The mute knew more than her; he knew everything. He came in behind her. He was our neighbour and one of my mother’s distant relatives. He was barefoot as usual. Whenever he crossed our doorstep, the smell of reeds and the river came in with him. He liked to fish for eels and weave baskets. He had words written on his face as he headed towards my mother.
Every day when she was finished her with housework, my mother sat with him. He would leave his basket weaving and come to her. They would drink coffee together. He was completely deaf and dumb and she was the only person who understood his language and communicated with him. They were a beautiful sight. He had taught her his language. A language he had completely made up himself. He knew how to characterise so-and-so as stingy or so-and-so as the one with glasses or such-and-such a woman as one who lies all the time. Whenever he had a good catch, he brought us a part of it.
He came in, eyes shining. He began waving his hands around rapidly, all excited, his eyes flitting around, tracing out signs in the air – sometimes as if he were turning the steering wheel of a car and other times imitating the sound of gunfire in all directions with his mouth. He was telling my mother about a long chain of events. My youngest sister was still sprawled on the couch, completely powerless. The mute tilted his head to one side, stuck out his tongue and rolled his eyes, possibly alluding to Haifa Abu Draa who had screamed and passed out.
He went to the window, pointing right and left at the various houses in the quarter, waving his fist in the direction of the mountain, in the direction of Burj al-Hawa. I understood later on that he was threatening that town, was angry at it the way one man gets mad at another man for insulting him. My mother followed his story, understanding him, widening her eyes and nearly choking with fright. She had to cover her mouth to stop herself from screaming. I couldn’t bear to see my mother that way any longer. ‘Mum! What’s he saying?’ I shouted at the top of my lungs. ‘Tell us!’
My little sister also had her hand over her mouth. My mother hesitated, not knowing where to begin. She’d gone mute, too. I looked over at the mute hoping I could read something on his face. He was standing there smiling. That’s the way he was, from the very first time he set foot in our house. Whenever he succeeded in getting his message across, he smiled.
Then we started to hear some commotion. An obscure rumble. Then suddenly we heard a car horn, beeping without pause, coming from a car speeding down to the city. The people of the quarter were coming out of their houses, wanting to find out what was going on. The square filled up with people crossing the street. Women propped their hands on their hips as if they were no longer able to hold their bodies up on those narrow street corners, or they stood with their arms crossed over their chests, expecting the worst. They were waiting to hear the names of the dead, and they’d heard there were many. I didn’t dare think about anyone anymore. Were there any of our men who had not gone up to Burj al-Hawa?
‘Muntaha!’ Kamileh called to me from the balcony.
I ran to her, still wearing my house clothes.
‘Yusef is gone!’
That moment, every woman with a husband who had gone up to Burj al-Hawa assumed he was now dead.
‘Don’t leave me, Muntaha!’
Kamileh’s mother hadn’t arrived yet. Her mother’s house was far away, down near the riverbank. How could I leave her? I’d been her neighbour ever since Yusef al-Kfoury brought her to our quarter. Whenever anyone was looking for Kamileh, they knew they could find her at Muntaha’s. We would sit in the corner over there, in the shade of the grapevine. We would sit on the bench and talk. We wouldn’t spare anyone from our sharp tongues. She had a bitter tongue, that Kamileh. She didn’t want to hurt anybody, but she did want to ward off evil from us.
I went inside her house and found her sitting on the floor. I tried to calm her down and take the broom from her hands. It seemed that when Kamileh heard the screams and the news reached her, she was in the middle of sweeping away the leaves and flower petals that had littered the balcony as usual. Her legs buckled under her and she sat down on the floor with the broom still in her hand. She was sitting there on the floor, her legs stretched out in front of her, holding onto the broomstick and lifting it up high. Like a flag.
‘Don’t worry. Your husband doesn’t like trouble. People love him . . .’
But she wasn’t listening. I couldn’t bear the sight of her with that broom.
