‘My mother was in the middle of broaching the topic of my future with me, what I would do for a living, and all the worrying about it, when we heard a scream followed by a single gunshot. Then there was a wailing sound that began to rise from every corner of the neighbourhood, followed by car horns and the roar of a military tank sounding its siren. After that came the sound of the church bell. We’d become experts at deciphering the various sounds that reached us, and became even better at it during the clashes. We didn’t dare go outside to see what was happening. We preferred to just depend on what we heard to know what was going on. Our house here was isolated, surrounded by gardens. The neighbours you see here to the right built their house only a few years ago. There wasn’t anyone nearby we could call to to find out what was happening except for your mother Kamileh, and we preferred not to bother her because we knew how acerbic her responses could be sometimes, and we just wanted to stay out of it. Your mother is a strong woman. That day screaming sounds reached us from your house, too. Painful screaming. I remember very well my mother saying in a decisive tone, “Yusef al-Kfoury has been killed. That’s the end of his bloodline!”
‘You hadn’t been born yet and we all thought Kamileh would not be blessed with a child. And your uncle never got married and your other uncle was sick, as you know…’
‘How did your mother know Yusef al-Kfoury had been killed?’
‘Kamileh wouldn’t scream like that except over her husband.
‘But when the screaming grew louder and all sorts of sounds kept coming from everywhere, especially the church bells, we knew for sure something very serious had happened.
‘“Lord help us,” my mother said. “There are so many dead!” And I also don’t know what gave my mother the idea that there were so many dead. I wanted to go out but she grabbed me by the hand and told me, “We have nothing to do with what’s happening.”
‘So I asked her, “What is happening?”
‘“Thank God,” she answered. “We are not involved in these problems.”
‘I used to hear about the problems but I didn’t care. After all, like my mother said, we were from a small family, only two Al-Aasi families in the whole town. Us — that is my father, my mother, my brothers, and myself — and Khalil al-Aasi the carpenter and his family. The strange thing was, we didn’t know if we were actually related to them, but because we had the same name we started being friendly with them and they were friendly with us, even if it was just talk and calling each other “cousin”, jokingly imitating the big families. At the same time, though, we kept our distance from them. Khalil al-Aasi’s family was aligned politically with the Ramis, which they had every right to be. They lived in the middle of their quarter after all. But we didn’t want to be lumped in with them and considered to be their relatives and subsequently elicit the enmity of the others. My father told us that the Semaanis made an offer to my grandfather to add Al-Semaani to our family name or to replace the Al-Aasi name with Al-Semaani, but he refused. We spent our whole lives walking a fine line. My mother knew how to walk it well. The first rule was to avoid going out around town during times of danger and tension because shooting at us had no consequences for those doing the shooting and would be classified under the general category of “errors”.
‘“I don’t want you to die as a result of some error…” she used to say. In fact, we grew up with a special temperament. We never gave our opinion about what was happening around us, and we never passed along any news or information or anything we knew to anyone. One of our mother’s rules was, “He who informs you humiliates you.” So we listened but we didn’t speak. We heard sounds and made predictions about what was happening. My father and mother could pinpoint the various sounds — sounds of people’s voices and of gunfire — and could predict what would ensue.’
First, people become uneasy upon hearing ‘deep’ gunfire for a well-known reason — not only is it far off in the distance, but it also doesn’t cause an echo. Thus, it is likely to have been fired directly at its target, which was more than likely to be a person, and the possibility of hearing some bad news after ‘deep’ gunfire was highly likely. Next there was what they called arrasi gunfire, which was gunfire shot into the air, in reference to shots fired in celebration of a wedding ceremony. And there were numerous occasions that called for celebratory gunfire, such as a child passing government exams or the birth of a son after long years of waiting. Someone even made a tape recording of himself shooting his rifle so he could send it to his brother who’d emigrated to Australia where (his brother assumed) he had been deprived of hearing the sound of gunfire. And then there was the unverified claim that Abu Saeed’s neighbours and relatives started shooting into the air one day, refusing to tell the reason for their joy. The secret didn’t come out until days later, thanks to some women who sent out news outside the quarter that Abu Saeed had been experiencing a constant erection and was worried sick about it. He’d consulted numerous doctors and the day it finally ‘slept’ for him, as they say, all his family and neighbours fired their rifles in celebration. And then there was the takleemi or ‘conversational’ gunfire, which is when one spray of fire is answered by another. That wasn’t such a bad sound to hear as it was an indication that the two sides were both ready with their weapons and it was most likely that matters would remain restricted to establishing each side’s presence and wouldn’t lead to casualties. Possibly the worst type of gunshot was that which could not be heard at a distance because it had been shot point blank — in other words at a very short distance from its target, too close to miss. And quite often you would hear people say, ‘I don’t like that gunfire,’ which was usually more a reflection of the bad feeling of whoever said it than something based on tangible information. That objection, which evolved into outright curses, was aimed especially at that kind of single gunshot. It was usually a shot from a rifle that broke the silence of the barricades and set off the confrontation. Even after the events came to an end, no one ever found out whose rifle it was and no one was ever certain from which side it was fired. It appeared both sides believed it came from behind the opposing sides’ barricades.
‘And then there was the problem of echoes. If we were to have a new visitor, for example, everything would be confusing for him, because when there was an echo we knew the sound coming from the east might have been produced on the western side. The thing that confused matters for us most of all was trying to decipher what the explosions and gunshots symbolised, like when the first 60-mm mortar shell fired in the direction of our neighbourhood landed in front of us. My mother saw the smoke rising up from the riverbank. Her eyes popped with shock and my father made a silent decision that we would leave this place.
‘We knew even without going outside that something big had happened. That was a difficult night; no one in the neighbourhood slept at all. From time to time we would hear weeping and there was someone who insisted on tolling the bells at night. Have you ever heard bells tolling at night? A lone cry of suffering reached us, too. They were keeping a vigil over the dead and we were not allowed to leave the house. Even the funeral the next day was something we didn’t dare attend. We were told that the bishop called on everyone to renounce their spite and vengeance and to be tolerant instead, but he was met with jeers of rejection and disapproval and was forced to finish up his sermon quickly. I didn’t sleep at all that night, either. The air was heavy and we knew they were all congregated there, around the church, weeping, even though we couldn’t hear their sobs.