June Rain (2 page)

The only thing that drew our attention away from Maurice was arriving at the steep mountain pass where the houses of the town, clumped together on top of the hill and still engulfed in the white fog rising from the river, came into view. After slowing a little before the final stretch, he drove us down with the brakes screeching until we could see the steel bridge and the crowd that had gathered around an army tank; a soldier wearing a helmet painted with camouflage colours peered out of the turret. There were only women and soldiers. I saw my aunt standing among them. She was wearing a red dress and her hair was dishevelled. Most of the women were dressed in black. I didn’t know why they had sent my aunt rather than someone else to pick me up. I assumed my mother and father were occupied with whatever was happening. I saw her from a distance, angrily shrugging her shoulders with her arms folded across her chest. There were around twenty women huddled together and a small band of soldiers scattered on and around the bridge. When we got off the bus, we heard one of the soldiers telling another, with their rifles strapped to their shoulders as they looked at the muddy water, how the snows had been late to thaw the year before and how the river had flooded, sweeping the stone bridge away, so a steel bridge had been built in its place. I tried to ask my aunt what was happening, but she shut me up. She put her hand on my mouth as if I had committed a crime. The women took off on foot, accompanying the schoolchildren to the town. It was a strange procession. My aunt took me by the hand and led me along. I remember I kept looking back, wondering what some of my schoolmates were going to do. They were still standing there waiting with the soldiers because no one had come to get them. No one had come for the two strangers. Perhaps their parents hadn’t expected their sudden arrival. I don’t know why I was worried about them, since, being strangers, they were not in any danger.

Strangers,
al-ghirb
in Arabic or
al-ghurb
in some dialects, is the plural of
al-ghareeb
,
stranger. It stems from the word
al-gharb
with an ‘
a
’ meaning ‘the West’, the direction from where those who are not from among us – the outsiders – come. We often went on about that – with or without any prompting – saying that nothing pleasing to the heart ever came from them. Those intruders made their foreignness obvious the moment they opened their mouths. A stranger’s accent exposed him immediately, and was usually quite humorous. We found it strange when one of us, a cousin or neighbour, adopted one of those accents after spending a year or two at a school near the capital city. Their accent made them sound more like a Beiruti or someone from Kisrwan. Those were accents we couldn’t stand. We would try to imitate them and make fun of people who talked that way, adding ‘sh’ to the ends of words or pronouncing the letter ‘
qaaf
’
like the people from the Chouf region, who pronounced these words as they do in formal Arabic, rather than as a glottal stop as we do. It was as though these comical idiosyncrasies made the people who articulated them seem so stupid and idiotic we couldn’t bear it. If they came back at us, making fun of our own accent known for its preponderance of ‘u’ vowels
–
as for example when we pronounce the word for ‘my brother’ we say
khayy-u
instead of
khayy-i
and
bayy-u
instead of
bayy-i
for ‘my father’
–
we would say we inherited this from Syriac, which we sometimes claimed was our original language and that there was no shame in that. Rather, it was a source of pride and a testimony to our deep-rootedness. We could also detect a stranger by the food he ate. ‘Strangers’ food’ was well-known, and strangers were easily discovered by the way they made their
kibbeh
; it always came out too thick so they’d have to add a lot of spices to make it taste better. There were other dishes we heard about, like
arnabiyyeh
and
ablama
, and so forth, but these never graced our dinner tables. And strangers did not get counted. For example, when certain events resulted in people getting killed and wounded, the strangers among them were neither mentioned by name nor counted among the casualties. And when there was a fatal accident or car crash, the best way to set everyone’s minds at ease was to say that the victim was ‘a stranger’. All the commotion and interest in the incident would suddenly come to a halt and everyone would go about their business as before. Also, if a man married a woman from outside the town, she remained nameless, ‘a stranger’. In general, that was not advisable, because such a woman would be a heavy burden on the husband since only a girl from his own village would know how to put up with him. ‘Strangeness’ was not measured in kilometres but rather in hundreds of metres outside the village, starting at the very first village which overlapped our own orchards. As for how long it took to become ‘naturalised’ there was no guaranteed timeframe. No one could be sure when people would stop whispering about a person and their family and referring to them as ‘strangers’. When we talked about Asaad Beyk bringing people from Akkar to build his house, for example, someone hearing this who wasn’t familiar with the history of that influx of la­­­bourers might think it took place yesterday. But a closer inspection of the biography of this eminent man, the son of that great family, would confirm that this influx happened before 1887, the year the house was constructed, when those strangers chiselled the stones and hoisted them into place.

I continued to worry about what would happen to those two strangers who had become part of our group, until the bus’s horn sounded, distracting me. While we were being divided up among the women who had come to collect us, Maurice sat waiting in the driver’s seat. His arms drooped over the steering wheel and his green eyes remained moist with his silent tears. It was because of the way he sat slumped over the steering wheel with his heavy arms that the horn sounded, startling the women who instinctively grabbed the little ones. I asked my aunt why Maurice didn’t drop us off near our houses like he usually did, but she scolded me, telling me to stop looking back and to move faster. When we reached a fork in the road, I could no longer see the bus, the soldiers, or the steel bridge over the river.

The crowd of women and schoolchildren dwindled as some of them left the main road and headed down side roads towards their homes as quickly as they could, the women’s eyes darting in all directions. We could hear the bells tolling from the Church of Our Lady down in the Lower Quarter. They were not the usual chimes for mass, nor were they the three tolls of mourning, but rather a single ring we’d never heard before. It rippled over the quiet of the town, followed by a long silence, then another ring, then silence . . . I noticed that every time we came close to one of the alleys leading to the main square, my aunt made me walk on the opposite side, trying to shield me with her own body whenever both of us were exposed. When my aunt moved me from her right side to her left side, I didn’t realise that she was putting herself in danger rather than exposing me to the gunfire that might be aimed at us from the depths of one of those narrow streets. She walked faster, pulling me along with her, until she took a turn downhill.

