June Rain (29 page)

Her mother didn’t show much dismay.

‘What’s going to happen, Mother?’

‘They’ll kill two in return.’

She turned towards Muntaha’s house. The streets were completely deserted and the tank that had been stationed in the middle of the square for the last month slowly circled around. The soldier who’d been outside its hatch ducked down inside and pulled the door shut. It moved along the road leading to Tripoli, preceded by a small military Jeep leading the way out. They heard on the radio the day before that the army wasn’t going to interfere in family feuds. The army commander was not taking sides. For a month the rumours had been flying, rumours of revenge and fear of what was to come. And all the while Kamileh hadn’t felt a thing.

She sat a bit at Muntaha’s but she didn’t dare tell her. She was afraid people would make fun of her if they thought she was imagining the pregnancy. Muntaha told her they had put up a barricade on the roof of the nuns’ school. They’d piled up sandbags that they watered every morning to make it harder for bullets to penetrate them. She told her that in his sermon after the gospel reading, Father Antonius said, ‘My children, pray many Our Fathers and Hail Marys so God will make us victorious over our enemies.’

She didn’t accept the truth until her belly began to show. Even then she said, ‘Maybe it’s bloated with water.’

‘Water?’

‘I don’t believe I am pregnant, Mother. I don’t believe it . . . How could that happen? What did you do to me?’

She was going to have a child. Her blood would bubble with joy and then just as quickly her stomach would wrench. She started getting scared. Every rumour she heard scared her, the sound of gunfire set her trembling. She was no longer alone.

‘You’re the object of scorn, Kamileh! You didn’t listen to me. Make them hold their tongues now if you can . . .’

‘What do I do, Mother?’

‘Don’t do anything. You have to eat well and get plenty of rest . . . Don’t pay them any attention.’

The news spread and along with it all kinds of talk, behind her back of course.

Then came the questions, heartless questions that lashed at her and gnawed at her. Where did she get it from? Fifteen years without children . . . her husband dies one minute and she gets pregnant the next, how’s that?

She preferred to hide inside the house, even avoiding the balcony. Only her mother came to visit her – her mother and Muntaha. And her sister Yasmeen whenever she managed to persuade her husband to let her chance it. Her mother brought her everything she needed.

‘Don’t go anywhere. I’ll make sure to get you everything you need.’

And Muntaha brought all the news, what people outside were saying, the neighbours in the area. Muntaha also had news of the fighting. She would come trembling with fear, and one day she came saying, ‘Kamileh, you won’t believe it. They are going to start sending wives back.’

‘Sending wives back?’

‘Yes, yes. I’m worried about my mother,’ Muntaha said. Her mother was an Al-Rami. ‘She’s been hearing things here in the quarter.’

‘Who’s saying it?’

‘I don’t know who, but they’re saying that she’s been relaying information to her family in the Upper Quarter.’

‘What information?’

‘I don’t know, Kamileh. They just say, “She’s been relaying information . . .”’

‘Does your mother visit her family’s quarter?’

‘Her sin was going there just once after the Burj al-Hawa incident, and they ganged up on her. Now, every time they run into her on the street or pass our house they curse the Rami family and curse their dead. My mother cries and says, “I am one of them, and so are my husband and children. Why are they saying those things to me?”

‘Where will my mother go if they kick her out of her house?’ Muntaha asked Kamileh, pounding her chest with her hand.

Kamileh didn’t answer. Muntaha let out a heavy sigh and raised her arms over her head in despair.

Her due date had come, but Eliyya was late. The army re-entered the town. A delegation consisting of members from both sides was formed and patrolled the streets to ensure the barricades had been lifted. The shooting stopped. The ambushes stopped. The same army commander who hadn’t taken sides was elected President of the Republic. It was what the Americans and Nasser wanted. People started talking about the law of ‘no winners and no losers’. The revolution was over and life went back to normal. Now there wouldn’t be anything to distract them from Kamileh anymore; no more dead and wounded. They would eat her alive.

