June Rain

by Jabbour Douaihy

  The women mourners went from bed to bed. We women are frightened when left alone with the dead, so we start talking and don’t know how to stop. The men kill each other and we do the crying.

  It was getting late.

  The sun was strong. I was praying for God to hurry the priests through the burial. A young man stood in the belfry, counting the dead in the square in a loud voice. He would count and repeat as he pointed to each one of them, and every time he reached ten, the wailing reached a fever pitch. Someone shouted to him to come down out of deference for the people, but he refused and started tolling the bell in sorrow. He held the clapper with his hand and banged the side of the bell with it. Three times, and then he would stop.

  I don’t know how I got distracted from Kamileh, but someone, a person I don’t want to name, came over to her and whispered something about Fuad al-Rami and his brother Boutros. She screamed as if a snake had bitten her. Names were being thrown around, names of those who would have to answer for the blood of the dead, even before they were buried.

  At around three o’clock, as the time for the funeral approached and the searing sun beat down on us, her mother bent over her and said to her, ‘Pass under the coffin.’

  A competent woman her mother was, well-versed in tradition.

  Kamileh didn’t appear to have heard, so I tugged on her sleeve to snap her out of it. I felt she didn’t understand what was being said to her, so I repeated for her. ‘After they put the incense they will lift the coffin. Make sure you pass under it, understand?’

  It was almost time.

  ‘Why should I go under the coffin?’

  Her mother chimed in again, ‘My daughter, when a woman’s husband dies, if she’s pregnant . . .’

  Kamileh interrupted her sharply, as if she woke up. ‘. . . and how could I be pregnant, Mother?’

  We didn’t say anything. We didn’t want to hurt her more than that. We were also afraid she would cause a scene if she started raising her voice. But her mother didn’t back down. She was stubborn like her, like all the members of the Franji family. She waited until they did the incense so she could go back to her.

  ‘Do what I told you, you hear?’

  She felt it was better to make the decision herself rather than leaving it to her daughter.

  ‘I’m not pregnant, I’m not pregnant, I’m not pregnant . . .’

  She started shouting angrily. She pounded on her belly as she used to do when she would lose hope of ever having children. The women standing around the dead next to us began to raise their heads to look at us. I covered her mouth with my hand. Then I whispered to her again, pleading with her, ‘Go under it anyway, Kamileh, my darling. We can always say later if you’re not pregnant that you made a mistake . . .’

  She looked at me inquisitively. I felt she was hesitating a little. Then she looked into my eyes and said in the kind of tone a person uses when putting up with other people’s stupidity, ‘My darling, my soul, my eyes . . . Muntaha . . . I told you all, I’m not pregnant.’

  ‘And what if you are pregnant, then what?’

  She almost started laughing.

  The time to lift the body drew near. The women emptied out what wailing they still had left in them. That strange woman passed by us. No one knew where she had come from, how she got to us, or where she went after completing her mission.

  I saw a woman I’d never seen in our quarter before. She was tall and fair-skinned. She moved from one bed to another, sat down next to the dead, fixing their ties, brushing the stray hair from their foreheads or wiping off some blood or dirt. She would look at each face a little and then move on to the next.

  Kamileh threw herself onto her husband and lost consciousness for the second time. We had to carry her into the church.

  Chapter 10

  We used to enjoy getting mad at each other. It was how we tested the warmth of our friendships and the true meaning of those family ties we were always boasting about. At the slightest derisive remark some tattletale whispered to us about one of our buddies we instantly responded with anger, and the next day we would turn our faces away from him and refrain from saluting him if we chanced upon him in the streets. Those were the challenges of early manhood; our insistence on ignoring each other did not last long in the light of the unspoken agreement that there should be no disputes between cousins, and we were all related after all, as some of the ‘peacemakers’ loved to repeat. In reality, we got fed up with each other from time to time, got bored hanging around with each other for hours on end in the squares and alleys as we tried to stay away from our cramped houses, especially when our mothers were busy cleaning and mopping and had kicked us out. We never let an opportunity to argue and get angry at each other slip by, plunging into it headlong for the most trivial excuse.

