least thirty years before that, and so he was the first of the living and the oldest of the dead. They appealed to him, asking for help and intercession every time they lost something dear to them, such as when a child lost the only coin in his pocket.

They distributed calendars with a picture of him in his name. Sometimes the picture showed him standing in audience with the Pope in Rome when the European Consuls, in collusion with the Maronite Patriarch who was afraid of him, as people asserted, consented to his exile. Another picture showed him wearing a vest embroidered with gold thread. They named the local football team after him as well as a number of organisations founded by emigrants to Mexico and Argentina. They constructed reliefs of his magnificent statue out of wood, steel and adobe and the artists depicted him in battle in the second half of the nineteenth century, corpses piling up around him. Amateurs started their drawings of him with his radiant face and his manly features. He was the subject of all their poems and they elegised him asking heaven to let the April moon shine down on him and on his men and guide them at night through their battles and help them to subdue their enemies. They called him ‘The Hero of Lebanon’, and he was virtuous, unsullied and prudish to the point that he forbade women to roll their sleeves up past their elbows.

After his death his nephews were given preferential treatment. There were three of them and the Turkish Administrative Authorities placated them with administrative positions. And just as the descendents of those great families feared, the first one didn’t have any children, which they assumed was due to his wife’s barrenness, and he died young. The second had a son who died in the prime of his youth from a disease they called ‘reeh al-sudaad’, the ‘cork wind’. His illness lasted for several days, and the people offered up sacrificial prayers for his recovery, imposing a fast on their livestock and bloodying their knees by crawling on them all the way to that little church on one of the hilltops where they prayed to the Virgin to intercede for him. His mother refused to allow him to be buried before her. She kept him at home with her in a tightly sealed coffin until, twenty years later, they carried her out of the house to be buried before him, as she had insisted.

The third nephew fathered a son from a second marriage just before he died, but they didn’t wait for the boy to grow up and instead chose a distant relative as their leader. Despite being a commoner and a cobbler by trade, he was possessed of great courage. Things began to change and there were people who competed for his position. Nevertheless, there always remained a number of small families who admired the descendents of the great families and beat the drums in celebration of their weddings or births, drums that had to be of a certain number and size depending on the occasion. They let out ululations when the heir of the great house passed one of the government exams and they congregated around the house if he got sick or had a fever. They hoisted black flags when one of them died, even if he was an aged invalid, and eulogised him as if death had struck him riding high up on his horse, exactly the way his great uncle sat there on his bronze saddle. They eulogised him saying:

O auburn mare, you with the beauty spots

Say not that your lord has passed away

Your lord has gone to Beirut

To bring you a pair of stirrups

With the change of regimes almost everyone around the great families parted company, especially since those who remained, who were blood relatives as they said — some for certain and some imaginary — woke up to themselves. They remembered that they were descended from the same grandfather, and the first thing they woke up to was their names. They realised all of a sudden that there were many of them and unfortunately they were divided up in support of this or that influential great family member. Suddenly they discovered that they could get one of them into parliament after the French mandate enacted an election law in two stages at first, and then by general election in an effort to introduce democracy in small doses to the countries of the East.

They were fever-stricken, even though a few years earlier the General Administration of Internal Affairs had asked them to come to the old government house, which they had built with unparalleled help out of their desire to turn their town into a centre for the Governorate, and not to forget anyone in their charge. They had answered the call in droves after they heard numerous rumours threatening that if they didn’t register their names they would no longer be Lebanese. They had declared their names the way they had inherited them, handed down from grandfathers to fathers and as the priest had written them in the church record books when they were christened or when they were married or when their hour came. One example was: ‘On the night of Thursday, the 14th of July, 1930, at 2:30, Butros Antonios Khattar passed away suddenly in his sleep, and received absolution by the hands of the priest Elias al-Mardini.’ But they now started insisting on writing their full names, Butros Antonios Khattar al-Rami, as if leaving out the family name had suddenly become an unforgivable sin against them and an infringement of their honour and an attempt to suppress a noble lineage they had just discovered.

They woke up to their names in the 1940s, specifically the mid-1940s, and so they went for a second time to the government palace, to the Court Magistrate, with a petition in hand requesting correction to what they said was mistakenly left out of the record of their names. The Magistrate got so sick and tired of them that he asked the court herald, who had only one eye, to go around the neighbourhood, stop at every intersection, and announce in a loud voice that name-change cases would only be considered once a week, on Tuesdays. They were familiar with the process, to the point that they didn’t need to hire a lawyer, because they could present the request and bring two witnesses and answer a few questions. The census clerk and the coffee vendor out in front of the government palace stood as witnesses for everyone. The Magistrate became furious, wondering aloud, right in front of his clerk, what had come upon them all of a sudden to wake up to family relations that for generations had been of little value except for dividing up lands and inheritance and all the bickering that went along with it.

The employees at the Department of Personal Records kept going back over and over the registration books, opening them so many times to correct names or add surnames or remove the names of the dead or of women who had married and moved to other towns or to register new births that the edges of the huge books became frayed and some of the pages were torn and had to be pasted back together with difficulty. The people’s very existence had become threatened, because a number of pages were nearly torn out or erased, nearly causing many names to be lost.

Nowadays they are able to quench their thirst for numbers — numbers of voters in their family, that is, because they can request a CD from the Ministry of Interior, something that has saved their rosters from dwindling away. This way they are able to get an exact count of their relatives according to how their names appear on the official ledger, and they regret that those of them who emigrated to faraway lands like South America and Australia didn’t bother to register their children, otherwise their numbers would be doubled. Likewise, they are able nowadays to surf the web and Google their family names, sometimes finding people with the same family name or the same first name in the Bahraini House of Notables or on the Moroccan national football team. Some youngsters who were electronics fanatics and web experts constructed websites for their families on the internet, like ‘Semaani.com’, for example, for which they also designed a family emblem with a sword, a book and the sceptre of their religious authority. They recorded on the website all the family births at home and abroad, as well as their marriages and deaths, and they also exchanged email addresses and posted news about the family notables and constantly reminded visitors of the luminaries among them — a historian, for example, who wrote about the eternalness of the Lebanese mountain and for whom General de Gaulle wrote an introduction to his collected works, or an artist who travelled to distant lands but made the scenery of his childhood and its colours the subject of his first and only paintings — all of this to make their families seem vast and rich and extended. They bragged that their family included everything from a highly reputed neurosurgeon in California to a judge running for mayor of Mexico City and a centre player for the Australian national rugby team.

Behind every family there was someone responsible for family reunions, a notable or rich man who began forging friendly relations in the capital with Monsieur Plafond, one of the aides to the French High Commissioner, or with one of the employees of the British delegation. He got promises of support from them and returned to the town at the end of the week in order to add to his family, which had just woken up to itself, as many well-known relatives as he could, along with neighbours who had earned the right to carry the family name, or the ones from small families who added their wives’ families to their own. And the family had its zaeem and its candidate for a seat in Parliament, who imitated the noble family’s descendents by seeking to build a Lebanese-style home, as they called it, and by making sure he didn’t take a wife from within the town.

When they woke up to their names and families like that, they assumed that they were eternal. This is why they were surprised by what a young historian who visited Istanbul at his own expense told them. He checked the Tabo Daftari, the Ottoman public records going back to the sixteenth century when they were released to the public by the Turkish Ministry of Culture, and found out that their ancestors carried simple names — the man’s name and his father’s name. Rizq bin Jirjis, or even simply, Ishaac bin Ibrahim. They didn’t care to hear what he had to say about the number of threshing floors they owned, or olive presses, cattle, fruit trees, or about the taxes their ancestors paid at times to the Wali of Damascus and at other times to the Wali of Tripoli, or how they had been hardy farmers who cultivated the rugged land, suffered persecution, and produced pure and pious men of religion, bishops and patriarchs who expounded on their beliefs and established them in rare writings and in numerous languages, monks who brought the first printing press to the East and founded in their town the first school in this mountain of knowledge and holiness. All of this did not elicit the slightest bit of interest. All that mattered was the shock of finding out that their names, the names of their families, which when arguments flared up they said they paid for in blood, did not even exist in those days and that perhaps they themselves had invented the families in the era of democratic pluralism.

The family was divided into branches, and each one of these they called a jibb, or a well. Each jibb had its characteristics, as for example the men of such-and-such jibb usually died of congenital heart failure, or those of this other jibb always over salted their food, and still others were known to be cowards who put on their pyjamas at sunset, or didn’t pay what they owed because their grandfather told them not to. They spun yarns about heroic deeds and every family had its tough guys, those with the frowns on their faces for no reason. Their fame and talk of their heroic deeds spread far and wide. Every one of them earned a title he bragged about. They started counting their ‘rifles’, in whispers, whereas before they had divided up into families they had had tough men among them who were not part of the big families’ lineage. They shared the memory of those men and held them up as examples, as in the case of Butros Touma, who had attacked the enemies carrying a cannon on his shoulder, or Al-Ghazaal and Al-Aaouri, who had both been shot high up in the mountains by Turkish soldiers after their own guns ran out of ammunition. And there was Sarkis Naoum who had supplied wheat free of charge during the Great Famine and the siege on Mount Lebanon during the Great War, and who had been shot in the back.

All of them stood to receive condolences whenever any member of their extensive family died, and relatives of theirs who strayed from them they called a communist or a mason. They couldn’t understand how anyone would disown his own family. Blood ties, after all, exerted obligatory pressure even on those who did not have much to offer. They hesitated over taking a wife from outside the family and some were wary of dangers the future might hold, so they rented or bought themselves houses close to where their relatives lived. They preferred to buy their daily needs and provisions from their cousins’ shops, even if they were a long distance from their homes. But if they happened upon members of other families — even the especially competitive and cut-throat ones — when they were in Beirut or anywhere outside their town, they always hastened to greet them wholeheartedly, offering their services with insistence. For the most part, they were sincere about the concern they showed for each other. They brought their familial divisions with them to Sydney, Caracas and Mexico, where they didn’t dare to resort to violence to settle accounts, but were content to hold meetings in which they backed each other up and offered aid to their relatives in the homeland, which did not extend beyond infusing the family coffers with dollars they were able to save up by the sweat of their brows. They dug up proverbs such as ‘He who takes off his clothes gets cold’ and ‘Blood is thicker than water.’ They brandished these proverbs in the face of those they felt were either hesitant or doubtful about their life’s journey, and they complained that none of the other families loved them. They felt they were being naïve, going out of their way for others without getting anything in return except perhaps some ingratitude.

There were some eloquent spokesmen among them who achieved prominence. They were half-educated and pretended to know a lot about the past and to have read many books. They fabricated an ancient oral history of their families, one that nobody but them exchanged and transmitted. It confirmed the precedence of their presence here and the seniority of their influence over this piece of land and their ownership of it, as if they never migrated to it from any other place in the world. If they relented on this idea, it was only to accept being descended from a French family that had come to the East with the Crusades, which was a history that attributed to their ancestors heroic deeds from a past in which they allied themselves with the Shahabi princes, expelled the Jacobites from the environs of their town, or rang the church bells in Muslim villages that had never heard such bells before. Some of them also discovered that their ancestors were the founders of the town, which they had been cheated out of in the eighteenth century and felt it was high time they got it back in the middle of the twentieth century.

One of their judges, who had been a man of letters, undertook the task of recording for them in a collection of books the ancestry and genealogy which they had spun for themselves. In everything he wrote he was careful not to slight anyone’s ancestry, for if something like that were to happen, it would have dire consequences. So he attributed to every family and every jibb only the best qualities that they themselves desired. He recounted their deeds the way they would want them to be recounted; in other words, he did not mention anything humiliating or any act of betrayal on their part, but rather gave a complete and perfectly connected history of superiority and courage.

When it came to other families, they discovered or recalled their endless vices, such as their extreme stinginess or the ease with which their votes could be bought during elections, or how difficult they were as neighbours especially in the orchards, never hesitating to encroach upon other people’s property. They tilled and planted other people’s land and ate the harvest if no one stopped them. Or they were mindful of the behaviour of the women of those competing families, such as how easy and fickle-hearted they were around men. They accused their competitors of not being indigenous to the town and claimed that any review of their actions in the distant or recent past was the best proof of their dubious ancestry. Add to that all the backstabbing and scheming and cowardice, which they attributed to the others. They detailed all of that in lengthy descriptions, which they said revealed the crimes of their enemies, starting with the theft of cattle and persecution of the people of the neighbouring farms at the height of the horrors of WWI and continuing on to assassinations they planned out and then artfully blamed on others. On the other hand, they attributed to themselves and their relatives great bravery and the ability to face up to any challenge, and they recounted their dignitaries’ virtues, such as generosity and compassion for the poor and the farmers — asking about the harvest and wondering how the cows, which they knew by name, were faring — and political acumen and awareness of the constants and the variables in the positions of the great powers.

Their women were even more severe than the men when it came to retaliating. One woman in particular gained a reputation for this, the one who told her children, ‘Any one of you who hesitates to avenge his brother will be cut off from his father’s inheritance.’ And there was that other woman. After her husband was shot down by soldiers, she covered him with a white sheet as she called out to his cousins not to pay any attention and just go on fighting.

It was quite bewildering to the members of the small families, who, despite having sufficient numbers, did not have the good fortune of having a notable family member who could reunite them and put together a noble family ancestry for them. Eventually they were content and felt compensated for their frustration by participating in the special fund set aside for burial expenses or aid to the sick and the poor among them. They divided up their loyalty between the big families causing themselves to be called lafeef, the hangers-on, by some and urra, the stray sheep that joined the herd, by others. They went overboard with their loyalty and jumped at the chance to be of service, composing jingles at election time and sticking their heads out of car windows to make victory signs, going out in groups into the villages and surrounding farms, securing votes for their supporters and giving dirty looks to backers of their opponents. They sent out delegates to all the villages and into the voting precincts, both the men’s and the women’s precincts. They roamed about the towns day and night for weeks before Election Day, and refused to go behind the curtain to cast their votes, insisting instead on casting their ballots openly, thereby proving to their leaders that their allegiance was as pure as white milk.

Fearing what might happen if the two parties came too close to each other, the Governor of North Lebanon asked each party to provide a schedule of their visits to make sure they didn’t run into each other and start shooting. Once, however, the Governor neglected to do so, or he purposely didn’t ask for their schedules for political reasons, as it was said. He let both parties attend the same service for the one-year anniversary of the death of the bishop’s brother in one of those towns at the base of the mountain where they ended up confronting each other and drowning in a river of blood. The resentments that they had been dragging around with them for decades ended in an all-out war, set ablaze as they dug trenches and amassed cannons and heavy artillery, and which left no innocent person safe from kidnapping and no passer-by safe from being shot. And if at some point the state was able to dispatch troops to separate the fighters and impose security, even if only for a few months, the only effect was to bring the war off the streets and back into their hearts where it waited for the opportunity to flare up again.

Chapter 9

At exactly five o’clock, Haifa Abu Draa let out a loud scream. A scream that pierced like a knife.

I was at home, at my parents’ house. I’ve never moved out of their house, and I never will til the day I die. I never got married. There were three of us girls. We were good friends to each other in our youth. Every day we went out, walking together. We held hands and set out in the evening for a stroll along the river road. We wore our best clothes and did everything we could to attract the boys. If one of the boys we were trying to interest was forward with us, we turned red with embarrassment and turned our faces in the other direction. We turned red with embarrassment and turned our faces away so much that all three of us ended up without husbands.

When Haifa Abu Draa screamed, I was at home because I didn’t like Sundays. I don’t know what other people like about Sundays. I always spent them at home, like any other day. I didn’t like to assign them any special importance, except for going to church. I went to church and came back home to do the laundry, wash the dishes and quarrel with my mother just like every other day of the week. We raised our voices, having a good time together, arguing over everything. I always liked housework, ever since I was a small child. I liked cleaning and tidying up and felt comfortable bickering with my mother.

I didn’t like Haifa Abu Draa’s scream, and neither did my mother. She was sitting, my mother that is, embroidering a comforter, facing me on the couch. She looked at me and I looked back at her.

We were used to Haifa’s noise. If the curses and sounds of struggle stopped coming to us from her direction, we knew she’d gone to Tripoli to do her shopping. An early morning lull.

This time her scream was deep, coming from the depths of her soul. I accidentally burned my brother’s shirt before I realised it and set the iron aside to make the sign of the cross. I always put my house clothes back on when I returned from church on Sunday. Who did I have to dress up for? I had all the dresses I needed, but who would I wear them for?

My mother went to the window. We didn’t hear a peep after Haifa’s scream. Nothing. A deep silence engulfed the whole neighbourhood. It was as if the news, as if whatever had caused Haifa to scream that way, was travelling in whispers, like bad news usually did with us, moving from one quarter to another, one door to another, and especially from one woman to another, so that if it struck one of them, she screamed, as if by electric shock.

Haifa Abu Draa had been struck. I didn’t know who had dared tell her the news. Her brother was an only boy among five sisters. How could anyone possibly have told her? It seems some woman came to her door and told her that her brother had been wounded. Haifa screamed once and fainted. She knew right away he was dead. The relaying of bad news always began lightly, to minimise the blow. If they said that so-and-so had been taken to the hospital, it meant he was dead as a doornail. The real news was written all over the bearer’s face, and Haifa was very good at reading faces.

The news struck Haifa and then finished its tour, hitting in every direction. It reached us a few minutes later with my little sister who had been on her way to the store to buy goat’s milk yogurt, which was just coming into season at that time. She turned back. She told us she didn’t know why she turned back. Something in the air made her do it, something in people’s eyes told her ‘Go back home, little girl.’ She came in, quite frightened, and looked at us, expecting us to already have heard the news. She almost stumbled and fell flat on the floor. She was as yellow as saffron and looking around as if something were trying to hunt her down. We didn’t get anything out of her because she couldn’t speak. Her tongue in a knot, she flung herself onto the couch. She hadn’t heard anything and hadn’t seen anything.

The mute knew more than her; he knew everything. He came in behind her. He was our neighbour and one of my mother’s distant relatives. He was barefoot as usual. Whenever he crossed our doorstep, the smell of reeds and the river came in with him. He liked to fish for eels and weave baskets. He had words written on his face as he headed towards my mother.

Every day when she was finished her with housework, my mother sat with him. He would leave his basket weaving and come to her. They would drink coffee together. He was completely deaf and dumb and she was the only person who understood his language and communicated with him. They were a beautiful sight. He had taught her his language. A language he had completely made up himself. He knew how to characterise so-and-so as stingy or so-and-so as the one with glasses or such-and-such a woman as one who lies all the time. Whenever he had a good catch, he brought us a part of it.

He came in, eyes shining. He began waving his hands around rapidly, all excited, his eyes flitting around, tracing out signs in the air — sometimes as if he were turning the steering wheel of a car and other times imitating the sound of gunfire in all directions with his mouth. He was telling my mother about a long chain of events. My youngest sister was still sprawled on the couch, completely powerless. The mute tilted his head to one side, stuck out his tongue and rolled his eyes, possibly alluding to Haifa Abu Draa who had screamed and passed out.

He went to the window, pointing right and left at the various houses in the quarter, waving his fist in the direction of the mountain, in the direction of Burj al-Hawa. I understood later on that he was threatening that town, was angry at it the way one man gets mad at another man for insulting him. My mother followed his story, understanding him, widening her eyes and nearly choking with fright. She had to cover her mouth to stop herself from screaming. I couldn’t bear to see my mother that way any longer. ‘Mum! What’s he saying?’ I shouted at the top of my lungs. ‘Tell us!’

My little sister also had her hand over her mouth. My mother hesitated, not knowing where to begin. She’d gone mute, too. I looked over at the mute hoping I could read something on his face. He was standing there smiling. That’s the way he was, from the very first time he set foot in our house. Whenever he succeeded in getting his message across, he smiled.

Then we started to hear some commotion. An obscure rumble. Then suddenly we heard a car horn, beeping without pause, coming from a car speeding down to the city. The people of the quarter were coming out of their houses, wanting to find out what was going on. The square filled up with people crossing the street. Women propped their hands on their hips as if they were no longer able to hold their bodies up on those narrow street corners, or they stood with their arms crossed over their chests, expecting the worst. They were waiting to hear the names of the dead, and they’d heard there were many. I didn’t dare think about anyone anymore. Were there any of our men who had not gone up to Burj al-Hawa?

‘Muntaha!’ Kamileh called to me from the balcony.

I ran to her, still wearing my house clothes.

‘Yusef is gone!’

That moment, every woman with a husband who had gone up to Burj al-Hawa assumed he was now dead.

‘Don’t leave me, Muntaha!’

Kamileh’s mother hadn’t arrived yet. Her mother’s house was far away, down near the riverbank. How could I leave her? I’d been her neighbour ever since Yusef al-Kfoury brought her to our quarter. Whenever anyone was looking for Kamileh, they knew they could find her at Muntaha’s. We would sit in the corner over there, in the shade of the grapevine. We would sit on the bench and talk. We wouldn’t spare anyone from our sharp tongues. She had a bitter tongue, that Kamileh. She didn’t want to hurt anybody, but she did want to ward off evil from us.

I went inside her house and found her sitting on the floor. I tried to calm her down and take the broom from her hands. It seemed that when Kamileh heard the screams and the news reached her, she was in the middle of sweeping away the leaves and flower petals that had littered the balcony as usual. Her legs buckled under her and she sat down on the floor with the broom still in her hand. She was sitting there on the floor, her legs stretched out in front of her, holding onto the broomstick and lifting it up high. Like a flag.

‘Don’t worry. Your husband doesn’t like trouble. People love him…’

But she wasn’t listening. I couldn’t bear the sight of her with that broom.

‘Give me that broom! Calm down!’

She wouldn’t release her grip. She kept banging the broom against the floor, methodically, one thud after another, until screams came from the direction of the main road, indicating that the dead and wounded had arrived. Kamileh was forced to stand up and go out into the streets with everyone else.

There was an armoured police car parked in the square with a security guard watching the crowd from its turret. The guard had a handlebar moustache, just like the odd-looking king of spades in a deck of cards. He examined his surroundings, completely baffled. He looked comical, but he was either afraid or stunned by us and our dead, I don’t know which.

We asked a lot of people. Kamileh begged people she knew and people she didn’t know to tell her what happened.

‘Did you see my husband? Yusef al-Kfoury?’

No one answered. No one knew anything. And those who had heard something didn’t dare tell. She screamed at them to answer. They avoided her.

At around five-thirty we heard a rumbling sound coming our way.

The dead had arrived.

A small truck drove through the crowd. The bodies were piled up on top of each other.

Waves of people crowded around the truck, and a man standing on the truck bed shouted at them to back away because not all of them were dead. ‘Let the truck get to the city hospital quickly. Maybe we can save one of them.’

We got as close as we could. Kamileh pushed her way through with me right behind her, trying to find our way to the truck. A number of people were able to grab hold of the protective metal bars on both sides of the truck bed and they walked along with the truck as it dragged them behind it. The dead had been piled up with their heads to the inside of the truck bed. A white sheet had been thrown over them, but their legs were still visible.

The truck passed through and the people weren’t able to stop it. The driver didn’t take his hand off the horn as he tried to get through and the man standing in the bed of the truck begged the people to get out of the way. Despite being so close to the bodies, no one dared lift the white sheet from their heads.

Kamileh suddenly stopped following the truck, turned around to me and asked me to go home with her.

‘Just walk with me and don’t ask anything.’

I went with her. I wanted to go to my house just for one minute to check on my family, but she wouldn’t let me go. I said to myself that Kamileh had gone crazy. She walked ahead of me at a fast pace. ‘Muntaha! Follow me!’ she was saying.

She must have said it twenty times as I walked behind her.

We reached her house, but she couldn’t find her key. In all the commotion, she had lost it. We got the neighbour’s son and lifted him up to the window. He got in. He was small and easy to lift. He was able to push his head through first, then his body. Before he was able to get to the door and open it for us from inside — that is, go through the living room and get to the front door — in those few seconds Kamileh pounded on the door at least a hundred times. I swear to God, a hundred times or more. She pounded so hard her knuckles started to bleed.

‘Where are we going, Kamileh?’

‘Follow me, Muntaha!’

That was all she knew how to say.

She headed towards the bedroom and pulled out one of the cupboard drawers. The edge of the drawer landed on her foot so she screamed. She put the drawer on the floor and sat down beside it. It was full of men’s socks. It was her husband’s sock drawer. I didn’t know that a man could own so many pairs of socks. I was comparing it with my father’s and brother’s, with their three or four pairs of socks, no more. We used to wash their socks and darn them when they got torn with the help of a light bulb. We would stuff the light bulb inside the sock which, with the right kind of thread, made it easier to darn.

Kamileh sat on the floor and started searching the drawer. She was tossing the socks right and left, as if playing some sort of colour game.

‘Navy, navy, navy…’ she said.

She’d grab one pair of socks, and unsure of its colour, hold it up to the light coming from the window. Then she’d ask some of the people around (some neighbours had followed us in).

‘Is this navy or black?’

How could we answer? We all thought she’d gone crazy. More neighbours came into the house. I grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her to make her speak. She did.

‘He’s gone, Muntaha. He’s gone!’

‘Where did he go, Kamileh?’ I asked, trying to lighten the atmosphere. She stopped talking. ‘OK, how do you know he’s gone?’ I asked.

‘I saw his feet in the truck.’

I shook her and then I hit her. I slapped her on the face to snap her out of it.

‘OK, you saw his feet. What does that mean?’

‘I saw his socks. Navy with white stripes. I know his socks, every one. Who washes them? I do. Who pairs them together? I do. Who mixes brown with beige? I do. And now, where are the navy ones? Bring me the navy socks and I’ll shut up. Today he put on the navy socks and went to Burj al-Hawa, Muntahaaaaaa!’

Her mother arrived and shouted at her to stand up. She shouted at her like a mother does, as if Kamileh had reverted to being a child again. She picked up the socks from the floor and put the drawer back in the closet. She just couldn’t bear to see her daughter become a spectacle in front of everyone. She asked the neighbours to leave. Then we persuaded Kamileh not to give up, maybe she was mistaken.

‘No one knows anything. They’re saying the bodies in the truck are strangers.’

‘Strangers?’ she mocked us. ‘We don’t kill strangers. We only kill our cousins.’

‘There are many rumours. Don’t believe them, Kamileh. At first they said our neighbour Abu Mansur was killed, but half an hour later he came back home safe and sound. Don’t believe what you hear…’

‘I don’t believe what I hear. Nobody told me Yusef is dead. I know it…’

We went back out to look for him again, hoping he was only wounded. Kamileh and her mother and I. Three women. The sun was going down. Who would take us to Tripoli?

‘No one but Hamid al-Semaani can help you,’ we were told.

We went to Hamid al-Semaani. We begged him to take us in his car. He had a blue Chevrolet of which he was very proud, and always very protective. We begged him. Kamileh’s appearance must have got to him. Her eyes were out of focus and one could read death on her face. He and his wife whispered to each other before he agreed to take us. His children were scared, little children who kept poking their heads around the door from the room inside. True, he was a member of our family, but he acted like he was a stranger. His wife was a stranger, from Al-Mazraa.

I remember him making the sign of the cross before we took off. On our way, we saw the army entering the town. Kamileh was silent. She had a lost look in her eyes.

We went down into the city. We checked all the hospitals. We met others searching, just like us. They sent us from one hospital to another until we found him. We found him. Dead. He didn’t have his identity card on him, but they told us some other people who were also searching for missing family members had recognised him. They had written his name on a piece of paper and placed it in his jacket pocket where he liked to put a handkerchief that matched his tie, or a sprig of Arabian jasmine, when he went out to those parties where the wine made everyone’s heads spin.

Yusef al-Kfoury was a handsome man. He had blue eyes. Kamileh’s two sisters had fallen in love with him, but he only had eyes for Kamileh. Kamileh was the youngest of her sisters, but the most sought after by the young men. She hadn’t wanted him. She told me that a hundred times. Her sisters convinced her to marry him in order to get rid of her, because if she didn’t get married, they’d never find husbands. And now there he was, laid out in a room in the basement of the hospital. He was covered with a white sheet except for his head and shoulders. He looked like someone lying on his back, asleep.

We stood there before him and the first move Kamileh made was to lift the sheet from his feet. Then she looked at me and said, ‘Do you believe me now, Miss Muntaha?’

I didn’t understand what she meant until I saw her go approach him and start removing his socks. When I saw her holding the socks and waving them in the air like some kind of war booty, I burst out laughing.

‘You believe me now?’

I believed her.

She repeated the question. She wanted me to admit it.

‘I believe you, Kamileh. I swear to God.’

The best I could do was keep her quiet, hold her, and prevent her from talking as much as possible.

Getting him out of the hospital was not an easy task. Kamileh insisted we take him with us. They didn’t have an ambulance to transport him.

‘I want to know who else was killed with him.’

‘We don’t know yet.’

‘Tell me!’

‘There were fifty killed.’

I exaggerated how many out of a sudden feeling that a large number might make her feel better.

‘I want to take him with me, right now!’

We screamed at them. We three women exploded. Hamid al-Semaani was trying to negotiate with the nurses. We didn’t get anywhere. A doctor who I thought might be the owner of the hospital came through the door and told us, with a dry look on his face and in the matter-of-fact tone of someone who’d had a long experience of dealing with dead people, ‘You want him? Take him.’

As well as a nonchalance towards death, or at least to seeming accustomed to it, his voice also carried some contempt for us.

He remembered something. ‘But I need a man to sign a release. I will not take responsibility for letting any body out of the hospital before I get permission from the examining magistrate. If I don’t, the hospital and I will both be fined.’

Hamid al-Semaani volunteered to sign the release papers.

We loaded Yusef al-Kfoury into the car. We put his head on Kamileh’s chest and his legs on my lap. Kamileh’s mother sat in the front seat next to Hamid. As the car slowly proceeded, Kamileh sang to him. The back seat got covered with blood, but Hamid al-Semaani didn’t care. He was all choked up with grief but wasn’t crying. My dress got soiled also, but it was my everyday dress. Kamileh hadn’t given me a chance to change my clothes.

Kamileh sang to him the whole way. She was calm. She held his head tight against her chest. I don’t know what made her sing that old Baghdadi mawwaal:

Ahmad Mohammed Ali Pasha wanted my demise

And the day it was a Friday

And everyone was there on time

They sat me on a camel, high very high

The executioner steered it and led the way…

Kamileh still sings to herself to this day. My window is close to her bedroom window. Every night she sings. Baghdadi mawwaals. I fall asleep to the sound of her voice. She has a tender voice that isn’t anything like her.

That night, though, we didn’t sleep. No one slept. We stayed in our day clothes. I didn’t leave her. We tried to feed her, but she didn’t eat. In the morning, they moved all the dead to the church courtyard. I don’t know who came up with this idea. A mass funeral. The Patriarch sent two bishops. As people say, the more numerous the dead, the less death has an impact.

Kamileh kept saying to me, ‘Don’t leave me, Muntaha.’

We went to the church courtyard. They agreed to leave the dead there in the courtyard throughout the day on Monday, until the time of the funeral.

They brought beds for them from the nearby houses. I wasn’t able to go home even for a second to change my clothes.

‘There’s blood all over my dress, Kamileh. I’m going home to change.’

‘Don’t leave me, Muntaha.’

I felt that if I left her, she would die, too. She held onto me as if drugged. We propped her up so she could walk, one woman on each side of her. She kept repeating the same question a thousand times. I handed her over to her mother for fifteen minutes and hurried home to change my dress. When I came back I found her asking him, asking her husband, ‘Why did you go up to Burj al-Hawa?’

She kept on repeating that in a monotonous, tired voice, like a tape recording. From time to time she would suddenly gather enough strength to raise her tone. ‘Why did you go up to Burj al-Hawa?’

Then she would divide the question up, word by word.

‘Why — did — you — go — to — Burj al-Hawa?’

It was as if she was insisting on getting an answer right then and there. For more than a quarter of an hour she kept posing this divided up question.

Then she switched to a run-down of blame, in an endearing tone:

‘You never go to your relatives’ funerals in the church here. What gave you this sudden desire to go up to Burj al-Hawa?’

She quietened down, and I forced her to drink some water at least. She refused to open her mouth like children do when they don’t want to take bitter medicine. She would drink, but then the water would drip onto her neck and her clothes. She would take two sips and then start asking again. The question was always directed at him. A difficult question: ‘Why did they kill you?’

She repeated that, demanding an answer from him. Insisting. That’s how we spent the whole day.

Kamileh was not the only one blabbering over a husband’s head. When she stopped talking for a little while to regain some strength I noticed all the other people blabbering over the heads of their dead loved ones.

Haifa Abu Draa lost her voice. She and her sisters and their daughters huddled together over their brother, the only male. Haifa flailed her arms instead of speaking.

The women mourners went from bed to bed. We women are frightened when left alone with the dead, so we start talking and don’t know how to stop. The men kill each other and we do the crying.

It was getting late.

The sun was strong. I was praying for God to hurry the priests through the burial. A young man stood in the belfry, counting the dead in the square in a loud voice. He would count and repeat as he pointed to each one of them, and every time he reached ten, the wailing reached a fever pitch. Someone shouted to him to come down out of deference for the people, but he refused and started tolling the bell in sorrow. He held the clapper with his hand and banged the side of the bell with it. Three times, and then he would stop.

I don’t know how I got distracted from Kamileh, but someone, a person I don’t want to name, came over to her and whispered something about Fuad al-Rami and his brother Boutros. She screamed as if a snake had bitten her. Names were being thrown around, names of those who would have to answer for the blood of the dead, even before they were buried.

At around three o’clock, as the time for the funeral approached and the searing sun beat down on us, her mother bent over her and said to her, ‘Pass under the coffin.’

A competent woman her mother was, well-versed in tradition.

Kamileh didn’t appear to have heard, so I tugged on her sleeve to snap her out of it. I felt she didn’t understand what was being said to her, so I repeated for her. ‘After they put the incense they will lift the coffin. Make sure you pass under it, understand?’

It was almost time.

‘Why should I go under the coffin?’

Her mother chimed in again, ‘My daughter, when a woman’s husband dies, if she’s pregnant…’

Kamileh interrupted her sharply, as if she woke up. ‘… and how could I be pregnant, Mother?’

We didn’t say anything. We didn’t want to hurt her more than that. We were also afraid she would cause a scene if she started raising her voice. But her mother didn’t back down. She was stubborn like her, like all the members of the Franji family. She waited until they did the incense so she could go back to her.

‘Do what I told you, you hear?’

She felt it was better to make the decision herself rather than leaving it to her daughter.

‘I’m not pregnant, I’m not pregnant, I’m not pregnant…’

She started shouting angrily. She pounded on her belly as she used to do when she would lose hope of ever having children. The women standing around the dead next to us began to raise their heads to look at us. I covered her mouth with my hand. Then I whispered to her again, pleading with her, ‘Go under it anyway, Kamileh, my darling. We can always say later if you’re not pregnant that you made a mistake…’

She looked at me inquisitively. I felt she was hesitating a little. Then she looked into my eyes and said in the kind of tone a person uses when putting up with other people’s stupidity, ‘My darling, my soul, my eyes… Muntaha… I told you all, I’m not pregnant.’

‘And what if you are pregnant, then what?’

She almost started laughing.

The time to lift the body drew near. The women emptied out what wailing they still had left in them. That strange woman passed by us. No one knew where she had come from, how she got to us, or where she went after completing her mission.

I saw a woman I’d never seen in our quarter before. She was tall and fair-skinned. She moved from one bed to another, sat down next to the dead, fixing their ties, brushing the stray hair from their foreheads or wiping off some blood or dirt. She would look at each face a little and then move on to the next.

Kamileh threw herself onto her husband and lost consciousness for the second time. We had to carry her into the church.

Chapter 10

We used to enjoy getting mad at each other. It was how we tested the warmth of our friendships and the true meaning of those family ties we were always boasting about. At the slightest derisive remark some tattletale whispered to us about one of our buddies we instantly responded with anger, and the next day we would turn our faces away from him and refrain from saluting him if we chanced upon him in the streets. Those were the challenges of early manhood; our insistence on ignoring each other did not last long in the light of the unspoken agreement that there should be no disputes between cousins, and we were all related after all, as some of the ‘peacemakers’ loved to repeat. In reality, we got fed up with each other from time to time, got bored hanging around with each other for hours on end in the squares and alleys as we tried to stay away from our cramped houses, especially when our mothers were busy cleaning and mopping and had kicked us out. We never let an opportunity to argue and get angry at each other slip by, plunging into it headlong for the most trivial excuse.

That is until we heard about al-muqaata’a al-hayaatiyyah, being ‘shunned for life’. This phrase came to us just like that, ready-made, a concept in itself. It was pronounced plainly and emphatically. And what it meant was, if one of the members of the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party disobeyed the party orders or deviated from what was deemed proper and virtuous behaviour, then the other members would not talk to him until the day he died. That also applied to his brothers if he had any. The party members obeyed all the instructions of their leadership, which was composed of an amid (chief), a namous (secretary), and a qayyim ala al-idhaa’a (spokesperson) and other positions with equally strange names.

I remember how the possibility of that kind of antagonism was particularly worrying to us because of its finality, but it also made the party more attractive to us, especially because of the pleasure those adherents to its strict doctrine took in recounting their stories in front of us. They told us how they had assassinated King Abdullah of Jordan for betraying the Palestinian cause, and about their retaliation for the execution of the party’s founder Antoun Saadeh under the cover of darkness, which was to assassinate Lebanese Prime Minister Riad al-Sulh. It had been carried out by a man from the Al-Deek family who said to the prime minister before shooting him, ‘Take this, a gift from al-Zaeem.’ The party members, young and old alike, always insisted on using the first person plural, saying things like, ‘When we killed Adnan al-Malki in Syria…’ In that way they transformed the assassinations into collective acts of heroism which even those who weren’t yet born at the time could boast about.

They taught us how to draw their hurricane emblem on the walls using pieces of charcoal or chalk, and they would interrupt this lesson whenever they spotted one of their comrades passing through the neighbourhood. They would raise their right arm and thrust it forward, open-handed in a military salute while barking out the phrase ‘Long live Syria!’, to which the comrade passing by responded in kind. They were always repeating pretentious words and phrases for our benefit, such as ‘You Are the Sons of Life’ or ‘Integrity’ and expressions like ‘Truth, Goodness, and Beauty’. We used to marvel at how our friends in the quarter reacted to hearing such expressions with eyes brimming with admiration for their meanings. We, on the other hand, had difficulty appreciating them because they reminded us of phrases out of our catechism books or the tiresome and incomprehensible epistles of Saint Paul.

