It truly pains The Woman's Voice to carry to its readers in the far corners of the earth this ill-omened news, because of the high place its former editor-in-chief held in their hearts, in appreciation of his bold, living literary art, and of his struggle and his devotion over two full years...
And this tear of Edvick Jureidini Shayboub's, for her departed friend, is but the repayment of some part of his claim upon her.
... At dawn on December 14, this nation was thunderstruck, and literature and poetry were bereaved, by the death of Mr. Fouad Suleiman...
... The nightingale has fallen silent from song. He died in the flower of
his youth, at the summit of his literary glory, of an incurable disease that defied medicine, leaving in the hearts of his kin and his loved ones an aching grief, and leaving behind a stricken life's partner
and three young branches: Rabi', Walid, and Wisam.
I doubted You, O Lord — I doubted Your compassion and Your justice. This is the third time in my life that I stand before Your holy face, my strength failing, my faith
shaken. Grant me then, O God, from Yourself an ample understanding, for I cannot comprehend Your wisdom in some of Your works! And forgive me, O my God....
*
Fouad, dearest of friends,
Yesterday your body embraced the soil of the white hill at "Fih," and was joined to its mother, the earth, in an everlasting union...
And tomorrow, when the village has been washed a thousand times by the rains, and the white hill breaks forth in a thousand colors and a thousand perfumes, your fragrance will breathe upon the air, and the wings of the winds will carry it to every place on earth...
*
Yesterday we were guests of your sweet village... hundreds... teeming thousands, all of them streaming to "Fih" to bid you farewell, Fouad...
Did you see them — broken, humbled, rigid, nailed to the ground, without life enough in them for the flicker of an eyelid, seared, choked by tears, holding back sob upon sob... It is the helplessness of weak, abased man before the tyrannical power whose essence we do not know. Is it true that it is God? Is it true that the tender, merciful God allows Fouad to drain those great draughts of pain, only to arrive at last at this heartrending end?
*
O Fouad!
In the terrible storm there died upon your lips the aching cry of "Akh," sent up in broken, convulsive gasps from your wounded throat...
while the doctors around you, perplexed and dazed, treated you with every remedy but the healing remedy they did not know!..
And amid the shrieking of the storm and its violence, amid its winds and its rains, the processions of the young — your friends and your students — bore you from the hospital to the heart of the capital,
the tears of the sky toying with their hair, while their own tears boiled within them and overflowed upon their cheeks... Whence had this calamity come upon them, whence?!
And in that same storm, thousands of mourners poured toward Fih, bearing armfuls of roses and lilies, crosses and wreaths, and with cold, trembling fingers heaped them upon
your precious tomb, while in their bleeding hearts a knife cut deep!
*
And memory carried me back, Fouad, two years — or perhaps three. It is as if you were before me, reading me your piece in memory of your comrade the poet Elias Abu Shabaki: "He Died in the Storm."
And suddenly you stopped
reading, lit a cigarette, and said to me in earnest, knitting your brows in that way of your own: — "I am a storm, Edvick — would that I might die in the storm!"
And I hastened to murmur: "After a long life!"
And we laughed together, unheeding; and we did not know that the fates, which had