Ahmad was my little brother, he and I used to sleep in the same bed. I would tell him stories and he loved listening to them. We’d lie in bed and pull the covers up over our heads, and he’d ask for the story about the Russian priest, and I would tell it, over and over again, until he fell asleep.
“Listen up, Ahmad,” I’d say. “There was once a Russian priest who had a cat he loved very, very much. One day the cat stole his piece of meat, so he beat her and killed her and then he buried her. And on the gravestone, he wrote: There was once a Russian priest who had a cat he loved very, very much. One day the cat stole his piece of meat, so he beat her and killed her and then he buried her. And on the gravestone, he wrote: There was once a Russian priest. .” And Ahmad would be asleep.
Why it seems like it was just yesterday. . even though he’d become a boxing champion, and I was married… he would come and sit beside me and ask me to tell him the story of the Russian priest.
I can’t remember who told us the story, but we used to sing it as a ditty at school, and the nun would get so mad at us, saying that it was wicked, and would chase us across the playground in her white and brown habit. She was pretty, that nun. I told my mother that I wanted to be a nun when I grew up, but when I draped a white towel over my head and walked around the house rattling off French words, Ahmad on my heels, it upset her.
She told my father about it, and he hit me. I nearly died he hit me so hard. The following year, he moved me from the convent to the local government school. But I liked the nuns’ school better.
I haven’t become a nun, and whenever I think about him now, I can’t help picturing Ahmad as a skinny little boy, brown as a nut, with a mass of curly hair, dripping with molasses! My mother is screaming at him in the kitchen for pouring a jar of molasses all over himself, and I run and scoop him up into my arms and whisk him off to the bathroom, where I undress him and splash water over his head and back and neck, and feel like licking the molasses off his eyes and face! And him holding his fists out in front of him like a boxer, running around the bathroom to make me chase after him and my mother yelling. His head dripping wet, his lips blue with cold, and my clothes soaked from washing and scrubbing his skinny little body, and still the molasses won’t come out of his hair. So I get the scissors and snip this way and that, and his thick dark curls cascade to the ground, and there is water everywhere, and then Ahmad slips. I finally take him to my bed to get him to go to sleep. He asks for the story of the Russian priest but I want to tell him about Jebina who’s lost in the forest and is attacked by wild animals, and how the wolf chases her so that he can ravish her.
“But that’s a scary story,” protests Ahmad. “I don’t like stories that make me cry.”
I begin the story, and he immediately starts to cry.
“But in the end everything’s alright,” I tell him. “Jebina gets married and the wolf doesn’t get her.”
He won’t stop crying, so I switch to the story of the Russian priest, and then he laughs and laughs and finally he falls asleep.
Hey, brother! That’s how he would call me. I don’t know why, but even as a grown man, he’d always say, “hey, brother.” He was the only one who truly loved me in the family: my father loved Su’ad, my sister, because she’s fair-skinned, but he hated me.
“Little soot-face,” he’d say, “we found you in a sack of charcoal!”
But he always spoiled Su’ad because she is fair, even though she never lifted a finger for him! When Father was ill that time, she came down from Tripoli just for two days and then went back home. The roads aren’t safe, she told Mother.
Whereas I stayed day and night — even though he wouldn’t talk to me, and Mother said I should go home. “Your husband will be upset, girl,” she’d say. But it wasn’t that… she doesn’t like me either, because I’m dark. I think dark is nice. Everyone says I’m prettier than my sister, except for my mother… All she ever wants is news of my sister. . She treats me like a servant. Yes, a servant. . ever since I was little…. First, I was a servant to them at home and now I’m a servant to Nadeem.
But Ahmad. . how could he die?
I told him, I begged him, not to! I still can’t believe it. I hardly saw his body for one minute. They brought him home in the coffin, they put it on his bed, and they opened it for just one minute and then they took it away. There was blood on his neck, it was horrible. And now, he’s dead. Everybody’s dead. Abu Saïd is dead too.
The war was supposed to be over. That’s what people said. The Deterrent 10 had come in and everyone said it was over. But it was nothing of the sort. Wars are like cats, it’s one litter after another. .
One day Abu Saïd is standing outside his butcher’s shop, with the freshly-slaughtered carcasses hanging from their hooks, and this car speeds by, guns blazing. . and, boom, he’s dead.
Nadeem was really upset. When he saw Abu Saïd sprawled out on the sidewalk with the strung-up lambs in the storefront, he came home crying like a child. Why did they kill him? I don’t know, Nadeem wouldn’t say anything. All I know is that ever since Abu Saïd died, Nadeem has started coming home early again. He’ll watch TV, have a glass of araq with a plate of labneh and some sliced tomatoes, and then go to bed.
Mother said they closed down the gambling den after Abu Saïd died. Which means Nadeem was involved. But I never asked-I don’t want to know. The important thing is he no longer hits me, and he doesn’t rant and rave and turn the house upside down. And he no longer gets apoplectic every time he sees Ahmad’s picture in its black frame hanging in the living room. And he’s stopped getting upset when I tell the children stories of Ahmad dancing in the ring and beating his opponent in every boxing match he was in.
Basically, he’s calmed down. Ahmad never did, however.
He used to come home from school, toss his books on the bed, and go straight out again to the sports club; and he wouldn’t return until after dark. Mother complained that he wasn’t studying hard enough but Father always said the boy had a future full of promise. Some future! What promise? He’s gone now, dead and gone.
They’re all dead. Even the son of our neighbor Abu Khalil died. The war was supposed to be over, that’s what everyone said, but they still kidnapped him, when his body came back, it was mutilated. Poor old Abu Khalil, sitting on a chair outside his front door, day after day, waiting for people to come and condole with him! Nine months he didn’t move off that chair, sitting there waiting all day, drinking endless cups of coffee and listening to the radio.
They’re all dead now.
What I’d like to know is why this shelling doesn’t stop, since the war is supposed to be over. When I asked Nadeem, he said it was the Jews.
“The Jews are shelling the South,” I told him, “not here in Beirut.”
But he said the only explanation for the shelling was the Jews.
“Why are they still shelling?” Abu Khalil would ask the mourners coming to condole with him. “Looks to me like they want to kill every single person — like that, there won’t be anyone left who’s witnessed this war to do the telling: if someone survived to tell the tale there’d never be another war. It seems that this country’s destiny is to spawn a new war every twenty years. That’s why everyone must be killed.”
“But who would do the fighting then, Abu Khalil?”
“People. .”
“But they would have all died.”
“Others would replace them. The human race is resilient, it’s not easily annihilated. God created Man to hold sway over Nature, to burn it all up if he so wishes! And that’s what we’ve done, we’ve torched every field and every orchard, and if it came to it, we might even set the sea alight.” Abu Khalil is always waiting for visitors and I feel scared. I’ve been scared of the shelling ever since the war began — unlike Nadeem, who was totally unfazed by it. He’d come home at all hours and never seemed scared of anything. But he’s changed. Now, whenever he hears the shelling, he doesn’t stir. He stays home all day, and sits quietly in a corner like a child who’s afraid he’s going to be punished.