Deep down you’re laughing at me. Go ahead, laugh, but I don’t wish my life on anyone. The doctors got tired of me. I used to go on my own to see them. At Hôtel Dieu Hospital the French doctor made fun of me and said the same thing as Saint Elias. ‘Don’t come back here without your husband, because he also has to undergo medical tests. And if he’s already convinced you that the problem is you, tell him that men can be sterile, too…’
I didn’t go back to that doctor. The worst times for me were when I’d go out on the balcony and see the laundry hanging out on rooftops and balconies, especially when I caught sight of baby clothes, their little coloured shirts and little socks hanging there, each with its own clothes pin, and also their little towels and cloth diapers. In those days they used to wash the diapers and hang them to dry, not throw them away like today. Those were days of poverty and suffering.
Before I got pregnant, and when your father was still alive, I went down to the souk in Tripoli. I bought diapers and hid them well so no one could see them and make fun of me. Yusef was afraid I was going crazy. I bought baby clothes, little shoes and all the necessities. I had everything I needed for a baby. Sometimes when I was alone I enjoyed taking them out and looking at them. I would spread everything I had bought all over the bedroom and gaze at it. Finally I insisted on buying a cradle. I said to myself, if I don’t buy a cradle I won’t have a baby. It had to be a genuine wooden rocking cradle. It was difficult getting it into the house secretly because my husband didn’t want people to gossip, and so we waited until night to bring it in from the car. There it is right over there. Look. Near the door. You’ve grown up now, Eliyya, and you don’t have any need for it anymore, so I planted flowers in it.
My life became very difficult. I would pound my belly in anger. I would go crying to my mother and she told me stories about women who got pregnant after they had lost hope. This one was in her forties, and this other one was forty-five. ‘Don’t give up, Kamileh. Don’t let your husband run away from you.’
I started hating other people’s children, hating even the mention and the sight of children. My women friends, little by little, started avoiding all talk of children in my presence. Previously they would go on and on with anecdotes about their little ones whenever they came over. Funny stories about them at school and the difficulty of bringing them up, their first words, their many sparks of intelligence. They’d say all this as if they were upset. ‘No soul is brought to life unless another soul dies!’
The thing that hurt me most was their complaining about the difficulty of raising children. They must have sensed my annoyance whenever the topic of children came up, and so they stopped counting how many of our friends were pregnant and stopped telling stories about cravings and weaning and so on. I would see them sometimes winking at each other to change the subject out of consideration for me when the talk even accidentally turned to stories of pregnancy and giving birth or christenings and first communions. After a period of time, they stopped even bringing their children with them, and finally they stopped coming to visit me at all. Being around me became difficult. People know these things. They knew that talking about children hurt me, suffocated me. What was worse was that I started consoling myself with news of tragedies. Even tragedies that befell people I knew. But my mother always remained optimistic that I would have a child and she would cite examples and scores of stories about late pregnancies. She kept saying for years, ‘You’re still young, Kamileh,’ and she would encourage me to sleep with my husband.
The truth was that we had grown lazy about sleeping together. You’re a man now. Why shouldn’t I tell you all this? Your father used to stay out late at night. His whole life he loved staying up late while I went to bed early. Someone came to tell me that he was womanising. I loved him and I didn’t care. I’d say to myself, as long as I don’t give him children, he has the right to take up with someone else. Don’t be surprised. That’s the way I am. I was convinced of this idea. Your generation certainly doesn’t think that way. I don’t know whether I made it up on my own or if someone convinced me of it. I kept quiet about his relations with other women. I never made him feel that I was jealous, and the truth was I didn’t really feel jealous. I knew that he loved me, and that feeling was enough for me. Until that one day when I saw him cleaning his revolver, spreading the pieces out in front of him on the table and polishing them with oil and fiddling with them. I asked him what he was doing. He said he was getting ready to participate in the next day’s memorial service for the bishop’s brother in Burj al-Hawa.
‘Why the gun, if you’re going to church for a change?’
‘This is our way of doing things around here,’ he answered, smiling.
‘Do you have to go?’
I had a dark feeling. At that time I was trying very hard to prevent him from participating in gatherings. I was more comfortable when he went gambling and womanising.
I remember I asked him that day, ‘Are Fuad al-Rami and his brother Butros going to the service?’
You know them, Eliyya, your father’s friends from his youth. Despite tensions between our families he still liked them and associated with them. He invited them to dinner sometimes on the balcony right here, and I would serve them until late into the night. They would play cards and I think he went womanising with them, because they were well-to-do bachelors who loved to gamble and drink and womanise. He hesitated a little when I asked about them and said he didn’t know whether they were going to accompany the family’s zaeem. They didn’t like trouble.
‘You know how they are, they love life,’ he said to me. So I asked him if he were to confront them one day, would he shoot at them? He laughed at the possibility. ‘Fuad and Butros al-Rami? How could I ever fight them?’
I was worried about him anyway and said to myself that if he died I would die too. I figured the easiest way would be poison. I’d drink some poison and be done with it. I imagined how I would kill myself, but no one really dies for someone else.
Early that night he combed his hair and shaved for the second time that day, the way he always did when he intended to stay out late. He poured half a bottle of cologne on himself, went towards the door, opened it and walked out without even saying goodbye to me. But I stood in his way.
‘Tonight I want to get pregnant,’ I said to him.
He laughed at me and tried to push me out of his way. ‘If it was going to rain, we’d have seen some clouds by now…’ He used to say that despairingly every time I brought up the topic of getting pregnant.
I begged him. He also loved me. He agreed. It’s true he used to make fun of me and my attempts, but his heart was sad. I don’t know why he wanted to appear to be above having children. He’d say things to make us both feel better. People and friends used to console him with sayings like ‘Children are nothing but worry, and the older they get, the bigger the worry’ or ‘This is God’s will…’ He went with men of his family to that memorial service for the soul of the bishop’s brother, may God dig him a deep hole in hell. He had died a year or two earlier. What devil suggested to the bishop that he should hold a service for him and invite all those people to it one week before the general elections? Ever since that day I can’t stand priests or anything related to priests.
Yusef left at one in the afternoon. They met somewhere and went up to the church in one procession. At five o’clock, he came back with the dead. They put them all in a small truck. They were tall young men and their feet stuck out the end. He had been shot in the back: two bullets. One pierced his heart. They shot him from behind.