‘Give me that broom! Calm down!’
She wouldn’t release her grip. She kept banging the broom against the floor, methodically, one thud after another, until screams came from the direction of the main road, indicating that the dead and wounded had arrived. Kamileh was forced to stand up and go out into the streets with everyone else.
There was an armoured police car parked in the square with a security guard watching the crowd from its turret. The guard had a handlebar moustache, just like the odd-looking king of spades in a deck of cards. He examined his surroundings, completely baffled. He looked comical, but he was either afraid or stunned by us and our dead, I don’t know which.
We asked a lot of people. Kamileh begged people she knew and people she didn’t know to tell her what happened.
‘Did you see my husband? Yusef al-Kfoury?’
No one answered. No one knew anything. And those who had heard something didn’t dare tell. She screamed at them to answer. They avoided her.
At around five-thirty we heard a rumbling sound coming our way.
The dead had arrived.
A small truck drove through the crowd. The bodies were piled up on top of each other.
Waves of people crowded around the truck, and a man standing on the truck bed shouted at them to back away because not all of them were dead. ‘Let the truck get to the city hospital quickly. Maybe we can save one of them.’
We got as close as we could. Kamileh pushed her way through with me right behind her, trying to find our way to the truck. A number of people were able to grab hold of the protective metal bars on both sides of the truck bed and they walked along with the truck as it dragged them behind it. The dead had been piled up with their heads to the inside of the truck bed. A white sheet had been thrown over them, but their legs were still visible.
The truck passed through and the people weren’t able to stop it. The driver didn’t take his hand off the horn as he tried to get through and the man standing in the bed of the truck begged the people to get out of the way. Despite being so close to the bodies, no one dared lift the white sheet from their heads.
Kamileh suddenly stopped following the truck, turned around to me and asked me to go home with her.
‘Just walk with me and don’t ask anything.’
I went with her. I wanted to go to my house just for one minute to check on my family, but she wouldn’t let me go. I said to myself that Kamileh had gone crazy. She walked ahead of me at a fast pace. ‘Muntaha! Follow me!’ she was saying.
She must have said it twenty times as I walked behind her.
We reached her house, but she couldn’t find her key. In all the commotion, she had lost it. We got the neighbour’s son and lifted him up to the window. He got in. He was small and easy to lift. He was able to push his head through first, then his body. Before he was able to get to the door and open it for us from inside – that is, go through the living room and get to the front door – in those few seconds Kamileh pounded on the door at least a hundred times. I swear to God, a hundred times or more. She pounded so hard her knuckles started to bleed.
‘Where are we going, Kamileh?’
‘Follow me, Muntaha!’
That was all she knew how to say.
She headed towards the bedroom and pulled out one of the cupboard drawers. The edge of the drawer landed on her foot so she screamed. She put the drawer on the floor and sat down beside it. It was full of men’s socks. It was her husband’s sock drawer. I didn’t know that a man could own so many pairs of socks. I was comparing it with my father’s and brother’
s, with their three or four pairs of socks, no more. We used to wash their socks and darn them when they got torn with the help of a light bulb. We would stuff the light bulb inside the sock which, with the right kind of thread, made it easier to darn.
Kamileh sat on the floor and started searching the drawer. She was tossing the socks right and left, as if playing some sort of colour game.
‘Navy, navy, navy . . .’ she said.
She’d grab one pair of socks, and unsure of its colour, hold it up to the light coming from the window. Then she’d ask some of the people around (some neighbours had followed us in).
‘Is this navy or black?’
How could we answer? We all thought she’d gone crazy. More neighbours came into the house. I grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her to make her speak. She did.
‘He’s gone, Muntaha. He’s gone!’
‘Where did he go, Kamileh?’ I asked, trying to lighten the atmosphere. She stopped talking. ‘OK, how do you know he’s gone?’ I asked.
‘I saw his feet in the truck.’
