‘I’m more than seventy years old, my son…’
‘So…’
Eliyya was alarmed for a moment. It was as though there was an eye from above watching him and following him. Soon, however, he became aware of the presence of the taxi driver. He was asleep, stretched back in the driver’s seat, snoring under the shade of the eucalyptus tree. The discovery made Eliyya feel at ease.
‘The taxi driver must have told you…’
The shopkeeper continued without commenting, which confirmed Eliyya’s suspicion. ‘There was a photographer who approached your father and his friend and offered to take their picture. I remember that your father put a cigarette in his mouth to pose for the picture. It was the fashion in those days. Young men always posed for pictures with cigarettes dangling from their mouths. I’m not hiding anything. I’m telling you what I saw. But a few minutes later the bullets started to fly and so I hid behind the shop front and when I looked up the shop was empty…’
There are some stories you listen to and you can tell they’re missing something and that whoever is telling them knows more than he is letting on. Hand gestures and eye movements. The shopkeeper, born of a marriage-happy father and a Brazilian mother, loved to spice up his stories. That was part of his nature.
‘My son, there were people who were killed by their own relatives’ bullets…’ Then he added with a whisper, ‘or their friends’ bullets…’
Eliyya turned towards him, and so the man continued. ‘At any rate, don’t believe everything you hear.’
That was what everyone advised.
The shopkeeper finished eating the okra and rice and drank the last sips of the glass of arak on the table in front of him while Eliyya cast a last glance at the square.
On the way back, the taxi driver stayed silent, but he kept glancing up at Eliyya in his mirror every time he rounded a sharp bend or had to stop.
Chapter 8
The houses of the commoners, who were the vast majority, were small and poor, mostly consisting of one or two rooms and an outhouse. They were piled up on top of each other in cramped neighbourhoods, low, damp houses with adobe roofs that required flattening with a stone roller in the winter to prevent leaks and on which springtime grass sprouted up in the month of May.
At the turn of the twentieth century, one of the notables built a three-story house out of sandstone, which he was able to pay for, most probably, from money he earned when he first emigrated. The family, rather self-importantly, called it Al-Amaara (The Edifice). They had owned another spacious and imposing house before that which they called Al-Kubra, (The Grand). Built by one of their elders more than a century before, it had high arched ceilings, and in the 1940s the government could not find a more spacious accommodation for its head office.
In the family’s view, the great houses were not just a matter of chiselled stone, double and triple archways and arcades, and French Honeybee red tiled roofs that were added later on. That style was imitated by anyone who managed to amass a small fortune either through emigration or by smuggling hashish across the roads of the Beqaa Valley that led to the sea, or by those who were contracted by the post-Independence government to do public works. Rather, a great house meant a high, open door, a generous meal, and a willingness to put up with the commoners and their ignorance, rough appearances, naïve questions and endless exuberance, simple folk who were content to sit in the presence of those families, simply listening to what they said and watching the little things they did.
These houses were an unavoidable stop for literati or pilgrims who were sent to the East from Europe. If they worked for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, they would include in their report a special reference to them, or highlight them in literary accounts of their trip telling of the hospitality and generosity of the house’s family and how they used gold-plated forks and knives when they ate, a rarity in the East.
The owners of these great houses also had Ottoman titles, the most important of which was ‘Bey’ and the rarest, ‘Pasha’. They were granted these titles through a decree signed by Moulay Sultan Abdel Hamid and were required to meet with a minister from Istanbul to receive them. They were kept in a locked drawer along with property deeds and money, which was sometimes rumoured to have come from extortion payments or loan repayments. Some of these monies were later donated to the Maronite Charitable Endowment in a moment of weakness or out of gratitude for being healed of an incurable disease.
An oilpainting of the house’s patriarch and founder was prominently displayed in the main part of the house. He had tender features and was wearing a city suit, which looked more like a coastal city businessman’s suit than that of a notable. On either side of the big painting were photographs of women sporting stylish hats and playing tennis when the game had first been introduced into the country. Also hanging on the wall was the family tree which extended into a past so distant and glorious it was implausible, a family tree which some Maronite monk who was a friend of the family had worked tirelessly to construct and revise.
The great house also meant a vast tract of land and threshing floors for wheat and an olive press and a foreign nanny for the children. And sometimes, a small church where they celebrated mass on Sundays with friends and where they were buried. And wives, beautiful or otherwise, but always rich, from other notable families in Mount Lebanon that were no less important and wealthy. Naturally, it was only a matter of time before disagreements between the wives’ brothers cropped up, over how to divide up the inheritance in light of the great families’ determination to exclude daughters from inheriting in order to restrict ownership to males.
The visitors who frequented the house did not speak Arabic. It must have been the case, therefore, that one of the young men of the house worked as a translator at the French Consulate in Beirut where he made a wide circle of acquaintances. Or maybe the oldest son had started but not completed his studies in Ayntoura under Father Sarloutte of the Lazarean Order, who in his turn recommended him to the French High Commissioner for one of the deputy positions allotted to the mandate power in the newly established Parliament. Or possibly as Education Minister in a cabinet that didn’t last more than two months. And maybe his father had been appointed as head of a county at a time when Wasa Pasha, the Governor of Mount Lebanon, had a weakness for gifts and invitations to banquets graced with beautiful, flirtatious ladies.
The great families didn’t like to be too numerous. They would give derisive nicknames to cousins who held the family name and tried to make the nicknames stick, singling themselves out as the only pure and unadulterated holders of that name, as a way of proving their true nobility and God-given right to its sole ownership. If any relatives stood beside them to accept condolences for the loss of a member of the family, the esteemed member of the family would yell at them disapprovingly and tell these cousins — ones the general public didn’t recognise as family members — to back off and stay clear of the right side of the church door, which was only for ‘me, my brother, and my nephew’. He would say this in an accent so foreign to them they wondered where the elder had got it from, or thought perhaps he was putting on the accent to distinguish himself from them. It seemed their preference for small numbers and their desire to limit ownership and influence to only a few heirs made them hold back from having many children as well. And so these great houses were always under threat of extinction, as they say.
The symbol and luminary leader of the great house was forever memorialised in a sculpture of him riding a shiny bronze horse, by the famous sculptor Yusef Hwayyek. The day it was unveiled a select group of Lebanese poets and poet singers who hailed from the furthest reaches of the country were in attendance, and at the base of the statue an anonymous line of poetry was inscribed: You filled their hearts with so much fear… They thought the earth had sprouted men. The patriarch also appears in a huge oil painting that carries the signature of Daoud Qurm, the famous artist who did not leave a single church without adorning its saints in the most magnificent vestments inspired by the Italian Renaissance. In the painting, which hangs above the altar in Saint George’s Church, the patriarch brandishes his sword high, his eyes peeled to the horizon, in front of the church courtyard. Saint George also appears, riding on horseback with his spear held high.