On a night close to that time, possibly a few days before or afterwards, another lady sat on another balcony that was also adorned with flowers and plants but which overlooked the Mediterranean Sea from a nearby elevation. The lady’s name was Laurice, or at least that’s the name she signed to her poetic writings, which she published soon after under the title Captain of the Wind. In the picture of her on the back cover of her poetry collection she’s wearing a white dress and a straw hat and is smiling coyly. In one of her poems she says, ‘It is difficult for me to be away from you . . . It is difficult for me to live . . . The land of mulberry trees and grapes . . . The land of secret springs . . . Images of God and a happy valley . . . After my death I will go searching for you . . . In the poor man’s bag is a little soil and a little water . . . The bread of promise . . . And it will be said: that woman in the distance has no shadow anywhere. My ancestors lived in the wastelands and the sand dunes . . . They went and came with the sand and the wind . . . They hunted gazelles that looked like women and waited at the doors of their houses until the end of time . . .’ She was said to have eventually married an Italian diplomat in Damascus and spent the rest of her days between Rome and Venice.
Kamileh relaxed a little, as if forcing her eyes shut against her will.
Kamileh’s mother pulled Muntaha aside, away from some of the neighbours who had come to the house. She repeated her request. ‘Go to Fuad and Butros al-Rami . . .’
‘Today?’
‘In an hour. When it gets dark. Go home, rest a little, change your clothes and come back.’
‘Oh God!’
‘They sent me some news,’ Kamileh’s mother said. She didn’t mention with whom or how. ‘They want to come to the house to offer their condolences to Kamileh. Yusef al-Kfoury was like a brother to them and they don’t want to delay in paying their respects to his wife.’
Muntaha went home, but she wasn’t convinced she should do it. She hoped Kamileh’s mother would get preoccupied looking after her daughter and forget the whole thing. Muntaha’s mother was sitting with her relative the mute near the entrance to the house, as usual, carrying on a conversation. He made speedy signs with his hands while she went slowly, as if searching for her words with her hands, or like someone speaking a language not her own and hesitating before pronouncing each word. They got tired quickly. One or two sentences and then they would have to rest. Muntaha’s mother had been weeping along with the other neighbours, too. Her eyes were red. The mute didn’t cry for anyone. He was probably feeling sad in his heart, but he didn’t cry. He hadn’t gone eel fishing that day but he still smelled like the river. He was barefoot, as usual. The mute was the sturdiest one among them in the face of tragedy.
Muntaha asked her mother about Haifa Abu Draa. Her mother had gone to Haifa’s house while Muntaha was with Kamileh.
‘No one ever died over someone,’ her mother said, meaning that no one had ever died from sorrow over another’s death. She was a harsh one, her mother. ‘The unfortunate one is the one who goes,’ she added, meaning that when it came down to it, the true loser was the one who died.
The mute nodded his head in agreement. He couldn’t hear what the woman was saying since she wasn’t moving her hands as she spoke. He couldn’t hear anything at all, but perhaps he intuited what his relative would say in such critical circumstances. It was difficult to imagine how such adages could be said in sign language or in the language of the mute eel-fisherman. No wonder his conversation partner had to put forth so much effort choosing her hand signals.
The mute was smiling and nodding his head in agreement. An indication he understood.
Muntaha didn’t hear what her mother said. Her answer was always the same whenever she returned from a funeral: death is a woman’s pastime. She’d heard her father say that once.
Muntaha collapsed onto the bench. She knew the day wasn’t over yet. She didn’t change her dress, in defiance of Kamileh’s mother who had told her to do so.
In all that stress, she had had the nerve to tell her to put on a new dress.
Muntaha later said that she had a dream during those few minutes when she shut her eyes and rested her head on the end of the wooden bench. She could have slept standing up.
Soldiers. She dreamt of soldiers. An entire platoon. A long line of soldiers dressed in blood-red, marching in a forest of tall trees. Poplar trees just like the ones planted along the two sides of the river road with their tops reaching up to the sky. The ground was wet from the rain of the night before and the ground was covered with yellow poplar leaves. Around each soldier’s neck was a cloth sack. Mizwid, they called it. They kept bread in it. They were all soldiers. No officers or sergeants among them.
