Laying Claim to the Church and the Cemetery
The priest and parish council of the town of Kfarbayda have hired attorney Nasib al-Sawda to file a case in the North District Criminal Court against Mr. F.R., asserting that he counterfeited or aided in the counterfeiting of documents giving him the right to ownership of the plot of land upon which the town’s church — Saint Joseph’s Church of the Epiphany — is built. The plot includes the cemetery behind the church where the townspeople’s remains have rested for hundreds of years. Court documents indicate the defendant is outside Lebanese soil at the present time and has been served with a court summons.
(Al-Nafeer, 12 September 1961)
A thread of poor luck seemed to run through his entire life. In 1956 he almost won the special New Year’s grand prize draw in the Lebanese National Lottery, missing it by just one number. Of course, that was only because the people in charge of the lottery had fixed the results, having rigged them ahead of time in favour of their relatives and other people with whom they would split the winnings. ‘Crooks,’ he used to say, with emphasis and shaking his head like someone who knew what he was talking about. Then there was the time at the roulette table in the casino in Nice, France, where he had been a guest of one of those filthy rich people who enjoyed listening to his stories despite knowing they were a pack of lies, because they benefited from his talent with the ladies. The metal ball jumped onto number 14 after everyone around the table had been certain it had settled on 13; the number he had bet everything on. The only reason it jumped was to prevent him from winning big time.
‘It’s the mafia. They have magnets under the table to make the metal ball land wherever they want. It’s just not written for me to be comfortable…’
What he meant by ‘comfortable’ was being able to accumulate enough money to settle down. In Caracas, Venezuela, at the dog races, the same fate fell upon the animal he’d bet on. The dog had led for the whole race, way ahead of the pack, and then suddenly stopped. When he reached the final stretch, for some reason no one could understand, he stopped and looked behind, as if he were missing his friends and didn’t want to be so far away from them. He lowered his head and rubbed it in the sand while the other dogs sped past him and he ended up finishing last.
‘Who bets on a dog, anyway?’ he would ask himself. At the horse races in Beirut, he would lose on a photo finish.
‘I swear to God the jockey pulled the reins. I saw him with my own eyes.’
Then one day, because he accepted a friend’s invitation for a morning cup of coffee, he was late getting to the estate agent’s and missed the opportunity of a lifetime by fifteen minutes: a piece of land in the Al-Tall area of Tripoli that would have made him and his children’s children rich for generations. He never told of a single success in his entire life. He was just like a gambler who only tells you about his hard luck. Gambling was a losing game.
Nevertheless he lived like a prince, refined and well dressed, a wide gold chain around his neck and an expensive gold watch on his wrist. He went to the dentist regularly, took good care of his fingernails, and was one of the first to dye his hair for fear of inheriting a family tendency to turn grey early. He was terrified of his hair falling out and the possibility of going bald. He never rested from his escapades into God’s wide world. He filled the pages of three passports, which he saved and bound together. He showed them off to everyone, visa after visa, from Costa Rica to Equatorial Guinea. Sometimes he would return to his hometown vanquished, with broken wings, so bankrupt that if he pulled his pockets inside out not a single lira would fall out. He’d sleep at a relative’s who would grudgingly take him in.
But soon enough he would disappear, after catching wind of things he didn’t like to hear, such as ‘The atmosphere in town isn’t clean,’ or ‘God help us from those two days…’ He knew the stories about killing and vendettas would start up again, too. They had been weaned on killing, he said that about them with a certain amount of pity, and then set off again. He would strike up a new plan, head in a new direction, as if he could sniff out money from afar. The moment his friends came into some money, he found out about it. The news of who’d won at gambling or who’d been lucky in the wheat market or selling diamonds would come out, and he would show up at the winner’s door while the money was still fresh. He’d show up with all his stories and his jokes.
‘Did you smell it or something?’ they would ask him, laughing.
He never asked for money, but he always got it. He knew the Lebanese communities by heart, naturally preferring the rich people if they were still in their youth and the gamblers if they were old. He sought the generosity of rich young men looking for women and the foolishness of gamblers, but he spent almost his entire life taking from the rich in return for charm and ladies and giving to the gamblers in return for an obscure form of pleasure only they could give him: the pleasure of losing. Sometimes, though, he would get cut off in exile. He would run out of money all of a sudden after a wild night of uncontrolled drinking and dancing on tables in Santo Domingo or Havana with a brunette capable of seducing the devil. In Cuba, he had fruitlessly tried to pursue an old aunt who was said to have come to the island by mistake on her way to the United States, decided to stay and made a fortune from tobacco farming.
However, he was not lacking in wiliness. He would go to Lima airport, for example, ask for a telephone book and search under ‘K’ for all the ‘Kfourys’, confident that there were members of the Kfoury family in every corner of the world. He wouldn’t hesitate to call one of the numbers which stood out to him, and after a short conversation in which he explained that he’d been forced to leave his hometown suddenly because of the violent events taking place all around him and that some relatives of his had been murdered there in the Burj al-Hawa incident and now revenge killings were being carried out in every nook and cranny. He’d come to the Peruvian capital to escape and now he didn’t know what to do. In fact, he knew well what to do, for he captivated them with his story. But no sooner would he catch a whiff of the palm of his own hand than he would start yearning to play poker again. No one knows how he found his way to those Lebanese who could not be cured of the vice of gambling no matter how far they travelled. He competed with them at tequila drinking and bluffing opponents and forcing them to fold, until one night he got lucky and won all the money on the table. One of them who was from a town near Barqa became furious. After losing all the money he had in his pocket, he pulled out some Lebanese property deeds and asked for their value in cash. Upon inspection he discovered they were very large parcels, so he gave him what he figured was a good percentage of what they were worth. He put them away in his suitcase and nearly forgot all about them, until he was down on his luck again and went back to his hometown. The situation had calmed down and people had gone back about their business. He was penniless again, so he fished out his newly acquired deeds with the intention of selling them and using the money to set off again. He found a buyer willing to buy the deeds without carefully inspecting them, because he had offered them at a very low price. The buyer was afraid he might change his mind so he was quick to pay, requesting that he sign a bill of sale before the notary public to conclude the deal before the transfer of title to its new owner was listed on the real estate ledger. And once again, off he went into God’s wide world.