June Rain

by Jabbour Douaihy

  Magnesium flashes were popular in those days. They flashed in people’s eyes, even outside in the bright sunlight. Hagop, his teacher, had advised him to use them on all occasions. They reduced the formation of shadows on faces, as he said. Nishan hadn’t known that Nazaret was going to come to Burj al-Hawa. If he’d known, he would not have come too. It was June, the peak of the end-of-school-year photo season. The teacher and his students on the wooden stage. Half an hour of quietening them down and lining them up from shortest to tallest. But schools paid well; plus, every student was required to buy a class picture, so it wasn’t bad.

  He ran into Nazaret in the courtyard outside the church. Photographers attend funerals without an invitation. They spread out in the beginning here and there in the courtyard, targeting customers from among the men dressed in suits despite the heat. He knew them, too, and that they wore the suits to conceal their guns inside their jackets. Some men called to him. They got into a group, put their arms on each other’s shoulders showing their affection for each other, and as usual didn’t smile. He took pictures of them beside the store and then joined Nazaret in the procession of mourners going to the church. The two of them exchanged words and even some jokes in Armenian behind the backs of the frowning men.

  He didn’t usually speak with Nazaret much, just a few necessary formalities. Nazaret was his competitor, who had followed him to Barqa and started copying him and stealing his customers. Of all the places in the whole wide world, Nazaret had to follow him to where he drew his livelihood. But there in front of the church door they’d both been afraid and went overboard speaking to each other in their own language. The men kept looking at them disapprovingly whenever they heard their chirpings in Armenian.

  It started raining without any warning, which only made them more frightened. There were so many priests and nuns. They both had the feeling that all of the men were carrying guns and exchanging looks – angry, threatening looks that didn’t exclude Nishan and Nazaret. The procession dispersed when the rain started to pour down and the crowd quickly went inside the church. The two felt safer inside the church. Nothing would happen there. As long as the people were inside the church, nothing would happen. Certainly they wouldn’t threaten each other during mass. The Syriac prayers and chanting began and their flashbulbs flashed for a few minutes before the sound of gunfire reached them from outside. Everything inside the church came to a standstill, even the chanting stopped little by little with the exception of one old priest who was probably hard of hearing and didn’t realise what was going on and so he continued intoning the Maronite funeral mass all by himself.

  Nazaret did not die. He rushed to aid Nishan. He searched around and found him there on the floor having trouble getting to his feet. Who did Nazaret have besides Nishan? Every family took off in a different direction. The dead and some of the wounded remained there on the floor. A nun was bent over one of the wounded writhing on the floor in pain, assuring him he was going to be all right. And the two Armenian photographers also remained – one who couldn’t walk and the other tongue-tied. Nishan began talking, talking without stopping. A person who has seen death speaks without stopping. Nazaret kept silent while he helped Nishan walk to the car. Nazaret said one thing: ‘World with no conscience and no religion!’

  He said it in Armenian.

  By ‘world’ he meant ‘people’.

  They took the two of them in for investigation, to the government house and to the army barracks. Twice, three times, four. The police, customs officers, even the army . . . The first time, two investigators in civilian clothes came to Davidian’s Photo Shop with a French language magazine. They opened it to the picture of the five youths and asked Nishan who had taken the picture.

  ‘I didn’t photograph any young men!’

  Nishan denied it, too quickly, so they came back. They got there quickly, got out of the Jeep and searched his shop and Nazaret’s shop, too. They turned everything upside down, opened the cameras, poured out the developing chemicals and ruined the film and white photo paper by exposing them to light. They pestered them with endless questions.

  ‘Name? Age? Profession?’

  ‘Profession? What does “profession” mean?’

  It took fifteen minutes spelling out the Armenian names – his father’s name was Hovsep, which was hard enough to pronounce, never mind spell.

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘I was in the back, far away, with the women, I swear to God!’

  He swore to God hoping the investigator would quit bombarding him with questions.

  ‘What did you see?’

  ‘I didn’t see anything, Baba, I heard.’

  ‘What did you hear?’

  ‘I heard the sound of gunfire . . . like rain. I heard women screaming and a nun crying and some small children, too, orphan girls wearing school uniforms . . .’

  He didn’t tell him about the man’s voice that saved his life. The women’s voices had been more unpleasant than the whistle of the bullets.

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I shut my eyes, Baba. I didn’t want to die with my eyes open. I shut my eyes and squeezed them tight until the bullets stopped, and then I opened my eyes. My leg was bleeding, from here.’ He lifted the leg of his trousers to show him the wound that had started to heal.

  ‘Where are the photos?’

  From that time forward everyone asked him, ‘Where are the photos?’

  ‘We didn’t photograph anything, brother. Believe me.’

  ‘If we are harsh with you and tug on your ears, you will confess, right?’

  He remained firm and didn’t give them anything. Nishan didn’t want to harm anyone.

  But after a little while he picked up his things and went down to the city. He ran away. He left Nazaret up there all by himself. He could have it all. Let him photograph them to his heart’s content. Nishan sure didn’t envy him for that.

