JUSTICE

"Every creature, human or animal, lowly beast or superman, undergoes, from the top of the scale to the bottom, an equitable evolution that makes them kin."
"ALAKIL ADIL"

For four years, every day, Sheikh Nessib, Anis Taleb, and I have been meeting. Anis, a widower since the first days of the war, has not remarried. Of his functions as Judge — the court-martial has taken the place of our magistracy — he keeps only his title of Istaz, fastened like an irony to his present misery. But Anis is a good Maronite and a wise man, and of the three of us he is the most enduring.

Sheikh Nessib is divorced and without ties: though close on fifty, he remains a bit of a rake, a bit of a gambler, and he loves fine clothes and drink — goods lost at the same time as his pension as a high official in the Sudan, cut off since the severing of our communications with the outside world. Well preserved and cutting a fine figure, Nessib deplores the impulse that drove him to take his retirement early. "Homesickness," he sighs, saying nothing of the epidemic of office-hunting to which he succumbed. An excusable lure in this still-feudal country, where governing demanded no other pains than palavering before a table abundantly laid and open to all. The smallest post reinforced the traditional authorities. I know it well — I, the modest mudir of Chartoun, impoverished, dismissed, and keeping a remnant of luster. Our sufferings in the Mountain are atrocious. No doubt the ordeal of Lebanon, enslaved and deliberately starved, is not comparable to that of the fighting countries, their lands dynamited from above and from below — blown apart and rising in the smoke of corpses.

But a human being truly feels only his own wounds. From the first months, the Lebanese of every class, improvident and spendthrift, found themselves destitute. The hanging of the most influential notables in the public square terrified the rest. And hunger demoralizes. We have sunk very low. Among us, even Sheikh Nessib dreams less of houris than of rotten corn bread. The three of us make a strange mixture: a Druze, a Maronite, and an Orthodox. I mention it because each of us realizes that he is typical of his clan, and is amused by it.

Not for anything in the world, for instance, would Anis pass before a church without crossing himself. When I happened to neglect that gesture, the glance Anis slid toward me expressed his thought plainly: a lowering of esteem for a Christian tainted with lukewarmness — a poor schismatic? Nessib believes in metempsychosis and in mysterious affinities between ourselves and the beasts. Otherwise, whence comes the attraction that unhappy houses hold for owls? The prescience of rats? and that of dogs? Who has not trembled on hearing a dog howling at death before a beloved house, struck soon afterward as if by lightning?

No doubt the dog's eye perceives death's rush upon us, and cries for help!

— My God — my God! — Anis Taleb suddenly moaned, his brown pallor turned green. In vain does the unhappy man forbid himself the superstitions his church condemns. His young wife was his one and only love. Three days before her death by accident, the howls of a dog beneath her windows, howling her death, had thrown the young woman into terror.

She was suffering from nothing at the time, he admitted. We remained silent; though night had fallen, I neglected to light a lamp.

★

A little later:

"Tell us a story," I asked Nessib. He understood, asked us whether we knew the case of Ahmed, and, without waiting for an answer: This farmer's son, he said, was born at the very time when the masters of his family were losing their son Mustapha, aged sixteen. As soon as he can babble, the newborn will consent to answer only to the name of the vanished boy. He takes his first steps with his arms stretched out toward Mustapha's parents, knows the rooms of their house, the attic full of toys; brought for the first time into a room, he lifts a table-cover and discovers the drawer that holds the candy.

Sheikh Nessib is a cultivated man; the instinct of doubt, he assures us, made him push aside hearsay and verify for himself. He takes the miracle child in his arms and carries him as far as his own house, on a somewhat distant street. From the outside it looks like the other houses ringed with little gardens; before reaching his own, he sets the child on the ground.

"Go ahead, I'll follow you," he tells him.

Without hesitating, Ahmed picks out the right door, stops at it, and calls the Sheikh.

"Come," he says to him.

★