They woke up to their names in the 1940s, specifically the mid-1940s, and so they went for a second time to the government palace, to the Court Magistrate, with a petition in hand requesting correction to what they said was mistakenly left out of the record of their names. The Magistrate got so sick and tired of them that he asked the court herald, who had only one eye, to go around the neighbourhood, stop at every intersection, and announce in a loud voice that name-change cases would only be considered once a week, on Tuesdays. They were familiar with the process, to the point that they didn’t need to hire a lawyer, because they could present the request and bring two witnesses and answer a few questions. The census clerk and the coffee vendor out in front of the government palace stood as witnesses for everyone. The Magistrate became furious, wondering aloud, right in front of his clerk, what had come upon them all of a sudden to wake up to family relations that for generations had been of little value except for dividing up lands and inheritance and all the bickering that went along with it.
The employees at the Department of Personal Records kept going back over and over the registration books, opening them so many times to correct names or add surnames or remove the names of the dead or of women who had married and moved to other towns or to register new births that the edges of the huge books became frayed and some of the pages were torn and had to be pasted back together with difficulty. The people’s very existence had become threatened, because a number of pages were nearly torn out or erased, nearly causing many names to be lost.
Nowadays they are able to quench their thirst for numbers – numbers of voters in their family, that is, because they can request a CD from the Ministry of Interior, something that has saved their rosters from dwindling away. This way they are able to get an exact count of their relatives according to how their names appear on the official ledger, and they regret that those of them who emigrated to faraway lands like South America and Australia didn’t bother to register their children, otherwise their numbers would be doubled. Likewise, they are able nowadays to surf the web and Google their family names, sometimes finding people with the same family name or the same first name in the Bahraini House of Notables or on the Moroccan national football team. Some youngsters who were electronics fanatics and web experts constructed websites for their families on the internet, like ‘Semaani.com’, for example, for which they also designed a family emblem with a sword, a book and the sceptre of their religious authority. They recorded on the website all the family births at home and abroad, as well as their marriages and deaths, and they also exchanged email addresses and posted news about the family notables and constantly reminded visitors of the luminaries among them – a historian, for example, who wrote about the eternalness of the Lebanese mountain and for whom General de Gaulle wrote an introduction to his collected works, or an artist who travelled to distant lands but made the scenery of his childhood and its colours the subject of his first and only paintings – all of this to make their families seem vast and rich and extended. They bragged that their family included everything from a highly reputed neurosurgeon in California to a judge running for mayor of Mexico City and a centre player for the Australian national rugby team.
Behind every family there was someone responsible for family reunions, a notable or rich man who began forging friendly relations in the capital with Monsieur Plafond, one of the aides to the French High Commissioner, or with one of the employees of the British delegation. He got promises of support from them and returned to the town at the end of the week in order to add to his family, which had just woken up to itself, as many well-known relatives as he could, along with neighbours who had earned the right to carry the family name, or the ones from small families who added their wives’ families to their own. And the family had its zaeem and its candidate for a seat in Parliament, who imitated the noble family’s descendents by seeking to build a Lebanese-style home, as they called it, and by making sure he didn’t take a wife from within the town.
When they woke up to their names and families like that, they assumed that they were eternal. This is why they were surprised by what a young historian who visited Istanbul at his own expense told them. He checked the Tabo Daftari, the Ottoman public records going back to the sixteenth century when they were released to the public by the Turkish Ministry of Culture, and found out that their ancestors carried simple names – the man’s name and his father’s name. Rizq bin Jirjis, or even simply, Ishaac bin Ibrahim. They didn’t care to hear what he had to say about the number of threshing floors they owned, or olive presses, cattle, fruit trees, or about the taxes their ancestors paid at times to the Wali of Damascus and at other times to the Wali of Tripoli, or how they had been hardy farmers who cultivated the rugged land, suffered persecution, and produced pure and pious men of religion, bishops and patriarchs who expounded on their beliefs and established them in rare writings and in numerous languages, monks who brought the first printing press to the East and founded in their town the first school in this mountain of knowledge and holiness. All of this did not elicit the slightest bit of interest. All that mattered was the shock of finding out that their names, the names of their families, which when arguments flared up they said they paid for in blood, did not even exist in those days and that perhaps they themselves had invented the families in the era of democratic pluralism.
