June Rain

by Jabbour Douaihy

  He revered the words of his father and mother. Women were more wicked than men, his mother told him. They sat inside the bakery in hand-me-down house clothes facing each other in two rows before the low, smooth, stone table. They sat with their legs stretched out in front of them, in attack position, while their hands worked without stopping. Their hands and their tongues, too. A hand would scoop out a lump of dough for kneading. She’d roll it between her hand and the surface of the stone table forming it into a ball, and then she’d dust it with flour and start flattening it out. With the right hand at first, as long as the dough was round and ball-like, then with both hands once it started to flatten into a circle. Finally, the rolling pin would finish and widen what the hands had started. The woman would roll it from the right and from the left and in all directions. She’d make the loaf circular, thin it out a little more and then hand toss it. She’d give it one last look before handing it over to Samih. The women followed his every move. Samih went to the city once and went into a bakery, just out of curiosity. There the bread was made by men only. He didn’t see any trace of a woman. He felt jealous.

  Before Samih took on the job of standing in front of the hot oven, he used to socialise with the women, too. His father tried to get him away from the bakery and away from the heat especially. He let him work beside him for a while, but it wasn’t long before his heart went out to him and he suggested Samih try accompanying his uncle. His uncle refurbished mattresses and served his customers in their homes, the exact opposite of a baker. Samih would carry the tools as they went from house to house. The woman of the house would leave the mattress outside the front door or in an open space where he could work on it comfortably. They worked at people’s houses while the men were out working. Samih would open up the mattress or the comforter and his uncle would start pounding the dead cotton, fluffing it up for Samih to stuff back inside and then sew back up again. It was a simple trade, easy to do, and didn’t require anything more than an iron rod, a needle and some thread . . . and an ability to please women, too.

  But Samih went back to the bakery and picked up his father’s bread paddle anew after his death. He only closed the bakery for three days in order to mourn for his father, in loud intermittent sobs, after bearing his coffin, all by himself at the front end while four men carried from behind. He returned the toolbox to his uncle and bid him goodbye saying he was his father’s only child and he didn’t want the bakery to close down. His uncle gave him a look of real pity and said simply, ‘Be careful of your eyes, nephew.’

  The bakery was his whole life and he seemed content with it. He was there seven days a week, Sundays the busiest of all. People brought trays of kibbeh to be baked in the oven, bulgur wheat and meat. They brought him trays of kibbeh by the hundreds. It was a long day but very profitable; Samih wouldn’t finish until two o’clock in the afternoon, after which he would relax and enjoy his free time. He’d change his clothes, take a bath (once a week), comb his hair and go out to the main street. He’d head straight for the public water fountain which was about two hundred metres from his house and the bakery. He walked there with his head held high: a new Samih looking at the onlookers as if to lure their glances his way. On this day he was out for a stroll like everyone else, out of the house for no other reason than to be like all the other people. Sometimes it happened that the neighbours or people out walking, heading for that same location, would see him on the road during the middle of the week, going to the store near the spring to buy eggs or yogurt. On those days he’d be dressed in his work clothes, walking in a hurry, looking straight ahead, intent only on getting what he needed and going back home. A quick trip that was nothing more than an extension of his work at the bakery.

  But how would he get a feeling for Sunday if he didn’t put on his clean shirt and walk slowly, nearly all the way to the water source, and stop there alone? He didn’t have time to enjoy the company of friends. He stood up straight, in the middle of the sidewalk, not leaning against any wall or tree, trying to occupy an empty space all to himself and not share it with anyone. If some women passed by him, they smiled. There was Samih in his Sunday clothes. They smiled at seeing him out of the bakery, as if he wasn’t qualified to do anything except stand in front of the hot oven making bread. He scrutinised everything that passed along the road, watching every passing thing like an event. There were the American cars or German Mercedes, which had recently grown in number – he followed them with his eyes until they disappeared around the bend; there were the young girls strolling up and down the main road arm in arm whispering and giggling whenever the young men looked their way or made comments; or there was a wedding procession or a bicycle race. He would smile when the leading racer appeared, leaning with all his effort over the handlebars of his bicycle. Samih would come a little closer to the public water fountain where the cyclists in their colourful clothing slowed down to grab bottles of water or sandwiches from the crowd waiting there for them, helping them stay the long course of the race. He knew they would climb the high mountains on those little bicycles of theirs. He waited for the last of the cyclists in the Homenetmen Club race and clapped for him with lots of enthusiasm. He clapped all by himself where no one else was waiting, which made the bystanders laugh as he concluded in a loud voice on his way towards the crowd gathered on the pavement who were also watching the scene:

  ‘The race is over. You can all go home now!’

