June Rain (21 page)

He also held fast to the new Zeiss Ikon camera hanging from his neck and kept mumbling prayers to Saint Vasken, mumbling in the manner of his mother. He stowed the camera safely in his lap and curled over it. He could smell the women and the nuns – permed hair, the pungent odour of ammonia, and cheap perfume mixed with sweat from the heat and the fear and the church crammed full of God’s creatures. He didn’t want to die and he didn’t want the Zeiss Ikon to get broken because it was extremely expensive. He had been lucky enough to buy it for half price from a man who had barely used it one month and had been forced to sell it because he was leaving the country. Nishan would not be able to get another one. He’d only shot two rolls of film with it – a wedding and a graduation. He was bent on saving the Zeiss Ikon at any cost.

He braced himself, ready to take the fatal blow. The next one would strike him for sure. The important thing was to avoid getting hit in the head. A bullet in the head would be unbea­rable, he thought, fearing pain more than death. He thought of his father. He thought of his mother. They were sitting quietly, side by side most likely – his father reading the Armenian newspaper and his mother doing needlework and possibly mumbling quick prayers to Saint Vasken. And here he was under the bullets raining down like stones. As long as that man kept screaming and Nishan kept listening, he would be spared.

Suddenly everything cleared up and life returned. He opened his eyes and caught sight of the sun’s rays coming through the skylights. He felt his blood start to move again. The shooting died down as did the sound of the man who had been screaming in the church. Nishan Davidian was still alive. He let the tension leave his body a little at a time, starting with lifting his head. No one in the church dared stand up. The moans of the wounded rose up, interrupted by a piercing cry. Nishan started looking around at the dead. He wouldn’t find out who the screaming man in the church had been. He didn’t even ask about him. People recalled all kinds of details to him, but no one mentioned the voice or its owner. The only person he asked was Nazaret. He asked him later on, two or three days later, when he went to visit him at his house. He asked Nazaret whether he heard a voice booming over the sound of bullets in the church. Nazaret said he hadn’t heard anything. He had been crammed against the door to the sacristy, sandwiched between the priests who were fleeing the altar. Nishan didn’t repeat his question. He was afraid his countryman would make fun of him. Maybe there had not been a man screaming. Maybe Nishan had been the only one hearing that voice that echoed in his head.

Nishan had opened his eyes and saw the blood on his trousers. It was coming from his right leg. A black splotch on his blue pants. He didn’t feel any pain; he didn’t feel anything. He saw his wound before he felt it. He was still fully conscious and fully frightened, too. But he didn’t die. He had heard once that a person who gets shot doesn’t feel the pain right away. It comes later, once the bullet cools down. Death was still present, then, still possible, lurking below, threatening to ascend from his leg to his heart. He heard some pushing and shoving near the door to the church. He silently concluded that Nazaret had been killed; he prepared himself for that possibility. When the gunfire first started he had seen him standing taking pictures of the worshippers in the front row – dignitaries and the family of the deceased and the clergy. He, on the other hand, had stayed in the back with the women so he could take pictures panning the altar and the priests. When they developed their pictures of the incident they both smiled when they discovered that Nazaret appeared in Nishan’s picture and Nishan appeared in Nazaret’s. Two photographers holding their large round flashes. Nazaret was more exposed to the gunfire than Nishan had been.

Magnesium flashes were popular in those days. They flashed in people’s eyes, even outside in the bright sunlight. Hagop, his teacher, had advised him to use them on all occasions. They reduced the formation of shadows on faces, as he said. Nishan hadn’t known that Nazaret was going to come to Burj al-Hawa. If he’d known, he would not have come too. It was June, the peak of the end-of-school-year photo season. The teacher and his students on the wooden stage. Half an hour of quietening them down and lining them up from shortest to tallest. But schools paid well; plus, every student was required to buy a class picture, so it wasn’t bad.

He ran into Nazaret in the courtyard outside the church. Photographers attend funerals without an invitation. They spread out in the beginning here and there in the courtyard, targeting customers from among the men dressed in suits despite the heat. He knew them, too, and that they wore the suits to conceal their guns inside their jackets. Some men called to him. They got into a group, put their arms on each other’s shoulders showing their affection for each other, and as usual didn’t smile. He took pictures of them beside the store and then joined Nazaret in the procession of mourners going to the church. The two of them exchanged words and even some jokes in Armenian behind the backs of the frowning men.

He didn’t usually speak with Nazaret much, just a few necessary formalities. Nazaret was his competitor, who had followed him to Barqa and started copying him and stealing his customers. Of all the places in the whole wide world, Nazaret had to follow him to where he drew his livelihood. But there in front of the church door they’d both been afraid and went overboard speaking to each other in their own language. The men kept looking at them disapprovingly whenever they heard their chirpings in Armenian.

It started raining without any warning, which only made them more frightened. There were so many priests and nuns. They both had the feeling that all of the men were carrying guns and exchanging looks – angry, threatening looks that didn’t exclude Nishan and Nazaret. The procession dispersed when the rain started to pour down and the crowd quickly went inside the church. The two felt safer inside the church. Nothing would happen there. As long as the people were inside the church, nothing would happen. Certainly they wouldn’t threaten each other during mass. The Syriac prayers and chanting began and their flashbulbs flashed for a few minutes before the sound of gunfire reached them from outside. Everything inside the church came to a standstill, even the chanting stopped little by little with the exception of one old priest who was probably hard of hearing and didn’t realise what was going on and so he continued intoning the Maronite funeral mass all by himself.