  That is until we heard about al-muqaata’a al-hayaatiyyah, being ‘shunned for life’. This phrase came to us just like that, ready-made, a concept in itself. It was pronounced plainly and emphatically. And what it meant was, if one of the members of the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party disobeyed the party orders or deviated from what was deemed proper and virtuous behaviour, then the other members would not talk to him until the day he died. That also applied to his brothers if he had any. The party members obeyed all the instructions of their leadership, which was composed of an amid (chief), a namous (secretary), and a qayyim ala al-idhaa’a (spokesperson) and other positions with equally strange names.

  I remember how the possibility of that kind of antagonism was particularly worrying to us because of its finality, but it also made the party more attractive to us, especially because of the pleasure those adherents to its strict doctrine took in recounting their stories in front of us. They told us how they had assassinated King Abdullah of Jordan for betraying the Palestinian cause, and about their retaliation for the execution of the party’s founder Antoun Saadeh under the cover of darkness, which was to assassinate Lebanese Prime Minister Riad al-Sulh. It had been carried out by a man from the Al-Deek family who said to the prime minister before shooting him, ‘Take this, a gift from al-Zaeem.’ The party members, young and old alike, always insisted on using the first person plural, saying things like, ‘When we killed Adnan al-Malki in Syria . . .’ In that way they transformed the assassinations into collective acts of heroism which even those who weren’t yet born at the time could boast about.

  They taught us how to draw their hurricane emblem on the walls using pieces of charcoal or chalk, and they would interrupt this lesson whenever they spotted one of their comrades passing through the neighbourhood. They would raise their right arm and thrust it forward, open-handed in a military salute while barking out the phrase ‘Long live Syria!’, to which the comrade passing by responded in kind. They were always repeating pretentious words and phrases for our benefit, such as ‘You Are the Sons of Life’ or ‘Integrity’ and expressions like ‘Truth, Goodness, and Beauty’. We used to marvel at how our friends in the quarter reacted to hearing such expressions with eyes brimming with admiration for their meanings. We, on the other hand, had difficulty appreciating them because they reminded us of phrases out of our catechism books or the tiresome and incomprehensible epistles of Saint Paul.

  When the Rami family joined ranks with Nasser’s Revolution and the United Arab Republic, and when the Semaani family supported President Camille Chamoun’s alliance with the Americans, the supporters of the Fertile Crescent – their ultimate objective, with Cyprus as its star – got lost in the shuffle. Our friends in the quarter, the few that we had, couldn’t decide which way to go and so the ‘weaklings’ among them yielded to their families; one could say that those whose family’s position was in agreement with their party’s position were the lucky ones. But it so happened that two or three members of the Rami family stubbornly broke away from their family, and one of them, people say, one and only one of them, took up arms with the anti-revolutionary forces, but at a front a long distance from the village.

  The commu
nists were further from our own instincts for vengeance and spite, which might explain why they remained a small minority of mature and polite adherents. They, too, had their obscure expressions which they spouted off after reading pamphlets by Stalin that had been hurriedly translated into Arabic and handed out to them for free, and which spoke about dialectics and materialism. Their emblem was less geometrical and more realistic than that of the Syrian Socialists, even though we rarely saw a sickle due to the scarcity of wheat in our region. And we never encountered a hammer of that size, except for the one the only blacksmith in town used to strike iron when it was red hot. One of their few accomplishments was their effort to raise a petition against the nuclear bomb, and one of the things they bequeathed to us was the name ‘Vladimir’, the first name of the leader of the October Revolution, which one of those internationalists gave to his son. Vladimir, at least, was less of a burden than Adolf, the first name of the leader of the Third Reich, which was given by one of the few adherents of Nazism to his oldest son, and is equally as strange as Daladier, the prime minister of France who signed the Munich Accord.

