‘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 h
e 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 h
olding 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 . . .
June Rain Page 6
