His questions didn’t bother me, even though they were strange. He’d ask me, for example, if I loved my mother. Or who I loved more, my mother or my father. The questions themselves weren’t strange. Rather, his voice. Something in his voice would change when he asked me those questions. His tone wouldn’t change, no, that’s not it, I don’t know how to explain it — words can’t explain what someone is saying, what they’re feeling. I noticed a strange gleam in his eyes when he asked me those questions. As if he were focusing his gaze on a single point on my face, as if he wanted to pierce me with that gaze and discover my secret. But what was the secret?
Ilya acted the same way sometimes. During the Hundred Days War, when the shelling was so intense that we were confined to the living room day and night, I’d catch him staring at me with that same strange look in his eyes: as if he wanted to peer into my depths. No, not my depths, I don’t know how to say what I’m trying to say. No, it was as if he wanted to see something that he couldn’t see — as if I were hiding another body within my own, a body beyond my body. I didn’t think about those things back then, but maybe that was when I began to feel them (feel? think?). It’s hard now to distinguish what I remember from what I imagine myself remembering. Everything blends together with the passing of time. I saw Ilya: tense, full of power, as if he were about to break the walls. My father forbade him from leaving the house. My father was out all the time, and my brother wasn’t allowed to leave, even though no one could stop him from leaving. My brother never shut the door. He wasn’t very big, and he wasn’t tall either — he’s still quite short, I’m taller than him now. He wasn’t tall, but he had the strength of a bull. I remember him as a rough man who used to frighten strangers. He was small, but violent. Even today, even now that he’s a “businessman,” as he calls himself, even today there’s a certain latent violence in the way he moves. He’s short and, like the math teacher I mentioned to you, he only wears sandals. A businessman in sandals. He has three restaurants: one in Sadd al-Bouchriya; another in downtown Beirut, which hasn’t been doing so well lately; and one in Achrafieh, not far from our old house. He spends all his time on his feet, so he only wears sandals. But they’re expensive sandals. He laughs whenever someone mentions them — he has countless pairs. He spends all his time standing in the doorway of one of the restaurants, smoking his Cuban cigars and keeping an eye on the business. He always wears a blue-jean jacket and black pants. He wears a khaki-colored shirt beneath his jacket, and during the summer he tosses the jacket over his shoulder. He’s the same as always: power bursting out of him. He never sleeps more than five hours a night. He always stays at one of the restaurants until the chairs are put up on the tables. And he arrives before the workers, early in the morning, to keep an eye on the street cleaning. During the Hundred Days War he used to look at me and then at the picture hanging on the wall, the one with the black ribbon in the corner, and then he’d look at my mother, who was staring at him: she knew he was only staying at home for her sake, and she was sad because he was so full of anger and she didn’t know what to say.
One time, he was fixing the living room door, the hinge of the door, that door led to the hallway and made an awful creaking sound whenever we opened it. Mary oiled it, and the oil worked for two days, but then it started creaking again. “We’ll change it,” Ilya said. He got out the toolbox and began taking the door off the hinge. He was unscrewing the old hinge when the shelling intensified, and bombs began falling behind the house, in the direction of the church. He stopped working and looked at Liliane. She was terrified of how he looked when he bit down on his lower lip. She was afraid of him, and she’d hide her face so he wouldn’t raise his voice, even though he usually didn’t raise his voice in front of mother. The shelling died down — or rather, it moved farther away — and so he went back to work on the old hinge and tried to take it off the door. At a certain moment he stopped trying. I saw the red liquid on his hand. He stood up holding the old door and smashed it against the wall, breaking it in two.
I remember how he used to come to school to get me whenever the shelling started. He came in an open-air jeep and drove the jeep into the middle of the schoolyard. No one could stop him. He’d take my heavy backpack from me and say, “Quickly, quickly.” And in a flash we’d be back home. I remember the tires hissing on the asphalt amid the din of gunfire and screaming.
On one of those occasions I saw a man crawling on the sidewalk. He lifted his hand and looked up at us as we drove by in the jeep without stopping. I remember the blood on his face, and the filth on the walls. But he wasn’t filthy.
That memory blends together with another one: We were in the safe room — not our living room, but the safe room of a building near our house, this one was underground — it was a storeroom, and now it’s part of a supermarket — we were in the safe room and the power was out, only the emergency neon light was buzzing. The neon light was buzzing, and someone came in from outside, took off his coat, and started cleaning it. The smell of rain and gunpowder came in with him, and I heard him say that Broadwell — the ful maker — was splattered all over the tree in front of the store. In the Lebanese dialect, we use the word “bits” sometimes. He said, “His bits are splattered all over the tree.” I didn’t understand what he was saying at first, but then I understood: he said “his bits” were all over the cherry tree, “His bits are splattered over the whole tree.” Over the whole tree.
We went there once the shelling stopped, once we could go outside again. A day or two had passed, I don’t know how long exactly. They’d cleaned up the place, but you could see the marks the shell had left on the road and the gouges the shrapnel had left in the walls. The cherry tree’s branches were broken. I used to watch it bloom in the spring, I used to gaze at its lovely white flowers. But I don’t remember ever seeing any red cherries on it. Maybe it did bear cherries, and the kids who were bigger than me ate them while they were still green, I don’t know. But I remember the white flowers, and I remember the boy I was sitting in the dimly-lit restaurant — I used to love that darkness, the darkness that hid me from prying eyes, hid me from my sister who would get upset if she passed by and saw me eating there, rather than at home, and I didn’t want to make her angry, but at the same time I wanted to eat there, I loved eating there — I remember that boy dipping a piece of bread into the hot ful submerged in oil, and I remember him lifting that piece from the bowl to his mouth, how he ate onions and fresh mint and chopped tomatoes with the ful, and how he licked his fingers afterward. The ful maker would slice pickled turnips just for me, his fingers always steady against the knife, though they trembled whenever he struck a match to light a cigarette. I remember that boy sitting in the restaurant, and I remember the smoke rising from the cigarette, and I remember the sun casting light on the blooming cherry tree.
For a long time I couldn’t pass by that sidewalk without looking at the tree. Years went by: new shops sprouted up, the sidewalk was widened, and the whole neighborhood changed. Many houses remained as they were, but others disappeared, replaced by tall buildings — yes, the whole street has changed: there are places that never see any sunlight now — they’re covered in shadows from morning to night. And the cherry tree’s gone. I don’t know when they cut it down, but I still remember where it was.