Jabbour Douaihy - June Rain

‘We didn’t allow ourselves to enjoy those songs, especially since we were from the Al-Aasi family. We didn’t want people to think we were happy about what happened. Some people might take it as an excuse to come after us. They wanted us to side with them, but we didn’t want to suffer any harm from them or from anyone else. We were also afraid that your mother, who never left her balcony, would hear the radio. I used to sit here and listen to Asmahan and Layla Murad and dream about the theatre. I was eighteen and had started caring about my appearance: I studied my look. I remember I used to be careful about how I sat and would spend a long time examining the mirror. But despite all my efforts everyone told me that when I walked my right shoulder dipped lower than the left and they accused me of walking on my tiptoes. It’s true I thought I was short, but I wasn’t trying to make myself look taller. During that period I once made it onto the stage. I insisted they give me some small role in the school play and the teacher agreed. He dressed me in a black robe and made me carry a long, metal pitch fork and trained me to walk across the stage from the right side to the left and to say one line: “I am Lucifer, Lord of Hell and God of Gehenna!”

‘I said it twice and stood in my place, refusing to exit off to the other side. I was relishing standing in front of the audience, until the teacher started pulling his hair and screaming at me from behind the curtain to move out of the way. My mother heard him from where she was sitting in the front row seats reserved for the actors’ parents. She stood up in protest and told him in a loud voice to let me stay on the stage a little longer. My father, on the other hand, didn’t like the idea of his son playing the role of Satan, and neither did he like it when they gave me the role of Judas on Holy Thursday. He got angry and told me I was handsome, so why hadn’t they given me the role of Jesus or Saint Peter, for example.

‘What mattered most was my parents’ concern when they noticed my stage fright, as people called it. I was sixteen years old and never went out of the house except to go to the cinema, and I was one of the few who went to see movies at both of the movie theatres in town after each neighbourhood ended up having its own theatre. The rest of the time I just sat here. I spent years sitting here on this same red velvet sofa. I’ve even made a dent in it where I always sat. Look. Sitting and smoking Lucky Strikes, two packs a day, imagining myself before an audience, maintaining a dignified and serious look on my face.

‘They must have told you I am strange. I know what people say about me. Lots of them used to make fun of my gait and didn’t expect me to amount to much. I think they used to whisper about me, call me crazy. They were quick to judge and didn’t accept any appeal for their verdicts. All that matters is that I was constantly on stage. They were right about my being wrapped up in myself.

‘I imagined I was Humphrey Bogart, because someone told me once that I look like him. I insisted on having all my shirts tailored by a particular tailor in Tripoli who always sewed the customer’s initials onto the shirt. I used to ask him to embroider HB on the front, but he wondered about that, knowing my real name, so I resorted to telling him I was having the shirts made for a friend with those initials who happened to have the same shirt measurements. He had no choice but to believe me. I tried to walk the way I imagined Humphrey Bogart walked, and I would stand with the same posture I studied him using in the movie Casablanca . I’d put on a hat like his when I was at home alone and practised speaking like Yusuf Wehbeh, and that was before I’d seen Yusuf Wehbeh in movies. I only knew his voice from radio plays. And I didn’t understand a word Humphrey Bogart said in English, so I mixed Yusuf Wehbeh’s dignified voice with Humphrey Bogart’s manly stance. My mother would come and sit beside me sometimes and ask me lovingly and calmly what I wanted to do with my future and tell me my father was very worried about me to the point of not being able to sleep at night and she was afraid he’d have a heart attack because of me. I didn’t dare tell her what I really wanted, because if I were to tell her my true desire, it would cause health problems not only for my father, but for her, too.

‘My mother was in the middle of broaching the topic of my future with me, what I would do for a living, and all the worrying about it, when we heard a scream followed by a single gunshot. Then there was a wailing sound that began to rise from every corner of the neighbourhood, followed by car horns and the roar of a military tank sounding its siren. After that came the sound of the church bell. We’d become experts at deciphering the various sounds that reached us, and became even better at it during the clashes. We didn’t dare go outside to see what was happening. We preferred to just depend on what we heard to know what was going on. Our house here was isolated, surrounded by gardens. The neighbours you see here to the right built their house only a few years ago. There wasn’t anyone nearby we could call to to find out what was happening except for your mother Kamileh, and we preferred not to bother her because we knew how acerbic her responses could be sometimes, and we just wanted to stay out of it. Your mother is a strong woman. That day screaming sounds reached us from your house, too. Painful screaming. I remember very well my mother saying in a decisive tone, “Yusef al-Kfoury has been killed. That’s the end of his bloodline!”

‘You hadn’t been born yet and we all thought Kamileh would not be blessed with a child. And your uncle never got married and your other uncle was sick, as you know…’

‘How did your mother know Yusef al-Kfoury had been killed?’

‘Kamileh wouldn’t scream like that except over her husband.

‘But when the screaming grew louder and all sorts of sounds kept coming from everywhere, especially the church bells, we knew for sure something very serious had happened.

‘“Lord help us,” my mother said. “There are so many dead!” And I also don’t know what gave my mother the idea that there were so many dead. I wanted to go out but she grabbed me by the hand and told me, “We have nothing to do with what’s happening.”

‘So I asked her, “What is happening?”

‘“Thank God,” she answered. “We are not involved in these problems.”

‘I used to hear about the problems but I didn’t care. After all, like my mother said, we were from a small family, only two Al-Aasi families in the whole town. Us — that is my father, my mother, my brothers, and myself — and Khalil al-Aasi the carpenter and his family. The strange thing was, we didn’t know if we were actually related to them, but because we had the same name we started being friendly with them and they were friendly with us, even if it was just talk and calling each other “cousin”, jokingly imitating the big families. At the same time, though, we kept our distance from them. Khalil al-Aasi’s family was aligned politically with the Ramis, which they had every right to be. They lived in the middle of their quarter after all. But we didn’t want to be lumped in with them and considered to be their relatives and subsequently elicit the enmity of the others. My father told us that the Semaanis made an offer to my grandfather to add Al-Semaani to our family name or to replace the Al-Aasi name with Al-Semaani, but he refused. We spent our whole lives walking a fine line. My mother knew how to walk it well. The first rule was to avoid going out around town during times of danger and tension because shooting at us had no consequences for those doing the shooting and would be classified under the general category of “errors”.