June Rain (26 page)

‘Who bets on a dog, anyway?’ he would ask himself. At the horse races in Beirut, he would lose on a photo finish.

‘I swear to God the jockey pulled the reins. I saw him with my own eyes.’

Then one day, because he accepted a friend’s invitation for a morning cup of coffee, he was late getting to the estate agent’s and missed the opportunity of a lifetime by fifteen minutes: a piece of land in the Al-Tall area of Tripoli that would have made him and his children’s children rich for generations. He never told of a single success in his entire life. He was just like a gambler who only tells you about his hard luck. Gambling was a losing game.

Nevertheless he lived like a prince, refined and well dressed, a wide gold chain around his neck and an expensive gold watch on his wrist. He went to the dentist regularly, took good care of his fingernails, and was one of the first to dye his hair for fear of inheriting a family tendency to turn grey early. He was terrified of his hair falling out and the possibility of going bald. He never rested from his escapades into God’s wide world. He filled the pages of three passports, which he saved and bound together. He showed them off to everyone, visa after visa, from Costa Rica to Equatorial Guinea. Sometimes he would return to his hometown vanquished, with broken wings, so bankrupt that if he pulled his pockets inside out not a single lira would fall out. He’d sleep at a relative’s who would grudgingly take him in.

But soon enough he would disappear, after catching wind of things he didn’t like to hear, such as ‘The atmosphere in town isn’t clean,’ or ‘God help us from those two days . . .’ He knew the stories about killing and vendettas would start up again, too. They had been weaned on killing, he said that about them with a certain amount of pity, and then set off again. He would strike up a new plan, head in a new direction, as if he could sniff out money from afar. The moment his friends came into some money, he found out about it. The news of who’d won at gambling or who’d been lucky in the wheat market or selling diamonds would come out, and he would show up at the winner’s door while the money was still fresh. He’d show up with all his stories and his jokes.

‘Did you smell it or something?’ they would ask him, laughing.

He never asked for money, but he always got it. He knew the Lebanese communities by heart, naturally preferring the rich people if they were still in their youth and the gamblers if they were old. He sought the generosity of rich young men looking for women and the foolishness of gamblers, but he spent almost his entire life taking from the rich in return for charm and ladies and giving to the gamblers in return for an obscure form of pleasure only they could give him: the pleasure of losing. Sometimes, though, he would get cut off in exile. He would run out of money all of a sudden after a wild night of uncontrolled drinking and dancing on tables in Santo Domingo or Havana with a brunette capable of seducing the devil. In Cuba, he had fruitlessly tried to pursue an old aunt who was said to have come to the island by mistake on her way to the United States, decided to stay and made a fortune from tobacco farming.

However, he was not lacking in wiliness. He would go to Lima airport, for example, ask for a telephone book and search under ‘K’ for all the ‘Kfourys’, confident that there were members of the Kfoury family in every corner of the world. He wouldn’t hesitate to call one of the numbers which stood out to him, and after a short conversation in which he explained that he’d been forced to leave his hometown suddenly because of the violent events taking place all around him and that some relatives of his had been murdered there in the Burj al-Hawa incident and now revenge killings were being carried out in every nook and cranny. He’d come to the Peruvian capital to escape and now he didn’t know what to do. In fact, he knew well what to do, for he captivated them with his story. But no sooner would he catch a whiff of the palm of his own hand than he would start yearning to play poker again. No one knows how he found his way to those Lebanese who could not be cured of the vice of gambling no matter how far they travelled. He competed with them at tequila drinking and bluffing opponents and forcing them to fold, until one night he got lucky and won all the money on the table. One of them who was from a town near Barqa became furious. After losing all the money he had in his pocket, he pulled out some Lebanese property deeds and asked for their value in cash. Upon inspection he discovered they were very large parcels, so he gave him what he figured was a good percentage of what they were worth. He put them away in his suitcase and nearly forgot all about them, until he was down on his luck again and went back to his hometown. The situation had calmed down and people had gone back about their business. He was penniless again, so he fished out his newly acquired deeds with the intention of selling them and using the money to set off again. He found a buyer willing to buy the deeds without carefully inspecting them, because he had offered them at a very low price. The buyer was afraid he might change his mind so he was quick to pay, requesting that he sign a bill of sale before the notary public to conclude the deal before the transfer of title to its new owner was listed on the real estate ledger. And once again, off he went into God’s wide world.

