June Rain Read online

  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.

  Chapter 2

  Eliyya was one of us, born and raised in Harat al-Isaaba, the Gang Quarter, as it was called, or Horit l-Isaabeh, as we proudly pronounced it in our accent. It was also known as the Western Our Lady Quarter in reference to the Church of Our Lady, as was recorded on the identity cards of everyone who had lived there since the census of 1932. At that time some unknown employee of the Ministry of Interior divided the town into five quarters whose names we never remembered and whose boundaries we never knew except at election time. Eliyya enjoyed a certain immunity in the quarter that we all recognised, and knocking him to the ground during a fight or pelting him with stones from a distance had repercussions. The truth was he wasn’t the only one who enjoyed the immunity. A number of other kids were entitled to the special treatment, the sons of those said to have paid the price in blood. As for us, the ones who had not lost a family member and lived in the loving embrace of both our parents, we were held to the strict letter of the law. It was never unjust if we were cursed at or treated harshly, because our parents sat back and did nothing. But back then, if someone dared attacked Eliyya, fits and curses and stones would come flying in a heartbeat, which is why there was always a need to be strong and physically fit. The very moment Eliyya stopped crying and reluctantly divulged the name of whichever kid had dared threaten him, his mother Kamileh would hunt him down. Eliyya’s pride prevented him from telling on his assailant, though, until he had exhausted all means of revenge he was personally capable of first. He knew that if he were to overuse his ‘privilege’ he would not have a single friend or ally left. But when he did reach that point, Kamileh would charge out like a storm, with evil in her eyes and a hairpin between her teeth as she quickly pulled her hair up into a bun. We would shout and cheer her on after some of us had already spirited the culprit to safety down by the river. Kamileh would stand at the door to the boy’s house with her hands on her hips and yell to his mother, ‘You’d better discipline him, or I’ll be forced to do it myself!’

  The mother would go along with Kamileh and threaten to punish that ‘little devil’ of hers, but the moment Kamileh turned her back, the mother would wink at her neighbour.

  Eliyya was one of the few kids in those days in the late sixties who wore thick glasses.

  ‘He’s frail,’ his mother would claim, even though he never had any health problems worth mentioning.

  Despite long protests from him, she would make him wear an extra jacket or wool turtleneck sweater that covered his neck all the way up to his ears, while his friends pranced around in short sleeves even when there was a chance of rain. On the
rare occasions when Eliyya went outside, he loved to take part in fights, even if they were non of his business. The moment any tension flared up, he removed his glasses – afraid his eyes might get hurt, as his mother always cautioned – handed them over to a friend and charged into the brawl full of joy, not worrying in the least about the consequences. He always took sides with the weaker party, whoever was in most need of help. He wove between the legs of the older boys involved in the fight, scratched, pinched and bit them as he shouted war cries and insulted their parents and uncles. We never could figure out how he managed to come up with all those insults with such ease. But before they noticed him and had a chance to deliver his share of well-deserved punches and kicks for being an instigator, his mother’s roar would ring out, forcing Eliyya to grudgingly withdraw amidst the whistling of his peers, as if his mother’s interference prevented him from achieving sure victory and spared his opponents severe punishment.

  The day Eliyya came home with his glasses broken and his face filled with fright, Kamileh had had enough. And this time she didn’t have to nag him to find out what happened, because he was in dire need of telling her. He began his story, panting. She put her hand on his chest feeling his heart beat as he told her how he had gone hunting with two mischievous boys up the hill near the old silk factory. They’d decided that day it was time to get rid of the dog that always followed them around because, according to what they said, he’d gone senile and for the past month the dog had been eating the birds they shot rather than retrieving them. As Eliyya spoke, Kamileh pounded her thighs, bracing herself for the worst. They lured the dog down the hill without telling Eliyya their plan.

  ‘Over there, over there, come see!’ Eliyya said to his mother, heading to the window. Near the fence, one of them pulled the clip off a hand grenade and threw the grenade for the dog to fetch. The dog ran after it, picked it up in his mouth and clamped down on the trigger, preventing it from going off, which meant that the moment he dropped it from his mouth, the grenade would explode. As Eliyya related the details, he relayed the fear that had gripped him there, and Kamileh squealed at the thought of her son being in such danger. She started patting him down, all over his body, fearing he had been hit somewhere but didn’t dare tell her. At any rate, contrary to his recent voracious appetite for birds, the dog decided – ‘Oh my goodness!’ – to bring the ‘prey’ back to the hunters. Everyone was terrified, and screamed at each other to spread out and go in different directions to minimise the danger. To everyone’s surprise, rather than heading after the two hunters, the dog followed the hunters’ incidental companion.

  ‘He followed me, Mother. He brought the hand grenade to me!’

  Kamileh squealed again.

  Fortunately, as he was running, Eliyya tripped and fell – which was how his glasses got smashed. Eliyya finished his story, panting, telling his mother how the dog suddenly and for no reason ran off in another direction. A huge explosion was heard and the poor dog’s body parts were strewn all over the branches of the Jaffa orange trees.

  ‘Come in and wash your face,’ Kamileh said. ‘And you stay away from those sons of bitches!’

  With the neighbours as witnesses, she swore two or three times a day to get Eliyya away from the Gang Quarter, away from the whole town, once and for all. She contacted her cousin, a nun and member of the Sisters of the Cross, to help her register him in one of the boarding schools near the capital. Her cousin pulled strings with the school administration to allow Kamileh to come and inspect the kitchen and the dormitory. She went around sniffing the bed sheets and stooping to look under the beds to make sure there were no mice droppings. She opened the window to make sure there were no drafts that might expose Eliyya to bronchitis. During that period, Eliyya had already slipped out of his mother’s sight at least twice, once to participate in fishing for eels using sticks of dynamite, and another time to take part in a penis-measuring competition amongst the neighbourhood boys that involved standing in a long line on the roof of the flour mill in front of an older expert who chose which ones stood out, giving the winners a kind of pride and reputation that lasted for years.

