Chapter One
The Order
On the third day of condolences the coffee ran out twice. The second time, Elie went to the church kitchen himself. The women who had been pouring since morning had finally sat down, and he could not bring himself to ask them to get up.
The kitchen smelled of cardamom and dish soap. Someone had stacked the small cups in the sink in towers of eight, rinsed and upside down, the way his mother stacked them at home. He found a sealed bag of ground coffee behind a box of candles, Abu Fadi’s stamp on the label, and stood holding it longer than necessary. Through the serving hatch he could see the length of the hall. Chairs ran along the walls. The men had taken the side nearest the door, the women the side nearest the photograph. His mother sat at the far end with Nadine beside her, and a woman Elie did not recognise held his mother’s hand and talked steadily into her face.
The photograph had been enlarged by the funeral home from a picture taken at Nadine’s wedding. His father had hated it. He said it made him look like a man who had just been told the price of something. In it he wore the blue tie Nadine had chosen, and his hair was still more black than grey, and he was looking slightly to the left of the camera at someone who had made him wait.
Elie filled the big pot with water and set it on the burner.
Fouad Haddad had died on a Tuesday afternoon in the office at the yard, between two phone calls. The first was to a supplier in Zahle about a delivery of cement. The second he never made. Tanios found him with the receiver still in his hand and the dial tone going. The doctor at the district hospital said it was his heart, which nobody had needed a doctor to tell them. He was sixty.
Elie had been in a meeting in Beirut when Nadine called. He silenced it, because Raffi was halfway through explaining why the client wanted the parking levels redesigned, and Nadine called often and about small things. She called again. Then his mother called, and his mother never called during working hours, and he was on his feet before the phone stopped ringing.
He had driven up the mountain that evening without going home for clothes. He had not been back to Beirut since. His shirts came from his father’s wardrobe now, loose in the shoulders and short in the sleeves, and every time he buttoned the cuffs he had to stop for a moment.
The coffee came up in a dark rush and he lowered the flame, let it settle, brought it up again. His father had taught him that on winter mornings before school, Elie standing on a chair beside him at the stove. Three times. You let it rise three times, and you never walk away from it, because it waits until you turn your back. His father said that about coffee and about a number of other things.
He carried the pot out on a tray with fresh cups.
* * *
For three days the hall had filled and emptied and filled again. People came from the town and from the villages along the ridge, from Zahle and Jounieh and Beirut. A deputy came on the second afternoon with two men who stayed by the door. The municipality closed its office on the day of the funeral, and the mayor, Georges Nakhleh, gave a speech at the graveside that went on until the priest touched his elbow. Men Elie had never seen gripped his hand and told him that his father had paid for a daughter’s kidney operation, a son’s university fees, a new roof after a bad winter. A man from the electricity company told him Fouad had once driven to the substation at
two in the morning to shout at someone until the lights came back on in the lower neighbourhood. A Syrian foreman from the yard, Abu Khaled, stood in front of him with his hands folded and could not say anything at all, and finally kissed him on both cheeks and went to sit with the other workers in the back row, where they had stayed for most of three days, getting up only to let older men have their seats.
Elie had grown up on these stories. He could have told most of them himself. What surprised him was how they kept arriving, new ones, from people he had never connected with his father at all. A schoolteacher from the next village. A taxi driver. A nun.
All his life, men had got to their feet when his father came into a room. Elie had stopped noticing it around the age of ten. On the second evening, when a gust caught the door at the end of the hall and swung it open on the empty steps, old Assaad Bou Rjeily, who had sat by that door since noon, put a hand on his knee and began to push himself up. He got halfway. Then he looked at the doorway, and at the dark outside it, and lowered himself back onto the chair and reached for his cigarettes, though smoking was not allowed in the hall and he knew it.
Elie poured coffee down the line of men. They took the cups without looking at him, or they looked at him too long.
“You have his hands,” said Wadih Karam, who was nearly ninety and said it to everyone about everything.
“Thank you, Ammo Wadih.”
“The face is your mother’s. But the hands.” Wadih held up his own, which shook. “Look after them.”
At the end of the line Nadine’s son Fadi was sitting on a chair too big for him, kicking the legs of the chair in front, where the Nakhleh boy sat. The Nakhleh boy was smaller and was trying not to cry about it. Fadi was nine and had his grandfather’s eyebrows and had been allowed, for three days, to do mostly as he pleased.
Elie crouched beside him with the tray balanced on his knee.
“Stop that.”
“I’m not doing anything.”
“Look at him.”
Fadi looked. The Nakhleh boy had turned around and was staring at them with his chin wobbling.
“If someone’s hurting because of you,” Elie said, “you’re the one who has to fix it.”
The voice was his father’s, low and unhurried. Fadi went red and leaned forward and said something to the Nakhleh boy that Elie did not catch, and the Nakhleh boy nodded and turned back around.