  The government men stopped paying him visits, stopped the investigations. They rested and let everyone else rest, too. Other people started visiting him – busy-bodies who’d heard or supposed that he had taken pictures of the men brandishing their guns. They thought that if they could see those pictures they could find out who had been doing the shooting. Some journalists came to him offering money, including that French-speaking woman. She might have also gone to see Nazaret, but Nazaret was not very experienced with women. He gave her the picture that was published in the magazine, the one the investigators asked him about. He’d been unable to resist the young journalist. He didn’t know how she managed to snatch the photo from him – the photo of the five young men. Those men had called to him. There were five of them standing and waiting for the funeral to begin. He remembered how he had to ask them to line up closer together. They draped their arms on each other’s shoulders, making him feel they loved each other and were very happy to have a picture taken together. They were all killed. All five. He had photographed them and other men scattered around the courtyard. The journalist had wrested that photo from him with sweet-talk and flattery. And she gave him a hundred liras, too. She had a beautiful figure and was conscientious. After her, some men came to see him who had participated in the incident or were relatives. He also opened his door to relatives of the victims. They followed him there, followed him to the city. He recognised them the moment they appeared at the door to his shop. One of them came in, slid his hand inside his jacket pocket, and said, ‘Here. I’ll give you a blank cheque. Give me what you have and you can write in whatever amount you want.’

  They didn’t fear the witnesses and didn’t fear the courts and the judge. They feared the pictures. A man of short stature, with stubby fingers, came one morning, his face scrunched into a frown. He asked Nishan the usual question without getting anywhere with him. Nishan repeated the same thing to him that when the bullets start, the photographer runs away, just like anyone else. ‘The photographer gets scared, habibi. You’re a tough guy. You don’t get scared. The photographe
r gets scared.’

  And he also told him how he dropped to the floor and took cover amongst the women.

  ‘You believe that? I hid behind the women!’

  Claiming cowardice was the easiest way to wiggle out of it. But the man with the chubby fingers didn’t believe him. He led him to the back room into the studio where Nishan, who was young and handsome in those days and was the city’s champion billiard player, took and developed passport photos. It was also where he led pretty young customers so he could flirt with them out of sight of passers-by – as soon as he shut the front door from inside and placed the ‘Be Back Soon’ sign in the window. The man pushed him up against the wall, put his hands on Nishan’s shoulders, pulled out his gun and pointed it at his head. That is almost certainly the very moment Nishan’s diabetes got worse.

  Nishan Davidian had spent many long years among them. He was their only photographer until Nazaret came along. Jorge, an Arab, had also appeared in the town. He learned the trade in America, but he was crazy. Nishan worried in the depths of his heart that Arabs would start learning and practising the trade. But Jorge never took away any of his customers and didn’t live long. Poor guy.

  They had all stood in front of Nishan at one time or another, in the back room he had made into a studio. In the beginning he used to store weapons for them. Guns were their religion and their idols. An ancient rifle that didn’t work, two rounds of bullets to strap on at the waist or make into a cross at the chest. He also kept a kuffiyeh and igal, the headscarf and band to hold it in place, since they hadn’t yet invented an image for themselves besides the one associated with traditional Arab machismo. He also acquired swords for those who wished. Two swords, actually, one of them curved.

  A man would enter the shop by himself. When someone headed to Nishan’s it wasn’t because he was looking especially handsome, it was because he was planning for the picture that would be shown at his funeral or hung in a central place in his house after his death. They had suddenly begun to worry that they would pass from this life without leaving behind a picture to remind their families of them. The man would stand before Nishan’s lens with all his weapons, even if he didn’t have one knife that cuts in his whole house, as they said. He’d give special attention to his moustache, and inspect himself in the mirror first. A frown was an absolute must that appeared spontaneously on the man’s face as he stood menacingly in front of the camera lens as if looking into the eyes of his archenemy. The more Nishan asked him to stay still so his picture wouldn’t come out blurry, the deeper he frowned.

  They began asking him to come outside to take a picture of as big a group of friends as could fit into a circle around a new car, or to take pictures of a bride and groom in their home surrounded by bouquets of flowers and ululations. Women began to appear later on when men’s dispositions improved and they started bringing their wives and children along with them. The entire family would come and stand together in their best clothes. Whenever they bought new clothes, they began to come and pose for the photographer in them. He’d ask them for a small smile. The children would go along with it first, followed by the wife. It was a difficult thing for a man to show his teeth, so he would keep his serious expression. He asked them to smile and tried to get them to all look in his direction. A stray look at something that caught their attention in the general surroundings behind the photographer or beside him was one of the mistakes a successful photographer had to avoid. Then they started having children’s pictures taken all by themselves – at First Communion in their angelic outfits or on Palm Sunday, tearful and holding candles taller than themselves. Or they would bring them to him and pose them on a wooden horse wearing a Mexican sombrero. Nazaret competed with him. He’d take pictures of children in the pilot’s seat of a colourfully painted wooden airplane. Women didn’t dare come to him all alone except in circumstances they couldn’t avoid, such as getting ID and passport photos taken once those became common.