The family was divided into branches, and each one of these they called a jibb, or a well. Each jibb had its characteristics, as for example the men of such-and-such jibb usually died of congenital heart failure, or those of this other jibb always over salted their food, and still others were known to be cowards who put on their pyjamas at sunset, or didn’t pay what they owed because their grandfather told them not to. They spun yarns about heroic deeds and every family had its tough guys, those with the frowns on their faces for no reason. Their fame and talk of their heroic deeds spread far and wide. Every one of them earned a title he bragged about. They started counting their ‘rifles’, in whispers, whereas before they had divided up into families they had had tough men among them who were not part of the big families’ lineage. They shared the memory of those men and held them up as examples, as in the case of Butros Touma, who had attacked the enemies carrying a cannon on his shoulder, or Al-Ghazaal and Al-Aaouri, who had both been shot high up in the mountains by Turkish soldiers after their own guns ran out of ammunition. And there was Sarkis Naoum who had supplied wheat free of charge during the Great Famine and the siege on Mount Lebanon during the Great War, and who had been shot in the back.
All of them stood to receive condolences whenever any member of their extensive family died, and relatives of theirs who strayed from them they called a communist or a mason. They couldn’t understand how anyone would disown his own family. Blood ties, after all, exerted obligatory pressure even on those who did not have much to offer. They hesitated over taking a wife from outside the family and some were wary of dangers the future might hold, so they rented or bought themselves houses close to where their relatives lived. They preferred to buy their daily needs and provisions from their cousins’ shops, even if they were a long distance from their homes. But if they happened upon members of other families – even the especially competitive and cut-throat ones – when they were in Beirut or anywhere outside their town, they always hastened to greet them wholeheartedly, offering their services with insistence. For the most part, they were sincere about the concern they showed for each other. They brought their familial divisions with them to Sydney, Caracas and Mexico, where they didn’t dare to resort to violence to settle accounts, but were content to hold meetings in which they backed each other up and offered aid to their relatives in the homeland, which did not extend beyond infusing the family coffers with dollars they were able to save up by the sweat of their brows. They dug up proverbs such as ‘He who takes off his clothes gets cold’ and ‘Blood is thicker than water.’ They brandished these proverbs in the face of those they felt were either hesitant or doubtful
about their life’s journey, and they complained that none of the other families loved them. They felt they were being naïve, going out of their way for others without getting anything in return except perhaps some ingratitude.
There were some eloquent spokesmen among them who achieved prominence. They were half-educated and pretended to know a lot about the past and to have read many books. They fabricated an ancient oral history of their families, one that nobody but them exchanged and transmitted. It confirmed the precedence of their presence here and the seniority of their influence over this piece of land and their ownership of it, as if they never migrated to it from any other place in the world. If they relented on this idea, it was only to accept being descended from a French family that had come to the East with the Crusades, which was a history that attributed to their ancestors heroic deeds from a past in which they allied themselves with the Shahabi princes, expelled the Jacobites from the environs of their town, or rang the church bells in Muslim villages that had never heard such bells before. Some of them also discovered that their ancestors were the founders of the town, which they had been cheated out of in the eighteenth century and felt it was high time they got it back in the middle of the twentieth century.
One of their judges, who had been a man of letters, undertook the task of recording for them in a collection of books the ancestry and genealogy which they had spun for themselves. In everything he wrote he was careful not to slight anyone’s ancestry, for if something like that were to happen, it would have dire consequences. So he attributed to every family and every jibb only the best qualities that they themselves desired. He recounted their deeds the way they would want them to be recounted; in other words, he did not mention anything humiliating or any act of betrayal on their part, but rather gave a complete and perfectly connected history of superiority and courage.
When it came to other families, they discovered or recalled their endless vices, such as their extreme stinginess or the ease with which their votes could be bought during elections, or how difficult they were as neighbours especially in the orchards, never hesitating to encroach upon other people’s property. They tilled and planted other people’s land and ate the harvest if no one stopped them. Or they were mindful of the behaviour of the women of those competing families, such as how easy and fickle-hearted they were around men. They accused their competitors of not being indigenous to the town and claimed that any review of their actions in the distant or recent past was the best proof of their dubious ancestry. Add to that all the backstabbing and scheming and cowardice, which they attributed to the others. They detailed all of that in lengthy descriptions, which they said revealed the crimes of their enemies, starting with the theft of cattle and persecution of the people of the neighbouring farms at the height of the horrors of WWI and continuing on to assassinations they planned out and then artfully blamed on others. On the other hand, they attributed to themselves and their relatives great bravery and the ability to face up to any challenge, and they recounted their dignitaries’ virtues, such as generosity and compassion for the poor and the farmers – asking about the harvest and wondering how the cows, which they knew by name, were faring – and political acumen and awareness of the constants and the variables in the positions of the great powers.
Their women were even more severe than the men when it came to retaliating. One woman in particular gained a reputation for this, the one who told her children, ‘Any one of you who hesitates to avenge his brother will be cut off from his father’s inheritance.’ And there was that other woman. After her husband was shot down by soldiers, she covered him with a white sheet as she called out to his cousins not to pay any attention and just go on fighting.
