Muhsin then turned to us again and ordered us to pull back. His tone was final, which was what made us not obey completely, because we expected something to happen. We disappeared from his sight, but we could still see him. There remained only one mystery: how did he know that his enemy in the barricade in the old three-story building was going to leave himself exposed a few minutes later?
For the first time ever, Muhsin looked around before aiming his rifle. He rested his cheek on the rifle’s neck, hugged the rifle close and peered into the distance. That might have been the longest embrace we ever witnessed between Muhsin and his rifle, more than ten minutes long. Then all of a sudden, without any indication from his body or movement of his head, Muhsin fired a single bullet that pierced the silence encamped there on the front in the middle of that hot summer day. After Muhsin’s shot there wasn’t any response. On the contrary, the silence became more entrenched. A few minutes later we heard screams from a woman on the other side, and so the cries of joy rose up from our side and the bullets began to fall like a rainstorm.
Chapter 16
Now, Kamileh thought, now she could relax. She locked the door and tossed the key up onto the roof. Yusef was dead and Kamileh was now living outside life. Strangely enough, it didn’t seem to her — in the beginning at least, during the weeks following the wake and the burial — that being widowed was going to be pure grief.
From now on, for example, she wouldn’t take a bath until she started to stink, or when Muntaha, the person most often by her side, said something. She wouldn’t change her underwear every day, either, and wouldn’t iron her hair or worry about going grey. And wearing black all the time relieved her from worrying about changing her dresses. Only the black stockings bothered her on those hot days, the way they tore her legs to pieces.
She was going to take a breather to a certain extent, the youngest of her parents’ children, the spoiled one who always got what she wanted. She threw off the weight of the world from her shoulders in one go. She would stop all the cooking and blowing on the fire, stop coring squash and removing hair from her legs, stop bearing pain and visiting doctors, especially gynaecologists. She wouldn’t be spreading her thighs for anyone; her body would retain its integrity, and the big battle wouldn’t have to be fought. Nothing would be wrenched from her and she wouldn’t have to endure the pain of the extraction.
Her life would be smooth, the hours of her days all alike, the normal cycle of December’s cold and summer’s humid heat, from which she would take what she needed and nothing more. After today, she would no longer exert so much effort trying to persuade her husband to have intercourse with her in the hopes of getting pregnant — pleading with him one night, tricking him another night with those attempts at seduction that she was never very good at. She didn’t want anyone entering her anymore. She could stop worrying about having children and making pleas — with her husband and all the saints, too.
His relatives were going to seek revenge. It was incumbent upon them never to forget his death for one second. Their blood couldn’t bear it for very long. They started ambushing roads at night. Three or four of them would get together and then get out of sight. They would get them sooner or later — the brothers of their brothers’ killers or their distant relatives, it didn’t matter.
From now on, Kamileh wouldn’t do a thing and nothing would be demanded of her. She was frustrated at the killers and frustrated at with the ones who had made her marry him in the first place. She was no longer under any obligation to open her door to anyone, no longer obliged to anyone, least of all his relatives. She would be satisfied to sit beside Muntaha, two absent-minded fools sitting on wicker stools in the summer humidity, while a gentle breeze rose up from the nearby river or the smell of eel wafted around near the mute fisherman. She relaxed her body with total abandon and gabbed with Muntaha about everybody’s business. No one escaped their tongues. They accused every woman who wore blusher and make-up of marital infidelity, and anyone who got a new car or new furniture of stealing and cheating. No one passed along the road without getting their share of that pair’s dirty, scrutinising looks and cutting words.
During her time alone she planted flowers on the balcony, flowers for every season. She checked on the progress of those little lives, helped them along and tied their tender skinny branches with strings. She watered them, pruned them and got mad at them if they got lazy. And later Kamileh’s neighbours would insist that, after spending years by herself after Eliyya left for America, she started talking quietly to her flowers without realising it, sometimes encouraging them and other times chastising them.
That was to be her sole project in life. She wouldn’t visit anyone except her mother; those who liked her could come to her. She would sleep through the night without tossing and turning in bed anymore; no more hanging in limbo for hours on end, waiting for her husband to come back from gambling parties he never once took her to and which she had no concept of — except to imagine they were filled with bright lights in spacious, high-ceilinged rooms, swarming with seductive women in black dresses exposing their breasts and backs. They were parties that lasted until dawn, when Yusef would tiptoe back home and timidly open the door, trying not to wake her and have her smell other women on him.
‘He has lots of tough cousins. They will avenge him!’
She wouldn’t remarry, because someone who is murdered remains forever present, hovering like an eagle over his widow’s head until she dies herself. He would remain like a sword over her, even if they avenged him and wreaked havoc for his sake. They’d nudge her to get married, but she wouldn’t do it, and they knew she wouldn’t, and besides, there wasn’t anyone who would come asking for her.
She didn’t want to get married again. She had never wanted to in the first place. They had pushed her into it the moment she showed the slightest interest.
‘Get married, Kamileh. Your sisters are waiting.’
She was the prettiest of them and the youngest, too. Whenever a young suitor came their way, she was the only one he liked. Young men liked her without any effort on her part, while she, on the other hand, tried to keep out of sight. She wasn’t going to get married and wasn’t going to let any of her sisters get married. Then Yusef al-Kfoury came asking for her hand. She warmed to him and they sensed it and didn’t give her any time.
‘They didn’t give me time to love him,’ she said. She loved him later on, loved him very much, and the more her hopes of having children dampened, the stronger she clung to him. They packed up her clothes and sneaked her out the back door so as not to give her mother a chance to protest. Her mother had insisted on marrying off her eldest daughter first. ‘Each one in her turn!’ Kamileh eloped, but her mother got over it in less than a month.
He was shot twice. People said they didn’t even give him a chance to pull out his gun. Someone called him by name, so he turned and they shot him, from more than one gun. They said that whoever called his name to make him turn around was not one of the men who shot him. He left her the house she was living in and nothing more. The family offered her money, gifts from rich people or expatriates, which she politely turned down. She was the only one among those whose husbands were killed at Burj al-Hawa who refused compensation. She didn’t want money in return for him. She would never stop wearing black, would never buy new clothes for herself. She went back to where she always wanted to be, there on her balcony where they could forget all about her as she sat drinking coffee with Muntaha and planted, watered and talked to her flowers. Her body was all her own; it wasn’t anybody’s business and she wasn’t going to demand anything of it either.