Elie stood. His knees cracked. Across the hall his mother had glanced their way, at Fadi or at him, and then the woman beside her said something and she turned to answer.
* * *
The rule had been given to him when he was eight, in the spring, over a pane of glass.
The Khalils kept a greenhouse behind their house on the lower road, a long structure of wood and old window glass where Umm Rabih grew tomatoes and seedlings to sell. Elie and Rabih Khalil and two other boys had been throwing stones at a tin can set on the wall above it. Elie’s stone went high. He remembered the sound more than anything, bright and final, and then all four of them running.
Umm Rabih caught her own son. Rabih was the slowest and had the bad luck to live there. He got the belt that evening and was kept home from football the next Saturday, and the next, and Elie went to football and said nothing, and every time he passed the Khalils’ house he walked on the other side of the road.
His father found out sixteen days later. Elie never learned how. Probably from Umm Rabih herself, who would have known from the start which boy threw like that, and who had waited to see what Fouad Haddad’s son would do.
His father did not shout. He came into Elie’s room after dinner and sat on the end of the bed so that the mattress tipped, and asked him to tell it from the beginning. Elie told it. When he finished, his father was quiet for a while. Then he said, “If someone suffers because of you, you answer for it.” He said it as if he were reading it off something. “Not his father. Not me. You.”
The next morning, a Saturday, his father drove him to the Khalils’ before eight. He stayed in the car with the engine off and the window down, and Elie walked up the path alone and knocked, and Umm Rabih opened the door in her housecoat with her hair in a scarf. Elie said what he had come to say. He offered his pocket money for the glass, perhaps a fifth of what it cost. She took it. She looked past him at the car on the road for a moment. Then she told Elie that Rabih was at his cousin’s and he could tell him himself, and shut the door.
When he got back into the car his father reached over and put a hand on the back of his neck, the whole warm weight of it, and left it there. They drove to the bakery by the square and his father bought two ka’ak with za’atar , and they ate them in the car with the windows fogging while his father told a long, ridiculous story about a donkey his own grandfather had owned that would only walk if you sang to it. Elie laughed until he got sesame seeds up his nose. For years afterward the smell of za’atar made him feel lighter, though he could not have said why.
Rabih Khalil was now a nurse at the district hospital. He had come on the first day of condolences and shaken Elie’s hand and said, “He paid for my training, you know. He never told you?”
He had never told him.
* * *
Hanna Daher came on the third evening, near the end, when the hall had thinned to family and the women of the church committee and a few old men who had nowhere else to be. He came in his good jacket with the smell of the shop still on him, cumin and paper bags and the rubber of the floor mats. Hanna was past seventy and had run the grocery on the square since before Elie was born. As a boy Elie had been sent there with lists, and Hanna had always given him a sweet bread from the jar on the counter and then written the price of the sweet on his mother’s account.
He made the rounds properly. He kissed Hoda, kissed Nadine, said the right things to each. He came to Elie last and held his hand and did not let go.
“Allah yerhamo.”
“Thank you, Ammo Hanna.”
Hanna nodded several times. He glanced along the row of chairs and lowered his voice.
“I don’t know who to ask. Forgive me. It’s a small thing.”
“Ask.”
“Sunday.” Hanna said it apologetically, as if it were a debt. “I’ve had it ready on Saturday night since ninety. The year we put in the new fridge. Twenty-seven years.” He cleared his throat. “I don’t know. Do I make it up? Do I not? And then nobody comes.”
Elie understood him at once, though he had not thought about it in years.
Two bags. Brown paper inside plastic, the paper so the bread would not sweat. Coffee from Abu Fadi, ground with cardamom. Sugar, rice, red lentils. A block of white cheese. Tomatoes, and whatever fruit was good that week. A box of matches. He could see his father lifting them from the counter by their handles, the plastic twisting into thin cords that cut into his fingers, and carrying them out to the car as if they weighed nothing.
“Make it up,” Elie said.
Hanna looked at him.
“The same?”
“The same.”
He had not decided to say it. Once it was said it was arranged, and he felt the lightness he sometimes felt on a site after signing off on a calculation he had done too quickly.
Hanna squeezed his hand once more and let it go. “Ten o’clock,” he said. “Like always.” Then, more quietly: “He was a good man to me.”
* * *
The house was too quiet that night. His father had filled rooms. He talked on the phone with the door open. He sang badly in the shower, the same three songs, and called Hoda from the other end of the house rather than walk to find her, and turned the television up for the news and then argued with it.
His mother went to bed early. Nadine took Fadi home to her own house at the bottom of the hill, and Joe followed later with the car full of trays of sweets that the women had pressed on them. Elie sat on the terrace under the vine with a glass of his father’s arak that he did not drink. The autumn had stripped most of the leaves. Down the valley the lights of the lower villages were coming on one at a time, and beyond them, faint and orange at the bottom of the sky, was the haze that was Beirut.
