June Rain (9 page)

‘Is it further than Al-Mazraa?’

‘Yes. Further than Al-Mazraa.’

Al-Mazraa was my mother’s village.

We could see it from our house, there at the foot of the mountain opposite us, that fiery mountain that was said to have been a volcano at one time. My mother’s village was just a cluster of trees and houses, more like a small oasis people had built with patience and care in the middle of that barren mountain. The day my father bought us the binoculars, the first thing we aimed them at was Al-Mazraa. Suddenly and by mere coincid­ence, my grandfather and my uncle appeared before us picking apricots from the Umm Hsayn apricot tree. They had white cloths on their heads tied at the corners, to protect them from the sun.

The conversation at the door was in whispers.

‘. . .’

‘. . .’

‘The Bey is going,’ Ayyoub said definitively, leaving no room for argument.

The one with the tipped hat looked inside the house. Actually, he had been looking more at our clothes and our furniture than at us, while his friend tried to persuade my father.

Ayyoub, the gregarious one, and his silent friend.

My father didn’t invite them in. He stayed at the door speaking to them, his face covered with shaving cream, the straight razor in his hand, his shoulders covered with thick black hair. The stocky one talked about the upcoming elections, how the campaign was serious and how they had to assert their presence, which he said with a wave of his right hand. He stopped talking, waiting for my father to respond, as if he had just recently learned the term ‘presence’ or had heard it from someone he considered knowledgeable and was trying to test out its impact every time he had a chance to speak.

Ayyoub spoke at great length, elaborating and preaching about the necessity of safeguarding our ‘essence’ and being wary of ‘them’. He had proof they were backstabbers. He also had a predilection for using classical Arabic expressions, which my mother had learned to decipher. That was why the more he spoke, the more my mother frowned. She knew my father and his cousins well, and if she kept quiet they would take him with them and if she interfered she would embarrass him in front of them.

As he listened, my father used the towel in his hand to wipe the shaving cream off his face a little bit at a time. That was his way of drawing out the pleasure of his shave, and it would also give him time to think.

Suddenly Ayyoub stopped talking, as if he had exhausted all his arguments and his entire dictionary. He waited for my father’s answer, but it didn’t come. Silence hung in the air. We felt my father’s silence to be a sign he would choose us over the two men.

It was now the man with the tipped hat’s turn. ‘If you don’t want to come with us, give us the car. There are many young men but very few cars . . .’

‘No!’ the four of us shouted in unison from inside the house without even looking at each other.

Our father quietened us down without responding to them. It was another meaningful silence that wasn’t difficult for the men to understand, and so they turned around and walked away.

My father shut the door, still holding the open straight blade in his right hand. He wasn’t himself. We surrounded him, the four of us, and showered him with kisses. Giving kisses on all sorts of occasions was one of my mother’s innovations, just as the girls’ baths every two days and the boys’ twice a week were also imported by her. Our father tried to escape our attack on him.

‘No, no. Get away. I still have shaving cream on my chin.’

He wouldn’t be kissing us then and not in the days and months that followed, either.

‘Get away from your father!’

My mother understood he was under a lot of pressure and kissing us meant confirmation he was abandoning his relatives.

He went back to the mirror in the bathroom to finish shaving. From the living room we heard him whistling intermittently just as he did while driving the Chevrolet around dangerous bends in the road. This whistling was his way of unburdening himself.

‘Hamid!’

We trembled a little. It was the voice of the eloquent stocky man again. They had both come back to the door. They weren’t going to let my father off easily. My mother made the sign of the cross and we all went back to our battle positions.

‘Yes?’ my father said in a dry tone as he opened the door for them. This time his face was clean-shaven and his shirt was buttoned all the way up to his neck.

The two men stammered. Each was nudging the other to speak first.

‘You say it.’

‘No. You say it.’

My father raised his voice. ‘What’s going on? Speak!’

My father rarely raised his voice. Getting angry exhausted him. If ever he shouted at us, he was quick to make it up to us with a joke or a kiss or some money.

The man with the tipped hat took the initiative. ‘Give us your gun.’

The gun or
fard
(personal) was the same thing as the
musaddas
(sixer) or the revolver . . . you pulled it out and if it was loaded or cocked you shot, either point blank or quick draw, otherwise your adversary would beat you to it and something regrettable would happen. They used bird metaphors and hand metaphors and ‘sparrow’s eye’ . . . You insisted on getting bullets to go with it, bullets that burned and bullets that penetrated . . .

My father had bought it two or three months earlier from a weapons merchant. He had brought it home, laughing as he told us how after the seller carefully organised the bills my father had paid him and put them in his pocket, satisfied with such a profitable deal.

‘God willing you’ll only use it on live flesh . . .’ the gun merchant had said to my father wistfully.

My father didn’t tell us why he had bought a revolver he wasn’t going to use. Most probably the time had come when he could no longer say to his family and cousins that he didn’t own a weapon.

On the Feast of Holy Transfiguration, he tested it out but stopped after the third shot because it jammed.

‘Lack of practice!’ shouted one of his friends standing next to him, jokingly. That joke was suited to my father more than anyone else. He wore the gun at his waist for less than a week and then he hid it somewhere in the house. Probably because the gun tired him out, its weight on his waist tired him out. We knew there was a gun in the house, but didn’t know where it was. Every house had a hiding place for guns, because at any time the government might resolve to confiscate all the weapons from people’s houses.

‘You want me to give you my gun?’

