‘Where’d you get that from? It’s so old . . .’ He stretched out the word ‘old’.
‘It was in my father’s pocket the day he was killed in the Burj al-Hawa incident.’
‘We’ll never be finished with that story,’ he said, practically to himself.
‘Do you remember it well?’ Eliyya asked.
He bent down to raise the leg of his trousers and uncovered his thin white leg. ‘Look, habibi,’ he said, pointing to the small scar.
‘How were you hit?’ Eliyya asked.
‘I didn’t know I’d been shot until I stood up and tried to walk. That’s when I screamed out in pain and saw the blood dripping down my leg, baba. I was in the back area with the women. I don’t know where that bullet came from . . .’
‘If you have any pictures from Burj al-Hawa I am prepared to pay you for them. It means a lot to me . . .’
They all wanted to pay him money. They never believed the money didn’t matter to him.
He hesitated a little, thought about his impending death, about his diabetes, about his wife’s leaving for Canada. What was there to be afraid of? Suddenly he said to Eliyya, ‘Look, baba. My conscience is clear . . .’ He stood up and grabbed an orange envelope from one of the shelves.
‘All the pictures that customers haven’t come to retrieve I’ve collected here in this envelope. I told myself, “Look, Nishan, the people these pictures belong to paid for them in advance.” I used to take pictures, baba, and take money for them up front. Maybe they would remember to come get them . . . Some people died and some forgot, but Nishan Davidian has a clear conscience.’
He tossed the orange envelope onto the table.
Nishan’s collection was not limited to pictures that were never picked up by their owners. He had another envelope full of pictures, which he now remembered. He opened it from time to time. Pictures of women, of two pretty girls, Jorge’s pictures, pictures he would surely show someone someday. If anyone came asking about them – Jorge’s relatives, for example – he would give them all of them.
‘Sit down, here, take a look at these pictures. I don’t want any money for them anymore, but be careful. Don’t take pictures that belong to others . . .’
Eliyya sat down before the envelope like someone sitting down to a feast after a long period of hunger.
Chapter 13
‘The truck is here!’
We had been waiting for the truck since morning. We waited for it, coming and going and shouting all around the quarter and the main street where we expected it to come from. The main street was our boundary, especially in those difficult days.
The moment the truck entered the intersection, we dashed out in front of it and started yelling. We shouted to the bystanders and the neighbours as if we were being chased by fire. We yelled to them to back away so we could direct the driver to the house. The truck was so wide it blocked the road, not leaving any space for pedestrians. It towered high, menacingly.
The porter was standing in the bed of the truck. When he started down the steep hill, the driver poked his head out of the window to shout at us to back away from his wheels because the brakes might not hold out. He shouted over the roar of the motor telling us he knew which house he was going to and didn’t need us to show him the way, but we didn’t pay any attention to his screams and just continued to run in front of him.
‘Where are they going, Mother?’
‘To their quarter . . .’
‘. . .’
‘. . . It looks like they’ve rented a house there.’
‘Do they have relatives where they’re going?’
‘Of course they have relatives. All their relatives are there. I just told you that’s their quarter. Look where all your uncles live, isn’t it here close to us? This is our quarter, and their quarter is up there.’
‘They’re not going to come back here?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’
‘Then why were they living here so far away from their family in the first place?’
‘. . .’
‘Are they taking the cat with them?’
‘. . .’
My mother didn’t always answer all of my questions, and I for my part just said whatever came to mind. I didn’t wait for her answers. The cat, which didn’t have a name, trusted me. She was a cute little kitten and I would take her all over the place. I had coaxed her to come to me the night before, as soon as I heard the news they were leaving.
It was rumoured that a messenger had come sent by Abu Jamil, a messenger no one saw, under the cover of darkness most likely. He told Umm Jamil to pack up everything in the house and get ready to move. The next morning Abu Jamil sent them a truck for the furniture. Abu Jamil had found them a house to move into. He had gone there ahead of them, to where they were moving. His relatives – his paternal cousins – helped him in his efforts there. A man was more vulnerable to danger than his wife and children, it seemed. They spirited him away from us, got him out before his wife and children. He left his wife and children exposed to danger for many days while he was kept safe. That was the opposite of my uncle Saeed. He’d taken off with his family the second the mortar rockets started shelling. He stayed away for two days and then came back by himself. He made sure his wife and children were safe first and then came back to the barricade.
I played with the cat for a little while, patted her and picked her up and walked around with her. I closed her eyelids with my fingers and dropped her into a big empty barrel. I tossed some pieces of meat for her to eat and locked her in. Not even her meowing could reach them. They couldn’t find her in the evening and she didn’t turn up in the nearby area, so they asked us. Everyone agreed with the notion that the cat didn’t want to leave the quarter and that was why she had run away. They laughed, then quickly realised they should stifle their laughter. The important thing was the cat made them laugh, so once again they spouted off everything they knew about cats and their intelligence. Good heavens. The talk about feline intelligence extended to mice and from there to dogs, as usual, making a full circle that ended up with Umm Jamil’s neighbours reassuring her that the cat would surely turn up again.
