You don’t know a thing about my mother, so listen at least to what I’m about to tell you. My mother ran away because she’d gotten into a bad marriage, because of a certain Jew. This is how my grandmother told it — my grandmother who seemed somewhat pacified after my mother ran away. From then on, my father’s horrendous death no longer constituted the mainspring of her life. From then on, she relaxed, tenderness softened her face, and she never stopped abusing this Jew. I was young and incapable of making sense of things, so I didn’t understand that when she abused “the Jew” she was talking about a specific person. Later I discovered that “the Jew” was the catalyst for my father’s marriage to Najwah, my mother.
My grandmother said my father had to go to work young. His sisters were married and the UNWRA assistance wasn’t enough, not to mention that he hadn’t done well at school. So he started work at Shukri’s pharmacy in Bab Idris. Then he found work in a sheet-metal factory at Mina al-Hesn that belonged to two Jews, Aslan Durziyyeh and Sa’id Lawi. That was where the scandal occurred.
My grandmother said they arrested my father and threw him in jail for more than two weeks. “Poor thing, he was just a child. True, he was tall and mature, but he was only sixteen. He liked reading a lot but was a troublemaker at school, so he went to work. At the pharmacy, his wages were a joke: seven lira a week, and he worked from dawn to dusk. I asked him to put up with it so he could learn something useful.”
The young man who was my father was fascinated by Beirut, especially by Abu Afif’s restaurant on al-Burj Square, not far from where he worked. He’d leave the camp at six in the morning, walk from Shatila to al-Burj Square, and arrive at work at half past six. Then he cleaned the shop before opening for customers at seven.
On the way, he’d pass in front of Abu Afif’s, which was at the intersection, and the smell of beans, onions, oil, and mint would make him feel hungry. He’d sit on the edge of the pavement opposite, spread out the food he’d brought with him and wolf it down. The food his mother had prepared was divided into two, half for breakfast and half for lunch, and consisted of squares of bread baked and sprinkled with thyme or pounded spices, three boiled eggs, two rounds of pita bread, and a tomato. But the young man seated on the pavement in front of the restaurant would smell the food and see the men sitting at the small tables inside devouring their meals, and he’d finish off all the food he’d brought with him. He’d eat breakfast and lunch together and would never feel satisfied. And when he went back to the house, at seven in the evening, he’d be overcome by hunger again, he’d gulp down his dinner quickly so he could go out into the alleys of the camp.
My grandmother didn’t know that my father longed for a dish of beans, but when she found out, she orchestrated a surprise. She woke him at five one morning, after laying out a special table with beans, mint, onions, tomatoes, and a pitcher of tea. The boy got up and looked at his mother’s table with neither hunger nor appetite. He ate to please her, telling her the smell over there was different. Then he took his picnic and left. When he came back that evening, my grandmother discovered that he hadn’t touched his food. He confessed that he’d eaten beans at the restaurant. He said he hadn’t been able to resist. He’d gone into Abu Afif’s at ten in the morning and had eaten two plates of beans and paid a whole lira. He said his stomach hurt, and he felt guilty, but the restaurant beans were tastier than the ones she made at home. “Then he started eating beans at Abu Afif’s every Friday morning, and he remained faithful to his dish of beans until the day he died, God rest his soul.”
But it wasn’t really the dish of beans that fascinated my father, it was the city. A new world stood before him, anonymous. And he wanted to know everything. I don’t know about how well educated he was, but in his room I found a box full of books. There were novels by Jurji Zeidan on the history of the Arabs, and the books of Taha Hussein, as well as a collection of yellowing Egyptian magazines. My grandmother said that if my father had finished his education, he’d have been a great scholar. But all mothers say the same, right? I’m the only one who has none of that self-confidence mothers can give.
I won’t talk to you about my mother now but about why my father married her. What happened was that after about a year of working at Shukri’s pharmacy, my father left to work in the sheet-metal factory at Mina al-Hesn.
After Emile Shukri threw him out for being rude to the customers, the young man roamed the streets of Beirut. My grandmother said he denied the accusation and said he’d never pestered customers for tips, and she believed him because he never came back at the end of the week with anything but the six and a half lira, his wages minus the cost of the weekly dish of beans.
“But he smoked,” I told her. “Where did he get the money to buy cigarettes?”
“How should I know?” she asked.
My father was shown the door because of tips. Mr. Emile didn’t like it: “You can’t insist with a customer. If he gives you a quarter of a lira, how can you tell him it’s not enough? The customer’s free to give you what he wants.” It seems, though, that my father insulted one of the customers, so that was the end.
He hung around in the streets. Heading down toward the sea, he kept on until he reached the Bahri restaurant, and from there walked in the direction of al-Zaitouneh. In the Mina al-Hesn district he went into a gas station to ask if they needed help, and there he saw a small notice announcing positions for workers in the sheet-metal factory.
“I went into the workshop through the old arch at the entrance and saw a man wearing a fez and a long, open gown. I asked if they needed workers. He looked me up and down and asked where I was from. When I said Palestine, he took me inside and said, ‘Get started.’”
It was because of the workshop that my father went to prison.
The sheet-metal factory owned by the Jews Aslan Durziyyeh and Sa’id Lawi was small and employed about twenty young men, most of whom were Lebanese Christians. The two owners differed in every respect. Aslan Durziyyeh loved the workers and mixed with them. He even invited my father to his house in Wadi Abu Jmil once Yasin got to know his son Simon, and they’d started going to the movies together. Sa’id Lawi, who wore Western dress, was tough on the workers and would dock their wages if they were even a few minutes late.
I won’t tell you about the work because I don’t know what it was like. What I know is that my father told my mother he’d visit the Durziyyeh family at their home in Wadi Abu Jmil and that they used to feed him lamb-sausage sandwiches and that Simon had suggested he work with him in a dairy that Simon managed close to the fish market. But everything came to an end when the Lebanese police surrounded the factory and arrested all the young men who worked there.
That was 1953, the year when Rabbi Ya’qoub Elfiyyeh was stabbed to death in his home in Wadi Abu Jmil. It seems the police suspected that the gang responsible for the crime consisted of workers at the sheet-metal factory owned by Durziyyeh and Lawi, so they raided the place and took all the young men in for interrogation.
“Your father went straight from the prison to his wedding,” said my grandmother.
The story spread through the camp. At the beginning, the newspapers hinted that the presence of three Palestinians among those arrested pointed to it being a revenge killing. You know how they make a big thing out of any crime committed by a Palestinian in Lebanon, so you can imagine when the victim was a rabbi.
The investigation turned up some amazing facts. The rabbi’s wife gave everything away, confessing that her husband had been involved in abnormal relationships with seven young men and had fallen madly in love with the Greek, Dimitri Alefteriades, and had kept him overnight in his bed despite his wife’s objections.