Текст книги "Gate of the Sun"

Автор книги: Elias Khoury

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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

My mother knew nothing and would curse the luck that had brought her here and say she hated Beirut, and hated this camp, and hated al-Ghabsiyyeh and its people, and didn’t know why she’d married man who was destined to die.

Should I tell you how my father married her?

Or maybe these things don’t interest you. You prefer stories of heroes and heroic deeds. You’d probably rather hear the story of how the man died on the threshold of his house.

But I don’t know that story.

Listen. I’m going to tell you a story I don’t know. My story isn’t beautiful like yours, but I’ll tell it so we don’t get bored.

I know you’re fed up with me. This way we can save some time and kill it before it kills us. I’m certain you can hear and are laughing to yourself and want to say lots and lots of things. Never mind, Father, say what you like, or say nothing at all; what matters is that you arise from this sleep. I’m certain you’ll wake up one day and discover that I bathed you in words, and washed your wounds with memories.

Fine words, you’ll say, but I don’t like them.

You like words when they’re like a knife’s edge. You used to make fun of people’s speech, of how instead of stating their opinions directly they take refuge in euphemisms and metaphors. “Words must wound,” you’ll say. But where do you want me to find you words that wound? All our words are circular. From the beginning, which is to say since Adam, our language has been circular. No matter how hard we try to break its circles, we find ourselves falling into new ones. So bear with me and play the game. Come, let’s circle with our words. Let’s circle around the sun, let’s circle around the camp, let’s circle around Galilee, let’s circle around Nahilah and Shams and around all the names. Let’s circle with names, let’s circle without names. Let’s circle and come back to the beginning. Come back with me to the beginning, so we can get to the opening of the story.

I see the opening as a long dress. I don’t know if it belonged to my mother or my grandmother. Two slender women covered from head to toe by long, ample, black dresses. Two women waiting, sitting on the doorstep of the house with me between them not knowing which is my mother and which my grandmother.

When I was little, I had two names and two mothers. My first mother called me Khalil and my second mother called me Yasin. The first told me stories about the death of her man, the second about the loss of her child after the village fell. Both stories belong to me, and I juggle them, becoming both child and man. You’ll understand what I’m saying because you yourself are living the moment that everyone yearns for: You’re in your second childhood – helpless as a child, speechless as a child, resigned as a child. Ah, how good you smell! Didn’t I tell you we’d go back to the beginning? Your childhood smell has come back to you, your childhood has come back to you. Even your shape has started to change. I’m convinced you’ve started to get shorter, that you’ve lost a lot of weight, and that you’ve returned to that mysterious moment that confuses our memory when we try to recapture our childhood.

Put out your hand so I can prove it to you.

I open your hand and place my finger in its palm; your hand closes over my finger. Do you know what that means?

It’s the first test we give a child at the moment of its birth. It’s an involuntary reflex. So now you’re at that stage: You’ve become a child again, and instead of being my father you’ve become my son. I open your hand again, and you have the same reaction, and I’m as proud of you as any father of his child. I play with you and hug you, and you surrender to the game and play and squirm. I hug you and breathe you in; your smell fills my nose. It isn’t the smell of soap and ointment and powder; there’s something that comes from deep inside you, a new smell that transports you to the first sproutings of childhood, to an ageless age, where we find the beginnings of speech.

I can return there, too, and see those mysterious days that I lived between two mothers. Najwah went away to her family and left me with Shahineh, daughter of Rabbah al-Awad – the leader of Ghabsiyyeh’s militia – and wife of Khalil Ayyoub, who was killed in ’36 when he was a bodyguard for his wife’s father in the revolution. I see the two as one woman. They looked as alike as sisters, the same dark complexion, small eyes, high forehead and long hair rippling black. When Shahineh died, I felt that Najwah had died, too. I won’t talk to you about Najwah now because I know nothing about her. I do know that I looked for her once. I went to Jordan and looked for the wife of Ayyoub and daughter of Fayyad in the Wahdat camp but could find no trace of her. Then I got that mysterious letter from Sameh’s wife in Ramallah. Then nothing.

I asked you why my father died, and you didn’t answer me.

I asked my grandmother, and she said he had been killed because he was destined to die like his father.