  Nishan left them all behind and went down to the city. He spent the nicest days of his life there. Life there was easy. People went about their business with a mixture of light-heartedness, acceptance and cunning. But now he had come to the end of the road. Defeat was written all over his shop window: dust and two pictures with faded colours – a groom with his bride dressed in her white gown, and a child carried on someone’s shoulders holding an olive branch in his hand. The studio had reverted into nothing more than his morning conference room. He couldn’t stand the loneliness of his house. The only metal letters of ‘NISHAN PHOTOS’ that hung over the door to his shop that still remained were a crooked ‘SH’ and a steadfast ‘A’. The damned tremors had got the better of him, and his hands were no longer going to obey him and hold the camera. The shaking was his true downfall, not the rise of speedy photo labs as was rumoured.

  The travelling coffee vendor always passed by him twice – once when he arrived at nine o’clock to pour him a hot cup of bitter black coffee from the pot in his right hand, and once after his long tour around the market place to retrieve the empty cup and to collect what he owed him. Nishan would welcome an old friend who shuffled between the cafés in Al-Tall Square. Someone who’d set out to do some official business and got lost would come into his shop, someone who’d made the trip from the high mountains and whose thick accent preceded him. He’d open the door for him and in he would come, bringing in the smell of grilled meat from the neighbouring restaurant. He’d be trying to buy excise stamps or asking how to obtain a copy of a police record. Around one-thirty, Nishan would lock the door and go to lunch and that would be all, as he wouldn’t return until the next morning.

  The future scenario was well-known; he had even participated in deciding on the details. No sooner would he shut his eyes – and the time would come soon, considering the disease that was destroying him, having lived more than thirty years with diabetes – than his wife would sell the shop to the owner of the barbecue restaurant next door who persistently offered to buy it at least once a week. She wouldn’t sell the house furniture but give it to his sister living in Beirut for free. He told her more than once to give the furniture to his sister for free and not to sell it to anyone. He knew his wife was stingy. He requested that she bury him in the Armenian Orthodox cemetery, after he’d bought a small plot there. He liked the smell of that city the way a person likes the smell of people he loves. And she should go to live with her son and his family who’d gone ahead of her to Canada. A hundred years in Lebanon were enough for the Davidians. Now it was that distant cold country’s turn.

  Eliyya poked his head inside the shop while holding the door open with one hand and reading the name he was asking about from the paper he held in his other hand. The rest of his body remained outside as he poked his head in as if he were looking into a well. Nishan didn’t look up to find out who was asking the question until he heard his name. He usually answered lost inquirers holding administrative papers in their hands with a wave of his hand or a brief word without even looking at their faces. It had been a very long time since anyone had come into the shop looking for the owner. People had their pictures taken at the photo booth a few metres down the road and only opened Nishan’s door to inquire where to find a photocopier for their documents or because they thought he had one in the store.

  ‘Yes, he’s here.’

  ‘Could I to talk to him?’

  Excessively polite.

  ‘Why sure thing, come in, habibi!’ Nishan recognised Eliyya. ‘You’re from Barqa, aren’t you?’

  Nishan could recognise them. He knew them from their sharp accents and the looks they gave – those same harsh looks they had when they had entered the church that day.

  ‘I’m looking for some pictures!’

  ‘Pictures of who, baba?’

  Nishan still didn’t speak good Arabic, even though he’d been born there, or maybe he’d just become used to those insertions – ‘baba’ between this word and that word, or ‘habibi’ at the end. He uttered them ofte
n in order to establish his identity, and so they would classify him as neutral.

  ‘Pictures from Burj al-Hawa.’

  Most likely the Burj al-Hawa incident. The very same. He spent one hour of his life there and it had become the story of his life. To the day he died. But nothing could prevent Nishan Davidian from skirting the issue one more time.

  ‘I take pictures of people. Men, missus . . . I don’t photograph a village, baba. Go see a watercolour artist, he’ll paint nature for you. Red-tiled roofs. There are lots of those artists, they’re good . . .’ Without meaning to, he exaggerated his Armenian accent. That old feeling of fear had come back to him, so he sought refuge in his accent and his Arabic almost turned into a bout of broken drivel.

  ‘You were in Burj al-Hawa that Sunday . . .’

  But matters got a little better when Nishan felt for some unclear reason that the man standing in front of him didn’t have bad intentions and didn’t want to harm him. He interrupted him. ‘How did you know? You weren’t even born then . . . How old are you, habibi?’

  ‘Forty-two . . . do you recognise this card?’ Eliyya asked him, showing the little card he was holding.

  He took the card from Eliyya’s hand. He, too, smiled. It was one of those little cards with the name, address, and telephone number that the photographer used to give out to people he had persuaded to stand in front of his camera in the streets or at parties or in the public park so they would come back a day or two later to get the pictures. He’d take the fee for the pictures and give them the card, thus insuring he got paid.