Chapter 15

Muhsin chose the millstone, the one in the nearby olive press. One day, when the first barricades were being set up, all the neighbourhood boys worked together to push the massive stone out onto the street and set it up as a barricade for him. But Muhsin wouldn’t go near it until all the olive residue was cleaned off of it, that job having been delegated to others so the fighter, who should not have to stoop to such menial tasks, could concentrate on the weapons and the attack. Regardless, when Muhsin later sat behind it throughout the days of the revolution, from April to September of 1958, he wouldn’t stop picking at the little black specks of olive residue and removing them with his pocket knife with its seven blades and seven switches, which he never parted with. He plugged up the hole in the centre of the stone with three small sandbags, leaving one small peephole through which he slid the nose of his long barrel rifle and took aim at the opposing barricade. At first they had given him what they called a ‘Model’ rifle, but he hadn’t warmed to it.

‘It doesn’t scope well,’ he said, without bothering as one might expect to explain this new verb. We had never it heard before and had no idea where he had got it from. It was possible he coined the term when he fired the Model rifle, missed his target and decided to blame it on the rifle.

The day they acquired a long barrel rifle like the one he’d been asking for, they gave it to him and joked, ‘You don’t have any excuses anymore . . .’

Now his toolkit was complete and all that was left to do was show off his skill. In what resembled a rite of passage, he held the rifle in his hand, raised it vertically to examine its minute details, and fired it into the air before sitting on his chair and sliding the rifle into its peephole. He liked to lean over it at first, with his cheek pressed gently against the metal. He’d shut his left eye and look through the rear sight at the opposing side. At first we thought it was just a practice exercise, a fighter getting a feel for his gun. But he persisted in this training of his, spending long hours and intervals in some obscure operation which bored us to death because it never led to any action. He kept at it while we wondered why on earth Muhsin would aim and aim and never shoot. All we saw was that at the end of all the aiming, he shook his head menacingly, postponing his big deed to a later date, which might be very soon, apparently assuring himself that embracing his rifle for such a long time would not be in vain, even if it had left a pink dent in his right cheek that remained visible for some time.

Muhsin was the millstone hero. We knew that he shared his barricade with his brother, though – Muhsin during the day and Halim at night. Muhsin was our warrior at the front line. We followed him in combat, though from a distance, for we didn’t dare approach where he sat as we believed he was in the line of fire. He handed over the barricade to his brother at eight o’clock – exactly dinner time. Before handing it over he checked every direction through his long barrel rifle, aiming one last time in the direction of the opposing barricades. Just aiming, in his usual boring way. He took his rifle with him, along with his wicker chair and the cushion he put on it to keep his clothes from getting dirty. He never sat down on that chair without brushing off the dust first.

That’s what he did whether he was at the barricade, at home or at the café. He kept his rifle clean, his pants perfectly creased and his shirt collar white as snow. He would send the waiter at the café back to the kitchen with whatever he tried to serve him if he glimpsed the tiniest smear on his water glass or sniffed some odour only the most sensitive nose could detect, like the faint smell of soap lingering on his coffee cup. His brother would take control of the barricade with hardly any exchange of words. Sometimes we happened to witness Halim’s arrival, during the few days when we rebelled against the order to go home early. Muhsin and Halim didn’t exchange a single word. Maybe a quiet grumble that didn’t reach our ears. And neither one received anything from the other. Muhsin would pick up his chair and his rifle and leave without looking back, not even once.

