June Rain (18 page)

The new car, straight from the dealership. We knew it by the smell of its leather seats. It had to be driven carefully through the narrow, winding roads of the quarter and pulled right up to the Church of Our Lady, kissing the bumper against the wall. There it was under the protection of the Virgin Mary, and a turquoise amulet hung from the rearview mirror, the horse’s bead itself or the horseshoe, it didn’t matter which one.

At the start of the 1950s, the car was added to the list of possessions a man simply did not lend out, like his wife or his rifle, and there was mechanical justification for a man insisting on being the sole driver of his car, since changing hands would increase the risk of it breaking down. Weapons were decorations, signs of manhood, but an American car – a Chevrolet or a DeSoto – decked out with what looked like two bird wings, and especially if it was a convertible with only two doors, had a fine wood inlay dash, a shiny chrome grill and coloured seats, well that topped the list of alluring essentials and sometimes topped a groom’s list of necessary possessions right along with a house to live in and a trade, as they put it, referring to the various common occupations such as carpentry or tailoring. And the owner of a new car never refused a photographer’s offer to take a picture of him behind the steering wheel or standing beside it with his hand on the door, by himself or surrounded by friends who would be certain to let him stand front and centre making it clear who the owner of the shiny new DeSoto was.

Pedestrians had to be cautious of passing automobiles. Our mothers made us promise we would look both ways, right and left, before crossing the roads, and there were some local wise men who feared the whole notion of mechanical things and warned drivers to be highly cognisant of the fact that what they held in their hands was ‘a motor’ – a machine that, were it to get loose, could not be restrained.

Writing things on the rear window became a very popular thing to do, but only on the public transportation vehicles that transported passengers for a fee and whose drivers did not shy away from overloading and would pick up riders from the streets and cram them in to his left, leaving the door half open and the rider hanging half-way out the door. There was one driver who worked out an ingenious method for preventing passengers from vomiting or getting dizzy, which was to give those passengers a rock to hold onto and tell them to concentrate on it the whole way and not to let it drop. The recipe was successful and helped the driver gain a good reputation, so he was preferred over the others.

As acts of defiance and the growing desire to take revenge became more and more widespread, the market for American cars gave way to the German Mercedes. In fact, it was tempting to say that they found in German cars a kind of toughness and durability they had missed in the American cars, maybe, but which they had also begun to lose in their private lives as well, with all the deaths around them. The truth is the praise they used to and continue to heap onto German cars and which they extended particularly to the BMW – and in another context, more closely related to killing and its tools, to the legendary Colt-12 revolver – had everything to do with their toughness and long-lasting durability. On that note they went around saying things like, ‘A Mercedes truck, if you take good care of it, will outlive a human being.’ Mixed in with all of that praise for mechanics was also a general fascination with the German nation for having confronted the whole world by itself in WWII, which was a reason enough for pride, despite its eventual loss.

It can be said that the townspeople were unanimous in their adoration of Mercedes cars. They had sayings about them that recalled the language of war they were all accustomed to, things like, ‘If you hit a Mercedes on the head, it will keep on going,’ or ‘If it were riddled with bullets while in flight, it would take three years to fall apart,’ and to that end there were metaphors which imbued steel with human qualities. And those among them who remained loyal to Mercedes were devastated when they discovered two or three decades later that fibreglass had begun to take the place of resistant steel and Mercedes with its famous triangular symbol had begun to ‘soften’ as it succumbed to the logic of consumerism.

‘Jirjis, you have to get up and bathe. Your wife is heating water for you because your brother Antonius is returning from Brazil in two days . . .’

Jirjis hesitated a bit then asked in all seriousness, ‘And what if he doesn’t come back?’

The anecdote about the man who refused to risk pouring water over his body reminded one of the extent of people’s fear of water. Perhaps the man knew there was a possibility his brother would be delayed in his voyage back to the homeland due to the fact that sailing on water was at least as risky as bathing in it. And swimming was a derivative of sailing the sea, something we never mastered, as we saw ourselves as land people, even though we lived only two kilometres from the Mediterranean Sea.

