A fat woman dressed in black was standing right in front of me. I didn’t know her. I’d never seen her before in our quarter, and she was definitely not one of our relatives. All of the women standing in line were wearing black. All black. And it was possible to determine how closely they were related to the dead by the heavy black stockings they were wearing in that hot weather, and by the scarves on their heads, too. Bare legs meant a relation of lesser degree or possibly that enough time had passed since the death to permit a slackening in mourning signs. My uncle’s wife was dressed in dark black and she also wore a black scarf on her head that covered her hair. She did that in order to be counted among the victims’ widows. Actually, she should have been in reduced mourning since my uncle had been very old and it had been over a year since he’d died.
I craned my neck and spotted a woman at the head of the queue, not four or five people away from the guard at the door to the little building. She was wearing a green dress. She was the only one not wearing black and she was looking all around in bewilderment as if she’d just discovered she was the only woman in that long line not dressed in black. She turned her head looking all the way to the end of the line that extended all the way to the main road. She was the only one wearing colourful clothing. I didn’t think she lived in the town. It was likely that someone had told her to come, so she came. Maybe she’d come from Beirut. I wanted to ask the Ghandour about her but I changed my mind for fear he would start talking my ear off again.
The number of women was equal to, or possibly exceeded, the number of men. All the relatives had come except for the ones who’d gone to Australia to escape the fighting. Those émigrés sent power of attorney to one of their relatives. Kamileh, the wife of Yusef al-Kfoury, hadn’t come down to the barracks. We didn’t realise it at the time. They told us later on that she was the only woman who had refused to come to the Michel Hlayel barracks. She said she didn’t want money in compensation for her husband, insinuating that the rest of us had sold out our dead relatives for money. She had no right to talk that way. People told all sorts of stories about her, that Kamileh. Everyone knew that she’d conceived a child after her husband’s death. More than nine months after. People don’t have anything else to do; they scrutinise, calculate and count on their fingers while waiting for each other around every corner.
The fat lady in front of me was trying to find someone to talk to, anyone. She was nervous. She looked to the front and to the back without seeing a single familiar face. There was no way I could respond or carry on a conversation with her because the Ghandour kept whispering to me from behind almost continually; it was impossible for me to follow two people talking at the same time. The Ghandour stopped just for a second, to take a sniff and try to stop his nose from running. I searched my pocket for a handkerchief to give him to blow his nose, but I didn’t find one, so I thought about tearing off a corner of the paper bag I was holding. He could use it to end the constant threat of his nose dripping once and for all.
Suddenly the fat lady started complaining to herself, in a loud voice. She spoke without looking at anyone. She hadn’t been able to find her identity card. She’d come to the barracks without any proof of who she was. When the Sûreté Générale officer had come to everyone’s house he told us to arrive before noon on Saturday at the Michel Hlayel barracks in Qubbah and to bring our identity cards. We hadn’t waited until before noon, but started heading to the barracks in the early hours after dawn and arrived even before the members of the committee coming from Beirut. The Sûreté Générale officer hadn’t said more than that; he asked only for our identity cards. The fat lady had lost hers. She woke up early that day and turned the house upside down looking for it for the third time. She hadn’t used it since the last election. I hadn’t yet understood this ability some people have to speak to themselves in a loud voice without addressing anyone in particular. When she first realised that she’d lost her ID, she had gone to the Civil Registry Office to try to obtain a new one, but the officer told her it would take time. Suddenly she changed her tone, as if to console herself, telling herself she would surely find someone to vouch for her.
‘My sister is here, and my nieces, but I don’t see them anywhere. Maybe they haven’t arrived yet. If they send me back home empty-handed, I’ll raise hell!’
Suddenly she spotted one of her relatives at the rear, so she called out to him as if she hadn’t seen him for ages; mainly to console herself that there was someone who knew her who was prepared to identify her.
I had no desire to come to the Michel Hlayel barracks in Qubbah, but my brother persuaded me with a simple plea: ‘If you don’t take the money allocated to you, they’ll take it instead.’
The ‘they’ he was referring to were the members of the committee or some officials we didn’t know. They’d take it and pocket it themselves. ‘At any rate,’ he added, ‘your generosity in the matter would go unnoticed by everyone but the two of us . . .’
Actually, I hadn’t been thinking about generosity. I was thinking about my uncle’s wife. As far as I knew, she didn’t even know where we lived. Never once had she come to our house for a visit. It was like the endless war of Dahis and Al-Ghabraa between us. We believed that our uncle loved us but she had turned him against us. I remember how he used to wait until her back was turned to give us money and tell us to hide it from her. He’d kiss me on the forehead and I could smell tobacco on his breath. We were little and he loved us. We were his brother’s children, so we were his children too. That’s what he used to say while I nearly gagged from the smell of tobacco reeking out of his jacket.