“Dear God! How could the dream come twice?” she asked. “And both times, the man dies.” The first time was in ’36, when I saw, as a dreamer sees, this light go out, and the second time was in ’59, when the light went out again. How can I describe what I saw to you, my son? A light like no other light, a light white and brilliant. It was over me as I sat on the ground. The light came in through the window and drew closer and closer to me. I got up and moved toward it, and when I got there, I saw the face of your grandfather, Khalil. ‘What’s the matter, man?’ I asked, and his face started to crumble into bits like glass. He came to me and hugged me, and suddenly he went out. People, like lights, go out. The light that came from the faces of your father and grandfather went out before my eyes, and I said to myself, ‘He is dead.’”

Both times, my grandmother saw a light that went out. She never tired of retelling her dream, which took the place of the actual story.

“Al-Ghabsiyyeh was like a light, and it went out,” said my grandmother as she listened to her son-in-law telling of his visit to the village.

“Al-Ghabsiyyeh went out,” said Shahineh. “I was alone that day. My late father and my husband were commanding the militia, and I had Yasin and his brothers with me. Suddenly they attacked. The Jews broke into the village from the north and southeast. They occupied the house of Osman As’ad Abdallah in the southern part of the village and seized him with his son. Then the shelling started, and we fled.”

My grandmother told how a man fell from the minaret of the mosque. She said she saw him falling like a bird. His name was Dawoud Ibrahim. In the midst of the bombardment and the chaos, he climbed to the highest point of the mosque to hang a white rag on the minaret to announce the village’s surrender. She said she saw him there at the top waving it in his hand. Then he hung the rag, but it fell. He picked it up, looking into the distance, toward the source of the shelling, as though he wished they’d stop firing for a while. As he tried to hang up the rag again, he was struck by a bullet in his chest and fell like a bird. He hugged his arms to his chest and plummeted. My grandmother said that when she saw him she understood how birds die, that Dawoud was like a bird. She gathered together her children and ran with the others, scared of the tall trees – she kept glancing upward as she ran, scared that people would fall from the trees.

She kept running until she reached the fields of Amqa, where she lived for a while with her children beneath the olive trees.

My grandmother said she lost all her relatives and her father disappeared.

I’m sure that you must know my grandfather because he joined up with you after the fall of al-Ghabsiyyeh on May 21, 1948. He went to Sha’ab and stayed there with your garrison until it was dismantled and you were all arrested. He died in prison in Syria. You got out and went to the Ain al-Hilweh camp, where you put on an unforgettable show of madness that allowed you to move in on the police post and seize their rifles before disappearing.

The story I want to tell you is that of my father in Amqa.

I swear it’s as though I were the one who lived the story. My grandmother told it to me hundreds of times, and every time she’d say to me, “You did such and such,” and then would catch herself and say, “May God forgive me, I was starting to get you and your father mixed up.” I’d enter the story and correct the details because she’d forget names or mix them up. Even the name of Aziz Ayyoub, my father’s uncle, that nobody from al-Ghabsiyyeh could possibly forget, slipped her mind when she was telling me the story of my father and the donkey.

They were in Amqa.

My grandmother was living under the olive trees, like everyone else, with her four children: three daughters and Yasin.

Let’s suppose now that I’m her son, by whose name she used to call me. I’m her son, and I’ll tell you the story.

I was short and round, and no one could believe that I was really twelve years old; they thought I was just a child until the day I returned with the sack of vegetables.

We were hungry. Do you know what we ate during that long month? Almost nothing: bread, thyme, and weeds. Then the bread ran out. Can you imagine a whole people living without bread? We’d gather greens and weeds, and we’d eat them and still be hungry. We slept under the trees, we’d spread woolen blankets over the branches of the olive trees for protection, and we waited. My mother wasn’t afraid. The olive trees weren’t so tall that she had to be afraid of dead men falling out of them. Her father let her know he’d joined the Sha’ab garrison and asked her to stay put with her children until he came and took them to Sha’ab. But he didn’t come, and she couldn’t take it any longer. She told her children that hunger had made her ache for her village and she’d decided to go back to gather some vegetables from her field and bring back some flour and oil. She told her children to stick together and to be careful while she was away.

So I volunteered.

“Yasin volunteered,” said my grandmother, “and insisted on coming with me. I refused and asked him to stay with his sisters. ‘You stay, and I’ll go,’ he said, and to cut a long story short, Yasin came with me.”

