‘The race is over. You can all go home now!’
When the town split into two, his house ended up being on the enemy side, but he didn’t leave it. They advised him to go to his own clan, as they called it, out of deference to the Bedouin tribes, but he refused. He said, ‘This is my house, the house of my father and my grandfather, and I’m going to stay in it. I didn’t harm anyone and everyone loves me and they’re all my customers.’ He stayed in the house, a mere five hundred metres from the border of his family’s neighbourhood, a stone’s throw away. When the shooting started at the beginning of the tensions, some of his family members would call out to him loud enough to be heard from behind their barricades to make sure he was safe. He was able to hear them clearly but he avoided answering. If he heard a voice calling to him when he was outside his house, he hurried back inside and shut the door behind him. Samih remained on the wrong side of the green line.
It hadn’t come to be called the green line yet. That was a fancy term that was later coined in the Beirut newspapers for the line of battle that divided the capital for two decades and extended from the hills overlooking the city down to the Damascus Highway and all the way to the port. We on the other hand had no name for it, or maybe we hadn’t managed to arrive at a concrete form for the idea of that imaginary line separating the Semaani family neighbourhood, which extended all the way to the southern edge, from the Rami family to the north of the town, though it was drawn there like a protruding line on a relief map. The townspeople all knew about it and knew precisely where it was, where it stretched to, where it took a turn, and where it got lost at some unidentifiable juncture. The green line, as demographics would have it, gave control of the town’s western outlet leading to the city to the Semaani family, while the Rami family controlled the eastern outlet that led to the towns in the elevations above. The coast was theirs and the mountains were ours. But the line became complicated once inside the crowded neighbourhoods and the ancient, damp quarters. It turned upwards around a cluster of houses whose inhabitants stood strong with all their men and guns, extending the Semaani neighbourhood up into the mountains. Or it left behind some deserted areas that stretched between the two quarters and were exposed to the opposing side’s barricades, making it impossible to live there. The important thing was that this line was drawn in the minds of the townspeople, young and old alike. They all knew that if they took ten extra steps in one direction or the other, they moved from one neighbourhood to another. The main road was not the divider; it was much more difficult than that, which was why it was nerve-wracking to clarify the situation to strangers. The line was drawn in stages, in conjunction with the rise in tensions. After the Burj al-Hawa incident, crossing the line remained possible for those who hadn’t been directly involved, but movement started to diminish when the barricades were set up. It seemed as though a deep abyss had come between the two quarters. The problems ended, the commander of the army was elected President of the Republic with the blessing of American special envoy to Lebanon Richard Murphy, and Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, and a national unity government was formed. It sent the army back to the town and the barricades were lifted after eight months during which the green line hadn’t budged an inch.
His name was Samih al-Rami and his parents’ house with its adjoining bakery was in the Semaani family neighbourhood, five hundred metres from the first public senior school for girls, which the green line passed straight through. Neither party was ever able to stay there and set up barricades.
In the beginning he didn’t show any signs of anxiety, as if he depended upon some hidden power that protected him and made him immune to the general danger around him. The Semaani family members themselves, in particular the women, from whom nothing was kept hidden, used to forget he was an Al-Rami. When tensions flared up, the women cursed his family as they rolled out the dough and never expected any response from him. The only thing that bothered him was the voices that called to him from behind the barricades, where the armed men from his family were. Some of the voices, which he recognised, sometimes asked him to leave the Semaani neighbourhood and come to them.
‘They’ll kill you, Samih. They have no conscience and no religion!’
He asked Father Boulos to inform the men of his family over on the other side that he was doing fine, not to worry about him. And he asked him specifically to ask them to please stop calling to him so as not to draw their eyes to him. They stopped asking for him out loud, but there were still people in the nearby Rami family barricades who would sneak forward a few metres, hoping to catch a glimpse of Samih leaving his bakery or entering it and make sure that he was still alive and well.
Not much about Samih’s daily life changed, except for the Sunday stroll, that short strut down to the main road which was no longer the stage for bicyclists with their strange hats and multi-coloured shirts, and which had been abandoned by the young girls and the American and German cars. At the bakery, he stuck closer to the oven than before. He wasn’t just trying to lean away and avoid responding to the women’s talk and what they said about others anymore. Now he shoved his head as far inside the oven as possible so as not to hear the women’s talk at all — especially when news spread of someone from the Semaani family having been killed or even worse, if one of their unarmed young men fell victim to an ambush set for him outside the town. The women didn’t spare anyone from their tongues. Their chatter transformed into prayers for their demise. As a general rule, he didn’t say anything to them, even if one of them looked him straight in the eye and said, ‘Yesterday your cousins robbed Elias al-Rami’s house and then blew it up with dynamite… God damn all their houses!’
Samih would raise his eyes to the heavens in submission, declaring he had nothing to do with whatever was happening. Samih was an only child, his father had been an only child and his grandfather, too. There weren’t any direct relatives to speak of, no paternal cousins from his father’s brother from the Rami family, no sturdy family tree to be drawn up for them. They themselves knew nothing more than the fact that they were from the Rami family. And they didn’t belong to some junior branch. Some even said they hailed directly from the original Rami family.
Samih used to avoid hearing and avoid speaking even more. If he opened his mouth at all, it was to say something about the bread or the dough or to count the loaves which were the bakery’s entitlement — loaves he’d take out of each portion of his clients’ bread dough to sell — because Samih always counted out loud, as if he couldn’t keep track of the numbers unless he called them out. Or maybe he counted noisily in order to make it clear in front of witnesses that he was taking his fair share and not a single loaf more.
It’s possible Samih was convinced that his safety depended on watching his tongue. If he didn’t speak, he’d be safe. That was the idea of ‘the tepid tongue’ — the importance of words and the harmful nature of words that his father taught him. And perhaps his father’s other advice to him not to listen to the women was related to this idea of the neutrality of speech more than it had to do with being careful that the bread or the trays of kibbeh on Sundays didn’t burn inside the oven.