In the picture there were five young men looking anxiously at the camera. Happy to be together, they huddled close to each other to make sure no one was left out of the picture. Aline Lahhoud’s caption read, ‘The last picture. Only a few short minutes after posing for this picture, these five men would meet their death. The bullets of betrayal would mow them down the moment they parted after the picture was taken.’ It was easy to confirm that the young man wearing glasses and standing furthest to the right, the only one of them who had graduated from high school, and who was interested in journalism, actually came out alive. He hadn’t been harmed at all during the exchange of gunfire, but in general it is preferable for this kind of news to be all-encompassing; best to leave out the exception that might reduce its impact on readers. Fuad Haddad took other pictures of the main street in Barqa. Because it was noon, it had been completely deserted except for a woman clad in black walking close to the wall. The first time she ‘listened to silence (that way)’, Aline Lahhoud wrote, ‘in that bereaved town — the silence of the men and the silence of things… and of silence itself,’ as she added, ‘it resonated like a taut string’. From there she moved abruptly from ‘silence’, which she mentioned in her article fourteen times to be exact, to ‘glances’, without so much as a comma. This was a stylistic choice that was expected in such cases since ‘glances’ articulated what a tied tongue could not: dry eyes burning with tears that wouldn’t flow, lying in ambush behind the windows, and looking askance from behind the metal helmets of the soldiers deployed on every corner. Going off on a tangent, she went to Corsica and Sicily in order to suppose that ‘the daggers fashioned especially for revenge that were hanging like relics next to icons of the saints were unsheathed and ready for the right moment to attack’. The final touches were being put on the second chapter of the tragedy. All that was left were the three shots announcing the lifting of the curtain. Who would fire them? And then, using a common metaphor, the elegantly dressed journalist brought out the old cliché of the literary character of Mediterranean violence by stating that ‘the doors were closed and the hearts were closed, too, while pain wore the mask of hatred and the perfume of spring flowers mingled with the lingering scent of anger…’ and persevering, adding in all the elements of her epic…‘the sun was burning and the sky was at its wits’ end after it tried so hard in Burj al-Hawa to stop the tragedy by sending a torrent of rain that was totally unexpected in the middle of June’. She went on to add that the smell of the soil, ‘which was redolent after a long drought, could not stop those men from settling their accounts. It wasn’t the time for being inspired by life’s aroma; it was an ostentatious push towards the precipice.’ Not a single line of Aline Lahhoud’s article was devoid of poetic artifice and no telling of the events of the Burj al-Hawa incident left out the rain. Even if the flirty veteran reporter from the French-language journal Magazine, saw in that downpour some kind of warning or omen of what was to come and proceeded to attribute it to some god from Greek mythology, eyewitnesses confirmed that the heavy rain began to pour down after the outbreak of gunfire, not before. Their explanation for the rain’s timing was that the rainmaker wanted to separate the combatants and limit the harm they inflicted on each other. Others simply deduced that the rain that came pouring down (though one of them insisted what fell was actually the kind of large hail that is rare not only in June but in any month of the year) was nothing short of an expression of God’s wrath over what was transpiring before Him in and around His own house. Or to use lighter terms, the word ‘anger’ would suffice. The deadly incident occurred just two weeks before the legislative elections, which were fraught with warnings that opposition candidates would fail in their run against supporters of the president who was seeking renewal of his term and was using all kinds of pressure for that purpose. Taking a metaphysical approach, Aline Lahhoud turned to Thornton Wilder, the American novelist, and his The Bridge of San Luis Rey: ‘Some say that… to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer day, and some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.’ Was it divine intervention or divine negligence? Reading Aline Lahhoud’s investigation might lead one to imagine the church massacre as a painting belonging to a naïve style, done in bold colours and divided into two tiers. The ones spraying bullets at each other at the Burj al-Hawa church and in the church square would be on the lower tier and above them a mélange of Greek gods and angels. The Christians would be sitting on their little blue clouds smiling — inadvertently or cunningly — before pelting the fighters with rain to separate them.
Even the sixteen-foolscap-page report about the incident that came out on 27 July 1957 did not omit this contrast. In fact, it appeared right in the introductory description of the events. ‘Just as the hour 3:30 drew near and the skies sent down drizzling rain, the procession started moving from the house of the Al-Abd family towards the church, a distance of approximately 200 metres, led by the bishops, monks and nuns. To get out of the rain, people started entering the church from its side doors on the north and south sides. The rest of the procession entered through the western door opposite the town square. No sooner had the procession started entering the church, than a commotion broke out; a bullet was fired outside the church which was the signal and the spark…’ And so it was that the examining magistrate at the Beirut Appeals Court — the investigator in the matter of the breach of internal state security that took place on 16 June 1957 ‘which led to the murder and attempted murder of numerous people, and all the issues that accompanied it or branched out from it, as well as the individuals who participated or interfered in any manner’ — the examining magistrate did not resist his desire to speak about the rain, even though there was no need to mention it in the context of his court brief. At the end of the report, the magistrate, Adib al-Ashqar, asked for the death sentence for a long list of men, some of whom came with witnesses who stated that at the time of the incident the men were at a location far away from the town. Al-Ashqar, signatory to the incident’s sole remaining official document after the participants benefited from a general amnesty that relieved the judicial system of a matter whose events were of the utmost difficulty to reconstruct, repeatedly resorted to a somewhat sentimental style in his comments on ‘the breach in security for the sake of satisfying whims and ambitions’ and in his detailed description of an armed confrontation ‘on the steps of God’s altar’. These introductions were followed up with ratiocinations denoting a suppressed literary style belonging to the writer of the indictment who traced the start of the dispute back to ‘some forty odd years’ during which ‘the animosity buried deep in the breasts grew and intensified over time, waiting for the slightest spark that would set off a civil war and a frenzy of killing…’ Al-Ashqar miraculously escaped unharmed from an assassination attempt when a car on the Beirut highway passed by him and shots were fired at him, because of what was considered bias on his part against one of the parties.