We walked with the others who were going to the village, each one with sack in hand. My mother had a donkey she’d gotten from a relative in Amqa. We kept walking until we reached al-Sheikh Dawoud. There the firing started from the rampart that dominates the village. The Jews were hiding behind the barrier, and the firing began. People got scared and ran back toward al-Kweikat and Amqa. I lost my mother, she’d gone off with the donkey toward Amqa, while I kept going toward al-Kweikat, running and shouting. Then, suddenly, there was a man standing in the middle of the road behind his donkey that was moving straight into the line of fire. “Help, Uncle Aziz!” I say, and he says, “Get behind me,” as if the donkey were a shield. I got behind him, and, after a while, the firing stopped. I left Aziz and his donkey and went down toward the valley. He told me he was going to al-Ghabsiyyeh to stay there. “I’m the guardian of the mosque,” he said, “and I won’t leave it. Come with me.” “I want my mother,” I told him, and I left him and went down the valley. I heard firing and thought, Uncle Aziz is dead and started crying, and when I saw my mother I told them Uncle Aziz had died behind his donkey, and everyone believed me.

But Uncle Aziz, as you know, Father, didn’t die. He remained dead in the memory of the people of al-Ghabsiyyeh until ’72, when my sister’s husband returned from his visit and told the amazing stories of Uncle Aziz. Then people found out that my father had lied, that he hadn’t seen Uncle Aziz dead. Yasin died before his son-in-law’s visit to the village, so he won’t be able to tell you about it. So I’ll tell you about it, but not just now.

Where were we?

We left Yasin in the valley of al-Kweikat, crying from fear. Then the bullets became fewer. “I pulled myself together and climbed in the direction of Amqa. On the way, I found a bundle of okra and vegetables. Someone must have thrown his bundle down and fled for his life when he heard the shots. I picked the sack up with difficulty; in fact, I couldn’t really lift it, so I dragged it and the vegetables started spilling out onto the ground. Then I slung the sack onto my back and set off.”

Shahineh reached the olive groves of Amqa and said she’d lost her son at al-Sheikh Dawoud and had fled along with everyone else. She’d led the donkey through the valleys looking for her son; she held on to the donkey’s halter and cried out her son’s name. On the outskirts of Amqa, she had to admit that she had truly lost him and, fearing that she might lose the donkey, too, she returned it to its owners before she went back to stand in front of her blanket-tent, waiting and weeping.

She said she was weeping and didn’t see him.

Yasin returned carrying the bundle of vegetables he’d found in the valley of al-Kweikat. He was small and bent over – the bundle hid him completely.

“I was tired, my back was bent, and the vegetables were on top of me – I was all sweat and okra pods. I made it to the entrance of the olive grove at Amqa with the okra spilling everywhere. I was exhausted and couldn’t believe I’d made it. Instead of throwing the bundle down and running toward my mother, I stood where I was with my back nearly breaking, inching toward her with tiny steps. She was tall and thin and kept waving her hands about and crying while everyone looked on and wept with her. Everyone was rooted to where they were while I drew closer, the bundle of vegetables still on top of me, until I reached her. Then I threw the bundle down on the ground and stood up. Everyone said, ‘Yasin’s here! Yasin’s here!’ They all saw me except for her. She kept crying and waving her arms around, and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I grabbed hold of her long black dress and started tugging on it. She bent down and saw me and fell to the ground as if she’d fainted, and everyone went and got water and sprinkled it on her face.”

My grandmother said that when she saw her son, she lost her voice and couldn’t remember anything after that.

She was the only one not to see him. When she recovered from her faint, Yasin and his three sisters were around her. He opened the bundle on the ground and told her he’d gathered all these things: “I went and harvested the land, and I wasn’t afraid of the Jews.” The mother slowly got up, asked her daughters to start the fire beneath the stew pot, and the bustle of cooking began.

My grandmother said they attacked the village at dawn.

The village was half-empty because after the fall of al-Kabri and what happened to its inhabitants we’d understood that everything was over. “But my father, God bless his dust in its foreign grave, didn’t leave,” said my grandmother. “He stayed with the militiamen, so we stayed. Do you know, Son, I don’t know where they buried my father. They said he was killed in the military camp, trying to escape from prison.”