I shook her and then I hit her. I slapped her on the face to snap her out of it.
‘OK, you saw his feet. What does that mean?’
‘I saw his socks. Navy with white stripes. I know his socks, every one. Who washes them? I do. Who pairs them together? I do. Who mixes brown with beige? I do. And now, where are the navy ones? Bring me the navy socks and I’ll shut up. Today he put on the navy socks and went to Burj al-Hawa, Muntahaaaaaa!’
Her mother arrived and shouted at her to stand up. She shouted at her like a mother does, as if Kamileh had reverted to being a child again. She picked up the socks from the floor and put the drawer back in the closet. She just couldn’t bear to see her daughter become a spectacle in front of everyone. She asked the neighbours to leave. Then we persuaded Kamileh not to give up, maybe she was mistaken.
‘No one knows anything. They’re saying the bodies in the truck are strangers.’
‘Strangers?’ she mocked us. ‘We don’t kill strangers. We only kill our cousins.’
‘There are many rumours. Don’t believe them, Kamileh. At first they said our neighbour Abu Mansur was killed, but half an hour later he came back home safe and sound. Don’t believe what you hear . . .’
‘I don’t believe what I hear. Nobody told me Yusef is dead. I know it . . .’
We went back out to look for him again, hoping he was only wounded. Kamileh and her mother and I. Three women. The sun was going down. Who would take us to Tripoli?
‘No one but Hamid al-Semaani can help you,’ we were told.
We went to Hamid al-Semaani. We begged him to take us in his car. He had a blue Chevrolet of which he was very proud, and always very protective. We begged him. Kamileh’s appearance must have got to him. Her eyes were out of focus and one could read death on her face. He and his wife whispered to each other before he agreed to take us. His children were scared, little children who kept poking their heads around the door from the room inside. True, he was a member of our family, but he acted like he was a stranger. His wife was a stranger, from Al-Mazraa.
I remember him making the sign of the cross before we took off. On our way, we saw the army entering the town. Kamileh was silent. She had a lost look in her eyes.
We went down into the city. We checked all the hospitals. We met others searching, just like us. They sent us from one hospital to another until we found him. We found him. Dead. He didn’t have his identity card on him, but they told us some other people who were also searching for missing family members had recognised him. They had written his name on a piece of paper and placed it in his jacket pocket where he liked to put a handkerchief that matched his tie, or a sprig of Arabian jasmine, when he went out to those parties where the wine made everyone’s heads spin.
Yusef al-Kfoury was a handsome man. He had blue eyes. Kamileh’s two sisters had fallen in love with him, but he only had eyes for Kamileh. Kamileh was the youngest of her sisters, but the most sought after by the young men. She hadn’t wanted him. She told me that a hundred times. Her sisters convinced her to marry him in order to get rid of her, because if she didn’t get married, they’d never find husbands. And now there he was, laid out in a room in the basement of the hospital. He was covered with a white sheet except for his head and shoulders. He looked like someone lying on his back, asleep.
We stood there before him and the first move Kamileh made was to lift the sheet from his feet. Then she looked at me and said, ‘Do you believe me now, Miss Muntaha?’
I didn’t understand what she meant until I saw her go approach him and start removing his socks. When I saw her holding the socks and waving them in the air like some kind of war booty, I burst out laughing.
‘You believe me now?’
I believed her.
She repeated the question. She wanted me to admit it.
‘I believe you, Kamileh. I swear to God.’
The best I could do was keep her quiet, hold her, and prevent her from talking as much as possible.
Getting him out of the hospital was not an easy task. Kamileh insisted we take him with us. They didn’t have an ambulance to transport him.
‘I want to know who else was killed with him.’
‘We don’t know yet.’
‘Tell me!’
‘There were fifty killed.’
I exaggerated how many out of a sudden feeling that a large number might make her feel better.
‘I want to take him with me, right now!’