Eliyya was ten days late. He was a big baby with a big head; he weighed a lot.

He was her life’s dream. A baby boy. Her mother taught her how to hold him, how to cradle his head in her arm. She stayed cooped up with her an entire month, training her in everything she knew. Kamileh’s mother was so wrapped up in worrying about the baby’s health that she didn’t have time to express her utter joy over him. She developed a severe lung infection and Eliyya hadn’t yet succeeded in calling her ‘Taita’ when they took her to the hospital and asked for a priest.

Kamileh had all the necessary equipment – nappies, clothes and even shoes. She had no need to go shopping. She washed his clothes for him and hung them to dry on the balcony – actually on a washing line she put up inside the house.

She was not going to show him in public.

In spite of all that, she was scorched by gossip. They’d all become experts on pregnancy and the lunar month. They made all kinds of calculations, salivating as they did. They besieged her with their calculations, which verified all their original suspicions.

All the talk reached her ears though she hid inside the house. She named him Eliyya after the last saint she had made supplications to. The saints had defeated her. She had thought she’d been released from her debt to them. She had trouble choosing between naming him Yusef after his father or naming him Eliyya. Kamileh was afraid of Saint Elias; his vengeance might be severe and she couldn’t bear that.

If only she could pick him up and fly away – a white swan spreading her immense wings, picking him up by his nappies with her beak as he slept all pink-cheeked and tender, his hands and little legs dangling in mid air. She’d pick him up and fly away to the ends of the earth, to lands where she didn’t know anyone. A voice whose owner she couldn’t see would guide her. A man’s voice like her father’s voice. She, the swan, would set him down from her long beak in a natural nest between two rocks high up in a mountain, far away from all the eyes and all the predators, so she could go out to battle every day and come back to him with food. She would fight with everything she had – her beak, her wings, her legs. She’d be wounded all over but she wouldn’t die. Her enemies were everywhere, in the air, behind the rocks, between the grains of sand and over the waves of the sea. She woke up from her dream to his cries of hunger. She gave him her breast and they both fell deeply back to sleep. The white swan would never return to her after that night.

Eliyya grew up and went to school. He was a skinny boy with a weak constitution and weak eyesight. She accompanied him to class, to the same room her father had removed her from back then. She wanted to know who the boy sitting next him was, wanted to know who his father and mother were.

‘Do not hit him, do you hear?’

The high praise for Eliyya began at the start of his school days. ‘He’s clever,’ the nun in charge of the small children would say. He was top of his class in every subject.

Kamileh forbade him to participate in gym class. She made a special request of the administration to excuse him from athletics.

‘Can’t you see how skinny he is?’ she’d say, looking at him.

Muntaha thought he looked like Kamileh. Kamileh would gaze at him at length without seeing the resemblance.

People’s eyes were quick to attack him. And so were their tongues. As soon as he was able to understand, they began saying things to him. The words were already on their tongues, poised and waiting for someone to hear them.

The words were on women’s tongues especially, spinsters in particular. They attacked little Eliyya on the streets, sought him out. One of them would start asking him questions, with her hand on her hip and her jaw hanging open, ‘Whose son are you, honey?’

He couldn’t understand the woman’s question. It embarrassed him, and he wouldn’t know how to answer.

The woman would smile. She’d ask him his name and he’d answer. Then she’d repeat the first question.

‘Whose son are you, Eliyya?’

He’d look at her with big, wide eyes, not answering. The woman would be satisfied with that. The child’s silence was a confession.

He didn’t tell his mother, but she knew. She knew and kept it buried inside.

Sometimes she would get upset. She’d blow up over a word or a look or nothing at all, pouring out her anger on young and old alike. She began cursing people out loud, on the street, as she walked by. She cursed them for no reason, talked to herself in a loud voice, and clashed with the people who had ruined her life.