They were the dead men. The ones who’d fallen and the ones who were going to fall.
The bread was the prayers that were chanted over each of their souls. They carried them around their necks to judgement day. Each would take the loaves out of his sack and present them to the Lord as He sat upon His throne.
He was the same Lord from the painting above the altar at the Church of Saint John the Baptist.
Kamileh’s mother, who didn’t knock at the door, because it was open, awakened Muntaha. She came right in to where Muntaha was in the sitting room.
She tugged at her shoulder. ‘Get up. We don’t have anyone besides you.’
Muntaha didn’t understand what she meant. She almost told Kamileh’s mother that she had two other daughters she could seek out for help. One of them was married and lived in one of the nearby villages; she could walk there if she wanted. The other one lived some distance away. Her husband didn’t like us and didn’t like our town, but she’d come from Beirut to attend her brother-in-law’s funeral. Her husband didn’t accompany her and made her go back in a hurry. Kamileh’s mother sent her daughters back to their families right away, out of fear for them. Why didn’t she send one of them? Why didn’t she go herself?
‘Why don’t they pay their respects tomorrow or the next day? There’s lots of time . . .’ Muntaha, half-asleep, asked only that one question.
‘They have to come tonight!’
‘Two men from the Rami family visiting the quarter tonight? Kamileh is totally distraught. What will she say to them? Wait until morning to see how God’s going to get us out of this mess!’
‘Tonight, Muntaha. We cannot put it off.’
The camel has one idea in his head and the camel driver has another.
God help her.
She dragged herself up from the bench. Neither her mother nor her mute relative was around. No one was checking on anyone that night.
She walked, somewhat afraid. Not many big things happened in her life. Had it not been for the fatigue and sleepiness she would have got a bit more excited. She would have to walk in front of them and clear the road for them.
The streets were deserted. Her heart pounded hard all the way to their quarter. She found them sitting at the entrance to the house, silently smoking cigarettes one after another, stamping them out under foot at the half-way point. They were waiting for her.
She knew them well. Kamileh was always pushing the idea that Muntaha should marry Butros al-Rami, the heavier and older one who was sitting to the right. If he paused from puffing cigarette smoke, he puffed the air as he exhaled.
They were sitting on wicker chairs.
‘What are people saying in your quarter?’
She didn’t know how to answer. She in turn asked them about their dead and how the funeral had gone.
She didn’t answer their question, and they didn’t answer hers.
One of them repeated the question. People said whatever they felt like. In any case, she wasn’t going to tell them anything. After thinking hard and carefully she said, ‘What do you want them to say? They’re hoarse from so much wailing.’
‘What are they saying about us, my brother Fuad and me?’
That was the real point of their question. They knew what was being said abo
ut them. News travelled fast, especially bad news.
‘I haven’t heard anyone mention you . . . I was busy with Kamileh the whole time.’
‘Poor Kamileh . . .’
They knew Muntaha would walk ahead of them.
It was a short road and a difficult one.
She walked ahead of them with her heart pounding. She could hear it the whole way. And the whole way, too, they remained silent, but she noticed each of them was carrying a gun. The metal glinted in their hands.
There had been three of them sitting at a table at the Brazilian Café in Tripoli, as was their custom – the two brothers and Yusef al-Kfoury, when the arms dealer joined them. He told them about a cache of revolvers he had just netted. They bought him a cup of coffee and exchanged bits of conversation and then ordered three revolvers. He delivered them the next day. He brought them in a sack to the same coffee shop. They found a secluded corner and looked them over. Yusef al-Kfoury chose the 14-caliber Herstel. Butros al-Rami paid for the guns and refused to let Yusef al-Kfoury pay him back. A gift, he told him. They didn’t keep track of debts with each other. Yusef al-Kfoury said things weren’t going to stay this way very long and that he didn’t like guns.
No one stopped them on the way, and they didn’t run into anyone.
