Brownies and Kalashnikovs Read online

  Time magazine labeled Beirut as “the most stressful city in the world” during the eighties and the city’s name became a catchword to depict ‘anarchy,’ ‘urban warfare,’ ‘divided city,’ ‘radical extremists,’ ‘war torn,’ ‘war weary,’ ‘dangerous,’ or ‘destroyed.’ Today, Palestine and Iraq are suffering what Lebanon suffered because they too are refusing occupation. Those who resist occupation are killed in the name of liberation, democracy, and freedom, three words that have lost their meaning in the ‘doublespeak’ of today’s colonizers.

  14

  Lessons in Love

  Life during the civil war evolved its own routine. So long as people were not in the immediate line of fire, they dressed up for dinner parties, played cards, cried, loved, and died normal deaths. We did the same. I started each day with a schedule that I stuck to religiously and at times pathetically as I tried to keep things ‘normal.’ Rola and Yasmine, for example, grew up vaguely wondering why they had to hide under the sink every time it ‘thundered,’ which was my way of explaining the cannon thuds when they came uncomfortably near.

  At long last, on February 28, 1988, we moved into our new house. It coincided with the coldest day of the year, and we didn’t know how to work the heating, so we slept with our coats on. Despite this minor hitch, it became home very quickly as its walls filled with sounds of life and laughter of our children and their friends and ours.

  Our children attended a reinvented American Community School (ACS), headed by an urbane and compassionate American from Philadelphia, Mrs. Catherine C. Bashour. She made the Americans look good. Tall and slim with short white-blonde hair, Catherine Bashour had the kind of blue eyes that provoked confessions from wayward students with just one piercing look. She had moved to Beirut with her husband, Dr. Mounir Bashour, Dean of the Education Department of the American University of Beirut, whom she had met while they were both graduate students in the University of Chicago. ACS being next door to AUB made it an easy commute for the young wife and she signed on as an English teacher. When the kidnapping of foreigners became a deadly political statement and the American Embassy was blown up by a suicide bomber, all the Americans were ordered to leave Beirut by their government and ACS closed down for lack of customers. Mrs. Bashour refused to leave despite intense pressure from her government. She loved Lebanon and she just wasn’t the type to pick up her skirts and run. After the dust settled somewhat, the Americans renewed their presence in Lebanon in 1985, and turned to Mrs. Bashour to breathe life into ACS once more. Of a practical nature, knowing that its former raison d’etre was no longer there, she opened the doors of the school to non-Americans for the first time in ACS’s history. She had never understood the elitest segregation policy of the former ACS in the first place.

  The first wave of Lebanese children to fill the student roster consisted of a total of seventy students, eleven of them Khayyats. They feel fortunate to have been under Mrs. Bashour’s guidance particularly during the dark and confusing days of the civil war. On those days when deafening crashes of artillery and mortar shells would come out of nowhere she was there to wipe their noses and dry their tears and soothe their terrified teachers, who would sob with fear as they tried to distract the children with a book.

  ***

  No sooner were the guns silenced, than we would push their presence out of our immediate world and go on with our lives. We proudly watched our children celebrate the four seasons and the holidays in song and dance on their school’s stage, determinedly ignoring the distant crashes of mortar fire so long as they were out of range. Birthday parties and play dates at our home were scheduled when circumstances allowed. When circumstances didn’t allow, we brought birthday cakes and party favors to our children’s classrooms.

  Returning home at the end of a school day, the children bubbled over with stories about their teachers and classmates. I would hardly know who to turn to first. Rola would giggle helplessly as she acted out how her stiff and formal music teacher taught them rhythm. Yasmine would proudly sing the new Arabic songs she’d learned over and over and over again. Munira would excitedly run her words together as she described a baby kitten she’d saved with her friends from the street. Amer would wonder how his friend managed to get away with murder just by using his charm; Ghassan would inform me proudly that he scored a goal in soccer. Lebanon had become home. The unceasing battles around our children’s lives became their normal world.

