In the evening Abu Jamil used to wear a robe. He was the first man I’d ever seen in my life wearing a robe. He wore it over his pyjamas. It was a shiny blue satin robe that gave you goose bumps when you touched it. We felt that our fathers and men in general, would be so embarrassed to be caught by surprise wearing their pyjamas by an unexpected visitor that they’d rush to put their clothes back on. Abu Jamil, on the other hand, was just the opposite, like someone who was so proud of his sleepwear that changing into it early – practically as soon as the sun went down – wasn’t enough for him, so he would go on visits close by in the neighbourhood, accepting invitations for coffee for example, wearing that outfit.
The porter continued his work all alone, stopping to take a break and looking around himself with amazement at the crowd of onlookers. Umm Jamil said only one thing, when the dining room table bumped against the doorframe and got scratched.
‘Abu Jamil is going to be upset.’
Abu Jamil’s excessive cleanliness and caution used to irritate us. It irritated the women, too, how he competed with them in their domain. He polished everything in his path. The bicycles’ frames and handlebars shined under his touch. With him around, Umm Jamil never had to pick up a broom or dust the furniture or wash the windows. He was a knowledgeable expert in matters we thought were monopolised by women. My mother would ask him how to pickle tomatoes or how to fix the Singer sewing machine, fully confident he would have all the right answers. Even though he’d been an employee in the Sûreté Générale – true it was an administrative post as he told us once that he used to receive what he called ‘wires’ or reports and hand them over to the officer in charge – despite that, Abu Jamil never woke up to the age of manliness. And he didn’t care about that at all, but rather was quite satisfied with himself the way he was.
He never entered into the age of manliness, but he was from the Rami family. His name was heavy, and it was heavy upon him, too. There was no ignoring it.
We never knew exactly how they knew they had to leave. It was said at first that there was someone who passed by their house the night after the Burj al-Hawa incident. They pronounced it haaditha, meaning ‘incident’. (It really should be haadith in the masculine, though the feminine ending gave it an element of gravity.) Before that there had been the haadith al-tall, or the Tull incident, which also contributed to its seriousness. (Most probably the oral pronunciation of haadith al-tall, which involves bridging the words together with the liaison and sounds like a feminine ending, led to the dropping of the feminine ending from haaditha.) That incident, in which two people were killed though it was never clear by whom, had been the one that started a series of communal confrontations. A fellow who’d been sprayed with at least ten bullets, and was hit by all of them, had survived. The word haaditha at any rate was a careful and mutually acceptable reference to a murder or a fight of some sort. The feminine ending also signified danger. One side should not bear the responsibility for it without the other side, as in a massacre or an ambush, the kind of thing that would be described as a rabita (trap), referring to an action where some armed men would suddenly start spewing gunfire at someone they’d been told was going to travel the road they had rabatu (blocked), or when some armed men lay in wait along a supply route to waylay their adversaries, gunning down the first ‘fat’ prey that passed by. Eventually the incident’s infamy overwhelmed the town where it took place, just like major battles in military history that grew to be known simply by the place name, so that people would say that so-and-so was killed at Burj al-Hawa, signifying that he was one of the fallen victims of that Sunday in the month of June of the year 1957. Or people would date events like a birth or a wedding in terms of before or after Burj al-Hawa, thus transforming the name of a place into the name of a time. And they also say that the incident ‘st’aamit’ ten minutes. No one knows from where that verb is derived, which in this context is a transitive verb, as opposed to its usage as an intransitive verb in the expression ‘the woman ist’aamit’, meaning she got pregnant, after which she would be called ‘mist’eemeh’ throughout the nine months. The incident is condensed here to the period of time during which the gunfire continued without interruption (or beginning specifically with two shots that were followed by a heavy silence, according to the funeral attendees, which in turn was followed by a small blast from a gun said to be a 9-mm, followed by a relatively long silence, and finally an uninterrupted shower of bullets that stopped just as suddenly and was not ensued by any more gunfire – and that, too, was one of the strange things about the incident) between the supporters of the family headmen and their relatives, and in the presence of those headmen. Perhaps the rush of the relatives and their companions to protect the headmen was what led to such a high number of casualties. Some people who tried to come up with a precise figure estimated that the exchange of gunfire had lasted no more than eight minutes or even five, but it was difficult to determine an exact time.
Someone passed by Abu Jamil’s at night to warn them they must move away from there. ‘We won’t be able to protect you,’ they had said. That was how they threatened Abu Jamil. They also told us someone threw a rock at their window and broke the glass – not just once but twice. People also spread the rumour that they found a mark drawn on their door, but we searched for it and never found it. We also looked for the broken glass and didn’t find that either. They were determined to leave, though.
The porter finished piling the things from the house into the truck. He wasn’t able to lift the kibbeh mortar. It was a huge mortar made of sumac-coloured stone.
‘Just leave it there!’ Umm Jamil said.
No one offered to help.
