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 w
hole 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.
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