Chapter 18
‘Pardon me for receiving you dressed this way. I’ve lived alone many, many years and rarely leave the house. The woman who cleans for me hasn’t come this week. I don’t know where she disappeared to or what I’ll do without her . . . Come closer, come closer, don’t be shy. I’ll tell you what you what to know. I don’t know who led you to me, but I remember you from a long time ago when you were just a small child running about the quarter and Kamileh would yell to you: “Eliyya!”
‘And you wouldn’t turn to look. I can still hear the sound of her calling to you. “Eliyyaaaaaaa . . .”
‘I’ll sit here, right here in my spot on the red sofa. I like the feel of the velvet even though it makes you feel even hotter in the summer.
‘Where did you get that picture? I know Davidian. He used to have a studio in the square. And I also know another photographer not many people know named Jorge al-Indari who especially liked to take pictures of women. He took the nicest portrait of me. I still have it. But he died in vague circumstances. Yes, that’s your father. That’s Yusef al-Kfoury. He had a sweet face. I remember how he’d always say to me whenever he saw me, “How are you, son of Al-Aasi?” He was the only one who called me “son of Al-Aasi”.
‘Look. Through that window. Come closer to me. Closer. What do you see there? The grapevine and the rusty roof tiles, right? That’s your house. Maybe you’re not used to seeing it from here. And those are your mother Kamileh’s flowers and her grapevines. People think our house is far from Yusef al-Kfoury’s house, but they’re wrong. Look – it’s less than a stone’s throw away. You are our closest neighbours. But nowadays if we had to go and see you for some reason, we’d have to go all the way down the main road and up around the church. A long way, and frankly I don’t like walking that way. All day long and into the middle of the night during the warm summer nights there are kids everywhere, and they’re rude kids, no respect for anyone. Their mothers are even worse than they are, sitting on low chairs in front of the houses and the shops with their legs and jaws wide open, waiting for anyone to pass so they can say something negative about them. They mock me saying I walk on my tiptoes, but I don’t pay any attention. That’s the way I walk and I’m not going to change it just to please them.
‘In the old days, to go up there we used to cut through the garden between us on foot – along a dirt road at the edge of the garden. It didn’t bother anyone and saved us a lot of time. And actually sometimes on the way up or the way down the path some of us would pick a tangerine or a loquat because we knew that at the end of the season everything would die on the branches in that vacant garden. Then one of those bratty kids told the property owners on us. They were old-time émigrés to Mexico. He wrote them a letter making it sound as if their land here had become a free for all. So these people, who were very rich – people called them the cotton kings – sent after one of their relatives asking him to put up a fence around the garden to stop us from using it as a shortcut.
‘Your mother knows the story. Ask her. At any rate, if anyone made a sound out on your balcony, we could hear it over here perfectly clearly. I used to hear you playing your accordion. You liked French tunes a lot, I remember. If someone as much as coughed on the balcony, we’d hear it. On quiet nights we could hear conversations from there, even if it was just Kamileh talking about everyday matters with Muntaha, her friend ever since the day she moved into the quarter. Sound travels at night. Your balcony was a popular destination for the neighbours. I was happy in the past when I saw them return to your house to congratulate your mother on your arrival. Kamileh wasn’t always such a recluse. Circumstances changed over time, though, and in recent years she’s stayed by herself the majority of the time. She prunes her flowers, waters them, talks to them. Your mother gets mad at the flowers if they droop or start to wilt. She chides them and sometimes she sings to them. We can hear her voice from here singing her mawwaals. We look forward to hearing her sad voice nearly every night.
‘I used to be amazed by her beautiful voice, which was powerful despite her age. But then we found out one day, not too long ago, that she had recorded her voice on a tape. Did you know that? She recorded her voice so she could play it back. All along we’d been listening those nights to the tape recorder. Kamileh acquired a tape recorder before we did, but we bought the radio before you and nearly everyone else in the neighbourhood. You hadn’t been born yet when I started sitting here. My mother used to bring me a cup of coffee every morning to this little table because she knew I’d come here as soon as I got up, to this place where I spent most of my time listening to the radio and smoking cigarettes.
