June Rain (39 page)

And Muntaha also comes along, as she does every day, at sunrise. She, too, locks the door to her house with two turns of the key and takes the key with her. She doesn’t dare leave the door wide open anymore the way she used to. In those days she’d even prop the door open with a chair to prevent the wind from slamming it shut. From the day she was born she’d been used to leaving the door open. Nowadays she is afraid of being robbed. Every day she hears about another incident. Skilled burglars came into people’s houses while they slept, crept into their bedrooms and stole all their jewellery out of the drawer right over the head of the man lying there asleep beside his wife. So far, no one had yet to wake up in the midst of the robbery. No doubt the thieves sprinkled some chloroform in the house they were robbing, which is why the people being robbed woke up in the morning feeling tired and groggy. Muntaha believed there had come to be more strangers living in the town than natives.

‘We don’t know anyone anymore. Where are they all coming from?’ she’d say, looking them right in the face.

Usually when Muntaha came over to Kamileh’s balcony she brought along with her a tray of lentils to sift through, to pick out the pieces of straw and the little pebbles, or she’d bring a batch of courgettes to core with ease and skill. If the lunch menu was an easy one to prepare, she’d just bring along her knitting – a navy blue sweater, for herself.

Muntaha doesn’t have anyone left to knit a sweater or scarf for. Her brother married and went abroad, but he taught his children to remember their aunt, all the way from Australia. She doesn’t know them but they always sent her their greetings and holiday cards in the mail and some money they managed to save up from the meagre salaries they earned from their humble work in the factory. She loves them. She doesn’t have anyone else to love but them, but she has never seen them except in pictures. After her mother died, the mute hadn’t lasted long. He went down to the river one Sunday morning to fish for eels as usual and never came back. They searched everywhere for him; he completely vanished. Maybe he had been sucked into the river. Muntaha has no one left to knit for, so she knits for herself – things she never wears. If anyone asked her about her knitting, she’d say she was finishing a sweater for the neighbours’ little boy in time for the start of school, as if it was shameful for a woman to knit for herself.

But today she comes empty-handed. She makes sure to wear her best dress – the dark brown one. They sit side by side. If Muntaha speaks, Kamileh responds – in brief.

The day heats up and sounds fill the air. Kamileh hushes whoever she can so Eliyya can sleep. She knows who makes every nearby sound and after every noise she scolds whoever caused it.

Around ten Eliyya comes out to the balcony, dressed in a fine white suit. He squeezes into the seat beside Kamileh. He kisses her on the forehead, goes overboard with kisses, wraps his arms around her, and she pushes him away. He insists and she insists back. She doesn’t want these kinds of emotional antics. She can’t stand them. He opens the notebook that never leaves his side, writes something down and then places it beside him on the seat.

Two boys poke their heads between the plants on the balcony, like two people poking their heads between the curtains to watch a play. They climb the wall between the balcony and the main road with agility. Their eyes burn with a desire to see. They stand on tiptoes to get a full view of the scene. News still travels door to door in the Gang Quarter, just like it did in the old days. News of murder and revenge preceded people’s news. It spread among the townspeople from mouth to ear, skipping the strangers Muntaha was so afraid of. It skipped them, waiting until they became integrated into the community. The news that has been travelling door to door since the night before and which the children heard along with stern words from their parents, is that Kamileh’s son, the son of Yusef al-Kfoury who was killed in the Burj al-Hawa incident, is returning to America today, and after today, his mother will never see him again.

Today the schools are on strike and the kids won’t be going to school. Unexpected days off have a special flavour to them. When they heard their parents talking about Kamileh’s son’s travel plans, they said to themselves, ‘There’s a strike tomorrow. Let’s go watch.’

The two boys poke their heads between the plants on the balcony, waiting for the goodbyes. It wasn’t clear who had added to the news bulletin the notion that Kamileh wouldn’t see her son again after today. The two youngsters rushed to watch the moment of final farewell. The idea that Kamileh will never see her son again is what attracts them. They want to see what a last goodbye looks like, one that will never be followed by a re­­­union. He will never come back to Lebanon after that day and soon she is going to die.

