June Rain (35 page)

Salimeh’s boys organised two nighttime operations. They amassed their troops and moved stealthily towards the opposing barricades under a cover of gunfire consisting of tracer bullets and exploding bullets. They tried to drive out their enemies from their protected positions, but they didn’t succeed. They had planned ahead of time how they would take them and force them out and how they would divide up the booty, but they failed. Both times they came back with dead and wounded of their own. They weren’t going to win the war and they weren’t going to lose it, either. They had lost their wits, though. They went into the homes of the enemy families in their own neighbourhood and blew up their houses with dynamite; they caused numerous casualties in their own ranks from all the shrapnel that resulted from their lack of expertise in blowing up houses. Then one of them crept into the demolished homes and stole furniture by night so no one would witness his depravity. Those were houses belonging to their enemies who had lived among them, but who’d left temporarily hoping to come back after things calmed down. They blasphemed against the saints and nearly sounded the Muslim call to prayer from the dome of the church just to spite their enemies who had allied themselves with America and the President of the Republic.

They still wanted more, but the ‘revolution’ ended. The president’s term came to an end; the parliament came into session and elected a new president.

Chapter 20

The whole thing had been Kamileh’s mother’s idea. Muntaha would never have dared do such a thing on her own. In any case, she had absolutely nothing to do with it. Kamileh’s mother had whispered something in Muntaha’s ear, and at first she didn’t take what she was saying the least bit seriously. She was asking her to go to Fuad and Butros al-Rami, right after the funeral.

The funeral . . . The sharp smell of sweat . . . The smell of people, the smell of the dead.

They had brought them in their coffins into the church, against the protests of the families, after a big argument. At first the clergy got involved but no one paid them much attention until the family’s
zaeem
arrived.

The family’s
zaeem
 . . . He stopped at each coffin before it was brought into the church. He stopped and bent over each victim, kissed each one on his yellow forehead, and hugged the widow or the children without weeping. He had done all his weeping at home, in the house those same men had pitched in to build for him during hard times. Everyone who had been able to help out, be it with the building or painting or carpentry, had volunteered their labour. He had wept all alone in his room, for a long time, sitting beneath a picture of his uncle, the one from whom he inherited his leadership position. His brother had stood guard outside the door to his room, arguing with anyone who tried to come in.

‘Let him rest. The President of the Republic wants to meet with him!’

His brother said he’d heard him sobbing like a baby. He stayed all alone like that for more than an hour, and then he stifled his sobs and stood up. He changed his clothes, shaved and sat at his desk writing the news bulletin he would broadcast after the funeral. In it he would place responsibility squarely on the shoulders of his enemies. What they had done had been a trap set for freedom-loving innocents, an act of treachery against unarmed citizens . . . He folded the paper and put it in his pocket. He got up, opened the door without warning, accidentally bumping his brother in the shoulder and left. Twenty young men followed after him, their weapons in plain sight. He would never lock himself in his room ever again, nor would he ever cry again after that day. He’d cried in advance, in one bout, for all of his brothers and cousins and relatives who’d died already and for those who were going to die in the future.

When he stopped before each of the dead in the church courtyard, he made the professional mourners stop their wailing. ‘Enough!’ he shouted. A woman whose son was laid out on a bed before her said, ‘The important thing is that you are still alive!’ He didn’t try to silence her. What silenced her were the strange glances her daughter cast at her.

It wasn’t exactly clear from the woman’s tone if she was being sarcastic or expressing her sincere concern for the
zaeem
. The way she had said it left it ambiguous.

A second battle broke out with the women inside the church over shutting the coffins. People would close the coffins only to have the women raise the lids again a little later. The negotiations and attempts at persuasion were lengthy, with the following result, ‘At the end of the funeral service, we will open the coffins for you one last time and then we will nail them shut.’ That was suggested by the family’s
zaeem
, who was standing at the head of the worshippers and initiated the funeral prayers himself.

It was a signal the priests should begin, so they quickly started their prayers. They sped through the Syriac hymns, as if running from a fire. Their eyes and minds were on the congregation there in the church yard. The people knew the funeral service by heart. They recited it in Syriac. Some of them knew it better than the priests. The moment the group of priests standing to the right of the altar got to the last line of the funeral prayers, and before they were able to finish it, the screaming erupted. It erupted all of a sudden from a hundred different throats at the same time.

The children who were present were surprised. They looked around, terrified, thinking something had happened. The new incense holder’s eyes bulged open and he lost the strength to hold onto the incense burner. The older people knew what was happening. The ones standing in the front pews didn’t even turn around to look. They weren’t going to look at the women as they clung to the coffins and wailed their hearts out. That final outburst was not something to look at.

In the end it was the priests and the members of the religious brotherhood who managed to succeed in separating the living from the dead. The leader of the family, surrounded by his men, stood at the church door. As the procession of coffins passed by, he leaned over and kissed each one. He bent over his brother’s and his nephew’s coffins a long, long time. They hoisted them onto the roofs of the cars. Two young men leaned out from the windows of each of the cars to secure each coffin on the roof. They told people to move out of the way. The important thing was for them to be able to hold onto the coffins on the way downhill. There weren’t enough cars to transport them all at once to the graveyard, so the cars came back a second time to transport the rest.

They took them to the almond grove. The pits had already been dug. One straight row, as if they’d been dug by an expert at planting olive trees and orange trees standing like a line of soldiers. Someone had got up early to dig up the ground and prepare it to receive them. One hole for each one, then the dirt poured on top and that was it. They are still there to this day, on land owned by the monastery. They selected this site as their burial ground because the town cemetery in the Rami neighbourhood would be impossible for them to reach to pay their respects. And even if they could get to it, they would never leave their dead there.

They brought Kamileh back to her house on foot. On the way, she’d walk a little and then stop. Muntaha braced her. She’d stand in front of one of the houses, call to the people who lived there, and tell them that Yusef was gone and wasn’t coming back. No one came outside to console her. She’d resume her journey and then stop all over again. ‘Yusef is gone,’ she’d say, addressing some woman standing out on her balcony watching the people on their way back from the funeral. The woman on the balcony would cover her face with a white kerchief, weeping or wanting to give the impression she was weeping. Finally Kamileh made it to her house. They took her inside to lie down and rest.

‘No, not the bedroom,’ she erupted, like a mad woman. ‘I will never go back in there after today. Get me out of here. Get me out . . .’ They took her out to the balcony and let her stretch out on the bench. She laid her head near the dahlias and her mother sat down beside her.

A flock of swallows swooped down onto the balcony. Three black birds with their little outspread wings traversed the nearby space and glided over the people’s heads.

Swallows in season.

That was Monday, 18 June 1957, at approximately seven o’clock in the evening.

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.