The war broke out and he began watching his movements. He went from the bakery to the house to the shop — he couldn’t do without the shop — reduced his movements to the nearest triangle and nowhere else. And he only went to the shop, which was a bit far and was exposed to people, at dusk, thus limiting the possibility of danger. The shopkeeper was a widow and sometimes he traded bread with her for eggs or goat’s milk yogurt, which he liked to drink cold. He counted the loaves in a loud voice and she counted the eggs as loud as she could, too. Sometimes he’d make a stop at the church.
Samih longed to go to church, but he wasn’t very consistent with his religious duties, especially because the bakery kept him from Sunday mass. He yearned to go to church, and would go inside for a split second, dip his fingers in the holy water, kneel alongside the wall beside the icon of the Virgin with a dark complexion and Indian features, which the donor who funded the building of the church and was an émigré to Mexico insisted be placed in a special spot inside the church. Samih quickly muttered his prayers and got up to leave. He hardly saw a single man during his day, only those who walked past. If he was afraid of anything, he was afraid of the women. And so he concluded that danger would come to him from the women.
But death came to him from the men.
The day one of their well-educated young men was killed, they came.
There were three of them who came along with the victim’s uncle.
They waited outside while the uncle came to the door.
He stood in the doorway, blocking the light from coming in. He had very broad shoulders.
His nephew had been in the Baccalaureate II class at the Frères School, preparing to take the government exams that had been postponed due to the fighting. He spent all his time studying.
‘They killed him with a book in his hands,’ his mother said, mourning him.
Maybe she meant to say figuratively that her son was a student unversed in the language of guns, or maybe he really had been reviewing his lessons out on the balcony where he thought bullets from the other side couldn’t possibly reach him. It seemed as if the Rami family had slipped into places where they could now make out back courtyards and houses whose inhabitants, believing they were out of their bullets’ reach, moved about freely. They would take advantage of them and hunt one of them down. Afterwards, the residents would avoid that exposed location or they’d build a makeshift wall to protect themselves from bullets coming from the opposing barricades.
The uncle was broad-shouldered and had rough features. He hadn’t sent his children to school. His brother had done that, and this had been his reward. He rushed to his brother’s house the moment he heard the news, leaned over his shoulder and said, ‘Didn’t I tell you not to educate your children?’
That was all he said.
As if his nephew’s education had caused his death.
In any case, the sun wouldn’t set on his murder. He swore on his mother’s soul. That’s what the uncle with the rough features said to himself. He grabbed one of his sons — one was plenty — and two fanatic relatives.
They knew about Samih’s presence in the neighbourhood. Everyone in the Semaani family knew of Samih’s presence, but they ignored him, saving him up for a rainy day.
They didn’t start with him. That would be too easy a prey, perhaps. They picked up their rifles, got in a car and hid around the bend. But soon they turned back.
It was more than likely that they didn’t get the chance they wanted. Maybe they waited and waited and no one passed by. They headed for the bakery.
The man stood in the doorway. Rarely did another man besides Samih come to the bakery. Samih didn’t look up. Maybe he thought the man was calling for his wife or some female relative for some urgent matter.
The man didn’t speak and didn’t come inside. He stood in the doorway, blocking the light from outside.
The news of the boy’s murder out on his balcony as he studied his lessons hadn’t spread yet, which is why the women didn’t pay much attention to the fact of the man standing in the doorway.
They kept on rolling and stretching the dough and dusting it with flour, but they stopped talking as a cautionary measure.
The man’s right hand was behind his back. He lowered it and the revolver appeared. It was cocked and ready as it shone in the bright sunlight.
He raised his arm to aim, mumbled some incomprehensible words, and shot three bullets. All three hit Samih, who was not paying attention to what was going on in the bakery doorway. He probably didn’t want to know what was going on.
He was waiting for the right moment to remove the loaf of bread from the oven, waiting for the onset of the burning smell and to see the little black spots appear.
The man said something out loud that the women didn’t hear. The sound of the three bullets exploding into the little bakery deafened their ears.
The man tucked his gun back inside his belt and left — he and his relatives, too. Daylight streamed back into the bakery.
Samih didn’t fall to the ground.
He fell into the chair he always kept beside him.
He sat down with a slight look of rebuke in his eyes, looking at the women, one by one.
Chapter 18
‘Pardon me for receiving you dressed this way. I’ve lived alone many, many years and rarely leave the house. The woman who cleans for me hasn’t come this week. I don’t know where she disappeared to or what I’ll do without her… Come closer, come closer, don’t be shy. I’ll tell you what you what to know. I don’t know who led you to me, but I remember you from a long time ago when you were just a small child running about the quarter and Kamileh would yell to you: “Eliyya!”
‘And you wouldn’t turn to look. I can still hear the sound of her calling to you. “Eliyyaaaaaaa…”
‘I’ll sit here, right here in my spot on the red sofa. I like the feel of the velvet even though it makes you feel even hotter in the summer.
‘Where did you get that picture? I know Davidian. He used to have a studio in the square. And I also know another photographer not many people know named Jorge al-Indari who especially liked to take pictures of women. He took the nicest portrait of me. I still have it. But he died in vague circumstances. Yes, that’s your father. That’s Yusef al-Kfoury. He had a sweet face. I remember how he’d always say to me whenever he saw me, “How are you, son of Al-Aasi?” He was the only one who called me “son of Al-Aasi”.
‘Look. Through that window. Come closer to me. Closer. What do you see there? The grapevine and the rusty roof tiles, right? That’s your house. Maybe you’re not used to seeing it from here. And those are your mother Kamileh’s flowers and her grapevines. People think our house is far from Yusef al-Kfoury’s house, but they’re wrong. Look — it’s less than a stone’s throw away. You are our closest neighbours. But nowadays if we had to go and see you for some reason, we’d have to go all the way down the main road and up around the church. A long way, and frankly I don’t like walking that way. All day long and into the middle of the night during the warm summer nights there are kids everywhere, and they’re rude kids, no respect for anyone. Their mothers are even worse than they are, sitting on low chairs in front of the houses and the shops with their legs and jaws wide open, waiting for anyone to pass so they can say something negative about them. They mock me saying I walk on my tiptoes, but I don’t pay any attention. That’s the way I walk and I’m not going to change it just to please them.
‘In the old days, to go up there we used to cut through the garden between us on foot — along a dirt road at the edge of the garden. It didn’t bother anyone and saved us a lot of time. And actually sometimes on the way up or the way down the path some of us would pick a tangerine or a loquat because we knew that at the end of the season everything would die on the branches in that vacant garden. Then one of those bratty kids told the property owners on us. They were old-time émigrés to Mexico. He wrote them a letter making it sound as if their land here had become a free for all. So these people, who were very rich — people called them the cotton kings — sent after one of their relatives asking him to put up a fence around the garden to stop us from using it as a shortcut.