For Samir Kassir
Contents
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
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 o
r 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 becaus
e 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?’
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