The statue is not of a man dead and buried, for the corpse of the patriarch is still there inside the church, preserved without embalmment in a glass box. Yes, they all insist it was not embalmed. For more than a hundred years the line of visitors passing before his corpse has not stopped, and it was as though he never died. His name was at the top of the list in the census taken just after the Great War, even though he had died at least thirty years before that, and so he was the first of the living and the oldest of the dead. They appealed to him, asking for help and intercession every time they lost something dear to them, such as when a child lost the only coin in his pocket.
They distributed calendars with a picture of him in his name. Sometimes the picture showed him standing in audience with the Pope in Rome when the European Consuls, in collusion with the Maronite Patriarch who was afraid of him, as people asserted, consented to his exile. Another picture showed him wearing a vest embroidered with gold thread. They named the local football team after him as well as a number of organisations founded by emigrants to Mexico and Argentina. They constructed reliefs of his magnificent statue out of wood, steel and adobe and the artists depicted him in battle in the second half of the nineteenth century, corpses piling up around him. Amateurs started their drawings of him with his radiant face and his manly features. He was the subject of all their poems and they elegised him asking heaven to let the April moon shine down on him and on his men and guide them at night through their battles and help them to subdue their enemies. They called him ‘The Hero of Lebanon’, and he was virtuous, unsullied and prudish to the point that he forbade women to roll their sleeves up past their elbows.
After his death his nephews were given preferential treatment. There were three of them and the Turkish Administrative Authorities placated them with administrative positions. And just as the descendents of those great families feared, the first one didn’t have any children, which they assumed was due to his wife’s barrenness, and he died young. The second had a son who died in the prime of his youth from a disease they called ‘reeh al-sudaad’, the ‘cork wind’. His illness lasted for several days, and the people offered up sacrificial prayers for his recovery, imposing a fast on their livestock and bloodying their knees by crawling on them all the way to that little church on one of the hilltops where they prayed to the Virgin to intercede for him. His mother refused to allow him to be buried before her. She kept him at home with her in a tightly sealed coffin until, twenty years later, they carried her out of the house to be buried before him, as she had insisted.
The third nephew fathered a son from a second marriage just before he died, but they didn’t wait for the boy to grow up and instead chose a distant relative as their leader. Despite being a commoner and a cobbler by trade, he was possessed of great courage. Things began to change and there were people who competed for his position. Nevertheless, there always remained a number of small families who admired the descendents of the great families and beat the drums in celebration of their weddings or births, drums that had to be of a certain number and size depending on the occasion. They let out ululations when the heir of the great house passed one of the government exams and they congregated around the house if he got sick or had a fever. They hoisted black flags when one of them died, even if he was an aged invalid, and eulogised him as if death had struck him riding high up on his horse, exactly the way his great uncle sat there on his bronze saddle. They eulogised him saying:
O auburn mare, you with the beauty spots
Say not that your lord has passed away
Your lord has gone to Beirut
To bring you a pair of stirrups
With the change of regimes almost everyone around the great families parted company, especially since those who remained, who were blood relatives as they said — some for certain and some imaginary — woke up to themselves. They remembered that they were descended from the same grandfather, and the first thing they woke up to was their names. They realised all of a sudden that there were many of them and unfortunately they were divided up in support of this or that influential great family member. Suddenly they discovered that they could get one of them into parliament after the French mandate enacted an election law in two stages at first, and then by general election in an effort to introduce democracy in small doses to the countries of the East.
They were fever-stricken, even though a few years earlier the General Administration of Internal Affairs had asked them to come to the old government house, which they had built with unparalleled help out of their desire to turn their town into a centre for the Governorate, and not to forget anyone in their charge. They had answered the call in droves after they heard numerous rumours threatening that if they didn’t register their names they would no longer be Lebanese. They had declared their names the way they had inherited them, handed down from grandfathers to fathers and as the priest had written them in the church record books when they were christened or when they were married or when their hour came. One example was: ‘On the night of Thursday, the 14th of July, 1930, at 2:30, Butros Antonios Khattar passed away suddenly in his sleep, and received absolution by the hands of the priest Elias al-Mardini.’ But they now started insisting on writing their full names, Butros Antonios Khattar al-Rami, as if leaving out the family name had suddenly become an unforgivable sin against them and an infringement of their honour and an attempt to suppress a noble lineage they had just discovered.
They woke up to their names in the 1940s, specifically the mid-1940s, and so they went for a second time to the government palace, to the Court Magistrate, with a petition in hand requesting correction to what they said was mistakenly left out of the record of their names. The Magistrate got so sick and tired of them that he asked the court herald, who had only one eye, to go around the neighbourhood, stop at every intersection, and announce in a loud voice that name-change cases would only be considered once a week, on Tuesdays. They were familiar with the process, to the point that they didn’t need to hire a lawyer, because they could present the request and bring two witnesses and answer a few questions. The census clerk and the coffee vendor out in front of the government palace stood as witnesses for everyone. The Magistrate became furious, wondering aloud, right in front of his clerk, what had come upon them all of a sudden to wake up to family relations that for generations had been of little value except for dividing up lands and inheritance and all the bickering that went along with it.
The employees at the Department of Personal Records kept going back over and over the registration books, opening them so many times to correct names or add surnames or remove the names of the dead or of women who had married and moved to other towns or to register new births that the edges of the huge books became frayed and some of the pages were torn and had to be pasted back together with difficulty. The people’s very existence had become threatened, because a number of pages were nearly torn out or erased, nearly causing many names to be lost.