June Rain

by Jabbour Douaihy

  Ghaleb al-Semaani sat outside his cousin’s store on a low wicker stool reading the article out loud. He liked to hear his own voice as he read to the usual crowd of listeners. That happened whenever the newspaper seller passed by and the shopkeeper would open up his register and buy a newspaper from him that lasted all day long, getting passed along from one pair of hands to another. When Ghaleb reached the part about ‘this crowd of simple folk’, he stopped reading and pointed with his middle finger at the article, indicating exactly where on the page that expression appeared. ‘Simple folk?’ he retorted. ‘We’re simple folk, you son of a you know what?’

  We in the Lower Quarter didn’t like being insulted. The next time the newspaper vendor came around he was going to get an earful of harsh words.

  After the Rami family zaeem arrived, all the other cards starting falling into place. All of the town’s dignitaries began descending upon the barracks one by one. They would walk past us, look us over, greet some of us here and there, and then enter the barracks building. The head of the municipality came, too. Our family headman passed through. His right eye was red and swollen, perhaps remnants of a sty. He waved to us. A woman at the end of the line ululated for him; no other woman imitated her. It seemed like she was doing it to antagonise the fat lady standing in front of me. They applauded for him, too. We were on our way into the small building to receive cheques and they were on their way into the big building to hold a meeting. We were headed to the military intelligence office, they to the office of the military commander of the north district. The newspaper published two pictures: one of the fat lady ululating with me smiling behind her and the Ghandour whispering curses into my ear, and the other of them holding their meeting – the zaeems and the committee seated in a circle around a desk behind which a high-ranking officer wearing black glasses was seated. They were smiling, and one of them, the Rami family zaeem, was sipping a cup of coffee.

  We moved forward in line until we got close to the building. When we went by them, the door to the office of the military district commander was open and the men gathered inside were laughing out loud, exchanging pleasantries and possibly some jokes.

  One of the men in attendance at the meeting from beginning to end later told us all the details. How they came in and shook hands and hugged each other – except for the Rami family headman who said he had a bad cold and didn’t want anyone to catch it so he declined hugs and restricted himself to handshakes. And someone had brought a bottle of champagne that two men raced to open. In all their excitement, the cork popped off and hit the director of the northern branch of the military intelligence service right in the ear as he was turned talking to the lawyer. The bottle bubbled over and they rushed to fill their glasses and drink a toast to Lebanon first. They were all standing as Henry Beyk made the toast. Then they drank a toast to the new President of the Republic, the former chief of staff of the army. Our headman suggested they drink a toast to Barqa and everyone enthusiastically agreed.

  When it was almost my turn in line and there was no one but the fat lady ahead of me, I offered the Ghandour to go ahead of me and he accepted. The soldier behind the desk didn’t ask the fat lady for her ID. She gave him her name and he found it on the list. He told her to sign and she said she didn’t know how to write, so she dipped her finger in the inkwell, made a fingerprint and he gave her a cheque. The Ghandour fingerprinted as well. He wasn’t happy with the small sum and so he spouted off a string of curses. I was still worried about being seen by my uncle’s wife as I received the cheque from the soldier’s hand. I needed the money because as soon as I’d heard we would be included in the compensation I borrowed money in advance against it and had already spent all of it.

  But I didn’t escape her after all. I bumped into my uncle’s wife on my way back from the office. She was standing there waiting. Waiting for us – me and my brother, too, probably. I didn’t look in her direction, but I heard her say in a loud voice, ‘I hope you’ll have to use that money to buy medicine!’

  Chapter 22

  Kamileh will get out of bed at the crack of dawn. Each day it becomes a little more difficult than the day before. She feels cold the moment she throws off the blankets; the river is near but the sun is still far off.

  She will repeat the same actions, the ones of her darkened life.

  She will die the day she changes a single letter of a single word of it. She imagines she will die in her sleep.