At every fork in the road and at every opening in the narrow streets the two brothers slowed down. They drew their weapons just in case, listened carefully, and continued walking.
The last calm night.
The night of Monday, 18 June 1957.
Just before noon on that very day, at perhaps the exact hour of night when the time difference was taken into account, one of the town’s émigrés was crowning a long life of struggle by putting his signature on the establishment of a bank in Caracas which he named after the Orinoco River. He had wanted to name it ‘Banco de Libano’ but was told the local population wouldn’t find it appealing. In attendance at the signing ceremony were the Minister of Tourism, Rafael Pikabia, the Minister of the Economy, and a crowd of Venezuelan journalists and media people. The émigré and the members of his family, his wife and two daughters, held 45% of the bank’s shares; this after many long years of labour and fatigue. He had started out as a travelling shirt merchant and then opened a clothing shop and then a factory, which enabled him to accumulate enough capital to open a bank. He told his children he wished to be buried in his hometown, but they weren’t able to transport him to Lebanon because the day he died in a Caracas hospital the fighting in his town was at its heaviest.
On that night, the families and relatives of the dead went to sleep in an attempt to gather up their strength. They slept but they didn’t eat. The men turned their backs to the women. The men recovered their strength while the women revived their ability to wail and mourn some more and incite the men.
And the next day, or possibly the next night, they would begin.
Kamileh was out on the balcony with only her mother, who had politely dismissed the neighbours. She thanked them and wished them long lives and prayed that their children would be spared from harm. And she told them Kamileh would die if she didn’t get some sleep. She also added that they hadn’t any tears left to cry.
Muntaha came in first, signalling that they were behind her.
‘Get up, Kamileh,’ her mother said in a tone filled with anguish. ‘Yusef’s friends are here!’
Kamileh sat up. From the time the news about her husband had arrived, that was the first movement she made of her own accord. She didn’t say a word.
They didn’t greet her with a handshake.
The two brothers sat silently looking at Kamileh while she looked back at them. They were all scrutinising each other. They had come all the way from the Lower Quarter just to look at her. They had wanted to attend the funeral, but hadn’t dared.
Butros broke into tears first, then Fuad. Butros wiped his tears with a handkerchief he pulled out of his jacket pocket. He blew his nose a long time. He blew it long and hard. He seemed to be searching inside his nose for some way to stop crying.
Kamileh’s mother looked around for fear the neighbours would hear all the nose-blowing.
Kamileh was content just looking into their eyes, asking them for answers they didn’t have.
The resemblance between the brothers was quite apparent – the way their backs inclined as they sat, the width of their noses, the little red splotches on their cheeks, the early signs of a receding hairline and the hairs sticking out of their ears. Fuad was the younger brother, but the differences had faded over time and the two looked like they could be twins.
The silent gathering continued. It went on for a long time, as if no one was going to speak because visits for condolences weren’t occasions for speaking.
It was Muntaha who finally said something. She stood up and excused herself to go home, claiming her mother would be worried about her. Kamileh laughed and then tried to cry but couldn’t.
Muntaha suddenly felt she had no place there. No one was looking at her.
‘Wait a little, Muntaha. Finish the favour.’ Kamileh’s mother wanted her to show them home. At least she could take them through the Lower Quarter. She could take them as far as the school and come back.
It was completely silent; just night sounds could be heard – some jackals in the distance letting out intermittent howls, a gunshot in a neighbouring town and the chirping of crickets in the grapevine.
Suddenly Kamileh started to shiver uncontrollably. Her teeth chattered.
‘It’s a fever-chill!’ her mother proclaimed. ‘We must get her inside.’
Kamileh didn’t want to go inside. Her head moved and a rattle came out of her throat.
The silence returned along with the exchange of glances. Only essential words were uttered. Kamileh shivered as the cold night air rose up from the river. The humidity from the river made sitting on the balcony difficult even on August nights.
‘Take her inside,’ Butros al-Rami said.
Kamileh protested again and suddenly it went dark. There was no light on the balcony or around the whole town.