It was quite bewildering to the members of the small families, who, despite having sufficient numbers, did not have the good fortune of having a notable family member who could reunite them and put together a noble family ancestry for them. Eventually they were content and felt compensated for their frustration by participating in the special fund set aside for burial expenses or aid to the sick and the poor among them. They divided up their loyalty between the big families causing themselves to be called lafeef, the hangers-on, by some and urra, the stray sheep that joined the herd, by others. They went overboard with their loyalty and jumped at the chance to be of service, composing jingles at election time and sticking their heads out of car windows to make victory signs, going out in groups into the villages and surrounding farms, securing votes for their supporters and giving dirty looks to backers of their opponents. They sent out delegates to all the villages and into the voting precincts, both the men’s and the women’s precincts. They roamed about the towns day and night for weeks before Election Day, and refused to go behind the curtain to cast their votes, insisting instead on casting their ballots openly, thereby proving to their leaders that their allegiance was as pure as white milk.
Fearing what might happen if the two parties came too close to each other, the Governor of North Lebanon asked each party to provide a schedule of their visits to make sure they didn’t run into each other and start shooting. Once, however, the Governor neglected to do so, or he purposely didn’t ask for their schedules for political reasons, as it was said. He let both parties attend the same service for the one-year anniversary of the death of the bishop’s brother in one of those towns at the base of the mountain where they ended up confronting each other and drowning in a river of blood. The resentments that they had been dragging around with them for decades ended in an all-out war, set ablaze as they dug trenches and amassed cannons and heavy artillery, and which left no innocent person safe from kidnapping and no passer-by safe from being shot. And if at some point the state was able to dispatch troops to separate the fighters and impose security, even if only for a few months, the only effect was to bring the war off the streets and back into their hearts where it waited for the opportunity to flare up again.
Chapter 9
At exactly five o’clock, Haifa Abu Draa let out a loud scream. A scream that pierced like a knife.
I was at home, at my parents’ house. I’ve never moved out of their house, and I never will til the day I die. I never got married. There were three of us girls. We were good friends to each other in our youth. Every day we went out, walking together. We held hands and set out in the evening for a stroll along the river road. We wore our best clothes and did everything we could to attract the boys. If one of the boys we were trying to interest was forward with us, we turned red with embarrassment and turned our faces in the other direction. We turned red with embarrassment and turned our faces away so much that all three of us ended up without husbands.
When Haifa Abu Draa screamed, I was at home because I didn’t like Sundays. I don’t know what other people like about Sundays. I always spent them at home, like any other day. I didn’t like to assign them any special importance, except for going to church. I went to church and came back home to do the laundry, wash the dishes and quarrel with my mother just like every other day of the week. We raised our voices, having a good time together, arguing over everything. I always liked housework, ever since I was a small child. I liked cleaning and tidying up and felt comfortable bickering with my mother.
I didn’t like Haifa Abu Draa’s scream, and neither did my mother. She was sitting, my mother that is, embroidering a comforter, facing me on the couch. She looked at me and I looked back at her.
We were used to Haifa’s noise. If the curses and sounds of struggle stopped coming to us from her direction, we knew she’d gone to Tripoli to do her shopping. An early morning lull.
This time her scream was deep, coming from the depths of her soul. I accidentally burned my brother’s shirt before I realised it and set the iron aside to make the sign of the cross. I always put my house clothes back on when I returned from church on Sunday. Who did I have to dress up for? I had all the dresses I needed, but who would I wear them for?
My mother went to the window. We didn’t hear a pe
ep after Haifa’s scream. Nothing. A deep silence engulfed the whole neighbourhood. It was as if the news, as if whatever had caused Haifa to scream that way, was travelling in whispers, like bad news usually did with us, moving from one quarter to another, one door to another, and especially from one woman to another, so that if it struck one of them, she screamed, as if by electric shock.
Haifa Abu Draa had been struck. I didn’t know who had dared tell her the news. Her brother was an only boy among five sisters. How could anyone possibly have told her? It seems some woman came to her door and told her that her brother had been wounded. Haifa screamed once and fainted. She knew right away he was dead. The relaying of bad news always began lightly, to minimise the blow. If they said that so-and-so had been taken to the hospital, it meant he was dead as a doornail. The real news was written all over the bearer’s face, and Haifa was very good at reading faces.
The news struck Haifa and then finished its tour, hitting in every direction. It reached us a few minutes later with my little sister who had been on her way to the store to buy goat’s milk yogurt, which was just coming into season at that time. She turned back. She told us she didn’t know why she turned back. Something in the air made her do it, something in people’s eyes told her ‘Go back home, little girl.’ She came in, quite frightened, and looked at us, expecting us to already have heard the news. She almost stumbled and fell flat on the floor. She was as yellow as saffron and looking around as if something were trying to hunt her down. We didn’t get anything out of her because she couldn’t speak. Her tongue in a knot, she flung herself onto the couch. She hadn’t heard anything and hadn’t seen anything.
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