‘I was infatuated with that radio, especially loved listening to Layla Murad and Mohammed Abd al-Wahhab songs. And when radio plays became popular I used to follow them daily, but I didn’t dare raise the volume too high. For years after the Burj al-Hawa incident I didn’t dare raise the volume on the radio. I used to keep the radio right there, in the salon. I think we bought it early on because of my cousin Odette who had joined the radio station chorus in Beirut. They had chosen her to sing a solo. So my mother saved up the money and bought the radio. When it came time for Odette’s song to be broadcast all the neighbours gathered at our house. Her mother and my mother ululated with delight and Odette was sitting there with us, too.
‘That was before all the fighting started, after which they all donned black mourning clothes and even stopped pounding meat for kibbeh in the mortar. That’s when I started being cautious about the volume and only turned it up loud enough to hear the songs when I went into the kitchen. Whenever we heard a knock at the door, we’d quickly turn off the radio before opening the door. We did that for years, even after the fighting was over and people went back to mixing with each other again. We would turn the radio off – that was my job, and my mother would put the dog in the closet in the bedroom so visitors wouldn’t hear him even if he started barking in there. Yes, we used to turn the radio off and close its cloth cover to make it look like we hadn’t touched it in a long time, and we’d hide my white dog. The dog used to sit beside me the whole time I sat here. He’d close his eyes and he’d let out a low bark at any sudden movement nearby. I named him Freddy, but I didn’t dare take him out into the streets. I was afraid the kids would follow me and whistle at me. Those wild bastards.
‘We didn’t allow ourselves to enjoy those songs, especially since we were from the Al-Aasi family. We didn’t want people to think we were happy about what happened. Some people might take it as an excuse to come after us. They wanted us to side with them, but we didn’t want to suffer any harm from them or from anyone else. We were also afraid that your mother, who never left her balcony, would hear the radio. I used to sit here and listen to Asmahan and Layla Murad and dream about the theatre. I was eighteen and had started caring about my appearance: I studied my look. I remember I used to be careful about how I sat and would spend a long time examining the mirror. But despite all my efforts everyone told me that when I walked my right shoulder dipped lower than the left and they accused me of walking on my tiptoes. It’s true I thought I was short, but I wasn’t trying to make myself look taller. During that period I once made it onto the stage. I insisted they give me some small role in the school play and the teacher agreed. He dressed me in a black robe and made me carry a long, metal pitch fork and trained me to walk across the stage from the right side to the left and to say one line: “I am Lucifer, Lord of Hell and God of Gehenna!”
‘I said it twice and stood in my place, refusing to exit off to the other side. I was relishing standing in front of the audience, until the teacher started pulling his hair and screaming at me from behind the curtain to move out of the way. My mother heard him from where she was sitting in the front row seats reserved for the actors’ parents. She stood up in protest and told him in a loud voice to let me stay on the stage a little longer. My father, on the other hand, didn’t like the idea of his son playing the role of Satan, and neither d
id he like it when they gave me the role of Judas on Holy Thursday. He got angry and told me I was handsome, so why hadn’t they given me the role of Jesus or Saint Peter, for example.
‘What mattered most was my parents’ concern when they noticed my stage fright, as people called it. I was sixteen years old and never went out of the house except to go to the cinema, and I was one of the few who went to see movies at both of the movie theatres in town after each neighbourhood ended up having its own theatre. The rest of the time I just sat here. I spent years sitting here on this same red velvet sofa. I’ve even made a dent in it where I always sat. Look. Sitting and smoking Lucky Strikes, two packs a day, imagining myself before an audience, maintaining a dignified and serious look on my face.
