Jabbour Douaihy - June Rain

( Sada Lubnan newspaper, 27 April 1957)

Nishan Hovsep Davidian and his compatriot and competitor Nazaret had inherited the photography profession from their fathers, who brought with them from Istanbul in their hasty and tragic flight to Lebanon. But Jorge — whose real name was Jirjis al-Indari — had returned from distant Montevideo with indoor photography as a hobby. In fact, he told one of the few people he conversed with here that he learned the profession from a German-Jewish photographer who fled to Bolivia to escape Nazi persecution at the end of the 1930s. A small minority in the town today still remembered Jorge — that young man with the sad, long face and hair that was always dishevelled as if whatever he was preoccupied with was much more important than dealing with trivial matters like combing his hair or shaving his beard or bathing. That small minority knew little more about him than his family origins and which of his distant relatives were still alive. He was found dead less than a year after his return. He had returned in 1956, at the height of the problems. He apparently hadn’t heard about them while he was away and they didn’t influence him very much when he came back. The fact was he was found dead, although there wasn’t any blood. He was found in the makeshift studio he had built in a room out in the little garden planted with orange trees, behind the family house that had waited a long time for his return. Jorge refused to carry his camera around in order to take pictures of interested customers as the Armenian photographers did; rather, he waited for customers to come to his room. Some came at first, but sitting in front of the camera was exhausting, like sitting for an artist’s painting, because Jorge would keep going back and forth from the camera lens to the customer countless times, adjusting his posture and other minute details. He constantly advised his subject to sit still, only to tilt his chin for him to the right or to the left with his hand, or brush off whatever was clinging to his jacket, or come at him with a comb and fix a stray strand of hair. The torture of sitting for him so exasperated the people wishing to have their pictures taken that they stopped going to him. And he had returned from Montevideo under circumstances unbeknown to anyone, although in their usual way people liked to speculate about the reasons behind every strange behaviour and said that he had fled from a woman who was in love with him and was out for revenge after he betrayed her. That was why he spent the majority of his time inside that studio of his, where no one saw him except a small group of close neighbours. Rarely did he go outside, even if a blast of gunfire broke out in the nearby streets. It was rumoured that he had committed suicide or that some woman had poisoned him. The notion that he was a womaniser clung to him despite his not appearing to be the romantic or adventurous type at all. Anyway, the people who found him in the studio immediately sent for Nishan Davidian. In the studio, the camera was propped on a tripod and the lighting equipment was all set up and turned on from every side of the little room. After they removed the body, Nishan applied himself to examining the room’s contents. He gathered all the photos he found and put them in a sack.

When he got to the camera, and at this point he found himself unsupervised, he opened it and removed the film. He closed up the room and went back to his shop to develop the film, hoping to discover even one of that strange photographer’s many secrets.

First Nishan examined the pictures that were in Jorge’s sack. Lo and behold, what he found was an extensive collection of pictures of women. Countless portraits. Nishan raised his eyebrows in wonder. Most of them were of a woman by herself, the same woman, and sometimes pictures of two women. Women and fabrics and a bed. The same bed. Why all this waste of film and photo paper, wondered the ever-thrifty Nishan. The women in the pictures were naked, but their nakedness was veiled with fabric — either silk or satin. The pieces of fabric were the same but sometimes the woman would drape them around her breasts, or if her breasts were covered up by her pose, she would toss the fabric over her shoulders with an unaffected coquettishness. No picture was exactly like any of the others. The woman’s pose was always different. There was a variety of poses that were mildly provocative and expressions that wouldn’t offend anyone. The fabric served a variety of purposes. Jorge’s collection seemed to be a series of practice exercises leading to the perfect shot, which of course Nishan Davidian never found. He wondered only if the women who appeared in Jorge al-Indari’s pictures were from their same town or were strangers. Or had he taken the pictures in far-off Montevideo, where Nishan imagined a much freer society in which girls could pose in front of a photographer with a level of ease he felt wasn’t possible here.

The next day Nishan planned to develop the film he had found in Jorge’s camera up on the tripod in the studio. It was clear the man had an odd style and a tendency to waste rolls of film. Nishan was quick to notice that all the photos Jorge shot before he died were nothing but pictures of himself, twenty or more self-portraits of Jorge al-Indari, which were difficult to tell apart on first glance. In all of them he appeared the same way: sitting on a chair and looking directly into the lens — nothing more, nothing less. Nishan realised that Jorge must have set the shutter release and then rushed back to sit for the picture each time.

Nishan looked closely at the pictures and noticed that when he looked at them in the order they were taken, he could see the fatigue on Jorge’s face gradually increase. In photo after photo, his eyes wandered more and more and his facial features tightened as if he were suffering from a gradually worsening pain. Nishan concluded that the young photographer had sensed his impending death and thus tried as best he could to make the final moments of his life last forever, which led the Armenian to further conclude that Jorge either poisoned himself or was poisoned by someone and when he realised he was in the final death throes he decided to photograph his own death. It was an idea that was supported by the fact that in the pictures Jorge was wearing the same clothes he was wearing when they found him dead, and sitting on the same chair, the one he used to invite his customers to sit on.

His relatives divided up the contents of his house amongst themselves. Later, one of them tried to sell the photography equipment to Nishan, but he refused. Not only because he didn’t need it for his work, but because a strange feeling overtook him that he shouldn’t go near Jorge’s belongings; he felt they might be cursed and would rub off on him.

A Bigamist Caught!

Mrs. M.N. formally accused her husband, 54-year-old Mr. S.S., of attempting to marry another woman, in a fraudulent manner and in violation of the personal affairs law for non-Mohammadans. Mrs. M.N. made the accusations before a judge in Tripoli. Court police officers arrested the accused Mr. S.S. in the remote village of Abra, where he had persuaded a priest to lead the ceremony of his marriage to Miss T.F., a young woman twenty-five years his junior. When police arrived, the accused attempted to flee but tripped over the bride’s wedding gown, falling to the ground, right into the hands of the law.

( The Telegraph , 10 October 1959)

No one knew how Shafiq al-Semaani had been able to convince his wife that the reason for his persistent absence from home was to pursue profitable job opportunities. However, people who knew the wife, who was both obstinate and observant, said that there was nothing stopping her from knowing her husband’s true doings, but deep down she loved him and wanted him to stay away from the town out of concern for his life, even if everyone laughed at her for being so naïve. Shafiq cheated on his wife, but she was perfectly content. She was happy whenever he came home and then made it easy for him to take off again. She did his laundry and cooked his meals. In fact, some said she actually seemed proud of her husband’s success with the ladies and always had a smug smile on her face. One could not mistake her pride one time when a woman came up to her at Samih’s Bakery and whispered some advice: to watch her husband. She used to ask about the details of his escapades and wanted to know everything — names, places, how beautiful his lovers were — but she never confronted him about it. Above all else, she didn’t want him to go down the same path as his brother, Farid. Farid Badwi al-Semaani, the Bear Plum, who was versed in every manner of evil. She herself found it hard to believe that they were brothers, except when she looked at her husband’s face and saw the wart on his left cheek. It was in the exact same spot as the one on Farid’s cheek.