Nazaret did not die. He rushed to aid Nishan. He searched around and found him there on the floor having trouble getting to his feet. Who did Nazaret have besides Nishan? Every family took off in a different direction. The dead and some of the wounded remained there on the floor. A nun was bent over one of the wounded writhing on the floor in pain, assuring him he was going to be all right. And the two Armenian photographers also remained – one who couldn’t walk and the other tongue-tied. Nishan began talking, talking without stopping. A person who has seen death speaks without stopping. Nazaret kept silent while he helped Nishan walk to the car. Nazaret said one thing: ‘World with no conscience and no religion!’

He said it in Armenian.

By ‘world’ he meant ‘people’.

They took the two of them in for investigation, to the government house and to the army barracks. Twice, three times, four. The police, customs officers, even the army . . . The first time, two investigators in civilian clothes came to Davidian’s Photo Shop with a French language magazine. They opened it to the picture of the five youths and asked Nishan who had taken the picture.

‘I didn’t photograph any young men!’

Nishan denied it, too quickly, so they came back. They got there quickly, got out of the Jeep and searched his shop and Nazaret’s shop, too. They turned everything upside down, opened the cameras, poured out the developing chemicals and ruined the film and white photo paper by exposing them to light. They pestered them with endless questions.

‘Name? Age? Profession?’

‘Profession? What does “profession” mean?’

It took fifteen minutes spelling out the Armenian names – his father’s name was Hovsep, which was hard enough to pronounce, never mind spell.

‘Where were you?’

‘I was in the back, far away, with the women, I swear to God!’

He swore to God hoping the investigator would quit bombarding him with questions.

‘What did you see?’

‘I didn’t see anything, Baba, I heard.’

‘What did you hear?’

‘I heard the sound of gunfire . . . like rain. I heard women screaming and a nun crying and some small children, too, orphan girls wearing school uniforms . . .’

He didn’t tell him about the man’s voice that saved his life. The women’s voices had been more unpleasant than the whistle of the bullets.

‘What did you do?’

‘I shut my eyes, Baba. I didn’t want to die with my eyes open. I shut my eyes and squeezed them tight until the bullets stopped, and then I opened my eyes. My leg was bleeding, from here.’ He lifted the leg of his trousers to show him the wound that had started to heal.

‘Where are the photos?’

From that time forward everyone asked him, ‘Where are the photos?’

‘We didn’t photograph anything, brother. Believe me.’

‘If we are harsh with you and tug on your ears, you will confess, right?’

He remained firm and didn’t give them anything. Nishan didn’t want to harm anyone.

But after a little while he picked up his things and went down to the city. He ran away. He left Nazaret up there all by himself. He could have it all. Let him photograph them to his heart’s content. Nishan sure didn’t envy him for that.

The government men stopped paying him visits, stopped the investigations. They rested and let everyone else rest, too. Other people started visiting him – busy-bodies who’d heard or supposed that he had taken pictures of the men brandishing their guns. They thought that if they could see those pictures they could find out who had been doing the shooting. Some journalists came to him offering money, including that French-speaking woman. She might have also gone to see Nazaret, but Nazaret was not very experienced with women. He gave her the picture that was published in the magazine, the one the investigators asked him about. He’d been unable to resist the young journalist. He didn’t know how she managed to snatch the photo from him – the photo of the five young men. Those men had called to him. There were five of them standing and waiting for the funeral to begin. He remembered how he had to ask them to line up closer together. They draped their arms on each other’s shoulders, making him feel they loved each other and were very happy to have a picture taken together. They were all killed. All five. He had photographed them and other men scattered around the courtyard. The journalist had wrested that photo from him with sweet-talk and flattery. And she gave him a hundred liras, too. She had a beautiful figure and was conscientious. After her, some men came to see him who had participated in the incident or were relatives. He also opened his door to relatives of the victims. They followed him there, followed him to the city. He recognised them the moment they appeared at the door to his shop. One of them came in, slid his hand inside his jacket pocket, and said, ‘Here. I’ll give you a blank cheque. Give me what you have and you can write in whatever amount you want.’

They didn’t fear the witnesses and didn’t fear the courts and the judge. They feared the pictures. A man of short stature, with stubby fingers, came one morning, his face scrunched into a frown. He asked Nishan the usual question without getting anywhere with him. Nishan repeated the same thing to him that when the bullets start, the photographer runs away, just like anyone else. ‘The photographer gets scared,
habibi
. You’re a tough guy. You don’t get scared. The photographer gets scared.’

And he also told him how he dropped to the floor and took cover amongst the women.

‘You believe that? I hid behind the women!’

Claiming cowardice was the easiest way to wiggle out of it. But the man with the chubby fingers didn’t believe him. He led him to the back room into the studio where Nishan, who was young and handsome in those days and was the city’s champion billiard player, took and developed passport photos. It was also where he led pretty young customers so he could flirt with them out of sight of passers-by – as soon as he shut the front door from inside and placed the ‘Be Back Soon’ sign in the window. The man pushed him up against the wall, put his hands on Nishan’s shoulders, pulled out his gun and pointed it at his head. That is almost certainly the very moment Nishan’s diabetes got worse.

Nishan Davidian had spent many long years among them. He was their only photographer until Nazaret came along. Jorge, an Arab, had also appeared in the town. He learned the trade in America, but he was crazy. Nishan worried in the depths of his heart that Arabs would start learning and practising the trade. But Jorge never took away any of his customers and didn’t live long. Poor guy.

They had all stood in front of Nishan at one time or another, in the back room he had made into a studio. In the beginning he used to store weapons for them. Guns were their religion and their idols. An ancient rifle that didn’t work, two rounds of bullets to strap on at the waist or make into a cross at the chest. He also kept a
kuffiyeh
and
igal
, the headscarf and band to hold it in place, since they hadn’t yet invented an image for themselves besides the one associated with traditional Arab machismo. He also acquired swords for those who wished. Two swords, actually, one of them curved.