June Rain (14 page)

The owners of these great houses also had Ottoman titles, the most important of which was ‘Bey’ and the rarest, ‘Pasha’. They were granted these titles through a decree signed by Moulay Sultan Abdel Hamid and were required to meet with a minister from Istanbul to receive them. They were kept in a locked drawer along with property deeds and money, which was sometimes rumoured to have come from extortion payments or loan repayments. Some of these monies were later donated to the Maronite Charitable Endowment in a moment of weakness or out of gratitude for being healed of an incurable disease.

An oilpainting of the house’s patriarch and founder was prominently displayed in the main part of the house. He had tender features and was wearing a city suit, which looked more like a coastal city businessman’s suit than that of a notable. On either side of the big painting were photographs of women sporting stylish hats and playing tennis when the game had first been introduced into the country. Also hanging on the wall was the family tree which extended into a past so distant and glorious it was implausible, a family tree which some Maronite monk who was a friend of the family had worked tirelessly to construct and revise.

The great house also meant a vast tract of land and threshing floors for wheat and an olive press and a foreign nanny for the children. And sometimes, a small church where they celebrated mass on Sundays with friends and where they were buried. And wives, beautiful or otherwise, but always rich, from other notable families in Mount Lebanon that were no less important and wealthy. Naturally, it was only a matter of time before disagreements between the wives’ brothers cropped up, over how to divide up the inheritance in light of the great families’ determination to exclude daughters from inheriting in order to restrict ownership to males.

The visitors who frequented the house did not speak Arabic. It must have been the case, therefore, that one of the young men of the house worked as a translator at the French Consulate in Beirut where he made a wide circle of acquaintances. Or maybe the oldest son had started but not completed his studies in Ayntoura under Father Sarloutte of the Lazarean Order, who in his turn recommended him to the French High Commissioner for one of the deputy positions allotted to the mandate power in the newly established Parliament. Or possibly as Education Minister in a cabinet that didn’t last more than two months. And maybe his father had been appointed as head of a county at a time when Wasa Pasha, the Governor of Mount Lebanon, had a weakness for gifts and invitations to banquets graced with beautiful, flirtatious ladies.

The great families didn’t like to be too numerous. They would give derisive nicknames to cousins who held the family name and tried to make the nicknames stick, singling themselves out as the only pure and unadulterated holders of that name, as a way of proving their true nobility and God-given right to its sole ownership. If any relatives stood beside them to accept condolences for the loss of a member of the family, the esteemed member of the family would yell at them disapprovingly and tell these cousins – ones the general public didn’t recognise as family members – to back off and stay clear of the right side of the church door, which was only for ‘me, my brother, and my nephew’. He would say this in an accent so foreign to them they wondered where the elder had got it from, or thought perhaps he was putting on the accent to distinguish himself from them. It seemed their preference for small numbers and their desire to limit ownership and influence to only a few heirs made them hold back from having many children as well. And so these great houses were always under threat of extinction, as they say.

The symbol and luminary leader of the great house was forever memorialised in a sculpture of him riding a shiny bronze horse, by the famous sculptor Yusef Hwayyek. The day it was unveiled a select group of Lebanese poets and poet singers who hailed from the furthest reaches of the country were in attendance, and at the base of the statue an anonymous line of poetry was inscribed:
You filled their hearts with so much fear . . . They thought the earth had sprouted men.
The patriarch also appears in a huge oil painting that carries the signature of Daoud Qurm, the famous artist who did not leave a single church without adorning its saints in the most magnificent vestments inspired by the Italian Renaissance. In the painting, which hangs above the altar in Saint George’s Church, the patriarch brandishes his sword high, his eyes peeled to the horizon, in front of the church courtyard. Saint George also appears, riding on horseback with his spear held high.

The statue is not of a man dead and buried, for the corpse of the patriarch is still there inside the church, preserved without embalmment in a glass box. Yes, they all insist it was not embalmed. For more than a hundred years the line of visitors passing before his corpse has not stopped, and it was as though he never died. His name was at the top of the list in the census taken just after the Great War, even though he had died at least thirty years before that, and so he was the first of the living and the oldest of the dead. They appealed to him, asking for help and intercession every time they lost something dear to them, such as when a child lost the only coin in his pocket.

They distributed calendars with a picture of him in his name. Sometimes the picture showed him standing in audience with the Pope in Rome when the European Consuls, in collusion with the Maronite Patriarch who was afraid of him, as people asserted, consented to his exile. Another picture showed him wearing a vest embroidered with gold thread. They named the local football team after him as well as a number of organisations founded by emigrants to Mexico and Argentina. They constructed reliefs of his magnificent statue out of wood, steel and adobe and the artists depicted him in battle in the second half of the nineteenth century, corpses piling up around him. Amateurs started their drawings of him with his radiant face and his manly features. He was the subject of all their poems and they elegised him asking heaven to let the April moon shine down on him and on his men and guide them at night through their battles and help them to subdue their enemies. They called him ‘The Hero of Lebanon’, and he was virtuous, unsullied and prudish to the point that he forbade women to roll their sleeves up past their elbows.

After his death his nephews were given preferential treatment. There were three of them and the Turkish Administrative Authorities placated them with administrative positions. And just as the descendents of those great families feared, the first one didn’t have any children, which they assumed was due to his wife’s barrenness, and he died young. The second had a son who died in the prime of his youth from a disease they called ‘
reeh al-sudaad
’, the ‘cork wind’. His illness lasted for several days, and the people offered up sacrificial prayers for his recovery, imposing a fast on their livestock and bloodying their knees by crawling on them all the way to that little church on one of the hilltops where they prayed to the Virgin to intercede for him. His mother refused to allow him to be buried before her. She kept him at home with her in a tightly sealed coffin until, twenty years later, they carried her out of the house to be buried before him, as she had insisted.