‘They want to take your inheritance while you’re still alive . . .’ That was her call to war against us. And we used to answer back. We weren’t shy about it, and our answer was harsh. We went back and forth with it at length at home. ‘Why didn’t she give him some children who could inherit from him? We’re not going to let you take our property to your family! If only my uncle could see, he wouldn’t have picked her up off the street!’
But her influence over him was much stronger than ours. He loved to eat and she used to threaten him that if he was nice to us she’d stop cooking for him. He loved baked spicy fish and stuffed tripe and grape leaves, and she was a very good cook. In any case, she was going to kill him with all that food. Once, and only once, she invited us to lunch. The bitch was a damn good cook! Eventually, she forbade him from visiting us and the enmity between us grew to the point where he started saying things like, ‘If I die I don’t want them walking in my funeral procession.’
Some people told us they’d heard him say that. He didn’t want us – my brother and mother and me – to walk in his funeral procession. I couldn’t believe he would say such a thing.
And now here we were, standing in line outside the army barracks for the sole reason that we were his nephews. My mother had forced me to take a sandwich of cheese and olives that she made and wrapped in a paper bag for me. I almost gave it to the Ghandour so he might give me a break and give himself a break from all his talking. My mother worried I would get hungry if there was a long wait. ‘You can’t stand being hungry,’ she said to me. She knew me well, my mother. I really can’t stand being hungry. But I was embarrassed by the bag and the cheese that was starting to stink. And I was embarrassed about my uncle’s wife, too. She’d be livid if she saw us standing in line.
I was trying my best to hide behind the fat lady blocking my view, but my head still stuck out no matter how hard I tried because she was short. The sun started to beat down on us as we inched slowly forward. We were dying to know what was happening inside that small building. Those exiting didn’t encounter those entering. The news travelled, though, in the end, from the back of the line to the front this time. There were people who’d made the full round and then returned to the end of the line holding something others could see. Many of them were holding a banker’s cheque in their hands for the very first time. At first, we didn’t understand how they’d
divided up the money as the shares weren’t equal. Eventually we figured out that they had divided it up according to each heir’s share of the dead man’s inheritance.
The truth was I was embarrassed to be there and tried to avoid people’s eyes – people I knew. I knew what they would say to themselves if they saw me there with my brother. My brother, on the other hand, didn’t really care about all that. I spotted him joking with the people standing next to him in line. Everyone had been included in the inheritance, without exception, and they all had come. Half the town was there. The Ghandour looked them over and told me about each one.
‘See that woman there in front of the soldier with the glasses? It was my brother Nassif who killed her husband. If it hadn’t been for my brother Nassif, it would have been a huge disgrace for us at Burj al-Hawa. They shot her husband from behind, because his relatives didn’t protect his back . . .’
They had made all of us come to the barracks and stand together in one line. It was the first time we’d come in contact with each other after the events. Two years earlier when the government took control of the situation and arrested men on both sides, guilty and innocent alike, they separated us, putting the Semaanis in the Qubbah prison and the Ramis in the Amir Bashir army barracks in Beirut. But this time they put us all in one line.
Abu Jamil passed next to me and put his hand on my shoulder. The way he looked at me made me feel he still loved me, the way he used to love me when he was in our quarter. That was before he fled and some of our family members occupied his house.
‘Tell your mother,’ he said to me, ‘that Umm Jamil says hello.’
I told my mother that when I got home. She sighed.
The Ghandour knew every one of them. ‘And that young man over there,’ the Ghandour continued. ‘My brother Nassif . . .’ None of his talk was about himself; the true hero in his eyes was his brother Nassif.
I put my hand over my ear trying to get his mouth away from me.
My uncle’s wife got half of the inheritance and we got the other half. If they’d had children, we wouldn’t have received anything. My uncle had run into an ambush that hadn’t been intended for him. He had been driving along in his car when he heard shots fired nearby. Startled, he lost control of the car, veered off the road, and his car flipped and ended up at the bottom of the valley. Despite that he didn’t die; people said he got out of the wrecked car and walked away. They didn’t find any evidence of bullet holes in the car, though. At any rate, the people who had set the trap on the road were from our side, and when they discovered their mistake they rushed to get my uncle out of the car. Be that as it may, my uncle’s health went downhill after that and he died six months later. We attended his funeral service at the church, but we didn’t go to the house afterwards because his wife sent someone to tell us she would cause a scene if we entered her house. She came at us with everything she had. Everywhere she went, she said that we had done everything in our power to prevent him from being listed among the victims of the fighting and that we had gone to the military commander to tell him our uncle died in a car accident and his wife wasn’t entitled to compensation.
I was looking for something to shade myself from the sun, which was burning a hole in my head, when we heard some noise coming from the back of the line, and some shouting, ‘The committee! The committee!’
