The day they acquired a long barrel rifle like the one he’d been asking for, they gave it to him and joked, ‘You don’t have any excuses anymore . . .’
Now his toolkit was complete and all that was left to do was show off his skill. In what resembled a rite of passage, he held the rifle in his hand, raised it vertically to examine its minute details, and fired it into the air before sitting on his chair and sliding the rifle into its peephole. He liked to lean over it at first, with his cheek pressed gently against the metal. He’d shut his left eye and look through the rear sight at the opposing side. At first we thought it was just a practice exercise, a fighter getting a feel for his gun. But he persisted in this training of his, spending long hours and intervals in some obscure operation which bored us to death because it never led to any action. He kept at it while we wondered why on earth Muhsin would aim and aim and never shoot. All we saw was that at the end of all the aiming, he shook his head menacingly, postponing his big deed to a later date, which might be very soon, apparently assuring himself that embracing his rifle for such a long time would not be in vain, even if it had left a pink dent in his right cheek that remained visible for some time.
Muhsin was the millstone hero. We knew that he shared his barricade with his brother, though – Muhsin during the day and Halim at night. Muhsin was our warrior at the front line. We followed him in combat, though from a distance, for we didn’t dare approach where he sat as we believed he was in the line of fire. He handed over the barricade to his brother at eight o’clock – exactly dinner time. Before handing it over he checked every direction through his long barrel rifle, aiming one last time in the direction of the opposing barricades. Just aiming, in his usual boring way. He took his rifle with him, along with his wicker chair and the cushion he put on it to keep his clothes from getting dirty. He never sat down on that chair without brushing off the dust first.
That’s what he did whether he was at the barricade, at home or at the café. He kept his rifle clean, his pants perfectly creased and his shirt collar white as snow. He would send the waiter at the café back to the kitchen with whatever he tried to serve him if he glimpsed the tiniest smear on his water glass or sniffed some odour only the most sensitive nose could detect, like the faint smell of soap lingering on his coffee cup. His brother would take control of the barricade with hardly any exchange of words. Sometimes we happened to witness Halim’s arrival, during the few days when we rebelled against the order to go home early. Muhsin and Halim didn’t exchange a single word. Maybe a quiet grumble that didn’t reach our ears. And neither one received anything from the other. Muhsin would pick up his chair and his rifle and leave without looking back, not even once.
Fighting from behind a barricade generally required standing up, although standing did not suit another fighter in our front – Abu Bashir, who God had made with one leg shorter than the other. It was very difficult for Abu Bashir to stand and aim his gun at the same time, and the story went that one day he burst out in an appeal to his comrades, making a promise to them, saying, ‘Get me a chair and we’ll rake in the casualties!’
His comrades behind the barricade laughed and laughed while the bullets rained down on them in torrents.
Muhsin fought sitting down for a reason we didn’t understand in the beginning. Naturally, we didn’t know much of anything that was going on at first. Years later we read in an old newspaper a statement by an American official saying in so many words that everyone who supported the Baghdad Pact was fighting for freedom in the Middle East and was a hero in the fight against communism. Some were the fighters from our town who sided with the government, that is the very same boys from the Lower Quarter who were so stingy about firing bullets from the long barrel rifles that the government sent them on mule-back, one of whom was Muhsin, standing behind the millstone.
Actually, we had been more interested in our freedom. We roamed the alleys freely after the headmaster locked the gates of the school with a heavy iron chain the moment the violence erupted and left for his hometown far off in the Batroun district. There was no way he could stay among us, being as he was a member of the Socialist Party. A Christian and a socialist! He had been drawn to socialism from reading so many books that corrupted his mind, according to the school doorman, the one with the fingers of his right hand cut off. We never liked school; it amounted to a series of slaps on the hands with the sharp edges of wooden rulers, bitter cold and the French language. In vain we tried to rein in the enunciation of that language’s sounds and avoid falling into the countless traps in dictation.
