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.
‘Arabic teacher, elementary and middle school levels, and chief editor of a periodical school magazine calling for liberation and education for girls and other progressive ideals, liked corresponding with famous great thinkers of the time and received letters from them which he preserved with care, 26 years old, unmarried.’
‘That’s Michel al-Rami.’
The descriptions, ages and occupations go on and on:‘Watchman hired by olive grove proprietors who determines the beginning of harvest and wards off encroachers and stops goat herders from going through the groves and turns a blind eye to the gleaners who come to collect the stray olives at the end of the season, carried a gun as part of his job, 38 years old, seven children, the last born three months after his death and named after him.
‘Butcher, 38 years old, seven children, the oldest 15 years old.
‘Taxi driver, Barqa–Tripoli route and Tripoli–Beirut route sometimes, 27 years old, married with four children.
‘18 years old, not in school as he found it unbearably difficult to do maths and French so he dropped out, not employed despite having made a futile attempt at learning to be a barber and then a carpenter, still young, his life hadn’t yet begun.’
‘Isn’t that your cousin, Muntaha? Your aunt Zahiyya’s son?’
‘Employee at one of the banks in the city – the Lebanese-African Bank – had just got a new job only two weeks earlier, unmarried, 26 years old.
‘Clerk assigned to the judge presiding at the local government building on Tuesdays and Thursdays, 26 years old, married with two children.
‘Australian expatriate who’d come back to the country a few weeks before after hearing news that his relatives were facing major threats, 33 years old, married, had four children at the time of the incident, two were later killed in the ensuing violence.
‘Not known to have stable employment though did well for himself. Did a lot of buying and selling, was said that one day before the incident he got a good deal on some guns and sold a bunch of them to his cousins and some to the family of the enemy, too, some people wanted to believe he was shot by one of those guns he sold to his enemies, married with five children.’
And then suddenly, just before the end: ‘Gambler, opened some clubs here and there, partnered with others here and there, played cards and fixed the deck, 42 years old, married, not blessed with children.’
Muntaha reads that one and stops.
‘That’s Yusef, isn’t it?’ Kamileh says.
‘Maybe.’ Muntaha regrets having read what Eliyya wrote about his father. Something caught Kamileh’s attention. She grabs Muntaha’s hand. ‘Read that to me again.’
Muntaha obliges. ‘Gambler, opened some clubs here and there, partnered with others here and there, played cards and fixed the deck, 42 years old, married.’
‘Is that it?’
‘Yes, that’s it.’
‘You’re a liar, Muntaha,’ Kamileh says, swiping the notebook from her hands.
She tears it apart. She tears out the open page first.
After Muntaha leaves she hides it away. Even after that, she can’t bear it. She takes it out of its hiding place. She feels its pages. She gropes through it a little. She lights a fire and burns it.
/> She finds relief.
From now on, she isn’t going to bother with putting things back in their places. She is no longer obliged to open the curtains every morning, nice and wide like Eliyya had done to get a full view of the mountain. Eliyya was right to open the curtains wide and fill himself with a view of the sky and the high mountains, but Kamileh doesn’t want to look and have her eyes fall upon Burj al-Hawa right over there on the mountainside. She can’t see one metre in front of her, but despite that she still closed the curtains to hide the view of that town which she would never dare set foot in or pass through ever again. She doesn’t have to get out of bed at night anymore to lock the door with two turns of the key. She will open up all her locked boxes and leave everything out in the open, not keep it hidden from Eliyya anymore. She will take out all of ‘Yusef’s things’ and put her husband’s pictures back on the walls or the table with the other framed pictures. And tonight she will fall asleep to the sound of her own voice again. She will play the tape right next to her head and listen to how her voice used to sound so many years ago when she sang:
Ahmad Mohammed Ali Pasha wanted my demise
And the day it was a Friday
And everyone was there on time
They sat me on a camel, high very high
The executioner steered it and led the way . . .
Chapter 23
The whole way from Lebanon to Cyprus, Eliyya was quiet and anxious; he wished to be alone. He barely mumbled a thank you to the pretty hostess who brought him a glass of tomato juice. He buried his head in a book he’d brought along specifically for the purpose of appearing to anyone who might look at him to be a seasoned traveller, undaunted by take-off or the sudden bouts of turbulence that bumped the plane around as it ascended into the pure clear sky at sunset. But he hadn’t been able to read a single sentence. The train of thought binding the succession of sentences together before their reader was constantly being severed and the words and meanings were strewn haphazardly in his mind. Every take-off, every start of an ascent into the air, had always frightened him. This was a short flight, but his belongings encumbered him – a carry-on bag full of food and the accordion, especially the accordion, a problem he hadn’t been able to solve. He had placed the bag of food that Kamileh had packed for him in the overhead compartment designed for carry-on luggage, but the accordion didn’t fit, so he kept it by him. He fumbled with it, sometimes putting it between his legs, other times on his lap. The heavy-set middle-aged man with the dark complexion and moustache sitting beside him annoyed him. From the start of the trip he asked nosy and persistent questions about Eliyya’s name, where he was born, where he was travelling to, but to no avail. Eliyya guessed the man was a used car salesman and had decided not to answer any of his questions, and so having failed, the man occupied himself by looking out the window. The man had rushed to get that window seat the second he got on the plane so he could look idiotically and absent-mindedly out at the clear sea and the sun-lit clouds, as if he was reading a book, all the way until the plane touched down with a smooth landing that Eliyya wasn’t expecting.