  The new car, straight from the dealership. We knew it by the smell of its leather seats. It had to be driven carefully through the narrow, winding roads of the quarter and pulled right up to the Church of Our Lady, kissing the bumper against the wall. There it was under the protection of the Virgin Mary, and a turquoise amulet hung from the rearview mirror, the horse’s bead itself or the horseshoe, it didn’t matter which one.

  At the start of the 1950s, the car was added to the list of possessions a man simply did not lend out, like his wife or his rifle, and there was mechanical justification for a man insisting on being the sole driver of his car, since changing hands would increase the risk of it breaking down. Weapons were decorations, signs of manhood, but an American car – a Chevrolet or a DeSoto – decked out with what looked like two bird wings, and especially if it was a convertible with only two doors, had a fine wood inlay dash, a shiny chrome grill and coloured seats, well that topped the list of alluring essentials and sometimes topped a groom’s list of necessary possessions right along with a house to live in and a trade, as they put it, referring to the various common occupations such as carpentry or tailoring. And the owner of a new car never refused a photographer’s offer to take a picture of him behind the steering wheel or standing beside it with his hand on the door, by himself or surrounded by friends who would be certain to let him stand front and centre making it clear who the owner of the shiny new DeSoto was.

  Pedestrians had to be cautious of passing automobiles. Our mothers made us promise we would look both ways, right and left, before crossing the roads, and there were some local wise men who feared the whole notion of mechanical things and warned drivers to be highly cognisant of the fact that what they held in their hands was ‘a motor’ – a machine that, were it to get loose, could not be restrained.

  Writing things on the rear window became a very popular thing to do, but only on the public transportation vehicles that transported passengers for a fee and whose drivers did not shy away from overloading and would pick up riders from the streets and cram them in to his left, leaving the door half open and the rider hanging half-way out the door. There was one driver who worked out an ingenious method for preventing passengers from vomiting or getting dizzy, which was to give those passengers a rock to hold onto and tell them to concentrate on it the whole way and not to let it drop. The recipe was successful and helped the driver gain a good reputation, so he was preferred over the others.

  As acts of defiance and the growing desire to take revenge became more and more widespread, the market for American cars gave way to the German Mercedes. In fact, it was tempting to say that they found in German cars a kind of toughness and durability they had missed in the American cars, maybe, but which they had also begun to lose in their private lives as well, with all the deaths around them. The truth is the praise they used to and continue to heap onto German cars and which they extended particularly to the BMW – and in another context, more closely related to killing and its tools, to the legendary Colt-12 revolver – had everything to do with their toughness and long-lasting durability. On that note they went around saying things like, ‘A Mercedes truck, if you take good care of it, will outlive a human being.’ Mixed in with all of that praise for mechanics was also a general fascination with the German nation for having confronted the whole world by itself in WWII, which was a reason enough for pride, despite its eventual loss.

  It can be said that the townspeople were unanimous in their adoration of Mercedes cars. They had sayings about them that recalled the language of war they were all accustomed to, things like, ‘If you hit a Mercedes on the head, it will keep on going,’ or ‘If it were riddled with bullets while in flight, it would take three years to fall apart,’ and to that end there were metaphors which imbued steel with human qualities. And those among them who remained loyal to Mercedes were devastated when they discovered two or three decades later that fibreglass had begun to take the place of resistant steel and Mercedes with its famous triangular symbol had begun to ‘soften’ as it succumbed to the logic of consumerism.

  ‘Jirjis, you have to get up and bathe. Your wife is heating water for you because your brother Antonius is returning from Brazil in two days . . .’

  Jirjis hesitated a bit then asked in all seriousness, ‘And what if he doesn’t come back?’

  The anecdote about the man who refused to risk pouring water over his body reminded one of the extent of people’s fear of water. Perhaps the man knew there was a possibility his brother would be delayed in his voyage back to the homeland due to the fact that sailing on water was at least as risky as bathing in it. And swimming was a derivative of sailing the sea, something we never mastered, as we saw ourselves as land people, even though we lived only two kilometres from the Mediterranean Sea.

