As I remember this now, I can picture deflated balls on the concrete, behind the fence. I’m not sure if this is a real memory — am I imagining things? And I can see a ball that wasn’t deflated, a ball that was still round because it hadn’t been hit by sniper fire. But no one climbed the fence to get the ball. We knew the sniper was waiting. We knew he’d left the ball as a trap.
The most horrific things we heard were stories of kidnappings. Shelling was easier than kidnapping. Shelling was clear and simple: the bombs would fall, and they wounded or killed people. We used to collect the cold shrapnel off the street (Mitri, the son of George Tayyan, put them in glass jars and sold them to a man who had a store in the Tabaris district). We weren’t scared when we gathered up shrapnel. Shelling was something we knew: this is a 106 shell, we used to say, and this is a 105. But kidnapping: What did they do to the ones they kidnapped? I knew things no one else knew — I, the boy who used to get dressed each morning in the living room beneath the picture of my dead brother on the wall, I knew things. I used to sleep in the living room with Liliane and Najwa. We’d spread out on the sofas and go to sleep. Other times, depending on how things were, the whole family would sleep in the living room.
I knew things, but not completely. What happened, for example, to the ones who were kidnapped but whose corpses were never found? Where were they? Who was holding them? And where exactly were they holding them? What were they doing with them? All of that was black, dark — the stuff of my nightmares.
I was a growing boy, and whenever I outgrew any of my clothes, Julia or Mary brought me some more from the closet: I’d never seen those clothes before. There were many closets. (There was a closet in my mother’s room, a closet in the family room, which we called the “winter room,” and one in the sitting room, though we rarely ever sat in it because it was open and exposed to the shelling. There was also a closet by the stairs that led to the roof, and another one in Julia’s room, which wasn’t really a closet, but a bunch of boxes that Ilya had painted white and stacked on top of one another — Mary had sewn a curtain for it, and stitched green grape leaves in the corner of the curtain.) Clothes and socks had been stuffed into the depths of the closets, along with lavender and dried leaves from other fragrant plants, which kept the moths away. I remember how someone’s hand would slowly take the clothes out and give them a good shake. Once I saw Julia smell one of the shirts, and an expression of immeasurable sorrow passed across her face.
Mary washed and folded the clothes. I’d try them on and say: The sleeves are too short. And Mary would reply: We’ll hem the sleeves and fold them over and add buttons, easy. I’d try on a pair of pants and find that the waist was too big. Mary would laugh and say: You’re all skin and bones, even with all those sandwiches you devour you’re still all skin and bones. And then she’d say: You’d better not be playing soccer when our backs are turned! She was always laughing and joking and pinching me, but she’d stop laughing whenever she brought out one of Ilya’s belts. She tightened the belt on me, but she could see it was no use, there weren’t enough holes in the belt. I really was all skin and bones.
Then she’d scowl at me and ask where I learned to lie like that. Again, I’d swear that I wasn’t playing soccer, but I could tell from her face that she didn’t believe me. She’d feel the muscles on my legs and say: These here tell a different story. I said I ran a lot, I loved running, all of us ran a lot. And I’d kick the ground and push her hand away and say: Is running forbidden too?
When I think of those quarrels now, I see that she too acted like my mother. Mary. I remember in ’82, when the planes were shelling West Beirut and the children in the neighborhood climbed onto the rooftops and said: this one hit the Hamra district, and that one hit Kola, and that one hit Mazra. I got hit too: with the measles. My face was covered with red dots and the doctor told me to keep away from people. The doctor warned my siblings and said adults could contract this type of measles too. Was it measles or smallpox? Were the dots red or black-brown? I’d come down with both of them: I had measles once, and smallpox once. You could call me a repository of diseases. I used to get nosebleeds sometimes too, but not very often. My nose would start bleeding whenever I played in the sun a lot. One time I got a nosebleed and sat down on the sidewalk in front of Mousa al-Zayyat’s store (he used to sell us Arabic “ice cream” and claim it was the best in Achrafieh — it was a mix of water, ice, and coloring, and you could crunch it between your teeth). He came out and gave me a tissue, telling me to press down hard on my nose, right at the top of the bone, and he stretched out his hand — it was as small as a girl’s, and also soft and damp, giving me the chills — and with his tiny fingers taught me how to press on the bone between my eyes to stop the bleeding. Raise your other hand, he said, and I raised it up high. Wait a bit now, he said, and the bleeding will stop. I asked him what would happen if it didn’t stop. He replied: If the bleeding doesn’t stop, you’ll die. I remember the exact words he used: “You’ll die.” He said I’d die if the bleeding didn’t stop. Years later, during the War of Elimination (1990), a burst of gunfire hit him in the liver.
While I was sick in ’82, the bed shook beneath me whenever the planes flew over our house. Mary and my mother were worried about me. Whenever my mother was sleeping (if she’d taken her medication), Mary would be at my side. And when my father or Ilya came home (from the “lines” or the port or the Phalangist headquarters), they’d approach my bed. Ilya wasn’t scared of the measles because he’d had them when he was young and was immune now. He’d draw near, put his palm on my forehead, and say I was burning up, smiling as he did so. My father would ask my sister when my fever had risen, and Mary would reach for the thermometer on the table by the bed, touch it, and say: Just a moment ago, or fifteen minutes ago, or a half-hour ago. Are you wondering how I remember all of this as if it happened yesterday, and not twenty-six years ago?
I haven’t forgotten the din of the warplanes. One time, as I was dragging my heavy head along the pillow (the itching sensation was awful, and they’d tied my hands so I wouldn’t scratch my face), I saw a plane beyond the window, and watched the plane’s shadow pass over me. The sun was shining on the metal, shining on the glistening silver. And the sound, the horrifying roar. Did I say I was only afraid of being kidnapped? Did I say the shelling wasn’t paralyzing, and the roar of the planes wasn’t terrifying? That wasn’t true. I was afraid of many things. How could I not be afraid when I was so young and my drugged mother was always sleeping? How could I not feel fear when neither my father nor my brother ever stayed at home? And then there was Liliane, who was always crying in the bathroom. Whenever she heard shelling she’d rush to the bathroom, lock the door, and start crying…. When I think about Liliane, I think of how she spent fifteen years in the bathroom. Poor Liliane. Even when they were shelling West Beirut, she’d hear the explosions and think they were shelling East Beirut (it wasn’t very far away, the only thing that separated us from them was the demarcation line) and rush to the bathroom. When I see Liliane’s daughter now (did I tell you her name? — her name’s Nathalie), I think I’m looking at Liliane, but there’s one difference: that young girl doesn’t look scared all the time.
Why is one person afraid when another isn’t? Ilya left the house during the Mountain War in 1983. We knew that he and his friends were involved in the fighting, that they were moving around between the Shouf and Matn districts, but we didn’t tell mother. When she asked us, we said he’d just gone out to buy bread. She’d fall asleep and when she woke up (she wasn’t completely awake, her eyes would water as if there were rainclouds in them) she’d ask if Ilya had come back from the market, if he’d found any bread. And we’d say yes, he’d come back: “Here, eat this bite… Ilya just bought this fresh bread, he bought it just now.” She’d ask us where he was. And we’d reply that he was on guard duty at Sassine Square, or that he’d gone to a friend’s house, or that he was down at the port looking for our father. She’d ask us why we hadn’t woken her. We’d say he’d sat beside her bed, waiting for her to wake up. Then my mother would eat a bit of labneh from my sister’s hand and say she’d felt him, she’d felt his hand on her head.