At the airport in Larnaca Eliyya waited long hours into the night for his next flight, his bags piled beside him. He was still uptight. The faces of the few passengers in the gate area were at once familiar and intense, intense like the colour of their skin. They were Arabs or their cousins from Cyprus, Turkey or Greece. There were also some young Lebanese men on their way back home, singing mawwaals to kill time. And there was a group of slender blonde European tourists. They were travelling light, wearing shorts and apparently used to travelling and to airports, probably travelling in the opposite direction. It was a long wait, so Eliyya opened the bag of food that he had kept with him out of respect for his mother’s wishes. It was very heavy on his shoulder and it was going to be a long trip to New York. The first thing he inspected was the kibbeh patties. He opened one and stuck his finger into the lamb fat filling; it was thick and dry. He set it aside and opened up the cheese, poking his fingers into the salty white mass. He took a bite – his first and last. It was a big chunk which he popped into his mouth after making sure no one was looking. He savoured it slowly. He let it melt in his mouth before swallowing it, allowing the goat flavour to rise up into his nostrils and nearly intoxicate him: the smell of thick, black, goat hide. When at around two o’clock in the morning they announced to passengers that the flight was about to begin boarding, he looked around before leaving the kibbeh and the package of cheese on the chair where he had been sitting. He left it there and avoided looking back. He pushed the rest of his suitcases in front of him on the baggage cart and walked away.
On the plane taking him away to Europe, stray glances here and there still sought him out and stalked him. He carried on a conversation in French with a young man with long hair and tattered clothes who said he was on his way back from Kathmandu. He had a strong odour and said he was looking for customers to whom he could sell small quantities of hashish. When the man asked Eliyya his name, he answered ‘Elie’ in French without hesitation. The man apologised for not giving Eliyya his name and address because, he said, the airport police and Interpol were looking for him. In his turn, he guessed Eliyya wasn’t French from his accent. ‘You’re Belgian or Canadian, aren’t you?’ Eliyya gave a sly smile and didn’t reply. He was at ease now, knowing that he’d re-entered the part of the world where his place of birth wouldn’t stalk him anymore.
At Orly airport he had a shorter layover. He left the bag of food, or what was left of it anyway, on one of the seats in the gate area, hoping some other passenger would take it. He left it and went to poke around the expensive shops, but the French security guard who was making his rounds in the various gate areas of the airport shouted to him to take his suitcase with him. People simply didn’t leave suitcases unattended in airports anymore. He bought a new notebook from one of the bookstores and tossed the pistachio cookies and the labneh balls submersed in olive oil into the trash can. Now his burden was a bit lighter. He later regretted tossing the pistachio cookies a little.
On board the plane to New York, Eliyya recorded his thoughts in his notebook: Here I am, travelling above the Atlantic Ocean inside a diamond wrapped in a white-hued infinity, more like a suffocating prison. Next to me is a young woman like the ones I dreamt of in my early adolescence: thin-framed glasses, mysterious, beautiful . . . He didn’t write that she was a blonde, his type. He ventured to scrutinise the other passengers, one at a time, sitting in their seats, but no one looked familiar. He didn’t try to flirt with the girl, but spread out a good number of papers and magazines in front of him and smiled at her with just enough nonchalance to capture her attention on that long night flight. She asked to look at one of the magazines, and so he introduced himself using an English accent. ‘I’m Eli,’ he said. Her name was Suzanne and the flight was going to take hours. She started talking. Usually he didn’t talk, but this Suzanne seemed to be talking to herself as she looked at him. Just like that, with no fancy introductions, she warmed up to him. There was something about him that put people at ease, especially women. She was living alone in New York, she said, and was much attached to her independence. She didn’t have a husband, or any boyfriends. Eliyya smiled inwardly. Women were always making that claim of satisfaction, of loving to be on their own. She went on to say that the most beautiful moment of her day was when she came home in the evening after a long tiring day at the Welfare Office in one of the poor neighbourhoods where she worked, and flung her window open. She would open the window and look up at the stars as they mingled with the city lights. She lived on the top floor and could watch the planes fly in one after another as they traversed the city sky, flashing their lights to signal their approach into the airport: innumerable little dots. She loved the refreshing night air and sought out those sweet moments, moments of temperance, before the tumultuous wave of life came crashing back down on her the next morning. Her goal in life was to make those peaceful moments last as lon
g as possible.
Eliyya paused. He let the girl from New York go on talking, and for a period of time, for almost an entire hour, Eliyya appeared not to have anything to say. He just listened and smiled enough to assure her he was trustworthy, an impression he knew he gave to people who talked to him. She, in turn, wasn’t expecting any response from him, but after describing herself and her daily routine to him, she remembered that being a good conversationalist required showing interest in the listener, so she asked him if he was familiar with New York. At that point, the knot in his tongue was loosened and he started improvising, as he’d grown accustomed to doing, this time with a new story in which he said he lived in New York and had been born in Egypt. He supposedly had grown up in a Jewish family in Alexandria and had a half-crazy paternal aunt whose real name was Sarah, but they called her by the alias Jamila. His aunt claimed that the commander of the British Army, Colonel Roger Whittaker, who was stationed there during WWII and according to her was a hero in the Battle of Elalamein, was in love with her. Supposedly the British Intelligence asked her to collaborate with them in return for a large sum of money, but she refused. Whenever she had trouble finding anyone to listen to her stories, she would gather the children of the family together and tell them her stories of love and disappointment. Eliyya went on to say he had a younger sister who had fallen in love with a young and handsome Muslim. She had run away with him despite the family’s protests and accusations of betrayal. He was finishing up his story with his usual enthusiasm when he noticed that Suzanne, sitting there beside him, was shutting her eyes little by little and the magazine she was holding was about to slip out of her hands. A little baffled, he watched her a while until she had dozed off completely with her head resting on his shoulder. Eliyya continued his story as if Suzanne was still listening to him. He took advantage of her nap to tell her another story.
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