Jabbour Douaihy - June Rain

Daytime was boring. At night, it was always advisable for the men on duty behind the barricades to fire warning shots signalling to the enemy we were ready to greet them with gunfire at any time, thus dispelling any ideas they might have of approaching our lines. During the day, not much happened. Maybe an exchange of curses to break the monotony, but that was about it. Usually they were the ones to start it. Our enemies behind the opposing barricades were apparently even more bored than we were from keeping guard so long. The instigator’s voice would come from the three-story building, from behind the sandbags piled up in the openings where the windows had been yanked out. Sometimes the gunfire would grow quiet. They saved the ammunition because it was dear to them and came to them in stingy consignments too. It came to them from Syria. Their weapons were from the East and ours were from the West. They’d put their guns down and start firing curses instead, curses sharp as bullets. The yelling sometimes reached the ears of the enemy and sometimes it didn’t. The space separating the two quarters filled up with curses before grenades and 24x29 machine gun fire drowned out the voices exhausted from long nights of keeping guard and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes.

The man would call to Muhsin by name, and Muhsin knew exactly who it was standing behind the barricade across from him. He’d call Muhsin. He knew Muhsin and it was said they were distant relatives. Muhsin would nod his head to him when he started shouting. Muhsin was gracious to him, as they said. He even smiled a little, but was careful not to answer the call. He would take the dare — their secret contest always began with a dare, a sudden call.

‘Come on out, Muhsin, if you’re a man…’

Then a little later, another voice, ‘Show your head, you coward!’

Muhsin bore the insults against his family and all his descendants, all the way to curses against the saints, but they never dared curse the Virgin whose church stood in the middle of our quarter. They cursed our family’s zaeem , and even attacked our dead. The voices and the intonations varied as they took turns shouting from the opposing barricade, and all the while, Muhsin did not respond. He didn’t respond because he thought they were setting a trap for him. They were trying to pinpoint his location and use his voice to hunt him down. That’s what he thought, or that’s what he claimed, in order to excuse himself for not joining in their chorus. But eventually they discovered his weak spot and used it to fish him out.

When Muhsin heard Katrine’s name his ears perked up as he listened carefully. The mere mention of his wife’s name from across the barricades was a defamation he simply could not put up with. The guard behind the barricade building across from him said he was going to screw Katrine because, ‘You, Muhsin, don’t know how to do it right!’

Muhsin didn’t let him finish. He stood up from his chair, withdrew his rifle from its peephole between the sandbags, stood up unprotected and began shooting in the direction of those who were mocking him. He emptied an entire clip, reloaded a second one and emptied that one, too, before his anger subsided. It was the first time Muhsin broke the rule of firm self-control and the first time we sneaked into his barricade to collect the empty shells that were still hot. He fired bullets at them rather than speaking. He hadn’t responded with words.

When one of his foolish cousins came to him at his barricade behind the millstone at sunset to whisper something in his ear, Muhsin pushed him back a little because he didn’t like whispering and he didn’t like the smell of bad breath. He asked his cousin to speak up because no one was around to hear them. He told Muhsin with a courageous look on his face that they were going to whistle for him outside his house at ten o’clock, right after dinner. He told Muhsin not to eat too much so he could catch up with them without letting anyone know, not even Katrine, and he should bring his gun, four clips, and his rubber-soled shoes that didn’t make any noise, the same shoes he wore to go quail hunting. There would be three men, plus him the fourth, intent on… Here his cousin pointed towards the enemy lines, and then he showed him the way. ‘We’ll break down Abu Sada’s door, enter the sawmill through the window, and from there we’ll turn left.’

Muhsin used the stomach cramps that plagued him at night as an excuse. He said he wasn’t a kid anymore and he might be a hindrance to them, plus it wasn’t useful to have too many people on such a mission. Further, if he was going to have to be killed in battle, he preferred to take his death into his own hands, not have it come as a result of someone else’s mistake. This was a clear indication of his lack of confidence in the people involved in that attack of theirs, perhaps because of their youth and lack of experience in the kind of fighting Muhsin had such intimate knowledge of, though we were never able at the time or later on to figure out how he knew so much about it. What Muhsin didn’t say was that he had a sister, Husneh, who was married to someone on the other side, and maybe he wanted to avoid a confrontation with his brother-in-law or his brother-in-law’s brothers. But he did promise the young men that he would keep guard at his post and wait for their return.

Just after midnight they came back to him. Apparently they hadn’t faced any major difficulties. They told him about the ease with which they advanced and how they found Abu Sada’s door already removed and how when they entered the sawmill the smell of wood was very strong. They heard a moaning sound, so they stiffened up, cocked their guns and told each other to be completely silent. But soon they discovered that in the corner there was a man relieving himself into the pile of sawdust. He was having a bout of constipation and they could hear him encouraging himself to get on with his business. ‘You can do it, son of Naamtallah…’

They knew who he was from his voice and from his name which was very uncommon. He was the butcher from the shop across from the church. He took a deep breath and tried some more, but failed. ‘You’re a coward, Naamtallah,’ he scolded himself.

They waited a long time for him to succeed in moving his bowels. Finally he let out a big sigh and stood to his feet.

‘He wiped his ass with sawdust! Grabbed a handful of sawdust from the floor and wiped his ass with it!’ They told him that jokingly or perhaps they fabricated that detail knowing how sensitive Muhsin was about cleanliness.

He interrupted them, his face full of disgust ever since the part about entering the sawmill. ‘And tomorrow he’ll feed meat to the folks in the Upper Quarter with those hands!’

He laughed and then commanded them decisively, ‘Kill him!’ as if he had been right there in front of him, as if Muhsin wanted him killed as punishment for wiping his ass with sawdust rather than for being an armed member of the enemy lines. And the man wasn’t from an important family, either, just one of the fold, so there wasn’t any compelling reason for Muhsin to show all that excitement. They told him that when they saw the man in that despicable scene none of them attempted to shoot him but rather they just let him go on his way, not wanting to give themselves away for the sake of such a trivial catch. Instead they continued their slow advancement, entered a house deep inside, and came back with a picture of the owner’s father that had been hanging on the wall, as the owner was very proud of his father and his father’s glorious deeds. Now their plan was to let them know what they had done by shouting it and telling the man from one barricade to another that they were going to piss on the picture of his father and if they’d wanted to they could have shot the butcher Naamtallah right in the ass.