  Each day she reviews what will happen, in great detail:

  She will lie down to sleep one night in good health and not wake up the next morning. Around noon the neighbours will notice she hasn’t come out to the balcony and that the door and all the windows are still shut. They will come over with some trepidation and knock at the door as they whisper to each other. She won’t hear. They will call to her, a little louder each time, but she won’t hear. They’ll go to her bedroom window and pound on it, calling out to her, but she won’t hear. Everyone will come. They will summon her friend Muntaha from her house, and the moment they call to her, Muntaha will know that Kamileh is dead. Kamileh has taken precautions for that morning when they will call her and she won’t answer and they’ll knock at her door and she won’t open. She’s taught Muntaha how to open the kitchen door so they won’t have to pry it off. She’ll reach in through the back window, tug on the rope tied to the door latch and the door will open. They will come into the bedroom, whispering, and there they will find her. Upon seeing her, Muntaha will be the only one to let out a cry of grief. ‘Don’t weep for me. Just stop the neighbours from stealing everything in the house. Lock up the gold bracelets and necklace, and Yusef’s things.’ Yusef, her husband.

  But today she isn’t going to change anything, especially not today.

  She slept with peace of mind knowing that she’d prepared all of Eliyya’s provisions without forgetting a thing – a suitcase filled with food just like the one she sent him off with on his first trip when she followed him all the way to the gate area at the airport and no one had been able to stop her.

  On this day she will fight to keep on going. She turns on the dim kitchen light even though she hasn’t been able to tell the difference for a long time. If she didn’t turn the light on, she would not begin the day. Still under the veil of sleep, she sets the coffee pot on the small burner, the front right one. She stands there and waits until she hears the water boil, tosses in two and a half teaspoons of ground coffee and raises the pot up from the burner so it won’t boil over. She can hear it bubble up before it boils over. Over time she’s come to hear sounds she didn’t used to hear before – the flapping of the swallow’s wings on spring days and the sound of the toilet flushing at the Aasis’ house. She raises the coffee pot high above the stove to allow it to foam up. She turns off the gas, turning the valve of the propane canister. After every use she turns the propane canister off and sometimes she even gets out of bed at night to make sure she’s shut the gas off. She places the pot of coffee on the serving tray along with two earless cups turned upside down. Always two cups, turned over, even though she isn’t expecting anyone to join her for morning coffee. Muntaha would still be asleep at that hour. Kamileh goes back to her room, puts on her dress and easily gropes her way to her seat out on the balcony, because she can sense the light. In the past she used to like to wait for day to break behind the high mountains. Now, too, she sits in the same spot. She pours half a cup of coffee, drinks it and pours some more. She even drinks the dregs from the bottom of the cup. She carries the tray and the coffee pot to the kitchen, washes them and puts them away. She fills a bucket with water and goes back to the balcony to water the flowers and the plants before the sun gets to them first. She will only change the details of her daily routine when she is tired of it all, on the day when she no longer feels like getting up the next morning.

  Ibrahim al-Halabi is the first to pass by, the first to wake up and leave the house at dawn. He slows down when he reaches the balcony, Kamileh returns the
greeting without extending the conversation beyond that. He always has something to say. He always wakes up early to go and stand in the town square, in front of the bookshop, and slowly sip a cup of coffee he buys from the coffee vendor. He watches the town wake up and watches people going into the store to buy the morning paper or pay for lotto tickets, and he watches the government building open its doors across the street. Once people start going to work, Ibrahim al-Halabi’s day comes to an end. He closes up and heads home around nine in the morning, not going back out until dawn the next day. If he’s said hello to Kamileh on his way by early in the morning, he won’t feel obliged to say anything as he totters back home. It was sufficient to merely look up at the balcony and make sure Kamileh was still where she ought to be on the balcony, watering her plants and drinking her coffee. This, in turn, would give him peace of mind that life was running its normal course and he’d won one more day just like the day before. A day whose beauty only people like him understood – people in good health on the brink of the final departure.

