But her influence over him was much stronger than ours. He loved to eat and she used to threaten him that if he was nice to us she’d stop cooking for him. He loved baked spicy fish and stuffed tripe and grape leaves, and she was a very good cook. In any case, she was going to kill him with all that food. Once, and only once, she invited us to lunch. The bitch was a damn good cook! Eventually, she forbade him from visiting us and the enmity between us grew to the point where he started saying things like, ‘If I die I don’t want them walking in my funeral procession.’
Some people told us they’d heard him say that. He didn’t want us — my brother and mother and me — to walk in his funeral procession. I couldn’t believe he would say such a thing.
And now here we were, standing in line outside the army barracks for the sole reason that we were his nephews. My mother had forced me to take a sandwich of cheese and olives that she made and wrapped in a paper bag for me. I almost gave it to the Ghandour so he might give me a break and give himself a break from all his talking. My mother worried I would get hungry if there was a long wait. ‘You can’t stand being hungry,’ she said to me. She knew me well, my mother. I really can’t stand being hungry. But I was embarrassed by the bag and the cheese that was starting to stink. And I was embarrassed about my uncle’s wife, too. She’d be livid if she saw us standing in line.
I was trying my best to hide behind the fat lady blocking my view, but my head still stuck out no matter how hard I tried because she was short. The sun started to beat down on us as we inched slowly forward. We were dying to know what was happening inside that small building. Those exiting didn’t encounter those entering. The news travelled, though, in the end, from the back of the line to the front this time. There were people who’d made the full round and then returned to the end of the line holding something others could see. Many of them were holding a banker’s cheque in their hands for the very first time. At first, we didn’t understand how they’d divided up the money as the shares weren’t equal. Eventually we figured out that they had divided it up according to each heir’s share of the dead man’s inheritance.
The truth was I was embarrassed to be there and tried to avoid people’s eyes — people I knew. I knew what they would say to themselves if they saw me there with my brother. My brother, on the other hand, didn’t really care about all that. I spotted him joking with the people standing next to him in line. Everyone had been included in the inheritance, without exception, and they all had come. Half the town was there. The Ghandour looked them over and told me about each one.
‘See that woman there in front of the soldier with the glasses? It was my brother Nassif who killed her husband. If it hadn’t been for my brother Nassif, it would have been a huge disgrace for us at Burj al-Hawa. They shot her husband from behind, because his relatives didn’t protect his back…’
They had made all of us come to the barracks and stand together in one line. It was the first time we’d come in contact with each other after the events. Two years earlier when the government took control of the situation and arrested men on both sides, guilty and innocent alike, they separated us, putting the Semaanis in the Qubbah prison and the Ramis in the Amir Bashir army barracks in Beirut. But this time they put us all in one line.
Abu Jamil passed next to me and put his hand on my shoulder. The way he looked at me made me feel he still loved me, the way he used to love me when he was in our quarter. That was before he fled and some of our family members occupied his house.
‘Tell your mother,’ he said to me, ‘that Umm Jamil says hello.’
I told my mother that when I got home. She sighed.
The Ghandour knew every one of them. ‘And that young man over there,’ the Ghandour continued. ‘My brother Nassif…’ None of his talk was about himself; the true hero in his eyes was his brother Nassif.
I put my hand over my ear trying to get his mouth away from me.
My uncle’s wife got half of the inheritance and we got the other half. If they’d had children, we wouldn’t have received anything. My uncle had run into an ambush that hadn’t been intended for him. He had been driving along in his car when he heard shots fired nearby. Startled, he lost control of the car, veered off the road, and his car flipped and ended up at the bottom of the valley. Despite that he didn’t die; people said he got out of the wrecked car and walked away. They didn’t find any evidence of bullet holes in the car, though. At any rate, the people who had set the trap on the road were from our side, and when they discovered their mistake they rushed to get my uncle out of the car. Be that as it may, my uncle’s health went downhill after that and he died six months later. We attended his funeral service at the church, but we didn’t go to the house afterwards because his wife sent someone to tell us she would cause a scene if we entered her house. She came at us with everything she had. Everywhere she went, she said that we had done everything in our power to prevent him from being listed among the victims of the fighting and that we had gone to the military commander to tell him our uncle died in a car accident and his wife wasn’t entitled to compensation.
I was looking for something to shade myself from the sun, which was burning a hole in my head, when we heard some noise coming from the back of the line, and some shouting, ‘The committee! The committee!’
We were pleased by the arrival of the committee, because it broke the monotony of our long wait. It was a small procession of three cars led by a police motorcycle escort. The first to get out of the car was a short man with thick black glasses and a black splotch on the upper part of his face. Two other men accompanied him. An officer rushed to greet him calling him ‘Henry Beyk’. We recognised him; the Ghandour recognised him. It seemed he was the one who’d raised the money from some wealthy friends of his in Beirut. We also found out what happened was the United States had been sending aid to Lebanon in the form of surplus wheat, and there was a businessman who suggested that the government sell the wheat from America — at discounted prices of course — and use the money to pay compensation to the victims’ families and to broker a reconciliation between us. The businessman had been slow in delivering the money and the reconciliation was delayed up until the day when we lined up in front of the Michel Hlayel barracks in Qubbah.
As Henry Beyk was walking, he stumbled, nearly falling over, which prompted the fat lady standing in front of me to shout, ‘Oh God!’ One of his bodyguards rushed to catch his fall. Henry Beyk smiled and looked around as if he wanted to thank the woman for her concern. Her concern was artificial, just like her. Some people around us said he was the owner of the racetrack in Beirut; a man standing in front of the fat lady said he used to be the foreign minister at the time of the Lebanese independence. He stopped to let the people who’d come with him from Beirut catch up with him.
An officer in dress uniform got out of the second car. The three soldiers who were in charge of making sure we didn’t cut in line saluted him. Soldiers always salute officers even if they don’t know them, at the mere sight of stars on their shoulders. He was very stern and I felt he was looking at us with disdain. The whole time I was standing in the queue inside that barracks I had the feeling that the military men were looking at the civilians with contempt. By civilians, I mean us. We reciprocated, calling them government horses, all fattened up with nothing to do. We wouldn’t reach out to help them because we believed they held ulterior motives — to attack us. None of us would ever join the army except as an officer.