I continued to worry about what would happen to those two strangers who had become part of our group, until the bus’s horn sounded, distracting me. While we were being divided up among the women who had come to collect us, Maurice sat waiting in the driver’s seat. His arms drooped over the steering wheel and his green eyes remained moist with his silent tears. It was because of the way he sat slumped over the steering wheel with his heavy arms that the horn sounded, startling the women who instinctively grabbed the little ones. I asked my aunt why Maurice didn’t drop us off near our houses like he usually did, but she scolded me, telling me to stop looking back and to move faster. When we reached a fork in the road, I could no longer see the bus, the soldiers, or the steel bridge over the river.
The crowd of women and schoolchildren dwindled as some of them left the main road and headed down side roads towards their homes as quickly as they could, the women’s eyes darting in all directions. We could hear the bells tolling from the Church of Our Lady down in the Lower Quarter. They were not the usual chimes for mass, nor were they the three tolls of mourning, but rather a single ring we’d never heard before. It rippled over the quiet of the town, followed by a long silence, then another ring, then silence… I noticed that every time we came close to one of the alleys leading to the main square, my aunt made me walk on the opposite side, trying to shield me with her own body whenever both of us were exposed. When my aunt moved me from her right side to her left side, I didn’t realise that she was putting herself in danger rather than exposing me to the gunfire that might be aimed at us from the depths of one of those narrow streets. She walked faster, pulling me along with her, until she took a turn downhill.
That is when the roles were reversed. Now it was her turn to keep looking behind her, making sure no one was within hearing distance. I had a strong feeling someone was following us, so I sped up without any urging from her this time. As soon as we had taken a few steps inside our quarter, she appeared more at ease. She started to talk. I didn’t know why she was going on about how the luckiest thing in her life was not getting married, despite all the eligible young men who had come asking for her hand, and whom she now began to name: Salman Abu Shalha, Saeed Antoun and a third who went to Mexico, became very rich, and donated to the building of the town’s new church. ‘I thank my lucky stars I refused to get married,’ she stopped to say with exaggerated disgust. She hated men with their crudeness and their stench, and the same went for children. ‘What’s the point of having children, anyway?’
When we reached an opening between the houses through which we could see the horizon, she stopped talking. She put her hand on my shoulder to stop me and pointed out the little village perched atop the crest of the mountain facing us from the east, and I understood her gesture meant that not a single stone there would be left standing. I wasn’t able to form a clear idea about what was happening, except that something calamitous had taken place, and even though the elders didn’t want to divulge the details, their faces and gestures gave them away and made us feel the world was crashing down around us. I didn’t understand exactly what was going on until I met up with one of my friends, from the Gang Quarter, who spoke to me in my own language. What he said to me, which was the first telling of the events I heard, has remained engraved in my memory.
As we entered the passageway, my aunt suddenly got the hiccups. The first hiccup was so sudden and strong that her whole chest jerked backward and her entire body shook. She stopped walking and was about to look around to see where the sound had come from. She didn’t stop talking, though, but talked faster and faster, talking to herself and not even addressing me anymore. I realised later that the closer we got to the church, the more agitated she became and the more she sped up and spewed out words in every direction. She cursed the damn humidity, the rheumatism that inflicted even the young among us, the lack of piety and the greed. She spouted off the names of people who had betrayed trust and others who had stolen and murdered… I told her she’d better stop talking like that or she would start hiccupping again.
That was the only sentence I’d uttered since she took me by the hand as I got off Maurice’s bus. But she didn’t pay any attention and continued her rant, cursing whoever had chosen that place for us to live. ‘Why didn’t they choose some other place, somewhere along the coast from where we could look across the sea and see the face of Our Lord? Why did they have to cram us here between the two rivers?’ We reached the gate of the convent and heard a woman wailing loudly. When my aunt heard that grating voice, she froze and began to lash out at her with cruel words.
‘The bitch! She’s been at it since six o’clock this morning. She hasn’t stopped to take a breath! She’ll be the death of us all!’
Then, hiccups punctuating her words, she asked me if I knew how to get home by myself. I nodded.
‘Tell your mother that your auntie has become utterly useless,’ she said before bending down and whispering in my ear that since yesterday she hadn’t gone into the church square where our house was, and that she’d spent all day and night going around it, peeking from behind the houses, not daring to look for very long, then shutting her eyes and running away.
I went the rest of the way home by myself, two hundred metres at most. Before the square came into full view, I spotted the ‘Poet of the Rose’ standing on the dome of the church. There he was — up high, where the swallows slept in the springtime, after swooping down in spectacular display and nearly brushing the tops of our little heads before the evening sunset — the Poet of the Rose, who built the nativity scene at Christmas time, placing the large statues inside it and redirecting the irrigation canals to create waterfalls; the one who made kites and covered the neighbourhood walls with charcoal graffiti calling for the unification of ‘the Fertile Crescent’ and glorifying the party leader, al-Zaeem, always signing with his pseudonym, the Poet of the Rose. I spotted him with his back against the bell, quietly swaying back and forth without allowing the bell to sound, peering down on the square from above. He was pointing to specific spots below while counting out loud, ‘One, two, three…’ all the way to ten and then he would pound hard on his chest with his fist, causing the bell to toll once. Then he would repeat the whole sequence again. ‘One, two, three…’
There were ten men stretched out on ten beds.
They laid the dead men on beds they had brought out from the neighbouring houses. My mother gave them my brother’s bed. He was two years my senior, and this preferential treatment remained a point of contention between us throughout our adolescence. He would brag about the event and I would pretend to be disgusted with him. I was amazed that our next door neighbour insisted that her brother be laid out on her own bed and that she refused to wash the sheets afterwards in order to keep his smell in the sheets for her to sniff any time she wanted. The sheets became black and dirty and she stopped sniffing them, I think, but she never washed them, because every time she was about to do so, she would remember her brother.
The square was full of women and children, groups of them scattered among the beds — wives, mothers, sisters, especially sisters. The little girls who lived next door imitated the grown-ups by grabbing fistfuls of their hair and tugging their heads right and left. I spotted the hunchbacked fabric seller among them, the one with the high effeminate voice who always sang love songs in his broken French to little girls before pinching their bottoms whenever he got the chance. I also saw a priest crying. I didn’t see any men other than the ones stretched out on the beds in their Sunday best, their last expressions fixed for eternity. I saw a woman I’d never seen before in our neighbourhood. She was tall and fair-skinned, and she moved from one bed to another, sitting beside each one to straighten their ties and brush back the stray strands of hair from their brows, or to wipe away a spot of blood or dust, and to gaze for a moment upon each face before moving on to the next.