One by one the late-comers joined the end of the line that reached all the way to the main road, back behind the statue of the Unknown Soldier at the main entrance to the barracks. It was a stone statue of a military fighter brandishing a flag, and beside it there was a plaque with the names of those who had fallen in the line of duty. Whoever had etched the names in the plaque didn’t list them in alphabetical order or in chronological order of their deaths. Instead, he’d tried to the best of his ability to deliberately alternate each Christian name with a Muslim name: First Adjutant Butros Mansour Saba, Sergeant Mahmoud Ismail al-Qaafarani, Private First Class Mousa Jibrail Touma, Private Mustafa al-Asaad, and so on. There were more Muslims than Christians, however, so he was forced to put three Muslim names in a row at the end of the list.
I had come on my own, and my brother had done the same. We hadn’t wanted to draw attention by arriving together. He was a few metres ahead of me in the queue. That’s how we were with everything — he beat me at doing, while I beat him at thinking. I noticed our uncle’s wife at the front of the queue, too, ahead of my brother. She was ahead of both of us, which, in my opinion, she deserved to be. She had left early for the barracks. I tried to avoid her eyes. As she scanned the crowd in all directions she was undoubtedly searching for us — for my brother and me. She didn’t see me, though, and in fact she would enter the small building and exit through the back door without ever seeing me. That’s how I preferred things to go — each one to his own.
A fat woman dressed in black was standing right in front of me. I didn’t know her. I’d never seen her before in our quarter, and she was definitely not one of our relatives. All of the women standing in line were wearing black. All black. And it was possible to determine how closely they were related to the dead by the heavy black stockings they were wearing in that hot weather, and by the scarves on their heads, too. Bare legs meant a relation of lesser degree or possibly that enough time had passed since the death to permit a slackening in mourning signs. My uncle’s wife was dressed in dark black and she also wore a black scarf on her head that covered her hair. She did that in order to be counted among the victims’ widows. Actually, she should have been in reduced mourning since my uncle had been very old and it had been over a year since he’d died.
I craned my neck and spotted a woman at the head of the queue, not four or five people away from the guard at the door to the little building. She was wearing a green dress. She was the only one not wearing black and she was looking all around in bewilderment as if she’d just discovered she was the only woman in that long line not dressed in black. She turned her head looking all the way to the end of the line that extended all the way to the main road. She was the only one wearing colourful clothing. I didn’t think she lived in the town. It was likely that someone had told her to come, so she came. Maybe she’d come from Beirut. I wanted to ask the Ghandour about her but I changed my mind for fear he would start talking my ear off again.
The number of women was equal to, or possibly exceeded, the number of men. All the relatives had come except for the ones who’d gone to Australia to escape the fighting. Those émigrés sent power of attorney to one of their relatives. Kamileh, the wife of Yusef al-Kfoury, hadn’t come down to the barracks. We didn’t realise it at the time. They told us later on that she was the only woman who had refused to come to the Michel Hlayel barracks. She said she didn’t want money in compensation for her husband, insinuating that the rest of us had sold out our dead relatives for money. She had no right to talk that way. People told all sorts of stories about her, that Kamileh. Everyone knew that she’d conceived a child after her husband’s death. More than nine months after. People don’t have anything else to do; they scrutinise, calculate and count on their fingers while waiting for each other around every corner.
The fat lady in front of me was trying to find someone to talk to, anyone. She was nervous. She looked to the front and to the back without seeing a single familiar face. There was no way I could respond or carry on a conversation with her because the Ghandour kept whispering to me from behind almost continually; it was impossible for me to follow two people talking at the same time. The Ghandour stopped just for a second, to take a sniff and try to stop his nose from running. I searched my pocket for a handkerchief to give him to blow his nose, but I didn’t find one, so I thought about tearing off a corner of the paper bag I was holding. He could use it to end the constant threat of his nose dripping once and for all.
Suddenly the fat lady started complaining to herself, in a loud voice. She spoke without looking at anyone. She hadn’t been able to find her identity card. She’d come to the barracks without any proof of who she was. When the Sûreté Générale officer had come to everyone’s house he told us to arrive before noon on Saturday at the Michel Hlayel barracks in Qubbah and to bring our identity cards. We hadn’t waited until before noon, but started heading to the barracks in the early hours after dawn and arrived even before the members of the committee coming from Beirut. The Sûreté Générale officer hadn’t said more than that; he asked only for our identity cards. The fat lady had lost hers. She woke up early that day and turned the house upside down looking for it for the third time. She hadn’t used it since the last election. I hadn’t yet understood this ability some people have to speak to themselves in a loud voice without addressing anyone in particular. When she first realised that she’d lost her ID, she had gone to the Civil Registry Office to try to obtain a new one, but the officer told her it would take time. Suddenly she changed her tone, as if to console herself, telling herself she would surely find someone to vouch for her.
‘My sister is here, and my nieces, but I don’t see them anywhere. Maybe they haven’t arrived yet. If they send me back home empty-handed, I’ll raise hell!’
Suddenly she spotted one of her relatives at the rear, so she called out to him as if she hadn’t seen him for ages; mainly to console herself that there was someone who knew her who was prepared to identify her.
I had no desire to come to the Michel Hlayel barracks in Qubbah, but my brother persuaded me with a simple plea: ‘If you don’t take the money allocated to you, they’ll take it instead.’
The ‘they’ he was referring to were the members of the committee or some officials we didn’t know. They’d take it and pocket it themselves. ‘At any rate,’ he added, ‘your generosity in the matter would go unnoticed by everyone but the two of us…’
Actually, I hadn’t been thinking about generosity. I was thinking about my uncle’s wife. As far as I knew, she didn’t even know where we lived. Never once had she come to our house for a visit. It was like the endless war of Dahis and Al-Ghabraa between us. We believed that our uncle loved us but she had turned him against us. I remember how he used to wait until her back was turned to give us money and tell us to hide it from her. He’d kiss me on the forehead and I could smell tobacco on his breath. We were little and he loved us. We were his brother’s children, so we were his children too. That’s what he used to say while I nearly gagged from the smell of tobacco reeking out of his jacket.
‘They want to take your inheritance while you’re still alive…’ That was her call to war against us. And we used to answer back. We weren’t shy about it, and our answer was harsh. We went back and forth with it at length at home. ‘Why didn’t she give him some children who could inherit from him? We’re not going to let you take our property to your family! If only my uncle could see, he wouldn’t have picked her up off the street!’