Bathing was a problem as our mother’s admonitions hounded us, telling us not to go outside after taking a bath and not to expose ourselves to the wind. Going outside would mean the mingling of water and air, and air was no less dangerous. We worried obsessively about not standing in front of a draft. It was part of our overall fear of what we called
safqit hawa
,
a ‘slap of air’, which was an obscure affliction that might affect any part of the body, the worst being in the chest and lungs where it could develop into an incurable disease difficult to recover from. The worst air was the deadly yellow one, the cholera, and one of its varieties was what they called ‘the cork wind’, which sent the afflicted one to his death.

Word went out at noon on Sunday. Tune into Radio Beirut because Odette was going to sing at 3:30. And it was most likely Odette herself who told them, having come from where she lived in the capital city to visit her family, or perhaps made a point to be with her family at that special moment in her life. Whatever the case, everyone in the quarter flocked to the three houses that owned radios. And there was Odette, sitting among them at her aunt’s house listening to her own voice and smiling wide when her mother let out a trill ululation of pride for her daughter and for the song she opened with. The radio announcer explained that the song was in local traditional style, which wasn’t telling us anything we didn’t already know. The neighbours divided their attention between Odette sitting there in the middle of the salon in her fancy green dress and high heels and the radio from which her melodious voice emerged. For the youngsters among us, it was a rare moment of truth in which we discovered in one fell swoop, though with some degree of confusion, the basic principle of radio and the technology of recording voices. On the occasion which brought us into Odette’s aunt’s house, we were given the opportunity to catch a glimpse of her cousin – Odette’s aunt’s son – who never left the house and who was surrounded by rumours that he fancied himself an actor and spent all his time listening to the radio and imitating the voices of the various actors who took turns appearing on the radio programs.

We had memorised all the city names written in fine print and listed on the radio’s glass dial. They helped us tune into Near East Radio or Radio Beirut. And on that incremental list were cities we had never heard of before and would never hear of again. Contented, oblivious cities in distant countries. Cities on the radio, like Helfersom, Saratova, Lviv, Hanover and other names that evoked severe cold in the north and were never mentioned in any book we read.

The radio had the importance of a piece of furniture, and was placed in the sitting room in a high and prominent position or inside a carefully painted and polished wooden cabinet. A clever lady of the house would sew a case for the radio out of Atlas Laser Die material, which she’d embellish with three roses embroidered with matching thread. The case could be opened at the centre so that its two curtains could be tied on the right and the left exactly like a theatre curtain, which wasn’t an exaggeration considering all the radio plays that were broadcast in the 1950s and the way the housewives and their visitors gathered around to listen, training their eyes throughout the broadcast on the radio, the place the voices emanated from, just as a theatre audience was inclined to gaze at the stage, the place where the action was taking place.

Those who could afford to buy a radio usually bought the accompanying cabinet, with its matching colours, the different shelves that went into it and the collection of Baydaphone records that announced themselves at the start of every song. Radio voices came to us from Egypt especially, which meant we became used to the Nile accent despite all the static that was the radio’s lot in life in those days. The ability to set up an antenna on the roof, secure it with wire, and aim it in the direction of the capital, was a talent not just anyone could be entrusted to achieve.

According to my mother, who did not miss many opportunities to make fun of him, my grandfather (my father’s father) used to go into the movie theatre when the first permanent theatre house opened up in town, hoping just once to catch a glimpse of his father who’d left him as an infant at the end of the nineteenth century, emigrated to the United States, and never came back. It was a rare indication that my grandfather still clung to the thought of his father, although to us he seemed, at his advanced age, to have long since given up trying to remember him. But my grandfather wasn’t able to follow what was going on on the screen and soon enough his snores would be heard all about the theatre and the owner would have to intervene and wake him up in response to a complaint from a member of the audience seated next to him.