My grandmother said she went to look for him in al-Neirab camp in Aleppo. She paid her uncle and his children a visit, who lived in strange barracks the French army had built. They were squashed on top of one another like flies, in long, oblong rooms. Her husband’s brother, Azmi, said he wasn’t sure, but he thought they’d buried him in the Yarmouk camp and suggested she forget the matter.

“The man’s dead,” Azmi said, “so we can say he died in Palestine.”

But Shahineh wasn’t convinced.

“Forget it, Shahineh, and look after your children.”

But Shahineh didn’t forget it.

She went to the Yarmouk camp and visited Abu Is’af, the commander of the Sha’ab garrison, who was living in the camp alone under a sort of house arrest.

In his tiny house, which consisted of one room without a bathroom, Abu Is’af told her he’d heard shots, but he wasn’t sure if the man had died. He said the military camp they’d been in resembled a prison.

“They took our weapons and said the war was over. We said, ‘Okay, then we’ll go back to our wives and children.’ They said no, you will stay as our guests. You know what Arab hospitality is like: We were prisoners without a prison, we were like people abandoned in the desert. In fact, we were in the desert. Then your father disappeared and we heard shots, but we didn’t know then that it was him. He did disappear, however. God rest your soul, Rabbah al-Awad, you were the reason for our release. After he disappeared, we went on a hunger strike. Yunes was the one who proclaimed the hunger strike and yelled in the officer’s face, ‘A strike to the death!’ Then they let us go. Everyone went back to his family except for me. They said that in view of my military experience, it had been decided to put me ‘at the disposal of the leadership.’ Imagine the situation that I find myself in at my age! I’m at the disposal of the leadership, I don’t have a latrine to use, and I’m not allowed to visit my children in Ain al-Hilweh. Go, daughter, and take care of your son: Rabbah is a martyr and is buried God-knows-where. Forget his grave and look after the living. Go, God keep you, and if you pass by Ain al-Hilweh, ask for my son Is’af and tell him his father wants to see him before he dies.”

My grandmother said she was convinced.

“Listen well, Daughter,” said Abu Is’af. “Death is destiny. Someone who was destined to die in Palestine and wasn’t able to, will die somewhere else.”

He said he’d wanted to die there himself because “Palestine is closer to paradise.”

My grandmother said she stayed in al-Ghabsiyyeh and didn’t want to move out with the others three days before the battle because her father was fighting there, but he soon disappeared. “I waited for him at the house during the shelling, but he never came. So I got myself and the children ready and left. They were bombarding as we fled, the houses were collapsing. They died: Mohammed Abd al-Hamid and his wife Fathiyyeh, Ahmad al-Dawoud, Fayyad al-Dawoud; I saw them lying in the street, as though they had been hurled out of their houses.” She said, “The houses were still standing, but their roofs had flown off.”

I didn’t want to believe my grandmother. The story of that birdman who fell from the minaret with his hands folded across his chest seemed like an image that had broken loose from memory and alighted in the woman’s consciousness.

“That’s history,” you’ll tell me.

But I’m not concerned with history anymore. My story with you, Abu Salem, isn’t an attempt to recapture history. I want to understand why we’re here, prisoners in this hospital. I want to understand why I can’t free myself from you and from my memory. In becoming the head nurse, I’ve returned to the position I deserve, as the hospital’s effective director.

Is that because the hospital isn’t a hospital any longer, that, in fact, it’s been turned into something less than a clinic?

Or because I saw in you an image of my own death and rushed toward death to talk with it?

Or because, deep down, I’m afraid of Shams? I’ll tell you her story later, then you’ll understand why I’m afraid. I’m not afraid of death but of Shams, yes – of her, of her hoarse voice when it shudders with anger and passion, and of her body marked by sex, men, and death.

I don’t believe my grandmother, and I don’t believe history either, but that day I found myself wearing the name my grandmother had given me. She’d dressed me in the name of her dead son, ruffling my hair and weeping for her husband who’d died in the Revolution of ’36 in the neighboring village of al-Nahar, and whom they brought back to her in a shroud, so that she was unable to see him.

My grandmother said she smelled the same odor when Yasin died.

“He was basted in his blood, and the odor of it escaped from the cracks of his disintegrating body until the whole house was filled with it, there in al-Ghabsiyyeh and here in the camp.”

“Like that smell, Grandmother?” I asked sarcastically, pointing to the pillow.