The third nephew fathered a son from a second marriage just before he died, but they didn’t wait for the boy to grow up and instead chose a distant relative as their leader. Despite being a commoner and a cobbler by trade, he was possessed of great courage. Things began to change and there were people who competed for his position. Nevertheless, there always remained a number of small families who admired the descendents of the great families and beat the drums in celebration of their weddings or births, drums that had to be of a certain number and size depending on the occasion. They let out ululations when the heir of the great house passed one of the government exams and they congregated around the house if he got sick or had a fever. They hoisted black flags when one of them died, even if he was an aged invalid, and eulogised him as if death had struck him riding high up on his horse, exactly the way his great uncle sat there on his bronze saddle. They eulogised him saying:

O auburn mare, you with the beauty spots

Say not that your lord has passed away

Your lord has gone to Beirut

To bring you a pair of stirrups

With the change of regimes almost everyone around the great families parted company, especially since those who remained, who were blood relatives as they said – some for certain and some imaginary – woke up to themselves. They remembered that they were descended from the same grandfather, and the first thing they woke up to was their names. They realised all of a sudden that there were many of them and unfortunately they were divided up in support of this or that influential great family member. Suddenly they discovered that they could get one of them into parliament after the French mandate enacted an election law in two stages at first, and then by general election in an effort to introduce democracy in small doses to the countries of the East.

They were fever-stricken, even though a few years earlier the General Administration of Internal Affairs had asked them to come to the old government house, which they had built with unparalleled help out of their desire to turn their town into a centre for the Governorate, and not to forget anyone in their charge. They had answered the call in droves after they heard numerous rumours threatening that if they didn’t register their names they would no longer be Lebanese. They had declared their names the way they had inherited them, handed down from grandfathers to fathers and as the priest had written them in the church record books when they were christened or when they were married or when their hour came. One example was: ‘On the night of Thursday, the 14th of July, 1930, at 2:30, Butros Antonios Khattar passed away suddenly in his sleep, and received absolution by the hands of the priest Elias al-Mardini.’ But they now started insisting on writing their full names, Butros Antonios Khattar al-Rami, as if leaving out the family name had suddenly become an unforgivable sin against them and an infringement of their honour and an attempt to suppress a noble lineage they had just discovered.

They woke up to their names in the 1940s, specifically the mid-1940s, and so they went for a second time to the government palace, to the Court Magistrate, with a petition in hand requesting correction to what they said was mistakenly left out of the record of their names. The Magistrate got so sick and tired of them that he asked the court herald, who had only one eye, to go around the neighbourhood, stop at every intersection, and announce in a loud voice that name-change cases would only be considered once a week, on Tuesdays. They were familiar with the process, to the point that they didn’t need to hire a lawyer, because they could present the request and bring two witnesses and answer a few questions. The census clerk and the coffee vendor out in front of the government palace stood as witnesses for everyone. The Magistrate became furious, wondering aloud, right in front of his clerk, what had come upon them all of a sudden to wake up to family relations that for generations had been of little value except for dividing up lands and inheritance and all the bickering that went along with it.

The employees at the Department of Personal Records kept going back over and over the registration books, opening them so many times to correct names or add surnames or remove the names of the dead or of women who had married and moved to other towns or to register new births that the edges of the huge books became frayed and some of the pages were torn and had to be pasted back together with difficulty. The people’s very existence had become threatened, because a number of pages were nearly torn out or erased, nearly causing many names to be lost.

Nowadays they are able to quench their thirst for numbers – numbers of voters in their family, that is, because they can request a CD from the Ministry of Interior, something that has saved their rosters from dwindling away. This way they are able to get an exact count of their relatives according to how their names appear on the official ledger, and they regret that those of them who emigrated to faraway lands like South America and Australia didn’t bother to register their children, otherwise their numbers would be doubled. Likewise, they are able nowadays to surf the web and Google their family names, sometimes finding people with the same family name or the same first name in the Bahraini House of Notables or on the Moroccan national football team. Some youngsters who were electronics fanatics and web experts constructed websites for their families on the internet, like ‘Semaani.com’, for example, for which they also designed a family emblem with a sword, a book and the sceptre of their religious authority. They recorded on the website all the family births at home and abroad, as well as their marriages and deaths, and they also exchanged email addresses and posted news about the family notables and constantly reminded visitors of the luminaries among them – a historian, for example, who wrote about the eternalness of the Lebanese mountain and for whom General de Gaulle wrote an introduction to his collected works, or an artist who travelled to distant lands but made the scenery of his childhood and its colours the subject of his first and only paintings – all of this to make their families seem vast and rich and extended. They bragged that their family included everything from a highly reputed neurosurgeon in California to a judge running for mayor of Mexico City and a centre player for the Australian national rugby team.

Behind every family there was someone responsible for family reunions, a notable or rich man who began forging friendly relations in the capital with Monsieur Plafond, one of the aides to the French High Commissioner, or with one of the employees of the British delegation. He got promises of support from them and returned to the town at the end of the week in order to add to his family, which had just woken up to itself, as many well-known relatives as he could, along with neighbours who had earned the right to carry the family name, or the ones from small families who added their wives’ families to their own. And the family had its
zaeem
and its candidate for a seat in Parliament, who imitated the noble family’s descendents by seeking to build a Lebanese-style home, as they called it, and by making sure he didn’t take a wife from within the town.