  When the town split into two, his house ended up being on the enemy side, but he didn’t leave it. They advised him to go to his own clan, as they called it, out of deference to the Bedouin tribes, but he refused. He said, ‘This is my house, the house of my father and my grandfather, and I’m going to stay in it. I didn’t harm anyone and everyone loves me and they’re all my customers.’ He stayed in the house, a mere five hundred metres from the border of his family’s neighbourhood, a stone’s throw away. When the shooting started at the beginning of the tensions, some of his family members would call out to him loud enough to be heard from behind their barricades to make sure he was safe. He was able to hear them clearly but he avoided answering. If he heard a voice calling to him when he was outside his house, he hurried back inside and shut the door behind him. Samih remained on the wrong side of the green line.

  It hadn’t come to be called the green line yet. That was a fancy term that was later coined in the Beirut newspapers for the line of battle that divided the capital for two decades and extended from the hills overlooking the city down to the Damascus Highway and all the way to the port. We on the other hand had no name for it, or maybe we hadn’t managed to arrive at a concrete form for the idea of that imaginary line separating the Semaani family neighbourhood, which extended all the way to the southern edge, from the Rami family to the north of the town, though it was drawn there like a protruding line on a relief map. The townspeople all knew about it and knew precisely where it was, where it stretched to, where it took a turn, and where it got lost at some unidentifiable juncture. The green line, as demographics would have it, gave control of the town’s western outlet leading to the city to the Semaani family, while the Rami family controlled the eastern outlet that led to the towns in the elevations above. The coast was theirs and the mountains were ours. But the line became complicated once inside the crowded neighbourhoods and the ancient, damp quarters. It turned upwards around a cluster of houses whose inhabitants stood strong with all their men and guns, extending the Semaani neighbourhood up into the mountains. Or it left behind some deserted areas that stretched between the two quarters and were exposed to the opposing side’s barricades, making it impossible to live there. The important thing was that this line was drawn in the minds of the townspeople, young and old alike. They all knew that if they took ten extra steps in one direction or the other, they moved from one neighbourhood to another. The main road was not the divider; it was much more difficult than that, which was why it was nerve-wracking to clarify the situation to strangers. The line was drawn in sta
ges, in conjunction with the rise in tensions. After the Burj al-Hawa incident, crossing the line remained possible for those who hadn’t been directly involved, but movement started to diminish when the barricades were set up. It seemed as though a deep abyss had come between the two quarters. The problems ended, the commander of the army was elected President of the Republic with the blessing of American special envoy to Lebanon Richard Murphy, and Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, and a national unity government was formed. It sent the army back to the town and the barricades were lifted after eight months during which the green line hadn’t budged an inch.

  His name was Samih al-Rami and his parents’ house with its adjoining bakery was in the Semaani family neighbourhood, five hundred metres from the first public senior school for girls, which the green line passed straight through. Neither party was ever able to stay there and set up barricades.

  In the beginning he didn’t show any signs of anxiety, as if he depended upon some hidden power that protected him and made him immune to the general danger around him. The Semaani family members themselves, in particular the women, from whom nothing was kept hidden, used to forget he was an Al-Rami. When tensions flared up, the women cursed his family as they rolled out the dough and never expected any response from him. The only thing that bothered him was the voices that called to him from behind the barricades, where the armed men from his family were. Some of the voices, which he recognised, sometimes asked him to leave the Semaani neighbourhood and come to them.

  ‘They’ll kill you, Samih. They have no conscience and no religion!’

  He asked Father Boulos to inform the men of his family over on the other side that he was doing fine, not to worry about him. And he asked him specifically to ask them to please stop calling to him so as not to draw their eyes to him. They stopped asking for him out loud, but there were still people in the nearby Rami family barricades who would sneak forward a few metres, hoping to catch a glimpse of Samih leaving his bakery or entering it and make sure that he was still alive and well.

  Not much about Samih’s daily life changed, except for the Sunday stroll, that short strut down to the main road which was no longer the stage for bicyclists with their strange hats and multi-coloured shirts, and which had been abandoned by the young girls and the American and German cars. At the bakery, he stuck closer to the oven than before. He wasn’t just trying to lean away and avoid responding to the women’s talk and what they said about others anymore. Now he shoved his head as far inside the oven as possible so as not to hear the women’s talk at all – especially when news spread of someone from the Semaani family having been killed or even worse, if one of their unarmed young men fell victim to an ambush set for him outside the town. The women didn’t spare anyone from their tongues. Their chatter transformed into prayers for their demise. As a general rule, he didn’t say anything to them, even if one of them looked him straight in the eye and said, ‘Yesterday your cousins robbed Elias al-Rami’s house and then blew it up with dynamite . . . God damn all their houses!’

  Samih would raise his eyes to the heavens in submission, declaring he had nothing to do with whatever was happening. Samih was an only child, his father had been an only child and his grandfather, too. There weren’t any direct relatives to speak of, no paternal cousins from his father’s brother from the Rami family, no sturdy family tree to be drawn up for them. They themselves knew nothing more than the fact that they were from the Rami family. And they didn’t belong to some junior branch. Some even said they hailed directly from the original Rami family.

