Chapter 15
Muhsin chose the millstone, the one in the nearby olive press. One day, when the first barricades were being set up, all the neighbourhood boys worked together to push the massive stone out onto the street and set it up as a barricade for him. But Muhsin wouldn’t go near it until all the olive residue was cleaned off of it, that job having been delegated to others so the fighter, who should not have to stoop to such menial tasks, could concentrate on the weapons and the attack. Regardless, when Muhsin later sat behind it throughout the days of the revolution, from April to September of 1958, he wouldn’t stop picking at the little black specks of olive residue and removing them with his pocket knife with its seven blades and seven switches, which he never parted with. He plugged up the hole in the centre of the stone with three small sandbags, leaving one small peephole through which he slid the nose of his long barrel rifle and took aim at the opposing barricade. At first they had given him what they called a ‘Model’ rifle, but he hadn’t warmed to it.
‘It doesn’t scope well,’ he said, without bothering as one might expect to explain this new verb. We had never it heard before and had no idea where he had got it from. It was possible he coined the term when he fired the Model rifle, missed his target and decided to blame it on the rifle.
The day they acquired a long barrel rifle like the one he’d been asking for, they gave it to him and joked, ‘You don’t have any excuses anymore…’
Now his toolkit was complete and all that was left to do was show off his skill. In what resembled a rite of passage, he held the rifle in his hand, raised it vertically to examine its minute details, and fired it into the air before sitting on his chair and sliding the rifle into its peephole. He liked to lean over it at first, with his cheek pressed gently against the metal. He’d shut his left eye and look through the rear sight at the opposing side. At first we thought it was just a practice exercise, a fighter getting a feel for his gun. But he persisted in this training of his, spending long hours and intervals in some obscure operation which bored us to death because it never led to any action. He kept at it while we wondered why on earth Muhsin would aim and aim and never shoot. All we saw was that at the end of all the aiming, he shook his head menacingly, postponing his big deed to a later date, which might be very soon, apparently assuring himself that embracing his rifle for such a long time would not be in vain, even if it had left a pink dent in his right cheek that remained visible for some time.
Muhsin was the millstone hero. We knew that he shared his barricade with his brother, though — Muhsin during the day and Halim at night. Muhsin was our warrior at the front line. We followed him in combat, though from a distance, for we didn’t dare approach where he sat as we believed he was in the line of fire. He handed over the barricade to his brother at eight o’clock — exactly dinner time. Before handing it over he checked every direction through his long barrel rifle, aiming one last time in the direction of the opposing barricades. Just aiming, in his usual boring way. He took his rifle with him, along with his wicker chair and the cushion he put on it to keep his clothes from getting dirty. He never sat down on that chair without brushing off the dust first.
That’s what he did whether he was at the barricade, at home or at the café. He kept his rifle clean, his pants perfectly creased and his shirt collar white as snow. He would send the waiter at the café back to the kitchen with whatever he tried to serve him if he glimpsed the tiniest smear on his water glass or sniffed some odour only the most sensitive nose could detect, like the faint smell of soap lingering on his coffee cup. His brother would take control of the barricade with hardly any exchange of words. Sometimes we happened to witness Halim’s arrival, during the few days when we rebelled against the order to go home early. Muhsin and Halim didn’t exchange a single word. Maybe a quiet grumble that didn’t reach our ears. And neither one received anything from the other. Muhsin would pick up his chair and his rifle and leave without looking back, not even once.
Fighting from behind a barricade generally required standing up, although standing did not suit another fighter in our front — Abu Bashir, who God had made with one leg shorter than the other. It was very difficult for Abu Bashir to stand and aim his gun at the same time, and the story went that one day he burst out in an appeal to his comrades, making a promise to them, saying, ‘Get me a chair and we’ll rake in the casualties!’
His comrades behind the barricade laughed and laughed while the bullets rained down on them in torrents.
Muhsin fought sitting down for a reason we didn’t understand in the beginning. Naturally, we didn’t know much of anything that was going on at first. Years later we read in an old newspaper a statement by an American official saying in so many words that everyone who supported the Baghdad Pact was fighting for freedom in the Middle East and was a hero in the fight against communism. Some were the fighters from our town who sided with the government, that is the very same boys from the Lower Quarter who were so stingy about firing bullets from the long barrel rifles that the government sent them on mule-back, one of whom was Muhsin, standing behind the millstone.
Actually, we had been more interested in our freedom. We roamed the alleys freely after the headmaster locked the gates of the school with a heavy iron chain the moment the violence erupted and left for his hometown far off in the Batroun district. There was no way he could stay among us, being as he was a member of the Socialist Party. A Christian and a socialist! He had been drawn to socialism from reading so many books that corrupted his mind, according to the school doorman, the one with the fingers of his right hand cut off. We never liked school; it amounted to a series of slaps on the hands with the sharp edges of wooden rulers, bitter cold and the French language. In vain we tried to rein in the enunciation of that language’s sounds and avoid falling into the countless traps in dictation.
We followed after the doorman. He used to play cards, holding them in a strange way, using a hand and a half. He enjoyed it more than staying up in the barricades. We rested assured that he was immersed in a game by the effusion of curses and cigarette smoke. We climbed over the wall with ease, stepping on each other’s shoulders, and jumped inside the school grounds. We wrote nasty things with whatever pieces of chalk we could find. We ate the jar of pickled turnips the supervisor forgot in his office and which he had brought from home to curb his hunger during his long hours at work. Our vengeance was flagrant. We stood on the desks and urinated. We tore the grade books to pieces. We erased the records completely, once and for all. We set the pages on fire and flushed them down the toilet. And before leaving, we rang the bell victoriously, the sound causing some of the neighbours to gather around. We went back to the alleys and ran wild on a never-ending vacation that would last until the revolution was over. That’s what I think we liked about the revolution that ended when American Marines landed on the shores of Lebanon. We had hoped, and some of us were certain it would happen, that the revolution would last a long time and expel school from our lives forever.