“It was our smell. The smell of the al-Awad family, the smell of blood mixed with the scents of flowers and herbs.”

She ran to her pillow.

“Smell it,” she said.

I clasped the pillow to my chest and took in a deep whiff of it; I chuckled and snorted at once.

“It’s the smell of henna, Grandma. It’s the smell of your head. Did my grandfather dye his hair with henna?!”

She snatched the pillow away from me angrily. “You don’t understand anything,” she said. “When you grow up, you’ll understand what I’m saying – the same dream and the same smell. They brought my husband and his smell came off him and filled me up. They took him into the house for a few minutes and stopped me from going to the grave. They carried him around the house and asked me to let out some ecstatic youyous, but I didn’t, not because I don’t believe in God, as they claimed, but because I couldn’t. The smell had overwhelmed me, and I could feel it creeping into my bones and inhabiting them. You have to trill for martyrs, and I’ve trilled for many. In fact, our lives are punctuated by youyous. We’re all martyrs, Son. But when they brought him to the house, I couldn’t; his smell reigned everywhere.”

She recounted my father’s death.

When she recounted his death, she’d rise and enact the crime. The truth of the matter is that the story changed after my mother disappeared. When my mother was here, she was the one who’d tell the story. My mother would speak, and my grandmother would sigh. My mother would say the man fell like a sack, motionless, as though he’d died before they shot him.

My mother said she opened the door, with Yasin behind her, and saw three men. Yasin said, “Is everything okay? Please come in.” One of them pulled out his revolver and fired three bullets. She said she was standing in front of him, saw the gun and heard the shots. She said that everything happened very fast – they shot him and left.

“I turned and saw him on the ground, motionless. I bent over him. His mother came and pushed me away. Then everyone came.”

My mother said my sister died two weeks after my father. “He took my daughter and went away,” she said, “so what am I doing still here?”

I don’t remember my younger sister, Fatmah. My grandmother said she was pink and blond and white, like the middle of the day, and that the Jew, Aslan Durziyyeh, when he visited us, couldn’t believe she was my father’s daughter, she was so beautiful and white. The old woman yawns and raises her hands to her head as though she’s going to throw the days behind her. “God bless him, Aslan Durziyyeh. I don’t know what’s become of him.”

My grandmother doesn’t remember my sister well. I ask her and she says she doesn’t know. “I told Najwah, ‘You take care of Fatmah, and Khalil’s mine,’” so the work was divided between the two women from Fatmah’s birth. But Fatmah died; she was struck by an intestinal infection.

“We got up in the morning, and she was like a piece of cold wood. Your mother picked her up and ran with her to the doctor. He told her she’d dehydrated.”

I lived alone. My mother stayed up at night, waiting for the moon of al-Ghabsiyyeh that she never saw, and my grandmother wept and called me Yasin. Between the two women I listened to stories I thought were mine and got confused. I would tell stories about my father as though I were telling them about myself. I’d imagine him through my mother’s eyes and see him fall like a sack. Then I’d see him in my grandmother’s words, see the blood staining his white hair as he convulsed between life and death on the threshold of our house.

But why did they kill him?

The papers wrote that he’d been killed because he’d resisted the police patrol that came to arrest him. My mother said he was behind her when he went to the door and didn’t possess any weapons. And my grandmother says the weapons were there, but they didn’t find any. “They came the next day and turned the house upside down. I’m the daughter of Rabbah al-Awad and you think they’re going to find the rifle? The rifle’s there, Son, and when you grow up you’ll take it. But they were liars. He didn’t resist. If he’d resisted, he’d have killed them all. He went out to greet them because he didn’t know they’d come to kill him. The sons of bitches.”

My grandmother doesn’t know why they killed him.

You, Father, on the other hand, know everything.

My grandmother said you showed up at the funeral when no one was expecting you, appearing among the mourners and raising your hand in the victory sign. You’d covered your face with your kufiyyeh. ^*In those days, the kufiyyehhadn’t yet become our emblem; we didn’t have an emblem. You came with the kufiyyehcovering your face and head and you shouted “God is most great!” and everyone shouted the same thing. Then you disappeared.

Tell me about those days. Tell me how you held onto the courage of the beginning after all that had happened.