  To the world outside Beirut, Shakin’ Steven’s lyrics for a Christmas song were:

  “Snow is falling, all around me, children playing, having fun.

  It’s the season, for love and understanding, Merry Christmas, Everyone.”

  To our children, the lyrics became:

  “Bombs are falling, all around us, people dying everywhere.

  It’s the season for death and destruction, Merry Christmas, Lebanon.”

  Standstill traffic for hours at Israeli and militia checkpoints was taken in their stride on their way to Beirut or to Sidon; they stocked up on books, sometimes finishing a novel at a time in what was ordinarily a ten-minute ride home. Cars bursting in flames after overheating in the hot summer sun, Syrian soldiers shooting machine guns in the air to keep traffic moving, and irate drivers at each other’s necks were routine scenes en route. Faces, haircuts, and uniforms invariably changed at the selfsame checkpoints at different turns of the war. Whichever fighting force had a stake in the war, our children met them at those checkpoints. At various points in time, they were waved through by Arab Deterrence Forces, Multinational Forces, Israeli soldiers, American Marines, Lebanese Forces, Amal militiamen, Druze militiamen and Syrian soldiers.

  The remarkable outcome of our travails during Lebanon’s civil war was that in spite of all this, our children did not waver in their love for their country or in their love for life. They proved to be the proverbial stoic Lebanese. They did most of their schooling in Beirut, graduated with honors, continued to prestigious universities for postgraduate studies and are now in careers that are firmly grounded in what they can contribute to their world. In their sensitive and highly charged developing years, they were forced to pass through the gauntlet of the arbitrary death and destruction that occurred around them. They emerged from the events all the stronger, in many ways wise beyond their years with no illusions about the absolutes of life and most importantly, loving life and embracing it. Their teenage years were defined by the edge of growing up with war, which affected their outlook on world matters. The war appeared in their university application essays and school assignments and how they sized people up. Munira had reached the conclusion of philosophical relativism early in her life at the tender age of eleven, “I think there are no such things as “facts.” What is considered as fact is really ‘in my opinion’ … especially here in Lebanon.”

  Aged twelve, Ghassan wrote a poem capturing the awakening of a war child to reality:

  My ears can hear it clearly

  ‘Cause they are not too far

  The waves which roll lonely

  Which sweep through my backyard

  But I am safe to float

  My table it is steady

  Boating … yes I’ve mastered

  My fishing rod, it is ready

  And so I fish the sea

  In two ways I do that

  For to my catch I am the creator

  And the hungry fisherman

  But one day a storm came up

  And I was lost at sea

  Lost my childhood’s interest

  But caught the memory

  ***

  My refuge was Im Bashar. She was my mentor, parent, judge, and best friend. She certainly had no illusions about life; after all, this was the fourth war she’d witnessed. She had learned not to put any store in politicians or religious leaders. Despite all the hardships she lived through, no one could shine a remote candle to her verve, love of life, and ability to always look on the bright side of life. It was her firm conviction that
no problem was unsolvable so long as one had a brain and good health. Family and especially children were a sacred first in her list of priorities. After Abu Bashar died heartbroken without seeing his beloved hometown that he had yearned for, Im Bashar made it clear she was not going anywhere. She was staying put in her apartment and we were all invited to move in with her if we so wished. Her independence was non-negotiable. And she remained in her home where we would continue to congregate.

  In 1984, the Israeli retreated into the deeper south unable to stem the attacks against them by the Lebanese resistance, which was inflicting politically damaging losses of Israeli lives. Immediately swarming into the vacated Israeli positions in Sidon was their proxy, the SLA, who wanted to control East Sidon (where Im Bashar lived) as it fell on the highway that lead to the SLA-controlled Christian enclave in the south. To wrest control over the southern highway, the proxy militia decided to first ethnically cleanse East Sidon of all of its Muslims.