The porter arranged the items from largest to smallest and from sturdiest to most fragile. The only way the people helped him was with their advice: don’t put wood on top of wood, use cushions to separate, that’s not placed well, it might fall out along the way. Moving household furniture required knowledge and skill. The porter worked, following the directions without looking to see which observer was giving them. In similar fashion, the people of the quarter always had a say in the goings on in Abu Jamil’s house. It was like an open-forum discussion of the children’s education, which doctors to choose and Abu Jamil’s early retirement. And on this day, too, the neighbours gave their opinions about their departure.
We were surprised at the way one man could empty out and stuff into that tight space all those items related to eating, drinking coffee, having get-togethers, sleeping, all the women’s whispered intimacies, the evening gatherings on hot summer nights and the children’s clamour that ended only at bedtime, the women’s morning social visits, the radio, the laughter, the tears – all the stuff of life that reverberated in Abu Jamil’s house. The loading was complete, so now the porter worked on securing everything. For the first time, some assistance was required to tie the ropes and pull them tight. He secured the load and sat on top of it, waiting. Now it was his turn to observe us.
Umm Jamil locked all the windows and doors. The driver started the motor. Umm Jamil looked at the neighbours and said, ‘Forgive our shortcomings.’
That was all. But she was thinking, I believe, about a lot of other things she never said. Maybe she was expecting the people of the quarter to hold onto them and never let them go.
The truck slowly made its way out of our narrow roads. We didn’t hop to our feet to direct the driver uphill. We were scattered and now it was behind the truck where the scene was unfolding. Umm Jamil and her children were walking behind the truck, wearing their house clothes and light shoes like they did every day. The truck disappeared around the first bend and they continued following behind. I got away from my mother and ran after them.
‘Don’t go too far!’ our mothers yelled.
We kids ran after them, staying some distance back. Each one had a role to play. They were leaving, never to return, and we were only escorting them. Dalal, who had grown physically but not mentally, joined us. The neighb
ours out on the balconies and in the middle of the street just stood silently after the truck left and Umm Jamil and her children disappeared around the bend. They stood looking at the closed door.
We followed after them silently. Occasionally Umm Jamil’s children would look back and their mother would admonish them to keep going. When they reached the road leading to the Upper Quarter, that is before they crossed the main road, they all turned to look back at us. Their mother looked at us, too. They turned in our direction. They didn’t wave to us, and they didn’t say a word before continuing on their way. We, in turn, looked at each other and went our separate ways back to our neighbourhood. Only Dalal continued to follow them. She was taken by what was happening and kept following behind the truck until we called to her to come back. She stopped for a moment in the middle of the road, confused, and then turned to head back to our quarter. Despite her massive size, Dalal didn’t know where the boundary of our quarter was and she wasn’t given the same warnings about not crossing the main road, possibly because no one feared she would be exposed to danger because of her naïveté.
The cat was more determined than Dalal. When I went back home, the circle of onlookers had broken up, so I immediately headed for the barrel where I had left the cat. I heard her meowing. She wasn’t dead. I lifted the cover and she jumped up to me, squinting and blinking from the sudden influx of light. She jumped down onto the ground, looked around, prepared herself a little, sniffed in and blew out her breath and started to run, run quickly. I went after her as fast as I could but wasn’t able to catch her. She went down the same road, the road the truck had travelled, the road Umm Jamil and her children had walked. She didn’t stop even for a second in front of the door to their house, didn’t even look in its direction, as if she’d never gone inside it before. She simply turned uphill and reached the main road, even though she had never been as far as the main road before. She crossed it like an arrow, as if it were a road she crossed every day, and then went right where the truck had disappeared with the porter riding on the roof wearing his copper badge, number 64.
Suddenly and with no advance warning, approximately two weeks after the departure of Abu Jamil’s family from the quarter, two men arrived at the door to the vacant house. They fiddled with it a little with a sharp object until it opened. I hurried to tell my mother only to find out that she already knew what was going on. I was surprised and continue to be surprised by the way the news had spread without any fuss. I wanted so badly to ask my mother how she knew that some people were going to come and occupy Abu Jamil’s house.
I later saw Abu Jamil’s new house, over there where they went when they left. I passed by their new house. They liked houses with open spaces in the front. They were sitting on wooden benches, drinking coffee in the early evening, and I got the feeling that they were happy and laughing. I didn’t see Abu Jamil as I passed by. No doubt at that time of day he was making his tour of visits with the neighbours – his new neighbours – wearing his robe and pyjamas. Abu Jamil’s house wasn’t far away in exile somewhere, as I had imagined. In fact, they had found a new life for themselves that didn’t include us and was far away from us. I had thought they would never recover from leaving our quarter and that taking up residence elsewhere would mean days of sadness and longing for us. Actually, I felt a little jealous. I didn’t want Abu Jamil’s family to be happy far away from us. My only consolation was hearing that in his new quarter Abu Jamil had stopped renting out bicycles. He had tried to keep it up but closed shop and sold all his bicycles when one of the children he rented to got into an accident and broke both his legs. I didn’t want Abu Jamil’s family to be happy where they were living, but I didn’t want to admit that I had started to like the people who occupied Abu Jamil’s old house. They kept nightingales in cages and they also drank coffee outside on moonlit nights.
Chapter 14
Another Victim of Blind Vengeance?