  After a bit the school teacher follows, clip-clopping in her high heels. One time she greeted Kamileh, but Kamileh didn’t reply or didn’t hear her, so now the teacher always walks past without saying hello. She walks past and does not even look in the direction of the balcony. Coldness suits Kamileh.

  And Muntaha also comes along, as she does every day, at sunrise. She, too, locks the door to her house with two turns of the key and takes the key with her. She doesn’t dare leave the door wide open anymore the way she used to. In those days she’d even prop the door open with a chair to prevent the wind from slamming it shut. From the day she was born she’d been used to leaving the door open. Nowadays she is afraid of being robbed. Every day she hears about another incident. Skilled burglars came into people’s houses while they slept, crept into their bedrooms and stole all their jewellery out of the drawer right over the head of the man lying there asleep beside his wife. So far, no one had yet to wake up in the midst of the robbery. No doubt the thieves sprinkled some chloroform in the house they were robbing, which is why the people being robbed woke up in the morning feeling tired and groggy. Muntaha believed there had come to be more strangers living in the town than natives.

  ‘We don’t know anyone anymore. Where are they all coming from?’ she’d say, looking them right in the face.

  Usually when Muntaha came over to Kamileh’s balcony she brought along with her a tray of lentils to sift through, to pick out the pieces of straw and the little pebbles, or she’d bring a batch of courgettes to core with ease and skill. If the lunch menu was an easy one to prepare, she’d just bring along her knitting – a navy blue sweater, for herself.

  Muntaha doesn’t have anyone left to knit a sweater or scarf for. Her brother married and went abroad, but he taught his children to remember their aunt, all the way from Australia. She doesn’t know them but they always sent her their greetings and holiday cards in the mail and some money they managed to save up from the meagre salaries they earned from their humble work in the factory. She loves them. She doesn’t have anyone else to love but them, but she has never seen them except in pictures. After her mother died, the mute hadn’t lasted long. He went down to the river one Sunday morning to fish for eels as usual and never came back. They searched everywhere for him; he completely vanished. Maybe he had been sucked into the river. Muntaha has no one left to knit for, so she knits for herself – things she never wears. If anyone asked her about her knitting, she’d say she was finishing a sweater for the neighbours’ little boy in time for the start of school, as if it was shameful for a woman to knit for herself.

  But today she comes empty-handed. She makes sure to wear her best dress – the dark brown one. They sit side by side. If Muntaha speaks, Kamileh responds – in brief.

  The day heats up and sounds fill the air. Kamileh hushes whoever she can so Eliyya can sleep. She knows who makes every nearby sound and after every noise she scolds whoever caused it.

  Around ten Eliyya comes out to the balcony, dressed in a fine white suit. He squeezes into the seat beside Kamileh. He kisses her on the forehead, goes overboard with kisses, wraps his arms around her, and she pushes him away. He insists and she insists back. She doesn’t want these kinds of emotional antics. She can’t stand them. He opens the notebook that never leaves his side, writes something down and then places it beside him on the seat.

  Two boys poke their heads between the plants on the balcony, like two people poking their heads between the curtains to watch a play. They climb the wall between the balcony and the main road with agility. Their eyes burn with a desire to see. They stand on tiptoes to get a full view of the scene. News still travels door to door in the Gang Quarter, just like it did in the old days. News of murder and revenge preceded people’s news. It spread among the townspeople from mouth to ear, skipping the strangers Muntaha was so afraid of. It skipped them, waiting until they became integrated into the community. The news that has been travelling door to door since the night before and which the children heard along with stern words from their parents, is that Kamileh’s son, the son of Yusef al-Kfoury who was killed in the Burj al-Hawa incident, is returning to America today, and after today, his mother will never see him again.

  Today the schools are on strike and the kids won’t be going to school. Unexpected days off have a special flavour to them. When they heard their parents talking about Kamileh’s son’s travel plans, they said to themselves, ‘There’s a strike tomorrow. Let’s go watch.’