When the Rami family joined ranks with Nasser’s Revolution and the United Arab Republic, and when the Semaani family supported President Camille Chamoun’s alliance with the Americans, the supporters of the Fertile Crescent — their ultimate objective, with Cyprus as its star — got lost in the shuffle. Our friends in the quarter, the few that we had, couldn’t decide which way to go and so the ‘weaklings’ among them yielded to their families; one could say that those whose family’s position was in agreement with their party’s position were the lucky ones. But it so happened that two or three members of the Rami family stubbornly broke away from their family, and one of them, people say, one and only one of them, took up arms with the anti-revolutionary forces, but at a front a long distance from the village.

The communists were further from our own instincts for vengeance and spite, which might explain why they remained a small minority of mature and polite adherents. They, too, had their obscure expressions which they spouted off after reading pamphlets by Stalin that had been hurriedly translated into Arabic and handed out to them for free, and which spoke about dialectics and materialism. Their emblem was less geometrical and more realistic than that of the Syrian Socialists, even though we rarely saw a sickle due to the scarcity of wheat in our region. And we never encountered a hammer of that size, except for the one the only blacksmith in town used to strike iron when it was red hot. One of their few accomplishments was their effort to raise a petition against the nuclear bomb, and one of the things they bequeathed to us was the name ‘Vladimir’, the first name of the leader of the October Revolution, which one of those internationalists gave to his son. Vladimir, at least, was less of a burden than Adolf, the first name of the leader of the Third Reich, which was given by one of the few adherents of Nazism to his oldest son, and is equally as strange as Daladier, the prime minister of France who signed the Munich Accord.

The new car, straight from the dealership. We knew it by the smell of its leather seats. It had to be driven carefully through the narrow, winding roads of the quarter and pulled right up to the Church of Our Lady, kissing the bumper against the wall. There it was under the protection of the Virgin Mary, and a turquoise amulet hung from the rearview mirror, the horse’s bead itself or the horseshoe, it didn’t matter which one.

At the start of the 1950s, the car was added to the list of possessions a man simply did not lend out, like his wife or his rifle, and there was mechanical justification for a man insisting on being the sole driver of his car, since changing hands would increase the risk of it breaking down. Weapons were decorations, signs of manhood, but an American car — a Chevrolet or a DeSoto — decked out with what looked like two bird wings, and especially if it was a convertible with only two doors, had a fine wood inlay dash, a shiny chrome grill and coloured seats, well that topped the list of alluring essentials and sometimes topped a groom’s list of necessary possessions right along with a house to live in and a trade, as they put it, referring to the various common occupations such as carpentry or tailoring. And the owner of a new car never refused a photographer’s offer to take a picture of him behind the steering wheel or standing beside it with his hand on the door, by himself or surrounded by friends who would be certain to let him stand front and centre making it clear who the owner of the shiny new DeSoto was.

Pedestrians had to be cautious of passing automobiles. Our mothers made us promise we would look both ways, right and left, before crossing the roads, and there were some local wise men who feared the whole notion of mechanical things and warned drivers to be highly cognisant of the fact that what they held in their hands was ‘a motor’ — a machine that, were it to get loose, could not be restrained.

Writing things on the rear window became a very popular thing to do, but only on the public transportation vehicles that transported passengers for a fee and whose drivers did not shy away from overloading and would pick up riders from the streets and cram them in to his left, leaving the door half open and the rider hanging half-way out the door. There was one driver who worked out an ingenious method for preventing passengers from vomiting or getting dizzy, which was to give those passengers a rock to hold onto and tell them to concentrate on it the whole way and not to let it drop. The recipe was successful and helped the driver gain a good reputation, so he was preferred over the others.

As acts of defiance and the growing desire to take revenge became more and more widespread, the market for American cars gave way to the German Mercedes. In fact, it was tempting to say that they found in German cars a kind of toughness and durability they had missed in the American cars, maybe, but which they had also begun to lose in their private lives as well, with all the deaths around them. The truth is the praise they used to and continue to heap onto German cars and which they extended particularly to the BMW — and in another context, more closely related to killing and its tools, to the legendary Colt-12 revolver — had everything to do with their toughness and long-lasting durability. On that note they went around saying things like, ‘A Mercedes truck, if you take good care of it, will outlive a human being.’ Mixed in with all of that praise for mechanics was also a general fascination with the German nation for having confronted the whole world by itself in WWII, which was a reason enough for pride, despite its eventual loss.

It can be said that the townspeople were unanimous in their adoration of Mercedes cars. They had sayings about them that recalled the language of war they were all accustomed to, things like, ‘If you hit a Mercedes on the head, it will keep on going,’ or ‘If it were riddled with bullets while in flight, it would take three years to fall apart,’ and to that end there were metaphors which imbued steel with human qualities. And those among them who remained loyal to Mercedes were devastated when they discovered two or three decades later that fibreglass had begun to take the place of resistant steel and Mercedes with its famous triangular symbol had begun to ‘soften’ as it succumbed to the logic of consumerism.

‘Jirjis, you have to get up and bathe. Your wife is heating water for you because your brother Antonius is returning from Brazil in two days…’

Jirjis hesitated a bit then asked in all seriousness, ‘And what if he doesn’t come back?’

The anecdote about the man who refused to risk pouring water over his body reminded one of the extent of people’s fear of water. Perhaps the man knew there was a possibility his brother would be delayed in his voyage back to the homeland due to the fact that sailing on water was at least as risky as bathing in it. And swimming was a derivative of sailing the sea, something we never mastered, as we saw ourselves as land people, even though we lived only two kilometres from the Mediterranean Sea.

Bathing was a problem as our mother’s admonitions hounded us, telling us not to go outside after taking a bath and not to expose ourselves to the wind. Going outside would mean the mingling of water and air, and air was no less dangerous. We worried obsessively about not standing in front of a draft. It was part of our overall fear of what we called safqit hawa, a ‘slap of air’, which was an obscure affliction that might affect any part of the body, the worst being in the chest and lungs where it could develop into an incurable disease difficult to recover from. The worst air was the deadly yellow one, the cholera, and one of its varieties was what they called ‘the cork wind’, which sent the afflicted one to his death.

Word went out at noon on Sunday. Tune into Radio Beirut because Odette was going to sing at 3:30. And it was most likely Odette herself who told them, having come from where she lived in the capital city to visit her family, or perhaps made a point to be with her family at that special moment in her life. Whatever the case, everyone in the quarter flocked to the three houses that owned radios. And there was Odette, sitting among them at her aunt’s house listening to her own voice and smiling wide when her mother let out a trill ululation of pride for her daughter and for the song she opened with. The radio announcer explained that the song was in local traditional style, which wasn’t telling us anything we didn’t already know. The neighbours divided their attention between Odette sitting there in the middle of the salon in her fancy green dress and high heels and the radio from which her melodious voice emerged. For the youngsters among us, it was a rare moment of truth in which we discovered in one fell swoop, though with some degree of confusion, the basic principle of radio and the technology of recording voices. On the occasion which brought us into Odette’s aunt’s house, we were given the opportunity to catch a glimpse of her cousin — Odette’s aunt’s son — who never left the house and who was surrounded by rumours that he fancied himself an actor and spent all his time listening to the radio and imitating the voices of the various actors who took turns appearing on the radio programs.

We had memorised all the city names written in fine print and listed on the radio’s glass dial. They helped us tune into Near East Radio or Radio Beirut. And on that incremental list were cities we had never heard of before and would never hear of again. Contented, oblivious cities in distant countries. Cities on the radio, like Helfersom, Saratova, Lviv, Hanover and other names that evoked severe cold in the north and were never mentioned in any book we read.

The radio had the importance of a piece of furniture, and was placed in the sitting room in a high and prominent position or inside a carefully painted and polished wooden cabinet. A clever lady of the house would sew a case for the radio out of Atlas Laser Die material, which she’d embellish with three roses embroidered with matching thread. The case could be opened at the centre so that its two curtains could be tied on the right and the left exactly like a theatre curtain, which wasn’t an exaggeration considering all the radio plays that were broadcast in the 1950s and the way the housewives and their visitors gathered around to listen, training their eyes throughout the broadcast on the radio, the place the voices emanated from, just as a theatre audience was inclined to gaze at the stage, the place where the action was taking place.

Those who could afford to buy a radio usually bought the accompanying cabinet, with its matching colours, the different shelves that went into it and the collection of Baydaphone records that announced themselves at the start of every song. Radio voices came to us from Egypt especially, which meant we became used to the Nile accent despite all the static that was the radio’s lot in life in those days. The ability to set up an antenna on the roof, secure it with wire, and aim it in the direction of the capital, was a talent not just anyone could be entrusted to achieve.

According to my mother, who did not miss many opportunities to make fun of him, my grandfather (my father’s father) used to go into the movie theatre when the first permanent theatre house opened up in town, hoping just once to catch a glimpse of his father who’d left him as an infant at the end of the nineteenth century, emigrated to the United States, and never came back. It was a rare indication that my grandfather still clung to the thought of his father, although to us he seemed, at his advanced age, to have long since given up trying to remember him. But my grandfather wasn’t able to follow what was going on on the screen and soon enough his snores would be heard all about the theatre and the owner would have to intervene and wake him up in response to a complaint from a member of the audience seated next to him.

As for the people we longed to see every week, on Sunday mornings when they showed two movies, no three, for the price of one — or excerpts of the films rather — at a reduced rate, they weren’t anything like our relatives. They were short-statured heroes like Eddie Murphy or masked men like the Lone Ranger and his stubborn horse, or more obscure faces like Jack Palance who stirred our emotions when they were victorious. We clapped and cheered for them just as we did all of Easter Week when, in addition to us, the theatre was taken over by numerous members of religious brotherhoods and zealous mass-goers wanting to see The Life and Passion of Christ. It was dubbed in Arabic, with the exception of the scene when Christ crucified calls to His heavenly Father and the dubber decided to say it in Aramaic, ‘Eloi, Eloi, Lama sabachtani.’ There would be huge applause every day from Monday to Sunday when Mary and the women went to Jesus’s tomb and found the stone had been moved away and the tomb was empty. For reasons that weren’t clear, there seemed to be a link between religious piety and the cinema. The owner of the theatre, for example, would hire a man to carry movie advertisements accompanied by a boy ringing a bell. One day he went into one of the inner neighbourhoods holding a picture of Ava Gardner. It was May, the month devoted to the Virgin, and some of the women thought it was a procession with an icon of the Virgin Mary so they stopped what they were doing to make the sign of the cross.

We remembered the theatre sometimes more than we remembered the movies. The owner named it after his son, Marcel, and we would wait until the film started before going up to the ticket window and offering the few coins we had in our possession and he would reluctantly let us in.

When we divided into two quarters and no one but those who had acquired a high level of neutrality dared travel between the two, a second movie theatre opened up for those who were banned from Marcel Cinema. The same films, however, were shown and circulated between the two theatres under agreement of the two owners. And when one of us would miss one of those adventure films when it was shown in the Lower Quarter theatre and heard us talking about it in glowing terms, he felt as if he would suffer an eternal deprivation if he didn’t see it, and so he would go out at night to the Upper Quarter to see it. And although no one there ever recognised him, he’d return to us as if from a successful clandestine military operation, and we would want to congratulate him on his bravery.

They would say that gambling and women revealed a man. Expounding this wise saying might be a lengthy exercise, and even then it wouldn’t reveal how it was possible for the game of Quatorze to have ‘revealed’ Madame Almaaz, one of the most famous of those ladies who fell in love with card playing. She competed with men, outlasting them all night and into the early hours of dawn. To a certain small group of women, playing cards was evidence of their membership in a tight knit circle that frequented the homes of the upper echelon, and it also marked their liberation from housework and other household concerns. For an eligible bachelor aspiring to marry, however, to never have touched a deck of cards was a highly praiseworthy achievement. After all, gambling was one of the quickest ways down the path of domestic destruction.

With the exception of backgammon, with its Turkish words for counting numbers, the new card games, roulette and the rest, came with an extensive French vocabulary, one that also enriched horse racing and betting on horses. Some people specialised in Paroli or unofficial betting offices that doubled winnings and losses. There were also those who became embroiled in horse ‘tugging’ and jockey bribing. And alongside gambling, ‘alongside’ meaning ‘in proximity to’ the poker and baccarat tables, they also practised what they themselves called ‘interest loaning’, in other words, they kept cash in their pockets with which they could instantly cover a losing gambler’s loss so that he could keep playing, in return for very high interest. And they either demanded a promissory note from the debtor or they advanced it to him based on knowing who he was and the certainty that the revolver the lenders carried at their hips guaranteed repayment of the loan, plus interest. Their visits to the Casino du Liban area, where they stationed themselves in anticipation of customers eager to continue placing their bets at the classic roulette table, gave them the chance to meet a class of people they would not otherwise meet. There were sons of rich families from Beirut or Aleppo spending their inheritance and draining the big bank accounts their forefathers had accumulated through profits made in early trading in pharmaceuticals, or household appliances, or cars. And there were all sorts of journalists, poets, and artists who lived out a nightly drama in front of electronic gaming devices or with the hope of getting a ‘zero’ at the roulette table.

There was a story people told about the WWII years about an English soldier in the Upper Hariq district, where the English had a military base, who chanced upon a watchman in one of the olive groves famous for their excellent oil and red soil. The watchman was whipping a poor horse that had refused to budge so hard he made him bleed. The soldier immediately shot the horse in the head and then swung his heavy fist at the watchman’s face so hard it knocked him to the ground, where he left him lying, nearly unconscious, beside the animal, not knowing what crime he had committed. People said that the English soldier had done that because he wanted to put the animal out of the misery it had been suffering at the hands of its ‘barbaric’ owner. At least that was how the locals explained the actions of the soldier who never said a word about it himself.

As for the lesson, if that’s truly what the soldier was after, it was useless, because we went on hitting donkeys with mulberry sticks to make them move and lit fires under mules’ tails if they stumbled or bit their ears to make them get up. We shot at migratory birds, so much that it was said they eventually instinctively altered their migratory pattern to avoid our town, used sticks of dynamite to fish in the river, and kicked tomcats the moment they tried to gain our affection and come inside our circle. When it got to where we set up barricades in front of each other in 1958, we became reckless to the point of strapping dynamite onto dogs or donkeys and sending them across the frontlines in the hope of causing as much destruction as possible, but they’d die half way and their loads would blow up, taken down by the bullets fired at them from behind the opposing barricades. When we wanted to characterise someone as having low morals or as being inferior, we called him a dog, and the best way to defame someone was to write on the walls in the main square that so-and-so was ‘the biggest donkey in all of Syria and Lebanon’. We may have added Syria to Lebanon in order to broaden the geographic circle and thereby include a huge number of people and increase the insult.

For us there were only two types of dog. One was the mongrel — that is, the ugly stray kind of dog that was of no use and had no name. It was filthy and children were afraid of its bite; the worst thing in the world was if the dog was afflicted with rabies. These dogs disappeared little by little from the inhabited areas and eventually only a few, select dogs remained, kept by shepherds. The other kind of dog was the clean and coddled hunting dog that had a name and responded to it and to its owner’s whistle by perking its ears. It was part of a man’s equipment, and men built these dogs wooden kennels in the yard and fed them a balanced diet. Training them became so extensive that one man even taught the dog to fetch his gun from its hiding place whenever he heard an unexplained movement or rustling sound and prompted him to get ready to fight.

Then came another type of dog, which made its way into the homes of the spoiled daughters of dignitaries who attended the elite nuns’ school in Beirut. When they first appeared, they were small and could be held and patted, and there wasn’t anything surprising about the matter until the big shock we had the day we saw a young man from our town walking down the main street. We knew the young man was one of us and it was clear he resembled us, and even if he had been away from the town a little while, he was still one of us. We saw him walking down the street leading a strange-looking dog on leash. It was a miniature dog one might say, and he had stitched a little embroidered harness for it and attached something that dangled from its neck. Some of the young men whistled at him disapprovingly, but what made the shock an even bigger blow was that he didn’t show the least bit of concern. Actually, and perhaps in an act of bravado, he motioned to the little doggie and it jumped up into his arms. He picked him up and walked away while the dog looked in wonder at us with his little eyes from over his owner’s shoulder, protected by him from the harm he instinctively felt we might inflict on him. From that day forward we had our suspicions about that man’s manhood, considering his preference to befriend a little dog over us, but a much deeper feeling struck us even if we didn’t reveal it, which was that the world was changing and there was nothing we could do to stop it.

Chapter 11

Eliyya set out into the streets of New York and, for more than twenty years, never slowed down. Like a toddler he discovered the pleasure of walking by himself and savoured it, the way a swimmer savours plunging into water. No wonder he didn’t last more than a month in the mechanical engineering course that, in accordance with his original plan, he registered for the moment he arrived. Those dust-ridden professors’ lectures soon reminded him of dull physics lessons from high school. So he quit the university and though he didn’t need the money, he answered a classified ad he saw in the subway and took a job in a fast-food restaurant in one of the city suburbs. In the backroom bathroom there, he experienced his first kiss. He kept his eyes closed while kissing one of the waitresses, who told him that she preferred to see his eyes open when he kissed her, because that excited her more.

After learning how to make every kind of pizza, he decided he’d had enough and started taking German lessons from a blonde American teacher he dreamed of dating. He tried every trick in the book, but in vain. At his first lesson she asked him in English why he had chosen to learn the language of Goethe, so he told her he was preparing himself to major in philosophy and made a facial expression suggesting that was understandable. That spontaneous answer of his may actually have driven him to attend lectures on Hegel’s philosophy he otherwise never would have dreamt of attending. He stuck with it despite not understanding much, or rather without understanding anything, though he refused to admit he hadn’t been able to grasp concepts like Begriff or Aufhebung. He stayed put as if nailed to his chair, not understanding a thing and making sure not to give the impression that he did understand, in case the lecturer asked him a revealing question he couldn’t answer. After a month’s time, however, he was able to pick up some imperfect expressions and ideas that reverberated in his head and enabled him to pretend he was an expert in German philosophy.

To compensate for the theoretical imprisonment that nearly sucked out all his emotions, he joined the New York Knicks basketball team fan club with a sweeping and excessive enthusiasm that was comical coming from a newcomer to the giant city. For an entire season he didn’t miss a single game, sometimes travelling with the Knicks to whichever state their schedule took them. A deep-seated desire to learn began to consume him again whenever he became idle for any period of time, as though his life had come to depend on resuming the lifestyle of the Gang Quarter kids balanced with a desire for every aspect of knowledge, the one making amends for the other in one way or another. And so Eliyya headed back to the university, but primarily as an auditor, convinced from the outset that his stay there would not be long.

His languages, or half-languages, became quite numerous, infringing on each other and getting all tangled up. He realised how strange his condition was when ideas and questions started coming to him in French while other ideas enticed him in English or even in German. And he embellished these languages with some phrases in Latin, too, while little by little the influence of Arabic began to diminish. He was happy with this polyphony and actually worked as an interpreter for the scientific delegations that never stopped coming to New York. He also worked as a security guard at an amusement park and as a taxi driver in order to gain life experience, as he said, referring to a scene in a movie he saw three times but whose title he didn’t know, having arrived too late to the cinema each time to catch the opening credits.

Likewise, he constantly changed his residence. He moved from one apartment to another, taking some paintings, two boxes of books — mostly dictionaries — and a basketball signed by Magic Johnson with him. He changed his residence as often as he changed his glasses, tiring of the wide frames in favour of thin lenses and dark sunglasses before settling on contact lenses. Public libraries, especially university libraries, never failed to provide him with the perfect backdrop for his activities. It did not take him long to discover that he had a quality that girls found comforting. He always found himself surrounded by humanities students who were more attracted to a man’s intellect than his broad shoulders. Eliyya went overboard with alluring talk and whenever he discussed any topic, he was a master in the art of suggesting he knew more than he was saying. To this end he resorted to embarrassing others with statements like, ‘You must know, of course, that Picasso was stingy’ or ‘Soon the neo-Trotskyites will rule the United States, as you well know,’ leaving them with a blank stare of ignorance and in awe of Eliyya’s unquestionable superiority.

Early on he began collecting literary and philosophic quotations. Short sentences he picked up here and there, from Saint Augustine to Jacques Derrida, and wrote down in a notebook and tried to memorise for future use, things that would have a strong impact when needed and give the impression he had a saying for every occasion. That was one of his methods of seduction. And during that period, before he went to sleep each night, he always wrote down at least one sentence he dug out from his personal feelings, even if it had become difficult to distinguish his own thoughts from those he’d memorised from the geniuses of the world. He promoted the idea sometimes that he was the last of the romantics and other times the first of the numerologists, publicising his preference for French surrealist painting by dropping the names of obscure artists and poets as if they were his close friends.

At the other end of the spectrum of human desire, cooking was his chosen method of seduction. He learned how to cook from books and practised preparing dishes with a high level of patience that always rewarded him. He studied food in books and if the topic was brought up in conversation he shocked anyone listening with his uncanny ability to differentiate between the ingredients used in Thai cuisine and the basic ingredients in Korean cooking. He memorised a long list of the names of gourmet restaurants in all the New York neighbourhoods. But despite all that, he remained a lone performer who had happily left his family only to tumble all alone into the very place his ancestors had landed a century before him and where their names are still recorded in the register at Ellis Island.

He remained a lonely hunter. His relationships with men and women did not last long because he wasn’t good at managing friendships amidst all those disparate and varied autobiographies which he told about himself. He gave many different answers to any question related to his personal life, to the point where he was afraid to make a mistake and preferred to stay away from anyone he felt he had filled up with imaginary accounts of his life, lest they reveal his illusions. If he met a friend he hadn’t seen in a long time, he sometimes had trouble remembering what profession he had claimed for his father… the father who ‘was still alive and well and in the prime of his life’. Or what fate he had chosen for his mother, who he sometimes said had been stunningly beautiful and was now dead. And so in order to avoid a mix-up, he preferred to stop meeting with that friend altogether.

To his arsenal of methods for influencing girls’ minds, he added numerous stories about his childhood, a series of anecdotes that were almost totally fabricated. One such story, which was basically an altered version of the plot to a movie he had just seen, made him out to be of Italian origin, though he didn’t speak his native tongue. He had supposedly been born in a popular neighbourhood in Naples, the one with the steps leading down to the sea. His mother had whisked him away to the United States for fear he would get caught up in the mafia when he grew up, because his uncles were all involved in it and topped the Carabinieri’s most wanted list. Or, in a turn to the East, he claimed to be originally from the Yemeni city of Taiz and to have been raised between two deserts — the Empty Quarter and Badiyat al-Sham. His father was supposedly an elder in the Shammar tribe who had been convinced by an old English friend from Her Majesty’s Secret Service of the benefits of higher education and so he sent his son — Eliyya that is — to America. This father of his had had the final word at the legendary meeting convened under a tent, where coffee was served to the seated guests, who chose their words carefully as they discussed the issue of whether to lend their support to the government in Sana’a or send secret envoys to hold talks with communist rebels in Aden.

Eliyya’s constant attempts to escape getting caught forced him to change his phone number frequently, until he finally stopped giving his number to anybody and requested to have his name removed from the phone book. And when email became widespread he made up countless email addresses for himself so no one could reach him. He would create an address one day, send messages from it, and then abandon it and switch to another address to avoid receiving the replies. Soon afterwards he created a website under a fake name, though it was derived from his real name — the same website the Gang Quarter kids had discovered — and avoided befriending anyone with any connection to the land of his birth.

He wouldn’t even make friends with anyone who knew Arabic. People who knew him and liked him insisted that his lying wasn’t some kind of a hobby to him; rather, he felt compelled to say what his acquaintances wanted to hear. If he met someone who was trying to find a quick way to get a residency visa, for example, Eliyya simply could not stop himself from claiming he knew some higher-up in the Department of Immigration who could help him. Eliyya would then give him a full name he’d made up on the spot or borrowed from somewhere and promise the applicant he would call him as soon as possible, assuring him it was a done deal and that the immigration office employee owed him a big favour worth much more than a simple residency visa. And that would be their last conversation, since Eliyya would choose to stay out of that friend’s sight after that. Eliyya also invented two or three serious diseases for himself, kidney failure with required dialysis sessions, bouts of acute shortness of breath and even leukaemia, and he would reveal his diseases to anyone who tried to confront him, turning their indignation about being lied to into sympathy for him.

Time flew past Eliyya; quick as an arrow, life was passing him by. The daily chronicles of his life seemed like one long holiday, yet he never found a way to rest. And he wasn’t spared of feelings of boredom and repetitiveness, not just repetition of the details, but of that scenario he kept falling into without meaning to. Something had begun to slowly slip away from his routine, despite his always being prepared and ready to go, rising every morning as if he had vital duties to carry out and which he took on with optimism.

But Eliyya began to chastise himself. A person who lives alone eventually ends up talking to himself. He rebuked himself in the shower or whenever he lay down for a little while after lunch and stared at the ceiling. If he found himself all alone in the elevator, he looked at himself in the mirror, sometimes thrusting his thumb at his image and waving his fist threateningly at himself. He interrogated himself out loud at the diner, Jack’s, where he sometimes went at noon, so that the waitress thought he was trying to capture her attention, forcing him to quickly excuse himself in embarrassment. If he were to write down all the censure he constantly heaped on himself, or if he were able to say it out loud to someone, it would no doubt be harsh. ‘Stop it, Eliyya. Dammit, stop! Don’t you realise you’re overdoing it? Haven’t you gotten tired of feigning desire every time some blonde’s hair unfurls in some place, on some street, some café, some store? One blonde after another… the whole country is nothing but blondes, so what’s the point?’

Once, with a woman named Julie, Eliyya became indifferent towards her the moment the dye faded from her hair. Even he couldn’t believe his sudden change in feelings. She cried, demanding an explanation, but he couldn’t explain. The moment he caught a glimpse of a blonde passing by, his antennas went up and he started preparing his lines. He’d start with a pomegranate juice mixed with soda — the deep red colour in the glass made a good opening to intimate chatter that ended the same way every time. To keep up his charade one time in front of a girl, he guzzled down a whole glass of vodka and lemon into the back of his throat, the way he was told Russians do at their boisterous banquets. He nearly choked and his eyes bulged out of his head, so they lifted him up high so he could spit the vodka from his throat and slapped him in the face until he came to.

He laid it all out on the table whenever a girl sat down in front of him: other people’s expressions and proverbs, plus a repertoire of stories he had made up only moments earlier while riding the subway to his date. Stories he drew inspiration for from anything he had read, trying at any cost to create the impression of himself as a genius wandering the sidewalks of New York City, or that the Middle East had spit out into the new world once again because the East could not bear the presence of minorities. He would describe places he never visited in his life with sincere and poetic nostalgia and then get up all of a sudden once he’d made certain from the look in the girl’s eyes that the scheme had worked yet again. He had succeeded in painting a bizarre picture of himself that opened up numerous possibilities to his new friend, things she never expected to come upon in her monotonous life that kept him in an unquenchable state of desire for what he believed women possessed but which he hadn’t yet been fortunate enough to obtain. He would do his dance and then suddenly, like every other time, make up something about having to go home right away and offer the girl a ride home. He would leave, calm and collected, convinced that his phone would ring the next day or the day after that, and the seduction he’d started would reach its conclusion as the activities of daytime made their way onto night’s stage. He was good at the game, too, even though it had started to unravel from overuse. Once he succeeded at a certain restaurant, he regarded it as lucky and returned again and again. He’d take women there one after the other, calling the waiters by their first names, all part and parcel of his seduction toolkit.

He did get caught a few times, however, like the day he went to Calabrese Restaurant and saw the plump redhead he’d met a month earlier and then shunned. When he saw her there having dinner he begged the earth to crack open and swallow him up, because she caught him doing his same act. He read it in her eyes as she watched how he coaxed the new girl he’d just escorted to the same corner of the restaurant he’d sat her down in. She could probably even predict which menu items he was going to suggest to his new little friend. ‘I highly recommend the fillet of sea bass in bitter lemon sauce…’

In that way, Eliyya became versed in the art of introductions of all kinds, including the art of persuading young women to come to his apartment, which was also adorned with various allurements, such as paintings, small statues and select furnishings. The stories he told and the details he gave to his ‘prey’ opened the floodgates of her imagination and fed her desire to discover the secret of this slender Easterner… The way he postponed going into the bedroom at first had the effect of putting his friend at ease as she attributed his restraint to his refined manners. But this delay tactic of his quickly transformed into the fear that Eliyya was merely delaying a test he would not perform nearly as well on as the preparations for it.

He hadn’t yet reached the age of settling down, but rather continued to eye up university girls a decade or decade and a half younger than him. He wound a rope around himself and never cut the cord, wound it tighter and tighter until he nearly choked, finally forcing him to yank his neck out of the noose he’d made with his own hands and run like the wind. ‘Escaping is two thirds of valour.’ He never knew how to end a conversation. He would excuse himself and make things up and invent all kinds of fibs, because he was incapable of severing any relationship, no matter how short-lived it was. If the other person didn’t bid him goodbye, he was no good at getting out of the mess. The moment he got the feeling one of his conquests wanted to move in with him and cling to his side because this Eastern man with the eloquent tongue had provided her in her time of need with the emotional support she so desperately required, he would run like the devil as if his rear end was on fire. He went as far as moving out of his apartment and moving to another one elsewhere in New York for fear that he would be forced to take in the Filipino girl who was intent on getting to know him fully; he also changed his phone number.

Over time he exhausted all his tricks and started feeling like he wanted to retire, that is until that day at one of his favourite hunting grounds, the department of Middle East Studies and Semitic Languages. He was sweet-talking the department secretary, Miss Davis, when he caught sight of the blonde American girl. There wasn’t anything in her eyes that indicated she was lost in the big city, and that was what attracted him to her. She seemed to be a child of the city. He imagined it: a happy childhood, her parents’ only child, she lived in the city and had sex without giving it much thought. He followed her into the library and managed to sit down beside her. He waited for her to take a peek at the book he was holding, A Perverse History of the Human Heart, another item in his toolkit. He waited for her to make a move before turning towards her and saying in one sentence that he thought she might be a student in the Arabic department, but he doubted she would accept his invitation to dinner the following Tuesday, bent as she might be on upholding her reputation as one of those young Baptist women born into a respectable and upright Baltimore family who tried to restrict herself from life’s pleasures. At this point he picked up another book he had in front of him for the girl to see the title, Dictionary of Small Pleasures, about going out into nature in the springtime to pick blackberries in season without worrying, just this one time during the year, about clothes getting dirty.

He said it all without taking a breath. Then he followed it with a nervous laugh with which he wanted to suggest that he was only pretending to play the role of the skilled ladies’ man who deployed prefabricated moves on the opposite sex, that in reality he wasn’t like that. His game came at the right time. The blonde was in an easy-going mood and didn’t correct his mistakes but rather responded to him as she was supposed to. ‘A French restaurant would be good. Come pick me up by taxi even if you have a nice car because that doesn’t impress me. You can start waiting for me out front, at 2 Arlington Avenue, as of eight o’clock. It might be a half hour before I come out, which is something I do on purpose to test your patience and desire to see me.’

She, too, capped off what she said with a studied laugh with which she made him realise that she wasn’t actually agreeing to go out with him; she was just pretending to go along with him. The game was exciting for both of them: ten minutes or more of a whispered parody in the silent library, while some of the people reading shot disapproving glances in their direction, until they finally agreed, as is expected when playing with fire, upon an actual date. Once it was concluded, he stood up from his chair in a celebratory manner with no concern for the groans of the other patrons, shook her hand and introduced himself, signalling, perhaps, that it was time to start being serious.

He told her his name was Eliyya, which made her think he was a Jew from some Middle Eastern country. She walked out of the library with him and they passed through the reception area under Miss Davis’s reproachful glare. He didn’t ever tell her he’d gained information about her identity and family background from the department secretary. He already knew her name: Heather Pollock, daughter of the Reverend Henry Pollock, Jr.

He took her to a French restaurant — and what a restaurant it was! ‘Le Relais d’Arcachon,’ he said, laughing. ‘French cuisine is one of the keys to seducing American women. Its effect on them is scientifically proven; tests verify it.’ He would run his experiment on her while she was in a state of submission. He didn’t hide his game. He admitted to everything he could be accused of. He would mess up the game and yet continue to play it. He fed her small doses of information about himself while she kept shouting at him, ‘Where are you from, for God’s sake?’

He smiled as if he’d succeeded in getting her right where he wanted. He took a long drink from his glass and a new kind of look came into his eyes — a mixture of pride and longing. He told her a lot of things, among them that the night made him anxious, especially Sunday night. Then he tied his white napkin around his neck, looked at the wine swirling in the glass he held with two fingers, closed his eyes and sniffed the wine as he stirred the glass before tasting it and spouting off expressions that sounded like they came straight out of the dining section of The New York Times. He requested that the waiter ask the chef if he still made the duck in orange sauce that he said had become a very popular dish. The kitchen manager came personally to answer his questions. It appeared to have all been set up in advance. He asked him about the prawns and whether they were freshly caught. He and his date argued back and forth. He made her laugh. She let her guard down and surrendered to having a good time. She had only one question left, which she kept repeating like a dumbfounded fool. ‘Who are you? Who are you?’

And he would keep at it, more and more. She’d burst out laughing hysterically, barely able to say, ‘Stop. Stop for God’s sake! Who are you?’

She described him in a letter to her friend as early forties, slim, eyes sparkling with intelligence. If you saw him on Sunday morning roaming in the streets before he put his contact lenses in, you might think he’s a novelist researching the subject of his next book about street people who depend on welfare and about the broken-hearted poor.

After a little while he surprised her with, ‘I want to visit Lebanon…’

Just like that, without any introductions as they walked across one of the city bridges.

‘I want to see the white almond blossoms in early spring…’

She smiled and he added, ‘I want to see my mother before she dies.’

He said it without showing much emotion and without a desire to affect her one way or another. He said it like someone saying he had to go to the train station at seven fifteen otherwise he’d miss the morning train to Pittsburgh.

This time around he wasn’t just making up an excuse to escape from his new girlfriend.

Chapter 12

Nishan never could have imagined himself pleading to save his soul and crawling on his knees that way, never could have imagined prostrating himself flat on the floor amidst a crumpled heap of women — nuns and girls from the orphanage — all dressed in black, as he prayed continuously to Saint Vasken inside a church dedicated to one of the Maronite saints. He muttered his cries for help, not knowing what he was saying because the sound of bullets being fired reverberated in his head and he couldn’t hear what was coming out of his own mouth. He squeezed his eyes shut like a child refusing to look when told, and knelt, huddled over himself, propped up by the women’s bodies, protecting himself behind them actually. No, he would not die with his eyes open. The sounds of the bullets clamoured in his head. He felt the shots in every part of his body. The sound of someone screaming, one man’s voice, called out with all his might, without stopping, ‘Hey all of you… for the fear of God!’

He couldn’t hear the wailing rising up around him — the moaning of a young woman shot in the shoulder who was bleeding profusely, and a nun struck with a bout of hysteria who was trembling and whose teeth chattered incessantly as she kissed the cross hanging at her neck. The nun’s fright was pushing him to the brink. He listened exclusively to the man’s voice, clinging with all his strength to the loud, angry voice as if it were a lifeline. If the man continued to scream, then Nishan Hovsep Davidian, the twenty-five-year-old photographer, would go on living.

He also held fast to the new Zeiss Ikon camera hanging from his neck and kept mumbling prayers to Saint Vasken, mumbling in the manner of his mother. He stowed the camera safely in his lap and curled over it. He could smell the women and the nuns — permed hair, the pungent odour of ammonia, and cheap perfume mixed with sweat from the heat and the fear and the church crammed full of God’s creatures. He didn’t want to die and he didn’t want the Zeiss Ikon to get broken because it was extremely expensive. He had been lucky enough to buy it for half price from a man who had barely used it one month and had been forced to sell it because he was leaving the country. Nishan would not be able to get another one. He’d only shot two rolls of film with it — a wedding and a graduation. He was bent on saving the Zeiss Ikon at any cost.

He braced himself, ready to take the fatal blow. The next one would strike him for sure. The important thing was to avoid getting hit in the head. A bullet in the head would be unbearable, he thought, fearing pain more than death. He thought of his father. He thought of his mother. They were sitting quietly, side by side most likely — his father reading the Armenian newspaper and his mother doing needlework and possibly mumbling quick prayers to Saint Vasken. And here he was under the bullets raining down like stones. As long as that man kept screaming and Nishan kept listening, he would be spared.

Suddenly everything cleared up and life returned. He opened his eyes and caught sight of the sun’s rays coming through the skylights. He felt his blood start to move again. The shooting died down as did the sound of the man who had been screaming in the church. Nishan Davidian was still alive. He let the tension leave his body a little at a time, starting with lifting his head. No one in the church dared stand up. The moans of the wounded rose up, interrupted by a piercing cry. Nishan started looking around at the dead. He wouldn’t find out who the screaming man in the church had been. He didn’t even ask about him. People recalled all kinds of details to him, but no one mentioned the voice or its owner. The only person he asked was Nazaret. He asked him later on, two or three days later, when he went to visit him at his house. He asked Nazaret whether he heard a voice booming over the sound of bullets in the church. Nazaret said he hadn’t heard anything. He had been crammed against the door to the sacristy, sandwiched between the priests who were fleeing the altar. Nishan didn’t repeat his question. He was afraid his countryman would make fun of him. Maybe there had not been a man screaming. Maybe Nishan had been the only one hearing that voice that echoed in his head.

Nishan had opened his eyes and saw the blood on his trousers. It was coming from his right leg. A black splotch on his blue pants. He didn’t feel any pain; he didn’t feel anything. He saw his wound before he felt it. He was still fully conscious and fully frightened, too. But he didn’t die. He had heard once that a person who gets shot doesn’t feel the pain right away. It comes later, once the bullet cools down. Death was still present, then, still possible, lurking below, threatening to ascend from his leg to his heart. He heard some pushing and shoving near the door to the church. He silently concluded that Nazaret had been killed; he prepared himself for that possibility. When the gunfire first started he had seen him standing taking pictures of the worshippers in the front row — dignitaries and the family of the deceased and the clergy. He, on the other hand, had stayed in the back with the women so he could take pictures panning the altar and the priests. When they developed their pictures of the incident they both smiled when they discovered that Nazaret appeared in Nishan’s picture and Nishan appeared in Nazaret’s. Two photographers holding their large round flashes. Nazaret was more exposed to the gunfire than Nishan had been.

