June Rain (17 page)

‘Tell me!’

‘There were fifty killed.’

I exaggerated how many out of a sudden feeling that a large number might make her feel better.

‘I want to take him with me, right now!’

We screamed at them. We three women exploded. Hamid al-Semaani was trying to negotiate with the nurses. We didn’t get anywhere. A doctor who I thought might be the owner of the hospital came through the door and told us, with a dry look on his face and in the matter-of-fact tone of someone who’d had a long experience of dealing with dead people, ‘You want him? Take him.’

As well as a nonchalance towards death, or at least to seeming accustomed to it, his voice also carried some contempt for us.

He remembered something. ‘But I need a man to sign a release. I will not take responsibility for letting any body out of the hospital before I get permission from the examining magistrate. If I don’t, the hospital and I will both be fined.’

Hamid al-Semaani volunteered to sign the release papers.

We loaded Yusef al-Kfoury into the car. We put his head on Kamileh’s chest and his legs on my lap. Kamileh’s mother sat in the front seat next to Hamid. As the car slowly proceeded, Kamileh sang to him. The back seat got covered with blood, but Hamid al-Semaani didn’t care. He was all choked up with grief but wasn’t crying. My dress got soiled also, but it was my everyday dress. Kamileh hadn’t given me a chance to change my clothes.

Kamileh sang to him the whole way. She was calm. She held his head tight against her chest. I don’t know what made her sing that old Baghdadi
mawwaal
:

Ahmad Mohammed Ali Pasha wanted my demise

And the day it was a Friday

And everyone was there on time

They sat me on a camel, high very high

The executioner steered it and led the way . . .

Kamileh still sings to herself to this day. My window is close to her bedroom window. Every night she sings. Baghdadi
mawwaals
. I fall asleep to the sound of her voice. She has a tender voice that isn’t anything like her.

That night, though, we didn’t sleep. No one slept. We stayed in our day clothes. I didn’t leave her. We tried to feed her, but she didn’t eat. In the morning, they moved all the dead to the church courtyard. I don’t know who came up with this idea. A mass funeral. The Patriarch sent two bishops. As people say, the more numerous the dead, the less death has an impact.

Kamileh kept saying to me, ‘Don’t leave me, Muntaha.’

We went to the church courtyard. They agreed to leave the dead there in the courtyard throughout the day on Monday, until the time of the funeral.

They brought beds for them from the nearby houses. I wasn’t able to go home even for a second to change my clothes.

‘There’s blood all over my dress, Kamileh. I’m going home to change.’

‘Don’t leave me, Muntaha.’

I felt that if I left her, she would die, too. She held onto me as if drugged. We propped her up so she could walk, one woman on each side of her. She kept repeating the same question a thousand times. I handed her over to her mother for fifteen minutes and hurried home to change my dress. When I came back I found her asking him, asking her husband, ‘Why did you go up to Burj al-Hawa?’

She kept on repeating that in a monotonous, tired voice, like a tape recording. From time to time she would suddenly gather enough strength to raise her tone. ‘Why did you go up to Burj al-Hawa?’

Then she would divide the question up, word by word.

‘Why – did – you – go – to – Burj al-Hawa?’

It was as if she was insisting on getting an answer right then and there. For more than a quarter of an hour she kept posing this divided up question.

Then she switched to a run-down of blame, in an endearing tone:

‘You never go to your relatives’ funerals in the church here. What gave you this sudden desire to go up to Burj al-Hawa?’

She quietened down, and I forced her to drink some water at least. She refused to open her mouth like children do when they don’t want to take bitter medicine. She would drink, but then the water would drip onto her neck and her clothes. She would take two sips and then start asking again. The question was always directed at him. A difficult question: ‘Why did they kill you?’

She repeated that, demanding an answer from him. Insisting. That’s how we spent the whole day.

Kamileh was not the only one blabbering over a husband’s head. When she stopped talking for a little while to regain some strength I noticed all the other people blabbering over the heads of their dead loved ones.