Some of their other friends also join the two boys, and a little while later a crowd of schoolchildren from the First Public High School for Boys surrounds Kamileh’s balcony from all directions. And other classmates who sat beside them on the desk benches at school also join in – little children, sons of the strangers who’d recently taken up residence in the Gang Quarter. Muntaha tries to shoo them away. They back off for a little while but stubbornly stick around in the area. If they back off a few metres, it is only to inevitably return a few minutes later. They follow every movement; they watch as Eliyya and his mother whisper back and forth. Eliyya hesitates a bit, looks around, acknowledges the others present, smiles and gets up to go into the house.

He comes out a little later with his instrument strapped to him. He bends over it wiping off the dust and rediscovering the keys. The children come closer; the appearance of the accordion is a signal to them to creep closer and closer. Some of them have the courage to jump over the balcony railing and sit on the floor beside the family members and the neighbours who’ve come to share in Kamileh’s farewell to her son. He hits one note and then two notes after that, making sure the instrument still makes sounds. He smiles. The number of onlookers multiplies as they call to one another in the narrow alleyways. The entire Gang Quarter.

He turns to face them. He plays the tunes for them that he still remembers after all those years, and they stare at him, silent and breathless. They watch his every move as he stretches the accordion as far as it will open, the whole length of his arms. They enjoy the way it stretches open like that. He opens it only to squeeze it back all the way shut. He probably hasn’t picked up the accordion the whole time he’s been abroad, but the moment he starts pressing the keys his ability to play comes back to him, like when you get back on a bicycle. You learn once and never forget. Without putting on airs, he leans over his accordion and shuts his eyes as if suffering some sort of pain along with the sad tune emanating from it; or he taps his feet in joy when the tempo and rhythm speed up, and sways side to side. He plays whatever tunes come to mind until Kamileh requests ‘
Zoorooni Kulli Sana Marra
’
– Visit Me Once a Year – which he plays, looking directly into the eyes of the children mesmerised by his deft fingers flying over the keys. They watch him play without listening to the music he is belting out of that amazing instrument of his. The moment Eliyya begins to play, a strange silence comes over the neighbourhood; all car movements seem to come to a complete stop and one no longer hears the sound of mothers calling their sons, or doors slamming, or dogs barking anywhere around.

When Eliyya starts to show signs of tiring, even though he continues to smile for his audience, Muntaha asks the neighbourhood children to leave, explaining that the woman wants to say goodbye to her son and they should all go play around their own mothers. Muntaha doesn’t have any other way of saying it. But they aren’t going to budge one iota. They are going to watch the scene to the very end. Muntaha threatens to go inside to the living room and even begins to ask Kamileh, Eliyya and their visitors to move inside, but the neighbourhood kids raise their voices in protest.

They are going to watch Eliyya say goodbye to his mother. It is the moment they’ve come for and have been waiting for ever since hearing their parents say she would never see him again after today.

She made him a dozen
kibbeh
patties stuffed with lamb fat, and specially prepared a kilo of dry green beans and a container of
labneh
balls in olive oil, to which she added some goat cheese and pickled olives and olive oil from the red soil groves of upper Hariq. She packed everything in one suitcase. She secretly sent someone to buy her some pistachio-filled pastries in a sealed wooden box from Tripoli, and half a ring of candied figs and a small bag of dark bulgur wheat. The same taxi driver who had taken him to Burj al-Hawa will take him to the airport. He won’t open his mouth the whole way except to say what is necessary.

Kamileh saves the question for the end, for the moment of farewell. She allows him to hold her hand when she suddenly asks him, ‘What do you want me to do with the house, son?’

The question catches him by surprise. ‘What house?’

‘This house. Your house . . .’

He tries to say something but is stopped short. She doesn’t force the issue.