Magnesium flashes were popular in those days. They flashed in people’s eyes, even outside in the bright sunlight. Hagop, his teacher, had advised him to use them on all occasions. They reduced the formation of shadows on faces, as he said. Nishan hadn’t known that Nazaret was going to come to Burj al-Hawa. If he’d known, he would not have come too. It was June, the peak of the end-of-school-year photo season. The teacher and his students on the wooden stage. Half an hour of quietening them down and lining them up from shortest to tallest. But schools paid well; plus, every student was required to buy a class picture, so it wasn’t bad.

He ran into Nazaret in the courtyard outside the church. Photographers attend funerals without an invitation. They spread out in the beginning here and there in the courtyard, targeting customers from among the men dressed in suits despite the heat. He knew them, too, and that they wore the suits to conceal their guns inside their jackets. Some men called to him. They got into a group, put their arms on each other’s shoulders showing their affection for each other, and as usual didn’t smile. He took pictures of them beside the store and then joined Nazaret in the procession of mourners going to the church. The two of them exchanged words and even some jokes in Armenian behind the backs of the frowning men.

He didn’t usually speak with Nazaret much, just a few necessary formalities. Nazaret was his competitor, who had followed him to Barqa and started copying him and stealing his customers. Of all the places in the whole wide world, Nazaret had to follow him to where he drew his livelihood. But there in front of the church door they’d both been afraid and went overboard speaking to each other in their own language. The men kept looking at them disapprovingly whenever they heard their chirpings in Armenian.

It started raining without any warning, which only made them more frightened. There were so many priests and nuns. They both had the feeling that all of the men were carrying guns and exchanging looks — angry, threatening looks that didn’t exclude Nishan and Nazaret. The procession dispersed when the rain started to pour down and the crowd quickly went inside the church. The two felt safer inside the church. Nothing would happen there. As long as the people were inside the church, nothing would happen. Certainly they wouldn’t threaten each other during mass. The Syriac prayers and chanting began and their flashbulbs flashed for a few minutes before the sound of gunfire reached them from outside. Everything inside the church came to a standstill, even the chanting stopped little by little with the exception of one old priest who was probably hard of hearing and didn’t realise what was going on and so he continued intoning the Maronite funeral mass all by himself.

Nazaret did not die. He rushed to aid Nishan. He searched around and found him there on the floor having trouble getting to his feet. Who did Nazaret have besides Nishan? Every family took off in a different direction. The dead and some of the wounded remained there on the floor. A nun was bent over one of the wounded writhing on the floor in pain, assuring him he was going to be all right. And the two Armenian photographers also remained — one who couldn’t walk and the other tongue-tied. Nishan began talking, talking without stopping. A person who has seen death speaks without stopping. Nazaret kept silent while he helped Nishan walk to the car. Nazaret said one thing: ‘World with no conscience and no religion!’

He said it in Armenian.

By ‘world’ he meant ‘people’.

They took the two of them in for investigation, to the government house and to the army barracks. Twice, three times, four. The police, customs officers, even the army… The first time, two investigators in civilian clothes came to Davidian’s Photo Shop with a French language magazine. They opened it to the picture of the five youths and asked Nishan who had taken the picture.

‘I didn’t photograph any young men!’

Nishan denied it, too quickly, so they came back. They got there quickly, got out of the Jeep and searched his shop and Nazaret’s shop, too. They turned everything upside down, opened the cameras, poured out the developing chemicals and ruined the film and white photo paper by exposing them to light. They pestered them with endless questions.

‘Name? Age? Profession?’

‘Profession? What does “profession” mean?’

It took fifteen minutes spelling out the Armenian names — his father’s name was Hovsep, which was hard enough to pronounce, never mind spell.

‘Where were you?’

‘I was in the back, far away, with the women, I swear to God!’

He swore to God hoping the investigator would quit bombarding him with questions.

‘What did you see?’

‘I didn’t see anything, Baba, I heard.’

‘What did you hear?’

‘I heard the sound of gunfire… like rain. I heard women screaming and a nun crying and some small children, too, orphan girls wearing school uniforms…’

He didn’t tell him about the man’s voice that saved his life. The women’s voices had been more unpleasant than the whistle of the bullets.

‘What did you do?’

‘I shut my eyes, Baba. I didn’t want to die with my eyes open. I shut my eyes and squeezed them tight until the bullets stopped, and then I opened my eyes. My leg was bleeding, from here.’ He lifted the leg of his trousers to show him the wound that had started to heal.

‘Where are the photos?’

From that time forward everyone asked him, ‘Where are the photos?’

‘We didn’t photograph anything, brother. Believe me.’

‘If we are harsh with you and tug on your ears, you will confess, right?’

He remained firm and didn’t give them anything. Nishan didn’t want to harm anyone.

But after a little while he picked up his things and went down to the city. He ran away. He left Nazaret up there all by himself. He could have it all. Let him photograph them to his heart’s content. Nishan sure didn’t envy him for that.

The government men stopped paying him visits, stopped the investigations. They rested and let everyone else rest, too. Other people started visiting him — busy-bodies who’d heard or supposed that he had taken pictures of the men brandishing their guns. They thought that if they could see those pictures they could find out who had been doing the shooting. Some journalists came to him offering money, including that French-speaking woman. She might have also gone to see Nazaret, but Nazaret was not very experienced with women. He gave her the picture that was published in the magazine, the one the investigators asked him about. He’d been unable to resist the young journalist. He didn’t know how she managed to snatch the photo from him — the photo of the five young men. Those men had called to him. There were five of them standing and waiting for the funeral to begin. He remembered how he had to ask them to line up closer together. They draped their arms on each other’s shoulders, making him feel they loved each other and were very happy to have a picture taken together. They were all killed. All five. He had photographed them and other men scattered around the courtyard. The journalist had wrested that photo from him with sweet-talk and flattery. And she gave him a hundred liras, too. She had a beautiful figure and was conscientious. After her, some men came to see him who had participated in the incident or were relatives. He also opened his door to relatives of the victims. They followed him there, followed him to the city. He recognised them the moment they appeared at the door to his shop. One of them came in, slid his hand inside his jacket pocket, and said, ‘Here. I’ll give you a blank cheque. Give me what you have and you can write in whatever amount you want.’

They didn’t fear the witnesses and didn’t fear the courts and the judge. They feared the pictures. A man of short stature, with stubby fingers, came one morning, his face scrunched into a frown. He asked Nishan the usual question without getting anywhere with him. Nishan repeated the same thing to him that when the bullets start, the photographer runs away, just like anyone else. ‘The photographer gets scared, habibi. You’re a tough guy. You don’t get scared. The photographer gets scared.’

And he also told him how he dropped to the floor and took cover amongst the women.

‘You believe that? I hid behind the women!’

Claiming cowardice was the easiest way to wiggle out of it. But the man with the chubby fingers didn’t believe him. He led him to the back room into the studio where Nishan, who was young and handsome in those days and was the city’s champion billiard player, took and developed passport photos. It was also where he led pretty young customers so he could flirt with them out of sight of passers-by — as soon as he shut the front door from inside and placed the ‘Be Back Soon’ sign in the window. The man pushed him up against the wall, put his hands on Nishan’s shoulders, pulled out his gun and pointed it at his head. That is almost certainly the very moment Nishan’s diabetes got worse.

Nishan Davidian had spent many long years among them. He was their only photographer until Nazaret came along. Jorge, an Arab, had also appeared in the town. He learned the trade in America, but he was crazy. Nishan worried in the depths of his heart that Arabs would start learning and practising the trade. But Jorge never took away any of his customers and didn’t live long. Poor guy.

They had all stood in front of Nishan at one time or another, in the back room he had made into a studio. In the beginning he used to store weapons for them. Guns were their religion and their idols. An ancient rifle that didn’t work, two rounds of bullets to strap on at the waist or make into a cross at the chest. He also kept a kuffiyeh and igal, the headscarf and band to hold it in place, since they hadn’t yet invented an image for themselves besides the one associated with traditional Arab machismo. He also acquired swords for those who wished. Two swords, actually, one of them curved.

A man would enter the shop by himself. When someone headed to Nishan’s it wasn’t because he was looking especially handsome, it was because he was planning for the picture that would be shown at his funeral or hung in a central place in his house after his death. They had suddenly begun to worry that they would pass from this life without leaving behind a picture to remind their families of them. The man would stand before Nishan’s lens with all his weapons, even if he didn’t have one knife that cuts in his whole house, as they said. He’d give special attention to his moustache, and inspect himself in the mirror first. A frown was an absolute must that appeared spontaneously on the man’s face as he stood menacingly in front of the camera lens as if looking into the eyes of his archenemy. The more Nishan asked him to stay still so his picture wouldn’t come out blurry, the deeper he frowned.

They began asking him to come outside to take a picture of as big a group of friends as could fit into a circle around a new car, or to take pictures of a bride and groom in their home surrounded by bouquets of flowers and ululations. Women began to appear later on when men’s dispositions improved and they started bringing their wives and children along with them. The entire family would come and stand together in their best clothes. Whenever they bought new clothes, they began to come and pose for the photographer in them. He’d ask them for a small smile. The children would go along with it first, followed by the wife. It was a difficult thing for a man to show his teeth, so he would keep his serious expression. He asked them to smile and tried to get them to all look in his direction. A stray look at something that caught their attention in the general surroundings behind the photographer or beside him was one of the mistakes a successful photographer had to avoid. Then they started having children’s pictures taken all by themselves — at First Communion in their angelic outfits or on Palm Sunday, tearful and holding candles taller than themselves. Or they would bring them to him and pose them on a wooden horse wearing a Mexican sombrero. Nazaret competed with him. He’d take pictures of children in the pilot’s seat of a colourfully painted wooden airplane. Women didn’t dare come to him all alone except in circumstances they couldn’t avoid, such as getting ID and passport photos taken once those became common.

Nishan left them all behind and went down to the city. He spent the nicest days of his life there. Life there was easy. People went about their business with a mixture of light-heartedness, acceptance and cunning. But now he had come to the end of the road. Defeat was written all over his shop window: dust and two pictures with faded colours — a groom with his bride dressed in her white gown, and a child carried on someone’s shoulders holding an olive branch in his hand. The studio had reverted into nothing more than his morning conference room. He couldn’t stand the loneliness of his house. The only metal letters of ‘NISHAN PHOTOS’ that hung over the door to his shop that still remained were a crooked ‘SH’ and a steadfast ‘A’. The damned tremors had got the better of him, and his hands were no longer going to obey him and hold the camera. The shaking was his true downfall, not the rise of speedy photo labs as was rumoured.

The travelling coffee vendor always passed by him twice — once when he arrived at nine o’clock to pour him a hot cup of bitter black coffee from the pot in his right hand, and once after his long tour around the market place to retrieve the empty cup and to collect what he owed him. Nishan would welcome an old friend who shuffled between the cafés in Al-Tall Square. Someone who’d set out to do some official business and got lost would come into his shop, someone who’d made the trip from the high mountains and whose thick accent preceded him. He’d open the door for him and in he would come, bringing in the smell of grilled meat from the neighbouring restaurant. He’d be trying to buy excise stamps or asking how to obtain a copy of a police record. Around one-thirty, Nishan would lock the door and go to lunch and that would be all, as he wouldn’t return until the next morning.

The future scenario was well-known; he had even participated in deciding on the details. No sooner would he shut his eyes — and the time would come soon, considering the disease that was destroying him, having lived more than thirty years with diabetes — than his wife would sell the shop to the owner of the barbecue restaurant next door who persistently offered to buy it at least once a week. She wouldn’t sell the house furniture but give it to his sister living in Beirut for free. He told her more than once to give the furniture to his sister for free and not to sell it to anyone. He knew his wife was stingy. He requested that she bury him in the Armenian Orthodox cemetery, after he’d bought a small plot there. He liked the smell of that city the way a person likes the smell of people he loves. And she should go to live with her son and his family who’d gone ahead of her to Canada. A hundred years in Lebanon were enough for the Davidians. Now it was that distant cold country’s turn.

Eliyya poked his head inside the shop while holding the door open with one hand and reading the name he was asking about from the paper he held in his other hand. The rest of his body remained outside as he poked his head in as if he were looking into a well. Nishan didn’t look up to find out who was asking the question until he heard his name. He usually answered lost inquirers holding administrative papers in their hands with a wave of his hand or a brief word without even looking at their faces. It had been a very long time since anyone had come into the shop looking for the owner. People had their pictures taken at the photo booth a few metres down the road and only opened Nishan’s door to inquire where to find a photocopier for their documents or because they thought he had one in the store.

‘Yes, he’s here.’

‘Could I to talk to him?’

Excessively polite.

‘Why sure thing, come in, habibi!’ Nishan recognised Eliyya. ‘You’re from Barqa, aren’t you?’

Nishan could recognise them. He knew them from their sharp accents and the looks they gave — those same harsh looks they had when they had entered the church that day.

‘I’m looking for some pictures!’

‘Pictures of who, baba?’

Nishan still didn’t speak good Arabic, even though he’d been born there, or maybe he’d just become used to those insertions — ‘baba’ between this word and that word, or ‘habibi’ at the end. He uttered them often in order to establish his identity, and so they would classify him as neutral.

‘Pictures from Burj al-Hawa.’

Most likely the Burj al-Hawa incident. The very same. He spent one hour of his life there and it had become the story of his life. To the day he died. But nothing could prevent Nishan Davidian from skirting the issue one more time.

‘I take pictures of people. Men, missus… I don’t photograph a village, baba. Go see a watercolour artist, he’ll paint nature for you. Red-tiled roofs. There are lots of those artists, they’re good…’ Without meaning to, he exaggerated his Armenian accent. That old feeling of fear had come back to him, so he sought refuge in his accent and his Arabic almost turned into a bout of broken drivel.

‘You were in Burj al-Hawa that Sunday…’

But matters got a little better when Nishan felt for some unclear reason that the man standing in front of him didn’t have bad intentions and didn’t want to harm him. He interrupted him. ‘How did you know? You weren’t even born then… How old are you, habibi?’

‘Forty-two… do you recognise this card?’ Eliyya asked him, showing the little card he was holding.

He took the card from Eliyya’s hand. He, too, smiled. It was one of those little cards with the name, address, and telephone number that the photographer used to give out to people he had persuaded to stand in front of his camera in the streets or at parties or in the public park so they would come back a day or two later to get the pictures. He’d take the fee for the pictures and give them the card, thus insuring he got paid.

‘Where’d you get that from? It’s so old…’ He stretched out the word ‘old’.

‘It was in my father’s pocket the day he was killed in the Burj al-Hawa incident.’

‘We’ll never be finished with that story,’ he said, practically to himself.

‘Do you remember it well?’ Eliyya asked.

He bent down to raise the leg of his trousers and uncovered his thin white leg. ‘Look, habibi,’ he said, pointing to the small scar.

‘How were you hit?’ Eliyya asked.

‘I didn’t know I’d been shot until I stood up and tried to walk. That’s when I screamed out in pain and saw the blood dripping down my leg, baba. I was in the back area with the women. I don’t know where that bullet came from…’

‘If you have any pictures from Burj al-Hawa I am prepared to pay you for them. It means a lot to me…’

They all wanted to pay him money. They never believed the money didn’t matter to him.

He hesitated a little, thought about his impending death, about his diabetes, about his wife’s leaving for Canada. What was there to be afraid of? Suddenly he said to Eliyya, ‘Look, baba. My conscience is clear…’ He stood up and grabbed an orange envelope from one of the shelves.

‘All the pictures that customers haven’t come to retrieve I’ve collected here in this envelope. I told myself, “Look, Nishan, the people these pictures belong to paid for them in advance.” I used to take pictures, baba, and take money for them up front. Maybe they would remember to come get them… Some people died and some forgot, but Nishan Davidian has a clear conscience.’

He tossed the orange envelope onto the table.

Nishan’s collection was not limited to pictures that were never picked up by their owners. He had another envelope full of pictures, which he now remembered. He opened it from time to time. Pictures of women, of two pretty girls, Jorge’s pictures, pictures he would surely show someone someday. If anyone came asking about them — Jorge’s relatives, for example — he would give them all of them.

‘Sit down, here, take a look at these pictures. I don’t want any money for them anymore, but be careful. Don’t take pictures that belong to others…’

Eliyya sat down before the envelope like someone sitting down to a feast after a long period of hunger.

Chapter 13

‘The truck is here!’

We had been waiting for the truck since morning. We waited for it, coming and going and shouting all around the quarter and the main street where we expected it to come from. The main street was our boundary, especially in those difficult days.

The moment the truck entered the intersection, we dashed out in front of it and started yelling. We shouted to the bystanders and the neighbours as if we were being chased by fire. We yelled to them to back away so we could direct the driver to the house. The truck was so wide it blocked the road, not leaving any space for pedestrians. It towered high, menacingly.

The porter was standing in the bed of the truck. When he started down the steep hill, the driver poked his head out of the window to shout at us to back away from his wheels because the brakes might not hold out. He shouted over the roar of the motor telling us he knew which house he was going to and didn’t need us to show him the way, but we didn’t pay any attention to his screams and just continued to run in front of him.

‘Where are they going, Mother?’

‘To their quarter…’

‘…’

‘… It looks like they’ve rented a house there.’

‘Do they have relatives where they’re going?’

‘Of course they have relatives. All their relatives are there. I just told you that’s their quarter. Look where all your uncles live, isn’t it here close to us? This is our quarter, and their quarter is up there.’

‘They’re not going to come back here?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’

‘Then why were they living here so far away from their family in the first place?’

‘…’

‘Are they taking the cat with them?’

‘…’

My mother didn’t always answer all of my questions, and I for my part just said whatever came to mind. I didn’t wait for her answers. The cat, which didn’t have a name, trusted me. She was a cute little kitten and I would take her all over the place. I had coaxed her to come to me the night before, as soon as I heard the news they were leaving.

It was rumoured that a messenger had come sent by Abu Jamil, a messenger no one saw, under the cover of darkness most likely. He told Umm Jamil to pack up everything in the house and get ready to move. The next morning Abu Jamil sent them a truck for the furniture. Abu Jamil had found them a house to move into. He had gone there ahead of them, to where they were moving. His relatives — his paternal cousins — helped him in his efforts there. A man was more vulnerable to danger than his wife and children, it seemed. They spirited him away from us, got him out before his wife and children. He left his wife and children exposed to danger for many days while he was kept safe. That was the opposite of my uncle Saeed. He’d taken off with his family the second the mortar rockets started shelling. He stayed away for two days and then came back by himself. He made sure his wife and children were safe first and then came back to the barricade.

I played with the cat for a little while, patted her and picked her up and walked around with her. I closed her eyelids with my fingers and dropped her into a big empty barrel. I tossed some pieces of meat for her to eat and locked her in. Not even her meowing could reach them. They couldn’t find her in the evening and she didn’t turn up in the nearby area, so they asked us. Everyone agreed with the notion that the cat didn’t want to leave the quarter and that was why she had run away. They laughed, then quickly realised they should stifle their laughter. The important thing was the cat made them laugh, so once again they spouted off everything they knew about cats and their intelligence. Good heavens. The talk about feline intelligence extended to mice and from there to dogs, as usual, making a full circle that ended up with Umm Jamil’s neighbours reassuring her that the cat would surely turn up again.

‘We’ll send her to you the moment we catch sight of her. Don’t worry.’

I realised later on that in difficult situations when adults don’t want to get into arguments with each other, they bring up trivial things everyone can agree upon, like stories about animal intelligence, and they pretend to believe them and be amazed by them in order to appease one another. I always noticed that talking about animal matters in our quarter was the quickest way to make peace and avoid a fight.

‘Hey, kids, get out of the way…’

‘God protect us…’

‘The truck’s mirror is going to hit the window. Watch out, watch out…’

‘Do you need some help, Umm Jamil?’

‘Look out for the power line. Don’t sever it.’

‘Stooooooop!’

With his door open and leaning halfway out of the truck, the driver backed up until the rear of the truck was right up against the door to the house. We continued giving him directions all the while. The porter jumped out of the truck. He was advanced in age and moved lightly — a professional porter we’d never seen before. We moved in closer to him. He had a small copper badge on his back with the serial number 64 engraved on it. He was an official porter from the city, from Tripoli.

He went inside the house, disappeared a little and then came back carrying the dining room cabinet. They had emptied it of all the glass dishes and crystal glassware that we always noticed sparkling from the shelves whenever we used to pass by it. We liked to pass back and forth in front of the hutch as much as possible, because we enjoyed playing with our reflections. The mirror on its back wall faced a second mirror hanging next to the cabinet’s door, and so as we passed in front of it our images were reflected infinitely in the mirrors. We never got tired of seeing our never-ending reflections. The porter strapped the cabinet onto his back and secured it over his forehead with a cloth belt he kept with him the whole time that made it easier for him to lift. He set it down in the truck and went back inside the house only to come out carrying a section of the copper bed frame we always used to see along with a green curtain behind there in the master bedroom which, despite our passing by it every day, we’d never seen with the door wide open like that before. Abu Jamil’s house didn’t hold any secrets from us except for that half a doorway’s opening to the bedroom: the husband and wife’s private place.

At that rate, the house would be emptied in less than an hour’s time. The neighbours had all congregated outside their houses, at their doorsteps, or were standing or even sitting on the balconies that overlooked Abu Jamil’s house, or they were crowded out in the open in the middle of the street. They were all watching the departure of Abu Jamil’s family from our quarter and their move into the quarter of our enemies. It didn’t appear that the women had been drawn away from their housework or that the children had suddenly stopped playing that weekend morning in order to watch some kind of accident — the way it sometimes happened when children came running with a ball in their hands and mud up to their knees, or when women came outside with their hands wet from doing laundry because they didn’t have time to dry them, like when our young neighbour went into a fit. That used to happen to our neighbour; all of a sudden he would faint and white foam would come out of his mouth, and we’d hear his mother’s squeals until the neighbours sought the help of someone who could drive him to the hospital.

That fellow who suffered from fits at least once a month was standing there with us, not showing any signs of his illness. We had all been prepared ahead of time, having cleared our schedules the day before in order to watch the spectacle. The lady of the house, Umm Jamil, and her children were standing outside like the rest of us, across the street from their house, watching everything along with us. We were standing there watching them while they watched the porter empty the house of its furniture. And they were watching us, too. Maybe deep down Umm Jamil expected the neighbours to object to their moving at the last minute. Neither she nor the children were wearing the kind of clothes that indicated they were ready to pack up and go. Umm Jamil was wearing her housecoat, the one that always bared her flabby white arms.

The porter worked by himself. No one — none of the young men or the women — lifted a hand to help him. The women’s arms were folded across their chests in grave silence. Every time the porter carried something out on his back, Umm Jamil looked at her neighbours, looked at her friends one woman at a time. She looked directly into their eyes. She wanted them to bear witness to what was happening to her. Some of them even had tears in their eyes, my mother included.

My mother was sad. Umm Jamil and her family’s departure was going to leave a big gap in our quarter. A gap in the sense of a hole no one would fill. She was sad, my mother, because of the young men who’d been killed and sad too because Umm Jamil was her friend and her cousin. Umm Jamil was a member of our family, from the heart of our family. She loved us; she cried tears of blood the day of the Burj al-Hawa incident. Her wailing filled the whole neighbourhood. She tore out her hair. She may have exaggerated her wailing on purpose to protect her husband and children — that’s what some bad-mouths said.

My mother was also sad because of the open area in front of their house. Maybe someone would move in who would want to keep the neighbours out of it. Maybe they would intentionally rent the house to someone they knew was despicable who would fence it in and plant a garden. It was an open area that had been created by the obscure decision to build the house a few metres back from the road, unlike the other houses whose owners made use of every bit of their land and consequently built their houses with the gates opening directly onto the main road. The patch in front of Abu Jamil’s house was the quarter’s only playground. That piece of land belonged to Abu Jamil’s family, but they never acted like they owned it, so it became a playground for everyone. My father always used to say that they could fence it off if they wanted and forbid anyone from passing through it, but they never did.

The residents of the quarter treated it like an extension of the road, a stopping place where Syrian peddlers from Saidnaya spread out their wares. They would rest there, taking a break from those heavy trunks they carried on their backs and travelled around with. Umm Jamil would bring chairs for them and coffee for the neighbours. They would haggle over the prices of shirts and towels and sheets, swearing their prices were fair and insinuating that they were Christians. There were two brothers dressed in baggy black sherwal trousers who would rummage through their goods, making it a tough task to pack everything back up and stuff it into the trunks before heaving them up onto their backs and slowly wending their way to other quarters. In that spot, too, the tall, dark salesman sold icons of the saints even though people said he was a Muslim. In that same patch we used to sit around on moonlit nights and tell each other scary stories until a familiar voice called us in for bed: my mother’s voice.

‘When will it be Fayad’s family’s turn?’ I whispered to her.

She became agitated. It gave her a lump in her throat. She wiped a tear from her eye.

‘Where do you get such ideas from?’ she shouted, covering up her agitation. ‘Who told you that?’

We knew everything. We knew other families would leave our quarter. We knew them and even counted them one by one. And there would be other families, relatives of ours we didn’t know and never saw before, who would pack up all their furniture and come to us, for protection.

‘Uncle Hamid, isn’t he from our family?’

She made light of my question. ‘Be quiet, boy.’

‘Why did Uncle Hamid and his family leave? Why did they leave the quarter and move to Beirut?’

‘…’

‘Why did my cousin Munir stop playing with us before he moved with his family to Beirut?’

She looked at me for the first time and said sharply, ‘I don’t know. Ask your uncle’s wife…’

I knew that my uncle’s wife was a stranger who wore red lipstick and powdered her cheeks, but I didn’t understand why I should ask her why Munir had stopped playing with us.

Each item the porter carried out of the house had its own effect on the people from the quarter who were watching. We all knew Abu Jamil’s house piece by piece. We knew his house because his door was always open, all day long. To us it was like an extension of the road. If we came running away from some stray dog, we would find ourselves, without meaning to, standing on their front steps in search of protection. If we played hide-and-seek outside we would hide in their living room without thinking anything of it. We’d crouch behind the drapes and even ask the family members not to do anything that might give us away. Young and old alike, they all put up with our noise with a smile. When we played war, we proceeded to shoot at each other between the kitchen and the little garden out back where we hunkered down behind the trunk of the loquat tree. We’d go inside the house with all our noise and all the dirt from the road that clung to our shoes. We never heard them complain once.

When the first bicycle appeared, hoisted up on the porter’s shoulder, the boys started talking. We mumbled to each other, uttering something akin to disapproval. It was as though we suddenly realised what we had refused to believe, which was that Abu Jamil’s departure also meant his bicycles would go with him. Abu Jamil was the king of bicycles. He charged a quarter lira for an hour. He had bought the bicycles after he retired from the Sûreté Générale. He was the epitome of orderliness at his job. He was neat and tidy, and was never late to work once. He enjoyed renting out the bicycles, as his wife said. She was a little embarrassed about this occupation of his; she saw it as a big step down from his previous job at the Sûreté Générale. He was fastidious in his care of his bicycles and he knew which kids in the quarter weren’t good drivers, so he wouldn’t allow them to ride them. He advised kids to go slowly and not to over apply the brakes causing them to snap.

We started counting the bicycles out loud. Whenever the porter carried another one out, we’d add it to the total. Seven. Three with straight handlebars, which we called ‘Humber’, and four with bent handlebars, which we called ‘Course’. I preferred the bent ones. I crashed into a man once, but I didn’t tell Abu Jamil. The man didn’t get hurt too badly; I’d caused him to fall to the ground and he swore at me. He cursed my mother and my sister but I didn’t dare swear back at him.

‘Who will move into their house?’

I kept asking my mother without getting an answer. It seems I’d been repeating questions since I was little, series of questions that started with one topic and diverged to no end. The truth was I wanted to know if whoever moved in would also have bicycles to rent to us on holidays.

She slapped my hand to quiet me.

‘My friends said they were going to leave the house open. Is it true?’

We children were especially accustomed to having Abu Jamil around. During the day we’d ride his bicycles, choosing the one with the loud bell, and we’d take on the high hills with our skinny legs only to have our hearts pound out of our chests in fear as we sped downhill. The moment we got out of Abu Jamil’s sight, a friend would hop on the back or the front and we’d take turns steering and split the rental fee. In vain he would warn us not to ride double. He gave me special treatment, though, and only charged me half price, because we were neighbours, as he used to say. Abu Jamil had a special appreciation for neighbours, especially those whose doors were directly across from each other, as was the case with his house and ours. He treated me well, but not in front of my other friends, possibly to prevent them from getting greedy with him. He’d give me back the change at a later time, whenever he happened to run into me by myself or found me playing with the cat at his house. My relationship with the cat had been established way back. When they lost her the night before their departure, some people told them to ask me, since if anyone could find her it would be me.

In the evening Abu Jamil used to wear a robe. He was the first man I’d ever seen in my life wearing a robe. He wore it over his pyjamas. It was a shiny blue satin robe that gave you goose bumps when you touched it. We felt that our fathers and men in general, would be so embarrassed to be caught by surprise wearing their pyjamas by an unexpected visitor that they’d rush to put their clothes back on. Abu Jamil, on the other hand, was just the opposite, like someone who was so proud of his sleepwear that changing into it early — practically as soon as the sun went down — wasn’t enough for him, so he would go on visits close by in the neighbourhood, accepting invitations for coffee for example, wearing that outfit.

The porter continued his work all alone, stopping to take a break and looking around himself with amazement at the crowd of onlookers. Umm Jamil said only one thing, when the dining room table bumped against the doorframe and got scratched.

‘Abu Jamil is going to be upset.’

Abu Jamil’s excessive cleanliness and caution used to irritate us. It irritated the women, too, how he competed with them in their domain. He polished everything in his path. The bicycles’ frames and handlebars shined under his touch. With him around, Umm Jamil never had to pick up a broom or dust the furniture or wash the windows. He was a knowledgeable expert in matters we thought were monopolised by women. My mother would ask him how to pickle tomatoes or how to fix the Singer sewing machine, fully confident he would have all the right answers. Even though he’d been an employee in the Sûreté Générale — true it was an administrative post as he told us once that he used to receive what he called ‘wires’ or reports and hand them over to the officer in charge — despite that, Abu Jamil never woke up to the age of manliness. And he didn’t care about that at all, but rather was quite satisfied with himself the way he was.

He never entered into the age of manliness, but he was from the Rami family. His name was heavy, and it was heavy upon him, too. There was no ignoring it.

We never knew exactly how they knew they had to leave. It was said at first that there was someone who passed by their house the night after the Burj al-Hawa incident. They pronounced it haaditha, meaning ‘incident’. (It really should be haadith in the masculine, though the feminine ending gave it an element of gravity.) Before that there had been the haadith al-tall, or the Tull incident, which also contributed to its seriousness. (Most probably the oral pronunciation of haadith al-tall, which involves bridging the words together with the liaison and sounds like a feminine ending, led to the dropping of the feminine ending from haaditha.) That incident, in which two people were killed though it was never clear by whom, had been the one that started a series of communal confrontations. A fellow who’d been sprayed with at least ten bullets, and was hit by all of them, had survived. The word haaditha at any rate was a careful and mutually acceptable reference to a murder or a fight of some sort. The feminine ending also signified danger. One side should not bear the responsibility for it without the other side, as in a massacre or an ambush, the kind of thing that would be described as a rabita (trap), referring to an action where some armed men would suddenly start spewing gunfire at someone they’d been told was going to travel the road they had rabatu (blocked), or when some armed men lay in wait along a supply route to waylay their adversaries, gunning down the first ‘fat’ prey that passed by. Eventually the incident’s infamy overwhelmed the town where it took place, just like major battles in military history that grew to be known simply by the place name, so that people would say that so-and-so was killed at Burj al-Hawa, signifying that he was one of the fallen victims of that Sunday in the month of June of the year 1957. Or people would date events like a birth or a wedding in terms of before or after Burj al-Hawa, thus transforming the name of a place into the name of a time. And they also say that the incident ‘st’aamit’ ten minutes. No one knows from where that verb is derived, which in this context is a transitive verb, as opposed to its usage as an intransitive verb in the expression ‘the woman ist’aamit’, meaning she got pregnant, after which she would be called ‘mist’eemeh’ throughout the nine months. The incident is condensed here to the period of time during which the gunfire continued without interruption (or beginning specifically with two shots that were followed by a heavy silence, according to the funeral attendees, which in turn was followed by a small blast from a gun said to be a 9-mm, followed by a relatively long silence, and finally an uninterrupted shower of bullets that stopped just as suddenly and was not ensued by any more gunfire — and that, too, was one of the strange things about the incident) between the supporters of the family headmen and their relatives, and in the presence of those headmen. Perhaps the rush of the relatives and their companions to protect the headmen was what led to such a high number of casualties. Some people who tried to come up with a precise figure estimated that the exchange of gunfire had lasted no more than eight minutes or even five, but it was difficult to determine an exact time.

Someone passed by Abu Jamil’s at night to warn them they must move away from there. ‘We won’t be able to protect you,’ they had said. That was how they threatened Abu Jamil. They also told us someone threw a rock at their window and broke the glass — not just once but twice. People also spread the rumour that they found a mark drawn on their door, but we searched for it and never found it. We also looked for the broken glass and didn’t find that either. They were determined to leave, though.

The porter finished piling the things from the house into the truck. He wasn’t able to lift the kibbeh mortar. It was a huge mortar made of sumac-coloured stone.

‘Just leave it there!’ Umm Jamil said.

No one offered to help.

The porter arranged the items from largest to smallest and from sturdiest to most fragile. The only way the people helped him was with their advice: don’t put wood on top of wood, use cushions to separate, that’s not placed well, it might fall out along the way. Moving household furniture required knowledge and skill. The porter worked, following the directions without looking to see which observer was giving them. In similar fashion, the people of the quarter always had a say in the goings on in Abu Jamil’s house. It was like an open-forum discussion of the children’s education, which doctors to choose and Abu Jamil’s early retirement. And on this day, too, the neighbours gave their opinions about their departure.

We were surprised at the way one man could empty out and stuff into that tight space all those items related to eating, drinking coffee, having get-togethers, sleeping, all the women’s whispered intimacies, the evening gatherings on hot summer nights and the children’s clamour that ended only at bedtime, the women’s morning social visits, the radio, the laughter, the tears — all the stuff of life that reverberated in Abu Jamil’s house. The loading was complete, so now the porter worked on securing everything. For the first time, some assistance was required to tie the ropes and pull them tight. He secured the load and sat on top of it, waiting. Now it was his turn to observe us.

Umm Jamil locked all the windows and doors. The driver started the motor. Umm Jamil looked at the neighbours and said, ‘Forgive our shortcomings.’

That was all. But she was thinking, I believe, about a lot of other things she never said. Maybe she was expecting the people of the quarter to hold onto them and never let them go.

The truck slowly made its way out of our narrow roads. We didn’t hop to our feet to direct the driver uphill. We were scattered and now it was behind the truck where the scene was unfolding. Umm Jamil and her children were walking behind the truck, wearing their house clothes and light shoes like they did every day. The truck disappeared around the first bend and they continued following behind. I got away from my mother and ran after them.

‘Don’t go too far!’ our mothers yelled.

We kids ran after them, staying some distance back. Each one had a role to play. They were leaving, never to return, and we were only escorting them. Dalal, who had grown physically but not mentally, joined us. The neighbours out on the balconies and in the middle of the street just stood silently after the truck left and Umm Jamil and her children disappeared around the bend. They stood looking at the closed door.

We followed after them silently. Occasionally Umm Jamil’s children would look back and their mother would admonish them to keep going. When they reached the road leading to the Upper Quarter, that is before they crossed the main road, they all turned to look back at us. Their mother looked at us, too. They turned in our direction. They didn’t wave to us, and they didn’t say a word before continuing on their way. We, in turn, looked at each other and went our separate ways back to our neighbourhood. Only Dalal continued to follow them. She was taken by what was happening and kept following behind the truck until we called to her to come back. She stopped for a moment in the middle of the road, confused, and then turned to head back to our quarter. Despite her massive size, Dalal didn’t know where the boundary of our quarter was and she wasn’t given the same warnings about not crossing the main road, possibly because no one feared she would be exposed to danger because of her naïveté.

The cat was more determined than Dalal. When I went back home, the circle of onlookers had broken up, so I immediately headed for the barrel where I had left the cat. I heard her meowing. She wasn’t dead. I lifted the cover and she jumped up to me, squinting and blinking from the sudden influx of light. She jumped down onto the ground, looked around, prepared herself a little, sniffed in and blew out her breath and started to run, run quickly. I went after her as fast as I could but wasn’t able to catch her. She went down the same road, the road the truck had travelled, the road Umm Jamil and her children had walked. She didn’t stop even for a second in front of the door to their house, didn’t even look in its direction, as if she’d never gone inside it before. She simply turned uphill and reached the main road, even though she had never been as far as the main road before. She crossed it like an arrow, as if it were a road she crossed every day, and then went right where the truck had disappeared with the porter riding on the roof wearing his copper badge, number 64.

Suddenly and with no advance warning, approximately two weeks after the departure of Abu Jamil’s family from the quarter, two men arrived at the door to the vacant house. They fiddled with it a little with a sharp object until it opened. I hurried to tell my mother only to find out that she already knew what was going on. I was surprised and continue to be surprised by the way the news had spread without any fuss. I wanted so badly to ask my mother how she knew that some people were going to come and occupy Abu Jamil’s house.

I later saw Abu Jamil’s new house, over there where they went when they left. I passed by their new house. They liked houses with open spaces in the front. They were sitting on wooden benches, drinking coffee in the early evening, and I got the feeling that they were happy and laughing. I didn’t see Abu Jamil as I passed by. No doubt at that time of day he was making his tour of visits with the neighbours — his new neighbours — wearing his robe and pyjamas. Abu Jamil’s house wasn’t far away in exile somewhere, as I had imagined. In fact, they had found a new life for themselves that didn’t include us and was far away from us. I had thought they would never recover from leaving our quarter and that taking up residence elsewhere would mean days of sadness and longing for us. Actually, I felt a little jealous. I didn’t want Abu Jamil’s family to be happy far away from us. My only consolation was hearing that in his new quarter Abu Jamil had stopped renting out bicycles. He had tried to keep it up but closed shop and sold all his bicycles when one of the children he rented to got into an accident and broke both his legs. I didn’t want Abu Jamil’s family to be happy where they were living, but I didn’t want to admit that I had started to like the people who occupied Abu Jamil’s old house. They kept nightingales in cages and they also drank coffee outside on moonlit nights.

