No, I never told you this before today. I never told you anything at all. Before you left, you were young, I felt you were too young to know. You heard about it from people, from here and there. And now I know that you’ve come back to ask, but you don’t want to ask me personally. You visit the widows of the Burj al-Hawa incident and you don’t ask me. People will say anything. You won’t get anywhere with them. They will lie to you. The ones who lost a relative up there will try to make a hero out of him, saying he paid the price of having held his head up high. And the ones who were there and got out of it alive don’t know what to say. They prefer to say nothing. Either way, if they chose to run, they’re not going to talk, and if they shot an adversary, they still won’t talk.
I know. I asked the doctor, ‘How was my husband shot?’ He said, ‘Look here,’ and I looked. ‘The two bullets entered here through his back. The opening here is narrow. And they exited from here, from his chest. The opening here is wide.’ Yes, your father had heart. He knew how to shoot and how to position himself in a battle, but they got him from behind. I heard all the stories. I was bombarded with all kinds of names, but after forty years, who cares?
I’m not going to give you advice about what you should do, because I don’t have a say. But if you get married, I insist that your wife give you a son right away. I’m sure it will be a boy. Handsome, blond, with blue eyes like yours. Don’t be afraid. Don’t laugh. Don’t be ashamed of yourself. People assured me she is beautiful. God’s best gift to a woman is the gift of beauty. Believe me, she won’t be worth much without her beauty. Have a child with her. Wrench him out of her and tell yourself this is the greatest blessing God can give a person.
Chapter 7
The shopkeeper was in his seventies, dark brown complexion, thin, sitting there behind the scales, looking like an old wretch. He rested his hands on the table and looked out. The ancient stone arch protected him from the heat.
From where he was, he could see a few metres down the road and had a view of part of the square and the western gate to the church. The passing cars stirred up the dust. The square was drenched in sunlight that accentuated the darkness inside, where the man sat waiting for his lunch.
His wife would bring it soon: okra with rice, olives, two hot green peppers and a glass of arak to help wash it all down. He liked all kinds of hot and spicy food, faithful to his birth place: São Paulo. His wife tied a polka dot scarf around her head, carried the plates over to the shop and placed them on the table next to the old scales without talking to him, and went back home. They’d been together a long time, and there weren’t many words left to exchange.
His shop was never the same after the incident. It had deteriorated along with his health. The first products to go were yogurt and cheese and anything else that needed refrigeration, after power cuts became more frequent and the refrigerator broke down and he gave up trying to fix it. Next he gave up anything that might wilt — vegetables, fruit, bunches of bananas, and boxes of oranges. He kept only those colourful bags of potato chips and two or three brands of cigarettes which he stored in empty glass containers, the kind one might imagine having once been filled with grains, and a hanging metal basket in which his wife put spare fresh eggs from her own chickens.
Despite everything, he didn’t close his shop. He didn’t know what had happened to the other shops. There had been four or five of them around the square that started closing down, one after the other. The owners’ children went off to school or went abroad in order to secure a comfortable retirement for their parents. He had been the only one to persevere. He arrived at seven in the morning and left at eight in the evening. He sat all day looking out onto the square.
People said the shopkeeper saw everything. But which shop? When the battle began, a number of men took refuge in one of the shops, according to the magistrate’s report.
Eliyya obtained a copy of the report and set off in a taxi — a Mercedes that was old, like its driver, who kept glancing up at him in the rearview mirror. The bends were frequent and the road was narrow. There was a huge quarry machine chipping away at the mountain. They both felt ill.
Houses began to appear on both sides of the road. Scattered villas, copies of homes of the American South with grand entrances, a façade that reminded one of a Roman temple, various types of Swiss chalet, and between them, here and there, a few modest houses. All of a sudden there appeared a building made of white stone in Japanese architectural style, or something like it.
‘Who designed those houses?’ Eliyya exclaimed when he saw them. ‘How can they live in them?’
‘They’re from diamond money and commerce… the owners got to Africa early on,’ the driver explained with a tinge of envy.
He meant that they had emigrated to Africa and amassed huge fortunes when it was still easy to take advantage of the native black population there.
The car reached the Old Quarter — a conglomeration of houses all stuck together.
‘There’s the church, there’s the square and the shops,’ the driver said.
The driver didn’t ask Eliyya who he was. He simply tossed his cigarette butt out of the car window and asked, ‘Where should I drop you?’
‘In front of the church.’
The driver mumbled something and swerved the car, parking it under the shady eucalyptus tree and said he would wait for him there.
‘Take your time. The church is over there.’
The driver walked over to the shop to ask for a drink of cold water. Eliyya saw him from a distance chatting briefly with the man sitting there eating okra and rice. He kept his eyes on his passenger to see when he would come back to the car. Perhaps he would slide the driver’s seat back and seize the opportunity to take a little nap. Under the shade of the eucalyptus tree, the breeze was soothing.
Eliyya began taking pictures immediately, as if he were stealing them and there was only a short window of time before someone discovered what he was doing and tried to stop him. It was a labyrinth of alleyways and houses. Eliyya gazed at the square. It was the first time he’d ever come to this town. In the past, he could never get anyone to come with him. He shaded his face from the strong sun with his right hand.
The shopkeeper had grown accustomed to journalists. They had come in large numbers at the beginning, some the very next day, on the Monday. At the time, the exact number of dead and wounded hadn’t been determined because they’d been taken to several different hospitals in the city. The magistrate’s report listed the names of twenty-four dead including four women, and twenty-eight wounded including seven women and a nun. There were also a large number of wounded who ran off and were not included in the investigation. The journalists continued to come throughout the summer of 1957, until the beginning of the ‘revolution’. There were journalists from Beirut and foreign correspondents from Europe taking pictures of people and the square. They stopped passers-by, asking all kinds of questions, and went around the church noting down in their little notebooks their first impressions, which they then incorporated into their articles.
The most famous of them was Aline Lahhoud, who, despite her experience in journalism, could not help resorting to naïve metaphors. She was constantly trying to cover up the gaps in her spoken Arabic with French expressions like déjà or somme toute and affectionately holding people’s hands or clothes as she spoke to them, both men and women, in order to facilitate communication. Three days after the incident she visited the crime scene, accompanied by the photographer Fuad Haddad. Contrary to her usual practice of flaunting the physical gifts God had endowed her with, and of which she was well aware, she chose to wear a modest grey outfit. Half-mourning, as they say, out of respect for the dead. And in line with her usual practice, before writing her article, before even arriving at the scene of the events, she chose the title: ‘When the Gods Nodded Off’. She kept repeating it to Fuad Haddad using a variety of intonations until she settled on it. At that point, she began writing an article to match her title. She embellished her lengthy investigation with a particular picture. No one knew how she had managed to obtain it. Later, people said that she confused the magistrate investigating the incident and drew his attention to the presence of photographers at the funeral, whose witnessing of the events and whose pictures could be useful, especially since the name of one of them appeared among the names of the wounded: Nishan Hovsep Davidian, age 26, a bullet wound to the lower right leg.