He remembered something. ‘But I need a man to sign a release. I will not take responsibility for letting any body out of the hospital before I get permission from the examining magistrate. If I don’t, the hospital and I will both be fined.’
Hamid al-Semaani volunteered to sign the release papers.
We loaded Yusef al-Kfoury into the car. We put his head on Kamileh’s chest and his legs on my lap. Kamileh’s mother sat in the front seat next to Hamid. As the car slowly proceeded, Kamileh sang to him. The back seat got covered with blood, but Hamid al-Semaani didn’t care. He was all choked up with grief but wasn’t crying. My dress got soiled also, but it was my everyday dress. Kamileh hadn’t given me a chance to change my clothes.
Kamileh sang to him the whole way. She was calm. She held his head tight against her chest. I don’t know what made her sing that old Baghdadi mawwaal:
Ahmad Mohammed Ali Pasha wanted my demise
And the day it was a Friday
And everyone was there on time
They sat me on a camel, high very high
The executioner steered it and led the way…
Kamileh still sings to herself to this day. My window is close to her bedroom window. Every night she sings. Baghdadi mawwaals. I fall asleep to the sound of her voice. She has a tender voice that isn’t anything like her.
That night, though, we didn’t sleep. No one slept. We stayed in our day clothes. I didn’t leave her. We tried to feed her, but she didn’t eat. In the morning, they moved all the dead to the church courtyard. I don’t know who came up with this idea. A mass funeral. The Patriarch sent two bishops. As people say, the more numerous the dead, the less death has an impact.
Kamileh kept saying to me, ‘Don’t leave me, Muntaha.’
We went to the church courtyard. They agreed to leave the dead there in the courtyard throughout the day on Monday, until the time of the funeral.
They brought beds for them from the nearby houses. I wasn’t able to go home even for a second to change my clothes.
‘There’s blood all over my dress, Kamileh. I’m going home to change.’
‘Don’t leave me, Muntaha.’
I felt that if I left her, she would die, too. She held onto me as if drugged. We propped her up so she could walk, one woman on each side of her. She kept repeating the same question a thousand times. I handed her over to her mother for fifteen minutes and hurried home to change my dress. When I came back I found her asking him, asking her husband, ‘Why did you go up to Burj al-Hawa?’
She kept on repeating that in a monotonous, tired voice, like a tape recording. From time to time she would suddenly gather enough strength to raise her tone. ‘Why did you go up to Burj al-Hawa?’
Then she would divide the question up, word by word.
‘Why — did — you — go — to — Burj al-Hawa?’
It was as if she was insisting on getting an answer right then and there. For more than a quarter of an hour she kept posing this divided up question.
Then she switched to a run-down of blame, in an endearing tone:
‘You never go to your relatives’ funerals in the church here. What gave you this sudden desire to go up to Burj al-Hawa?’
She quietened down, and I forced her to drink some water at least. She refused to open her mouth like children do when they don’t want to take bitter medicine. She would drink, but then the water would drip onto her neck and her clothes. She would take two sips and then start asking again. The question was always directed at him. A difficult question: ‘Why did they kill you?’
She repeated that, demanding an answer from him. Insisting. That’s how we spent the whole day.
Kamileh was not the only one blabbering over a husband’s head. When she stopped talking for a little while to regain some strength I noticed all the other people blabbering over the heads of their dead loved ones.
Haifa Abu Draa lost her voice. She and her sisters and their daughters huddled together over their brother, the only male. Haifa flailed her arms instead of speaking.
The women mourners went from bed to bed. We women are frightened when left alone with the dead, so we start talking and don’t know how to stop. The men kill each other and we do the crying.
It was getting late.
The sun was strong. I was praying for God to hurry the priests through the burial. A young man stood in the belfry, counting the dead in the square in a loud voice. He would count and repeat as he pointed to each one of them, and every time he reached ten, the wailing reached a fever pitch. Someone shouted to him to come down out of deference for the people, but he refused and started tolling the bell in sorrow. He held the clapper with his hand and banged the side of the bell with it. Three times, and then he would stop.
I don’t know how I got distracted from Kamileh, but someone, a person I don’t want to name, came over to her and whispered something about Fuad al-Rami and his brother Boutros. She screamed as if a snake had bitten her. Names were being thrown around, names of those who would have to answer for the blood of the dead, even before they were buried.
At around three o’clock, as the time for the funeral approached and the searing sun beat down on us, her mother bent over her and said to her, ‘Pass under the coffin.’
A competent woman her mother was, well-versed in tradition.
Kamileh didn’t appear to have heard, so I tugged on her sleeve to snap her out of it. I felt she didn’t understand what was being said to her, so I repeated for her. ‘After they put the incense they will lift the coffin. Make sure you pass under it, understand?’
It was almost time.
‘Why should I go under the coffin?’
Her mother chimed in again, ‘My daughter, when a woman’s husband dies, if she’s pregnant…’
Kamileh interrupted her sharply, as if she woke up. ‘… and how could I be pregnant, Mother?’
We didn’t say anything. We didn’t want to hurt her more than that. We were also afraid she would cause a scene if she started raising her voice. But her mother didn’t back down. She was stubborn like her, like all the members of the Franji family. She waited until they did the incense so she could go back to her.
‘Do what I told you, you hear?’
She felt it was better to make the decision herself rather than leaving it to her daughter.
‘I’m not pregnant, I’m not pregnant, I’m not pregnant…’
She started shouting angrily. She pounded on her belly as she used to do when she would lose hope of ever having children. The women standing around the dead next to us began to raise their heads to look at us. I covered her mouth with my hand. Then I whispered to her again, pleading with her, ‘Go under it anyway, Kamileh, my darling. We can always say later if you’re not pregnant that you made a mistake…’
She looked at me inquisitively. I felt she was hesitating a little. Then she looked into my eyes and said in the kind of tone a person uses when putting up with other people’s stupidity, ‘My darling, my soul, my eyes… Muntaha… I told you all, I’m not pregnant.’
‘And what if you are pregnant, then what?’
She almost started laughing.
The time to lift the body drew near. The women emptied out what wailing they still had left in them. That strange woman passed by us. No one knew where she had come from, how she got to us, or where she went after completing her mission.
I saw a woman I’d never seen in our quarter before. She was tall and fair-skinned. She moved from one bed to another, sat down next to the dead, fixing their ties, brushing the stray hair from their foreheads or wiping off some blood or dirt. She would look at each face a little and then move on to the next.