Pictures That Will Not Return

In those far-off days we used to summer in Aley, the resort that was blessed with building after the railway came, and blessed with the abonné train that carried up every evening the husbands and brothers of the summering ladies, from the inferno of the coast to the paradise of the peaks.

And though "the Station" was the meeting place of the elegant young girls, and though the Khan al-Shaykh road was a promenade for the young men of the aristocratic class, who raced their carriages with their glossy horses after the carriages of the ladies of "Sursock" society — alongside that glittering touch of the city, which in those days moved slowly and gently, there were in the great summering villages colors of village life which our man of letters Sheikh Said Takieddine described when he told us of the village of "'Ayn al-Burghush," and his description was a marvel.

Colors that have vanished today from Aley and Bhamdoun and Souk al-Gharb. Dawn there is no longer that dawn — when we would rise from sleep and the cool breeze would tickle our cheeks as we went out to the arcaded gallery, where jars and pitchers of rose-colored earthenware had been set out, their water "setting the teeth on edge," with plates of fruit ranged beside them; and up to us from the valleys came the voices of the cows and the sheep and the goats, threaded through with the chugging of the train as it panted wearily up the grade with the string of cars it dragged behind it; then the fall of the mules' hooves on the road, the muleteers walking behind them humming village songs.

No. Dawn is no longer that dawn, nor night that night. People have traded the stars and the moon for electric lamps; and the bands of young men and girls have vanished who used to stroll beneath the balconies of the houses and call to one another to form choruses that marched singing along the 'Ayn al-Rummaneh road to the strumming of mandolins — innocent songs of love; and in their place have risen couples who drink and gamble and carouse in the clubs, leaving the pleasure of walking in the moonlight to the rubber and steel of motorcars.

Nor have the evenings remained those evenings; there is no room on the roads now for the flocks of gazelles, leaping and slipping in among the woods, of whom the zajal singers would say:

All the stars of Paradise
beneath the pines of Araya!

★

In those far-off days we used to summer in Aley.

And I would wallow in the delights of life in the villages, feeling the smell of the mountain enter through my nostrils into my blood and my bones. Sitting on the balcony, going to the spring, helping the baker-woman at the tannour, accompanying "the girl" to the square — all these were pleasures to me; had it happened that I was deprived of them, I would have counted it an unjust punishment such as only the cruel and the tyrannous impose.

That summer was my last with my father. One evening the disease he had concealed for months came upon us, asserting its existence decisively and finally. A doctor came, then another doctor, then a company of doctors; and when we went down to the city, there was a race on between medicine and the disease.

And the disease won, after forty days — during which we learned that the father who in his own house had been "lord and master" had been the same in his life among people. Our house began to swarm with callers from early morning until night; night became day, in which the big petroleum lamps were never put out; the young men and girls of the family and the wives of our uncles on both sides took turns sitting up, and slept — when they slept — on the benches or on mattresses laid on the floor.

The day the families of my grandfathers — my father's and my mother's — took refuge in Beirut from Wadi al-Taym after the catastrophe of 1860, my father was a little over ten years old. Before long he was carrying his whole family on his shoulders; and when his two brothers grew up they all supported one another in extensive commercial ventures, and he remained a faithful partner to his brothers until he died.

He was dignified, grave, a man of few words. A sharp, raised voice pained him, and he would knit his two thick eyebrows; the fall of footsteps pained him if the shoes had heels; the rattling of the windows pained him when the winds blew. So our care in the house was to walk like ants, to refrain from everything that made clatter and din, and to lay the great table and range the many chairs around it gently and with care.

From the day my young brother died — and he was the dearest thing in the world to him — he was never once seen laughing. When he came home of an evening from the city and we all came forward to kiss his hand, my sisters would push me ahead first, so that his features would relax and his lips part in a smile of contentment.

And when I traveled to Brazil in 1939, my uncle — by then an old man — told me that grapes had been my dead brother's favorite fruit, and that my father never tasted a single grape after losing him.

He used to forbid us to utter the word "servant," and so we grew used to saying "the girl" or "the girls."

It happened during that last summer that I rose early one day to accompany "the girl" to the market. My father called me, gave me an Ottoman dinar, and charged me to hand it to the butcher.

The sight of the square was a delight: the village women in their bright dresses sitting beside the trays; the smells of mint and apples and yellow melons and peaches with their soft rosy down; and the cucumbers people crunched so that their scent carried far and wide.

Near the square there was a house one went down to by several steps; before its entrance was a great platform paved with clean tiles, and on that platform I always saw a lady of great splendor, dressed in loose morning gowns of silk or costly velvet, sitting smoking the narghile with a number of ladies around her.

We reached the square and made straight for the butcher. He had hung the sheep from the roof of a tent made of tree trunks covered with vine leaves, and stood cutting the meat beside a table, before a large number of customers.

I drew near him... Did I hand him the dinar? Did I lay it on the table before him? I do not know.

I remember that people turned to gaze at that enchanting lady "of the narghile," who had come to the square swaying in her velvet gown, its train lifted off the ground by a soft white hand, while behind her walked a number of her companions, who seemed to me her ladies-in-waiting.

And naturally... I stood feasting my eyes, from close by, on that sight which "glorifies the Creator," as my father used to say when he described a beautiful face. "The girl" disappeared, so I went to find out what had become of her, and when I found her she said:

Where is the dinar? I left you handing it to the butcher. I said: I gave it to him.

We went to him; he demanded his money and denied that he had taken any dinar from me.

— Where is the dinar? How did it go? Who snatched it from your hand?

She went at once to the watchman of the square and told him what had happened, and I returned home weeping.

And my sisters fell upon me, scolding: You lose an "'usayliyya" just like that, like the feeble-minded! People lose a beshlik, or a zahrawi, or a Mejidi riyal — and you lose five Mejidis and three beshliks at one stroke?

I nearly died of grief and mortification. My father was watching and listening; he rebuked my sisters and said:

— Enough! Leave the little one be. Come, ya baba.

Then he took me into the sitting room and shut the door. My tears were streaming like brooks. He said, deliberately:

— Wipe your tears, and listen: do you remember exactly that you handed the dinar to the butcher, hand to hand? If, ya baba, you do not remember exactly, then do not swerve from the truth — and he used the word "swerve" — the watchman has learned of it, and he accuses the butcher, and the man may go to prison, and he may be innocent. Speak, ya baba.

And he looked into the depths of my eyes with two pitying, honest eyes, and I said, the tears choking me:

— I cannot say whether I gave it to him hand to hand, or laid it on the table, or whether it fell from my hand to the ground.

And he drew me to him, and I hid in his breast, and I felt, as he kissed me, that he was breathing in the scent of my hair and my neck, deeply. At last he said:

— Ya baba! Remember always what I am going to tell you. Never say anything but what you are certain is truth and right.

Then he opened the door and called my sisters and said to them:

— Enough. We are done now with the story of the 'usayliyya.