He tried to remember the first Sunday he had gone along and could not. He remembered fragments in no order. The smell of the grey Mercedes, the leather cracked across the back seat, his father’s aftershave. Being told to wait in the car. Watching through the windscreen while his father walked up the short path, set the bags down on the step, and stood up straight. His father checking his cuffs, pulling each one down a little with two fingers, the right first, then the left. Running a hand down the front of his shirt. Knocking three times, evenly spaced, the way you knock for a doctor.
The door never opened. Elie stopped watching it after a while and watched his father’s back instead. His father would wait, a minute, perhaps less. Then he would pick the bags up again and carry them around the side of the house and set them under a window, and come back to the car and start the engine.
His father never stopped talking. He talked to men in the street from the car window and to the radio and to himself. On the drive home on Sundays he said nothing at all until the bend at the cemetery, where the road turned back up toward the town, and there he would switch the radio on, and by the time they reached the square he was honking at someone and pointing out a pothole he was going to have the municipality fix.
Once, when Elie was perhaps ten, he had asked who she was.
“An old friend of the family.”
“Why doesn’t she open the door?”
His father took a while to answer. “She’s proud,” he said finally. “Some people are proud.”
“Then why do we go?”
They were at the cemetery bend by then. His father reached for the radio and stopped with his hand above the dial.
“Because it’s Sunday,” he said, and turned it on.
Elie stopped going at around twelve, when football and then friends and then exams took his Sundays. His father did not ask him to come, and he did not ask to. The visits became one of the facts of his father, like the cuffs and the bad singing, a habit so old it no longer needed a reason.
He sat on the terrace until the arak was warm, and then he poured it into the pot of the lemon tree, which his father would have called a waste.
* * *
On Sunday he skipped the morning mass and went to the square at ten. Hanna had the bags on the counter. He would not take money. Elie argued with him and lost, and Hanna wrote something in the account book and closed it with his palm flat on the cover.
The grey Mercedes was parked behind the yard, where it had been since Tuesday. Tanios had washed it. Elie did not know when. It smelled of the same leather and of an air freshener shaped like a pine tree that had stopped smelling of pine long ago. The seat was pulled forward for his father, who had been shorter, and Elie left it that way and drove with his knees too near the wheel.
The old valley road went down from the lower end of town past the last petrol station, where the Daou brothers sat outside on plastic chairs and raised their hands to the car out of habit, then saw who was driving and lowered them more slowly. Past the cemetery, where the earth on his father’s grave would still be raw under the wreaths. Past the terraces of olives that belonged to the Karams and that nobody had picked in years. The road narrowed and the asphalt went patchy, and below the Karams’ terraces it bent hard
round a shelf of bare stone. The town fell away above him and the valley opened on the right, a long fall of scrub oak and stone into blue shadow.
He had expected not to remember the way, and he remembered every turn.
Below the bend the house sat back from the road on a level patch of ground, square and stone, with a tin-roofed kitchen built onto one side. The shutters had been blue once. A fig tree leaned against the wall, heavy and dark, and a lemon tree grew in an old olive-oil tin by the step, and a line strung between the fig and a metal pole held a single dishcloth. Smoke came from a pipe in the tin roof.
He parked where his father had parked, on the gravel at the edge of the road, and sat with the engine off.
The bags were on the passenger seat. Through the paper he could see the rounded shapes of oranges. Hanna had put them in because it was nearly November and the first ones had come up from the coast.
He got out and lifted the bags and walked up the path. It was shorter than he remembered. At the step he set them down and straightened, and found that his hands had gone to his cuffs. He was wearing his father’s shirt under a sweater, and the cuffs were hidden, and he stood there pulling at the wool at his wrists. He let his hands drop and wiped them on his trousers.
He knocked three times.
The sound went into the house and stopped. A car went by on the road behind him, slowing to look. A dog barked further down the valley. He thought of how he must look from the road, a grown man in a dead man’s shirt with two bags of groceries at his feet.
He was bending to pick them up when he heard the bolt.
The door opened all the way, and a woman stood in it. She was small and very upright, in a brown cardigan buttoned wrong by one button, and her hair was thick and white and pinned up off her neck. A pair of glasses hung on a cord against her chest. Behind her he could smell coffee.
She looked him over the way she might have examined a hem, starting at his shoes and coming up, taking her time, stopping at his hands, at his face. He did not know what to do with his face and so he did nothing with it. It occurred to him that she had been standing on the other side of this door every Sunday, for years. That she had stood there today and heard the car, and the gravel, and counted the knocks.
“You look like him,” she said at last, “before people started listening.”
Then she turned and went back into the house and left the door open behind her.
