When the first bicycle appeared, hoisted up on the porter’s shoulder, the boys started talking. We mumbled to each other, uttering something akin to disapproval. It was as though we suddenly realised what we had refused to believe, which was that Abu Jamil’s departure also meant his bicycles would go with him. Abu Jamil was the king of bicycles. He charged a quarter lira for an hour. He had bought the bicycles after he retired from the Sûreté Générale. He was the epitome of orderliness at his job. He was neat and tidy, and was never late to work once. He enjoyed renting out the bicycles, as his wife said. She was a little embarrassed about this occupation of his; she saw it as a big step down from his previous job at the Sûreté Générale. He was fastidious in his care of his bicycles and he knew which kids in the quarter weren’t good drivers, so he wouldn’t allow them to ride them. He advised kids to go slowly and not to over apply the brakes causing them to snap.
We started counting the bicycles out loud. Whenever the porter carried another one out, we’d add it to the total. Seven. Three with straight handlebars, which we called ‘Humber’, and four with bent handlebars, which we called ‘Course’. I preferred the bent ones. I crashed into a man once, but I didn’t tell Abu Jamil. The man didn’t get hurt too badly; I’d caused him to fall to the ground and he swore at me. He cursed my mother and my sister but I didn’t dare swear back at him.
‘Who will move into their house?’
I kept asking my mother without getting an answer. It seems I’d been repeating questions since I was little, series of questions that started with one topic and diverged to no end. The truth was I wanted to know if whoever moved in would also have bicycles to rent to us on holidays.
She slapped my hand to quiet me.
‘My friends said they were going to leave the house open. Is it true?’
We children were especially accustomed to having Abu Jamil around. During the day we’d ride his bicycles, choosing the one with the loud bell, and we’d take on the high hills with our skinny legs only to have our hearts pound out of our chests in fear as we sped downhill. The moment we got out of Abu Jamil’s sight, a friend would hop on the back or the front and we’d take turns steering and split the rental fee. In vain he would warn us not to ride double. He gave me special treatment, though, and only charged me half price, because we were neighbours, as he used to say. Abu Jamil had a special appreciation for neighbours, especially those whose doors were directly across from each other, as was the case with his house and ours. He treated me well, but not in front of my other friends, possibly to prevent them from getting greedy with him. He’d give me back the change at a later time, whenever he happened to run into me by myself or found me playing with the cat at his house. My relationship with the cat had been established way back. When they lost her the night before their departure, some people told them to ask me, since if anyone could find her it would be me.
In the evening Abu Jamil used to wear a robe. He was the first man I’d ever seen in my life wearing a robe. He wore it over his pyjamas. It was a shiny blue satin robe that gave you goose bumps when you touched it. We felt that our fathers and men in general, would be so embarrassed to be caught by surprise wearing their pyjamas by an unexpected visitor that they’d rush to put their clothes back on. Abu Jamil, on the other hand, was just the opposite, like someone who was so proud of his sleepwear that changing into it early — practically as soon as the sun went down — wasn’t enough for him, so he would go on visits close by in the neighbourhood, accepting invitations for coffee for example, wearing that outfit.
The porter continued his work all alone, stopping to take a break and looking around himself with amazement at the crowd of onlookers. Umm Jamil said only one thing, when the dining room table bumped against the doorframe and got scratched.
‘Abu Jamil is going to be upset.’
Abu Jamil’s excessive cleanliness and caution used to irritate us. It irritated the women, too, how he competed with them in their domain. He polished everything in his path. The bicycles’ frames and handlebars shined under his touch. With him around, Umm Jamil never had to pick up a broom or dust the furniture or wash the windows. He was a knowledgeable expert in matters we thought were monopolised by women. My mother would ask him how to pickle tomatoes or how to fix the Singer sewing machine, fully confident he would have all the right answers. Even though he’d been an employee in the Sûreté Générale — true it was an administrative post as he told us once that he used to receive what he called ‘wires’ or reports and hand them over to the officer in charge — despite that, Abu Jamil never woke up to the age of manliness. And he didn’t care about that at all, but rather was quite satisfied with himself the way he was.
He never entered into the age of manliness, but he was from the Rami family. His name was heavy, and it was heavy upon him, too. There was no ignoring it.
We never knew exactly how they knew they had to leave. It was said at first that there was someone who passed by their house the night after the Burj al-Hawa incident. They pronounced it haaditha, meaning ‘incident’. (It really should be haadith in the masculine, though the feminine ending gave it an element of gravity.) Before that there had been the haadith al-tall, or the Tull incident, which also contributed to its seriousness. (Most probably the oral pronunciation of haadith al-tall, which involves bridging the words together with the liaison and sounds like a feminine ending, led to the dropping of the feminine ending from haaditha.) That incident, in which two people were killed though it was never clear by whom, had been the one that started a series of communal confrontations. A fellow who’d been sprayed with at least ten bullets, and was hit by all of them, had survived. The word haaditha at any rate was a careful and mutually acceptable reference to a murder or a fight of some sort. The feminine ending also signified danger. One side should not bear the responsibility for it without the other side, as in a massacre or an ambush, the kind of thing that would be described as a rabita (trap), referring to an action where some armed men would suddenly start spewing gunfire at someone they’d been told was going to travel the road they had rabatu (blocked), or when some armed men lay in wait along a supply route to waylay their adversaries, gunning down the first ‘fat’ prey that passed by. Eventually the incident’s infamy overwhelmed the town where it took place, just like major battles in military history that grew to be known simply by the place name, so that people would say that so-and-so was killed at Burj al-Hawa, signifying that he was one of the fallen victims of that Sunday in the month of June of the year 1957. Or people would date events like a birth or a wedding in terms of before or after Burj al-Hawa, thus transforming the name of a place into the name of a time. And they also say that the incident ‘st’aamit’ ten minutes. No one knows from where that verb is derived, which in this context is a transitive verb, as opposed to its usage as an intransitive verb in the expression ‘the woman ist’aamit’, meaning she got pregnant, after which she would be called ‘mist’eemeh’ throughout the nine months. The incident is condensed here to the period of time during which the gunfire continued without interruption (or beginning specifically with two shots that were followed by a heavy silence, according to the funeral attendees, which in turn was followed by a small blast from a gun said to be a 9-mm, followed by a relatively long silence, and finally an uninterrupted shower of bullets that stopped just as suddenly and was not ensued by any more gunfire — and that, too, was one of the strange things about the incident) between the supporters of the family headmen and their relatives, and in the presence of those headmen. Perhaps the rush of the relatives and their companions to protect the headmen was what led to such a high number of casualties. Some people who tried to come up with a precise figure estimated that the exchange of gunfire had lasted no more than eight minutes or even five, but it was difficult to determine an exact time.