Читать книгу The Lemon Tree - Helen Forrester - Страница 8

She slept uneasily and suffered a familiar nightmare, though some of the hazy, sadistic faces which seemed to peer at her out of the darkness were, this time, reminiscent of the men she had met in the soapery.

She cried out frantically to them, ‘I’m not Wallace Harding, I’m not! I’m Helena Al-Khoury – and I hate the Territories. I want to go home to Beirut. Let me go! I want to go home.’

It seemed as if she pulled herself away from restraining hands, and floated easily along a seashore; and then she was in her father’s courtyard amid the perfume from the blossom of the lemon tree. Uncle James was picking her up and saying she was as sweet as the flowers on the tree. She laughed in his swarthy, cheerful face, and he was gone. Instead, her mother was there, her blenched face beaded with sweat, as she held Helena’s hand and pulled her along. ‘Hurry, my darling. Run!’

1860 and she was nearly twelve. As her terrified mother pulled her along behind her father, Charles Al-Khoury, she heard his startled exclamations at the hideous sights which each turn in the narrow streets revealed, the carnage left by a mob gone mad.

Before turning into a narrow alley leading down to the waterfront, they crouched close to the side of the blank wall of a warehouse, to catch their breath, while Charles Al-Khoury peered down the lane to make sure it was clear.

It was already darkened by the long shadows of the evening and the smoke from the ruins of old houses further down, but there was no sound, except for the crackle of fire; the looters had been thorough. The little family flitted silently down it. As they crossed another alley they heard men shouting in the distance, and Charles Al-Khoury increased his pace.

Almost numb with fear, his wife and daughter followed closely after him. Suddenly, he half-tripped over a dark shape lying on the ground. His women bumped into him and clung to him.

They stared down in horror. A woman had had her clothes torn off her. She had been butchered like a dead cow, and the child of her womb lay smashed against a house wall. A horribly mutilated, decapitated man lay near her, and further down the alley were other pitiful bundles, blood-soaked and still.

Leila Al-Khoury vomited, the vomit making her fluttering black head veil cling to her face. Young Helena began to scream in pure terror.

Her father clapped his hand over her mouth. ‘Helena!’ he whispered forcefully. ‘Be quiet.’

She swallowed her fear and nearly choked with the effort.

As they continued to scurry down narrow lanes, leading seaward, her father held her close to him, so that she would see as little as possible of the carnage; dogs were already nosing cautiously at the corpses of the Maronite Christians and being challenged by venturesome birds. One or two dogs had entered little homes through smashed doorways and could be heard growling over the spoils inside.

Wallace Helena, the grown woman, stirred in her bed, and cried out to the only person left to assuage her nightmares. ‘Joe, darling! Joe!’ But she was not heard and plunged again into her scarifying dreams, her heart beating a frantic tattoo.

Much later on, when they had established themselves in Chicago, she had asked her mother how the massacre had come about. She had been sitting cross-legged on her parents’ bed, watching her mother struggle into Western clothes.

Her mother had explained that the Muslim Turkish rulers of Lebanon did not like Christians very much; neither did another sect called Druze.

Egged on by the Turks, the Druze set out to eradicate their ancient enemies, the Maronite Christians, some of whom were enviably richer than they should be. In Beirut, they struck on July 9th, 1860.

‘We had heard rumours of unrest amongst the Druze, for some time before,’ her mother told her, ‘but neither your father nor your grandfather – my father – believed that we should be disturbed.

‘Our family had always lived in or near Beirut; it was such a pleasant little place – and you’ll remember our visiting our kin nearby. Our courtyard wall was high and strongly built – quite enough, we believed, to protect the house. And we were well-to-do; we could always placate the tax collectors and the servants of the Sultan, Abdul Mejid – may he be eternally accursed!’ She sounded vicious, as she lashed out at the hated Turkish ruler. Then she said more calmly, ‘You know, it’s usually the less powerful, and the poor who can’t pay, who are attacked.’

In the hope of obliterating her sickening memories, Helena had screwed up her eyes and covered them with her hands; yet there was a morbid desire to know more.

‘Well, why did we run away then?’

‘The rabble – Druze and Turks alike – swept right into our neighbourhood – you heard them and saw them. And your respected father knew then that this uprising was much more serious than usual; he had not believed an earlier warning which his brother had had whispered to him by a kindly Turkish official – he had felt the warning was part of a campaign by the Turks to get the Maronites to move out of their own accord.

‘So when the mob came in like a flight of angry bees – they were mad with hashish, I suspect – he knew in a flash that the warning had been a genuine act of kindness. He heard the screams and the gunshots, and he ran upstairs from his office to the roof, to confirm his fears.’ She paused, her voice harsh from unshed tears. ‘You and I’d been sitting under the lemon tree, by the well – so quiet and peaceful. But from the roof Papa could really see what was happening. Dear Grandpa’s house was already a great bonfire and the shrieking crowd was pouring into the square at the bottom of our street; he said the menace of the swords and guns flashing in the evening sun was terrifying.’

Helena said hesitantly from behind her hands, ‘I remember Papa leaning over the parapet and yelling to us to come up immediately. I’d never seen Papa really frightened before.’