  Bathing was a problem as our mother’s admonitions hounded us, telling us not to go outside after taking a bath and not to expose ourselves to the wind. Going outside would mean the mingling of water and air, and air was no less dangerous. We worried obsessively about not standing in front of a draft. It was part of our overall fear of what we called safqit hawa, a ‘slap of air’, which was an obscure affliction that might affect any part of the body, the worst being in the chest and lungs where it could develop into an incurable disease difficult to recover from. The worst air was the deadly yellow one, the cholera, and one of its varieties was what they called ‘the cork wind’, which sent the afflicted one to his death.

  Word went out at noon on Sunday. Tune into Radio Beirut because Odette was going to sing at 3:30. And it was most likely Odette herself who told them, having come from where she lived in the capital city to visit her family, or perhaps made a point to be with her family at that special moment in her life. Whatever the case, everyone in the quarter flocked to the three houses that owned radios. And there was Odette, sitting among them at her aunt’s house listening to her own voice and smiling wide when her mother let out a trill ululation of pride for her daughter and for the song she opened with. The radio announcer explained that the song was in local traditional style, which wasn’t telling us anything we didn’t already know. The neighbours divided their attention between Odette sitting there in the middle of the salon in her fancy green dress and high heels and the radio from which her melodious voice emerged. For the youngsters among us, it was a rare moment of truth in which we discovered in one fell swoop, though with some degree of confusion, the basic principle of radio and the technology of recording voices. On the occasion which brought us into Odette’s aunt’s house, we were given the opportunity to catch a glimpse of her cousin – Odette’s aunt’s son – who never left the house and who was surrounded by rumours that he fancied himself an actor and spent all his time listening to the radio and imitating the voices of the various actors who took turns appearing on the radio programs.

  We had memorised all the city names writte
n in fine print and listed on the radio’s glass dial. They helped us tune into Near East Radio or Radio Beirut. And on that incremental list were cities we had never heard of before and would never hear of again. Contented, oblivious cities in distant countries. Cities on the radio, like Helfersom, Saratova, Lviv, Hanover and other names that evoked severe cold in the north and were never mentioned in any book we read.

  The radio had the importance of a piece of furniture, and was placed in the sitting room in a high and prominent position or inside a carefully painted and polished wooden cabinet. A clever lady of the house would sew a case for the radio out of Atlas Laser Die material, which she’d embellish with three roses embroidered with matching thread. The case could be opened at the centre so that its two curtains could be tied on the right and the left exactly like a theatre curtain, which wasn’t an exaggeration considering all the radio plays that were broadcast in the 1950s and the way the housewives and their visitors gathered around to listen, training their eyes throughout the broadcast on the radio, the place the voices emanated from, just as a theatre audience was inclined to gaze at the stage, the place where the action was taking place.

  Those who could afford to buy a radio usually bought the accompanying cabinet, with its matching colours, the different shelves that went into it and the collection of Baydaphone records that announced themselves at the start of every song. Radio voices came to us from Egypt especially, which meant we became used to the Nile accent despite all the static that was the radio’s lot in life in those days. The ability to set up an antenna on the roof, secure it with wire, and aim it in the direction of the capital, was a talent not just anyone could be entrusted to achieve.

  According to my mother, who did not miss many opportunities to make fun of him, my grandfather (my father’s father) used to go into the movie theatre when the first permanent theatre house opened up in town, hoping just once to catch a glimpse of his father who’d left him as an infant at the end of the nineteenth century, emigrated to the United States, and never came back. It was a rare indication that my grandfather still clung to the thought of his father, although to us he seemed, at his advanced age, to have long since given up trying to remember him. But my grandfather wasn’t able to follow what was going on on the screen and soon enough his snores would be heard all about the theatre and the owner would have to intervene and wake him up in response to a complaint from a member of the audience seated next to him.