  The ethnic cleansing of East Sidon began in broad daylight. Young men who had grown up in the neighborhood transformed into the enemy. On a rainy autumn day in 1984, a month after we had moved to Beirut from Abu Dhabi, the SLA militiamen burst into Im Bashar’s apartment building yelling and cursing, bristling with machine guns. They kicked open the apartment doors of each apartment, and pushed, shoved, and terrorized the occupants of each floor as they herded them en masse upwards until they reached Im Bashar’s top-floor apartment. Her next door neighbors were having their usual morning coffee in Im Bashar’s kitchen when the militia men burst in with the terrified neighbors, shouting and cursing their captives, prodding them like cattle with the butt of their machine guns. Her Syrian neighbor, Buthaina Dada, the same lady who had been so helpful in transporting Abu Bashar’s body through Syria to Sidon was singled out, and taken to another room where her screams for mercy pierced through the neighbors’ hearts. Im Bashar was unable to contain her distress for her neighbor whom she loved as a daughter and pleaded with the gunmen to have mercy. The leader of the group turned on her with a vengeful grin and hit her with the full force of his rifle butt, throwing her to the ground, and spat, “Shut up old woman or I’ll kill you.”

  Mercifully, no one was killed. No men were among the group as it was a work day and they were at their offices. Thankfully, the young children were in school. A Red Cross ambulance was ordered and Im Bashar and her neighbors were shoved unceremoniously into it with only the clothes on their backs. Our children returned to Doha from school that afternoon to find their grandmother and her neighbors, now united with their husbands and children, sitting in stunned silence, disheveled and dispirited. They found it difficult to accept their eviction at the hands of teenage boys they had known from early childhood, although they knew the reason: the poison of political sectarianism that turned people into categories of friend or foe.

  As days turned into weeks, Im Bashar pined for her home but she put on a cheerful face for the sake of of her grandchildren who never left her side. They worried about their grandmother who had never been this despondent before. She had always been their cheerleader and now they wanted to be hers. Im Bashar awoke each morning with a prayer that this would be the day that she would go home. The longed for moment finally came in the spring of 1985.

  The Sidonian nationalists under the late Maarouf Sa’ad’s son Mustafa Sa’ad fought the South Lebanese Army’s occupation of East Sidon and defeated them. We all piled into the car to share one of Im Bashar’s happiest days as we headed to Sidon. All through the trip, she thanked God repeatedly for letting her live to see her home once more. Her infectious laughter had us all laughing and Lebanon and Sidon never looked more beautiful than that spring day.

  We entered her apartment preparing ourselves for the worst and our predictions were not wrong. Cupboard doors hung limply exposing empty shelves, a safe that had nothing in it had been shot at close range with a grenade launcher, bullet holes riddled Abu Bashar’s portrait in the living room.

  “I don’t care,” Im Bashar commented defiantly, “They’ve been routed out of Sidon and my home is mine once more.”

  We cleaned up what we could, Im Bashar packed a few items of clothing and we set out for Doha to return after the apartment was habitable once more. Our driver, Mohammed, whose village was still under occupation by the Israelis and the SLA, decided to take us back through Bramiyeh, where we had lunch in 1977 with the grandparents of Nicola. As we approached its location we saw that Bramiyeh was no more. It no longer existed. The Sidonian Muslim nationalists had destroyed it in a clear message that the Maronites were no longer welcome to return. The well-tended stone houses we had admired on our way to Nicola’s grandparents were now piles of rubble and so was the house of Nicola’s grandfather.

  The hatred and rage in this violent act of revenge were understandable. But revenge did not exist in Im Bashar’s heart. She was unable to bear the sight and shut her eyes tight, sobbing, “Oh those poor souls! Where are they sleeping tonight? Abu Tanios loved his khabias so much and look at them now, powder and dust.”

  Mohammed realized he had made a big mistake but he had the sense to know that the less said the better to Im Bashar in this moment of unanticipated sorrow. We attempted to speak of other topics but to no avail. By the time we arrived home, Im Bashar had fallen into a deep state of depression and was unable to leave the car unassisted. Frightened, we immediately called for her doctor who ordered us to take her straight to the emergency ward. She was in the full throes of a heart attack, triggered by the sight of Bramiyeh’s destruction. Im Bashar had lived long enough to know the futility of war.