We followed after the doorman. He used to play cards, holding them in a strange way, using a hand and a half. He enjoyed it more than staying up in the barricades. We rested assured that he was immersed in a game by the effusion of curses and cigarette smoke. We climbed over the wall with ease, stepping on each other’s shoulders, and jumped inside the school grounds. We wrote nasty things with whatever pieces of chalk we could find. We ate the jar of pickled turnips the supervisor forgot in his office and which he had brought from home to curb his hunger during his long hours at work. Our vengeance was flagrant. We stood on the desks and urinated. We tore the grade books to pieces. We erased the records completely, once and for all. We set the pages on fire and flushed them down the toilet. And before leaving, we rang the bell victoriously, the sound causing some of the neighbours to gather around. We went back to the alleys and ran wild on a never-ending vacation that would last until the revolution was over. That’s what I think we liked about the revolution that ended when American Marines landed on the shores of Lebanon. We had hoped, and some of us were certain it would happen, that the revolution would last a long time and expel school from our lives forever.
We inspected the battlefront from barricade to barricade, delivered messages we hadn’t been charged with delivering, congregated close to Muhsin as he sat on his wicker chair behind the millstone. We’d poke our heads out from the alleyway; our chatter would catch his attention. He’d shoo us away and we’d quieten down and disappear, though we stayed right where we were. When he turned the barricade over to his brother at nightfall, we got scared. We worried that the enemies would take advantage of their absence and inattentiveness and launch a surprise attack.
We also worried whenever he rose from his chair – Muhsin that is – even if just for one minute to relieve his balls from being sat on for so long, sliding his hand deep into the right pocket of his baggy pants to move them from one side to the other. And we worried whenever he would put his rifle down, propping it against the millstone, and start slowly slurping his vegetable soup or labniyyeh, the steam rising up from the bowl. He would blow on the spoonful and slurp it up loudly. As long as the food was hot, the noises that came out of Muhsin’s lips and teeth were loud, to the point that we wondered if the people behind the opposing barricade could hear. And maybe they would use the opportunity to shoot at us, while our lead fighter was lapping up his lunch. Katrine always brought Muhsin’s lunch exactly at noon. If she was late, he’d yell to her, ‘Katrine!’ just once, and she’d come running. She’d have to take two trips in order to bring everything he needed – a plate of olives, the salt shaker, the oil decanter and a generous loaf of bread. On the return trip would come the bean and meat stew and the fried eggs. He loved fried eggs and loved to add a squirt of lemon and a dash of red pepper.
He turned over all matters related to the store to his wife so he could go off and fight behind the millstone, about a hundred metres away from his house and his store. Katrine never complained. What use was he, after all, sitting behind the cash register all day long? The man’s presence was always heavy. If a customer asked for some coal, he’d shout, ‘Katrine!’ and along she would come to cater to the customer, because Muhsin refused to dirty his hands with the coal. If someone came to buy kerosene, Muhsin would shout, ‘Katrine!’ because there was no way he was going to allow the smell of kerosene to get on his nice, clean clothes. And if a customer tried to
hand him some dirty and wrinkled money, he would look down his nose at him with disgust and ask, ‘Did you give it to the dog to chew on?’ Then he would take the money reluctantly, holding it with his fingertips with total repugnance, and throw it quickly into the drawer as if it carried some kind of contagious disease.
Muhsin wasn’t sick, but he feared humidity and feared the night. They prescribed a woollen girdle for him to wrap around his waist to keep his stomach warm during the hours after midnight when the humidity set in. His brother Halim was younger than him, but he could bear the night and the humidity. During the early days, Muhsin tried to take the night shift. He was the older brother and night was dangerous. They might infiltrate our side at night, and he’d rather be there himself at such a moment. He didn’t want to endanger his younger brother. But he couldn’t bear staying out in the open air. He’d spend the whole night erupting with the air inside his body. He was like an air factory, releasing it from below and burping it from above. Both actions were carried out in the open, for Muhsin didn’t try to – or wasn’t capable of – hiding them. His music could be heard for quite a distance, especially in the silent, jet-black night.
