Jabbour Douaihy - June Rain

The thing that hurt me most was their complaining about the difficulty of raising children. They must have sensed my annoyance whenever the topic of children came up, and so they stopped counting how many of our friends were pregnant and stopped telling stories about cravings and weaning and so on. I would see them sometimes winking at each other to change the subject out of consideration for me when the talk even accidentally turned to stories of pregnancy and giving birth or christenings and first communions. After a period of time, they stopped even bringing their children with them, and finally they stopped coming to visit me at all. Being around me became difficult. People know these things. They knew that talking about children hurt me, suffocated me. What was worse was that I started consoling myself with news of tragedies. Even tragedies that befell people I knew. But my mother always remained optimistic that I would have a child and she would cite examples and scores of stories about late pregnancies. She kept saying for years, ‘You’re still young, Kamileh,’ and she would encourage me to sleep with my husband.

The truth was that we had grown lazy about sleeping together. You’re a man now. Why shouldn’t I tell you all this? Your father used to stay out late at night. His whole life he loved staying up late while I went to bed early. Someone came to tell me that he was womanising. I loved him and I didn’t care. I’d say to myself, as long as I don’t give him children, he has the right to take up with someone else. Don’t be surprised. That’s the way I am. I was convinced of this idea. Your generation certainly doesn’t think that way. I don’t know whether I made it up on my own or if someone convinced me of it. I kept quiet about his relations with other women. I never made him feel that I was jealous, and the truth was I didn’t really feel jealous. I knew that he loved me, and that feeling was enough for me. Until that one day when I saw him cleaning his revolver, spreading the pieces out in front of him on the table and polishing them with oil and fiddling with them. I asked him what he was doing. He said he was getting ready to participate in the next day’s memorial service for the bishop’s brother in Burj al-Hawa.

‘Why the gun, if you’re going to church for a change?’

‘This is our way of doing things around here,’ he answered, smiling.

‘Do you have to go?’

I had a dark feeling. At that time I was trying very hard to prevent him from participating in gatherings. I was more comfortable when he went gambling and womanising.

I remember I asked him that day, ‘Are Fuad al-Rami and his brother Butros going to the service?’

You know them, Eliyya, your father’s friends from his youth. Despite tensions between our families he still liked them and associated with them. He invited them to dinner sometimes on the balcony right here, and I would serve them until late into the night. They would play cards and I think he went womanising with them, because they were well-to-do bachelors who loved to gamble and drink and womanise. He hesitated a little when I asked about them and said he didn’t know whether they were going to accompany the family’s zaeem . They didn’t like trouble.

‘You know how they are, they love life,’ he said to me. So I asked him if he were to confront them one day, would he shoot at them? He laughed at the possibility. ‘Fuad and Butros al-Rami? How could I ever fight them?’

I was worried about him anyway and said to myself that if he died I would die too. I figured the easiest way would be poison. I’d drink some poison and be done with it. I imagined how I would kill myself, but no one really dies for someone else.

Early that night he combed his hair and shaved for the second time that day, the way he always did when he intended to stay out late. He poured half a bottle of cologne on himself, went towards the door, opened it and walked out without even saying goodbye to me. But I stood in his way.

‘Tonight I want to get pregnant,’ I said to him.

He laughed at me and tried to push me out of his way. ‘If it was going to rain, we’d have seen some clouds by now…’ He used to say that despairingly every time I brought up the topic of getting pregnant.

I begged him. He also loved me. He agreed. It’s true he used to make fun of me and my attempts, but his heart was sad. I don’t know why he wanted to appear to be above having children. He’d say things to make us both feel better. People and friends used to console him with sayings like ‘Children are nothing but worry, and the older they get, the bigger the worry’ or ‘This is God’s will…’ He went with men of his family to that memorial service for the soul of the bishop’s brother, may God dig him a deep hole in hell. He had died a year or two earlier. What devil suggested to the bishop that he should hold a service for him and invite all those people to it one week before the general elections? Ever since that day I can’t stand priests or anything related to priests.

Yusef left at one in the afternoon. They met somewhere and went up to the church in one procession. At five o’clock, he came back with the dead. They put them all in a small truck. They were tall young men and their feet stuck out the end. He had been shot in the back: two bullets. One pierced his heart. They shot him from behind.

No, I never told you this before today. I never told you anything at all. Before you left, you were young, I felt you were too young to know. You heard about it from people, from here and there. And now I know that you’ve come back to ask, but you don’t want to ask me personally. You visit the widows of the Burj al-Hawa incident and you don’t ask me. People will say anything. You won’t get anywhere with them. They will lie to you. The ones who lost a relative up there will try to make a hero out of him, saying he paid the price of having held his head up high. And the ones who were there and got out of it alive don’t know what to say. They prefer to say nothing. Either way, if they chose to run, they’re not going to talk, and if they shot an adversary, they still won’t talk.

I know. I asked the doctor, ‘How was my husband shot?’ He said, ‘Look here,’ and I looked. ‘The two bullets entered here through his back. The opening here is narrow. And they exited from here, from his chest. The opening here is wide.’ Yes, your father had heart. He knew how to shoot and how to position himself in a battle, but they got him from behind. I heard all the stories. I was bombarded with all kinds of names, but after forty years, who cares?

I’m not going to give you advice about what you should do, because I don’t have a say. But if you get married, I insist that your wife give you a son right away. I’m sure it will be a boy. Handsome, blond, with blue eyes like yours. Don’t be afraid. Don’t laugh. Don’t be ashamed of yourself. People assured me she is beautiful. God’s best gift to a woman is the gift of beauty. Believe me, she won’t be worth much without her beauty. Have a child with her. Wrench him out of her and tell yourself this is the greatest blessing God can give a person.

The shopkeeper was in his seventies, dark brown complexion, thin, sitting there behind the scales, looking like an old wretch. He rested his hands on the table and looked out. The ancient stone arch protected him from the heat.

From where he was, he could see a few metres down the road and had a view of part of the square and the western gate to the church. The passing cars stirred up the dust. The square was drenched in sunlight that accentuated the darkness inside, where the man sat waiting for his lunch.

His wife would bring it soon: okra with rice, olives, two hot green peppers and a glass of arak to help wash it all down. He liked all kinds of hot and spicy food, faithful to his birth place: São Paulo. His wife tied a polka dot scarf around her head, carried the plates over to the shop and placed them on the table next to the old scales without talking to him, and went back home. They’d been together a long time, and there weren’t many words left to exchange.