Chapter 14

Another Victim of Blind Vengeance?

From our correspondent in Tripoli:

The body of 41-year-old Jirjis Tanios al-Indari was discovered Friday morning inside his home in Barqa. The criminal investigation unit inspected the scene and determined he had been dead for at least twenty-four hours. The cause of death is yet to be determined, but in view of the current state of affairs in the northern town, ridden with acts of revenge, it appears that Al-Indari may have been the latest victim of the bloody series of events, though he does not belong to any of the major feuding families. An investigation is underway with the hope that this will mark an end to the violence in the centuries-old Lebanese town. The Sada Lubnan team wishes the town a speedy rescue from this ordeal so the rule of law and reason can once again solve the differences between its people.

(Sada Lubnan newspaper, 27 April 1957)

Nishan Hovsep Davidian and his compatriot and competitor Nazaret had inherited the photography profession from their fathers, who brought with them from Istanbul in their hasty and tragic flight to Lebanon. But Jorge — whose real name was Jirjis al-Indari — had returned from distant Montevideo with indoor photography as a hobby. In fact, he told one of the few people he conversed with here that he learned the profession from a German-Jewish photographer who fled to Bolivia to escape Nazi persecution at the end of the 1930s. A small minority in the town today still remembered Jorge — that young man with the sad, long face and hair that was always dishevelled as if whatever he was preoccupied with was much more important than dealing with trivial matters like combing his hair or shaving his beard or bathing. That small minority knew little more about him than his family origins and which of his distant relatives were still alive. He was found dead less than a year after his return. He had returned in 1956, at the height of the problems. He apparently hadn’t heard about them while he was away and they didn’t influence him very much when he came back. The fact was he was found dead, although there wasn’t any blood. He was found in the makeshift studio he had built in a room out in the little garden planted with orange trees, behind the family house that had waited a long time for his return. Jorge refused to carry his camera around in order to take pictures of interested customers as the Armenian photographers did; rather, he waited for customers to come to his room. Some came at first, but sitting in front of the camera was exhausting, like sitting for an artist’s painting, because Jorge would keep going back and forth from the camera lens to the customer countless times, adjusting his posture and other minute details. He constantly advised his subject to sit still, only to tilt his chin for him to the right or to the left with his hand, or brush off whatever was clinging to his jacket, or come at him with a comb and fix a stray strand of hair. The torture of sitting for him so exasperated the people wishing to have their pictures taken that they stopped going to him. And he had returned from Montevideo under circumstances unbeknown to anyone, although in their usual way people liked to speculate about the reasons behind every strange behaviour and said that he had fled from a woman who was in love with him and was out for revenge after he betrayed her. That was why he spent the majority of his time inside that studio of his, where no one saw him except a small group of close neighbours. Rarely did he go outside, even if a blast of gunfire broke out in the nearby streets. It was rumoured that he had committed suicide or that some woman had poisoned him. The notion that he was a womaniser clung to him despite his not appearing to be the romantic or adventurous type at all. Anyway, the people who found him in the studio immediately sent for Nishan Davidian. In the studio, the camera was propped on a tripod and the lighting equipment was all set up and turned on from every side of the little room. After they removed the body, Nishan applied himself to examining the room’s contents. He gathered all the photos he found and put them in a sack.

When he got to the camera, and at this point he found himself unsupervised, he opened it and removed the film. He closed up the room and went back to his shop to develop the film, hoping to discover even one of that strange photographer’s many secrets.

First Nishan examined the pictures that were in Jorge’s sack. Lo and behold, what he found was an extensive collection of pictures of women. Countless portraits. Nishan raised his eyebrows in wonder. Most of them were of a woman by herself, the same woman, and sometimes pictures of two women. Women and fabrics and a bed. The same bed. Why all this waste of film and photo paper, wondered the ever-thrifty Nishan. The women in the pictures were naked, but their nakedness was veiled with fabric — either silk or satin. The pieces of fabric were the same but sometimes the woman would drape them around her breasts, or if her breasts were covered up by her pose, she would toss the fabric over her shoulders with an unaffected coquettishness. No picture was exactly like any of the others. The woman’s pose was always different. There was a variety of poses that were mildly provocative and expressions that wouldn’t offend anyone. The fabric served a variety of purposes. Jorge’s collection seemed to be a series of practice exercises leading to the perfect shot, which of course Nishan Davidian never found. He wondered only if the women who appeared in Jorge al-Indari’s pictures were from their same town or were strangers. Or had he taken the pictures in far-off Montevideo, where Nishan imagined a much freer society in which girls could pose in front of a photographer with a level of ease he felt wasn’t possible here.

The next day Nishan planned to develop the film he had found in Jorge’s camera up on the tripod in the studio. It was clear the man had an odd style and a tendency to waste rolls of film. Nishan was quick to notice that all the photos Jorge shot before he died were nothing but pictures of himself, twenty or more self-portraits of Jorge al-Indari, which were difficult to tell apart on first glance. In all of them he appeared the same way: sitting on a chair and looking directly into the lens — nothing more, nothing less. Nishan realised that Jorge must have set the shutter release and then rushed back to sit for the picture each time.

Nishan looked closely at the pictures and noticed that when he looked at them in the order they were taken, he could see the fatigue on Jorge’s face gradually increase. In photo after photo, his eyes wandered more and more and his facial features tightened as if he were suffering from a gradually worsening pain. Nishan concluded that the young photographer had sensed his impending death and thus tried as best he could to make the final moments of his life last forever, which led the Armenian to further conclude that Jorge either poisoned himself or was poisoned by someone and when he realised he was in the final death throes he decided to photograph his own death. It was an idea that was supported by the fact that in the pictures Jorge was wearing the same clothes he was wearing when they found him dead, and sitting on the same chair, the one he used to invite his customers to sit on.

His relatives divided up the contents of his house amongst themselves. Later, one of them tried to sell the photography equipment to Nishan, but he refused. Not only because he didn’t need it for his work, but because a strange feeling overtook him that he shouldn’t go near Jorge’s belongings; he felt they might be cursed and would rub off on him.

A Bigamist Caught!

Mrs. M.N. formally accused her husband, 54-year-old Mr. S.S., of attempting to marry another woman, in a fraudulent manner and in violation of the personal affairs law for non-Mohammadans. Mrs. M.N. made the accusations before a judge in Tripoli. Court police officers arrested the accused Mr. S.S. in the remote village of Abra, where he had persuaded a priest to lead the ceremony of his marriage to Miss T.F., a young woman twenty-five years his junior. When police arrived, the accused attempted to flee but tripped over the bride’s wedding gown, falling to the ground, right into the hands of the law.

(The Telegraph, 10 October 1959)

No one knew how Shafiq al-Semaani had been able to convince his wife that the reason for his persistent absence from home was to pursue profitable job opportunities. However, people who knew the wife, who was both obstinate and observant, said that there was nothing stopping her from knowing her husband’s true doings, but deep down she loved him and wanted him to stay away from the town out of concern for his life, even if everyone laughed at her for being so naïve. Shafiq cheated on his wife, but she was perfectly content. She was happy whenever he came home and then made it easy for him to take off again. She did his laundry and cooked his meals. In fact, some said she actually seemed proud of her husband’s success with the ladies and always had a smug smile on her face. One could not mistake her pride one time when a woman came up to her at Samih’s Bakery and whispered some advice: to watch her husband. She used to ask about the details of his escapades and wanted to know everything — names, places, how beautiful his lovers were — but she never confronted him about it. Above all else, she didn’t want him to go down the same path as his brother, Farid. Farid Badwi al-Semaani, the Bear Plum, who was versed in every manner of evil. She herself found it hard to believe that they were brothers, except when she looked at her husband’s face and saw the wart on his left cheek. It was in the exact same spot as the one on Farid’s cheek.

Shafiq loved pleasure and loved women and no doubt had discovered the quickest way to their hearts: enjoyment and laughter. He loved his ‘conferences’ as he called them. He had an insatiable appetite for re-enacting the same scenario whenever it was within his means: a banquet at some country restaurant or one with a view of a river or the sea, spread with a colourful, garden-like display of hors d’oeuvres. Food was to be enjoyed with the eyes, as he put it so succinctly, while gazing at all those appetising mezze dishes laid out on the table, waiting for his dinner guests to arrive, a handful of friends, none of them from Barqa. He would arrive at the restaurant before them in order to put his personal finishing touches on the feast.

He chose his friends from distant places, knowing they wouldn’t broadcast his news where he didn’t want it to go. The group would not be complete without the inclusion of some women at the table, even if they were generally much fewer than the men. And these women were unusual. They had loose tongues, smoked hookah pipes and drank arak. Undoubtedly they were of lowly backgrounds, women he alone knew how to coax out of their dens. As a general rule, he also made sure to befriend an oud player with a beautiful voice. He wouldn’t prompt him to start singing until after the spirits had had a chance to go to everyone’s heads a little, at which time he would pull out the oud from its cloth case, hand it to the singer himself and let the party begin.

In reality, despite the presence of waiters at the restaurant, he spent half of the evening standing, unable to refrain from serving his friends. That was the ideal he constantly tried to emulate, every day. Every action he undertook before and after noon, all of his daily activities, could be summarised as one long effort to prepare the table for dinner. And Shafiq got much more enjoyment from watching the others eat than from eating himself. Food was to be seen with the eyes, after all: all those dishes spread out on the table, and all the people eating it, too. He offered little bites to them and invited them to taste the various dishes carefully arranged. Those dinners, even though they took place in restaurants, were never without some dish he had brought himself. He would order the shankleesheh specially from Rahbeh, the village he knew was famous for it, or he would buy some green onions from a seller who planted them behind his house and gave them clean, fresh water. He didn’t care about what was going on in town, but if he was forced to put his two cents in he would say he loved everyone, everyone was his friend, and life was short and should be lived to the fullest.

Nothing muddied the purity of his pleasure except the daily reminder of his brother Farid’s propensity for fighting and guns. He had anticipated hearing the news of his brother’s murder right up until the day it actually reached him while he was on one of those outings of his through the towns of Mount Lebanon. His eyes filled with tears. He said he had been expecting that news for ages. He asked if Farid had suffered and was told he had died instantly, which gave him some solace before he headed home to his family. The killing of his brother Farid was a devastating blow to Shafiq’s life. The call to revenge beckoned him and along he went with his relatives. They tried to block roads and mount ambushes, but weren’t successful, so he started wearing a gun at his waist and justified it by claiming he had been struck. In other words, he’d been struck by the disaster that befell his brother. His carrying a gun was merely a way of showing his agreement with the basic premise of revenge, but actually going down the path that led to it was another matter altogether. He cut himself off from his buddies for about a month, but then little by little went back to his old ways.

It was clear to those close to him that what he was really up to was chasing after women, and all the organised get-togethers were nothing but bait to catch them. Indeed, he was able to achieve some success in that area, more than he had expected. And his record continued to improve despite his advancing age. As he got older his conquests from among the fairer sex were increasingly younger. He did have faults, such as winking to his friends about women in their presence and signalling his ability to lure them into his trap. Similarly, he used a multitude of hand signals and facial gestures suggestive of his indomitable sexual prowess. He was known for pounding his fists rapidly against his chest to express his pressing need to have sex — which he would have done right then and there were it not for the presence of his friends. On the faces of his companions, before whom he put all his sexual ambitions out on display, were tepid smiles feigning belief in his heroic escapades. It would get to the point where he believed them himself and began cornering some young woman and applying his seductions until he coaxed out of her the kind of response he was looking for.

However, one particularly beautiful and realistic country girl laid down the condition, as he pounded his chest with his fists in anticipation, that before she would submit to him he had to marry her. He had kept his personal life hidden from her completely, while she was good at stringing him along with that natural instinct women possess, even those with little schooling. She was much better than him at plotting and scheming. She would let him hold her hand and let his hand stray onto her thigh only to burst suddenly into tears and claim she was being mistreated and men were always trying to take advantage of her innocence. He was just like everyone else, she’d say, interested in getting her now only to turn around and toss her aside later on. He was afraid of losing her, so he began to secretly plot to marry her, making sure to keep the plan from his friends. But eventually the girl talked and the plan fell on the ears of the spy his wife had planted among his friends. His wife had made an agreement with the spy to tell her only things that might put her husband’s life in danger or expose his family to ridicule or harm. And that was exactly what happened. He told her that her husband was going to get married on Sunday in Abra. She arrived right in the middle of the ululations, got out of the taxi, walked up to him and said, ‘Come on home.’ Then she turned to his bride with contempt and said to her, ‘Did you try him out first at least?’

Laying Claim to the Church and the Cemetery

The priest and parish council of the town of Kfarbayda have hired attorney Nasib al-Sawda to file a case in the North District Criminal Court against Mr. F.R., asserting that he counterfeited or aided in the counterfeiting of documents giving him the right to ownership of the plot of land upon which the town’s church — Saint Joseph’s Church of the Epiphany — is built. The plot includes the cemetery behind the church where the townspeople’s remains have rested for hundreds of years. Court documents indicate the defendant is outside Lebanese soil at the present time and has been served with a court summons.

(Al-Nafeer, 12 September 1961)

A thread of poor luck seemed to run through his entire life. In 1956 he almost won the special New Year’s grand prize draw in the Lebanese National Lottery, missing it by just one number. Of course, that was only because the people in charge of the lottery had fixed the results, having rigged them ahead of time in favour of their relatives and other people with whom they would split the winnings. ‘Crooks,’ he used to say, with emphasis and shaking his head like someone who knew what he was talking about. Then there was the time at the roulette table in the casino in Nice, France, where he had been a guest of one of those filthy rich people who enjoyed listening to his stories despite knowing they were a pack of lies, because they benefited from his talent with the ladies. The metal ball jumped onto number 14 after everyone around the table had been certain it had settled on 13; the number he had bet everything on. The only reason it jumped was to prevent him from winning big time.

‘It’s the mafia. They have magnets under the table to make the metal ball land wherever they want. It’s just not written for me to be comfortable…’

What he meant by ‘comfortable’ was being able to accumulate enough money to settle down. In Caracas, Venezuela, at the dog races, the same fate fell upon the animal he’d bet on. The dog had led for the whole race, way ahead of the pack, and then suddenly stopped. When he reached the final stretch, for some reason no one could understand, he stopped and looked behind, as if he were missing his friends and didn’t want to be so far away from them. He lowered his head and rubbed it in the sand while the other dogs sped past him and he ended up finishing last.

‘Who bets on a dog, anyway?’ he would ask himself. At the horse races in Beirut, he would lose on a photo finish.

‘I swear to God the jockey pulled the reins. I saw him with my own eyes.’

Then one day, because he accepted a friend’s invitation for a morning cup of coffee, he was late getting to the estate agent’s and missed the opportunity of a lifetime by fifteen minutes: a piece of land in the Al-Tall area of Tripoli that would have made him and his children’s children rich for generations. He never told of a single success in his entire life. He was just like a gambler who only tells you about his hard luck. Gambling was a losing game.

Nevertheless he lived like a prince, refined and well dressed, a wide gold chain around his neck and an expensive gold watch on his wrist. He went to the dentist regularly, took good care of his fingernails, and was one of the first to dye his hair for fear of inheriting a family tendency to turn grey early. He was terrified of his hair falling out and the possibility of going bald. He never rested from his escapades into God’s wide world. He filled the pages of three passports, which he saved and bound together. He showed them off to everyone, visa after visa, from Costa Rica to Equatorial Guinea. Sometimes he would return to his hometown vanquished, with broken wings, so bankrupt that if he pulled his pockets inside out not a single lira would fall out. He’d sleep at a relative’s who would grudgingly take him in.

But soon enough he would disappear, after catching wind of things he didn’t like to hear, such as ‘The atmosphere in town isn’t clean,’ or ‘God help us from those two days…’ He knew the stories about killing and vendettas would start up again, too. They had been weaned on killing, he said that about them with a certain amount of pity, and then set off again. He would strike up a new plan, head in a new direction, as if he could sniff out money from afar. The moment his friends came into some money, he found out about it. The news of who’d won at gambling or who’d been lucky in the wheat market or selling diamonds would come out, and he would show up at the winner’s door while the money was still fresh. He’d show up with all his stories and his jokes.

‘Did you smell it or something?’ they would ask him, laughing.

He never asked for money, but he always got it. He knew the Lebanese communities by heart, naturally preferring the rich people if they were still in their youth and the gamblers if they were old. He sought the generosity of rich young men looking for women and the foolishness of gamblers, but he spent almost his entire life taking from the rich in return for charm and ladies and giving to the gamblers in return for an obscure form of pleasure only they could give him: the pleasure of losing. Sometimes, though, he would get cut off in exile. He would run out of money all of a sudden after a wild night of uncontrolled drinking and dancing on tables in Santo Domingo or Havana with a brunette capable of seducing the devil. In Cuba, he had fruitlessly tried to pursue an old aunt who was said to have come to the island by mistake on her way to the United States, decided to stay and made a fortune from tobacco farming.

However, he was not lacking in wiliness. He would go to Lima airport, for example, ask for a telephone book and search under ‘K’ for all the ‘Kfourys’, confident that there were members of the Kfoury family in every corner of the world. He wouldn’t hesitate to call one of the numbers which stood out to him, and after a short conversation in which he explained that he’d been forced to leave his hometown suddenly because of the violent events taking place all around him and that some relatives of his had been murdered there in the Burj al-Hawa incident and now revenge killings were being carried out in every nook and cranny. He’d come to the Peruvian capital to escape and now he didn’t know what to do. In fact, he knew well what to do, for he captivated them with his story. But no sooner would he catch a whiff of the palm of his own hand than he would start yearning to play poker again. No one knows how he found his way to those Lebanese who could not be cured of the vice of gambling no matter how far they travelled. He competed with them at tequila drinking and bluffing opponents and forcing them to fold, until one night he got lucky and won all the money on the table. One of them who was from a town near Barqa became furious. After losing all the money he had in his pocket, he pulled out some Lebanese property deeds and asked for their value in cash. Upon inspection he discovered they were very large parcels, so he gave him what he figured was a good percentage of what they were worth. He put them away in his suitcase and nearly forgot all about them, until he was down on his luck again and went back to his hometown. The situation had calmed down and people had gone back about their business. He was penniless again, so he fished out his newly acquired deeds with the intention of selling them and using the money to set off again. He found a buyer willing to buy the deeds without carefully inspecting them, because he had offered them at a very low price. The buyer was afraid he might change his mind so he was quick to pay, requesting that he sign a bill of sale before the notary public to conclude the deal before the transfer of title to its new owner was listed on the real estate ledger. And once again, off he went into God’s wide world.

Chapter 15

Muhsin chose the millstone, the one in the nearby olive press. One day, when the first barricades were being set up, all the neighbourhood boys worked together to push the massive stone out onto the street and set it up as a barricade for him. But Muhsin wouldn’t go near it until all the olive residue was cleaned off of it, that job having been delegated to others so the fighter, who should not have to stoop to such menial tasks, could concentrate on the weapons and the attack. Regardless, when Muhsin later sat behind it throughout the days of the revolution, from April to September of 1958, he wouldn’t stop picking at the little black specks of olive residue and removing them with his pocket knife with its seven blades and seven switches, which he never parted with. He plugged up the hole in the centre of the stone with three small sandbags, leaving one small peephole through which he slid the nose of his long barrel rifle and took aim at the opposing barricade. At first they had given him what they called a ‘Model’ rifle, but he hadn’t warmed to it.

‘It doesn’t scope well,’ he said, without bothering as one might expect to explain this new verb. We had never it heard before and had no idea where he had got it from. It was possible he coined the term when he fired the Model rifle, missed his target and decided to blame it on the rifle.

The day they acquired a long barrel rifle like the one he’d been asking for, they gave it to him and joked, ‘You don’t have any excuses anymore…’

Now his toolkit was complete and all that was left to do was show off his skill. In what resembled a rite of passage, he held the rifle in his hand, raised it vertically to examine its minute details, and fired it into the air before sitting on his chair and sliding the rifle into its peephole. He liked to lean over it at first, with his cheek pressed gently against the metal. He’d shut his left eye and look through the rear sight at the opposing side. At first we thought it was just a practice exercise, a fighter getting a feel for his gun. But he persisted in this training of his, spending long hours and intervals in some obscure operation which bored us to death because it never led to any action. He kept at it while we wondered why on earth Muhsin would aim and aim and never shoot. All we saw was that at the end of all the aiming, he shook his head menacingly, postponing his big deed to a later date, which might be very soon, apparently assuring himself that embracing his rifle for such a long time would not be in vain, even if it had left a pink dent in his right cheek that remained visible for some time.

Muhsin was the millstone hero. We knew that he shared his barricade with his brother, though — Muhsin during the day and Halim at night. Muhsin was our warrior at the front line. We followed him in combat, though from a distance, for we didn’t dare approach where he sat as we believed he was in the line of fire. He handed over the barricade to his brother at eight o’clock — exactly dinner time. Before handing it over he checked every direction through his long barrel rifle, aiming one last time in the direction of the opposing barricades. Just aiming, in his usual boring way. He took his rifle with him, along with his wicker chair and the cushion he put on it to keep his clothes from getting dirty. He never sat down on that chair without brushing off the dust first.

That’s what he did whether he was at the barricade, at home or at the café. He kept his rifle clean, his pants perfectly creased and his shirt collar white as snow. He would send the waiter at the café back to the kitchen with whatever he tried to serve him if he glimpsed the tiniest smear on his water glass or sniffed some odour only the most sensitive nose could detect, like the faint smell of soap lingering on his coffee cup. His brother would take control of the barricade with hardly any exchange of words. Sometimes we happened to witness Halim’s arrival, during the few days when we rebelled against the order to go home early. Muhsin and Halim didn’t exchange a single word. Maybe a quiet grumble that didn’t reach our ears. And neither one received anything from the other. Muhsin would pick up his chair and his rifle and leave without looking back, not even once.

Fighting from behind a barricade generally required standing up, although standing did not suit another fighter in our front — Abu Bashir, who God had made with one leg shorter than the other. It was very difficult for Abu Bashir to stand and aim his gun at the same time, and the story went that one day he burst out in an appeal to his comrades, making a promise to them, saying, ‘Get me a chair and we’ll rake in the casualties!’

His comrades behind the barricade laughed and laughed while the bullets rained down on them in torrents.

Muhsin fought sitting down for a reason we didn’t understand in the beginning. Naturally, we didn’t know much of anything that was going on at first. Years later we read in an old newspaper a statement by an American official saying in so many words that everyone who supported the Baghdad Pact was fighting for freedom in the Middle East and was a hero in the fight against communism. Some were the fighters from our town who sided with the government, that is the very same boys from the Lower Quarter who were so stingy about firing bullets from the long barrel rifles that the government sent them on mule-back, one of whom was Muhsin, standing behind the millstone.

Actually, we had been more interested in our freedom. We roamed the alleys freely after the headmaster locked the gates of the school with a heavy iron chain the moment the violence erupted and left for his hometown far off in the Batroun district. There was no way he could stay among us, being as he was a member of the Socialist Party. A Christian and a socialist! He had been drawn to socialism from reading so many books that corrupted his mind, according to the school doorman, the one with the fingers of his right hand cut off. We never liked school; it amounted to a series of slaps on the hands with the sharp edges of wooden rulers, bitter cold and the French language. In vain we tried to rein in the enunciation of that language’s sounds and avoid falling into the countless traps in dictation.

We followed after the doorman. He used to play cards, holding them in a strange way, using a hand and a half. He enjoyed it more than staying up in the barricades. We rested assured that he was immersed in a game by the effusion of curses and cigarette smoke. We climbed over the wall with ease, stepping on each other’s shoulders, and jumped inside the school grounds. We wrote nasty things with whatever pieces of chalk we could find. We ate the jar of pickled turnips the supervisor forgot in his office and which he had brought from home to curb his hunger during his long hours at work. Our vengeance was flagrant. We stood on the desks and urinated. We tore the grade books to pieces. We erased the records completely, once and for all. We set the pages on fire and flushed them down the toilet. And before leaving, we rang the bell victoriously, the sound causing some of the neighbours to gather around. We went back to the alleys and ran wild on a never-ending vacation that would last until the revolution was over. That’s what I think we liked about the revolution that ended when American Marines landed on the shores of Lebanon. We had hoped, and some of us were certain it would happen, that the revolution would last a long time and expel school from our lives forever.

We inspected the battlefront from barricade to barricade, delivered messages we hadn’t been charged with delivering, congregated close to Muhsin as he sat on his wicker chair behind the millstone. We’d poke our heads out from the alleyway; our chatter would catch his attention. He’d shoo us away and we’d quieten down and disappear, though we stayed right where we were. When he turned the barricade over to his brother at nightfall, we got scared. We worried that the enemies would take advantage of their absence and inattentiveness and launch a surprise attack.

We also worried whenever he rose from his chair — Muhsin that is — even if just for one minute to relieve his balls from being sat on for so long, sliding his hand deep into the right pocket of his baggy pants to move them from one side to the other. And we worried whenever he would put his rifle down, propping it against the millstone, and start slowly slurping his vegetable soup or labniyyeh, the steam rising up from the bowl. He would blow on the spoonful and slurp it up loudly. As long as the food was hot, the noises that came out of Muhsin’s lips and teeth were loud, to the point that we wondered if the people behind the opposing barricade could hear. And maybe they would use the opportunity to shoot at us, while our lead fighter was lapping up his lunch. Katrine always brought Muhsin’s lunch exactly at noon. If she was late, he’d yell to her, ‘Katrine!’ just once, and she’d come running. She’d have to take two trips in order to bring everything he needed — a plate of olives, the salt shaker, the oil decanter and a generous loaf of bread. On the return trip would come the bean and meat stew and the fried eggs. He loved fried eggs and loved to add a squirt of lemon and a dash of red pepper.

He turned over all matters related to the store to his wife so he could go off and fight behind the millstone, about a hundred metres away from his house and his store. Katrine never complained. What use was he, after all, sitting behind the cash register all day long? The man’s presence was always heavy. If a customer asked for some coal, he’d shout, ‘Katrine!’ and along she would come to cater to the customer, because Muhsin refused to dirty his hands with the coal. If someone came to buy kerosene, Muhsin would shout, ‘Katrine!’ because there was no way he was going to allow the smell of kerosene to get on his nice, clean clothes. And if a customer tried to hand him some dirty and wrinkled money, he would look down his nose at him with disgust and ask, ‘Did you give it to the dog to chew on?’ Then he would take the money reluctantly, holding it with his fingertips with total repugnance, and throw it quickly into the drawer as if it carried some kind of contagious disease.

Muhsin wasn’t sick, but he feared humidity and feared the night. They prescribed a woollen girdle for him to wrap around his waist to keep his stomach warm during the hours after midnight when the humidity set in. His brother Halim was younger than him, but he could bear the night and the humidity. During the early days, Muhsin tried to take the night shift. He was the older brother and night was dangerous. They might infiltrate our side at night, and he’d rather be there himself at such a moment. He didn’t want to endanger his younger brother. But he couldn’t bear staying out in the open air. He’d spend the whole night erupting with the air inside his body. He was like an air factory, releasing it from below and burping it from above. Both actions were carried out in the open, for Muhsin didn’t try to — or wasn’t capable of — hiding them. His music could be heard for quite a distance, especially in the silent, jet-black night.

Daytime was boring. At night, it was always advisable for the men on duty behind the barricades to fire warning shots signalling to the enemy we were ready to greet them with gunfire at any time, thus dispelling any ideas they might have of approaching our lines. During the day, not much happened. Maybe an exchange of curses to break the monotony, but that was about it. Usually they were the ones to start it. Our enemies behind the opposing barricades were apparently even more bored than we were from keeping guard so long. The instigator’s voice would come from the three-story building, from behind the sandbags piled up in the openings where the windows had been yanked out. Sometimes the gunfire would grow quiet. They saved the ammunition because it was dear to them and came to them in stingy consignments too. It came to them from Syria. Their weapons were from the East and ours were from the West. They’d put their guns down and start firing curses instead, curses sharp as bullets. The yelling sometimes reached the ears of the enemy and sometimes it didn’t. The space separating the two quarters filled up with curses before grenades and 24x29 machine gun fire drowned out the voices exhausted from long nights of keeping guard and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes.

The man would call to Muhsin by name, and Muhsin knew exactly who it was standing behind the barricade across from him. He’d call Muhsin. He knew Muhsin and it was said they were distant relatives. Muhsin would nod his head to him when he started shouting. Muhsin was gracious to him, as they said. He even smiled a little, but was careful not to answer the call. He would take the dare — their secret contest always began with a dare, a sudden call.

‘Come on out, Muhsin, if you’re a man…’

Then a little later, another voice, ‘Show your head, you coward!’

Muhsin bore the insults against his family and all his descendants, all the way to curses against the saints, but they never dared curse the Virgin whose church stood in the middle of our quarter. They cursed our family’s zaeem, and even attacked our dead. The voices and the intonations varied as they took turns shouting from the opposing barricade, and all the while, Muhsin did not respond. He didn’t respond because he thought they were setting a trap for him. They were trying to pinpoint his location and use his voice to hunt him down. That’s what he thought, or that’s what he claimed, in order to excuse himself for not joining in their chorus. But eventually they discovered his weak spot and used it to fish him out.

When Muhsin heard Katrine’s name his ears perked up as he listened carefully. The mere mention of his wife’s name from across the barricades was a defamation he simply could not put up with. The guard behind the barricade building across from him said he was going to screw Katrine because, ‘You, Muhsin, don’t know how to do it right!’

Muhsin didn’t let him finish. He stood up from his chair, withdrew his rifle from its peephole between the sandbags, stood up unprotected and began shooting in the direction of those who were mocking him. He emptied an entire clip, reloaded a second one and emptied that one, too, before his anger subsided. It was the first time Muhsin broke the rule of firm self-control and the first time we sneaked into his barricade to collect the empty shells that were still hot. He fired bullets at them rather than speaking. He hadn’t responded with words.

When one of his foolish cousins came to him at his barricade behind the millstone at sunset to whisper something in his ear, Muhsin pushed him back a little because he didn’t like whispering and he didn’t like the smell of bad breath. He asked his cousin to speak up because no one was around to hear them. He told Muhsin with a courageous look on his face that they were going to whistle for him outside his house at ten o’clock, right after dinner. He told Muhsin not to eat too much so he could catch up with them without letting anyone know, not even Katrine, and he should bring his gun, four clips, and his rubber-soled shoes that didn’t make any noise, the same shoes he wore to go quail hunting. There would be three men, plus him the fourth, intent on… Here his cousin pointed towards the enemy lines, and then he showed him the way. ‘We’ll break down Abu Sada’s door, enter the sawmill through the window, and from there we’ll turn left.’

Muhsin used the stomach cramps that plagued him at night as an excuse. He said he wasn’t a kid anymore and he might be a hindrance to them, plus it wasn’t useful to have too many people on such a mission. Further, if he was going to have to be killed in battle, he preferred to take his death into his own hands, not have it come as a result of someone else’s mistake. This was a clear indication of his lack of confidence in the people involved in that attack of theirs, perhaps because of their youth and lack of experience in the kind of fighting Muhsin had such intimate knowledge of, though we were never able at the time or later on to figure out how he knew so much about it. What Muhsin didn’t say was that he had a sister, Husneh, who was married to someone on the other side, and maybe he wanted to avoid a confrontation with his brother-in-law or his brother-in-law’s brothers. But he did promise the young men that he would keep guard at his post and wait for their return.

Just after midnight they came back to him. Apparently they hadn’t faced any major difficulties. They told him about the ease with which they advanced and how they found Abu Sada’s door already removed and how when they entered the sawmill the smell of wood was very strong. They heard a moaning sound, so they stiffened up, cocked their guns and told each other to be completely silent. But soon they discovered that in the corner there was a man relieving himself into the pile of sawdust. He was having a bout of constipation and they could hear him encouraging himself to get on with his business. ‘You can do it, son of Naamtallah…’

They knew who he was from his voice and from his name which was very uncommon. He was the butcher from the shop across from the church. He took a deep breath and tried some more, but failed. ‘You’re a coward, Naamtallah,’ he scolded himself.

They waited a long time for him to succeed in moving his bowels. Finally he let out a big sigh and stood to his feet.

‘He wiped his ass with sawdust! Grabbed a handful of sawdust from the floor and wiped his ass with it!’ They told him that jokingly or perhaps they fabricated that detail knowing how sensitive Muhsin was about cleanliness.

He interrupted them, his face full of disgust ever since the part about entering the sawmill. ‘And tomorrow he’ll feed meat to the folks in the Upper Quarter with those hands!’

He laughed and then commanded them decisively, ‘Kill him!’ as if he had been right there in front of him, as if Muhsin wanted him killed as punishment for wiping his ass with sawdust rather than for being an armed member of the enemy lines. And the man wasn’t from an important family, either, just one of the fold, so there wasn’t any compelling reason for Muhsin to show all that excitement. They told him that when they saw the man in that despicable scene none of them attempted to shoot him but rather they just let him go on his way, not wanting to give themselves away for the sake of such a trivial catch. Instead they continued their slow advancement, entered a house deep inside, and came back with a picture of the owner’s father that had been hanging on the wall, as the owner was very proud of his father and his father’s glorious deeds. Now their plan was to let them know what they had done by shouting it and telling the man from one barricade to another that they were going to piss on the picture of his father and if they’d wanted to they could have shot the butcher Naamtallah right in the ass.

Muhsin laughed at their heroics and encouraged them, but he knew deep down that their deeds weren’t going to make any difference in the battle. At any rate, Muhsin didn’t participate in sneak attacks or in ambushes along far-off roads.

Muhsin’s war had its rules, though no one knew from what source he extracted them; for every imaginable combat scenario he had an action and a decisive opinion about what to do. Don’t attack your adversary except when the sun is coming up, the time of deepest sleep. Don’t hit your enemy with just one bullet, because he might still have strategies to kill you. Whoever you are shooting, look them right in the eye…

Despite all that, he nearly killed Father Boulos, none other. After we begged and pleaded with him for a long time, Muhsin agreed to tell us about that incident once, though he avoided talking about his errors. He was amazed that he hadn’t shot him, and when he showed this astonishment of his we felt it would have been better for Muhsin’s reputation if the priest had actually been shot, even if it hadn’t been fatal. Father Boulos had tricked him that day.

The priest called out in a loud voice, announcing his presence whenever he crossed between the two quarters. He was the only one who could move between the two sides. He carried news and letters with him — news of those who died after being shot by the other side, those who died of natural causes, those of their relatives who were sick, and ‘Here’s a hundred liras from your aunt, because they told her you needed some money during these hard times,’ and ‘Tell your nephew to look after himself,’ and secret messages that stayed deep inside the ears into which he deposited them.

That day Father Boulos forgot to announce himself. He was deep in thought, worried. He was anxious and intent on going down to our quarter to inform those concerned that Syria had delivered a cannon ‘to them’, to the other side that is, and that they were assembling it and soon they would start shelling us, and it was impossible to hide from mortar fire. The moment Muhsin detected a shadow appearing around the corner he fired his rifle. Father Boulos was hit by shrapnel from the stone wall Muhsin hit with his bullet. Muhsin had dispassionately fired his rifle, and he didn’t appear very sorry when he realised his mistake, either.

It was true that his front was relatively quiet compared to others, but the six months he spent behind the millstone bore witness, in the middle of the month of July, to an infiltration attempt that forced Muhsin to request help to stop it. He was alert to the slightest movement coming from the opposing side. A dog or cat passing by would wake him up. If water trickled down from somewhere, or if he heard a sound, he’d double his attention for fear of some manoeuvre or ploy. He’d worked out exactly who the men standing guard in the opposing barricades were. He knew them by name and knew them by the sound of the bullets fired from each of their weapons, and by the way they fired their weapons, in a spray of fire or staccato shots. As soon as he heard a gun being fired he could name who’d fired it with total confidence.

During the remaining days, which were very long, Muhsin ‘committed himself’ to his post, as he liked to say, just as composure required a nosy woman who was going around the neighbourhood gossiping and spreading rumours to ‘commit herself’ to her own house. Muhsin didn’t show any signs of boredom. In fact, in his new seat behind the millstone, he appeared ready to stay there until God knows when. And Muhsin didn’t sleep. He worked while we nodded off out of boredom or left him, often to look for some excitement near the other barricades.

Muhsin laid out his plan the first day he took the millstone post, and he waited for exactly three and a half months for his opportunity. He aimed the barrel of his rifle towards the open space that whoever kept watch in the opposing barricade passed in front of, for one second when he entered his post and one second when he left it at the changing of the guards. It was a gap the size of a small window and Muhsin caught sight of them as they crossed quickly in front of it, like shadows flashing by. He waited for the day when one of his enemies would accidentally leave himself exposed even for a few seconds before going inside his barricade. That’s what he told us later on. And that’s what happened at exactly 12:30 on the 10th of August beneath the hot sun just before lunchtime: he fired one bullet from his long barrel rifle and hit his enemy right in the head. Earlier, Muhsin had called to one of us to go and tell Katrine not to bring his lunch that day because he wasn’t hungry. Then he hurried to add in response to what she might say, ‘Tell her I’m not sick…’

Muhsin then turned to us again and ordered us to pull back. His tone was final, which was what made us not obey completely, because we expected something to happen. We disappeared from his sight, but we could still see him. There remained only one mystery: how did he know that his enemy in the barricade in the old three-story building was going to leave himself exposed a few minutes later?

For the first time ever, Muhsin looked around before aiming his rifle. He rested his cheek on the rifle’s neck, hugged the rifle close and peered into the distance. That might have been the longest embrace we ever witnessed between Muhsin and his rifle, more than ten minutes long. Then all of a sudden, without any indication from his body or movement of his head, Muhsin fired a single bullet that pierced the silence encamped there on the front in the middle of that hot summer day. After Muhsin’s shot there wasn’t any response. On the contrary, the silence became more entrenched. A few minutes later we heard screams from a woman on the other side, and so the cries of joy rose up from our side and the bullets began to fall like a rainstorm.