Eliyya enjoyed competing, with words and by fighting. One time he and one of his buddies in the quarter were exchanging insults. A bad word here, a curse there, swearing against family and relatives, until Eliyya finally outdid his opponent with a good dose of adjectives. The other boy had no recourse but to pelt him with, ‘Son of Kamileh!’

He tossed it out there in the context of their contest.

‘You pygmy!’ Eliyya exclaimed, full of confidence, his clear proof being the short stature of his opponent.

‘You’re a sicko!’ his opponent said, targeting Eliyya’s leanness and gaunt face. This was fired at Eliyya without any need for proof.

‘Lettuce seller!’ Eliyya spouted off, mocking the occupation of his opponent’s father who was a greengrocer. This was Eliyya’s first venture into that type of exchange.

The insult caught Eliyya’s opponent off guard because Eliyya had now opened the door on fathers, where he had the advantage. Eliyya’s opponent had been disarmed, and he hesitated, not finding a way to respond. He looked around hoping for some help; a young man around twenty years old leaned over and quickly whispered something in his ear. The younger boy squealed with joy as if he’d found some long lost object.

‘Son of Kamileh!’

A short silence followed, broken by laughter that resounded the moment the bystanders understood the meaning of the accusation. Those who understood and those who didn’t all laughed. It was as though Eliyya’s opponent had won the victory on points and deserved acclaim from the audience. Eliyya hesitated. He got flustered for a minute and then he suddenly started throwing rocks at his rival, an indication that words had reached their limit and the only response left was to hurt him directly. When his opponent ran away, Eliyya rushed home, angry and crying. He, too, hadn’t understood exactly what happened, but he felt the sting of the insult when everyone laughed.

From the kitchen and from the balcony, Kamileh constantly tried to watch over Eliyya. She worried what they might do to him and wished he wouldn’t go out into the streets, because he didn’t know what was waiting for him out there. She, on the other hand, did know and expected the worst. Being stabbed with a knife would have been easier for her to bear than his tears. She consoled him and decided then and there to send him to the Sisters of the Holy Cross School. And to anyone who asked her about it she said, ‘I don’t have any others beside him and this is a difficult environment here. He learns all sorts of bad things from them. If I leave him to his own devices he won’t learn anything.’ By which she meant ‘school learning’. She visited him there at his new school twice a week. She cooked for him, fed him, gazed at him. But she didn’t want him to come back home. She couldn’t stand the holidays when the school would send him home to her with his accordion. She’d invent all sorts of reasons for him not to leave the house. But they sought him out and would congregate below the balcony hoping he would join them.

They could say she had no feelings and didn’t miss her son as much as they wanted, just as long as they kept their dirty looks away from her – their dirty looks and nasty tongues. She remembered what her brother-in-law, Yasmeen’s husband, was always saying, ‘Staying far away from all of you is a blessing!’

She sent him far away and remained steadfast and alone. But they didn’t forget and wouldn’t forget even after a hundred years. They never said anything to her face, they didn’t dare, but she got the feeling from their little questions – ‘How’s Eliyya doing? We hear he’s very clever’ – from the way they dragged out the question and curled their lips – ‘Did he find himself a nice girl, your son, huh Kamileh, over there?’ She felt they were still lying in wait for her. And now she didn’t want to undergo the cataract surgery because she didn’t want to see what was in their eyes, what was still in their eyes, because what was in their voices was more than enough for her. Maybe the reason her eyesight weakened was so that she wouldn’t have to see them anymore. She didn’t want to see them and she didn’t want Eliyya to come back home. The further away from her he remained, the easier life was for her and for him. By herself, her head butting against theirs, they couldn’t get the best of her, but she wouldn’t be able to fight them off with him standing next to her.

Chapter 17

Samih was the only man among all those women. In every bakery there was just one man who ran the show and withstood the heat of the oven for them – from the moment the women arrived at the break of dawn with the bread dough in trays up on their heads, until the moment they left just before noon carrying their round loaves with the little bubbles on top that looked so hot and appetising and cried out for nothing but a little olive oil and a dash of salt.