‘We’ll send her to you the moment we catch sight of her. Don’t worry.’
I realised later on that in difficult situations when adults don’t want to get into arguments with each other, they bring up trivial things everyone can agree upon, like stories about animal intelligence, and they pretend to believe them and be amazed by them in order to appease one another. I always noticed that talking about animal matters in our quarter was the quickest way to make peace and avoid a fight.
‘Hey, kids, get out of the way . . .’
‘God protect us . . .’
‘The truck’s mirror is going to hit the window. Watch out, watch out . . .’
‘Do you need some help, Umm Jamil?’
‘Look out for the power line. Don’t sever it.’
‘Stooooooop!’
With his door open and leaning halfway out of the truck, the driver backed up until the rear of the truck was right up against the door to the house. We continued giving him directions all the while. The porter jumped out of the truck. He was advanced in age and moved lightly – a professional porter we’d never seen before. We moved in closer to him. He had a small copper badge on his back with the serial number 64 engraved on it. He was an official porter from the city, from Tripoli.
He went inside the house, disappeared a little and then came back carrying the dining room cabinet. They had emptied it of all the glass dishes and crystal glassware that we always noticed sparkling from the shelves whenever we used to pass by it. We liked to pass back and forth in front of the hutch as much as possible, because we enjoyed playing with our reflections. The mirror on its back wall faced a second mirror hanging next to the cabinet’s door, and so as we passed in front of it our images were reflected infinitely in the mirrors. We never got tired of seeing our never-ending reflec
tions. The porter strapped the cabinet onto his back and secured it over his forehead with a cloth belt he kept with him the whole time that made it easier for him to lift. He set it down in the truck and went back inside the house only to come out carrying a section of the copper bed frame we always used to see along with a green curtain behind there in the master bedroom which, despite our passing by it every day, we’d never seen with the door wide open like that before. Abu Jamil’s house didn’t hold any secrets from us except for that half a doorway’s opening to the bedroom: the husband and wife’s private place.
At that rate, the house would be emptied in less than an hour’s time. The neighbours had all congregated outside their houses, at their doorsteps, or were standing or even sitting on the balconies that overlooked Abu Jamil’s house, or they were crowded out in the open in the middle of the street. They were all watching the departure of Abu Jamil’s family from our quarter and their move into the quarter of our enemies. It didn’t appear that the women had been drawn away from their housework or that the children had suddenly stopped playing that weekend morning in order to watch some kind of accident – the way it sometimes happened when children came running with a ball in their hands and mud up to their knees, or when women came outside with their hands wet from doing laundry because they didn’t have time to dry them, like when our young neighbour went into a fit. That used to happen to our neighbour; all of a sudden he would faint and white foam would come out of his mouth, and we’d hear his mother’s squeals until the neighbours sought the help of someone who could drive him to the hospital.
That fellow who suffered from fits at least once a month was standing there with us, not showing any signs of his illness. We had all been prepared ahead of time, having cleared our schedules the day before in order to watch the spectacle. The lady of the house, Umm Jamil, and her children were standing outside like the rest of us, across the street from their house, watching everything along with us. We were standing there watching them while they watched the porter empty the house of its furniture. And they were watching us, too. Maybe deep down Umm Jamil expected the neighbours to object to their moving at the last minute. Neither she nor the children were wearing the kind of clothes that indicated they were ready to pack up and go. Umm Jamil was wearing her housecoat, the one that always bared her flabby white arms.
The porter worked by himself. No one – none of the young men or the women – lifted a hand to help him. The women’s arms were folded across their chests in grave silence. Every time the porter carried something out on his back, Umm Jamil looked at her neighbours, looked at her friends one woman at a time. She looked directly into their eyes. She wanted them to bear witness to what was happening to her. Some of them even had tears in their eyes, my mother included.
My mother was sad. Umm Jamil and her family’s departure was going to leave a big gap in our quarter. A gap in the sense of a hole no one would fill. She was sad, my mother, because of the young men who’d been killed and sad too because Umm Jamil was her friend and her cousin. Umm Jamil was a member of our family, from the heart of our family. She loved us; she cried tears of blood the day of the Burj al-Hawa incident. Her wailing filled the whole neighbourhood. She tore out her hair. She may have exaggerated her wailing on purpose to protect her husband and children – that’s what some bad-mouths said.
My mother was also sad because of the open area in front of their house. Maybe someone would move in who would want to keep the neighbours out of it. Maybe they would intentionally rent the house to someone they knew was despicable who would fence it in and plant a garden. It was an open area that had been created by the obscure decision to build the house a few metres back from the road, unlike the other houses whose owners made use of every bit of their land and consequently built their houses with the gates opening directly onto the main road. The patch in front of Abu Jamil’s house was the quarter’s only playground. That piece of land belonged to Abu Jamil’s family, but they never acted like they owned it, so it became a playground for everyone. My father always used to say that they could fence it off if they wanted and forbid anyone from passing through it, but they never did.
