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 refe
rence 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.
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