Chapter 16

Now, Kamileh thought, now she could relax. She locked the door and tossed the key up onto the roof. Yusef was dead and Kamileh was now living outside life. Strangely enough, it didn’t seem to her — in the beginning at least, during the weeks following the wake and the burial — that being widowed was going to be pure grief.

From now on, for example, she wouldn’t take a bath until she started to stink, or when Muntaha, the person most often by her side, said something. She wouldn’t change her underwear every day, either, and wouldn’t iron her hair or worry about going grey. And wearing black all the time relieved her from worrying about changing her dresses. Only the black stockings bothered her on those hot days, the way they tore her legs to pieces.

She was going to take a breather to a certain extent, the youngest of her parents’ children, the spoiled one who always got what she wanted. She threw off the weight of the world from her shoulders in one go. She would stop all the cooking and blowing on the fire, stop coring squash and removing hair from her legs, stop bearing pain and visiting doctors, especially gynaecologists. She wouldn’t be spreading her thighs for anyone; her body would retain its integrity, and the big battle wouldn’t have to be fought. Nothing would be wrenched from her and she wouldn’t have to endure the pain of the extraction.

Her life would be smooth, the hours of her days all alike, the normal cycle of December’s cold and summer’s humid heat, from which she would take what she needed and nothing more. After today, she would no longer exert so much effort trying to persuade her husband to have intercourse with her in the hopes of getting pregnant — pleading with him one night, tricking him another night with those attempts at seduction that she was never very good at. She didn’t want anyone entering her anymore. She could stop worrying about having children and making pleas — with her husband and all the saints, too.

His relatives were going to seek revenge. It was incumbent upon them never to forget his death for one second. Their blood couldn’t bear it for very long. They started ambushing roads at night. Three or four of them would get together and then get out of sight. They would get them sooner or later — the brothers of their brothers’ killers or their distant relatives, it didn’t matter.

From now on, Kamileh wouldn’t do a thing and nothing would be demanded of her. She was frustrated at the killers and frustrated at with the ones who had made her marry him in the first place. She was no longer under any obligation to open her door to anyone, no longer obliged to anyone, least of all his relatives. She would be satisfied to sit beside Muntaha, two absent-minded fools sitting on wicker stools in the summer humidity, while a gentle breeze rose up from the nearby river or the smell of eel wafted around near the mute fisherman. She relaxed her body with total abandon and gabbed with Muntaha about everybody’s business. No one escaped their tongues. They accused every woman who wore blusher and make-up of marital infidelity, and anyone who got a new car or new furniture of stealing and cheating. No one passed along the road without getting their share of that pair’s dirty, scrutinising looks and cutting words.

During her time alone she planted flowers on the balcony, flowers for every season. She checked on the progress of those little lives, helped them along and tied their tender skinny branches with strings. She watered them, pruned them and got mad at them if they got lazy. And later Kamileh’s neighbours would insist that, after spending years by herself after Eliyya left for America, she started talking quietly to her flowers without realising it, sometimes encouraging them and other times chastising them.

That was to be her sole project in life. She wouldn’t visit anyone except her mother; those who liked her could come to her. She would sleep through the night without tossing and turning in bed anymore; no more hanging in limbo for hours on end, waiting for her husband to come back from gambling parties he never once took her to and which she had no concept of — except to imagine they were filled with bright lights in spacious, high-ceilinged rooms, swarming with seductive women in black dresses exposing their breasts and backs. They were parties that lasted until dawn, when Yusef would tiptoe back home and timidly open the door, trying not to wake her and have her smell other women on him.

‘He has lots of tough cousins. They will avenge him!’

She wouldn’t remarry, because someone who is murdered remains forever present, hovering like an eagle over his widow’s head until she dies herself. He would remain like a sword over her, even if they avenged him and wreaked havoc for his sake. They’d nudge her to get married, but she wouldn’t do it, and they knew she wouldn’t, and besides, there wasn’t anyone who would come asking for her.

She didn’t want to get married again. She had never wanted to in the first place. They had pushed her into it the moment she showed the slightest interest.

‘Get married, Kamileh. Your sisters are waiting.’

She was the prettiest of them and the youngest, too. Whenever a young suitor came their way, she was the only one he liked. Young men liked her without any effort on her part, while she, on the other hand, tried to keep out of sight. She wasn’t going to get married and wasn’t going to let any of her sisters get married. Then Yusef al-Kfoury came asking for her hand. She warmed to him and they sensed it and didn’t give her any time.

‘They didn’t give me time to love him,’ she said. She loved him later on, loved him very much, and the more her hopes of having children dampened, the stronger she clung to him. They packed up her clothes and sneaked her out the back door so as not to give her mother a chance to protest. Her mother had insisted on marrying off her eldest daughter first. ‘Each one in her turn!’ Kamileh eloped, but her mother got over it in less than a month.

He was shot twice. People said they didn’t even give him a chance to pull out his gun. Someone called him by name, so he turned and they shot him, from more than one gun. They said that whoever called his name to make him turn around was not one of the men who shot him. He left her the house she was living in and nothing more. The family offered her money, gifts from rich people or expatriates, which she politely turned down. She was the only one among those whose husbands were killed at Burj al-Hawa who refused compensation. She didn’t want money in return for him. She would never stop wearing black, would never buy new clothes for herself. She went back to where she always wanted to be, there on her balcony where they could forget all about her as she sat drinking coffee with Muntaha and planted, watered and talked to her flowers. Her body was all her own; it wasn’t anybody’s business and she wasn’t going to demand anything of it either.

However, her life’s détente wasn’t to last very long.

One month, no more.

Then the warning came and she returned to battle. The warning came from her own body, which she had thought was going to rest and allow her to rest, too. She started feeling more and more each day that something was waking up inside her, that her body seemed to be slipping from her. Her period was late. She’d get sudden headaches, every day at nightfall, sudden and severe headaches. She assumed it all had to do with her grief, or at least that’s what everyone said. More and more signs of pregnancy began to appear, but she didn’t want to believe it. She didn’t want it, full stop.

The first one to notice was Yasmeen, her married sister in Beirut. Every time she came to see her she would start with complaints. Her husband never wanted her to come; he’d send her by herself by taxi, and he didn’t want her to bring any of the children. ‘Yasmeen,’ he’d say to her, ‘staying far away from them all is for the best!’ By ‘them all’ he meant the town his wife was born in and all its people.

Yasmeen would retort that her heart filled with joy the moment the taxi went through the Chekka tunnel and she could see the north. She’d roll down the window and suck in a deep breath of air. But then the sorrow would come back to her once she saw her sister Kamileh.

‘Luck is for whores, my sister. It’s all in God’s hands.’

Then Yasmeen would chastise Kamileh to go fix her hair and take better care of her appearance and eat. She’d go on about women their mother’s age who hadn’t yet given up on looking elegant.

It was the cravings that gave Kamileh away. She longed for fruits that weren’t in season, in front of her sister. ‘I want fresh dates, Yasmeen!’

‘What on earth made you think of fresh dates this time of year?’

Yasmeen looked her up and down and after thinking about it a little she asked, ‘Are you pregnant, Kamileh?’

Kamileh laughed sarcastically. She wasn’t pregnant. But what exactly was happening to her?

‘How could I be pregnant?’

‘Why couldn’t you be pregnant, sister?’

Kamileh burst out, ‘Who could I be pregnant from?’

And so Yasmeen screamed in her turn, ‘Your husband… It’s been less than a month since he died hasn’t it?’

Kamileh was lost in thought for a moment.

‘No, no. Not possible.’

‘Tell me, when did you sleep with him? Tell me…’

Kamileh felt a burning sensation in her throat. ‘Saturday night. They killed him on Sunday.’

‘Shall I come stay with you, Kamileh? I’ll go home and get everything in order there and come back tomorrow.’

‘No, you go home,’ Kamileh refused. ‘I don’t need any help.’

A couple days later she threw up, for no reason. It was still morning before breakfast, and she was home alone. That was at the end of July. Weapons started arriving in town on mule-back, smuggled weapons. Strangers who were said to be army officers, camouflaged in civilian clothes, drove the mules. They crossed the river over wooden bridges that had been quickly built for that purpose in an area that was not in plain view. They unloaded the shipment near the flour mill where the men of the family tried out the rifles by shooting at the trunks of some nearby poplar trees. They whistled in amazement every time they went to inspect the marks the bullets made on the trees. People said weapons came from Syria to the other side, too. They arrived from inside the city, from the old souk where the fighters were hunkering down. They would load them up and take them up across the river, too. Before noon, war planes passed by flying low, keeping an eye on both sides, as they said.

Her period was two weeks late. She couldn’t ignore it any longer.

She went to see her mother. It was the first time she had gone out on the main road since her husband died. No, it was the second time in fact, because she took flowers one other time to the place in the almond grove where they had buried them so hastily, in one long row of little mounds of dirt. She brought him a bouquet of red roses and placed it beside his picture. Each little mound of dirt had a picture on top of it. His grave was the third one from the right. She stuck a stem of white lilies into the dirt.

Other Burj al-Hawa widows went out to participate in the elections. They carried posters of candidates and joined in the rallies. They were deliberately chosen as delegates inside the voting precincts; they argued and challenged and ululated and danced with joy and zeal when the election results were being announced.

Kamileh walked like a stranger, wrapped in black, trying to escape all the prying eyes. Evil’s hot wind scorched the roads and rumours were rampant.

‘Saeed al-Rami was killed.’

‘Where?’

‘He was reading the newspaper inside the pharmacy. They came in and killed him.’

‘Who killed him?’

‘Say hello to my brother if you see him there!’ That’s what one of them said just before shooting him in the head.

Everyone fled the scene and he remained there alone for two hours bleeding to death.

Kamileh told her mother what was going on with her. Her mother slapped her in the face for not listening to her from the start, the day they buried the dead. But her mother was not a woman who gave in. She tried to hang on to what was possible.

‘Go straight away, on your way home, hurry to Muntaha’s and have some coffee with her. Tell her about your cravings for dates and that your period is late. And tell her not to tell anyone. That’ll guarantee she’ll spread the word around to all the neighbours. She’s your friend. You know her better than I do.’

Kamileh changed the subject. ‘They killed Saeed al-Rami.’

Her mother didn’t show much dismay.

‘What’s going to happen, Mother?’

‘They’ll kill two in return.’

She turned towards Muntaha’s house. The streets were completely deserted and the tank that had been stationed in the middle of the square for the last month slowly circled around. The soldier who’d been outside its hatch ducked down inside and pulled the door shut. It moved along the road leading to Tripoli, preceded by a small military Jeep leading the way out. They heard on the radio the day before that the army wasn’t going to interfere in family feuds. The army commander was not taking sides. For a month the rumours had been flying, rumours of revenge and fear of what was to come. And all the while Kamileh hadn’t felt a thing.

She sat a bit at Muntaha’s but she didn’t dare tell her. She was afraid people would make fun of her if they thought she was imagining the pregnancy. Muntaha told her they had put up a barricade on the roof of the nuns’ school. They’d piled up sandbags that they watered every morning to make it harder for bullets to penetrate them. She told her that in his sermon after the gospel reading, Father Antonius said, ‘My children, pray many Our Fathers and Hail Marys so God will make us victorious over our enemies.’

She didn’t accept the truth until her belly began to show. Even then she said, ‘Maybe it’s bloated with water.’

‘Water?’

‘I don’t believe I am pregnant, Mother. I don’t believe it… How could that happen? What did you do to me?’

She was going to have a child. Her blood would bubble with joy and then just as quickly her stomach would wrench. She started getting scared. Every rumour she heard scared her, the sound of gunfire set her trembling. She was no longer alone.

‘You’re the object of scorn, Kamileh! You didn’t listen to me. Make them hold their tongues now if you can…’

‘What do I do, Mother?’

‘Don’t do anything. You have to eat well and get plenty of rest… Don’t pay them any attention.’

The news spread and along with it all kinds of talk, behind her back of course.

Then came the questions, heartless questions that lashed at her and gnawed at her. Where did she get it from? Fifteen years without children… her husband dies one minute and she gets pregnant the next, how’s that?

She preferred to hide inside the house, even avoiding the balcony. Only her mother came to visit her — her mother and Muntaha. And her sister Yasmeen whenever she managed to persuade her husband to let her chance it. Her mother brought her everything she needed.

‘Don’t go anywhere. I’ll make sure to get you everything you need.’

And Muntaha brought all the news, what people outside were saying, the neighbours in the area. Muntaha also had news of the fighting. She would come trembling with fear, and one day she came saying, ‘Kamileh, you won’t believe it. They are going to start sending wives back.’

‘Sending wives back?’

‘Yes, yes. I’m worried about my mother,’ Muntaha said. Her mother was an Al-Rami. ‘She’s been hearing things here in the quarter.’

‘Who’s saying it?’

‘I don’t know who, but they’re saying that she’s been relaying information to her family in the Upper Quarter.’

‘What information?’

‘I don’t know, Kamileh. They just say, “She’s been relaying information…”’

‘Does your mother visit her family’s quarter?’

‘Her sin was going there just once after the Burj al-Hawa incident, and they ganged up on her. Now, every time they run into her on the street or pass our house they curse the Rami family and curse their dead. My mother cries and says, “I am one of them, and so are my husband and children. Why are they saying those things to me?”

‘Where will my mother go if they kick her out of her house?’ Muntaha asked Kamileh, pounding her chest with her hand.

Kamileh didn’t answer. Muntaha let out a heavy sigh and raised her arms over her head in despair.

Her due date had come, but Eliyya was late. The army re-entered the town. A delegation consisting of members from both sides was formed and patrolled the streets to ensure the barricades had been lifted. The shooting stopped. The ambushes stopped. The same army commander who hadn’t taken sides was elected President of the Republic. It was what the Americans and Nasser wanted. People started talking about the law of ‘no winners and no losers’. The revolution was over and life went back to normal. Now there wouldn’t be anything to distract them from Kamileh anymore; no more dead and wounded. They would eat her alive.

Eliyya was ten days late. He was a big baby with a big head; he weighed a lot.

He was her life’s dream. A baby boy. Her mother taught her how to hold him, how to cradle his head in her arm. She stayed cooped up with her an entire month, training her in everything she knew. Kamileh’s mother was so wrapped up in worrying about the baby’s health that she didn’t have time to express her utter joy over him. She developed a severe lung infection and Eliyya hadn’t yet succeeded in calling her ‘Taita’ when they took her to the hospital and asked for a priest.

Kamileh had all the necessary equipment — nappies, clothes and even shoes. She had no need to go shopping. She washed his clothes for him and hung them to dry on the balcony — actually on a washing line she put up inside the house.

She was not going to show him in public.

In spite of all that, she was scorched by gossip. They’d all become experts on pregnancy and the lunar month. They made all kinds of calculations, salivating as they did. They besieged her with their calculations, which verified all their original suspicions.

All the talk reached her ears though she hid inside the house. She named him Eliyya after the last saint she had made supplications to. The saints had defeated her. She had thought she’d been released from her debt to them. She had trouble choosing between naming him Yusef after his father or naming him Eliyya. Kamileh was afraid of Saint Elias; his vengeance might be severe and she couldn’t bear that.

If only she could pick him up and fly away — a white swan spreading her immense wings, picking him up by his nappies with her beak as he slept all pink-cheeked and tender, his hands and little legs dangling in mid air. She’d pick him up and fly away to the ends of the earth, to lands where she didn’t know anyone. A voice whose owner she couldn’t see would guide her. A man’s voice like her father’s voice. She, the swan, would set him down from her long beak in a natural nest between two rocks high up in a mountain, far away from all the eyes and all the predators, so she could go out to battle every day and come back to him with food. She would fight with everything she had — her beak, her wings, her legs. She’d be wounded all over but she wouldn’t die. Her enemies were everywhere, in the air, behind the rocks, between the grains of sand and over the waves of the sea. She woke up from her dream to his cries of hunger. She gave him her breast and they both fell deeply back to sleep. The white swan would never return to her after that night.

Eliyya grew up and went to school. He was a skinny boy with a weak constitution and weak eyesight. She accompanied him to class, to the same room her father had removed her from back then. She wanted to know who the boy sitting next him was, wanted to know who his father and mother were.

‘Do not hit him, do you hear?’

The high praise for Eliyya began at the start of his school days. ‘He’s clever,’ the nun in charge of the small children would say. He was top of his class in every subject.

Kamileh forbade him to participate in gym class. She made a special request of the administration to excuse him from athletics.

‘Can’t you see how skinny he is?’ she’d say, looking at him.

Muntaha thought he looked like Kamileh. Kamileh would gaze at him at length without seeing the resemblance.

People’s eyes were quick to attack him. And so were their tongues. As soon as he was able to understand, they began saying things to him. The words were already on their tongues, poised and waiting for someone to hear them.

The words were on women’s tongues especially, spinsters in particular. They attacked little Eliyya on the streets, sought him out. One of them would start asking him questions, with her hand on her hip and her jaw hanging open, ‘Whose son are you, honey?’

He couldn’t understand the woman’s question. It embarrassed him, and he wouldn’t know how to answer.

The woman would smile. She’d ask him his name and he’d answer. Then she’d repeat the first question.

‘Whose son are you, Eliyya?’

He’d look at her with big, wide eyes, not answering. The woman would be satisfied with that. The child’s silence was a confession.

He didn’t tell his mother, but she knew. She knew and kept it buried inside.

Sometimes she would get upset. She’d blow up over a word or a look or nothing at all, pouring out her anger on young and old alike. She began cursing people out loud, on the street, as she walked by. She cursed them for no reason, talked to herself in a loud voice, and clashed with the people who had ruined her life.

Eliyya enjoyed competing, with words and by fighting. One time he and one of his buddies in the quarter were exchanging insults. A bad word here, a curse there, swearing against family and relatives, until Eliyya finally outdid his opponent with a good dose of adjectives. The other boy had no recourse but to pelt him with, ‘Son of Kamileh!’

He tossed it out there in the context of their contest.

‘You pygmy!’ Eliyya exclaimed, full of confidence, his clear proof being the short stature of his opponent.

‘You’re a sicko!’ his opponent said, targeting Eliyya’s leanness and gaunt face. This was fired at Eliyya without any need for proof.

‘Lettuce seller!’ Eliyya spouted off, mocking the occupation of his opponent’s father who was a greengrocer. This was Eliyya’s first venture into that type of exchange.

The insult caught Eliyya’s opponent off guard because Eliyya had now opened the door on fathers, where he had the advantage. Eliyya’s opponent had been disarmed, and he hesitated, not finding a way to respond. He looked around hoping for some help; a young man around twenty years old leaned over and quickly whispered something in his ear. The younger boy squealed with joy as if he’d found some long lost object.

‘Son of Kamileh!’

A short silence followed, broken by laughter that resounded the moment the bystanders understood the meaning of the accusation. Those who understood and those who didn’t all laughed. It was as though Eliyya’s opponent had won the victory on points and deserved acclaim from the audience. Eliyya hesitated. He got flustered for a minute and then he suddenly started throwing rocks at his rival, an indication that words had reached their limit and the only response left was to hurt him directly. When his opponent ran away, Eliyya rushed home, angry and crying. He, too, hadn’t understood exactly what happened, but he felt the sting of the insult when everyone laughed.

From the kitchen and from the balcony, Kamileh constantly tried to watch over Eliyya. She worried what they might do to him and wished he wouldn’t go out into the streets, because he didn’t know what was waiting for him out there. She, on the other hand, did know and expected the worst. Being stabbed with a knife would have been easier for her to bear than his tears. She consoled him and decided then and there to send him to the Sisters of the Holy Cross School. And to anyone who asked her about it she said, ‘I don’t have any others beside him and this is a difficult environment here. He learns all sorts of bad things from them. If I leave him to his own devices he won’t learn anything.’ By which she meant ‘school learning’. She visited him there at his new school twice a week. She cooked for him, fed him, gazed at him. But she didn’t want him to come back home. She couldn’t stand the holidays when the school would send him home to her with his accordion. She’d invent all sorts of reasons for him not to leave the house. But they sought him out and would congregate below the balcony hoping he would join them.

They could say she had no feelings and didn’t miss her son as much as they wanted, just as long as they kept their dirty looks away from her — their dirty looks and nasty tongues. She remembered what her brother-in-law, Yasmeen’s husband, was always saying, ‘Staying far away from all of you is a blessing!’

She sent him far away and remained steadfast and alone. But they didn’t forget and wouldn’t forget even after a hundred years. They never said anything to her face, they didn’t dare, but she got the feeling from their little questions — ‘How’s Eliyya doing? We hear he’s very clever’ — from the way they dragged out the question and curled their lips — ‘Did he find himself a nice girl, your son, huh Kamileh, over there?’ She felt they were still lying in wait for her. And now she didn’t want to undergo the cataract surgery because she didn’t want to see what was in their eyes, what was still in their eyes, because what was in their voices was more than enough for her. Maybe the reason her eyesight weakened was so that she wouldn’t have to see them anymore. She didn’t want to see them and she didn’t want Eliyya to come back home. The further away from her he remained, the easier life was for her and for him. By herself, her head butting against theirs, they couldn’t get the best of her, but she wouldn’t be able to fight them off with him standing next to her.

Chapter 17

Samih was the only man among all those women. In every bakery there was just one man who ran the show and withstood the heat of the oven for them — from the moment the women arrived at the break of dawn with the bread dough in trays up on their heads, until the moment they left just before noon carrying their round loaves with the little bubbles on top that looked so hot and appetising and cried out for nothing but a little olive oil and a dash of salt.

Samih did even better than his father had done and was so talented that the large white bread came to be associated with him by name.

‘This is Samih’s bread for sure,’ they’d say, savouring it.

Samih’s bread came out nice and thin and could be separated into two layers that looked like delicate communion wafers. Samih kept his eye on the fire, turned each loaf over and then took it out of the oven at just the right time. The whole operation hinged on timing. Samih would decide to remove the loaf of bread the moment he started to smell the faint odour of burning that had to occur otherwise the bread would turn out doughy. It was an odour he sensed within seconds of it reaching the bread, in the flash of time between burning, for which he would have to pay the price if it happened, and the appearance of little black spots on the surface of the loaf as it glowed in the fiery oven.

Samih’s bread loaves were baked to perfection. They came out of the oven all round and puffy. Whenever we were on vacation and went with our mothers to the bakery, there was nothing we loved more than to make a little vent in the fat loaves Samih would toss to us; we so enjoyed watching the steam come out as if from a fiery chimney before they began to go limp.

Samih’s eye was always on the flames, and his livelihood, too, was in the flames. His father had known how to disregard the women’s chatter and would say that if he responded even once to what one of the women said, he’d burn something in the oven, without a doubt, as punishment for paying attention to their talk. Samih maintained that same rule; either your eye is here or it’s there.

And the women never stopped talking, as if they didn’t have time for a truce. There was a saying about them that said if one of them fell silent one morning, all the others would think there was something — some sickness or need — behind her silence about which they should worry. She’d be bombarded with questions until she spoke, at which time their anxiety was sure to fade away once she’d joined back in. Most of the talk was generalities, nothing that hurt anyone, a preliminary exercise. The morning would begin with vague homilies about the importance of education these days, even for girls, or something about the sanctity of neighbourly ties, or that a boy belonged to his family whereas a girl belonged to her husband’s family or possibly the opposite of that; then the talk would move on to a specific person, though how he got into their conversation nobody knew. That was when they’d start getting serious. First of all, they’d take a quick look around the table to make sure none of the women sitting there was related to the person. If not, their tongues would be let loose; otherwise they’d choose some other person of no relation to any of the women. Sometimes they’d miscalculate and one of the women would start talking, unaware that the person she was talking about was a distant relative of one of the other women. But there was always someone ready to rescue the situation by changing the subject and bringing up some much more serious matter that drew their attention away from the impending embarrassment.

Samih’s mother also had advised him not to listen to the women and not to let them take advantage of him. His mother died only one month after his father. She was no good at living without him — that’s what the bakery women themselves said, praising her loyalty despite knowing that she didn’t really like them.

Samih was an only child. They left him the bakery and the house which consisted mainly of two rooms. That was everything they owned. The house was connected to the bakery, most likely because Samih’s father or grandfather had decided to section off a portion of the house to turn into a bakery. The heat from the oven penetrated the wall separating the bakery from Samih’s parents’ bedroom. He painted it twice a year but eventually it would start peeling again from the intense heat. Samih had been born in that room and his parents died there in that bedroom propped up against the oven. His parents hadn’t been blessed with any other children. They had a daughter who died of measles while still an infant. Her mother let out a single cry over her and then was silent, and she did the same thing when her husband died. One loud shriek and that was all.

After their deaths, Samih left his parents’ bedroom as it was — a modest closet, two formica beds, and, hanging on the wall, a picture half-eaten by the heat that crept in from the opposite side, of a man with obscure features. His father used to say that the man was his grandfather and that he had travelled to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, leaving behind his young grandmother and his infant father. And he never came back. He went to Tripoli to buy some leather for making shoes, and never came back. No doubt something happened to him — an accident or a fight — that prevented him from returning to his town and compelled him to climb aboard a ship at the city’s seaport.

Samih didn’t touch a thing in the bedroom, not even the bedcovers, until someone told him he should open the window and door and let the sun and air come in from time to time, otherwise the mould and mildew would creep in. The other room and the kitchen were enough for him, along with the small area at the entrance. When he was finished working at the bakery he liked to take a chair and sit out in that area after changing his clothes. People said that from there he would peer into the house of the girl he was in love with, though she had no idea how madly in love with her he was. He would say he was in love with her but all he ever did was sit there on the wicker chair, holding three marbles in his left hand that were bigger than the ones children play with. He’d sit for two or three hours, depending on the length or shortness of the day. He rolled the marbles between his fingers tirelessly, continuously casting glances towards her balcony in case she came out to hang laundry or to glimpse her shadow behind the window pane. It was even said that he stayed there in the Semaani family neighbourhood for her sake…

He revered the words of his father and mother. Women were more wicked than men, his mother told him. They sat inside the bakery in hand-me-down house clothes facing each other in two rows before the low, smooth, stone table. They sat with their legs stretched out in front of them, in attack position, while their hands worked without stopping. Their hands and their tongues, too. A hand would scoop out a lump of dough for kneading. She’d roll it between her hand and the surface of the stone table forming it into a ball, and then she’d dust it with flour and start flattening it out. With the right hand at first, as long as the dough was round and ball-like, then with both hands once it started to flatten into a circle. Finally, the rolling pin would finish and widen what the hands had started. The woman would roll it from the right and from the left and in all directions. She’d make the loaf circular, thin it out a little more and then hand toss it. She’d give it one last look before handing it over to Samih. The women followed his every move. Samih went to the city once and went into a bakery, just out of curiosity. There the bread was made by men only. He didn’t see any trace of a woman. He felt jealous.

Before Samih took on the job of standing in front of the hot oven, he used to socialise with the women, too. His father tried to get him away from the bakery and away from the heat especially. He let him work beside him for a while, but it wasn’t long before his heart went out to him and he suggested Samih try accompanying his uncle. His uncle refurbished mattresses and served his customers in their homes, the exact opposite of a baker. Samih would carry the tools as they went from house to house. The woman of the house would leave the mattress outside the front door or in an open space where he could work on it comfortably. They worked at people’s houses while the men were out working. Samih would open up the mattress or the comforter and his uncle would start pounding the dead cotton, fluffing it up for Samih to stuff back inside and then sew back up again. It was a simple trade, easy to do, and didn’t require anything more than an iron rod, a needle and some thread… and an ability to please women, too.

But Samih went back to the bakery and picked up his father’s bread paddle anew after his death. He only closed the bakery for three days in order to mourn for his father, in loud intermittent sobs, after bearing his coffin, all by himself at the front end while four men carried from behind. He returned the toolbox to his uncle and bid him goodbye saying he was his father’s only child and he didn’t want the bakery to close down. His uncle gave him a look of real pity and said simply, ‘Be careful of your eyes, nephew.’

The bakery was his whole life and he seemed content with it. He was there seven days a week, Sundays the busiest of all. People brought trays of kibbeh to be baked in the oven, bulgur wheat and meat. They brought him trays of kibbeh by the hundreds. It was a long day but very profitable; Samih wouldn’t finish until two o’clock in the afternoon, after which he would relax and enjoy his free time. He’d change his clothes, take a bath (once a week), comb his hair and go out to the main street. He’d head straight for the public water fountain which was about two hundred metres from his house and the bakery. He walked there with his head held high: a new Samih looking at the onlookers as if to lure their glances his way. On this day he was out for a stroll like everyone else, out of the house for no other reason than to be like all the other people. Sometimes it happened that the neighbours or people out walking, heading for that same location, would see him on the road during the middle of the week, going to the store near the spring to buy eggs or yogurt. On those days he’d be dressed in his work clothes, walking in a hurry, looking straight ahead, intent only on getting what he needed and going back home. A quick trip that was nothing more than an extension of his work at the bakery.

But how would he get a feeling for Sunday if he didn’t put on his clean shirt and walk slowly, nearly all the way to the water source, and stop there alone? He didn’t have time to enjoy the company of friends. He stood up straight, in the middle of the sidewalk, not leaning against any wall or tree, trying to occupy an empty space all to himself and not share it with anyone. If some women passed by him, they smiled. There was Samih in his Sunday clothes. They smiled at seeing him out of the bakery, as if he wasn’t qualified to do anything except stand in front of the hot oven making bread. He scrutinised everything that passed along the road, watching every passing thing like an event. There were the American cars or German Mercedes, which had recently grown in number — he followed them with his eyes until they disappeared around the bend; there were the young girls strolling up and down the main road arm in arm whispering and giggling whenever the young men looked their way or made comments; or there was a wedding procession or a bicycle race. He would smile when the leading racer appeared, leaning with all his effort over the handlebars of his bicycle. Samih would come a little closer to the public water fountain where the cyclists in their colourful clothing slowed down to grab bottles of water or sandwiches from the crowd waiting there for them, helping them stay the long course of the race. He knew they would climb the high mountains on those little bicycles of theirs. He waited for the last of the cyclists in the Homenetmen Club race and clapped for him with lots of enthusiasm. He clapped all by himself where no one else was waiting, which made the bystanders laugh as he concluded in a loud voice on his way towards the crowd gathered on the pavement who were also watching the scene:

‘The race is over. You can all go home now!’

When the town split into two, his house ended up being on the enemy side, but he didn’t leave it. They advised him to go to his own clan, as they called it, out of deference to the Bedouin tribes, but he refused. He said, ‘This is my house, the house of my father and my grandfather, and I’m going to stay in it. I didn’t harm anyone and everyone loves me and they’re all my customers.’ He stayed in the house, a mere five hundred metres from the border of his family’s neighbourhood, a stone’s throw away. When the shooting started at the beginning of the tensions, some of his family members would call out to him loud enough to be heard from behind their barricades to make sure he was safe. He was able to hear them clearly but he avoided answering. If he heard a voice calling to him when he was outside his house, he hurried back inside and shut the door behind him. Samih remained on the wrong side of the green line.

It hadn’t come to be called the green line yet. That was a fancy term that was later coined in the Beirut newspapers for the line of battle that divided the capital for two decades and extended from the hills overlooking the city down to the Damascus Highway and all the way to the port. We on the other hand had no name for it, or maybe we hadn’t managed to arrive at a concrete form for the idea of that imaginary line separating the Semaani family neighbourhood, which extended all the way to the southern edge, from the Rami family to the north of the town, though it was drawn there like a protruding line on a relief map. The townspeople all knew about it and knew precisely where it was, where it stretched to, where it took a turn, and where it got lost at some unidentifiable juncture. The green line, as demographics would have it, gave control of the town’s western outlet leading to the city to the Semaani family, while the Rami family controlled the eastern outlet that led to the towns in the elevations above. The coast was theirs and the mountains were ours. But the line became complicated once inside the crowded neighbourhoods and the ancient, damp quarters. It turned upwards around a cluster of houses whose inhabitants stood strong with all their men and guns, extending the Semaani neighbourhood up into the mountains. Or it left behind some deserted areas that stretched between the two quarters and were exposed to the opposing side’s barricades, making it impossible to live there. The important thing was that this line was drawn in the minds of the townspeople, young and old alike. They all knew that if they took ten extra steps in one direction or the other, they moved from one neighbourhood to another. The main road was not the divider; it was much more difficult than that, which was why it was nerve-wracking to clarify the situation to strangers. The line was drawn in stages, in conjunction with the rise in tensions. After the Burj al-Hawa incident, crossing the line remained possible for those who hadn’t been directly involved, but movement started to diminish when the barricades were set up. It seemed as though a deep abyss had come between the two quarters. The problems ended, the commander of the army was elected President of the Republic with the blessing of American special envoy to Lebanon Richard Murphy, and Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, and a national unity government was formed. It sent the army back to the town and the barricades were lifted after eight months during which the green line hadn’t budged an inch.

His name was Samih al-Rami and his parents’ house with its adjoining bakery was in the Semaani family neighbourhood, five hundred metres from the first public senior school for girls, which the green line passed straight through. Neither party was ever able to stay there and set up barricades.

In the beginning he didn’t show any signs of anxiety, as if he depended upon some hidden power that protected him and made him immune to the general danger around him. The Semaani family members themselves, in particular the women, from whom nothing was kept hidden, used to forget he was an Al-Rami. When tensions flared up, the women cursed his family as they rolled out the dough and never expected any response from him. The only thing that bothered him was the voices that called to him from behind the barricades, where the armed men from his family were. Some of the voices, which he recognised, sometimes asked him to leave the Semaani neighbourhood and come to them.

‘They’ll kill you, Samih. They have no conscience and no religion!’

He asked Father Boulos to inform the men of his family over on the other side that he was doing fine, not to worry about him. And he asked him specifically to ask them to please stop calling to him so as not to draw their eyes to him. They stopped asking for him out loud, but there were still people in the nearby Rami family barricades who would sneak forward a few metres, hoping to catch a glimpse of Samih leaving his bakery or entering it and make sure that he was still alive and well.

Not much about Samih’s daily life changed, except for the Sunday stroll, that short strut down to the main road which was no longer the stage for bicyclists with their strange hats and multi-coloured shirts, and which had been abandoned by the young girls and the American and German cars. At the bakery, he stuck closer to the oven than before. He wasn’t just trying to lean away and avoid responding to the women’s talk and what they said about others anymore. Now he shoved his head as far inside the oven as possible so as not to hear the women’s talk at all — especially when news spread of someone from the Semaani family having been killed or even worse, if one of their unarmed young men fell victim to an ambush set for him outside the town. The women didn’t spare anyone from their tongues. Their chatter transformed into prayers for their demise. As a general rule, he didn’t say anything to them, even if one of them looked him straight in the eye and said, ‘Yesterday your cousins robbed Elias al-Rami’s house and then blew it up with dynamite… God damn all their houses!’

Samih would raise his eyes to the heavens in submission, declaring he had nothing to do with whatever was happening. Samih was an only child, his father had been an only child and his grandfather, too. There weren’t any direct relatives to speak of, no paternal cousins from his father’s brother from the Rami family, no sturdy family tree to be drawn up for them. They themselves knew nothing more than the fact that they were from the Rami family. And they didn’t belong to some junior branch. Some even said they hailed directly from the original Rami family.

Samih used to avoid hearing and avoid speaking even more. If he opened his mouth at all, it was to say something about the bread or the dough or to count the loaves which were the bakery’s entitlement — loaves he’d take out of each portion of his clients’ bread dough to sell — because Samih always counted out loud, as if he couldn’t keep track of the numbers unless he called them out. Or maybe he counted noisily in order to make it clear in front of witnesses that he was taking his fair share and not a single loaf more.

It’s possible Samih was convinced that his safety depended on watching his tongue. If he didn’t speak, he’d be safe. That was the idea of ‘the tepid tongue’ — the importance of words and the harmful nature of words that his father taught him. And perhaps his father’s other advice to him not to listen to the women was related to this idea of the neutrality of speech more than it had to do with being careful that the bread or the trays of kibbeh on Sundays didn’t burn inside the oven.

The war broke out and he began watching his movements. He went from the bakery to the house to the shop — he couldn’t do without the shop — reduced his movements to the nearest triangle and nowhere else. And he only went to the shop, which was a bit far and was exposed to people, at dusk, thus limiting the possibility of danger. The shopkeeper was a widow and sometimes he traded bread with her for eggs or goat’s milk yogurt, which he liked to drink cold. He counted the loaves in a loud voice and she counted the eggs as loud as she could, too. Sometimes he’d make a stop at the church.

Samih longed to go to church, but he wasn’t very consistent with his religious duties, especially because the bakery kept him from Sunday mass. He yearned to go to church, and would go inside for a split second, dip his fingers in the holy water, kneel alongside the wall beside the icon of the Virgin with a dark complexion and Indian features, which the donor who funded the building of the church and was an émigré to Mexico insisted be placed in a special spot inside the church. Samih quickly muttered his prayers and got up to leave. He hardly saw a single man during his day, only those who walked past. If he was afraid of anything, he was afraid of the women. And so he concluded that danger would come to him from the women.

But death came to him from the men.

The day one of their well-educated young men was killed, they came.

There were three of them who came along with the victim’s uncle.

They waited outside while the uncle came to the door.

He stood in the doorway, blocking the light from coming in. He had very broad shoulders.

His nephew had been in the Baccalaureate II class at the Frères School, preparing to take the government exams that had been postponed due to the fighting. He spent all his time studying.

‘They killed him with a book in his hands,’ his mother said, mourning him.

Maybe she meant to say figuratively that her son was a student unversed in the language of guns, or maybe he really had been reviewing his lessons out on the balcony where he thought bullets from the other side couldn’t possibly reach him. It seemed as if the Rami family had slipped into places where they could now make out back courtyards and houses whose inhabitants, believing they were out of their bullets’ reach, moved about freely. They would take advantage of them and hunt one of them down. Afterwards, the residents would avoid that exposed location or they’d build a makeshift wall to protect themselves from bullets coming from the opposing barricades.

The uncle was broad-shouldered and had rough features. He hadn’t sent his children to school. His brother had done that, and this had been his reward. He rushed to his brother’s house the moment he heard the news, leaned over his shoulder and said, ‘Didn’t I tell you not to educate your children?’

That was all he said.

As if his nephew’s education had caused his death.

In any case, the sun wouldn’t set on his murder. He swore on his mother’s soul. That’s what the uncle with the rough features said to himself. He grabbed one of his sons — one was plenty — and two fanatic relatives.

They knew about Samih’s presence in the neighbourhood. Everyone in the Semaani family knew of Samih’s presence, but they ignored him, saving him up for a rainy day.