Daytime was boring. At night, it was always advisable for the men on duty behind the barricades to fire warning shots signalling to the enemy we were ready to greet them with gunfire at any time, thus dispelling any ideas they might have of approaching our lines. During the day, not much happened. Maybe an exchange of curses to break the monotony, but that was about it. Usually they were the ones to start it. Our enemies behind the opposing barricades were apparently even more bored than we were from keeping guard so long. The instigator’s voice would come from the three-story building, from behind the sandbags piled up in the openings where the windows had been yanked out. Sometimes the gunfire would grow quiet. They saved the ammunition because it was dear to them and came to them in stingy consignments too. It came to them from Syria. Their weapons were from the East and ours were from the West. They’d put their guns down and start firing curses instead, curses sharp as bullets. The yelling sometimes reached the ears of the enemy and sometimes it didn’t. The space separating the two quarters filled up with curses before grenades and 24x29 machine gun fire drowned out the voices exhausted from long nights of keeping guard and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes.
The man would call to Muhsin by name, and Muhsin knew exactly who it was standing behind the barricade across from him. He’d call Muhsin. He knew Muhsin and it was said they were distant relatives. Muhsin would nod his head to him when he started shouting. Muhsin was gracious to him, as they said. He even smiled a little, but was careful not to answer the call. He would take the dare – their secret contest always began with a dare, a sudden call.
‘Come on out, Muhsin, if you’re a man . . .’
Then a little later, another voice, ‘Show your head, you coward!’
Muhsin bore the insults against his family and all his descendants, all the way to curses against the saints, but they never dared curse the Virgin whose church stood in the middle of our quarter. They cursed our family’s zaeem, and even attacked our dead. The voices and the intonations varied as they took turns shouting from the opposing barricade, and all the while, Muhsin did not respond. He didn’t respond because he thought they were setting a trap for him. They were trying to pinpoint his location and use his voice to hunt him down. That’s what he thought, or that’s what he claimed, in order to excuse himself for not joining in their chorus. But eventually they discovered his weak spot and used it to fish him out.
When Muhsin heard Katrine’s name his ears perked up as he listened carefully. The mere mention of his wife’s name from across the barricades was a defamation he simply could not put up with. The guard behind the barricade building across from him said he was going to screw Katrine because, ‘You, Muhsin, don’t know how to do it right!’
Muhsin didn’t let him finish. He stood up from his chair, withdrew his rifle from its peephole between the sandbags, stood up unprotected and began shooting in the direction of those who were mocking him. He emptied an entire clip, reloaded a second one and emptied that one, too, before his anger subsided. It was the first time Muhsin broke the rule of firm self-control and the first time we sneaked into his barricade to collect the empty shells that were still hot. He fired bullets at them rather than speaking. He hadn’t responded with words.
When one of his foolish cousins came to him at his barricade behind the millstone at sunset to whisper something in his ear, Muhsin pushed him back a little because he didn’t like whispering and he didn’t like the smell of bad breath. He asked his cousin to speak up because no one was around to hear them. He told Muhsin with a courageous look on his face that they were going to whistle for him outside his house at ten o’clock, right after dinner. He told Muhsin not to eat too much so he could catch up with them without letting anyone know, not even Katrine, and he should bring his gun, four clips, and his rubber-soled shoes that didn’t make any noise, the same shoes he wore to go quail hunting. There would be three men, plus him the fourth, intent on . . . Here his cousin pointed towards the enemy lines, and then he showed him the way. ‘We’ll break down Abu Sada’s door, enter the sawmill through the window, and from there we’ll turn left.’