Haifa Abu Draa lost her voice. She and her sisters and their daughters huddled together over their brother, the only male. Haifa flailed her arms instead of speaking.

The women mourners went from bed to bed. We women are frightened when left alone with the dead, so we start talking and don’t know how to stop. The men kill each other and we do the crying.

It was getting late.

The sun was strong. I was praying for God to hurry the priests through the burial. A young man stood in the belfry, counting the dead in the square in a loud voice. He would count and repeat as he pointed to each one of them, and every time he reached ten, the wailing reached a fever pitch. Someone shouted to him to come down out of deference for the people, but he refused and started tolling the bell in sorrow. He held the clapper with his hand and banged the side of the bell with it. Three times, and then he would stop.

I don’t know how I got distracted from Kamileh, but someone, a person I don’t want to name, came over to her and whispered something about Fuad al-Rami and his brother Boutros. She screamed as if a snake had bitten her. Names were being thrown around, names of those who would have to answer for the blood of the dead, even before they were buried.

At around three o’clock, as the time for the funeral approached and the searing sun beat down on us, her mother bent over her and said to her, ‘Pass under the coffin.’

A competent woman her mother was, well-versed in tradition.

Kamileh didn’t appear to have heard, so I tugged on her sleeve to snap her out of it. I felt she didn’t understand what was being said to her, so I repeated for her. ‘After they put the incense they will lift the coffin. Make sure you pass under it, understand?’

It was almost time.

‘Why should I go under the coffin?’

Her mother chimed in again, ‘My daughter, when a woman’s husband dies, if she’s pregnant . . .’

Kamileh interrupted her sharply, as if she woke up. ‘. . . and how could I be pregnant, Mother?’

We didn’t say anything. We didn’t want to hurt her more than that. We were also afraid she would cause a scene if she started raising her voice. But her mother didn’t back down. She was stubborn like her, like all the members of the Franji family. She waited until they did the incense so she could go back to her.

‘Do what I told you, you hear?’

She felt it was better to make the decision herself rather than leaving it to her daughter.

‘I’m not pregnant, I’m not pregnant, I’m not pregnant . . .’

She started shouting angrily. She pounded on her belly as she used to do when she would lose hope of ever having children. The women standing around the dead next to us began to raise their heads to look at us. I covered her mouth with my hand. Then I whispered to her again, pleading with her, ‘Go under it anyway, Kamileh, my darling. We can always say later if you’re not pregnant that you made a mistake . . .’

She looked at me inquisitively. I felt she was hesitating a little. Then she looked into my eyes and said in the kind of tone a person uses when putting up with other people’s stupidity, ‘My darling, my soul, my eyes . . . Muntaha . . . I told you all, I’m not pregnant.’

‘And what if you are pregnant, then what?’

She almost started laughing.

The time to lift the body drew near. The women emptied out what wailing they still had left in them. That strange woman passed by us. No one knew where she had come from, how she got to us, or where she went after completing her mission.

I saw a woman I’d never seen in our quarter before. She was tall and fair-skinned. She moved from one bed to another, sat down next to the dead, fixing their ties, brushing the stray hair from their foreheads or wiping off some blood or dirt. She would look at each face a little and then move on to the next.

Kamileh threw herself onto her husband and lost consciousness for the second time. We had to carry her into the church.

Chapter 10

We used to enjoy getting mad at each other. It was how we tested the warmth of our friendships and the true meaning of those family ties we were always boasting about. At the slightest derisive remark some tattletale whispered to us about one of our buddies we instantly responded with anger, and the next day we would turn our faces away from him and refrain from saluting him if we chanced upon him in the streets. Those were the challenges of early manhood; our insistence on ignoring each other did not last long in the light of the unspoken agreement that there should be no disputes between cousins, and we were all related after all, as some of the ‘peacemakers’ loved to repeat. In reality, we got fed up with each other from time to time, got bored hanging around with each other for hours on end in the squares and alleys as we tried to stay away from our cramped houses, especially when our mothers were busy cleaning and mopping and had kicked us out. We never let an opportunity to argue and get angry at each other slip by, plunging into it headlong for the most trivial excuse.