We screamed at them. We three women exploded. Hamid al-Semaani was trying to negotiate with the nurses. We didn’t get anywhere. A doctor who I thought might be the owner of the hospital came through the door and told us, with a dry look on his face and in the matter-of-fact tone of someone who’d had a long experience of dealing with dead people, ‘You want him? Take him.’
As well as a nonchalance towards death, or at least to seeming accustomed to it, his voice also carried some contempt for us.
He remembered something. ‘But I need a man to sign a release. I will not take responsibility for letting any body out of the hospital before I get permission from the examining magistrate. If I don’t, the hospital and I will both be fined.’
Hamid al-Semaani volunteered to sign the release papers.
We loaded Yusef al-Kfoury into the car. We put his head on Kamileh’s chest and his legs on my lap. Kamileh’s mother sat in the front seat next to Hamid. As the car slowly proceeded, Kamileh sang to him. The back seat got covered with blood, but Hamid al-Semaani didn’t care. He was all choked up with grief but wasn’t crying. My dress got soiled also, but it was my everyday dress. Kamileh hadn’t given me a chance to change my clothes.
Kamileh sang to him the whole way. She was calm. She held his head tight against her chest. I don’t know what made her sing that old Baghdadi mawwaal:
Ahmad Mohammed Ali Pasha wanted my demise
And the day it was a Friday
And everyone was there on time
They sat me on a camel, high very high
The executioner steered it and led the way . . .
Kamileh still sings to herself to this day. My window is close to her bedroom window. Every night she sings. Baghdadi mawwaals. I fall asleep to the sound of her voice. She has a tender voice that isn’t anything like her.
That night, though, we didn’t sleep. No one slept. We stayed in our day clothes. I didn’t leave her. We tried to feed her, but she didn’t eat. In the morning, they moved all the dead to the church courtyard. I don’t know who came up with this idea. A mass funeral. The Patriarch sent two bishops. As people say, the more numerous the dead, the less death has an impact.
Kamileh kept saying to me, ‘Don’t leave me, Muntaha.’
We went to the church courtyard. They agreed to leave the dead there in the courtyard throughout the day on Monday, until the time of the funeral.
They brought beds for them from the nearby houses. I wasn’t able to go hom
e even for a second to change my clothes.
‘There’s blood all over my dress, Kamileh. I’m going home to change.’
‘Don’t leave me, Muntaha.’
I felt that if I left her, she would die, too. She held onto me as if drugged. We propped her up so she could walk, one woman on each side of her. She kept repeating the same question a thousand times. I handed her over to her mother for fifteen minutes and hurried home to change my dress. When I came back I found her asking him, asking her husband, ‘Why did you go up to Burj al-Hawa?’
She kept on repeating that in a monotonous, tired voice, like a tape recording. From time to time she would suddenly gather enough strength to raise her tone. ‘Why did you go up to Burj al-Hawa?’
Then she would divide the question up, word by word.
‘Why – did – you – go – to – Burj al-Hawa?’
It was as if she was insisting on getting an answer right then and there. For more than a quarter of an hour she kept posing this divided up question.
Then she switched to a run-down of blame, in an endearing tone:
‘You never go to your relatives’ funerals in the church here. What gave you this sudden desire to go up to Burj al-Hawa?’
She quietened down, and I forced her to drink some water at least. She refused to open her mouth like children do when they don’t want to take bitter medicine. She would drink, but then the water would drip onto her neck and her clothes. She would take two sips and then start asking again. The question was always directed at him. A difficult question: ‘Why did they kill you?’
She repeated that, demanding an answer from him. Insisting. That’s how we spent the whole day.
Kamileh was not the only one blabbering over a husband’s head. When she stopped talking for a little while to regain some strength I noticed all the other people blabbering over the heads of their dead loved ones.
Haifa Abu Draa lost her voice. She and her sisters and their daughters huddled together over their brother, the only male. Haifa flailed her arms instead of speaking.
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