‘That’s all we need, the electricity to go out . . .’ her mother said in the dark.
Silence . . . and night . . . and humidity.
Her mother started up again. She whispered long pleas into her ear. Kamileh agreed to go inside the house. Maybe she convinced her that in the darkness she wouldn’t be able to see anything in the bedroom.
Muntaha sat alone, exhausted. A little while later Butros al-Rami came back onto the balcony. He stood peering into the dark. A few minutes later Kamileh’s mother also came out. The three of them peered into the dark. Some scattered little lights shone from across the way where it appeared the electricity hadn’t gone out – other lives in those villages spread about the mountainside.
Kamileh stayed with Fuad al-Rami for more than an hour. The two of them, alone inside. Kamileh’s mother would never tell anyone about this visit. Butros and Fuad al-Rami would never tell anyone. Only Muntaha would have difficulty keeping the secret. She would try very hard.
Butros, Muntaha, and Kamileh’s mother waited for Kamileh and Fuad in the dark out on the balcony. Suddenly the electricity came back on and Fuad al-Rami came outside. That was between the hours of ten and eleven o’clock on that Monday night, the 18th of June, 1957.
Muntaha accompanied them on the way back. She walked ahead of them. They kept their guns drawn the whole way, and when they reached the school they tucked them back at their waists and asked her to go back home.
‘Many people will die, Muntaha,’ Fuad al-Rami said.
‘Yusef al-Kfoury was dearer than a brother to us!’ Butros said.
Then they continued on their way up to their quarter, the two of them looking all around in the dark.
Chapter 21
We were standing in a long, winding line in front of the army barracks at Qubbah. It was a two-story French structure of sandstone with a lightning conductor on the roof that had a Lebanes
e flag attached to it. There were three stern-faced soldiers – two with twisted moustaches and one wearing thin glasses – keeping us in order.
We could see the people at the front of the line passing one by one into a small house across from the main barracks building. There was a guard standing ready at the door, not moving an inch, as though he had been painted there.
We didn’t see the ones who went inside come back out after completing the transaction they’d come for. It was as if that small two-room house were steadily swallowing up a long rope of Barqa citizens. Most likely they were exiting through another door, one on the other side which I couldn’t see from where I was edging slowly forward.
There was a man from my family standing behind me whose brother had been killed in the Burj al-Hawa incident. His name was Hilal, but they nicknamed him ‘al-Ghandour’ – ‘the Dandy’ – for reasons I never thought to inquire about. His brother who had died in the incident was called Nassif. He kept talking in my ear, practically non-stop since the time we arrived, and the first thing on my mind was to get free of him. And so I offered to let him cut in front of me, but he refused.
One by one the late-comers joined the end of the line that reached all the way to the main road, back behind the statue of the Unknown Soldier at the main entrance to the barracks. It was a stone statue of a military fighter brandishing a flag, and beside it there was a plaque with the names of those who had fallen in the line of duty. Whoever had etched the names in the plaque didn’t list them in alphabetical order or in chronological order of their deaths. Instead, he’d tried to the best of his ability to deliberately alternate each Christian name with a Muslim name: First Adjutant Butros Mansour Saba, Sergeant Mahmoud Ismail al-Qaafarani, Private First Class Mousa Jibrail Touma, Private Mustafa al-Asaad, and so on. There were more Muslims than Christians, however, so he was forced to put three Muslim names in a row at the end of the list.
I had come on my own, and my brother had done the same. We hadn’t wanted to draw attention by arriving together. He was a few metres ahead of me in the queue. That’s how we were with everything – he beat me at doing, while I beat him at thinking. I noticed our uncle’s wife at the front of the queue, too, ahead of my brother. She was ahead of both of us, which, in my opinion, she deserved to be. She had left early for the barracks. I tried to avoid her eyes. As she scanned the crowd in all directions she was undoubtedly searching for us – for my brother and me. She didn’t see me, though, and in fact she would enter the small building and exit through the back door without ever seeing me. That’s how I preferred things to go – each one to his own.
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