‘They must have told you I am strange. I know what people say about me. Lots of them used to make fun of my gait and didn’t expect me to amount to much. I think they used to whisper about me, call me crazy. They were quick to judge and didn’t accept any appeal for their verdicts. All that matters is that I was constantly on stage. They were right about my being wrapped up in myself.
‘I imagined I was Humphrey Bogart, because someone told me once that I look like him. I insisted on having all my shirts tailored by a particular tailor in Tripoli who always sewed the customer’s initials onto the shirt. I used to ask him to embroider HB on the front, but he wondered about that, knowing my real name, so I resorted to telling him I was having the shirts made for a friend with those initials who happened to have the same shirt measurements. He had no choice but to believe me. I tried to walk the way I imagined Humphrey Bogart walked, and I would stand with the same posture I studied him using in the movie Casablanca. I’d put on a hat like his when I was at home alone and practised speaking like Yusuf Wehbeh, and that was before I’d seen Yusuf Wehbeh in movies. I only knew his voice from radio plays. And I didn’t understand a word Humphrey Bogart said in English, so I mixed Yusuf Wehbeh’s dignified voice with Humphrey Bogart’s manly stance. My mother would come and sit beside me sometimes and ask me lovingly and calmly what I wanted to do with my future and tell me my father was very worried about me to the point of not being able to sleep at night and she was afraid he’d have a heart attack because of me. I didn’t dare tell her what I really wanted, because if I were to tell her my true desire, it would cause health problems not only for my father, but for her, too.
‘My mother was in the middle of broaching the topic of my future with me, what I would do for a living, and all the worrying about it, when we heard a scream followed by a single gunshot. Then there was a wailing sound that began to rise from every corner of the neighbourhood, followed by car horns and the roar of a military tank sounding its siren. After that came the sound of the church bell. We’d become experts at deciphering the various sounds that reached us, and became even better at it during the clashes. We didn’t dare go outside to see what was happening. We preferred to just depend on what we heard to know what was going on. Our house here was isolated, surrounded by gardens. The neighbours you see here to the right built their house only a few years ago. There wasn’t anyone nearby we could call to to find out what was happening except for your mother Kamileh, and we preferred not to bother her because we knew how acerbic her responses could be sometimes, and we just wanted to stay out of it. Your mother is a strong woman. That day screaming sounds reached us from your house, too. Painful screaming. I remember very well my mother saying in a decisive tone, “Yusef al-Kfoury has been killed. That’s the end of his bloodline!”
‘You hadn’t been born yet and we all thought Kamileh would not be blessed with a child. And your uncle never got married and your other uncle was sick, as you know . . .’
‘How did your mother know Yusef al-Kfoury had been killed?’
‘Kamileh wouldn’t scream like that except over her husband.
‘But when the screaming grew louder and all sorts of sounds kept coming from everywhere, especially the church bells, we knew for sure something very serious had happened.
‘“Lord help us,” my mother said. “There are so many dead!” And I also don’t know what gave my mother the idea that there were so many dead. I wanted to go out but she grabbed me by the hand and told me, “We have nothing to do with what’s happening.”
‘So I asked her, “What is happening?”
‘“Thank God,” she answered. “We are not involved in these problems.”
‘I used to hear about the problems but I didn’t care. After all, like my mother said, we were from a small family, only two Al-Aasi families in the whole town. Us – that is my father, my mother, my brothers, and myself – and Khalil al-Aasi the carpenter and his family. The strange thing was, we didn’t know if we were actually related to them, but because we had the same name we started being friendly with them and they were friendly with us, even if it was just talk and calling each other “cousin”, jokingly imitating the big families. At the same time, though, we kept our distance from them. Khalil al-Aasi’s family was aligned politically with the Ramis, which they had every right to be. They lived in the middle of their quarter after all. But we didn’t want to be lumped in with them and considered to be their relatives and subsequently elicit the enmity of the others. My father told us that the Semaanis made an offer to my grandfather to add Al-Semaani to our family name or to replace the Al-Aasi name with Al-Semaani, but he refused. We spent our whole lives walking a fine line. My mother knew how to walk it well. The first rule was to avoid going out around town during times of danger and tension because shooting at us had no consequences for those doing the shooting and would be classified under the general category of “errors”.
