‘Your mother knows the story. Ask her. At any rate, if anyone made a sound out on your balcony, we could hear it over here perfectly clearly. I used to hear you playing your accordion. You liked French tunes a lot, I remember. If someone as much as coughed on the balcony, we’d hear it. On quiet nights we could hear conversations from there, even if it was just Kamileh talking about everyday matters with Muntaha, her friend ever since the day she moved into the quarter. Sound travels at night. Your balcony was a popular destination for the neighbours. I was happy in the past when I saw them return to your house to congratulate your mother on your arrival. Kamileh wasn’t always such a recluse. Circumstances changed over time, though, and in recent years she’s stayed by herself the majority of the time. She prunes her flowers, waters them, talks to them. Your mother gets mad at the flowers if they droop or start to wilt. She chides them and sometimes she sings to them. We can hear her voice from here singing her mawwaals. We look forward to hearing her sad voice nearly every night.
‘I used to be amazed by her beautiful voice, which was powerful despite her age. But then we found out one day, not too long ago, that she had recorded her voice on a tape. Did you know that? She recorded her voice so she could play it back. All along we’d been listening those nights to the tape recorder. Kamileh acquired a tape recorder before we did, but we bought the radio before you and nearly everyone else in the neighbourhood. You hadn’t been born yet when I started sitting here. My mother used to bring me a cup of coffee every morning to this little table because she knew I’d come here as soon as I got up, to this place where I spent most of my time listening to the radio and smoking cigarettes.
‘I was infatuated with that radio, especially loved listening to Layla Murad and Mohammed Abd al-Wahhab songs. And when radio plays became popular I used to follow them daily, but I didn’t dare raise the volume too high. For years after the Burj al-Hawa incident I didn’t dare raise the volume on the radio. I used to keep the radio right there, in the salon. I think we bought it early on because of my cousin Odette who had joined the radio station chorus in Beirut. They had chosen her to sing a solo. So my mother saved up the money and bought the radio. When it came time for Odette’s song to be broadcast all the neighbours gathered at our house. Her mother and my mother ululated with delight and Odette was sitting there with us, too.
‘That was before all the fighting started, after which they all donned black mourning clothes and even stopped pounding meat for kibbeh in the mortar. That’s when I started being cautious about the volume and only turned it up loud enough to hear the songs when I went into the kitchen. Whenever we heard a knock at the door, we’d quickly turn off the radio before opening the door. We did that for years, even after the fighting was over and people went back to mixing with each other again. We would turn the radio off — that was my job, and my mother would put the dog in the closet in the bedroom so visitors wouldn’t hear him even if he started barking in there. Yes, we used to turn the radio off and close its cloth cover to make it look like we hadn’t touched it in a long time, and we’d hide my white dog. The dog used to sit beside me the whole time I sat here. He’d close his eyes and he’d let out a low bark at any sudden movement nearby. I named him Freddy, but I didn’t dare take him out into the streets. I was afraid the kids would follow me and whistle at me. Those wild bastards.
‘We didn’t allow ourselves to enjoy those songs, especially since we were from the Al-Aasi family. We didn’t want people to think we were happy about what happened. Some people might take it as an excuse to come after us. They wanted us to side with them, but we didn’t want to suffer any harm from them or from anyone else. We were also afraid that your mother, who never left her balcony, would hear the radio. I used to sit here and listen to Asmahan and Layla Murad and dream about the theatre. I was eighteen and had started caring about my appearance: I studied my look. I remember I used to be careful about how I sat and would spend a long time examining the mirror. But despite all my efforts everyone told me that when I walked my right shoulder dipped lower than the left and they accused me of walking on my tiptoes. It’s true I thought I was short, but I wasn’t trying to make myself look taller. During that period I once made it onto the stage. I insisted they give me some small role in the school play and the teacher agreed. He dressed me in a black robe and made me carry a long, metal pitch fork and trained me to walk across the stage from the right side to the left and to say one line: “I am Lucifer, Lord of Hell and God of Gehenna!”
‘I said it twice and stood in my place, refusing to exit off to the other side. I was relishing standing in front of the audience, until the teacher started pulling his hair and screaming at me from behind the curtain to move out of the way. My mother heard him from where she was sitting in the front row seats reserved for the actors’ parents. She stood up in protest and told him in a loud voice to let me stay on the stage a little longer. My father, on the other hand, didn’t like the idea of his son playing the role of Satan, and neither did he like it when they gave me the role of Judas on Holy Thursday. He got angry and told me I was handsome, so why hadn’t they given me the role of Jesus or Saint Peter, for example.
‘What mattered most was my parents’ concern when they noticed my stage fright, as people called it. I was sixteen years old and never went out of the house except to go to the cinema, and I was one of the few who went to see movies at both of the movie theatres in town after each neighbourhood ended up having its own theatre. The rest of the time I just sat here. I spent years sitting here on this same red velvet sofa. I’ve even made a dent in it where I always sat. Look. Sitting and smoking Lucky Strikes, two packs a day, imagining myself before an audience, maintaining a dignified and serious look on my face.
‘They must have told you I am strange. I know what people say about me. Lots of them used to make fun of my gait and didn’t expect me to amount to much. I think they used to whisper about me, call me crazy. They were quick to judge and didn’t accept any appeal for their verdicts. All that matters is that I was constantly on stage. They were right about my being wrapped up in myself.
‘I imagined I was Humphrey Bogart, because someone told me once that I look like him. I insisted on having all my shirts tailored by a particular tailor in Tripoli who always sewed the customer’s initials onto the shirt. I used to ask him to embroider HB on the front, but he wondered about that, knowing my real name, so I resorted to telling him I was having the shirts made for a friend with those initials who happened to have the same shirt measurements. He had no choice but to believe me. I tried to walk the way I imagined Humphrey Bogart walked, and I would stand with the same posture I studied him using in the movie Casablanca. I’d put on a hat like his when I was at home alone and practised speaking like Yusuf Wehbeh, and that was before I’d seen Yusuf Wehbeh in movies. I only knew his voice from radio plays. And I didn’t understand a word Humphrey Bogart said in English, so I mixed Yusuf Wehbeh’s dignified voice with Humphrey Bogart’s manly stance. My mother would come and sit beside me sometimes and ask me lovingly and calmly what I wanted to do with my future and tell me my father was very worried about me to the point of not being able to sleep at night and she was afraid he’d have a heart attack because of me. I didn’t dare tell her what I really wanted, because if I were to tell her my true desire, it would cause health problems not only for my father, but for her, too.