  Samih used to avoid hearing and avoid speaking even more. If he opened his mouth at all, it was to say something about the bread or the dough or to count the loaves which were the bakery’s entitlement – loaves he’d take out of each portion of his clients’ bread dough to sell – because Samih always counted out loud, as if he couldn’t keep track of the numbers unless he called them out. Or maybe he counted noisily in order to make it clear in front of witnesses that he was taking his fair share and not a single loaf more.

  It’s possible Samih was convinced that his safety depended on watching his tongue. If he didn’t speak, he’d be safe. That was the idea of ‘the tepid tongue’ – the importance of words and the harmful nature of words that his father taught him. And perhaps his father’s other advice to him not to listen to the women was related to this idea of the neutrality of speech more than it had to do with being careful that the bread or the trays of kibbeh on Sundays didn’t burn inside the oven.

  The war broke out and he began watching his movements. He went from the bakery to the house to the shop – he couldn’t do without the shop – reduced his movements to the nearest triangle and nowhere else. And he only went to the shop, which was a bit far and was exposed to people, at dusk, thus limiting the possibility of danger. The shopkeeper was a widow and sometimes he traded bread with her for eggs or goat’s milk yogurt, which he liked to drink cold. He counted the loaves in a loud voice and she counted the eggs as loud as she could, too. Sometimes he’d make a stop at the church.

  Samih longed to go to church, but he wasn’t very consistent with his religious duties, especially because the bakery kept him from Sunday mass. He yearned to go to church, and would go inside for a split second, dip his fingers in the holy water, kneel alongside the wall beside the icon of the Virgin with a dark complexion and Indian features, which the donor who funded the building of the church and was an émigré to Mexico insisted be placed in a special spot inside the church. Samih quickly muttered his prayers and got up to leave. He hardly saw a single man during his day, only those who walked past. If he was afraid of anything, he was afraid of the women. And so he concluded that danger would come to him from the women.

  But death came to him from the men.

  The day one of their well-educated young men was killed, they came.

  There were three of them who came along with the victim’s uncle.

  They waited outside while the uncle came to the door.

  He stood in the doorway, blocking the light from coming in. He had very broad shoulders.

  His nephew had been in the Baccalaureate II class at the Frères School, preparing to take the government exams that had been postponed due to the fighting. He spent all his time studying.

  ‘They killed him with a book in his hands,’ his mother said, mourning him.

  Maybe she meant to say figuratively that her son was a student unversed in the language of guns, or maybe he really had been reviewing his lessons out on the balcony where he thought bullets from the other side couldn’t possibly reach him. It seemed as if the Rami family had slipped into places where they could now make out back courtyards and houses whose inhabitants, believing they were out of their bullets’ reach, moved about freely. They would take advantage of them and hunt one of them down. Afterwards, the residents would avoid that exposed location or they’d build a makeshift wall to protect themselves from bullets coming from the opposing barricades.

  The uncle was broad-shouldered and had rough features. He hadn’t sent his children to school. His brother had done that, and this had been his reward. He rushed to his brother’s house the moment he heard the news, leaned over his shoulder and said, ‘Didn’t I tell you not to educate your children?’

  That was all he said.

  As if his nephew’s education had caused his death.

  In any case, the sun wouldn’t set on his murder. He swore on his mother’s soul. That’s what the uncle with the rough features said to himself. He grabbed one of his sons – one was plenty – and two fanatic relatives.

  They knew about Samih’s presence in the neighbourhood. Everyone in the Semaani family knew of Samih’s presence, but they ignored him, saving him up for a rainy day.

  They didn’t start with him. That would be too easy a prey, perhaps. They picked up their rifles, got in a car and hid around the bend. But soon they turned back.

  It was more than likely that they didn’t get
the chance they wanted. Maybe they waited and waited and no one passed by. They headed for the bakery.

  The man stood in the doorway. Rarely did another man besides Samih come to the bakery. Samih didn’t look up. Maybe he thought the man was calling for his wife or some female relative for some urgent matter.

  The man didn’t speak and didn’t come inside. He stood in the doorway, blocking the light from outside.

  The news of the boy’s murder out on his balcony as he studied his lessons hadn’t spread yet, which is why the women didn’t pay much attention to the fact of the man standing in the doorway.

  They kept on rolling and stretching the dough and dusting it with flour, but they stopped talking as a cautionary measure.

  The man’s right hand was behind his back. He lowered it and the revolver appeared. It was cocked and ready as it shone in the bright sunlight.

  He raised his arm to aim, mumbled some incomprehensible words, and shot three bullets. All three hit Samih, who was not paying attention to what was going on in the bakery doorway. He probably didn’t want to know what was going on.

  He was waiting for the right moment to remove the loaf of bread from the oven, waiting for the onset of the burning smell and to see the little black spots appear.

  The man said something out loud that the women didn’t hear. The sound of the three bullets exploding into the little bakery deafened their ears.

  The man tucked his gun back inside his belt and left – he and his relatives, too. Daylight streamed back into the bakery.

  Samih didn’t fall to the ground.

  He fell into the chair he always kept beside him.

  He sat down with a slight look of rebuke in his eyes, looking at the women, one by one.