‘“I don’t want you to die as a result of some error . . .” she used to say. In fact, we grew up with a special temperament. We never gave our opinion about what was happening around us, and we never passed along any news or information or anything we knew to anyone. One of our mother’s rules was, “He who informs you humiliates you.” So we listened but we didn’t speak. We heard sounds and made predictions about what was happening. My father and mother could pinpoint the various sounds – sounds of people’s voices and of gunfire – and could predict what would ensue.’
First, people become uneasy upon hearing ‘deep’ gunfire for a well-known reason – not only is it far off in the distance, but it also doesn’t cause an echo. Thus, it is likely to have been fired directly at its target, which was more than likely to be a person, and the possibility of hearing some bad news after ‘deep’ gunfire was highly likely. Next there was what they called arrasi gunfire, which was gunfire shot into the air, in reference to shots fired in celebration of a wedding ceremony. And there were numerous occasions that called for celebratory gunfire, such as a child passing government exams or the birth of a son after long years of waiting. Someone even made a tape recording of himself shooting his rifle so he could send it to his brother who’d emigrated to Australia where (his brother assumed) he had been deprived of hearing the sound of gunfire. And then there was the unverified claim that Abu Saeed’s neighbours and relatives started shooting into the air one day, refusing to tell the reason for their joy. The secret didn’t come out until days later, thanks to some women who sent out news outside the quarter that Abu Saeed had been experiencing a constant erection and was worried sick about it. He’d consulted numerous doctors and the day it finally ‘slept’ for him, as they say, all his family and neighbours fired their rifles in celebration. And then there was the takleemi or ‘conversational’ gunfire, which is when one spray of fire is answered by another. That wasn’t such a bad sound to hear as it was an indication that the two sides were both ready with their weapons and it was most likely that matters would remain restricted to establishing each side’s presence and wouldn’t lead to casualties. Possibly the worst type of gunshot was that which could not be heard at a distance because it had been shot point blank – in other words at a very short distance from its target, too close to miss. And quite often you would h
ear people say, ‘I don’t like that gunfire,’ which was usually more a reflection of the bad feeling of whoever said it than something based on tangible information. That objection, which evolved into outright curses, was aimed especially at that kind of single gunshot. It was usually a shot from a rifle that broke the silence of the barricades and set off the confrontation. Even after the events came to an end, no one ever found out whose rifle it was and no one was ever certain from which side it was fired. It appeared both sides believed it came from behind the opposing sides’ barricades.
‘And then there was the problem of echoes. If we were to have a new visitor, for example, everything would be confusing for him, because when there was an echo we knew the sound coming from the east might have been produced on the western side. The thing that confused matters for us most of all was trying to decipher what the explosions and gunshots symbolised, like when the first 60-mm mortar shell fired in the direction of our neighbourhood landed in front of us. My mother saw the smoke rising up from the riverbank. Her eyes popped with shock and my father made a silent decision that we would leave this place.
‘We knew even without going outside that something big had happened. That was a difficult night; no one in the neighbourhood slept at all. From time to time we would hear weeping and there was someone who insisted on tolling the bells at night. Have you ever heard bells tolling at night? A lone cry of suffering reached us, too. They were keeping a vigil over the dead and we were not allowed to leave the house. Even the funeral the next day was something we didn’t dare attend. We were told that the bishop called on everyone to renounce their spite and vengeance and to be tolerant instead, but he was met with jeers of rejection and disapproval and was forced to finish up his sermon quickly. I didn’t sleep at all that night, either. The air was heavy and we knew they were all congregated there, around the church, weeping, even though we couldn’t hear their sobs.
June Rain Page 24