That is until we heard about
al-muqaata’a al-hayaatiyyah
,
being ‘shunned for life’. This phrase came to us just like that, ready-made, a concept in itself. It was pronounced plainly and emphatically. And what it meant was, if one of the members of the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party disobeyed the party orders or deviated from what was deemed proper and virtuous behaviour, then the other members would not talk to him until the day he died. That also applied to his brothers if he had any. The party members obeyed all the instructions of their leadership, which was composed of an
amid
(chie
f
), a
namous
(secretary), and a
qayyim ala al-idhaa’a
(spokesperson) and other positions with equally strange names.

I remember how the possibility of that kind of antagonism was particularly worrying to us because of its finality, but it also made the party more attractive to us, especially because of the pleasure those adherents to its strict doctrine took in recounting their stories in front of us. They told us how they had assassinated King Abdullah of Jordan for betraying the Palestinian cause, and about their retaliation for the execution of the party’s founder Antoun Saadeh under the cover of darkness, which was to assassinate Lebanese Prime Minister Riad al-Sulh. It had been carried out by a man from the Al-Deek family who said to the prime minister before shooting him, ‘Take this, a gift from
al-Zaeem
.’ The party members, young and old alike, always insisted on using the first person plural, saying things like, ‘When
we
killed Adnan al-Malki in Syria . . .’ In that way they transformed the assassinations into collective acts of heroism which even those who weren’t yet born at the time could boast about.

They taught us how to draw their hurricane emblem on the walls using pieces of charcoal or chalk, and they would interrupt this lesson whenever they spotted one of their comrades passing through the neighbourhood. They would raise their right arm and thrust it forward, open-handed in a military salute while barking out the phrase ‘Long live Syria!’, to which the comrade passing by responded in kind. They were always repeating pretentious words and phrases for our benefit, such as ‘You Are the Sons of Life’ or ‘Integrity’ and expressions like ‘Truth, Goodness, and Beauty’. We used to marvel at how our friends in the quarter reacted to hearing such expressions with eyes brimming with admiration for their meanings. We, on the other hand, had difficulty appreciating them because they reminded us of phrases out of our catechism books or the tiresome and incomprehensible epistles of Saint Paul.

When the Rami family joined ranks with Nasser’s Revolution and the United Arab Republic, and when the Semaani family supported President Camille Chamoun’s alliance with the Americans, the supporters of the Fertile Crescent – their ultimate objective, with Cyprus as its star – got lost in the shuffle. Our friends in the quarter, the few that we had, couldn’t decide which way to go and so the ‘weaklings’ among them yielded to their families; one could say that those whose family’s position was in agreement with their party’s position were the lucky ones. But it so happened that two or three members of the Rami family stubbornly broke away from their family, and one of them, people say, one and only one of them, took up arms with the anti-revolutionary forces, but at a front a long distance from the village.

The communists were further from our own instincts for vengeance and spite, which might explain why they remained a small minority of mature and polite adherents. They, too, had their obscure expressions which they spouted off after reading pamphlets by Stalin that had been hurriedly translated into Arabic and handed out to them for free, and which spoke about dialectics and materialism. Their emblem was less geometrical and more realistic than that of the Syrian Socialists, even though we rarely saw a sickle due to the scarcity of wheat in our region. And we never encountered a hammer of that size, except for the one the only blacksmith in town used to strike iron when it was red hot. One of their few accomplishments was their effort to raise a petition against the nuclear bomb, and one of the things they bequeathed to us was the name ‘Vladimir’, the first name of the leader of the October Revolution, which one of those internationalists gave to his son. Vladimir, at least, was less of a burden than Adolf, the first name of the leader of the Third Reich, which was given by one of the few adherents of Nazism to his oldest son, and is equally as strange as Daladier, the prime minister of France who signed the Munich Accord.