That is when the roles were reversed. Now it was her turn to keep looking behind her, making sure no one was within hearing distance. I had a strong feeling someone was following us, so I sped up without any urging from her this time. As soon as we had taken a few steps inside our quarter, she appeared more at ease. She started to talk. I didn’t know why she was going on about how the luckiest thing in her life was not getting married, despite all the eligible young men who had come asking for her hand, and whom she now began to name: Salman Abu Shalha, Saeed Antoun and a third who went to Mexico, became very rich, and donated to the building of the town’s new church. ‘I thank my lucky stars I refused to get married,’ she stopped to say with exaggerated disgust. She hated men with their crudeness and their stench, and the same went for children. ‘What’s the point of having children, anyway?’

When we reached an opening between the houses through which we could see the horizon, she stopped talking. She put her hand on my shoulder to stop me and pointed out the little village perched atop the crest of the mountain facing us from the east, and I understood her gesture meant that not a single stone there would be left standing. I wasn’t able to form a clear idea about what was happening, except that something calamitous had taken place, and even though the elders didn’t want to divulge the details, their faces and gestures gave them away and made us feel the world was crashing down around us. I didn’t understand exactly what was going on until I met up with one of my friends, from the Gang Quarter, who spoke to me in my own language. What he said to me, which was the first telling of the events I heard, has remained engraved in my memory.

As we entered the passageway, my aunt suddenly got the hiccups. The first hiccup was so sudden and strong that her whole chest jerked backward and her entire body shook. She stopped walking and was about to look around to see where the sound had come from. She didn’t stop talking, though, but talked faster and faster, talking to herself and not even addressing me anymore. I realised later that the closer we got to the church, the more agitated she became and the more she sped up and spewed out words in every direction. She cursed the damn humidity, the rheumatism that inflicted even the young among us, the lack of piety and the greed. She spouted off the names of people who had betrayed trust and others who had stolen and murdered . . . I told her she’d better stop talking like that or she would start hiccupping again.

That was the only sentence I’d uttered since she took me by the hand as I got off Maurice’s bus. But she didn’t pay any attention and continued her rant, cursing whoever had chosen that place for us to live. ‘Why didn’t they choose some other place, somewhere along the coast from where we could look across the sea and see the face of Our Lord? Why did they have to cram us here between the two rivers?’ We reached the gate of the convent and heard a woman wailing loudly. When my aunt heard that grating voice, she froze and began to lash out at her with cruel words.

‘The bitch! She’s been at it since six o’clock this morning. She hasn’t stopped to take a breath! She’ll be the death of us all!’

Then, hiccups punctuating her words, she asked me if I knew how to get home by myself. I nodded.

‘Tell your mother that your auntie has become utterly useless,’ she said before bending down and whispering in my ear that since yesterday she hadn’t gone into the church square where our house was, and that she’d spent all day and night going around it, peeking from behind the houses, not daring to look for very long, then shutting her eyes and running away.

I went the rest of the way home by myself, two hundred metres at most. Before the square came into full view, I spotted the ‘Poet of the Rose’ standing on the dome of the church. There he was – up high, where the swallows slept in the springtime, after swooping down in spectacular display and nearly brushing the tops of our little heads before the evening sunset – the Poet of the Rose, who built the nativity scene at Christmas time, placing the large statues inside it and redirecting the irrigation canals to create waterfalls; the one who made kites and covered the neighbourhood walls with charcoal graffiti calling for the unification of ‘the Fertile Crescent’ and glorifying the party leader,
al-Zaeem
,
always signing with his pseudonym, the Poet of the Rose. I spotted him with his back against the bell, quietly swaying back and forth without allowing the bell to sound, peering down on the square from above. He was pointing to specific spots below while counting out loud, ‘One, two, three . . .’ all the way to ten and then he would pound hard on his chest with his fist, causing the bell to toll once. Then he would repeat the whole sequence again. ‘One, two, three . . .’

There were ten men stretched out on ten beds.

They laid the dead men on beds they had brought out from the neighbouring houses. My mother gave them my brother’s bed. He was two years my senior, and this preferential treatment remained a point of contention between us throughout our adolescence. He would brag about the event and I would pretend to be disgusted with him. I was amazed that our next door neighbour insisted that her brother be laid out on her own bed and that she refused to wash the sheets afterwards in order to keep his smell in the sheets for her to sniff any time she wanted. The sheets became black and dirty and she stopped sniffing them, I think, but she never washed them, because every time she was about to do so, she would remember her brother.

The square was full of women and children, groups of them scattered among the beds – wives, mothers, sisters, especially sisters. The little girls who lived next door imitated the grown-ups by grabbing fistfuls of their hair and tugging their heads right and left. I spotted the hunchbacked fabric seller among them, the one with the high effeminate voice who always sang love songs in his broken French to little girls before pinching their bottoms whenever he got the chance. I also saw a priest crying. I didn’t see any men other than the ones stretched out on the beds in their Sunday best, their last expressions fixed for eternity. I saw a woman I’d never seen before in our neighbourhood. She was tall and fair-skinned, and she moved from one bed to another, sitting beside each one to straighten their ties and brush back the stray strands of hair from their brows, or to wipe away a spot of blood or dust, and to gaze for a moment upon each face before moving on to the next.