They didn’t start with him. That would be too easy a prey, perhaps. They picked up their rifles, got in a car and hid around the bend. But soon they turned back.

It was more than likely that they didn’t get the chance they wanted. Maybe they waited and waited and no one passed by. They headed for the bakery.

The man stood in the doorway. Rarely did another man besides Samih come to the bakery. Samih didn’t look up. Maybe he thought the man was calling for his wife or some female relative for some urgent matter.

The man didn’t speak and didn’t come inside. He stood in the doorway, blocking the light from outside.

The news of the boy’s murder out on his balcony as he studied his lessons hadn’t spread yet, which is why the women didn’t pay much attention to the fact of the man standing in the doorway.

They kept on rolling and stretching the dough and dusting it with flour, but they stopped talking as a cautionary measure.

The man’s right hand was behind his back. He lowered it and the revolver appeared. It was cocked and ready as it shone in the bright sunlight.

He raised his arm to aim, mumbled some incomprehensible words, and shot three bullets. All three hit Samih, who was not paying attention to what was going on in the bakery doorway. He probably didn’t want to know what was going on.

He was waiting for the right moment to remove the loaf of bread from the oven, waiting for the onset of the burning smell and to see the little black spots appear.

The man said something out loud that the women didn’t hear. The sound of the three bullets exploding into the little bakery deafened their ears.

The man tucked his gun back inside his belt and left — he and his relatives, too. Daylight streamed back into the bakery.

Samih didn’t fall to the ground.

He fell into the chair he always kept beside him.

He sat down with a slight look of rebuke in his eyes, looking at the women, one by one.

Chapter 18

‘Pardon me for receiving you dressed this way. I’ve lived alone many, many years and rarely leave the house. The woman who cleans for me hasn’t come this week. I don’t know where she disappeared to or what I’ll do without her… Come closer, come closer, don’t be shy. I’ll tell you what you what to know. I don’t know who led you to me, but I remember you from a long time ago when you were just a small child running about the quarter and Kamileh would yell to you: “Eliyya!”

‘And you wouldn’t turn to look. I can still hear the sound of her calling to you. “Eliyyaaaaaaa…”

‘I’ll sit here, right here in my spot on the red sofa. I like the feel of the velvet even though it makes you feel even hotter in the summer.

‘Where did you get that picture? I know Davidian. He used to have a studio in the square. And I also know another photographer not many people know named Jorge al-Indari who especially liked to take pictures of women. He took the nicest portrait of me. I still have it. But he died in vague circumstances. Yes, that’s your father. That’s Yusef al-Kfoury. He had a sweet face. I remember how he’d always say to me whenever he saw me, “How are you, son of Al-Aasi?” He was the only one who called me “son of Al-Aasi”.

‘Look. Through that window. Come closer to me. Closer. What do you see there? The grapevine and the rusty roof tiles, right? That’s your house. Maybe you’re not used to seeing it from here. And those are your mother Kamileh’s flowers and her grapevines. People think our house is far from Yusef al-Kfoury’s house, but they’re wrong. Look — it’s less than a stone’s throw away. You are our closest neighbours. But nowadays if we had to go and see you for some reason, we’d have to go all the way down the main road and up around the church. A long way, and frankly I don’t like walking that way. All day long and into the middle of the night during the warm summer nights there are kids everywhere, and they’re rude kids, no respect for anyone. Their mothers are even worse than they are, sitting on low chairs in front of the houses and the shops with their legs and jaws wide open, waiting for anyone to pass so they can say something negative about them. They mock me saying I walk on my tiptoes, but I don’t pay any attention. That’s the way I walk and I’m not going to change it just to please them.

‘In the old days, to go up there we used to cut through the garden between us on foot — along a dirt road at the edge of the garden. It didn’t bother anyone and saved us a lot of time. And actually sometimes on the way up or the way down the path some of us would pick a tangerine or a loquat because we knew that at the end of the season everything would die on the branches in that vacant garden. Then one of those bratty kids told the property owners on us. They were old-time émigrés to Mexico. He wrote them a letter making it sound as if their land here had become a free for all. So these people, who were very rich — people called them the cotton kings — sent after one of their relatives asking him to put up a fence around the garden to stop us from using it as a shortcut.

‘Your mother knows the story. Ask her. At any rate, if anyone made a sound out on your balcony, we could hear it over here perfectly clearly. I used to hear you playing your accordion. You liked French tunes a lot, I remember. If someone as much as coughed on the balcony, we’d hear it. On quiet nights we could hear conversations from there, even if it was just Kamileh talking about everyday matters with Muntaha, her friend ever since the day she moved into the quarter. Sound travels at night. Your balcony was a popular destination for the neighbours. I was happy in the past when I saw them return to your house to congratulate your mother on your arrival. Kamileh wasn’t always such a recluse. Circumstances changed over time, though, and in recent years she’s stayed by herself the majority of the time. She prunes her flowers, waters them, talks to them. Your mother gets mad at the flowers if they droop or start to wilt. She chides them and sometimes she sings to them. We can hear her voice from here singing her mawwaals. We look forward to hearing her sad voice nearly every night.

‘I used to be amazed by her beautiful voice, which was powerful despite her age. But then we found out one day, not too long ago, that she had recorded her voice on a tape. Did you know that? She recorded her voice so she could play it back. All along we’d been listening those nights to the tape recorder. Kamileh acquired a tape recorder before we did, but we bought the radio before you and nearly everyone else in the neighbourhood. You hadn’t been born yet when I started sitting here. My mother used to bring me a cup of coffee every morning to this little table because she knew I’d come here as soon as I got up, to this place where I spent most of my time listening to the radio and smoking cigarettes.

‘I was infatuated with that radio, especially loved listening to Layla Murad and Mohammed Abd al-Wahhab songs. And when radio plays became popular I used to follow them daily, but I didn’t dare raise the volume too high. For years after the Burj al-Hawa incident I didn’t dare raise the volume on the radio. I used to keep the radio right there, in the salon. I think we bought it early on because of my cousin Odette who had joined the radio station chorus in Beirut. They had chosen her to sing a solo. So my mother saved up the money and bought the radio. When it came time for Odette’s song to be broadcast all the neighbours gathered at our house. Her mother and my mother ululated with delight and Odette was sitting there with us, too.

‘That was before all the fighting started, after which they all donned black mourning clothes and even stopped pounding meat for kibbeh in the mortar. That’s when I started being cautious about the volume and only turned it up loud enough to hear the songs when I went into the kitchen. Whenever we heard a knock at the door, we’d quickly turn off the radio before opening the door. We did that for years, even after the fighting was over and people went back to mixing with each other again. We would turn the radio off — that was my job, and my mother would put the dog in the closet in the bedroom so visitors wouldn’t hear him even if he started barking in there. Yes, we used to turn the radio off and close its cloth cover to make it look like we hadn’t touched it in a long time, and we’d hide my white dog. The dog used to sit beside me the whole time I sat here. He’d close his eyes and he’d let out a low bark at any sudden movement nearby. I named him Freddy, but I didn’t dare take him out into the streets. I was afraid the kids would follow me and whistle at me. Those wild bastards.

‘We didn’t allow ourselves to enjoy those songs, especially since we were from the Al-Aasi family. We didn’t want people to think we were happy about what happened. Some people might take it as an excuse to come after us. They wanted us to side with them, but we didn’t want to suffer any harm from them or from anyone else. We were also afraid that your mother, who never left her balcony, would hear the radio. I used to sit here and listen to Asmahan and Layla Murad and dream about the theatre. I was eighteen and had started caring about my appearance: I studied my look. I remember I used to be careful about how I sat and would spend a long time examining the mirror. But despite all my efforts everyone told me that when I walked my right shoulder dipped lower than the left and they accused me of walking on my tiptoes. It’s true I thought I was short, but I wasn’t trying to make myself look taller. During that period I once made it onto the stage. I insisted they give me some small role in the school play and the teacher agreed. He dressed me in a black robe and made me carry a long, metal pitch fork and trained me to walk across the stage from the right side to the left and to say one line: “I am Lucifer, Lord of Hell and God of Gehenna!”

‘I said it twice and stood in my place, refusing to exit off to the other side. I was relishing standing in front of the audience, until the teacher started pulling his hair and screaming at me from behind the curtain to move out of the way. My mother heard him from where she was sitting in the front row seats reserved for the actors’ parents. She stood up in protest and told him in a loud voice to let me stay on the stage a little longer. My father, on the other hand, didn’t like the idea of his son playing the role of Satan, and neither did he like it when they gave me the role of Judas on Holy Thursday. He got angry and told me I was handsome, so why hadn’t they given me the role of Jesus or Saint Peter, for example.

‘What mattered most was my parents’ concern when they noticed my stage fright, as people called it. I was sixteen years old and never went out of the house except to go to the cinema, and I was one of the few who went to see movies at both of the movie theatres in town after each neighbourhood ended up having its own theatre. The rest of the time I just sat here. I spent years sitting here on this same red velvet sofa. I’ve even made a dent in it where I always sat. Look. Sitting and smoking Lucky Strikes, two packs a day, imagining myself before an audience, maintaining a dignified and serious look on my face.

‘They must have told you I am strange. I know what people say about me. Lots of them used to make fun of my gait and didn’t expect me to amount to much. I think they used to whisper about me, call me crazy. They were quick to judge and didn’t accept any appeal for their verdicts. All that matters is that I was constantly on stage. They were right about my being wrapped up in myself.

‘I imagined I was Humphrey Bogart, because someone told me once that I look like him. I insisted on having all my shirts tailored by a particular tailor in Tripoli who always sewed the customer’s initials onto the shirt. I used to ask him to embroider HB on the front, but he wondered about that, knowing my real name, so I resorted to telling him I was having the shirts made for a friend with those initials who happened to have the same shirt measurements. He had no choice but to believe me. I tried to walk the way I imagined Humphrey Bogart walked, and I would stand with the same posture I studied him using in the movie Casablanca. I’d put on a hat like his when I was at home alone and practised speaking like Yusuf Wehbeh, and that was before I’d seen Yusuf Wehbeh in movies. I only knew his voice from radio plays. And I didn’t understand a word Humphrey Bogart said in English, so I mixed Yusuf Wehbeh’s dignified voice with Humphrey Bogart’s manly stance. My mother would come and sit beside me sometimes and ask me lovingly and calmly what I wanted to do with my future and tell me my father was very worried about me to the point of not being able to sleep at night and she was afraid he’d have a heart attack because of me. I didn’t dare tell her what I really wanted, because if I were to tell her my true desire, it would cause health problems not only for my father, but for her, too.

‘My mother was in the middle of broaching the topic of my future with me, what I would do for a living, and all the worrying about it, when we heard a scream followed by a single gunshot. Then there was a wailing sound that began to rise from every corner of the neighbourhood, followed by car horns and the roar of a military tank sounding its siren. After that came the sound of the church bell. We’d become experts at deciphering the various sounds that reached us, and became even better at it during the clashes. We didn’t dare go outside to see what was happening. We preferred to just depend on what we heard to know what was going on. Our house here was isolated, surrounded by gardens. The neighbours you see here to the right built their house only a few years ago. There wasn’t anyone nearby we could call to to find out what was happening except for your mother Kamileh, and we preferred not to bother her because we knew how acerbic her responses could be sometimes, and we just wanted to stay out of it. Your mother is a strong woman. That day screaming sounds reached us from your house, too. Painful screaming. I remember very well my mother saying in a decisive tone, “Yusef al-Kfoury has been killed. That’s the end of his bloodline!”

‘You hadn’t been born yet and we all thought Kamileh would not be blessed with a child. And your uncle never got married and your other uncle was sick, as you know…’

‘How did your mother know Yusef al-Kfoury had been killed?’

‘Kamileh wouldn’t scream like that except over her husband.

‘But when the screaming grew louder and all sorts of sounds kept coming from everywhere, especially the church bells, we knew for sure something very serious had happened.

‘“Lord help us,” my mother said. “There are so many dead!” And I also don’t know what gave my mother the idea that there were so many dead. I wanted to go out but she grabbed me by the hand and told me, “We have nothing to do with what’s happening.”

‘So I asked her, “What is happening?”

‘“Thank God,” she answered. “We are not involved in these problems.”

‘I used to hear about the problems but I didn’t care. After all, like my mother said, we were from a small family, only two Al-Aasi families in the whole town. Us — that is my father, my mother, my brothers, and myself — and Khalil al-Aasi the carpenter and his family. The strange thing was, we didn’t know if we were actually related to them, but because we had the same name we started being friendly with them and they were friendly with us, even if it was just talk and calling each other “cousin”, jokingly imitating the big families. At the same time, though, we kept our distance from them. Khalil al-Aasi’s family was aligned politically with the Ramis, which they had every right to be. They lived in the middle of their quarter after all. But we didn’t want to be lumped in with them and considered to be their relatives and subsequently elicit the enmity of the others. My father told us that the Semaanis made an offer to my grandfather to add Al-Semaani to our family name or to replace the Al-Aasi name with Al-Semaani, but he refused. We spent our whole lives walking a fine line. My mother knew how to walk it well. The first rule was to avoid going out around town during times of danger and tension because shooting at us had no consequences for those doing the shooting and would be classified under the general category of “errors”.

‘“I don’t want you to die as a result of some error…” she used to say. In fact, we grew up with a special temperament. We never gave our opinion about what was happening around us, and we never passed along any news or information or anything we knew to anyone. One of our mother’s rules was, “He who informs you humiliates you.” So we listened but we didn’t speak. We heard sounds and made predictions about what was happening. My father and mother could pinpoint the various sounds — sounds of people’s voices and of gunfire — and could predict what would ensue.’

First, people become uneasy upon hearing ‘deep’ gunfire for a well-known reason — not only is it far off in the distance, but it also doesn’t cause an echo. Thus, it is likely to have been fired directly at its target, which was more than likely to be a person, and the possibility of hearing some bad news after ‘deep’ gunfire was highly likely. Next there was what they called arrasi gunfire, which was gunfire shot into the air, in reference to shots fired in celebration of a wedding ceremony. And there were numerous occasions that called for celebratory gunfire, such as a child passing government exams or the birth of a son after long years of waiting. Someone even made a tape recording of himself shooting his rifle so he could send it to his brother who’d emigrated to Australia where (his brother assumed) he had been deprived of hearing the sound of gunfire. And then there was the unverified claim that Abu Saeed’s neighbours and relatives started shooting into the air one day, refusing to tell the reason for their joy. The secret didn’t come out until days later, thanks to some women who sent out news outside the quarter that Abu Saeed had been experiencing a constant erection and was worried sick about it. He’d consulted numerous doctors and the day it finally ‘slept’ for him, as they say, all his family and neighbours fired their rifles in celebration. And then there was the takleemi or ‘conversational’ gunfire, which is when one spray of fire is answered by another. That wasn’t such a bad sound to hear as it was an indication that the two sides were both ready with their weapons and it was most likely that matters would remain restricted to establishing each side’s presence and wouldn’t lead to casualties. Possibly the worst type of gunshot was that which could not be heard at a distance because it had been shot point blank — in other words at a very short distance from its target, too close to miss. And quite often you would hear people say, ‘I don’t like that gunfire,’ which was usually more a reflection of the bad feeling of whoever said it than something based on tangible information. That objection, which evolved into outright curses, was aimed especially at that kind of single gunshot. It was usually a shot from a rifle that broke the silence of the barricades and set off the confrontation. Even after the events came to an end, no one ever found out whose rifle it was and no one was ever certain from which side it was fired. It appeared both sides believed it came from behind the opposing sides’ barricades.

‘And then there was the problem of echoes. If we were to have a new visitor, for example, everything would be confusing for him, because when there was an echo we knew the sound coming from the east might have been produced on the western side. The thing that confused matters for us most of all was trying to decipher what the explosions and gunshots symbolised, like when the first 60-mm mortar shell fired in the direction of our neighbourhood landed in front of us. My mother saw the smoke rising up from the riverbank. Her eyes popped with shock and my father made a silent decision that we would leave this place.

‘We knew even without going outside that something big had happened. That was a difficult night; no one in the neighbourhood slept at all. From time to time we would hear weeping and there was someone who insisted on tolling the bells at night. Have you ever heard bells tolling at night? A lone cry of suffering reached us, too. They were keeping a vigil over the dead and we were not allowed to leave the house. Even the funeral the next day was something we didn’t dare attend. We were told that the bishop called on everyone to renounce their spite and vengeance and to be tolerant instead, but he was met with jeers of rejection and disapproval and was forced to finish up his sermon quickly. I didn’t sleep at all that night, either. The air was heavy and we knew they were all congregated there, around the church, weeping, even though we couldn’t hear their sobs.

‘The next evening, I turned the radio back on. I couldn’t deprive myself of it for more than one day, but I did move it closer to this red couch right here and I put my ear nearly up against it so I could hear it without letting the sound travel to any other person. It was a very dark night, no moon and no light. I remember I was listening to the Mohammed Abd al-Wahhab song ‘Love and Youth’ when the electricity went out. My mother shouted out, saying that was the last thing we needed on that disastrous day. It was dead silent in the neighbourhood and all through the town, after two days of misery and a long, sleepless night. The time for bodies to go limp had come. The whole town was like a team of runners who’d just finished a gruelling race and were so exhausted they fell to the ground trying to catch their breath. We were the least affected. Though we knew many of the dead, none of them were our relatives. There was Farid Badwi al-Semaani, the tailor, who was a handsome young man my father was always teasing and never responded except with a sly smile. And we knew Yusef al-Kfoury, your poor father. He loved life and loved evening gatherings… and women, too, which Kamileh knew about though she never complained.

‘And so here I was, sitting here, when the electricity went out and the radio stopped singing. What could I do? I sat in the dark, smoking and waiting. It was a rare silence that was only interrupted by the sound of frogs croaking near the river, and total darkness pierced only by the flash of fireflies. I remember listening closely to the silence that night after the day’s noise and heartbreak and weeping. I stayed there that way for more than two hours wishing the calm would last a long time. But suddenly the electricity came back on and in a matter of seconds something occurred that I can never forget. I’ve never told anyone about it, actually, except my mother. And now that my mother is dead, no one but me knows what I saw and I want to tell you about it. I don’t know who sent you to me. I didn’t move from here, from this velvet sofa, the whole time the electricity was out. The only movement I made was to light a match every half hour to light a cigarette. But when the electricity suddenly came back on, I saw a very strange thing, which I will tell you about because it’s been forty years since then.

‘The lights came back on in our house and here in the sitting room, and with the surge of electricity the radio came blaring on, too. It came on very loud despite my having lowered the volume so no one else could hear it but me before the electricity went out. The electricity and the loud blare of Um Kulthum’s voice into the night surprised me. My first reaction was to look towards your house to determine if your mother or anyone there had heard the song. In fact, I did that even before reaching over to turn the volume down. In any case, it all happened in a matter of seconds. The image was stamped in my mind but I didn’t think much of it the moment I saw it because I was so concerned with the radio and the high volume and the shame of it all and what my father might say about my negligence and the scandal of my listening to the radio despite all our fallen neighbours and friends. Once I was able to turn the radio completely off and make sure no one was going to pounce on me and complain because they’d all finally fallen into a deep sleep after two nights of sleeplessness, I went back to my spot here on the red sofa. I noticed in that moment what I had glimpsed happening in your house and was still unfolding before my eyes. I saw Fuad and Butros al-Rami on the balcony, like in the old days. I thought I must be mistaken about the timeframe, that I was witnessing a scene from a long time ago that was still stamped in my memory. You know who Fuad and Butros al-Rami are, right? True they were your father’s closest friends, but how could they be here? They were from the Rami family!

‘We knew Fuad and his brother Butros. They used to have drinks sometimes on the balcony with your father, and Kamileh would bring them mezze. We could smell the grilled meat and hear their laughter from here. Some evenings Fuad al-Rami would persuade Kamileh to sing. Your father would encourage her and she would send out her ataaba and mijana tunes into the night, followed by a shy laugh and a long round of approval.

‘We were told later on that they had come to offer their condolences to Kamileh and that someone had brought them to her under cover of darkness. We weren’t able to hear what they were saying there on the balcony. They were whispering… When the electricity came back on, the light bulb on Kamileh’s balcony lit up. The two men were sitting with your mother and her friend Muntaha. I stayed in my spot on the sofa until morning, until my mother woke up and tugged my shoulder telling me to go sleep in my bed. All the time I sat there, in between nodding off, I would lift my head and look in the direction of your house, and actually I’m no longer certain exactly what time I looked and didn’t see anyone on the balcony anymore.’

Chapter 19

Everyone reached wits’ end as the fighting dragged on.

Yusuf Saeed al-Rami reached his wits’ end, too.

He had been forced to stop ploughing his olive groves and pruning his trees with his rough hands and spraying them with the sprayer he carried on his shoulder. His grove in the lower village of Al-Hariq was exposed to the enemy. Yusuf had received a warning from one of his old friends, a childhood friend, though childhood was a very long time ago now that Yusuf was almost seventy. His friend sent him the news secretly with Father Boulos, which was to tell Yusuf that the last time he went to look after his olive trees his enemies spotted him from behind the barricade set up on the roof of the monastery, and next time he wouldn’t be able to escape their bullets.

‘They’ll kill you, Yusuf,’ Father Boulos told him. ‘Stop going up to Al-Hariq. You all have suffered enough.’

His enemies were waiting for a new German rifle with a telescope to arrive any day.

Yusuf didn’t have anything left in the world except that olive grove.

He was at odds with his neighbours and his relatives. They didn’t like him and he didn’t like them. He started throwing stones at them one day because of how much they mocked him. He’d pass by them without greeting any of them. And he was at odds with his wife Salimeh and with his five sons — four of whom he still had and one who’d been hit. They never asked for his opinion and he never offered one. They ate without inviting him for lunch. They died and didn’t ask him anything. Their mother was in charge of them.

He had planned to build a room for himself in the olive orchard where he could sleep and get away from Salimeh. He hadn’t had any friends for a long time. His old friend in the Lower Quarter, who sent him the warning about the German rifle with the telescope, was connected to Yusuf more by the memory of their friendship than by the friendship itself.

He used to go to Al-Hariq in order to flee the house and the neighbourhood. He’d stay there until nightfall, battling the thorns and building a stone border he had no need for, by himself, with his own hands — just to avoid going home too early.

And now here he was stuck at home. He was too old to fight and didn’t want to fight, either. He counted the days until he could go back to the olive orchard.

Salimeh al-Hamati, his wife, had also reached her wits’ end.

She showed disdain for anyone who weakened, gathered and collected information about them, and publicised it in a loud voice wherever she went. She wasn’t afraid of anyone. ‘So-and-so’s wife took him to her family’s town so he could hide there under her skirt. What a pity of a man! So-and-so sold two boxes of ammunition instead of using them in battle so he could put the money in his pocket. So-and-so claims he’s sick every time they ask him to join the fight.’

She lashed at everyone with that tongue of hers, starting with her own ‘strong-armed’ relatives and her husband’s relatives. She blasted them with the harshest words, right to their faces if she saw them, whenever she found they were preparing to flee with their children to safer places.

‘Their children are in school,’ she’d say, ‘and they don’t want them to lose a single year of their life while our children are here in the barricades defending their honour.’

Her children’s job was to fill the sandbags with sand. They piled them up on the rooftops and watered them so they would be impenetrable to the bullets. Then they poured all the gunfire and curses they had over those sandbags.

For others, those were carefree and comfortable days, but for them, they were days of war.

People called them ‘Salimeh’s boys’.

There were five brothers: Hashim, Saeed who they called ‘Abu Ali’, Francis, Shakir (‘Abu Layla’) and DeGaulle. One of them — Saeed — had been killed in the early battles. He might have been the first casualty of the war of the barricades. A grenade he was holding and inspecting before throwing it at the enemy exploded in his hands. Another one of her sons was wounded, too — DeGaulle, the youngest. He was shot in the back and the injury left him crippled. Every day around noon he would leave his barricade to get lunch from the house and take it to his brothers. No doubt they had been lying in wait for him when they spotted him. They shot one bullet at him, from a longbarrel rifle; the shot came from Muhsin al-Semaani’s barricade, which was directly across from theirs. Muhsin al-Semaani was Husneh’s brother. Her day would come. Salimeh watched her son DeGaulle as he tried to get to the bathroom, tripping on his way. She called out to one of his brothers to help him. They had promised to get a wheelchair for him, but wheelchairs were very expensive. In the meantime, DeGaulle just lay there in front of her, flat on his back.

She pounded her chest and called for evil to befall whoever had shot him, prayed for whoever it had been to be paralysed by a stroke and live a long, long time.

They reached their wits’ end as the fighting went on and on… and they still wanted more… Until one day at the end of September, when a man stood in the doorway of the cobbler shop and asked, ‘Where’s Husneh?’

The man was one of those men who fought alongside Salimeh’s boys. He posed the question to all of us, all four of us sitting in chairs there in the store. Two of us were working — Abboud, the store owner, and myself, and the other two were regulars who were used to spending some of their time there in the mornings. Like us, they were no good at fighting or barricades. My father had wanted me to learn the trade young, and the fact of my young age also allowed him to say I wasn’t qualified for battle. Abboud used to look after me. He would let me do the gluing and the pounding of nails in the beginning, but he wanted me beside him at all times for another reason, too, which was to relate to him what the others were saying. I was his ears. We were in the middle of exchanging bits of conversation and the previous night’s news when the man appeared. Because the battles usually flared up at night and quietened down in the morning, the fighters slept during the day.

The others didn’t know the man who asked us the question, and I didn’t know him either. But it wouldn’t have been appropriate to ask who he was. As usual, I repeated the question in a loud voice into Abboud’s ear. ‘Where is Husneh?’

Husneh was his wife. I had just seen her a few minutes earlier carrying a bag of vegetables on her way into the house in the back of the store, but I decided to let her husband answer in whatever way he wanted to.

‘She’s inside.’ He was answering without raising his head from the piece of leather he was working with, believing I was the one asking about Husneh. When he noticed the man standing in the doorway holding a rifle, he stopped cutting and sewing the pieces of leather.

Everyone knew Husneh, to the point that people used to call Abboud ‘Abboud Husneh’ after his wife. They called him that when he wasn’t around and sometimes in front of him, too, since they thought he couldn’t hear. Husneh made all the decisions about everything — the house, the children, and she even categorised the customers according to who could be trusted to pay later and who couldn’t. All she lacked was to give advice about how to make shoes, too.

‘What’s Husneh doing?’ the armed man asked. The two guests of the cobbler shop exchanged glances with each other. I shouted into the ear of Abboud who was looking perplexedly at the source of that question. Abboud was going to be the first man ever to be asked by a stranger, ‘What’s your wife doing?’

Those were difficult times. Little kids carried weapons as did some strangers, too. Abboud felt he had to answer, so he faced me and said, ‘I don’t know, maybe she’s nursing the baby.’

He said it somewhat sharply, surrendering to the strangeness of the question. Abboud had said it loud enough that I didn’t have to repeat it for the man holding the rifle. Actually, the man with the rifle strapped to his shoulder looked like he was going quail hunting up on Amiriyya hill at sunset. He seemed to have stopped in at the cobbler shop on his way, the way lots of people stopped in every day, to order some shoes or just to join the open forum. He seemed to be asking just to ask. The deaf Abboud answered him, so he didn’t make a move and didn’t ask the next question.

Abboud stopped what he was doing, waiting for the next question. He might have thought the man added something that he hadn’t been able to hear, so he looked at me inquisitively but I gave him a blank look. The man didn’t look like he’d asked anything and was waiting for a reply. He was waiting for something else. He turned his back to the shop and looked towards the deserted main street. Perhaps he was unsure what his next step should be.

In his hand was a list of names. Women’s names. He looked at it as if he detested the mission he had been given. Husneh’s name was at the top of the list. The rifleman smiled and bared his teeth when he read it and showed it to us: Husneh, wife of Abboud Husneh.

I don’t think she was nursing the baby at that time, but rather was planning lunch. Seven people plus me. They fed me with them sometimes, especially during those days of fighting so I wouldn’t move around too much by going home at noon and then coming back to the cobbler shop. That would have been an unnecessary risk. She made good food, Husneh, and I’d guess in the end she would choose the easiest solution: lentils, chickpea kibbeh and fried onions and potatoes. It was Friday. Before the fighting started she used to buy fish on Fridays, but the fish sellers stopped bringing baskets of fresh fish up from Al-Mina in Tripoli.

Whenever Abboud was asked about Husneh he said she was nursing the baby, as if the baby never stopped nursing, or maybe that was what he hoped so that the baby would grow quickly. The baby wasn’t yet four months old, but Abboud was bent on forbidding his wife from weaning him until he could walk, so he could walk over and nurse on his mother’s breast, go run off and play with his friends and come back again to his mother’s breast. His mother told him he had done the same thing when he was a child.

He named his son Raouf.

He was Abboud’s first son… and last, too, most likely, after four daughters. The day they rushed to bring him the news, Abboud knocked at his neighbour’s door and asked if he could borrow his rifle. He fired seven shots and then returned it.

Abboud couldn’t hear the child if he cried, but he certainly was able to dole out orders incessantly to his two oldest daughters and their mother.

‘Pick him up!’

‘Take him outside a little, let him get some sunshine.’

‘Change his nappies…’

Abboud was a boring pest, a parasite. He could never look at his only son without finding something that needed to be done for him. He behaved like a tough guy around the house, but now in his shop he just sat there on his cobbler’s chair not moving an inch. He didn’t do anything about the armed man standing there in his doorway asking about his wife.

He hid behind his deafness. Abboud was completely deaf or nearly so and possibly the most famous deaf man in town. He was persuaded to use a hearing aid only after I stopped working at his shop and opened my own. Just a few years before he died he had finally agreed to using a hearing aid, but it irritated him quite a bit with all the sudden buzzing and whistling sounds it made, so he would only put up with it for a few minutes, preferring instead the quietness and isolation of deafness he’d grown accustomed to.

In spite of all that, people accused him of only hearing what he wanted to hear. That was his reputation at least, and I thought they were right. They used to test him, too. They’d curse at him in a very soft voice and he’d retaliate with a harsher curse. Even though he couldn’t hear them when they spoke, he could always tell when they were cursing him. From merely noticing the semblance of a smile on my face he knew whoever was standing there talking to him was mocking him and so he’d respond however he saw fit in order to defend himself.

All of a sudden, the man holding the rifle turned back around toward the door of the shop and said, ‘We need her!’ He said it while pointing to an unspecified place off to the east. In other words, he wasn’t the one who needed her, they did, them over there.

This time Abboud heard even though the man hadn’t raised his voice any higher than before. I didn’t have to shout in his ear.

The armed man didn’t get animated. It was more like he was confused by his own actions.

It was more than likely he’d been told that the women on his list were sending messages to their relatives in the Lower Quarter and were leading the enemy to us, that the women were spies in our midst that we must get rid of.

A lot of time passed while he stood there with his back to the shop absent-mindedly looking off into the horizon, his view blocked by a dilapidated house and some fallow land. We resumed our conversation.

Abboud’s shop was the place where the townspeople assembled for the final word on the talk of the town. Whenever anyone heard anything, he would come to the shop to have it confirmed. And anyone who had an opinion to express came to the shop to make it known. We often ran out of chairs, leaving some people to remain standing.

The situation was going to last a long time, they were saying. The headline of the newspaper tossed onto one of the chairs said that the search for solutions was getting closer.

The Americans were participating in the solution. Ever since that point in history the Americans have been behind much of what goes on in this country. Camille Chamoun wasn’t going to succeed in his bid for a term extension. They commander of the army was mentioned as a possible successor.

Abboud resumed his work, poring over the shoe in his hand once again.

He signalled for me to go back to driving the thin nails into the circle of leather.

We used to talk politics or the news of the night before, whether it had been a harsh one or calm one. The topic of weapons cropped up suddenly, as it did every time. Everyone was an expert on guns, even people like us in Abboud’s cobbler shop who were unable to fight.

There was praise for the semi-automatic rifle, which shot only one bullet at a time. But there was no substitute for it for long range and for high-precision targets. It could penetrate the trunk of a poplar tree.

There was praise for the Mauser rifle, though it was still new to them and they were only beginning to discover its merits.

There was praise for the 12-caliber revolver, their idol.

There was praise for weapons of all kinds.

Suddenly the man came closer to the door and stepped inside; the talk about guns came to a halt. He began right away, with no introductions and in a loud voice this time, like someone trying to be heard by a deaf man, counting off all of Husneh’s offences. He addressed Abboud, knowing exactly how high he should raise his voice — high enough to render me unnecessary. As stingy as he had been with his words when he first arrived, now he was running his mouth off to no end. Having that rifle on his shoulder gave him superiority over us — we who’d had enough of counting the dead and wounded and sought the cover of walls just to get home.

‘Husneh has been making secret visits to her family or has somehow been sending them messages. In any case, her brother Muhsin is hurting us a lot. Abu Haroun’s wife Khadra was killed from the direction of his barricade, and DeGaulle al-Rami was shot in the back from there…’

‘Come on, man, use your head…’ one of the people sitting in the shop interjected. ‘The woman just had a baby. She’s overjoyed with her new son. How in the world would she go down to the Lower Quarter and leave her nursing infant behind?’

Abboud didn’t respond. His eyes widened as he began to understand why the man had asked about Husneh a little earlier.

‘She sneaked information to her brother about where we were keeping the 60-mm mortar cannon and he blabbed to everyone else. We noticed they started shooting heavily at that spot, so we were forced to change the location, which changed the coordinates, and now we are having trouble hitting our targets.’

‘Who told you such lies? He should have his tongue cut off…’

All of a sudden Husneh appeared. She had been listening to everything from the room in the back of the shop. The whole house consisted of just two rooms. She wasn’t holding the baby. She’d given him to her eldest daughter. The visitor at the shop spoke again.

‘Be reasonable, now. This is dangerous business. We can’t go around accusing one another. Husneh is one of us now. What name do her children carry? Shame on you.’

Abboud took refuge in his total deafness once again, no longer hearing anything even though everyone was speaking loudly.

‘One of our women told us,’ the armed man said. ‘One of our women who is married into the Lower Quarter. We too have our informants. Blood cannot become water.’

Abboud looked to me for help even though I felt he was hearing everything. I could tell from the agitation that appeared on his face when he heard the man’s mounting criticism of Husneh. The voices intermingled.

‘The best solution would be for you to go to your family and stay there with them.’ The man had finally come out with the true objective of his mission.

Even with my voice so close to Abboud’s ear, it wasn’t reaching him. Abboud was unable to hear any more.

‘We won’t allow you to stay here,’ the man continued amidst protests. ‘I came against my will to tell you this calmly.’

‘And if she refuses to leave her house?’ asked Abboud, finally daring to say something. He stood up from his chair with his eyes wide open and his cobbler’s apron smeared with the stains of his profession.

‘Someone else will come and take her by force. I don’t draw weapons on women.’

Abboud heard, not wanting to understand, cowering behind his deafness. ‘Where are you going to take her? What kind of outrage is this?’

They were planning to gather all the Semaani family women who had married into our neighbourhood and put them in Aziz al-Rami’s house. There were around twenty or more such women. It was possible they would turn them over to Father Boulos who would then escort them to the Lower Quarter. We imagined the scene as we sat there in the cobbler shop: Father Boulos leading the women, crossing over the green line with them before they went their separate ways to their families’ houses. And then he’d return with the Rami family women from the Lower Quarter.

‘If that’s the way it is, you don’t want me here, then I’ll go…’ Husneh said.

Husneh had heard all kinds of talk. It wasn’t the fact that she was a Semaani that bothered them; it was her brother they had to take into consideration. He was fighting right across from them, bullet for bullet, ploy for ploy.

‘Yes. I’ll go to my family.’

I didn’t try to tell Abboud what was being said because I was sure he knew. But Husneh, to make certain, bent into his ear and shouted so he could hear. ‘I am going to my family’s house, Abboud…’

Actually, she no longer had a family. Her whole family was her brother Muhsin.

‘In any case,’ she added not as loudly, to spite us and the armed man standing in the doorway, ‘the closer I get to the Lower Quarter the more my heart fills with joy…’ That was her way of taking revenge.

Suddenly three armed men arrived to provide backup for their comrade. Those men we knew. They were Salimeh’s boys — Hashem and his brothers Francis and Abu Layla. They’d been charged with a serious mission and had scowls on their faces. They paid no attention to us. It was clear that we were not going to be able to ward them off.

‘Where’s Husneh? Hurry up. Father Boulos wants to leave before noon…’

They caught sight of her inside.

‘If my own mother Salimeh were one of them, I’d send her,’ one of them said in turn to justify what was going on. He continued, speaking to Abboud, ‘War is war, Abboud… It’s either us or them.’

Husneh didn’t say anything. She just turned around and went inside the room at the back of the shop. Abboud stood up. It was the second time he stood up wearing his soiled apron. He rushed into the room at the back of the shop. He hadn’t tried to discuss things with Salimeh’s son Hashem; he had surrendered to the decision. Now he had to try to salvage whatever he could.

‘No. You’re not taking the boy with you…’

‘Who’s going to nurse him? You?’

‘You’re not taking him with you. I don’t have another son.’ He was resolute.

The little girls started to cry. The cobbler shop guests and I followed him inside. The oldest daughter was holding Raouf, unsure who to give him to, so she too began to cry. The baby followed suit.

Abboud was like a child who couldn’t be persuaded to let go of what he was holding onto. I don’t know why Husneh suddenly tied her kerchief over her hair and walked out of the room towards the shop. She had decided to go alone. We all followed her. We couldn’t believe she was going to leave just like that.

Salimeh’s boys were standing waiting for her next to a Mercedes taxi. She opened the door to get into the car, then turned towards us and said to her daughter, ‘Remove the lentils and green beans from the stove before they burn and peel some radishes for your father. He likes radishes with lentils and green beans. The meatless kibbeh is ready in the oven. Change your brother’s nappy. He stinks. And don’t forget to feed Bashir. Don’t let him go home. He might run into danger along the way. His mother asked me to look after him…’

Bashir… that was me.

Still they weren’t satisfied.

Salimeh’s son Hashem wasn’t satisfied with spraying bullets out of his 24x29 light machine gun, which he had taken by force. The shots he fired would fly into empty space. He’d shoot the gun for no reason, just to establish his presence, as he sometimes said. The only approval he got came from the little kids who’d gather around to pick up the empty cartridges while they were still hot.

