Prologue
The building sits at the end of a dirt road, where the valley gives up and the mountain begins. No sign on the gate. Grain sacks rotted to rags along one wall. A single bulb hangs from a wire in the middle of the dark, and every time the wind leans on the tin roof, the bulb swings and the light slides across the floor and comes back.
Under the bulb stands an old leather armchair, cracked at the arms, the seat sagged into the shape of somebody who is not sitting in it.
A man sits in it now.
Black suit. White shirt open at the collar. His face stays above the reach of the light. The light finds his hands instead, resting on the arms of the chair: clean, bare, a heavy gold ring on the right hand, a cigarette burning down between two fingers of the left. He hasn't drawn on it once. The ash has grown long and bent.
A black animal lies at his feet. The men outside call it a dog because they need to call it something. It has a wolf's long legs and a wolf's yellow eyes, and it lies with its head on its paws, and every few breaths its upper lip peels back from the gums, pink and wet, and settles again. A chain runs from its collar to the man's left hand. The chain hangs slack in the dirt. Nobody has ever needed to pull it.
Three steps from the chair, something has been dragged across the floor. The dirt there is dark and wet, a long smear that ends at the open doors. Beside it lies a shoe. Brown leather, polished that morning by someone who expected to be looked at. It lies on its side with its laces still tied.
The man taps the ring against the arm of the chair.
Once. Twice.
The animal's ears turn toward the sound. Its eyes stay on the doors.
Three. Four. Five.
Outside, a car door slams. Gravel shifts under a weight that stops moving.
Six. Seven.
The phone on the arm of the chair lights up and buzzes against the leather. He lets it.
Eight. Nine. Ten.
He drops the cigarette and grinds it out under his heel. Then he picks up the phone and holds it to his ear, and listens to whoever is out there in the dark, and the voice goes on for a long while.
When it stops, he says one word.
"Go."
The animal lowers its lip. The bulb swings, the light crosses the shoe once more, and the building goes quiet the way the valley goes quiet in winter, when everything that is going to die has already been decided.
ACT ONE: THE HEIR
Chapter 1: The Promise
Rami heard his brother's voice through the kitchen door and stopped with his hand on the frame.
It was past eleven. The generator had cut out at ten, the way it did every night when the neighborhood's hours ran down, and the corridor was black except for a thin line of yellow under the kitchen door, where somebody had lit the gas lamp. Rami had his car keys in one hand and his cigarettes in the other. He came to this door every night before he went out. He looked in, said goodnight, kissed her forehead if she was awake, and left. Ten seconds. Fifteen. He had never once stayed longer, because the kitchen smelled of rubbing alcohol and the lemon cream Zein put on her heels, and because she looked at him, and he couldn't stand to be looked at like that for more than fifteen seconds.
Tonight his brother was talking to her, low, and Rami's hand stayed on the frame.
"I'm here, Mama."
The bed creaked. Their mother's voice came after it, thin as paper.
"Promise me something."
"Anything."
Rami pressed his shoulder to the wall. The plaster was cold through his shirt.
They'd moved the bed into the kitchen a year and a half ago, because she wanted the window. Zein had carried the table out to the yard himself and shoved the bed under the sink window so the first thing she saw in the morning was the mountain. She couldn't turn her head anymore. She couldn't lift her hands. She lay where Zein put her, and Zein put her where she could see the mountain, and that was the arrangement the whole house had learned to walk around.
"Promise me you'll take care of this family."
A pause. Rami heard his brother shift on the chair.
"I promise."
Something happened in the kitchen then that Rami couldn't see. A long quiet. When his mother spoke again her voice had changed, the way it changed when she was about to say something about him.
"Rami," she said. "My little devil."
He took his hand off the frame.
"Your brother. Take care of him."
"I will, Mama. I promise you."
The bed creaked again, and then there was nothing. The gas lamp hissed. Rami stood in the black corridor with his keys digging into his palm. He could have opened the door. He could have gone in and said I'm right here, I can take care of myself, and made her smile at him for once instead of worry. He knew exactly what her face did when she worried about him. It went still around the mouth, the same stillness their grandfather used to get when a storm was coming over the jurd.
He didn't open the door.
He went out through the front of the house instead, across the yard, past the two guards smoking under the gate lamp. One of them said "Rami" and lifted a hand. Rami didn't answer. He got into the car and sat with his hands on the wheel and the engine off, looking at the kitchen window, the one yellow square in the dark house.
Then he drove to Hermel and didn't come back until it was light.
* * *
She lived four more days.
On the fifth morning, the women of the family washed her in the kitchen where she'd lain for a year and a half, and the men stood in the yard in their black jackets, smoking and saying nothing, and the coffee went round in the tiny cups as if this were any other morning. At noon they carried her up the hill to the old cemetery at the edge of the jurd, where the valley ends and the bare high land begins, and buried her beside her father under the oak tree.
