Jabbour Douaihy - June Rain

Samih was the only man among all those women. In every bakery there was just one man who ran the show and withstood the heat of the oven for them — from the moment the women arrived at the break of dawn with the bread dough in trays up on their heads, until the moment they left just before noon carrying their round loaves with the little bubbles on top that looked so hot and appetising and cried out for nothing but a little olive oil and a dash of salt.

Samih did even better than his father had done and was so talented that the large white bread came to be associated with him by name.

‘This is Samih’s bread for sure,’ they’d say, savouring it.

Samih’s bread came out nice and thin and could be separated into two layers that looked like delicate communion wafers. Samih kept his eye on the fire, turned each loaf over and then took it out of the oven at just the right time. The whole operation hinged on timing. Samih would decide to remove the loaf of bread the moment he started to smell the faint odour of burning that had to occur otherwise the bread would turn out doughy. It was an odour he sensed within seconds of it reaching the bread, in the flash of time between burning, for which he would have to pay the price if it happened, and the appearance of little black spots on the surface of the loaf as it glowed in the fiery oven.

Samih’s bread loaves were baked to perfection. They came out of the oven all round and puffy. Whenever we were on vacation and went with our mothers to the bakery, there was nothing we loved more than to make a little vent in the fat loaves Samih would toss to us; we so enjoyed watching the steam come out as if from a fiery chimney before they began to go limp.

Samih’s eye was always on the flames, and his livelihood, too, was in the flames. His father had known how to disregard the women’s chatter and would say that if he responded even once to what one of the women said, he’d burn something in the oven, without a doubt, as punishment for paying attention to their talk. Samih maintained that same rule; either your eye is here or it’s there.

And the women never stopped talking, as if they didn’t have time for a truce. There was a saying about them that said if one of them fell silent one morning, all the others would think there was something — some sickness or need — behind her silence about which they should worry. She’d be bombarded with questions until she spoke, at which time their anxiety was sure to fade away once she’d joined back in. Most of the talk was generalities, nothing that hurt anyone, a preliminary exercise. The morning would begin with vague homilies about the importance of education these days, even for girls, or something about the sanctity of neighbourly ties, or that a boy belonged to his family whereas a girl belonged to her husband’s family or possibly the opposite of that; then the talk would move on to a specific person, though how he got into their conversation nobody knew. That was when they’d start getting serious. First of all, they’d take a quick look around the table to make sure none of the women sitting there was related to the person. If not, their tongues would be let loose; otherwise they’d choose some other person of no relation to any of the women. Sometimes they’d miscalculate and one of the women would start talking, unaware that the person she was talking about was a distant relative of one of the other women. But there was always someone ready to rescue the situation by changing the subject and bringing up some much more serious matter that drew their attention away from the impending embarrassment.

Samih’s mother also had advised him not to listen to the women and not to let them take advantage of him. His mother died only one month after his father. She was no good at living without him — that’s what the bakery women themselves said, praising her loyalty despite knowing that she didn’t really like them.

Samih was an only child. They left him the bakery and the house which consisted mainly of two rooms. That was everything they owned. The house was connected to the bakery, most likely because Samih’s father or grandfather had decided to section off a portion of the house to turn into a bakery. The heat from the oven penetrated the wall separating the bakery from Samih’s parents’ bedroom. He painted it twice a year but eventually it would start peeling again from the intense heat. Samih had been born in that room and his parents died there in that bedroom propped up against the oven. His parents hadn’t been blessed with any other children. They had a daughter who died of measles while still an infant. Her mother let out a single cry over her and then was silent, and she did the same thing when her husband died. One loud shriek and that was all.

After their deaths, Samih left his parents’ bedroom as it was — a modest closet, two formica beds, and, hanging on the wall, a picture half-eaten by the heat that crept in from the opposite side, of a man with obscure features. His father used to say that the man was his grandfather and that he had travelled to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, leaving behind his young grandmother and his infant father. And he never came back. He went to Tripoli to buy some leather for making shoes, and never came back. No doubt something happened to him — an accident or a fight — that prevented him from returning to his town and compelled him to climb aboard a ship at the city’s seaport.

Samih didn’t touch a thing in the bedroom, not even the bedcovers, until someone told him he should open the window and door and let the sun and air come in from time to time, otherwise the mould and mildew would creep in. The other room and the kitchen were enough for him, along with the small area at the entrance. When he was finished working at the bakery he liked to take a chair and sit out in that area after changing his clothes. People said that from there he would peer into the house of the girl he was in love with, though she had no idea how madly in love with her he was. He would say he was in love with her but all he ever did was sit there on the wicker chair, holding three marbles in his left hand that were bigger than the ones children play with. He’d sit for two or three hours, depending on the length or shortness of the day. He rolled the marbles between his fingers tirelessly, continuously casting glances towards her balcony in case she came out to hang laundry or to glimpse her shadow behind the window pane. It was even said that he stayed there in the Semaani family neighbourhood for her sake…

He revered the words of his father and mother. Women were more wicked than men, his mother told him. They sat inside the bakery in hand-me-down house clothes facing each other in two rows before the low, smooth, stone table. They sat with their legs stretched out in front of them, in attack position, while their hands worked without stopping. Their hands and their tongues, too. A hand would scoop out a lump of dough for kneading. She’d roll it between her hand and the surface of the stone table forming it into a ball, and then she’d dust it with flour and start flattening it out. With the right hand at first, as long as the dough was round and ball-like, then with both hands once it started to flatten into a circle. Finally, the rolling pin would finish and widen what the hands had started. The woman would roll it from the right and from the left and in all directions. She’d make the loaf circular, thin it out a little more and then hand toss it. She’d give it one last look before handing it over to Samih. The women followed his every move. Samih went to the city once and went into a bakery, just out of curiosity. There the bread was made by men only. He didn’t see any trace of a woman. He felt jealous.