He wasn’t satisfied, so he revived the idea of a catapult. Something to cause more damage.

At first he and his brother Francis went looking for some discarded tires. Tires from broken down cars. They removed the inner tube, cut it into long sections and carefully bound them onto a fork of wood like a huge slingshot. They secured it up on one of the rooftops and shouted to everyone to back away. People made futile attempts to stop them.

Hashem launched a hand grenade from it, which exploded in the air on its way to the Lower Quarter. Over on the other side it caused more noise and rumours than anything else.

When they got the 60-mm mortar cannon and along with it an officer — a stranger it was said — to train them how to use it, Hashem was the first conscript. He learned quickly. When the time came to execute, Hashem suggested they wait until people were coming out of the ten-thirty mass on Sunday, the most crowded mass. He volunteered to monitor them on their way into the church. They fired on them on their way out. Hashem was standing behind the cannon, but the shell went too far and landed on the riverbank, setting some dry reeds on fire and hitting a fisherman in the leg.

Hashem got frustrated and started firing the rocket launcher at random targets and at random times of the day and night. He managed to kill some women and children, according to news reports from the Lower Quarter.

But they still weren’t satisfied.

Salimeh’s boys organised two nighttime operations. They amassed their troops and moved stealthily towards the opposing barricades under a cover of gunfire consisting of tracer bullets and exploding bullets. They tried to drive out their enemies from their protected positions, but they didn’t succeed. They had planned ahead of time how they would take them and force them out and how they would divide up the booty, but they failed. Both times they came back with dead and wounded of their own. They weren’t going to win the war and they weren’t going to lose it, either. They had lost their wits, though. They went into the homes of the enemy families in their own neighbourhood and blew up their houses with dynamite; they caused numerous casualties in their own ranks from all the shrapnel that resulted from their lack of expertise in blowing up houses. Then one of them crept into the demolished homes and stole furniture by night so no one would witness his depravity. Those were houses belonging to their enemies who had lived among them, but who’d left temporarily hoping to come back after things calmed down. They blasphemed against the saints and nearly sounded the Muslim call to prayer from the dome of the church just to spite their enemies who had allied themselves with America and the President of the Republic.

They still wanted more, but the ‘revolution’ ended. The president’s term came to an end; the parliament came into session and elected a new president.

Chapter 20

The whole thing had been Kamileh’s mother’s idea. Muntaha would never have dared do such a thing on her own. In any case, she had absolutely nothing to do with it. Kamileh’s mother had whispered something in Muntaha’s ear, and at first she didn’t take what she was saying the least bit seriously. She was asking her to go to Fuad and Butros al-Rami, right after the funeral.

The funeral… The sharp smell of sweat… The smell of people, the smell of the dead.

They had brought them in their coffins into the church, against the protests of the families, after a big argument. At first the clergy got involved but no one paid them much attention until the family’s zaeem arrived.

The family’s zaeem… He stopped at each coffin before it was brought into the church. He stopped and bent over each victim, kissed each one on his yellow forehead, and hugged the widow or the children without weeping. He had done all his weeping at home, in the house those same men had pitched in to build for him during hard times. Everyone who had been able to help out, be it with the building or painting or carpentry, had volunteered their labour. He had wept all alone in his room, for a long time, sitting beneath a picture of his uncle, the one from whom he inherited his leadership position. His brother had stood guard outside the door to his room, arguing with anyone who tried to come in.

‘Let him rest. The President of the Republic wants to meet with him!’

His brother said he’d heard him sobbing like a baby. He stayed all alone like that for more than an hour, and then he stifled his sobs and stood up. He changed his clothes, shaved and sat at his desk writing the news bulletin he would broadcast after the funeral. In it he would place responsibility squarely on the shoulders of his enemies. What they had done had been a trap set for freedom-loving innocents, an act of treachery against unarmed citizens… He folded the paper and put it in his pocket. He got up, opened the door without warning, accidentally bumping his brother in the shoulder and left. Twenty young men followed after him, their weapons in plain sight. He would never lock himself in his room ever again, nor would he ever cry again after that day. He’d cried in advance, in one bout, for all of his brothers and cousins and relatives who’d died already and for those who were going to die in the future.

When he stopped before each of the dead in the church courtyard, he made the professional mourners stop their wailing. ‘Enough!’ he shouted. A woman whose son was laid out on a bed before her said, ‘The important thing is that you are still alive!’ He didn’t try to silence her. What silenced her were the strange glances her daughter cast at her.

It wasn’t exactly clear from the woman’s tone if she was being sarcastic or expressing her sincere concern for the zaeem. The way she had said it left it ambiguous.

A second battle broke out with the women inside the church over shutting the coffins. People would close the coffins only to have the women raise the lids again a little later. The negotiations and attempts at persuasion were lengthy, with the following result, ‘At the end of the funeral service, we will open the coffins for you one last time and then we will nail them shut.’ That was suggested by the family’s zaeem, who was standing at the head of the worshippers and initiated the funeral prayers himself.

It was a signal the priests should begin, so they quickly started their prayers. They sped through the Syriac hymns, as if running from a fire. Their eyes and minds were on the congregation there in the church yard. The people knew the funeral service by heart. They recited it in Syriac. Some of them knew it better than the priests. The moment the group of priests standing to the right of the altar got to the last line of the funeral prayers, and before they were able to finish it, the screaming erupted. It erupted all of a sudden from a hundred different throats at the same time.

The children who were present were surprised. They looked around, terrified, thinking something had happened. The new incense holder’s eyes bulged open and he lost the strength to hold onto the incense burner. The older people knew what was happening. The ones standing in the front pews didn’t even turn around to look. They weren’t going to look at the women as they clung to the coffins and wailed their hearts out. That final outburst was not something to look at.

In the end it was the priests and the members of the religious brotherhood who managed to succeed in separating the living from the dead. The leader of the family, surrounded by his men, stood at the church door. As the procession of coffins passed by, he leaned over and kissed each one. He bent over his brother’s and his nephew’s coffins a long, long time. They hoisted them onto the roofs of the cars. Two young men leaned out from the windows of each of the cars to secure each coffin on the roof. They told people to move out of the way. The important thing was for them to be able to hold onto the coffins on the way downhill. There weren’t enough cars to transport them all at once to the graveyard, so the cars came back a second time to transport the rest.

They took them to the almond grove. The pits had already been dug. One straight row, as if they’d been dug by an expert at planting olive trees and orange trees standing like a line of soldiers. Someone had got up early to dig up the ground and prepare it to receive them. One hole for each one, then the dirt poured on top and that was it. They are still there to this day, on land owned by the monastery. They selected this site as their burial ground because the town cemetery in the Rami neighbourhood would be impossible for them to reach to pay their respects. And even if they could get to it, they would never leave their dead there.

They brought Kamileh back to her house on foot. On the way, she’d walk a little and then stop. Muntaha braced her. She’d stand in front of one of the houses, call to the people who lived there, and tell them that Yusef was gone and wasn’t coming back. No one came outside to console her. She’d resume her journey and then stop all over again. ‘Yusef is gone,’ she’d say, addressing some woman standing out on her balcony watching the people on their way back from the funeral. The woman on the balcony would cover her face with a white kerchief, weeping or wanting to give the impression she was weeping. Finally Kamileh made it to her house. They took her inside to lie down and rest.

‘No, not the bedroom,’ she erupted, like a mad woman. ‘I will never go back in there after today. Get me out of here. Get me out…’ They took her out to the balcony and let her stretch out on the bench. She laid her head near the dahlias and her mother sat down beside her.

A flock of swallows swooped down onto the balcony. Three black birds with their little outspread wings traversed the nearby space and glided over the people’s heads.

Swallows in season.

That was Monday, 18 June 1957, at approximately seven o’clock in the evening.

On a night close to that time, possibly a few days before or afterwards, another lady sat on another balcony that was also adorned with flowers and plants but which overlooked the Mediterranean Sea from a nearby elevation. The lady’s name was Laurice, or at least that’s the name she signed to her poetic writings, which she published soon after under the title Captain of the Wind. In the picture of her on the back cover of her poetry collection she’s wearing a white dress and a straw hat and is smiling coyly. In one of her poems she says, ‘It is difficult for me to be away from you… It is difficult for me to live… The land of mulberry trees and grapes… The land of secret springs… Images of God and a happy valley… After my death I will go searching for you… In the poor man’s bag is a little soil and a little water… The bread of promise… And it will be said: that woman in the distance has no shadow anywhere. My ancestors lived in the wastelands and the sand dunes… They went and came with the sand and the wind… They hunted gazelles that looked like women and waited at the doors of their houses until the end of time…’ She was said to have eventually married an Italian diplomat in Damascus and spent the rest of her days between Rome and Venice.

Kamileh relaxed a little, as if forcing her eyes shut against her will.

Kamileh’s mother pulled Muntaha aside, away from some of the neighbours who had come to the house. She repeated her request. ‘Go to Fuad and Butros al-Rami…’

‘Today?’

‘In an hour. When it gets dark. Go home, rest a little, change your clothes and come back.’

‘Oh God!’

‘They sent me some news,’ Kamileh’s mother said. She didn’t mention with whom or how. ‘They want to come to the house to offer their condolences to Kamileh. Yusef al-Kfoury was like a brother to them and they don’t want to delay in paying their respects to his wife.’

Muntaha went home, but she wasn’t convinced she should do it. She hoped Kamileh’s mother would get preoccupied looking after her daughter and forget the whole thing. Muntaha’s mother was sitting with her relative the mute near the entrance to the house, as usual, carrying on a conversation. He made speedy signs with his hands while she went slowly, as if searching for her words with her hands, or like someone speaking a language not her own and hesitating before pronouncing each word. They got tired quickly. One or two sentences and then they would have to rest. Muntaha’s mother had been weeping along with the other neighbours, too. Her eyes were red. The mute didn’t cry for anyone. He was probably feeling sad in his heart, but he didn’t cry. He hadn’t gone eel fishing that day but he still smelled like the river. He was barefoot, as usual. The mute was the sturdiest one among them in the face of tragedy.

Muntaha asked her mother about Haifa Abu Draa. Her mother had gone to Haifa’s house while Muntaha was with Kamileh.

‘No one ever died over someone,’ her mother said, meaning that no one had ever died from sorrow over another’s death. She was a harsh one, her mother. ‘The unfortunate one is the one who goes,’ she added, meaning that when it came down to it, the true loser was the one who died.

The mute nodded his head in agreement. He couldn’t hear what the woman was saying since she wasn’t moving her hands as she spoke. He couldn’t hear anything at all, but perhaps he intuited what his relative would say in such critical circumstances. It was difficult to imagine how such adages could be said in sign language or in the language of the mute eel-fisherman. No wonder his conversation partner had to put forth so much effort choosing her hand signals.

The mute was smiling and nodding his head in agreement. An indication he understood.

Muntaha didn’t hear what her mother said. Her answer was always the same whenever she returned from a funeral: death is a woman’s pastime. She’d heard her father say that once.

Muntaha collapsed onto the bench. She knew the day wasn’t over yet. She didn’t change her dress, in defiance of Kamileh’s mother who had told her to do so.

In all that stress, she had had the nerve to tell her to put on a new dress.

Muntaha later said that she had a dream during those few minutes when she shut her eyes and rested her head on the end of the wooden bench. She could have slept standing up.

Soldiers. She dreamt of soldiers. An entire platoon. A long line of soldiers dressed in blood-red, marching in a forest of tall trees. Poplar trees just like the ones planted along the two sides of the river road with their tops reaching up to the sky. The ground was wet from the rain of the night before and the ground was covered with yellow poplar leaves. Around each soldier’s neck was a cloth sack. Mizwid, they called it. They kept bread in it. They were all soldiers. No officers or sergeants among them.

They were the dead men. The ones who’d fallen and the ones who were going to fall.

The bread was the prayers that were chanted over each of their souls. They carried them around their necks to judgement day. Each would take the loaves out of his sack and present them to the Lord as He sat upon His throne.

He was the same Lord from the painting above the altar at the Church of Saint John the Baptist.

Kamileh’s mother, who didn’t knock at the door, because it was open, awakened Muntaha. She came right in to where Muntaha was in the sitting room.

She tugged at her shoulder. ‘Get up. We don’t have anyone besides you.’

Muntaha didn’t understand what she meant. She almost told Kamileh’s mother that she had two other daughters she could seek out for help. One of them was married and lived in one of the nearby villages; she could walk there if she wanted. The other one lived some distance away. Her husband didn’t like us and didn’t like our town, but she’d come from Beirut to attend her brother-in-law’s funeral. Her husband didn’t accompany her and made her go back in a hurry. Kamileh’s mother sent her daughters back to their families right away, out of fear for them. Why didn’t she send one of them? Why didn’t she go herself?

‘Why don’t they pay their respects tomorrow or the next day? There’s lots of time…’ Muntaha, half-asleep, asked only that one question.

‘They have to come tonight!’

‘Two men from the Rami family visiting the quarter tonight? Kamileh is totally distraught. What will she say to them? Wait until morning to see how God’s going to get us out of this mess!’

‘Tonight, Muntaha. We cannot put it off.’

The camel has one idea in his head and the camel driver has another.

God help her.

She dragged herself up from the bench. Neither her mother nor her mute relative was around. No one was checking on anyone that night.

She walked, somewhat afraid. Not many big things happened in her life. Had it not been for the fatigue and sleepiness she would have got a bit more excited. She would have to walk in front of them and clear the road for them.

The streets were deserted. Her heart pounded hard all the way to their quarter. She found them sitting at the entrance to the house, silently smoking cigarettes one after another, stamping them out under foot at the half-way point. They were waiting for her.

She knew them well. Kamileh was always pushing the idea that Muntaha should marry Butros al-Rami, the heavier and older one who was sitting to the right. If he paused from puffing cigarette smoke, he puffed the air as he exhaled.

They were sitting on wicker chairs.

‘What are people saying in your quarter?’

She didn’t know how to answer. She in turn asked them about their dead and how the funeral had gone.

She didn’t answer their question, and they didn’t answer hers.

One of them repeated the question. People said whatever they felt like. In any case, she wasn’t going to tell them anything. After thinking hard and carefully she said, ‘What do you want them to say? They’re hoarse from so much wailing.’

‘What are they saying about us, my brother Fuad and me?’

That was the real point of their question. They knew what was being said about them. News travelled fast, especially bad news.

‘I haven’t heard anyone mention you… I was busy with Kamileh the whole time.’

‘Poor Kamileh…’

They knew Muntaha would walk ahead of them.

It was a short road and a difficult one.

She walked ahead of them with her heart pounding. She could hear it the whole way. And the whole way, too, they remained silent, but she noticed each of them was carrying a gun. The metal glinted in their hands.

There had been three of them sitting at a table at the Brazilian Café in Tripoli, as was their custom — the two brothers and Yusef al-Kfoury, when the arms dealer joined them. He told them about a cache of revolvers he had just netted. They bought him a cup of coffee and exchanged bits of conversation and then ordered three revolvers. He delivered them the next day. He brought them in a sack to the same coffee shop. They found a secluded corner and looked them over. Yusef al-Kfoury chose the 14-caliber Herstel. Butros al-Rami paid for the guns and refused to let Yusef al-Kfoury pay him back. A gift, he told him. They didn’t keep track of debts with each other. Yusef al-Kfoury said things weren’t going to stay this way very long and that he didn’t like guns.

No one stopped them on the way, and they didn’t run into anyone.

At every fork in the road and at every opening in the narrow streets the two brothers slowed down. They drew their weapons just in case, listened carefully, and continued walking.

The last calm night.

The night of Monday, 18 June 1957.

Just before noon on that very day, at perhaps the exact hour of night when the time difference was taken into account, one of the town’s émigrés was crowning a long life of struggle by putting his signature on the establishment of a bank in Caracas which he named after the Orinoco River. He had wanted to name it ‘Banco de Libano’ but was told the local population wouldn’t find it appealing. In attendance at the signing ceremony were the Minister of Tourism, Rafael Pikabia, the Minister of the Economy, and a crowd of Venezuelan journalists and media people. The émigré and the members of his family, his wife and two daughters, held 45 % of the bank’s shares; this after many long years of labour and fatigue. He had started out as a travelling shirt merchant and then opened a clothing shop and then a factory, which enabled him to accumulate enough capital to open a bank. He told his children he wished to be buried in his hometown, but they weren’t able to transport him to Lebanon because the day he died in a Caracas hospital the fighting in his town was at its heaviest.

On that night, the families and relatives of the dead went to sleep in an attempt to gather up their strength. They slept but they didn’t eat. The men turned their backs to the women. The men recovered their strength while the women revived their ability to wail and mourn some more and incite the men.

And the next day, or possibly the next night, they would begin.

Kamileh was out on the balcony with only her mother, who had politely dismissed the neighbours. She thanked them and wished them long lives and prayed that their children would be spared from harm. And she told them Kamileh would die if she didn’t get some sleep. She also added that they hadn’t any tears left to cry.

Muntaha came in first, signalling that they were behind her.

‘Get up, Kamileh,’ her mother said in a tone filled with anguish. ‘Yusef’s friends are here!’

Kamileh sat up. From the time the news about her husband had arrived, that was the first movement she made of her own accord. She didn’t say a word.

They didn’t greet her with a handshake.

The two brothers sat silently looking at Kamileh while she looked back at them. They were all scrutinising each other. They had come all the way from the Lower Quarter just to look at her. They had wanted to attend the funeral, but hadn’t dared.

Butros broke into tears first, then Fuad. Butros wiped his tears with a handkerchief he pulled out of his jacket pocket. He blew his nose a long time. He blew it long and hard. He seemed to be searching inside his nose for some way to stop crying.

Kamileh’s mother looked around for fear the neighbours would hear all the nose-blowing.

Kamileh was content just looking into their eyes, asking them for answers they didn’t have.

The resemblance between the brothers was quite apparent — the way their backs inclined as they sat, the width of their noses, the little red splotches on their cheeks, the early signs of a receding hairline and the hairs sticking out of their ears. Fuad was the younger brother, but the differences had faded over time and the two looked like they could be twins.

The silent gathering continued. It went on for a long time, as if no one was going to speak because visits for condolences weren’t occasions for speaking.

It was Muntaha who finally said something. She stood up and excused herself to go home, claiming her mother would be worried about her. Kamileh laughed and then tried to cry but couldn’t.

Muntaha suddenly felt she had no place there. No one was looking at her.

‘Wait a little, Muntaha. Finish the favour.’ Kamileh’s mother wanted her to show them home. At least she could take them through the Lower Quarter. She could take them as far as the school and come back.

It was completely silent; just night sounds could be heard — some jackals in the distance letting out intermittent howls, a gunshot in a neighbouring town and the chirping of crickets in the grapevine.

Suddenly Kamileh started to shiver uncontrollably. Her teeth chattered.

‘It’s a fever-chill!’ her mother proclaimed. ‘We must get her inside.’

Kamileh didn’t want to go inside. Her head moved and a rattle came out of her throat.

The silence returned along with the exchange of glances. Only essential words were uttered. Kamileh shivered as the cold night air rose up from the river. The humidity from the river made sitting on the balcony difficult even on August nights.

‘Take her inside,’ Butros al-Rami said.

Kamileh protested again and suddenly it went dark. There was no light on the balcony or around the whole town.

‘That’s all we need, the electricity to go out…’ her mother said in the dark.

Silence… and night… and humidity.

Her mother started up again. She whispered long pleas into her ear. Kamileh agreed to go inside the house. Maybe she convinced her that in the darkness she wouldn’t be able to see anything in the bedroom.

Muntaha sat alone, exhausted. A little while later Butros al-Rami came back onto the balcony. He stood peering into the dark. A few minutes later Kamileh’s mother also came out. The three of them peered into the dark. Some scattered little lights shone from across the way where it appeared the electricity hadn’t gone out — other lives in those villages spread about the mountainside.

Kamileh stayed with Fuad al-Rami for more than an hour. The two of them, alone inside. Kamileh’s mother would never tell anyone about this visit. Butros and Fuad al-Rami would never tell anyone. Only Muntaha would have difficulty keeping the secret. She would try very hard.

Butros, Muntaha, and Kamileh’s mother waited for Kamileh and Fuad in the dark out on the balcony. Suddenly the electricity came back on and Fuad al-Rami came outside. That was between the hours of ten and eleven o’clock on that Monday night, the 18th of June, 1957.

Muntaha accompanied them on the way back. She walked ahead of them. They kept their guns drawn the whole way, and when they reached the school they tucked them back at their waists and asked her to go back home.

‘Many people will die, Muntaha,’ Fuad al-Rami said.

‘Yusef al-Kfoury was dearer than a brother to us!’ Butros said.

Then they continued on their way up to their quarter, the two of them looking all around in the dark.

Chapter 21

We were standing in a long, winding line in front of the army barracks at Qubbah. It was a two-story French structure of sandstone with a lightning conductor on the roof that had a Lebanese flag attached to it. There were three stern-faced soldiers — two with twisted moustaches and one wearing thin glasses — keeping us in order.

We could see the people at the front of the line passing one by one into a small house across from the main barracks building. There was a guard standing ready at the door, not moving an inch, as though he had been painted there.

We didn’t see the ones who went inside come back out after completing the transaction they’d come for. It was as if that small two-room house were steadily swallowing up a long rope of Barqa citizens. Most likely they were exiting through another door, one on the other side which I couldn’t see from where I was edging slowly forward.

There was a man from my family standing behind me whose brother had been killed in the Burj al-Hawa incident. His name was Hilal, but they nicknamed him ‘al-Ghandour’ — ‘the Dandy’ — for reasons I never thought to inquire about. His brother who had died in the incident was called Nassif. He kept talking in my ear, practically non-stop since the time we arrived, and the first thing on my mind was to get free of him. And so I offered to let him cut in front of me, but he refused.

One by one the late-comers joined the end of the line that reached all the way to the main road, back behind the statue of the Unknown Soldier at the main entrance to the barracks. It was a stone statue of a military fighter brandishing a flag, and beside it there was a plaque with the names of those who had fallen in the line of duty. Whoever had etched the names in the plaque didn’t list them in alphabetical order or in chronological order of their deaths. Instead, he’d tried to the best of his ability to deliberately alternate each Christian name with a Muslim name: First Adjutant Butros Mansour Saba, Sergeant Mahmoud Ismail al-Qaafarani, Private First Class Mousa Jibrail Touma, Private Mustafa al-Asaad, and so on. There were more Muslims than Christians, however, so he was forced to put three Muslim names in a row at the end of the list.

I had come on my own, and my brother had done the same. We hadn’t wanted to draw attention by arriving together. He was a few metres ahead of me in the queue. That’s how we were with everything — he beat me at doing, while I beat him at thinking. I noticed our uncle’s wife at the front of the queue, too, ahead of my brother. She was ahead of both of us, which, in my opinion, she deserved to be. She had left early for the barracks. I tried to avoid her eyes. As she scanned the crowd in all directions she was undoubtedly searching for us — for my brother and me. She didn’t see me, though, and in fact she would enter the small building and exit through the back door without ever seeing me. That’s how I preferred things to go — each one to his own.

A fat woman dressed in black was standing right in front of me. I didn’t know her. I’d never seen her before in our quarter, and she was definitely not one of our relatives. All of the women standing in line were wearing black. All black. And it was possible to determine how closely they were related to the dead by the heavy black stockings they were wearing in that hot weather, and by the scarves on their heads, too. Bare legs meant a relation of lesser degree or possibly that enough time had passed since the death to permit a slackening in mourning signs. My uncle’s wife was dressed in dark black and she also wore a black scarf on her head that covered her hair. She did that in order to be counted among the victims’ widows. Actually, she should have been in reduced mourning since my uncle had been very old and it had been over a year since he’d died.

I craned my neck and spotted a woman at the head of the queue, not four or five people away from the guard at the door to the little building. She was wearing a green dress. She was the only one not wearing black and she was looking all around in bewilderment as if she’d just discovered she was the only woman in that long line not dressed in black. She turned her head looking all the way to the end of the line that extended all the way to the main road. She was the only one wearing colourful clothing. I didn’t think she lived in the town. It was likely that someone had told her to come, so she came. Maybe she’d come from Beirut. I wanted to ask the Ghandour about her but I changed my mind for fear he would start talking my ear off again.

The number of women was equal to, or possibly exceeded, the number of men. All the relatives had come except for the ones who’d gone to Australia to escape the fighting. Those émigrés sent power of attorney to one of their relatives. Kamileh, the wife of Yusef al-Kfoury, hadn’t come down to the barracks. We didn’t realise it at the time. They told us later on that she was the only woman who had refused to come to the Michel Hlayel barracks. She said she didn’t want money in compensation for her husband, insinuating that the rest of us had sold out our dead relatives for money. She had no right to talk that way. People told all sorts of stories about her, that Kamileh. Everyone knew that she’d conceived a child after her husband’s death. More than nine months after. People don’t have anything else to do; they scrutinise, calculate and count on their fingers while waiting for each other around every corner.

The fat lady in front of me was trying to find someone to talk to, anyone. She was nervous. She looked to the front and to the back without seeing a single familiar face. There was no way I could respond or carry on a conversation with her because the Ghandour kept whispering to me from behind almost continually; it was impossible for me to follow two people talking at the same time. The Ghandour stopped just for a second, to take a sniff and try to stop his nose from running. I searched my pocket for a handkerchief to give him to blow his nose, but I didn’t find one, so I thought about tearing off a corner of the paper bag I was holding. He could use it to end the constant threat of his nose dripping once and for all.

Suddenly the fat lady started complaining to herself, in a loud voice. She spoke without looking at anyone. She hadn’t been able to find her identity card. She’d come to the barracks without any proof of who she was. When the Sûreté Générale officer had come to everyone’s house he told us to arrive before noon on Saturday at the Michel Hlayel barracks in Qubbah and to bring our identity cards. We hadn’t waited until before noon, but started heading to the barracks in the early hours after dawn and arrived even before the members of the committee coming from Beirut. The Sûreté Générale officer hadn’t said more than that; he asked only for our identity cards. The fat lady had lost hers. She woke up early that day and turned the house upside down looking for it for the third time. She hadn’t used it since the last election. I hadn’t yet understood this ability some people have to speak to themselves in a loud voice without addressing anyone in particular. When she first realised that she’d lost her ID, she had gone to the Civil Registry Office to try to obtain a new one, but the officer told her it would take time. Suddenly she changed her tone, as if to console herself, telling herself she would surely find someone to vouch for her.

‘My sister is here, and my nieces, but I don’t see them anywhere. Maybe they haven’t arrived yet. If they send me back home empty-handed, I’ll raise hell!’

Suddenly she spotted one of her relatives at the rear, so she called out to him as if she hadn’t seen him for ages; mainly to console herself that there was someone who knew her who was prepared to identify her.

I had no desire to come to the Michel Hlayel barracks in Qubbah, but my brother persuaded me with a simple plea: ‘If you don’t take the money allocated to you, they’ll take it instead.’

The ‘they’ he was referring to were the members of the committee or some officials we didn’t know. They’d take it and pocket it themselves. ‘At any rate,’ he added, ‘your generosity in the matter would go unnoticed by everyone but the two of us…’

Actually, I hadn’t been thinking about generosity. I was thinking about my uncle’s wife. As far as I knew, she didn’t even know where we lived. Never once had she come to our house for a visit. It was like the endless war of Dahis and Al-Ghabraa between us. We believed that our uncle loved us but she had turned him against us. I remember how he used to wait until her back was turned to give us money and tell us to hide it from her. He’d kiss me on the forehead and I could smell tobacco on his breath. We were little and he loved us. We were his brother’s children, so we were his children too. That’s what he used to say while I nearly gagged from the smell of tobacco reeking out of his jacket.

‘They want to take your inheritance while you’re still alive…’ That was her call to war against us. And we used to answer back. We weren’t shy about it, and our answer was harsh. We went back and forth with it at length at home. ‘Why didn’t she give him some children who could inherit from him? We’re not going to let you take our property to your family! If only my uncle could see, he wouldn’t have picked her up off the street!’

But her influence over him was much stronger than ours. He loved to eat and she used to threaten him that if he was nice to us she’d stop cooking for him. He loved baked spicy fish and stuffed tripe and grape leaves, and she was a very good cook. In any case, she was going to kill him with all that food. Once, and only once, she invited us to lunch. The bitch was a damn good cook! Eventually, she forbade him from visiting us and the enmity between us grew to the point where he started saying things like, ‘If I die I don’t want them walking in my funeral procession.’

Some people told us they’d heard him say that. He didn’t want us — my brother and mother and me — to walk in his funeral procession. I couldn’t believe he would say such a thing.

And now here we were, standing in line outside the army barracks for the sole reason that we were his nephews. My mother had forced me to take a sandwich of cheese and olives that she made and wrapped in a paper bag for me. I almost gave it to the Ghandour so he might give me a break and give himself a break from all his talking. My mother worried I would get hungry if there was a long wait. ‘You can’t stand being hungry,’ she said to me. She knew me well, my mother. I really can’t stand being hungry. But I was embarrassed by the bag and the cheese that was starting to stink. And I was embarrassed about my uncle’s wife, too. She’d be livid if she saw us standing in line.

I was trying my best to hide behind the fat lady blocking my view, but my head still stuck out no matter how hard I tried because she was short. The sun started to beat down on us as we inched slowly forward. We were dying to know what was happening inside that small building. Those exiting didn’t encounter those entering. The news travelled, though, in the end, from the back of the line to the front this time. There were people who’d made the full round and then returned to the end of the line holding something others could see. Many of them were holding a banker’s cheque in their hands for the very first time. At first, we didn’t understand how they’d divided up the money as the shares weren’t equal. Eventually we figured out that they had divided it up according to each heir’s share of the dead man’s inheritance.

The truth was I was embarrassed to be there and tried to avoid people’s eyes — people I knew. I knew what they would say to themselves if they saw me there with my brother. My brother, on the other hand, didn’t really care about all that. I spotted him joking with the people standing next to him in line. Everyone had been included in the inheritance, without exception, and they all had come. Half the town was there. The Ghandour looked them over and told me about each one.

‘See that woman there in front of the soldier with the glasses? It was my brother Nassif who killed her husband. If it hadn’t been for my brother Nassif, it would have been a huge disgrace for us at Burj al-Hawa. They shot her husband from behind, because his relatives didn’t protect his back…’

They had made all of us come to the barracks and stand together in one line. It was the first time we’d come in contact with each other after the events. Two years earlier when the government took control of the situation and arrested men on both sides, guilty and innocent alike, they separated us, putting the Semaanis in the Qubbah prison and the Ramis in the Amir Bashir army barracks in Beirut. But this time they put us all in one line.

Abu Jamil passed next to me and put his hand on my shoulder. The way he looked at me made me feel he still loved me, the way he used to love me when he was in our quarter. That was before he fled and some of our family members occupied his house.

‘Tell your mother,’ he said to me, ‘that Umm Jamil says hello.’

I told my mother that when I got home. She sighed.

The Ghandour knew every one of them. ‘And that young man over there,’ the Ghandour continued. ‘My brother Nassif…’ None of his talk was about himself; the true hero in his eyes was his brother Nassif.

I put my hand over my ear trying to get his mouth away from me.

My uncle’s wife got half of the inheritance and we got the other half. If they’d had children, we wouldn’t have received anything. My uncle had run into an ambush that hadn’t been intended for him. He had been driving along in his car when he heard shots fired nearby. Startled, he lost control of the car, veered off the road, and his car flipped and ended up at the bottom of the valley. Despite that he didn’t die; people said he got out of the wrecked car and walked away. They didn’t find any evidence of bullet holes in the car, though. At any rate, the people who had set the trap on the road were from our side, and when they discovered their mistake they rushed to get my uncle out of the car. Be that as it may, my uncle’s health went downhill after that and he died six months later. We attended his funeral service at the church, but we didn’t go to the house afterwards because his wife sent someone to tell us she would cause a scene if we entered her house. She came at us with everything she had. Everywhere she went, she said that we had done everything in our power to prevent him from being listed among the victims of the fighting and that we had gone to the military commander to tell him our uncle died in a car accident and his wife wasn’t entitled to compensation.

I was looking for something to shade myself from the sun, which was burning a hole in my head, when we heard some noise coming from the back of the line, and some shouting, ‘The committee! The committee!’

We were pleased by the arrival of the committee, because it broke the monotony of our long wait. It was a small procession of three cars led by a police motorcycle escort. The first to get out of the car was a short man with thick black glasses and a black splotch on the upper part of his face. Two other men accompanied him. An officer rushed to greet him calling him ‘Henry Beyk’. We recognised him; the Ghandour recognised him. It seemed he was the one who’d raised the money from some wealthy friends of his in Beirut. We also found out what happened was the United States had been sending aid to Lebanon in the form of surplus wheat, and there was a businessman who suggested that the government sell the wheat from America — at discounted prices of course — and use the money to pay compensation to the victims’ families and to broker a reconciliation between us. The businessman had been slow in delivering the money and the reconciliation was delayed up until the day when we lined up in front of the Michel Hlayel barracks in Qubbah.

As Henry Beyk was walking, he stumbled, nearly falling over, which prompted the fat lady standing in front of me to shout, ‘Oh God!’ One of his bodyguards rushed to catch his fall. Henry Beyk smiled and looked around as if he wanted to thank the woman for her concern. Her concern was artificial, just like her. Some people around us said he was the owner of the racetrack in Beirut; a man standing in front of the fat lady said he used to be the foreign minister at the time of the Lebanese independence. He stopped to let the people who’d come with him from Beirut catch up with him.

An officer in dress uniform got out of the second car. The three soldiers who were in charge of making sure we didn’t cut in line saluted him. Soldiers always salute officers even if they don’t know them, at the mere sight of stars on their shoulders. He was very stern and I felt he was looking at us with disdain. The whole time I was standing in the queue inside that barracks I had the feeling that the military men were looking at the civilians with contempt. By civilians, I mean us. We reciprocated, calling them government horses, all fattened up with nothing to do. We wouldn’t reach out to help them because we believed they held ulterior motives — to attack us. None of us would ever join the army except as an officer.

The third man had a large folder tucked under his armpit; it was brimming with papers he kept reorganising to prevent them from spilling out. He wore thick glasses and smiled right and left for no reason as if smiling was his constant expression. People said he was the committee’s lawyer. I didn’t understand at the time why the committee needed to appoint a lawyer.

So here was the committee. Maybe they’d come to make sure the money was distributed properly. Word went around in whispers that the family zaeems would be arriving soon. The three members of the committee entered the main barracks building. The lawyer took a look at the long line as he went up the stairs leading to the door. Perhaps he thought there were more people in line than were entitled to receive compensation according to what was recorded in those papers of his that threatened to strew themselves on the ground.

A little later some journalists arrived; they must have heard about the committee’s arrival. As they proceeded to the military building where the committee had entered, they went around taking pictures of us. They too were fascinated by the long line. When one of the photographers aimed his camera in the direction of the area I was standing in, I turned instinctively and once again tried to hide behind the fat lady. But the flash went off quickly, right in my face. The next day I saw another picture of me in the newspaper, on the front page. The newspaper seller with the limp was very happy. He took a big stack of papers and circulated through all the town’s neighbourhoods. He even went down narrow alleys he’d never gone down before, crying, as was his custom to try to sell papers, ‘News about the people of Barqa, today! Read all about it!’

In the picture, I appeared to be smiling, even though I hadn’t been in the best mood standing there in the long line with the fat lady in front of me, her hand over her mouth as she let out a long ululation. I hadn’t even noticed that the photographer had aimed his camera at us again to take that picture because I was preoccupied, like everyone else, with the arrival of the Rami family zaeem.

He got out of his car quickly, possibly worried he was late for the meeting with the committee. Two of his bodyguards rushed up ahead of him as well. Some people in the front of the line clapped somewhat cautiously, maybe to avoid angering the soldiers in charge of supervising them. But all of a sudden the fat lady let out a loud ululation, which made me realise she was one of them. I might have guessed that, since I didn’t know her. If she were one of us I would have seen her in the neighbourhood at least once. She let out a never-ending ululation, like the ones they do at weddings, and another woman tried to imitate her but didn’t fare so well in the length department, her voice cracking quickly.

The Ghandour also appeared in the picture in the newspaper, leaning on my shoulder. They had been trying to get a picture of the woman who was ululating for her family zaeem and the Ghandour and I ended up in the picture, too. I think he might have been cursing the Rami family the very moment the picture was taken. I remember when the fat lady had started to ululate he said horrible things, starting with an attack on her dead relatives and all her ancestors before turning on her mother and sister and even her daughter, calling them a bunch of whores who’d inherited the profession from their elders.

My brother didn’t appear in the photo and neither did my uncle’s wife. The journalists wrote things in the paper about us that we in the Lower Quarter didn’t like. They said, ‘From the early hours of morning…’ I didn’t like that expression ‘From the early hours of morning’, as if to imply we were eager to get our money. And also, how would they know we’d been there since early in the morning? The reporters didn’t come until after the committee arrived. And the paper also described how the families of the victims who died in the events of 1957 and 1958 crowded into the North Lebanon military intelligence office. It went on to say, ‘These citizens, a crowd of simple folk, were preparing to enter the office of the committee to receive compensation for the bloodshed…’ Who told whoever wrote the article we were ‘simple folk’?

Ghaleb al-Semaani sat outside his cousin’s store on a low wicker stool reading the article out loud. He liked to hear his own voice as he read to the usual crowd of listeners. That happened whenever the newspaper seller passed by and the shopkeeper would open up his register and buy a newspaper from him that lasted all day long, getting passed along from one pair of hands to another. When Ghaleb reached the part about ‘this crowd of simple folk’, he stopped reading and pointed with his middle finger at the article, indicating exactly where on the page that expression appeared. ‘Simple folk?’ he retorted. ‘We’re simple folk, you son of a you know what?’

We in the Lower Quarter didn’t like being insulted. The next time the newspaper vendor came around he was going to get an earful of harsh words.

After the Rami family zaeem arrived, all the other cards starting falling into place. All of the town’s dignitaries began descending upon the barracks one by one. They would walk past us, look us over, greet some of us here and there, and then enter the barracks building. The head of the municipality came, too. Our family headman passed through. His right eye was red and swollen, perhaps remnants of a sty. He waved to us. A woman at the end of the line ululated for him; no other woman imitated her. It seemed like she was doing it to antagonise the fat lady standing in front of me. They applauded for him, too. We were on our way into the small building to receive cheques and they were on their way into the big building to hold a meeting. We were headed to the military intelligence office, they to the office of the military commander of the north district. The newspaper published two pictures: one of the fat lady ululating with me smiling behind her and the Ghandour whispering curses into my ear, and the other of them holding their meeting — the zaeems and the committee seated in a circle around a desk behind which a high-ranking officer wearing black glasses was seated. They were smiling, and one of them, the Rami family zaeem, was sipping a cup of coffee.