The request had surprised him, despite his distaste for weapons.

‘We’ll give it back to you this evening or tomorrow morning . . . We may need it.’

The fellow with the wart on his left cheek added, ‘You can spare it. Nothing bad will happen to you as long you’re staying here with your wife.’

He didn’t say, ‘As long as you’re staying here with your wife and children.’ He seemed to be trying to insult my father that way. We hadn’t noticed that detail but my mother explained it later, on our way to the Grotto of Qadisha. And truly something stirred inside my father, but not in the expected direction.

He passed by us, red in the face, walking steadily towards the kitchen with signs of a difficult decision written in his eyes. We watched him from where we had gathered to wait for him in the living room. He opened the bread bin, reached deep down to its base, and pulled out the gun in its black leather holster. A hiding place so obvious you’d never think of it. If we had ever used up every last loaf of bread, we would have discovered it.

He came back with the same steady walk. We could see him from behind as he stood at the door.

‘Here you go!’

Later, images that we came across – like those officers in World War II movies who’d been stripped of their ranks by the military court, or the picture in our history book of the French general (who we later found out was Jewish) dressed in colourful clothing as he handed over his sword to another officer to be broken over his knee ­– these images and many others would remind us of our father as he stood there in the doorway handing over his revolver with one hand to the stocky man and the two clips to the man with the tipped hat with the other, while the bright light of day streamed over the three men and flooded into the living room.

But we children won out. We went on our Sunday outing. It was a warm and sunny day. I have no idea where the rain that fell at the time of the incident came from.

My father drove in silence. Every once in a while, and without realising it – as he said when my mother alerted him to it – he would start going too fast, and so my mother would remind him that all the children were in the back seat. He would slow down a little, only to press down on the accelerator again a little later.

At lunch, too, my father barely said a word. He would let out a boisterous laugh for no real reason and then plunge back into a long silence. Later on he told us he had had a bad feeling that day. When we coaxed him, he would laugh or play with one of us, look at his watch, stop eating, only to become distracted once again.

We came home in the evening. But Farid Badwi al-Semaani, the man with the tipped hat, my father’s paternal cousin who we’d seen standing in our doorway that Sunday morning for the first and last time, did not return. They covered him in a shroud and laid him out in the church courtyard, right in front of the main gate to the Girls’ School. His mother stooped over him, grieving. She waved his silk shirt in the air at times and later wore it herself. Having lost her voice, she began opening her mouth and moving her lips without making any sound. Nazha Murad elegised him, calling him the best tailor that ever was, the maker of the finest suits.

The stocky eloquent Ayyoub is still alive today. He had been shot in the mouth and thigh and was counted among the casualties in the
Telegraph
newspaper that came out the next day. He passed out for a few hours from loss of blood, but then he came round. Ayyoub was also my father’s cousin, but he only dropped by our house from time to time.

At any rate, they all became cousins after the incident.

As for us, the news about us spread quickly. Us, meaning my father. His sin was the outing to Qadisha. And my mother.

We girls – my sister and I – kept the harsh words that were sometimes slung at us to ourselves. My ten-year-old brother couldn’t bear those sharp arrows. He didn’t understand. One day he came home early, before sunset – his usual curfew. He slammed every door to express his anger.

‘Open the door, Munir.’

We gathered in front of the bedroom door. He had locked it with the key from the inside. We could hear nothing but pounding on the walls, either from his fists or his head. We were worried about him. We threatened to break the door down if he didn’t speak.

But in the face of his stubbornness we chose to keep pleading with him and questioning him until he finally came out with a question. ‘I want to know . . .’

We seized the opportunity and encouraged him. ‘What do you want to know?’

‘Tell me now, right now. Where is my father’s gun?’

When we weren’t able to answer him, he stamped his feet. ‘Who took it?’

My father’s gun hadn’t returned that day, and no one asked to have it back, out of embarrassment. My father had been told that whoever had been using it tossed it onto the ground when it ran out of bullets, in order to pull out his second gun, and then it got lost. Then later someone came and told him that his gun was not actually lost but was still with one of his relatives. He didn’t think anything of it. Of course, the suspicions surrounding Ayyoub continued, but Ayyoub was immune to questions because of the wounds he suffered: three bullets to the body.

At any rate, my father was willing to forfeit his gun as the price for his absence.

Munir resumed his pounding on the wall. We found out that his friends didn’t want to play with him. They wouldn’t let him play war, the only game they knew and which they played with weapons made out of reeds and gun sounds made with their mouths. They wouldn’t allow him to be a soldier, of course, or even an outlaw, on the basis that his father was scared to shoot his own gun. He even begged them to let him be a guard at the prison they made for outlaws trying to escape justice, but they were adamant. He stamped his feet in anger, burst into tears and hurried home to take it out on us.

We girls, in turn, divulged everything that had happened to us. They had accused my mother of ceasing to wear black mourning clothes after only three months of bereavement and they complained that none of her daughters wore mourning clothes at all, even though we were mature ‘young women’, as they would say.

My father came home a little later. We told him Munir had locked himself in the bedroom. He smiled and went to the door.

‘Munir?’

‘What’s my name?’

My brother’s question surprised us all. My father laughed and answered him pompously, ‘Munir Hamid Jirjis al-Semaani.’

‘No it isn’t . . .’

‘What do you mean, no it isn’t?’

‘No it isn’t.’

‘What’s your name, then?’

‘They say we are not Semaanis . . .’