We were pleased by the arrival of the committee, because it broke the monotony of our long wait. It was a small procession of three cars led by a police motorcycle escort. The first to get out of the car was a short man with thick black glasses and a black splotch on the upper part of his face. Two other men accompanied him. An officer rushed to greet him calling him ‘Henry Beyk’. We recognised him; the Ghandour recognised him. It seemed he was the one who’d raised the money from some wealthy friends of his in Beirut. We also found out what happened was the United States had been sending aid to Lebanon in the form of surplus wheat, and there was a businessman who suggested that the government sell the wheat from America – at discounted prices of course – and use the money to pay compensation to the victims’ families and to broker a reconciliation between us. The businessman had been slow in delivering the money and the reconciliation was delayed up until the day when we lined up in front of the Michel Hlayel barracks in Qubbah.
As Henry Beyk was walking, he stumbled, nearly falling over, which prompted the fat lady standing in front of me to shout, ‘Oh God!’ One of his bodyguards rushed to catch his fall. Henry Beyk smiled and looked around as if he wanted to thank the woman for her concern. Her concern was artificial, just like her. Some people around us said he was the owner of the racetrack in Beirut; a man standing in front of the fat lady said he used to be the foreign minister at the time of the Lebanese independence. He stopped to let the people who’d come with him from Beirut catch up with him.
An officer in dress uniform got out of the second car. The three soldiers who were in charge of making sure we didn’t cut in line saluted him. Soldiers always salute officers even if they don’t know them, at the mere sight of stars on their shoulders. He was very stern and I felt he was looking at us with disdain. The whole time I was standing in the queue inside that barracks I had the feeling that the military men were looking at the civilians with contempt. By civilians, I mean us. We reciprocated, calling them government horses, all fattened up with nothing to do. We wouldn’t reach out to help them because we believed they held ulterior motives – to attack us. None of us would ever join the army except as an officer.
The third man had a large folder tucked under his armpit; it was brimming with papers he kept reorganising to prevent them from spilling out. He wore thick glasses and smiled right and left for no reason as if smiling was his constant expression. People said he was the committee’s lawyer. I didn’t understand at the time why the committee needed to appoint a lawyer.
So here was the committee. Maybe they’d come to make sure the money was distributed properly. Word went around in whispers that the family zaeems would be arriving soon. The three members of the committee entered the main barracks building. The lawyer took a look at the long line as he went up the stairs leading to the door. Perhaps he thought there were more people in line than were entitled to receive compensation according to what was recorded in those papers of his that threatened to strew themselves on the ground.
A little later some journalists arrived; they must have heard about the committee’s arrival. As they proceeded to the military building where the committee had entered, they went around taking pictures of us. They too were fascinated by the long line. When one of the photographers aimed his camera in the direction of the area I was standing in, I turned instinctively and once again tried to hide behind the fat lady. But the flash went off quickly, right in my face. The next day I saw another picture of me in the newspaper, on the front page. The newspaper seller with the limp was very happy. He took a big stack of papers and circulated through all the town’s neighbourhoods. He even went down narrow alleys he’d never gone down before, crying, as was his custom to try to sell papers, ‘News about the people of Barqa, today! Read all about it!’
In the picture, I appeared to be smiling, even though I hadn’t been in the best mood standing there in the long line with the fat lady in front of me, her hand over her mouth as she let out a long ululation. I hadn’t even noticed that the photographer had aimed his camera at us again to take that picture because I was preoccupied, like everyone else, with the arrival of the Rami family zaeem.
He got out of his car quickly, possibly worried he was late for the meeting with the committee. Two of his bodyguards rushed up ahead of him as well. Some people in the front of the line clapped somewhat cautiously, maybe to avoid angering the soldiers in charge of supervising them. But all of a sudden the fat lady let out a loud ululation, which made me realise she was one of them. I might have guessed that, since I didn’t know her. If she were one of us I would have seen her in the neighbourhood at least once. She let out a
never-ending ululation, like the ones they do at weddings, and another woman tried to imitate her but didn’t fare so well in the length department, her voice cracking quickly.
The Ghandour also appeared in the picture in the newspaper, leaning on my shoulder. They had been trying to get a picture of the woman who was ululating for her family zaeem and the Ghandour and I ended up in the picture, too. I think he might have been cursing the Rami family the very moment the picture was taken. I remember when the fat lady had started to ululate he said horrible things, starting with an attack on her dead relatives and all her ancestors before turning on her mother and sister and even her daughter, calling them a bunch of whores who’d inherited the profession from their elders.
My brother didn’t appear in the photo and neither did my uncle’s wife. The journalists wrote things in the paper about us that we in the Lower Quarter didn’t like. They said, ‘From the early hours of morning . . .’ I didn’t like that expression ‘From the early hours of morning’, as if to imply we were eager to get our money. And also, how would they know we’d been there since early in the morning? The reporters didn’t come until after the committee arrived. And the paper also described how the families of the victims who died in the events of 1957 and 1958 crowded into the North Lebanon military intelligence office. It went on to say, ‘These citizens, a crowd of simple folk, were preparing to enter the office of the committee to receive compensation for the bloodshed . . .’ Who told whoever wrote the article we were ‘simple folk’?
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