You’ll tell me that in those days you weren’t aware of the beginning. You continued your journeys over there as though things hadn’t been interrupted, as though what had been etched on our bodies hadn’t been etched on yours. You moved among the forests and hills of Galilee, continuing your life and returning to the camp. You appeared only to disappear.

I know that things weren’t as simple as they appeared.

I know you were a wolf and like all wolves didn’t like to settle down in one place. In the early years, you felt a strange wildness and a killing loneliness.

But my father.

Why did he die that way?

Why didn’t he go with you?

Why did he leave me?

Dr. Amjad is wrong. Do you know what he told Zainab? He said: “Khalil is going through a psychological crisis driven by the need to find his father; leave him with that corpse until he’s had enough.”

He spoke of you as a corpse, of me as an idiot, and of our story as nonsense. The son of a bitch! I wish I could rip away that shell he hides behind! Camouflaged behind those thick glasses of his, he’s so sure he’s discovered meaning in his life by chasing after money. I know he’s a thief. He steals here, and he works at another hospital, where he dons the skin of the all-knowing, all-understanding doctor – but he doesn’t know a thing. No one who hasn’t crossed a desert like the desert of Shams can know anything about life.

Excuse me, Father, if I say that love is not as you describe it. Love is feeling yourself to be lost and unanchored. Love is dying because you can’t hold on to the woman you love. Shams would slip through my hands, and she made a fool of me, saying that she wanted me, then taking off for some other man. That’s love – an emptiness suddenly filled, or a fullness that empties and melts into thin air. With her I learned to see myself and love my body. Before, I knew nothing. I thought that love was Nuha, her mother’s cooking, and her father’s throat clearing, desire that wakes and then dies away. But Shams taught me to be a man, how to die in her arms and cease to exist. Please don’t laugh. I don’t remember if I became aroused with her the way men do, the way I would when I took hold of my member and discharged it with my hand. With her I didn’t have a member. Naturally, I’d become aroused but – how can I put it? – it was more like melting and coming out of the water. We’d bathe in the water of desire and dissolve – but the desire never died. Her water. . her water would burst forth like a spring emerging from the depths of the earth, and I’d drown.

That’s what Amjad doesn’t know, since, if he had known love, his life would’ve been ravaged as mine has been.

How can you expect me to fix my life now that she is dead?

Should I tell you a secret? My secret, Father, is that now, when her ghost comes to haunt me, I feel the same desire that used to take me into her limitless world, and I tremble with lust, and I’m afraid.

But why?

I used to think that Sameh’s death would be swept under the carpet the way we’ve swept so many hundreds of deaths under the carpet. Why did they sentence her to death?

Was it because. .?

Or because she. .?

But I knew she was going to die, because I could see death lurking in her eyes. You were the one who told me about the death that blazes from people’s eyes. Do you remember that girl, what was her name? Dalal? Yes, Dalal al-Maghribi. Do you remember the suicide operation she carried out in Tel Aviv, convulsing the camp as though it had been struck by an earthquake? We were unable to believe that Dalal, that melancholy, meek girl who worked in the sewing workshop, had been capable of commanding a boat that would set her down in Haifa, of kidnapping an Israeli bus full of passengers and dying that way.

That day you told me you’d seen death in her eyes and explained that you could tell the fighter who was going to die from his eyes, since death covers the eyes like an invisible film and the fighter is bewitched by his own death before he dies, and so goes obediently. I remembered the Lebanese youth, Mohammed Shbaro, who we called Talal. You don’t know him because you weren’t with us during the Lebanese war. That was our war, Abu Salem. I say that in all sorrow because whenever I talk about memories of the Lebanese war, I feel as though my face is falling to the ground and shattering. I could see death in the eyes of that young man, who we called the Engineer because he was a student at the Jesuit University in Beirut. He’d put on his thick glasses, wrap the patterned kufiyyeharound his neck, and go out looking for death. He died in Sanin because he’d decided to die. He didn’t have to die, but you might say he was trailing behind his eyes. The image of the Engineer resurfaced when you were telling me about the connection between my father’s death and his eyes. I know you’ll say that my father carried his death in his eyes, I know that it wasn’t your fault, or Adnan’s, God rest his soul. In those days you were all in a hurry to carry out armed operations, and the central authority that emerged from the Lebanese civil war of ’58 had decided to teach you a lesson. My father was the lesson. They came and killed him to deter you, but in vain. My father died and my mother paid the price.