We moved forward in line until we got close to the building. When we went by them, the door to the office of the military district commander was open and the men gathered inside were laughing out loud, exchanging pleasantries and possibly some jokes.

One of the men in attendance at the meeting from beginning to end later told us all the details. How they came in and shook hands and hugged each other — except for the Rami family headman who said he had a bad cold and didn’t want anyone to catch it so he declined hugs and restricted himself to handshakes. And someone had brought a bottle of champagne that two men raced to open. In all their excitement, the cork popped off and hit the director of the northern branch of the military intelligence service right in the ear as he was turned talking to the lawyer. The bottle bubbled over and they rushed to fill their glasses and drink a toast to Lebanon first. They were all standing as Henry Beyk made the toast. Then they drank a toast to the new President of the Republic, the former chief of staff of the army. Our headman suggested they drink a toast to Barqa and everyone enthusiastically agreed.

When it was almost my turn in line and there was no one but the fat lady ahead of me, I offered the Ghandour to go ahead of me and he accepted. The soldier behind the desk didn’t ask the fat lady for her ID. She gave him her name and he found it on the list. He told her to sign and she said she didn’t know how to write, so she dipped her finger in the inkwell, made a fingerprint and he gave her a cheque. The Ghandour fingerprinted as well. He wasn’t happy with the small sum and so he spouted off a string of curses. I was still worried about being seen by my uncle’s wife as I received the cheque from the soldier’s hand. I needed the money because as soon as I’d heard we would be included in the compensation I borrowed money in advance against it and had already spent all of it.

But I didn’t escape her after all. I bumped into my uncle’s wife on my way back from the office. She was standing there waiting. Waiting for us — me and my brother, too, probably. I didn’t look in her direction, but I heard her say in a loud voice, ‘I hope you’ll have to use that money to buy medicine!’

Chapter 22

Kamileh will get out of bed at the crack of dawn. Each day it becomes a little more difficult than the day before. She feels cold the moment she throws off the blankets; the river is near but the sun is still far off.

She will repeat the same actions, the ones of her darkened life.

She will die the day she changes a single letter of a single word of it. She imagines she will die in her sleep.

Each day she reviews what will happen, in great detail:

She will lie down to sleep one night in good health and not wake up the next morning. Around noon the neighbours will notice she hasn’t come out to the balcony and that the door and all the windows are still shut. They will come over with some trepidation and knock at the door as they whisper to each other. She won’t hear. They will call to her, a little louder each time, but she won’t hear. They’ll go to her bedroom window and pound on it, calling out to her, but she won’t hear. Everyone will come. They will summon her friend Muntaha from her house, and the moment they call to her, Muntaha will know that Kamileh is dead. Kamileh has taken precautions for that morning when they will call her and she won’t answer and they’ll knock at her door and she won’t open. She’s taught Muntaha how to open the kitchen door so they won’t have to pry it off. She’ll reach in through the back window, tug on the rope tied to the door latch and the door will open. They will come into the bedroom, whispering, and there they will find her. Upon seeing her, Muntaha will be the only one to let out a cry of grief. ‘Don’t weep for me. Just stop the neighbours from stealing everything in the house. Lock up the gold bracelets and necklace, and Yusef’s things.’ Yusef, her husband.

But today she isn’t going to change anything, especially not today.

She slept with peace of mind knowing that she’d prepared all of Eliyya’s provisions without forgetting a thing — a suitcase filled with food just like the one she sent him off with on his first trip when she followed him all the way to the gate area at the airport and no one had been able to stop her.

On this day she will fight to keep on going. She turns on the dim kitchen light even though she hasn’t been able to tell the difference for a long time. If she didn’t turn the light on, she would not begin the day. Still under the veil of sleep, she sets the coffee pot on the small burner, the front right one. She stands there and waits until she hears the water boil, tosses in two and a half teaspoons of ground coffee and raises the pot up from the burner so it won’t boil over. She can hear it bubble up before it boils over. Over time she’s come to hear sounds she didn’t used to hear before — the flapping of the swallow’s wings on spring days and the sound of the toilet flushing at the Aasis’ house. She raises the coffee pot high above the stove to allow it to foam up. She turns off the gas, turning the valve of the propane canister. After every use she turns the propane canister off and sometimes she even gets out of bed at night to make sure she’s shut the gas off. She places the pot of coffee on the serving tray along with two earless cups turned upside down. Always two cups, turned over, even though she isn’t expecting anyone to join her for morning coffee. Muntaha would still be asleep at that hour. Kamileh goes back to her room, puts on her dress and easily gropes her way to her seat out on the balcony, because she can sense the light. In the past she used to like to wait for day to break behind the high mountains. Now, too, she sits in the same spot. She pours half a cup of coffee, drinks it and pours some more. She even drinks the dregs from the bottom of the cup. She carries the tray and the coffee pot to the kitchen, washes them and puts them away. She fills a bucket with water and goes back to the balcony to water the flowers and the plants before the sun gets to them first. She will only change the details of her daily routine when she is tired of it all, on the day when she no longer feels like getting up the next morning.

Ibrahim al-Halabi is the first to pass by, the first to wake up and leave the house at dawn. He slows down when he reaches the balcony, Kamileh returns the greeting without extending the conversation beyond that. He always has something to say. He always wakes up early to go and stand in the town square, in front of the bookshop, and slowly sip a cup of coffee he buys from the coffee vendor. He watches the town wake up and watches people going into the store to buy the morning paper or pay for lotto tickets, and he watches the government building open its doors across the street. Once people start going to work, Ibrahim al-Halabi’s day comes to an end. He closes up and heads home around nine in the morning, not going back out until dawn the next day. If he’s said hello to Kamileh on his way by early in the morning, he won’t feel obliged to say anything as he totters back home. It was sufficient to merely look up at the balcony and make sure Kamileh was still where she ought to be on the balcony, watering her plants and drinking her coffee. This, in turn, would give him peace of mind that life was running its normal course and he’d won one more day just like the day before. A day whose beauty only people like him understood — people in good health on the brink of the final departure.

After a bit the school teacher follows, clip-clopping in her high heels. One time she greeted Kamileh, but Kamileh didn’t reply or didn’t hear her, so now the teacher always walks past without saying hello. She walks past and does not even look in the direction of the balcony. Coldness suits Kamileh.

And Muntaha also comes along, as she does every day, at sunrise. She, too, locks the door to her house with two turns of the key and takes the key with her. She doesn’t dare leave the door wide open anymore the way she used to. In those days she’d even prop the door open with a chair to prevent the wind from slamming it shut. From the day she was born she’d been used to leaving the door open. Nowadays she is afraid of being robbed. Every day she hears about another incident. Skilled burglars came into people’s houses while they slept, crept into their bedrooms and stole all their jewellery out of the drawer right over the head of the man lying there asleep beside his wife. So far, no one had yet to wake up in the midst of the robbery. No doubt the thieves sprinkled some chloroform in the house they were robbing, which is why the people being robbed woke up in the morning feeling tired and groggy. Muntaha believed there had come to be more strangers living in the town than natives.

‘We don’t know anyone anymore. Where are they all coming from?’ she’d say, looking them right in the face.

Usually when Muntaha came over to Kamileh’s balcony she brought along with her a tray of lentils to sift through, to pick out the pieces of straw and the little pebbles, or she’d bring a batch of courgettes to core with ease and skill. If the lunch menu was an easy one to prepare, she’d just bring along her knitting — a navy blue sweater, for herself.

Muntaha doesn’t have anyone left to knit a sweater or scarf for. Her brother married and went abroad, but he taught his children to remember their aunt, all the way from Australia. She doesn’t know them but they always sent her their greetings and holiday cards in the mail and some money they managed to save up from the meagre salaries they earned from their humble work in the factory. She loves them. She doesn’t have anyone else to love but them, but she has never seen them except in pictures. After her mother died, the mute hadn’t lasted long. He went down to the river one Sunday morning to fish for eels as usual and never came back. They searched everywhere for him; he completely vanished. Maybe he had been sucked into the river. Muntaha has no one left to knit for, so she knits for herself — things she never wears. If anyone asked her about her knitting, she’d say she was finishing a sweater for the neighbours’ little boy in time for the start of school, as if it was shameful for a woman to knit for herself.

But today she comes empty-handed. She makes sure to wear her best dress — the dark brown one. They sit side by side. If Muntaha speaks, Kamileh responds — in brief.

The day heats up and sounds fill the air. Kamileh hushes whoever she can so Eliyya can sleep. She knows who makes every nearby sound and after every noise she scolds whoever caused it.

Around ten Eliyya comes out to the balcony, dressed in a fine white suit. He squeezes into the seat beside Kamileh. He kisses her on the forehead, goes overboard with kisses, wraps his arms around her, and she pushes him away. He insists and she insists back. She doesn’t want these kinds of emotional antics. She can’t stand them. He opens the notebook that never leaves his side, writes something down and then places it beside him on the seat.

Two boys poke their heads between the plants on the balcony, like two people poking their heads between the curtains to watch a play. They climb the wall between the balcony and the main road with agility. Their eyes burn with a desire to see. They stand on tiptoes to get a full view of the scene. News still travels door to door in the Gang Quarter, just like it did in the old days. News of murder and revenge preceded people’s news. It spread among the townspeople from mouth to ear, skipping the strangers Muntaha was so afraid of. It skipped them, waiting until they became integrated into the community. The news that has been travelling door to door since the night before and which the children heard along with stern words from their parents, is that Kamileh’s son, the son of Yusef al-Kfoury who was killed in the Burj al-Hawa incident, is returning to America today, and after today, his mother will never see him again.

Today the schools are on strike and the kids won’t be going to school. Unexpected days off have a special flavour to them. When they heard their parents talking about Kamileh’s son’s travel plans, they said to themselves, ‘There’s a strike tomorrow. Let’s go watch.’

The two boys poke their heads between the plants on the balcony, waiting for the goodbyes. It wasn’t clear who had added to the news bulletin the notion that Kamileh wouldn’t see her son again after today. The two youngsters rushed to watch the moment of final farewell. The idea that Kamileh will never see her son again is what attracts them. They want to see what a last goodbye looks like, one that will never be followed by a reunion. He will never come back to Lebanon after that day and soon she is going to die.

Some of their other friends also join the two boys, and a little while later a crowd of schoolchildren from the First Public High School for Boys surrounds Kamileh’s balcony from all directions. And other classmates who sat beside them on the desk benches at school also join in — little children, sons of the strangers who’d recently taken up residence in the Gang Quarter. Muntaha tries to shoo them away. They back off for a little while but stubbornly stick around in the area. If they back off a few metres, it is only to inevitably return a few minutes later. They follow every movement; they watch as Eliyya and his mother whisper back and forth. Eliyya hesitates a bit, looks around, acknowledges the others present, smiles and gets up to go into the house.

He comes out a little later with his instrument strapped to him. He bends over it wiping off the dust and rediscovering the keys. The children come closer; the appearance of the accordion is a signal to them to creep closer and closer. Some of them have the courage to jump over the balcony railing and sit on the floor beside the family members and the neighbours who’ve come to share in Kamileh’s farewell to her son. He hits one note and then two notes after that, making sure the instrument still makes sounds. He smiles. The number of onlookers multiplies as they call to one another in the narrow alleyways. The entire Gang Quarter.

He turns to face them. He plays the tunes for them that he still remembers after all those years, and they stare at him, silent and breathless. They watch his every move as he stretches the accordion as far as it will open, the whole length of his arms. They enjoy the way it stretches open like that. He opens it only to squeeze it back all the way shut. He probably hasn’t picked up the accordion the whole time he’s been abroad, but the moment he starts pressing the keys his ability to play comes back to him, like when you get back on a bicycle. You learn once and never forget. Without putting on airs, he leans over his accordion and shuts his eyes as if suffering some sort of pain along with the sad tune emanating from it; or he taps his feet in joy when the tempo and rhythm speed up, and sways side to side. He plays whatever tunes come to mind until Kamileh requests ‘Zoorooni Kulli Sana Marra’ — Visit Me Once a Year — which he plays, looking directly into the eyes of the children mesmerised by his deft fingers flying over the keys. They watch him play without listening to the music he is belting out of that amazing instrument of his. The moment Eliyya begins to play, a strange silence comes over the neighbourhood; all car movements seem to come to a complete stop and one no longer hears the sound of mothers calling their sons, or doors slamming, or dogs barking anywhere around.

When Eliyya starts to show signs of tiring, even though he continues to smile for his audience, Muntaha asks the neighbourhood children to leave, explaining that the woman wants to say goodbye to her son and they should all go play around their own mothers. Muntaha doesn’t have any other way of saying it. But they aren’t going to budge one iota. They are going to watch the scene to the very end. Muntaha threatens to go inside to the living room and even begins to ask Kamileh, Eliyya and their visitors to move inside, but the neighbourhood kids raise their voices in protest.

They are going to watch Eliyya say goodbye to his mother. It is the moment they’ve come for and have been waiting for ever since hearing their parents say she would never see him again after today.

She made him a dozen kibbeh patties stuffed with lamb fat, and specially prepared a kilo of dry green beans and a container of labneh balls in olive oil, to which she added some goat cheese and pickled olives and olive oil from the red soil groves of upper Hariq. She packed everything in one suitcase. She secretly sent someone to buy her some pistachio-filled pastries in a sealed wooden box from Tripoli, and half a ring of candied figs and a small bag of dark bulgur wheat. The same taxi driver who had taken him to Burj al-Hawa will take him to the airport. He won’t open his mouth the whole way except to say what is necessary.

Kamileh saves the question for the end, for the moment of farewell. She allows him to hold her hand when she suddenly asks him, ‘What do you want me to do with the house, son?’

The question catches him by surprise. ‘What house?’

‘This house. Your house…’

He tries to say something but is stopped short. She doesn’t force the issue.

She walks behind him to the gate. She stands there with Muntaha at her side. Muntaha despairs of trying to shoo the children, especially now that the time for what they came to see has almost come. Over time and with the gradual waning of Kamileh’s eyesight, Muntaha has grown accustomed to whispering to Kamileh what she needed to know about what was going on in front of her that she could no longer see, as if Muntaha wanted to give back to her lifelong companion what old age had taken away from her.

Eliyya can’t stop hugging and kissing her, and she gives in but does not cry. She wants him to stop, and he does, then takes the suitcases to the car and comes back for one final embrace. Kamileh calls out. The taxi driver comes over and she tells him not to drive too fast taking Eliyya to Beirut and tells him to wait in the airport with him to make sure about his flight and to stop by to see her on his way back to let her know the plane took off with him. The driver promises to do everything she asked and then she hears the car doors shut, one then the other. She hears Eliyya’s voice as he addresses her for the last time. ‘Mother.’ The driver turns the ignition. Kamileh knows that the car will travel around fifty metres before turning left onto the main road. After enough time has passed for the car to disappear around the bend, she asks Muntaha, ‘Did he look back?’

Muntaha pretends not to hear the question. Kamileh repeats, ‘Did Eliyya look back this way before turning the corner?’

‘He looked. Yes, he looked…’ Muntaha lies to her.

A little later, after all the neighbours have left without saying a word all the way to their homes, knowing that Kamileh’s sense of hearing has grown sharper as her vision has grown dim; and after the schoolchildren get bored of looking at her once she goes back to her seat on the balcony near the dahlias; and after all the little kids on their unexpected day off head to the alleys or the video arcades; and after Muntaha claims to have to go home to make lunch, about which Kamileh keeps quiet, knowing well that most of the time Muntaha never makes anything for lunch and just snacks on little things while standing at the sink; after all that, Kamileh takes a deep breath before making herself a cup of coffee and going back to life as usual.

She gropes around the bench and the low tables searching for coffee cups and ashtrays, and while doing this she stumbles upon a notebook left there on the bench. At first she doesn’t know it’s the notebook in which Eliyya wrote all his notes about his trip. She doesn’t know if he’s accidentally forgotten it and would regret that and ask his mother to send it to him one way or another, or if he’s left it there on the bench on the balcony on purpose. However, when later that afternoon she asks Muntaha, who returns to Kamileh’s on this difficult day, to read what is written in the notebook, the first thing she discovers are words that reminded her of the Bible: ‘And Adam knew Eve, his wife, and she was with child and gave birth to Cain. And so she said that she had been blessed with a man from the Lord. Then she was again with child and gave birth to his brother Abel. Abel was a shepherd and Cain ploughed the fields. And it happened after some time that Cain made an offering of fruits of the earth to the Lord; and Abel also made an offering of the fatted, first-born lambs. The Lord looked upon Abel and his offering, but upon Cain and his offering He did not look …’

Muntaha gets tired of reading and Kamileh gets tired of listening. Muntaha turns a few pages: ‘I got more than seven contradictory stories of what started the incident, as if everyone suddenly started shooting at the same time in all directions. Every person I asked had his own story …’

Muntaha’s attention is drawn to a numbered list that she and Kamileh later discover is a list of everyone killed in the Burj al-Hawa incident. Eliyya didn’t mention them by name, but by their occupations or their family status. Muntaha starts reading about each one and pausing so she and Kamileh can figure out who each one is: ‘Driver of an American pick-up truck, 1946 Dodge, worked in export transportation, to Syria and Jordan, sometimes as far as Iraq on long hauls, 32 years old, married, four children, the youngest one week old.’

‘That’s Saeed al-Abras!’

‘Tailor’s apprentice, unmarried, 25 years old.’

‘Farid Badwi al-Semaani!’ Muntaha knew that one.

‘Mechanic trained in a local auto repair shop, had just gotten a promotion at work, manager started giving him some simple repairs to do on his own, unmarried, 25 years old.

‘Arabic teacher, elementary and middle school levels, and chief editor of a periodical school magazine calling for liberation and education for girls and other progressive ideals, liked corresponding with famous great thinkers of the time and received letters from them which he preserved with care, 26 years old, unmarried.’

‘That’s Michel al-Rami.’

The descriptions, ages and occupations go on and on:‘Watchman hired by olive grove proprietors who determines the beginning of harvest and wards off encroachers and stops goat herders from going through the groves and turns a blind eye to the gleaners who come to collect the stray olives at the end of the season, carried a gun as part of his job, 38 years old, seven children, the last born three months after his death and named after him.

‘Butcher, 38 years old, seven children, the oldest 15 years old.

‘Taxi driver, Barqa — Tripoli route and Tripoli — Beirut route sometimes, 27 years old, married with four children.

‘18 years old, not in school as he found it unbearably difficult to do maths and French so he dropped out, not employed despite having made a futile attempt at learning to be a barber and then a carpenter, still young, his life hadn’t yet begun.’

‘Isn’t that your cousin, Muntaha? Your aunt Zahiyya’s son?’

‘Employee at one of the banks in the city — the Lebanese-African Bank — had just got a new job only two weeks earlier, unmarried, 26 years old.

‘Clerk assigned to the judge presiding at the local government building on Tuesdays and Thursdays, 26 years old, married with two children.

‘Australian expatriate who’d come back to the country a few weeks before after hearing news that his relatives were facing major threats, 33 years old, married, had four children at the time of the incident, two were later killed in the ensuing violence.

‘Not known to have stable employment though did well for himself. Did a lot of buying and selling, was said that one day before the incident he got a good deal on some guns and sold a bunch of them to his cousins and some to the family of the enemy, too, some people wanted to believe he was shot by one of those guns he sold to his enemies, married with five children.’

And then suddenly, just before the end: ‘Gambler, opened some clubs here and there, partnered with others here and there, played cards and fixed the deck, 42 years old, married, not blessed with children.’

Muntaha reads that one and stops.

‘That’s Yusef, isn’t it?’ Kamileh says.

‘Maybe.’ Muntaha regrets having read what Eliyya wrote about his father. Something caught Kamileh’s attention. She grabs Muntaha’s hand. ‘Read that to me again.’

Muntaha obliges. ‘Gambler, opened some clubs here and there, partnered with others here and there, played cards and fixed the deck, 42 years old, married.’

‘Is that it?’

‘Yes, that’s it.’

‘You’re a liar, Muntaha,’ Kamileh says, swiping the notebook from her hands.

She tears it apart. She tears out the open page first.

After Muntaha leaves she hides it away. Even after that, she can’t bear it. She takes it out of its hiding place. She feels its pages. She gropes through it a little. She lights a fire and burns it.

She finds relief.

From now on, she isn’t going to bother with putting things back in their places. She is no longer obliged to open the curtains every morning, nice and wide like Eliyya had done to get a full view of the mountain. Eliyya was right to open the curtains wide and fill himself with a view of the sky and the high mountains, but Kamileh doesn’t want to look and have her eyes fall upon Burj al-Hawa right over there on the mountainside. She can’t see one metre in front of her, but despite that she still closed the curtains to hide the view of that town which she would never dare set foot in or pass through ever again. She doesn’t have to get out of bed at night anymore to lock the door with two turns of the key. She will open up all her locked boxes and leave everything out in the open, not keep it hidden from Eliyya anymore. She will take out all of ‘Yusef’s things’ and put her husband’s pictures back on the walls or the table with the other framed pictures. And tonight she will fall asleep to the sound of her own voice again. She will play the tape right next to her head and listen to how her voice used to sound so many years ago when she sang:

Ahmad Mohammed Ali Pasha wanted my demise

And the day it was a Friday

And everyone was there on time

They sat me on a camel, high very high

The executioner steered it and led the way…

Chapter 23

The whole way from Lebanon to Cyprus, Eliyya was quiet and anxious; he wished to be alone. He barely mumbled a thank you to the pretty hostess who brought him a glass of tomato juice. He buried his head in a book he’d brought along specifically for the purpose of appearing to anyone who might look at him to be a seasoned traveller, undaunted by take-off or the sudden bouts of turbulence that bumped the plane around as it ascended into the pure clear sky at sunset. But he hadn’t been able to read a single sentence. The train of thought binding the succession of sentences together before their reader was constantly being severed and the words and meanings were strewn haphazardly in his mind. Every take-off, every start of an ascent into the air, had always frightened him. This was a short flight, but his belongings encumbered him — a carry-on bag full of food and the accordion, especially the accordion, a problem he hadn’t been able to solve. He had placed the bag of food that Kamileh had packed for him in the overhead compartment designed for carry-on luggage, but the accordion didn’t fit, so he kept it by him. He fumbled with it, sometimes putting it between his legs, other times on his lap. The heavy-set middle-aged man with the dark complexion and moustache sitting beside him annoyed him. From the start of the trip he asked nosy and persistent questions about Eliyya’s name, where he was born, where he was travelling to, but to no avail. Eliyya guessed the man was a used car salesman and had decided not to answer any of his questions, and so having failed, the man occupied himself by looking out the window. The man had rushed to get that window seat the second he got on the plane so he could look idiotically and absent-mindedly out at the clear sea and the sun-lit clouds, as if he was reading a book, all the way until the plane touched down with a smooth landing that Eliyya wasn’t expecting.

At the airport in Larnaca Eliyya waited long hours into the night for his next flight, his bags piled beside him. He was still uptight. The faces of the few passengers in the gate area were at once familiar and intense, intense like the colour of their skin. They were Arabs or their cousins from Cyprus, Turkey or Greece. There were also some young Lebanese men on their way back home, singing mawwaals to kill time. And there was a group of slender blonde European tourists. They were travelling light, wearing shorts and apparently used to travelling and to airports, probably travelling in the opposite direction. It was a long wait, so Eliyya opened the bag of food that he had kept with him out of respect for his mother’s wishes. It was very heavy on his shoulder and it was going to be a long trip to New York. The first thing he inspected was the kibbeh patties. He opened one and stuck his finger into the lamb fat filling; it was thick and dry. He set it aside and opened up the cheese, poking his fingers into the salty white mass. He took a bite — his first and last. It was a big chunk which he popped into his mouth after making sure no one was looking. He savoured it slowly. He let it melt in his mouth before swallowing it, allowing the goat flavour to rise up into his nostrils and nearly intoxicate him: the smell of thick, black, goat hide. When at around two o’clock in the morning they announced to passengers that the flight was about to begin boarding, he looked around before leaving the kibbeh and the package of cheese on the chair where he had been sitting. He left it there and avoided looking back. He pushed the rest of his suitcases in front of him on the baggage cart and walked away.

On the plane taking him away to Europe, stray glances here and there still sought him out and stalked him. He carried on a conversation in French with a young man with long hair and tattered clothes who said he was on his way back from Kathmandu. He had a strong odour and said he was looking for customers to whom he could sell small quantities of hashish. When the man asked Eliyya his name, he answered ‘Elie’ in French without hesitation. The man apologised for not giving Eliyya his name and address because, he said, the airport police and Interpol were looking for him. In his turn, he guessed Eliyya wasn’t French from his accent. ‘You’re Belgian or Canadian, aren’t you?’ Eliyya gave a sly smile and didn’t reply. He was at ease now, knowing that he’d re-entered the part of the world where his place of birth wouldn’t stalk him anymore.

At Orly airport he had a shorter layover. He left the bag of food, or what was left of it anyway, on one of the seats in the gate area, hoping some other passenger would take it. He left it and went to poke around the expensive shops, but the French security guard who was making his rounds in the various gate areas of the airport shouted to him to take his suitcase with him. People simply didn’t leave suitcases unattended in airports anymore. He bought a new notebook from one of the bookstores and tossed the pistachio cookies and the labneh balls submersed in olive oil into the trash can. Now his burden was a bit lighter. He later regretted tossing the pistachio cookies a little.

On board the plane to New York, Eliyya recorded his thoughts in his notebook: Here I am, travelling above the Atlantic Ocean inside a diamond wrapped in a white-hued infinity, more like a suffocating prison. Next to me is a young woman like the ones I dreamt of in my early adolescence: thin-framed glasses, mysterious, beautiful… He didn’t write that she was a blonde, his type. He ventured to scrutinise the other passengers, one at a time, sitting in their seats, but no one looked familiar. He didn’t try to flirt with the girl, but spread out a good number of papers and magazines in front of him and smiled at her with just enough nonchalance to capture her attention on that long night flight. She asked to look at one of the magazines, and so he introduced himself using an English accent. ‘I’m Eli,’ he said. Her name was Suzanne and the flight was going to take hours. She started talking. Usually he didn’t talk, but this Suzanne seemed to be talking to herself as she looked at him. Just like that, with no fancy introductions, she warmed up to him. There was something about him that put people at ease, especially women. She was living alone in New York, she said, and was much attached to her independence. She didn’t have a husband, or any boyfriends. Eliyya smiled inwardly. Women were always making that claim of satisfaction, of loving to be on their own. She went on to say that the most beautiful moment of her day was when she came home in the evening after a long tiring day at the Welfare Office in one of the poor neighbourhoods where she worked, and flung her window open. She would open the window and look up at the stars as they mingled with the city lights. She lived on the top floor and could watch the planes fly in one after another as they traversed the city sky, flashing their lights to signal their approach into the airport: innumerable little dots. She loved the refreshing night air and sought out those sweet moments, moments of temperance, before the tumultuous wave of life came crashing back down on her the next morning. Her goal in life was to make those peaceful moments last as long as possible.

Eliyya paused. He let the girl from New York go on talking, and for a period of time, for almost an entire hour, Eliyya appeared not to have anything to say. He just listened and smiled enough to assure her he was trustworthy, an impression he knew he gave to people who talked to him. She, in turn, wasn’t expecting any response from him, but after describing herself and her daily routine to him, she remembered that being a good conversationalist required showing interest in the listener, so she asked him if he was familiar with New York. At that point, the knot in his tongue was loosened and he started improvising, as he’d grown accustomed to doing, this time with a new story in which he said he lived in New York and had been born in Egypt. He supposedly had grown up in a Jewish family in Alexandria and had a half-crazy paternal aunt whose real name was Sarah, but they called her by the alias Jamila. His aunt claimed that the commander of the British Army, Colonel Roger Whittaker, who was stationed there during WWII and according to her was a hero in the Battle of Elalamein, was in love with her. Supposedly the British Intelligence asked her to collaborate with them in return for a large sum of money, but she refused. Whenever she had trouble finding anyone to listen to her stories, she would gather the children of the family together and tell them her stories of love and disappointment. Eliyya went on to say he had a younger sister who had fallen in love with a young and handsome Muslim. She had run away with him despite the family’s protests and accusations of betrayal. He was finishing up his story with his usual enthusiasm when he noticed that Suzanne, sitting there beside him, was shutting her eyes little by little and the magazine she was holding was about to slip out of her hands. A little baffled, he watched her a while until she had dozed off completely with her head resting on his shoulder. Eliyya continued his story as if Suzanne was still listening to him. He took advantage of her nap to tell her another story.

‘In a small town far, far away, on the western coast of the Mediterranean Sea, there was a place full of dense fir trees standing like sad women on the slopes of the high mountains; clusters of snow shimmered above them in the spring sun, and the plains were covered with olive trees; a place where the waters splashed and the mountain dipped its feet in the ancient sea…’

Eliyya told the story as if he were reading it from a book, with a monotonous rhythm that most likely helped keep Suzanne asleep.

‘… And there was a man who was forty years old. He’d married a girl he loved and who loved him, and for fifteen years they lived without the blessing of children. Then, on one hot spring night, his wife forced him to sleep with her. But it so happened that the next day the man was killed in a massacre that took place in a church. This was when, rather than coming to an end, all the problems began. Some of the townspeople insisted that in all the confusion the man had been accidentally shot by his own relatives; while friends of his from the enemy’s family said he’d been shot in the back intentionally. On Saturday, the 7th of March of the following year, his widow gave birth to a son. It was at least one week more than nine months later, assuming that the last time his father had slept with his mother before he was killed was the one that led to conception after fifteen years of futile attempts. In those days doctors did not have methods for inducing labour. And his mother had no way of getting to a doctor. So when she realised she was overdue, she sent a friend to get the midwife who lived in the area. The midwife spread his mother’s legs and took a look. The only medicine she could prescribe was to wait. She delivered him the next day, amidst the gunfire and family feuding and never-ending vendettas. He was a big baby, with a big body and a big head. At fourteen he could recite French poems by heart and learned to play the accordion and the clarinet. He knew it all — English, Arabic, French and Latin — though he hadn’t mastered any of it. He knew German philosophy but didn’t know the names of its pioneers. He knew music but couldn’t read musical notation. He was an expert in all the world’s cuisines, but couldn’t make an omelette. He lived an adventurous childhood but no one could be convinced that he was his father’s son, so they guessed other men to be his father, finally settling on the notion that his mother was his only parent. This was something that created a deep hole in his and his mother’s hearts. His mother couldn’t stand to have him near her, so she sent him away. He went to the other side of the world and told everyone he met there fabricated stories of his past, which no one believed. And here he is now, floating on his last flight to New York, carrying his burdensome Biblical name and that past of his, fraught with all its stubborn legends, trying to tell the truth about himself and his family for the first time in his life to a blonde American girl who isn’t listening…’

As soon as Eliyya stopped speaking, Suzanne opened her eyes and said reproachfully, ‘Why did you stop? I was enjoying your story very much… I usually don’t really like stories about fathers and mothers and sons, but it’s been a long time since someone told me a story while I drifted in and out of sleep…’

He paused a little, and then said, ‘It’s not a story…’

‘Doesn’t matter. You tell it the way my father used to tell me and my sister the story of Peter Pan. However much we resisted it would always send us to sleep… Go on. Please,’ she said, laying her head back on Eliyya’s shoulder to assure him she wanted to fall asleep to the sound of his voice again.

Eliyya finished his story before falling asleep himself on that long flight over the Atlantic. When the announcement to fasten seatbelts in preparation for landing came over the loudspeaker, Suzanne woke up and Eliyya cast out his hooks, as usual. ‘I know a French restaurant on…’ Suzanne didn’t seem to hear what he was saying. She was busy gathering her things.

He tried again. ‘Do you like French cuisine?’

He couldn’t get an answer from her. Things weren’t going his way as they usually did.

She preferred to change the subject. ‘Can you play it?’ she asked, pointing to the accordion.

Now it was his turn to keep silent and look out at the Manhattan skyscrapers.

At John F. Kennedy airport where the plane landed, Suzanne gave him her phone number and walked off into the crowd of travellers. He stood following her with his eyes until she disappeared into the distance, the whole time hoping she would turn just once to say goodbye to him. He tried calling her a week later and discovered there was no Suzanne to be found at that number and whoever it was who answered was very rude and angry. Whether it was her father or her husband or her boyfriend he didn’t know. Or maybe she had given him someone else’s phone number. He was forced to cut the call short and hang up.

Eliyya felt reassured having returned to his world. He smiled to himself. At the airport where Suzanne had left him standing among a group of Japanese tourists, he reclaimed his suitcase full of clothes. His mother had packed it with his baby clothes and shoes and added his school books and notebooks from his first years of school, along with the shiny metal bird standing on one leg with its wings spread. He took out the picture of his father that Davidian, the Armenian photographer, had had in his possession. He looked at it a long time. A man of medium build, with a look of self-assurance hiding some kind of sadness behind a smile he was forced to wear for the photographer. He tore the picture in half, getting rid of the other man standing beside his father. Eliyya checked the weather; it seemed cold so he took his black overcoat out of the suitcase, tossed it over his shoulder, shut the suitcase and left it behind him. He also left the bag of food and whatever still remained in it. He went outside carrying the wine-coloured accordion and the picture of Yusef al-Kfoury: unburdened, a traveller without bags. If anyone asked him — and who was going to ask him anyway? — he’d say his bags had been lost somewhere along the way in one of the three airports he’d travelled through.

That night he wasn’t able to go back to his apartment; he couldn’t bring himself to return to all of his things all at once. He stayed in a small hotel, but couldn’t fall asleep until the break of dawn, after tossing and turning in his bed all night. The noise from the street and all the light from the neon signs flooded the room. After the feeling of excitement that had overcome him again as he travelled between three continents in a single day, he was suddenly struck with a deep depression mixed with fatigue from the long trip. But he buried his head into the thick pillow and made every effort until he finally slept without dreaming until almost noon. That was when the front desk receptionist called to say he preferred to notify guests who were late for check-out as a courtesy. He went down to the hotel lobby, looked out through the thick windowpane, and dreaded going outside. He wished he could go back to his room and stay there like the traveller he’d read about in a fantasy novel who had remained suspended outside time in a city he was passing through and was never able to leave.

Some hotel guests checked out, others checked in — a woman with her daughter, an old man and a young black man. Eliyya sat a little while, long enough to write a letter by hand. It was a special gesture he wanted to surprise his latest girlfriend Heather Pollock with. She was the daughter of Reverend Henry Pollock, Jr. who was famous for his sermons about the turn of the third millennium, which were broadcast, live on one of the local TV stations. He focused his attention a little, trying to remember things he’d said to her that had made her eyes light up in enchantment when she heard them. At the beginning he noted that this letter was going to reach her with a postage stamp on it just like in the old days. This time at least she would find something in her mailbox that she could read, something besides sales flyers and coupons for fashion magazine subscriptions she would immediately toss into the nearest bin. ‘Here you have a letter written by hand, emotions written by hand, too,’ he wrote to her and added that spring had come early in his country this year so he hadn’t been able to enjoy the white almond blossoms. Concerning his mother, she couldn’t see well anymore and he thought she was suffering from a hereditary illness he might end up developing someday. He was back in New York now, longing to see her and to invite her back to Relais d’Arcachon.

He paid his bill and stood at the door leading out to the busy street. Once again, at his first step outside the door, for a split second he thought about turning back. He stood watching the sea of pedestrians; he was afraid. A lump formed in his throat. He was afraid the wave of pedestrians would sweep him away. As usual, they seemed to be walking in unison, jammed together like columns of soldiers in battles from the old days, all going in the same direction, hurrying to arrive at the appointed time. There was no way to escape the confrontation. He placed his foot on the pavement like a swimmer dipping his foot in the water to see how cold it was before gradually letting his body adjust to the cold and finally immersing himself all the way. He went a short distance, but nearly suffocated. Without thinking, he decided to turn right and go into a clothes shop. He needed a new suit. He stood for a long time in front of the mirror. He tried one after another until he found something he liked. He limited his choices to black and white. He spent a lot of time worrying about the details, making sure to get the right size and the right cut. He chose a necktie and socks, but just like every time, there was something missing from the clothes he chose, just like his hasty French accent and his measured English accent, just as in his previous life, in his meandering and interrupted university studies and the never-ending chain of romances he plunged into and the little jobs he started and stopped, and just like his sudden return trip home to his mother and his hometown and what he came back with from that trip; in all these things there was always a little something missing, something lost, an imperfect way of standing, an unusual look in the eyes, an emptiness, a current of air between what he aimed at and the efforts he exerted in an effort to get there, an opening that, unknowingly, he insisted on keeping open as a means of escape. Eliyya, the son of Yusef al-Kfoury, was an unfinished project.

He stopped a moment at the door of the clothes shop. His ability to confront the world had improved. Suddenly the flavour of goat cheese came back to him, the smell of black goat hide. He girded himself with the shiny wine-coloured accordion, took a deep breath like a swimmer preparing to dive into deep waters, and slipped in between the pedestrians, surrendering to the procession. At first he tried to carve out some space for himself; as the crowd brushed against him from behind, he fell back a step and blocked their path. He made his way towards the edge of the pavement, where the cars were zooming by; there one of the four cardinal directions would surely open up for him and allow him a small margin of freedom. But soon enough he lost his need to breathe. He forgot his body and headed back into the sea of pedestrians, into the middle of the pavement, never to stop again.

A Note on the Author

Jabbour Douaihy was born in 1949 in Zgharta, Lebanon. He is a professor of French literature at the Lebanese University in Beirut and has published numerous novels and story collections, some of which have been translated into English. June Rain was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arab Fiction. Jabbour Douaihy lives in Lebanon.

A Note on the Translator

Paula Haydar has translated several novels by leading Lebanese and Palestinian novelists including Elias Khoury and Sarah Khalifeh. She won the Arkansas Arabic Translation Prize for her translation of Elias Khoury’s The Kingdom of Strangers.

Content

Jabbour Douaihy
June Rain

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

A Note on the Author

A Note on the Translator