As for the people
we
longed to see every week, on Sunday mornings when they showed two movies, no three, for the price of one – or excerpts of the films rather – at a reduced rate, they weren’t anything like our relatives. They were short-statured heroes like Eddie Murphy or masked men like the Lone Ranger and his stubborn horse, or more obscure faces like Jack Palance who stirred our emotions when they were victorious. We clapped and cheered for them just as we did all of Easter Week when, in addition to us, the theatre was taken over by numerous members of religious brotherhoods and zealous mass-goers wanting to see
The Life and Passion of Christ
. It was dubbed in Arabic, with the exception of the scene when Christ crucified calls to His heavenly Father and the dubber decided to say it in Aramaic, ‘
Eloi, Eloi, Lama sabachtani
.’ There would be huge applause every day from Monday to Sunday when Mary and the women went to Jesus’s tomb and found the stone had been moved away and the tomb was empty. For reasons that weren’t clear, there seemed to be a link between religious piety and the cinema. The owner of the theatre, for example, would hire a man to carry movie advertisements accompanied by a boy ringing a bell. One day he went into one of the inner neighbourhoods holding a picture of Ava Gardner. It was May, the month devoted to the Virgin, and some of the women thought it was a procession with an icon of the Virgin Mary so they stopped what they were doing to make the sign of the cross.

We remembered the theatre sometimes more than we remembered the movies. The owner named it after his son, Marcel, and we would wait until the film started before going up to the ticket window and offering the few coins we had in our possession and he would reluctantly let us in.

When we divided into two quarters and no one but those who had acquired a high level of neutrality dared travel between the two, a second movie theatre opened up for those who were banned from Marcel Cinema. The same films, however, were shown and circulated between the two theatres under agreement of the two owners. And when one of us would miss one of those adventure films when it was shown in the Lower Quarter theatre and heard us talking about it in glowing terms, he felt as if he would suffer an eternal deprivation if he didn’t see it, and so he would go out at night to the Upper Quarter to see it. And although no one there ever recognised him, he’d return to us as if from a successful clandestine military operation, and we would want to congratulate him on his bravery.

They would say that gambling and women revealed a man. Expounding this wise saying might be a lengthy exercise, and even then it wouldn’t reveal how it was possible for the game of
Quatorze
to have ‘revealed’ Madame Almaaz, one of the most famous of those ladies who fell in love with card playing. She competed with men, outlasting them all night and into the early hours of dawn. To a certain small group of women, playing cards was evidence of their membership in a tight knit circle that frequented the homes of the upper echelon, and it also marked their liberation from housework and other household concerns. For an eligible bachelor aspiring to marry, however, to never have touched a deck of cards was a highly praiseworthy achievement. After all, gambling was one of the quickest ways down the path of domestic destruction.

With the exception of backgammon, with its Turkish words for counting numbers, the new card games, roulette and the rest, came with an extensive French vocabulary, one that also enriched horse racing and betting on horses. Some people specialised in
Paroli
or unofficial betting offices that doubled winnings and losses. There were also those who became embroiled in horse ‘tugging’ and jockey bribing. And alongside gambling, ‘alongside’ meaning ‘in proximity to’ the poker and baccarat tables, they also practised what they themselves called ‘interest loaning’, in other words, they kept cash in their pockets with which they could instantly cover a losing gambler’s loss so that he could keep playing, in return for very high interest. And they either demanded a promissory note from the debtor or they advanced it to him based on knowing who he was and the certainty that the revolver the lenders carried at their hips guaranteed repayment of the loan, plus interest. Their visits to the Casino du Liban area, where they stationed themselves in anticipation of customers eager to continue placing their bets at the classic roulette table, gave them the chance to meet a class of people they would not otherwise meet. There were sons of rich families from Beirut or Aleppo spending their inheritance and draining the big bank accounts their forefathers had accumulated through profits made in early trading in pharmaceuticals, or household appliances, or cars. And there were all sorts of journalists, poets, and artists who lived out a nightly drama in front of electronic gaming devices or with the hope of getting a ‘zero’ at the roulette table.