The residents of the quarter treated it like an extension of the road, a stopping place where Syrian peddlers from Saidnaya spread out their wares. They would rest there, taking a break from those heavy trunks they carried on their backs and travelled around with. Umm Jamil would bring chairs for them and coffee for the neighbours. They would haggle over the prices of shirts and towels and sheets, swearing their prices were fair and insinuating that they were Christians. There were two brothers dressed in baggy black sherwal trousers who would rummage through their goods, making it a tough task to pack everything back up and stuff it into the trunks before heaving them up onto their backs and slowly wending their way to other quarters. In that spot, too, the tall, dark salesman sold icons of the saints even though people said he was a Muslim. In that same patch we used to sit around on moonlit nights and tell each other scary stories until a familiar voice called us in for bed: my mother’s voice.
‘When will it be Fayad’s family’s turn?’ I whispered to her.
She became agitated. It gave her a lump in her throat. She wiped a tear from her eye.
‘Where do you get such ideas from?’ she shouted, covering up her agitation. ‘Who told you that?’
We knew everything. We knew other families would leave our quarter. We knew them and even counted them one by one. And there would be other families, relatives of ours we didn’t know and never saw before, who would pack up all their furniture and come to us, for protection.
‘Uncle Hamid, isn’t he from our family?’
She made light of my question. ‘Be quiet, boy.’
‘Why did Uncle Hamid and his family leave? Why did they leave the quarter and move to Beirut?’
‘. . .’
‘Why did my cousin Munir stop playing with us before he moved with his family to Beirut?’
She looked at me for the first time and said sharply, ‘I don’t know. Ask your uncle’s wife . . .’
I knew that my uncle’s wife was a stranger who wore red lipstick and powdered her cheeks, but I didn’t understand why I should ask her why Munir had stopped playing with us.
Each item the porter carried out of the house had its own effect on the people from the quarter who were watching. We all knew Abu Jamil’s house piece by piece. We knew his house because his door was always open, all day long. To us it was like an extension of the road. If we came running away from some stray dog, we would find ourselves, without meaning to, standing on their front steps in search of protection. If we played hide-and-seek outside we would hide in their living room without thinking anything of it. We’d crouch behind the drapes and even ask the family members not to do anything that might give us away. Young and old alike, they all put up with our noise with a smile. When we played war, we proceeded to shoot at each other between the kitchen and the little garden out back where we hunkered down behind the trunk of the loquat tree. We’d go inside the house with all our noise and all the dirt from the road that clung to our shoes. We never heard them complain once.
When the first bicycle appeared, hoisted up on the porter’s shoulder, the boys started talking. We mumbled to each other, uttering something akin to disapproval. It was as though we suddenly realised what we had refused to believe, which was that Abu Jamil’s departure also meant his bicycles would go with him. Abu Jamil was the king of bicycles. He charged a quarter lira for an hour. He had bought the bicycles after he retired from the Sûreté Générale. He was the epitome of orderliness at his job. He was neat and tidy, and was never late to work once. He enjoyed renting out the bicycles, as his wife said. She was a little embarrassed about this occupation of his; she saw it as a big step down from his previous job at the Sûreté Générale. He was fastidious in his care of his bicycles and he knew which kids in the quarter weren’t good drivers, so he wouldn’t allow them to ride them. He advis
ed kids to go slowly and not to over apply the brakes causing them to snap.
We started counting the bicycles out loud. Whenever the porter carried another one out, we’d add it to the total. Seven. Three with straight handlebars, which we called ‘Humber’, and four with bent handlebars, which we called ‘Course’. I preferred the bent ones. I crashed into a man once, but I didn’t tell Abu Jamil. The man didn’t get hurt too badly; I’d caused him to fall to the ground and he swore at me. He cursed my mother and my sister but I didn’t dare swear back at him.
‘Who will move into their house?’
I kept asking my mother without getting an answer. It seems I’d been repeating questions since I was little, series of questions that started with one topic and diverged to no end. The truth was I wanted to know if whoever moved in would also have bicycles to rent to us on holidays.
She slapped my hand to quiet me.
‘My friends said they were going to leave the house open. Is it true?’
We children were especially accustomed to having Abu Jamil around. During the day we’d ride his bicycles, choosing the one with the loud bell, and we’d take on the high hills with our skinny legs only to have our hearts pound out of our chests in fear as we sped downhill. The moment we got out of Abu Jamil’s sight, a friend would hop on the back or the front and we’d take turns steering and split the rental fee. In vain he would warn us not to ride double. He gave me special treatment, though, and only charged me half price, because we were neighbours, as he used to say. Abu Jamil had a special appreciation for neighbours, especially those whose doors were directly across from each other, as was the case with his house and ours. He treated me well, but not in front of my other friends, possibly to prevent them from getting greedy with him. He’d give me back the change at a later time, whenever he happened to run into me by myself or found me playing with the cat at his house. My relationship with the cat had been established way back. When they lost her the night before their departure, some people told them to ask me, since if anyone could find her it would be me.
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