Half the valley came up that hill behind the coffin. Women from villages Rami had never heard of. Old farmers in their good shoes. The baker from the market, with flour still in the creases of his knuckles. Cousins from Zahle who hadn't been seen at a funeral in ten years.
And then for three days, the other half came to the house.
That was the custom. Three days of condolence, the doors open from first light until long after midnight, the men in the guest hall and the women in the salon, bitter coffee and dates, cigarettes, low voices, the same sentences said a thousand times. May God have mercy on her. May her soul rest. May the rest be in your life. The house had no quiet room left in it. The generator ran all day on Nizar's money and the neighbors' diesel, and the lights stayed on, and nobody slept more than a few hours.
What Rami would remember about those three days, later, was his father and his brother working side by side.
Nobody had arranged it. It just happened, the way water finds a way down a hill. Somebody had to stand at the gate and greet the cars and walk the important men in. That was Nizar, in his black coat, receiving. Somebody had to make sure the old women from the high villages got a chair with a cushion and a glass of water and somebody to sit with them. That was Zein. Somebody had to keep the coffee moving, carry trays, carry chairs, carry messages from the hall to the salon and back, drive to Baalbek for more dates when the dates ran out. That was Rami, and he didn't stop moving for three days.
He saw his father watching Zein on the second morning.
Zein had just walked an old widow in from the gate. Umm Fares, from the village at the bottom of the valley, whose husband had died owing money to half the families in the Bekaa. She was nobody. Nobody in the guest hall would have turned to look at her. Zein had his arm under hers from the gate to the salon, slow, one step at a time, and he put her in the best chair by the stove and brought her coffee with his own hands and crouched beside her to listen while she talked.
Rami looked up from the coffee tray and saw Nizar standing in the doorway of the guest hall, watching this.
Their father's face didn't change. He looked for a while, and then he turned back into the hall.
On the third night, after the last car had gone, Rami was in the kitchen stacking cups when his brother walked past the door toward the guest hall. Rami put down the tray and followed him.
The guest hall was the longest room in the house: a stone floor under worn red carpets, cushioned benches down both walls, a brass brazier in the middle with the long-spouted coffee pot sitting in the coals. At the far end stood one chair that was not a bench. High-backed, dark wood, leather seat. Their father's chair. It had been their father's father's chair, and the chairs of the chiefs of the Al-Jurd before that, as far back as anyone in the family bothered to count.
The inner circle was still there. Six men had sat along those walls for as long as Rami had been alive: the men who ran his father's business, who carried his father's word into the valley, who drank his coffee every night and kissed his shoulder every morning. They sat now in their black funeral jackets with their ties pulled loose, smoking, quiet. Nobody had said anything in a while.
Nizar sat in the chair at the end of the room with his elbows on his knees and his head down, looking at the carpet between his shoes.
Rami had never seen his father sit like that. He went to his stool by the brazier, his corner, and took the prayer beads out of his jacket pocket. Black stones on a black cord. He'd never prayed with them in his life. He turned them through his fingers one bead at a time, click, pause, click, and watched the room the way he'd learned to watch it since he was eight years old.
Zein came in last.
Every head came up. Rami felt it go round the room like a draft. In twenty-one years his brother had walked into the guest hall uncalled exactly once. As a boy he'd stood outside that door in the evenings. As a young man he'd walked past it to the kitchen. Every man along those walls had watched him do it, for years.
Zein didn't look at any of them. He went to the brazier and picked up the long-spouted pot by its handle, and lifted it high, and poured himself a cup in a thin brown stream from a foot above the rim, the way the men did it and the boys practiced it in the yard. Not a drop on the tray. He set the pot back in the coals.
Then he took the cup and sat down. Not on the benches along the wall. In the middle of the room, on the low stool across the brazier from his father, facing all of them at once.
He lifted the cup almost to his lips and looked at Nizar over the rim.
"You asked for an heir, Nizar," he said. "You got one now."
He drank. He set the cup down on the brass tray beside the coals, and the small click of it was the only sound in the hall.
Nizar's head had come up. He was looking at his son as if a stranger had walked in off the road and sat down in his house.
Zein stood up and walked to the door.
Rami watched him go. His brother stopped there with his hand on the knob and his head down, the way a man stops when he's forgotten something. He stayed like that, his back to the room.
"Rami," Zein said, without turning. "I'd like a brief on the business. By the morning."
Then he opened the door and went out and closed it behind him.
* * *
Nobody moved for a while.
Ghassan had a cigarette halfway to his mouth and left it there until the ash fell on his trousers. Wajih looked at Kamal. Kamal looked at the floor. Fouad's chair was empty, Rami noticed, and nobody had noticed that either, or nobody would say it.
Their father sat in the high-backed chair and stared at the door his son had walked out of.
The beads had started moving faster in Rami's fingers. He didn't tell them to. Click click click click. He kept his eyes on the carpet, and the corner of his mouth went up on its own, and he let it.
Take care of this family. I promise.
I've got you, brother, he thought. I've got you.
