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 m
eet 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.
June Rain Page 9