  ***

  This was a lesson she passed on to her children and they learned it well. Adnan’s dream of owning his own orchards was realized with our return to Lebanon. The land was on the hills that overlooked Sidon’s entrance just beyond the Awali River that flowed into the sea, creating one of the most fertile areas of the region. While his bulldozers plowed and prepared the earth for his trees, he set up greenhouses growing tomatoes. Next to his greenhouses were those belonging to Walid Jumblatt, the Druze warlord who had wrested control over the forcibly depopulated Christian villages of the area. Adnan visited the greenhouses often to glean ideas and direction as he was relatively new to the profession. Amongst the workers, he noticed a pleasant-faced, red-haired middleaged man who carried himself in a manner different from the rest of the workers who tended the tomatoes. He did not look like a Syrian laborer. Curiously and typically, Adnan struck up a conversation with the gentleman diving immediately into his question, “So where are you from?”

  The man smiled sadly, “I’m Abu Mansour from Rmaileh and this is my land and these are my greenhouses.”

  Adnan was moved by the man’s painful but dignified response, “How can I help you?” he asked him.

  “Only God can help me now,” he answered ruefully. “I’m happy to have the chance to work on my land and I am a patient man, this war will end one day.”

  Adnan maintained his friendship with Abu Mansour and at the first chance that he had to meet with Walid Jumblatt, he asked for Abu Mansour’s rights. They eventually came after the Rmaileh villagers were invited to return to their village at war’s end. Abu Mansour never forgot Adnan’s compassion and from that day forward, every Christian and Muslim holiday would see him at our door with Im Mansour, a plucky smiling grandmother with trays of homemade bread, pickled cucumbers, colored eggs, Christmas sweets or apricot syrup, according to season.

  ***

  On the dawn of June 28th, 1994, the saddest farewell took place. Im Bashar died peacefully in her bed as she had always wished. I was lying down next to her, holding her tightly, as though that might keep her soul from leaving her body. Bushra was seated next to her holding her hand and reciting Qur’anic verses. We had been prepared, as was Im Bashar, for her last breath. Sadly for Adnan, he was far away in Abu Dhabi.

  There is a Muslim belief that the angels remain at the bedside of those who have done goo
d deeds to mankind to carry their soul to Heaven. At the moment of her last breath, Im Bashar pushed herself into a seated position, her back ramrod straight, to meet her angel. We suppressed cries of sorrow as we watched Im Bashar, true to form, meet her Maker face-to-face. Her six grandsons carried her coffin at the lead of a silent entourage of the townspeople of Sidon to her final resting place in the cemetery in the heart of old Sidon next to Abu Bashar and her son, Hassan. As her cortege wound slowly through her beloved town, shopkeepers shut down their stores and bowed their heads with palms turned upwards silently, mouthing a prayer for Im Bashar’s soul.

  15

  What Goes Around Comes Around

  Moments of Truth

  Our first year without Im Bashar was very difficult. We tried to accept the finality of her absence, but we missed her more with each day that passed. The pain of parting just did not get better with time. That same year, I received the news that my mother was not feeling well. Marwan called me to come to Saudi Arabia immediately. Our mother had breast cancer. She had discovered a lump the size of a pea in her breast and was in the hospital undergoing tests in preparation for a mastectomy. I dropped everything and took the first flight out to Dhahran. It had been ten years since I had last seen my father and three since I had seen my mother during her visit to her family in Damascus. I was unable to see her as much as I would have liked, mainly due to my estrangement with my father. Any possibility for reconciliation had been erased on my part after my father took in a second wife. It shattered us and it took a big toll on my mother’s already fragile mental health. The emotional effort then that it would have taken to face my father was something I was not able to make. I had needed all the strength I could muster just to deal with living in a war-ridden country that had nothing functioning properly and five teenagers in university and high school.