Muhsin used the stomach cramps that plagued him at night as an excuse. He said he wasn’t a kid anymore and he might be a hindrance to them, plus it wasn’t useful to have too many people on such a mission. Further, if he was going to have to be killed in battle, he preferred to take his death into his own hands, not have it come as a result of someone else’s mistake. This was a clear indication of his lack of confidence in the people involved in that attack of theirs, perhaps because of their youth and lack of experience in the kind of fighting Muhsin had such intimate knowledge of, though we were never able at the time or later on to figure out how he knew so much about it. What Muhsin didn’t say was that he had a sister, Husneh, who was married to someone on the other side, and maybe he wanted to avoid a confrontation with his brother-in-law or his brother-in-law’s brothers. But he did promise the young men that he would keep guard at his post and wait for their return.
Just after midnight they came back to him. Apparently they hadn’t faced any major difficulties. They told him about the ease with which they advanced and how they found Abu Sada’s door already removed and how when they entered the sawmill the smell of wood was very strong. They heard a moaning sound, so they stiffened up, cocked their guns and told each other to be completely silent. But soon they discovered that in the corner there was a man relieving himself into the pile of sawdust. He was having a bout of constipation and they could hear him encouraging himself to get on with his business. ‘You can do it, son of Naamtallah . . .’
They knew who he was from his voice and from his name which was very uncommon. He was the butcher from the shop across from the church. He took a deep breath and tried some more, but failed. ‘You’re a coward, Naamtallah,’ he scolded himself.
They waited a long time for him to succeed in moving his bowels. Finally he let out a big sigh and stood to his feet.
‘He wiped his ass with sawdust! Grabbed a handful of sawdust from the floor and wiped his ass with it!’ They told him that jokingly or perhaps they fabricated that detail knowing how sensitive Muhsin was about cleanliness.
He interrupted them, his face full of disgust ever since the part about entering the sawmill. ‘And tomorrow he’ll feed meat to the folks in the Upper Quarter with those hands!’
He laughed and then commanded them decisively, ‘Kill him!’ as if he had been right there in front of him, as if Muhsin wanted him killed as punishment for wiping his ass with sawdust rather than for being an armed member of the enemy lines. And the man wasn’t from an important family, either, just one of the fold, so there wasn’t any compelling reason for Muhsin to show all that excitement. They told him that when they saw the man in that despicable scene none of them attempted to shoot him but rather th
ey just let him go on his way, not wanting to give themselves away for the sake of such a trivial catch. Instead they continued their slow advancement, entered a house deep inside, and came back with a picture of the owner’s father that had been hanging on the wall, as the owner was very proud of his father and his father’s glorious deeds. Now their plan was to let them know what they had done by shouting it and telling the man from one barricade to another that they were going to piss on the picture of his father and if they’d wanted to they could have shot the butcher Naamtallah right in the ass.
Muhsin laughed at their heroics and encouraged them, but he knew deep down that their deeds weren’t going to make any difference in the battle. At any rate, Muhsin didn’t participate in sneak attacks or in ambushes along far-off roads.
Muhsin’s war had its rules, though no one knew from what source he extracted them; for every imaginable combat scenario he had an action and a decisive opinion about what to do. Don’t attack your adversary except when the sun is coming up, the time of deepest sleep. Don’t hit your enemy with just one bullet, because he might still have strategies to kill you. Whoever you are shooting, look them right in the eye . . .
Despite all that, he nearly killed Father Boulos, none other. After we begged and pleaded with him for a long time, Muhsin agreed to tell us about that incident once, though he avoided talking about his errors. He was amazed that he hadn’t shot him, and when he showed this astonishment of his we felt it would have been better for Muhsin’s reputation if the priest had actually been shot, even if it hadn’t been fatal. Father Boulos had tricked him that day.
The priest called out in a loud voice, announcing his presence whenever he crossed between the two quarters. He was the only one who could move between the two sides. He carried news and letters with him – news of those who died after being shot by the other side, those who died of natural causes, those of their relatives who were sick, and ‘Here’s a hundred liras from your aunt, because they told her you needed some money during these hard times,’ and ‘Tell your nephew to look after himself,’ and secret messages that stayed deep inside the ears into which he deposited them.
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