My mother was a stranger. She taught us many things and still does so today.
She taught us, for example, to shake hands with our elders rather than let them grab our shoulders or lovingly touch our faces; she taught us not to offer our cheeks to be kissed by anyone.
She taught us to turn off the lights when we left a room and to shut the door behind us whenever we entered the house. She was the only one in the neighbourhood who locked the door.
‘This is a house,’ she used to say.
My father was inside shaving, enjoying every movement, taking his time, going after the little hairs inside his nose without touching his moustache. He was good at everything he did.
My father didn’t hear the man calling at the door.
It was Sunday, roughly the middle of June. Every day of the week had its agenda in my mother’s calculations and plans for our upbringing. We were waiting for my father, all bathed, dressed, and ready to go, having already worked out the seating arrangement for the back of the blue Chevrolet.
That’s how Sundays were in the spring. As we waited, we imagined how he would drive the car, tilting his head to the left and whistling around the difficult bends. Whenever he whistled, we would laugh secretly and wink at each other, my sister and I. On Sundays we would visit the Grotto of Qadisha. We would touch the stalactites that hung down like icicles from the cave’s ceiling. We would yell to each other and wait for the echoes to reverberate from its deep recesses. We would have lunch at the restaurant and my father would order a glass of arak along with the food. Once we came back with a picture frame made of cedar wood in which we put a picture of the four of us standing in a line, from tallest to shortest. The two daughters first and after us, a boy and then another boy, to make sure that the first boy wasn’t left by himself, as my father would say.
The man called again, louder this time. We heard him calling out without knocking on the door.
Strange. I remember how visitors often used to call from outside rather than knocking on the door if the door was shut, perhaps to object to our door always being shut.
My mother was standing in front of the mirror putting the last touches of red on her lips and examining the skin under her beautiful eyes. My mother used to worry a lot about wrinkles. She looked at us, her index finger pressed against her pursed lips to warn us not to respond or make a sound. Perhaps the man calling from outside would leave.
She was worried about the Sunday plans she had promised us, and she was worried about the plans the men had in mind.
My father appeared with all his gear: straight razor in his hand, towel on his shoulder and half of his face covered with shaving cream. He was wearing only his white undershirt, the ‘cotton shirt’, as we used to call it.
‘Who’s there?’
‘Us.’
Two voices. Two men.
He recognised them. He looked at my mother.
Our relatives never forgave my mother for being a stranger, never got over her accent or her cooking or her insistence on red lipstick and being fashionable. She was married after all, so what did she need red lipstick for? Nor did they forgive her for always keeping the door shut. As if she was shutting it in their faces.
The two men were also dressed in Sunday clothes, as best they could. That is, the stocky one with the thin moustache, whom we knew and whose name was Ayyoub, was wearing a grey suit that time had left its mark upon, and sweat stains blotched his unbuttoned white shirt, even though it was still early in the morning.
The other one was tall. He was wearing a tie and an American hat tipped to the side. He had a cigarette between his lips and a wart on his left cheek. We were seeing him for the first time as he peered inside our house in a strange manner. Later on we would find out that his name was Farid Badwi al-Semaani.
‘Get dressed. We’re going to the funeral, Moussa,’ the fat one said.
‘What’s going on?’
‘A funeral.’
‘Whose funeral?’
‘…’
‘…’
It was the first time we had ever heard of Burj al-Hawa.
‘Is that village far away, Mother?’
‘Yes. It’s far and the road to it is difficult.’
Worried and embarrassed, my mother stopped putting on her make-up. She listened carefully to what the two men were saying.
‘Is it further than Al-Mazraa?’
‘Yes. Further than Al-Mazraa.’
Al-Mazraa was my mother’s village.
We could see it from our house, there at the foot of the mountain opposite us, that fiery mountain that was said to have been a volcano at one time. My mother’s village was just a cluster of trees and houses, more like a small oasis people had built with patience and care in the middle of that barren mountain. The day my father bought us the binoculars, the first thing we aimed them at was Al-Mazraa. Suddenly and by mere coincidence, my grandfather and my uncle appeared before us picking apricots from the Umm Hsayn apricot tree. They had white cloths on their heads tied at the corners, to protect them from the sun.
The conversation at the door was in whispers.
‘…’
‘…’
‘The Bey is going,’ Ayyoub said definitively, leaving no room for argument.
The one with the tipped hat looked inside the house. Actually, he had been looking more at our clothes and our furniture than at us, while his friend tried to persuade my father.
Ayyoub, the gregarious one, and his silent friend.
My father didn’t invite them in. He stayed at the door speaking to them, his face covered with shaving cream, the straight razor in his hand, his shoulders covered with thick black hair. The stocky one talked about the upcoming elections, how the campaign was serious and how they had to assert their presence, which he said with a wave of his right hand. He stopped talking, waiting for my father to respond, as if he had just recently learned the term ‘presence’ or had heard it from someone he considered knowledgeable and was trying to test out its impact every time he had a chance to speak.
Ayyoub spoke at great length, elaborating and preaching about the necessity of safeguarding our ‘essence’ and being wary of ‘them’. He had proof they were backstabbers. He also had a predilection for using classical Arabic expressions, which my mother had learned to decipher. That was why the more he spoke, the more my mother frowned. She knew my father and his cousins well, and if she kept quiet they would take him with them and if she interfered she would embarrass him in front of them.
As he listened, my father used the towel in his hand to wipe the shaving cream off his face a little bit at a time. That was his way of drawing out the pleasure of his shave, and it would also give him time to think.
Suddenly Ayyoub stopped talking, as if he had exhausted all his arguments and his entire dictionary. He waited for my father’s answer, but it didn’t come. Silence hung in the air. We felt my father’s silence to be a sign he would choose us over the two men.
It was now the man with the tipped hat’s turn. ‘If you don’t want to come with us, give us the car. There are many young men but very few cars…’
‘No!’ the four of us shouted in unison from inside the house without even looking at each other.
Our father quietened us down without responding to them. It was another meaningful silence that wasn’t difficult for the men to understand, and so they turned around and walked away.
My father shut the door, still holding the open straight blade in his right hand. He wasn’t himself. We surrounded him, the four of us, and showered him with kisses. Giving kisses on all sorts of occasions was one of my mother’s innovations, just as the girls’ baths every two days and the boys’ twice a week were also imported by her. Our father tried to escape our attack on him.