Helen Forrester - The Lemon Tree

1860 and she was nearly twelve. As her terrified mother pulled her along behind her father, Charles Al-Khoury, she heard his startled exclamations at the hideous sights which each turn in the narrow streets revealed, the carnage left by a mob gone mad.

Before turning into a narrow alley leading down to the waterfront, they crouched close to the side of the blank wall of a warehouse, to catch their breath, while Charles Al-Khoury peered down the lane to make sure it was clear.

It was already darkened by the long shadows of the evening and the smoke from the ruins of old houses further down, but there was no sound, except for the crackle of fire; the looters had been thorough. The little family flitted silently down it. As they crossed another alley they heard men shouting in the distance, and Charles Al-Khoury increased his pace.

Almost numb with fear, his wife and daughter followed closely after him. Suddenly, he half-tripped over a dark shape lying on the ground. His women bumped into him and clung to him.

They stared down in horror. A woman had had her clothes torn off her. She had been butchered like a dead cow, and the child of her womb lay smashed against a house wall. A horribly mutilated, decapitated man lay near her, and further down the alley were other pitiful bundles, blood-soaked and still.

Leila Al-Khoury vomited, the vomit making her fluttering black head veil cling to her face. Young Helena began to scream in pure terror.

Her father clapped his hand over her mouth. ‘Helena!’ he whispered forcefully. ‘Be quiet.’

She swallowed her fear and nearly choked with the effort.

As they continued to scurry down narrow lanes, leading seaward, her father held her close to him, so that she would see as little as possible of the carnage; dogs were already nosing cautiously at the corpses of the Maronite Christians and being challenged by venturesome birds. One or two dogs had entered little homes through smashed doorways and could be heard growling over the spoils inside.

Wallace Helena, the grown woman, stirred in her bed, and cried out to the only person left to assuage her nightmares. ‘Joe, darling! Joe!’ But she was not heard and plunged again into her scarifying dreams, her heart beating a frantic tattoo.

Much later on, when they had established themselves in Chicago, she had asked her mother how the massacre had come about. She had been sitting cross-legged on her parents’ bed, watching her mother struggle into Western clothes.

Her mother had explained that the Muslim Turkish rulers of Lebanon did not like Christians very much; neither did another sect called Druze.

Egged on by the Turks, the Druze set out to eradicate their ancient enemies, the Maronite Christians, some of whom were enviably richer than they should be. In Beirut, they struck on July 9th, 1860.

‘We had heard rumours of unrest amongst the Druze, for some time before,’ her mother told her, ‘but neither your father nor your grandfather – my father – believed that we should be disturbed.

‘Our family had always lived in or near Beirut; it was such a pleasant little place – and you’ll remember our visiting our kin nearby. Our courtyard wall was high and strongly built – quite enough, we believed, to protect the house. And we were well-to-do; we could always placate the tax collectors and the servants of the Sultan, Abdul Mejid – may he be eternally accursed!’ She sounded vicious, as she lashed out at the hated Turkish ruler. Then she said more calmly, ‘You know, it’s usually the less powerful, and the poor who can’t pay, who are attacked.’

In the hope of obliterating her sickening memories, Helena had screwed up her eyes and covered them with her hands; yet there was a morbid desire to know more.

‘Well, why did we run away then?’

‘The rabble – Druze and Turks alike – swept right into our neighbourhood – you heard them and saw them. And your respected father knew then that this uprising was much more serious than usual; he had not believed an earlier warning which his brother had had whispered to him by a kindly Turkish official – he had felt the warning was part of a campaign by the Turks to get the Maronites to move out of their own accord.

‘So when the mob came in like a flight of angry bees – they were mad with hashish, I suspect – he knew in a flash that the warning had been a genuine act of kindness. He heard the screams and the gunshots, and he ran upstairs from his office to the roof, to confirm his fears.’ She paused, her voice harsh from unshed tears. ‘You and I’d been sitting under the lemon tree, by the well – so quiet and peaceful. But from the roof Papa could really see what was happening. Dear Grandpa’s house was already a great bonfire and the shrieking crowd was pouring into the square at the bottom of our street; he said the menace of the swords and guns flashing in the evening sun was terrifying.’

Helena said hesitantly from behind her hands, ‘I remember Papa leaning over the parapet and yelling to us to come up immediately. I’d never seen Papa really frightened before.’

It was the moment when my whole world fell apart, she thought wretchedly; I simply didn’t understand how it could be so.

She watched her mother buttoning her shabby black blouse, getting ready to go to work as a menial in a foreign city, and apparently accepting with fortitude what the Turks had done to her.

Leila continued her story. ‘We didn’t know it then,’ she said, ‘but Christians were suffering all over the Turkish Empire.

‘When our servants heard the noise, they rushed into the courtyard to ask what was happening. They heard your father shout, and they panicked. Instead of running up to the roof themselves, they followed Cook, who ran to the main gate and opened it! I suppose he thought they would be able to escape before the mob reached us. For a second, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing – it was so stupid – our gate was very stout; it might have held.

‘As I whipped you indoors, I could hear their screams.’

Helena shuddered. ‘I heard them.’

Leila ignored the interjection, as she sat head bowed, her fingers on the top button of her blouse. ‘Well, after I’d bundled you into the house, I slammed the front door and turned the beam which locked it. That, and the barred windows, halted the crowd when they rushed into the courtyard, just long enough to allow us to escape.’

Helena sighed deeply. ‘I remember the smoke – the yells – men pounding on the door – and the smell of gunpowder – and blood.’

Her mother put her arm around her and held her close.

‘We were lucky, child, that we had an indoor staircase, not an outside one like many people have; if it had run straight up from the courtyard, the mob would have come up after us and killed us on the roof.’

‘Papa had a piece of rope on the roof, I remember. I was so scared we’d fall, when he lowered first you and then me down into the tiny alley at the back of the house.’

Her mother nodded. ‘I think he’d stored the rope up there, in case we needed an escape from fire,’ she said absently. Then she added, ‘The alleyway saved our lives by giving us an exit to another street.’

‘I wonder why we were saved, Mama? Was our neighbour’s family at the back saved?’

‘Not to my knowledge, dearest. I was told that by the time the Druze and the Turks had finished, the whole area was one big funeral pyre.’

‘Why does God allow such terrible things, Mama?’ the young girl asked piteously.

Her mother looked shocked. ‘We’re not here to question God’s Will, child.’ Her pretty lower lip trembled. ‘I didn’t ask that even when your brothers died.’

Helena laid her head on her mother’s shoulder. ‘Of course not, Mama,’ she said contritely. ‘It was a wrong question to ask.’