From our correspondent in Tripoli:
The body of 41-year-old Jirjis Tanios al-Indari was discovered Friday morning inside his home in Barqa. The criminal investigation unit inspected the scene and determined he had been dead for at least twenty-four hours. The cause of death is yet to be determined, but in view of the current state of affairs in the northern town, ridden with acts of revenge, it appears that Al-Indari may have been the latest victim of the bloody series of events, though he does not belong to any of the major feuding families. An investigation is underway with the hope that this will mark an end to the violence in the centuries-old Lebanese town. The Sada Lubnan team wishes the town a speedy rescue from this ordeal so the rule of law and reason can once again solve the differences between its people.
(Sada Lubnan newspaper, 27 April 1957)
Nishan Hovsep Davidian and his compatriot and competitor Nazaret had inherited the photography profession from their fathers, who brought with them from Istanbul in their hasty and tragic flight to Lebanon. But Jorge – whose real name was Jirjis al-Indari – had returned from distant Montevideo with indoor photography as a hobby. In fact, he told one of the few people he conversed with here that he learned the profession from a German-Jewish photographer who fled to Bolivia to escape Nazi persecution at the end of the 1930s. A small minority in the town today still remembered Jorge – that young man with the sad, long face and hair that was always dishevelled as if whatever he was preoccupied with was much more important than dealing with trivial matters like combing his hair or shaving his beard or bathing. That small minority knew little more about him than his family origins and which of his distant relatives were still alive. He was found dead less than a year after his return. He had returned in 1956, at the height of the problems. He apparently hadn’t heard about them while he was away and they didn’t influence him very much when he came back. The fact was he was found dead, although there wasn’t any blood. He was found in the makeshift studio he had built in a room out in the little garden planted with orange trees, behind the family house that had waited a long time for his return. Jorge refused to carry his camera around in order to take pictures of interested customers as the Armenian photographers did; rather, he waited for customers to come to his room. Some came at first, but sitting in front of the camera was exhausting, like sitting for an artist’s painting, because Jorge would keep going back and forth from the camera lens to the customer countless times, adjusting his posture and other minute details. He constantly advised his subject to sit still, only to tilt his chin for him to the right or to the left with his hand, or brush off whatever was clinging to his jacket, or come at him with a comb and fix a stray strand of hair. The torture of sitting for him so exasperated the people wishing to have their pictures taken that they stopped going to him. And he had returned from Montevideo under circumstances unbeknown to anyone, although in their usual way people liked to speculate about the reasons behind every strange behaviour and said that he had fled from a woman who was in love with him and was out for revenge after he betrayed her. That was why he spent the majority of his time inside that studio of his, where no one saw him except a small group of close neighbours. Rarely did he go outside, even if a blast of gunfire broke out in the nearby streets. It was rumoured that he had committed suicide or that some woman had poisoned him. The notion that he was a womaniser clung to him despite his not appearing to be the romantic or adventurous type at all. Anyway, the people who found him in the studio immediately sent for Nishan Davidian. In the studio, the camera was propped on a tripod and the lighting equipment was all set up and turned on from every side of the little room. After they removed the body, Nishan applied himself to examining the room’s contents. He gathered all the photos he found and put them in a sack.
When he got to the camera, and at this point he found himself unsupervised, he opened it and removed the film. He closed up the room and went back to his shop to develop the film, hoping to discover even one of that strange photographer’s many secrets.
First Nishan examined the pictures tha
t were in Jorge’s sack. Lo and behold, what he found was an extensive collection of pictures of women. Countless portraits. Nishan raised his eyebrows in wonder. Most of them were of a woman by herself, the same woman, and sometimes pictures of two women. Women and fabrics and a bed. The same bed. Why all this waste of film and photo paper, wondered the ever-thrifty Nishan. The women in the pictures were naked, but their nakedness was veiled with fabric – either silk or satin. The pieces of fabric were the same but sometimes the woman would drape them around her breasts, or if her breasts were covered up by her pose, she would toss the fabric over her shoulders with an unaffected coquettishness. No picture was exactly like any of the others. The woman’s pose was always different. There was a variety of poses that were mildly provocative and expressions that wouldn’t offend anyone. The fabric served a variety of purposes. Jorge’s collection seemed to be a series of practice exercises leading to the perfect shot, which of course Nishan Davidian never found. He wondered only if the women who appeared in Jorge al-Indari’s pictures were from their same town or were strangers. Or had he taken the pictures in far-off Montevideo, where Nishan imagined a much freer society in which girls could pose in front of a photographer with a level of ease he felt wasn’t possible here.
The next day Nishan planned to develop the film he had found in Jorge’s camera up on the tripod in the studio. It was clear the man had an odd style and a tendency to waste rolls of film. Nishan was quick to notice that all the photos Jorge shot before he died were nothing but pictures of himself, twenty or more self-portraits of Jorge al-Indari, which were difficult to tell apart on first glance. In all of them he appeared the same way: sitting on a chair and looking directly into the lens – nothing more, nothing less. Nishan realised that Jorge must have set the shutter release and then rushed back to sit for the picture each time.
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