Helen Forrester - The Lemon Tree

Leila looked down at the child cuddled beside her, and she sighed. Her husband had always said that Helena was too clever to be a woman. She hoped he was wrong; women were supposed to accept, not ask questions.

Helena fingered a small pendant embossed with the head of the Virgin Mary that hung on a fine gold chain from her mother’s neck. ‘Did you bring this from Beirut?’ she asked.

‘Oh, yes, dear. For months and months that year, Papa insisted that I wear all my jewellery all the time. He must’ve been more nervous about the situation than he allowed us to think.’

‘It’s important for a lady to have lots of jewellery, isn’t it, Mama?’

‘Yes, dear – and small gold coins, easily carried. You never know what life has in store for you – life is very precarious. Jewellery is easy to carry – you can trade it anywhere – though at a great loss, of course.’

Helena nodded, and her mother hugged her again.

Leila thought with apprehension of a clouded future; but the child digested the lesson that good jewellery can be an important financial reserve – and that a collection of small gold coins is probably even better.

After a few minutes, Helena lifted her head and said heavily, ‘We must’ve run for ages; I was so puffed.’ Her young face was grim, and she swallowed. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever forget the ghastly cruelty – how can men do such dreadful things?’ She looked at her mother as if begging for some reasonable explanation of what she had seen.

Leila Al-Khoury had resumed easing herself clumsily into black woollen stockings, while sitting on the end of her bed. Now she turned again to her troubled little daughter and put her arms round her. She wished she had an answer to the child’s question.

‘My darling, I don’t know. Sometimes men seem to go mad.’ She stroked Helena’s silky black hair. ‘In time the memories will go away, my love. And life is not all cruelty. All kinds of nice things will happen to you in your life, you’ll see.’ She felt Helena give a shuddering sigh, and she added, ‘I wish we had foreseen what would happen, so that you could have been spared what you saw. And we might have been able to clear the warehouse and transfer some money – so that we wouldn’t be in quite such dire straits. But we lived in a good district; we’d never been disturbed before.’

Helena shut her eyes tightly and wanted to be sick, as she remembered a young boy lying sobbing in the dust, one arm severed, the rest of him terribly cut about as he had tried to protect himself from sword or bayonet. Her mother had paused instinctively, bent on helping him, but her husband caught her arm to propel her forward.

‘You can’t leave him! He’s alive!’ she had protested.

He did not answer her. Terrified of what the rampaging rabble would do to his lovely wife and little daughter if they were caught, he dragged her onwards.

The dying boy haunted Wallace Helena’s dreams all her life, returning like some eternal ghost to cry out to her in his agony, telling her that even loving fathers could have hearts of stone.

She had clear memories of reaching her father’s silk warehouse, as yet untouched by vandals, though deserted by its panic-stricken nightwatchmen, and of meeting a youth of about fifteen when they entered the wicket gate. He was the bookkeeper’s son, set to unlock the gate for any members of the family who might not have a key.

In answer to Charles Al-Khoury’s inquiry, the boy said that nobody had come, except his own parents and younger brothers and Mr James Al-Khoury.

Charles Al-Khoury told him to continue to keep watch through the grating in the main door and to hurry to the boat if he heard or saw anything suspicious.

The whey-faced boy had nodded assent, and Charles hurried Helena and her mother between bales wrapped in cotton cloth and through the silk carpet section, which smelled of hemp and dust.

They had emerged onto a covered wharf on the seaward side of the building, where a small sailing boat with an Egyptian rig bobbed fretfully on the sunlit water.

Charles’s brother, James, was already in the boat. He looked up at the new arrivals and exclaimed fervently, ‘Thank God you’ve come! Nobody came to work this morning – I tried to get back to the house to warn you that something was up; but the whole town seemed to be rioting – and drunk. So I returned here to alert the boatman to be ready. I guessed you’d hear the racket in the town and be warned.’ He gestured towards the bookkeeper, and added, ‘Then Bachiro, here, brought his family.’

‘We got out by a hair’s breadth,’ Charles responded sombrely, as he took the hand of the Nubian boatman and jumped into the little craft. He turned to help his wife into the boat, and went on, ‘I’m afraid Leila’s family is lost.’

As James stared unbelievingly up at him, Leila balked and held back, as she cried out in horror, ‘Mama and Papa dead? Oh, no! And my sisters – and Auntie and my cousin?’

James said gently, ‘We’ll wait a while; they may have got out.’ He hoped fervently that her women relations were burned in their house rather than thrown to the mob.

Petrified and exhausted, Leila allowed her husband to lift her down into the boat. Uncle James turned to a benumbed Helena. ‘Come on, my little lemon blossom, you’re safe now.’

Without a word, she sat down on the edge of the wharf and jumped into her uncle’s arms. He caught and held her to him for a moment, while the boat bounced unhappily on the water. Then he put her down beside her weeping mother, who snatched her to her. Bachiro’s wife began to wail and was hastily hushed by her husband.

‘When I went to see him this morning,’ Charles muttered to James, ‘Leila’s father said it wouldn’t be the first riot he’d seen, nor would it be the last. I reminded him that I’d had this felucca standing by for a week, in case of emergency, and he as good as told me I was a craven fool.’

His back to Leila, James made a rueful face, while Charles berated himself that he had not transferred money abroad.

‘With the Turks watching every move, it would have been almost impossible,’ James comforted him.

The wind showed signs of changing, and the boatman said it would be dangerous to linger any longer; the Turks would undoubtedly soon arrive to sack the warehouses along the waterfront. Better to leave while the wind held.

‘For Jesus’ sake, make him wait,’ Leila whispered urgently to her husband. ‘Mama – Papa – somebody – may come.’

Charles agreed, and argued heatedly with the stolid black seaman until, encouraged by some silver coins, he agreed to wait until the sun had set.

They waited anxiously through the afterglow, until shouts from the landward side of the warehouse and the sound of heavy thuds on wood brought Bachiro’s eldest son speeding to the wharf. ‘They’re coming,’ he shouted breathlessly, as he leapt into the little craft, his eyes starting out of his head with fright.

The felucca slipped seaward, while Leila crouched on a coil of rope and wept unrestrainedly for parents and sisters she would never see again. Charles Al-Khoury stared dumbly landwards. He was numb with horror, unable, as yet, to accept his parents’ fiery death.

Seated on the end of her bed in a small apartment in a Chicago slum, putting on her garters over her black stockings, Leila had pointed out in defence of her husband that he had done quite a lot to protect his family. Her deep, vibrant voice shook as she told Helena, ‘Papa arranged that a shipment of French silk he was expecting be redirected to our friend, Mr Ghanem, here in Chicago – and he began to wear his special moneybelt with gold coins in it, as did Uncle James. I wore my jewellery all the time.’