She walks behind him to the gate. She stands there with Muntaha at her side. Muntaha despairs of trying to shoo the children, especially now that the time for what they came to see has almost come. Over time and with the gradual waning of Kamileh’s eyesight, Muntaha has grown accustomed to whispering to Kamileh what she needed to know about what was going on in front of her that she could no longer see, as if Muntaha wanted to give back to her lifelong companion what old age had taken away from her.

Eliyya can’t stop hugging and kissing her, and she gives in but does not cry. She wants him to stop, and he does, then takes the suitcases to the car and comes back for one final embrace. Kamileh calls out. The taxi driver comes over and she tells him not to drive too fast taking Eliyya to Beirut and tells him to wait in the airport with him to make sure about his flight and to stop by to see her on his way back to let her know the plane took off with him. The driver promises to do everything she asked and then she hears the car doors shut, one then the other. She hears Eliyya’s voice as he addresses her for the last time. ‘Mother.’ The driver turns the ignition. Kamileh knows that the car will travel around fifty metres before turning left onto the main road. After enough time has passed for the car to disappear around the bend, she asks Muntaha, ‘Did he look back?’

Muntaha pretends not to hear the question. Kamileh repeats, ‘Did Eliyya look back this way before turning the corner?’

‘He looked. Yes, he looked . . .’ Muntaha lies to her.

A little later, after all the neighbours have left without saying a word all the way to their homes, knowing that Kamileh’s sense of hearing has grown sharper as her vision has grown dim; and after the schoolchildren get bored of looking at her once she goes back to her seat on the balcony near the dahlias; and after all the little kids on their unexpected day off head to the alleys or the video arcades; and after Muntaha claims to have to go home to make lunch, about which Kamileh keeps quiet, knowing well that most of the time Muntaha never makes anything for lunch and just snacks on little things while standing at the sink; after all that, Kamileh takes a deep breath before making herself a cup of coffee and going back to life as usual.

She gropes around the bench and the low tables searching for coffee cups and ashtrays, and while doing this she stumbles upon a notebook left there on the bench. At first she doesn’t know it’s the notebook in which Eliyya wrote all his notes about his trip. She doesn’t know if he’s accidentally forgotten it and would regret that and ask his mother to send it to him one way or another, or if he’s left it there on the bench on the balcony on purpose. However, when later that afternoon she asks Muntaha, who returns to Kamileh’s on this difficult day, to read what is written in the notebook, the first thing she discovers are words that reminded her of the Bible: ‘
And Adam knew Eve, his wife, and she was with child and gave birth to Cain. And so she said that she had been blessed with a man from the Lord. Then she was again with child and gave birth to his brother Abel. Abel was a shepherd and Cain ploughed the fields. And it happened after some time that Cain made an offering of fruits of the earth to the Lord; and Abel also made an offering of the fatted, first-born lambs. The Lord looked upon Abel and his offering, but upon Cain and his offering He did not look 
. . .’

Muntaha gets tired of reading and Kamileh gets tired of listening. Muntaha turns a few pages: ‘
I got more than seven contradictory stories of what started the incident, as if everyone suddenly started shooting at the same time in all directions. Every person I asked had his own story 
. . .’

Muntaha’s attention is drawn to a numbered list that she and Kamileh later discover is a list of everyone killed in the Burj al-Hawa incident. Eliyya didn’t mention them by name, but by their occupations or their family status. Muntaha starts reading about each one and pausing so she and Kamileh can figure out who each one is:
‘
Driver of an American pick-up truck, 1946 Dodge, worked in export transportation, to Syria and Jordan, sometimes as far as Iraq on long hauls, 32 years old, married, four children, the youngest one week old.
’

‘That’s Saeed al-Abras!’

‘Tailor’s apprentice, unmarried, 25 years old.’

‘Farid Badwi al-Semaani!’ Muntaha knew that one.

‘Mechanic trained in a local auto repair shop, had just gotten a promotion at work, manager started giving him some simple repairs to do on his own, unmarried, 25 years old.