My Family

My father often drove to Deir ez-Zor to hunt fowl along the Euphrates, all kinds of birds, ducks and geese and quail and grouse and pheasant. Once or twice a year, he would drive for nine hours from Beirut, spend a few days, and return with a bounty that would be distributed to his friends, since his wife cared not one whit for cleaning or cooking the damn things. He went mostly by himself, and I wondered whether his passion was the hunt or the solitude. Since he was married to my mother, I thought it was the latter. But then, Deir ez-Zor was where he had met his beautiful and energetically ambitious wife, and he had already been going there since he turned eighteen, so it might have been the hunt. He was twenty and she seventeen when he brought her to Beirut, much to his family’s chagrin since hers was of much lower class. His family shouldn’t have worried too much, because she was much more class-conscious than all of them put together. After her marriage, she set foot in her hometown once and only once, for her father’s funeral. My father kept to his hunting schedule; once or twice a year, he would drive to Deir ez-Zor, stay with his in-laws, sleep in their house, and eat with them. She wanted nothing to do with the town or her family. She could not convince him not to go, and he couldn’t convince her to accompany him. They compromised when it came to the children. The three boys could accompany him every few years but my sister never. Luckily for my mother, no one but my father cared much for the city or her family: the drive was too long, nothing to do over there, too hot in summer, too cold in winter, lumpy beds.

I visited Deir ez-Zor twice only, including for the funeral of my grandfather, whom I barely remembered. What I did remember was that my mother made sure we all dressed in our best and that she’d bought a black dress we could barely afford.

I would not want you to think that my father and mother did not get along, not at all. She worshipped him until the day he died. He was above all for her—and not simply because of tradition. Whatever his faults, and they were plentiful, she loved him in both a godly and an ungodly manner, for he used to look at her as if she’d arrived on a scallop shell, the smell of sea on her hair. She was his holy spirit. Their neuroses were perfectly complementary; their insanities fit together like a jigsaw. The odd piece was mine, not theirs.

I used to love him as well. When I was young, Mazen and I would wait for him to get home from work. The first thing he did upon entering the apartment was unlace and take off his shoes and hand them over to us. My nose would detect an ammoniacal odor. One black shoe on each of our laps, Mazen and I would sit on the old storage bench in the entryway, he to my left because he was left-handed. We would hand polish them to the perfect shine, rub them with a clean rag, delicately shove a cedar shoe tree into each, and then store the shoes in separate cotton bags. Before leaving for work the following day, he would unwrap each shoe as meticulously as we had wrapped them. When he returned from his hunting trips, we would have to take his boots out to the balcony for a vigorous scrubbing. He certainly loved his footwear.

When my father died, Mazen, the only family member who crossed my picket line after years of silence, sent me another photograph that my mother did not eradicate, a picture of my father, Firas, Mazen, and me on the one hunting trip to Deir ez-Zor. My father was the center in the photo, of course, holding a shotgun, a round mound raising a Beretta double-barreled over-and-under. Mostly whites and light grays, faded pewter and oyster, the photograph was of long ago, the sixties. His oiled hair was much darker than anything else in the picture, darker than the gun, the metal temples of his aviator glasses whiter than white. I remembered him that way, in that pose, the shooter of birds. When I imagined him, I even saw the vest he was wearing in the picture, its color in real life a diluted beige, wide enough to hold his sizable waist, with four deep, low pockets for carrying shot shells. Firas and Mazen, hyper and overtestosteroned, shot out in different directions, he the sizable sun, they his rays of sunshine. I stood next to him, the top of my head barely reaching his belt. I, his youngest offspring, his little black cloud, drip-drip-dripping tears—the brute brute heart of a brute like you—unwilling or unable to step away, my mass too tiny to resist his gravitational pull. That was what I remembered from my childhood. That dear child a false translation of who I was.

I was not surprised that Mazen would send a memorial photograph that included me crying. I was helpless with guns. I remember the exact make and model of my father’s two shotguns, one for skeet and one for bird, but nothing about the one he handed me. Was it a fourteen gauge? He gave it to me in the morning and took it away moments later because I almost shot him as soon as I loaded it. He told me in his comforting voice not to fret because I couldn’t have hurt him much given the size of the shell, but we both knew otherwise. I couldn’t tell you which felt worse to him, the fact that I was hapless with guns or that I broke up in tears when the contraption went off, the pellets exploding right next to his foot, the circle on the dirt barely larger than the diameter of the shell, but I could tell you in minute detail how his devastated face looked that day, the shock, the horror, the sorrow, the open mouth, the white wide eyes with black dilated pupils, as if he’d returned from the ophthalmologist, the globular nose and its oddly circular nostrils, one smaller than the other.