  The two boys poke their heads between the plants on the balcony, waiting for the goodbyes. It wasn’t clear who had added to the news bulletin the notion that Kamileh wouldn’t see her son again after today. The two youngsters rushed to watch the moment of final farewell. The idea that Kamileh will never see her son again is what attracts them. They want to see what a last goodbye looks like, one that will never be followed by a re­­­union. He will never come back to Lebanon after that day and soon she is going to die.

  Some of their other friends also join the two boys, and a little while later a crowd of schoolchildren from the First Public High School for Boys surrounds Kamileh’s balcony from all directions. And other classmates who sat beside them on the desk benches at school also join in – little children, sons of the strangers who’d recently taken up residence in the Gang Quarter. Muntaha tries to shoo them away. They back off for a little while but stubbornly stick around in the area. If they back off a few metres, it is only to inevitably return a few minutes later. They follow every movement; they watch as Eliyya and his mother whisper back and forth. Eliyya hesitates a bit, looks around, acknowledges the others present, smiles and gets up to go into the house.

  He comes out a little later with his instrument strapped to him. He bends over it wiping off the dust and rediscovering the keys. The children come closer; the appearance of the accordion is a signal to them to creep closer and closer. Some of them have the courage to jump over the balcony railing and sit on the floor beside the family members and the neighbours who’ve come to share in Kamileh’s farewell to her son. He hits one note and then two notes after that, making sure the instrument still makes sounds. He smiles. The number of onlookers multiplies as they call to one another in the narrow alleyways. The entire Gang Quarter.

  He turns to face them. He plays the tunes for them that he still remembers after all those years, and they stare at him, silent and breathless. They watch his every move as he stretches the accordion as far as it will open, the whole length of his arms. They enjoy the way it stretches open like that. He opens it only to squeeze it back all the way shut. He probably hasn’t picked up the accordion the whole time he’s been abroad, but the moment he starts pressing the keys his ability to play comes back to him, like when you get back on a bicycle. You learn once and never forget. Without putting on airs, he leans over his accordion and shuts his eyes as if suffering some sort of pain along with the sad tune emanating from it; or he taps his feet in joy when the tempo
and rhythm speed up, and sways side to side. He plays whatever tunes come to mind until Kamileh requests ‘Zoorooni Kulli Sana Marra’ – Visit Me Once a Year – which he plays, looking directly into the eyes of the children mesmerised by his deft fingers flying over the keys. They watch him play without listening to the music he is belting out of that amazing instrument of his. The moment Eliyya begins to play, a strange silence comes over the neighbourhood; all car movements seem to come to a complete stop and one no longer hears the sound of mothers calling their sons, or doors slamming, or dogs barking anywhere around.

  When Eliyya starts to show signs of tiring, even though he continues to smile for his audience, Muntaha asks the neighbourhood children to leave, explaining that the woman wants to say goodbye to her son and they should all go play around their own mothers. Muntaha doesn’t have any other way of saying it. But they aren’t going to budge one iota. They are going to watch the scene to the very end. Muntaha threatens to go inside to the living room and even begins to ask Kamileh, Eliyya and their visitors to move inside, but the neighbourhood kids raise their voices in protest.

  They are going to watch Eliyya say goodbye to his mother. It is the moment they’ve come for and have been waiting for ever since hearing their parents say she would never see him again after today.

  She made him a dozen kibbeh patties stuffed with lamb fat, and specially prepared a kilo of dry green beans and a container of labneh balls in olive oil, to which she added some goat cheese and pickled olives and olive oil from the red soil groves of upper Hariq. She packed everything in one suitcase. She secretly sent someone to buy her some pistachio-filled pastries in a sealed wooden box from Tripoli, and half a ring of candied figs and a small bag of dark bulgur wheat. The same taxi driver who had taken him to Burj al-Hawa will take him to the airport. He won’t open his mouth the whole way except to say what is necessary.