Fighting from behind a barricade generally required standing up, although standing did not suit another fighter in our front – Abu Bashir, who God had made with one leg shorter than the other. It was very difficult for Abu Bashir to stand and aim his gun at the same time, and the story went that one day he burst out in an appeal to his comrades, making a promise to them, saying, ‘Get me a chair and we’ll rake in the casualties!’

His comrades behind the barricade laughed and laughed while the bullets rained down on them in torrents.

Muhsin fought sitting down for a reason we didn’t understand in the beginning. Naturally, we didn’t know much of anything that was going on at first. Years later we read in an old newspaper a statement by an American official saying in so many words that everyone who supported the Baghdad Pact was fighting for freedom in the Middle East and was a hero in the fight against communism. Some were the fighters from our town who sided with the government, that is the very same boys from the Lower Quarter who were so stingy about firing bullets from the long barrel rifles that the government sent them on mule-back, one of whom was Muhsin, standing behind the millstone.

Actually, we had been more interested in our freedom. We roamed the alleys freely after the headmaster locked the gates of the school with a heavy iron chain the moment the violence erupted and left for his hometown far off in the Batroun district. There was no way he could stay among us, being as he was a member of the Socialist Party. A Christian and a socialist! He had been drawn to socialism from reading so many books that corrupted his mind, according to the school doorman, the one with the fingers of his right hand cut off. We never liked school; it amounted to a series of slaps on the hands with the sharp edges of wooden rulers, bitter cold and the French language. In vain we tried to rein in the enunciation of that language’s sounds and avoid falling into the countless traps in dictation.

We followed after the doorman. He used to play cards, holding them in a strange way, using a hand and a half. He enjoyed it more than staying up in the barricades. We rested assured that he was immersed in a game by the effusion of curses and cigarette smoke. We climbed over the wall with ease, stepping on each other’s shoulders, and jumped inside the school grounds. We wrote nasty things with whatever pieces of chalk we could find. We ate the jar of pickled turnips the supervisor forgot in his office and which he had brought from home to curb his hunger during his long hours at work. Our vengeance was flagrant. We stood on the desks and urinated. We tore the grade books to pieces. We erased the records completely, once and for all. We set the pages on fire and flushed them down the toilet. And before leaving, we rang the bell victoriously, the sound causing some of the neighbours to gather around. We went back to the alleys and ran wild on a never-ending vacation that would last until the revolution was over. That’s what I think we liked about the revolution that ended when American Marines landed on the shores of Lebanon. We had hoped, and some of us were certain it would happen, that the revolution would last a long time and expel school from our lives forever.

We inspected the battlefront from barricade to barricade, delivered messages we hadn’t been charged with delivering, congregated close to Muhsin as he sat on his wicker chair behind the millstone. We’d poke our heads out from the alleyway; our chatter would catch his attention. He’d shoo us away and we’d quieten down and disappear, though we stayed right where we were. When he turned the barricade over to his brother at nightfall, we got scared. We worried that the enemies would take advantage of their absence and inattentiveness and launch a surprise attack.

We also worried whenever he rose from his chair – Muhsin that is – even if just for one minute to relieve his balls from being sat on for so long, sliding his hand deep into the right pocket of his baggy pants to move them from one side to the other. And we worried whenever he would put his rifle down, propping it against the millstone, and start slowly slurping his vegetable soup or
labniyyeh
, the steam rising up from the bowl. He would blow on the spoonful and slurp it up loudly. As long as the food was hot, the noises that came out of Muhsin’s lips and teeth were loud, to the point that we wondered if the people behind the opposing barricade could hear. And maybe they would use the opportunity to shoot at us, while our lead fighter was lapping up his lunch. Katrine always brought Muhsin’s lunch exactly at noon. If she was late, he’d yell to her, ‘Katrine!’ just once, and she’d come running. She’d have to take two trips in order to bring everything he needed – a plate of olives, the salt shaker, the oil decanter and a generous loaf of bread. On the return trip would come the bean and meat stew and the fried eggs. He loved fried eggs and loved to add a squirt of lemon and a dash of red pepper.