  Her only child, Eliyya, who had required so much time and effort to conceive, was now heading down the wrong path, right before her eyes. One had to admit that Kamileh was an able woman who succeeded in saving her son. Distancing him yielded quick results, perhaps quicker than Kamileh expected. If he had gone to some faraway country and come back, we would have said, as we always did, that the sea whisked him away. But he hadn’t gone beyond Beirut, a mere hour and a half by car. We didn’t know what happened to him at his new school. Perhaps after going to school and experiencing some of life’s trials, he had left his extended childhood behind and entered all of a sudden into a sad and repressed adolescence. We often talked about him, but most of all, this sudden transformation in him increased the already high esteem with which we regarded the schools in Beirut. Between Christmas and Easter, Eliyya had grown timid. The school had taught him manners. During an absence of three short months, he was transformed. On Holy Thursday he came back to spend a week with his mother.

  He passed his time lounging on the balcony, content to sit in that cramped square surrounded by all those plants with their colourful early spring blooms. It was as though being there in his own house in the Gang Quarter was tantamount to temporary exile from his real home; he counted the days until he was to go back. He kept his head buried in a thick book. Kamileh threw a wool blanket on him the moment she felt the slightest draft, not wanting him to catch a chill, something he certainly could do without. He didn’t respond when his old friends happened to pass by, whether intentionally or by accident, and called for him. When they were sure Kamileh was occupied in the kitchen washing the dishes, cooking or fuming about something, they threw pebbles at him to attract his attention, or they whistled through their fingers to disturb him. But he paid no attention. It was as if he didn’t hear them, as if he was adrift in the world of his books. The boys exchanged looks of surprise, shrugged their shoulders and decided to leave him alone, because they had reached an age when they no longer begged for friendship.

  On the following New Year’s Day, on one of his visits, he arrived with an accordion. The taxi dropped him off some distance away that day. Eliyya strapped the shiny wine-coloured instrument on his back and walked through the drizzling rain towards his house like a disciplined soldier carrying his gear, attracting a following of inquisitive young stragglers. In the afternoon, the rain stopped. The neighbourhood kids congregated near Kamileh’s porch as soon as Eliyya’s accordion belted out the first tune. They stared at him in silence as he stretched the bellows as far as they would open, the full length of his arms. He pulled them open only to push them back together again, at times bending over the accordion with his eyes closed as if feeling the pain of the sad tune or stamping his feet with joy when the rhythm picked up. He swayed along with the accordion, his fingers flying over the numerous black and white keys, drawing out a dazzling new sound never before experienced in those damp winding alleys of the neighbourhood. More and more people stopped to listen to him. At first he played a popular tune for the small baffled gathering, one they had all heard on the radio, Fayrouz’s ‘Zurooni Kulli Sana Marra’ (‘Visit Me Once a Year’) but soon they realised, as they listened along in astonishment, that he was now passionately playing Western tunes they didn’t recognise. They realised they were trying in vain to recognise the tunes, for Eliyya had abandoned their world. He had abandoned the riverbanks and the pilfering of plums and loquats in season, the games of daring and endurance. He had abandoned all of that for good. He had left for another realm they knew nothing about. Some of them felt he had even forgotten their names. It wasn’t that Eliyya had changed out of concern for his future as his mother wished, and it was not, as one might suppose, a matter of haughtiness on his part. Rather, it was as if he had suddenly become preoccupied with more important matters. They were unable, for example, to understand t
he talent that had enabled him to win first place in the school-wide French poetry competition. They saw his picture in the Telegraph, a shot of him as the competition organisers handed him the shiny metal trophy of a bird with outspread wings standing on one leg. They, on the other hand, persisted in the boorish ways of their ancestors, cursing the souls of the dead if they stumbled over a stone in the road, or aggressively asking bystanders who looked at them inquisitively what they wanted. They stopped inviting Eliyya to participate in their games. In fact, they stopped paying him any attention at all.

  War broke out and Eliyya’s school was close to the green line. ‘We got clobbered once,’ Kamileh said. ‘We’ve had more than our share of it. No more!’

  She tried to get her son out of Beirut temporarily by sending him to the mountains, to one of the summer resort towns in which her cousin resided, in a convent, and on their way up there they ran into an armed checkpoint. Amidst the commotion and because they weren’t familiar with the area they were passing through, they didn’t know if the armed men were stopping Christians or Muslims. It was enough of a scare for Kamileh to hand him over to the nun, but he didn’t last there more than two nights because the war was spreading up into the mountains and the bombs were falling close to the convent. The nuns prepared a bed for him down in the cellar, but soon Kamileh came scrambling back to retrieve him and take him all the way home to the Gang Quarter; to get there from Beirut they had to traverse tortuous mountain roads.

  Back in our village, Eliyya was sentenced to house arrest. But again his imprisonment didn’t last, because it wasn’t long before the dangers caught up with us. Like water, the war seeped into all the regions it could possibly reach. It reached us at first in the form of incessant rumours about an impending attack for which the other side had amassed fighters from different nationalities and even different colours. When they started putting up barricades and young men started wearing battle fatigues and driving around in quasi-military style Jeeps on which slogans of old wars that had taken place a thousand years before were painted, Kamileh made a most difficult decision.