It was the moment when my whole world fell apart, she thought wretchedly; I simply didn’t understand how it could be so.

She watched her mother buttoning her shabby black blouse, getting ready to go to work as a menial in a foreign city, and apparently accepting with fortitude what the Turks had done to her.

Leila continued her story. ‘We didn’t know it then,’ she said, ‘but Christians were suffering all over the Turkish Empire.

‘When our servants heard the noise, they rushed into the courtyard to ask what was happening. They heard your father shout, and they panicked. Instead of running up to the roof themselves, they followed Cook, who ran to the main gate and opened it! I suppose he thought they would be able to escape before the mob reached us. For a second, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing – it was so stupid – our gate was very stout; it might have held.

‘As I whipped you indoors, I could hear their screams.’

Helena shuddered. ‘I heard them.’

Leila ignored the interjection, as she sat head bowed, her fingers on the top button of her blouse. ‘Well, after I’d bundled you into the house, I slammed the front door and turned the beam which locked it. That, and the barred windows, halted the crowd when they rushed into the courtyard, just long enough to allow us to escape.’

Helena sighed deeply. ‘I remember the smoke – the yells – men pounding on the door – and the smell of gunpowder – and blood.’

Her mother put her arm around her and held her close.

‘We were lucky, child, that we had an indoor staircase, not an outside one like many people have; if it had run straight up from the courtyard, the mob would have come up after us and killed us on the roof.’

‘Papa had a piece of rope on the roof, I remember. I was so scared we’d fall, when he lowered first you and then me down into the tiny alley at the back of the house.’

Her mother nodded. ‘I think he’d stored the rope up there, in case we needed an escape from fire,’ she said absently. Then she added, ‘The alleyway saved our lives by giving us an exit to another street.’

‘I wonder why we were saved, Mama? Was our neighbour’s family at the back saved?’

‘Not to my knowledge, dearest. I was told that by the time the Druze and the Turks had finished, the whole area was one big funeral pyre.’

‘Why does God allow such terrible things, Mama?’ the young girl asked piteously.

Her mother looked shocked. ‘We’re not here to question God’s Will, child.’ Her pretty lower lip trembled. ‘I didn’t ask that even when your brothers died.’

Helena laid her head on her mother’s shoulder. ‘Of course not, Mama,’ she said contritely. ‘It was a wrong question to ask.’

Leila looked down at the child cuddled beside her, and she sighed. Her husband had always said that Helena was too clever to be a woman. She hoped he was wrong; women were supposed to accept, not ask questions.

Helena fingered a small pendant embossed with the head of the Virgin Mary that hung on a fine gold chain from her mother’s neck. ‘Did you bring this from Beirut?’ she asked.

‘Oh, yes, dear. For months and months that year, Papa insisted that I wear all my jewellery all the time. He must’ve been more nervous about the situation than he allowed us to think.’

‘It’s important for a lady to have lots of jewellery, isn’t it, Mama?’

‘Yes, dear – and small gold coins, easily carried. You never know what life has in store for you – life is very precarious. Jewellery is easy to carry – you can trade it anywhere – though at a great loss, of course.’

Helena nodded, and her mother hugged her again.

Leila thought with apprehension of a clouded future; but the child digested the lesson that good jewellery can be an important financial reserve – and that a collection of small gold coins is probably even better.

After a few minutes, Helena lifted her head and said heavily, ‘We must’ve run for ages; I was so puffed.’ Her young face was grim, and she swallowed. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever forget the ghastly cruelty – how can men do such dreadful things?’ She looked at her mother as if begging for some reasonable explanation of what she had seen.

Leila Al-Khoury had resumed easing herself clumsily into black woollen stockings, while sitting on the end of her bed. Now she turned again to her troubled little daughter and put her arms round her. She wished she had an answer to the child’s question.

‘My darling, I don’t know. Sometimes men seem to go mad.’ She stroked Helena’s silky black hair. ‘In time the memories will go away, my love. And life is not all cruelty. All kinds of nice things will happen to you in your life, you’ll see.’ She felt Helena give a shuddering sigh, and she added, ‘I wish we had foreseen what would happen, so that you could have been spared what you saw. And we might have been able to clear the warehouse and transfer some money – so that we wouldn’t be in quite such dire straits. But we lived in a good district; we’d never been disturbed before.’

Helena shut her eyes tightly and wanted to be sick, as she remembered a young boy lying sobbing in the dust, one arm severed, the rest of him terribly cut about as he had tried to protect himself from sword or bayonet. Her mother had paused instinctively, bent on helping him, but her husband caught her arm to propel her forward.

‘You can’t leave him! He’s alive!’ she had protested.

He did not answer her. Terrified of what the rampaging rabble would do to his lovely wife and little daughter if they were caught, he dragged her onwards.

The dying boy haunted Wallace Helena’s dreams all her life, returning like some eternal ghost to cry out to her in his agony, telling her that even loving fathers could have hearts of stone.

She had clear memories of reaching her father’s silk warehouse, as yet untouched by vandals, though deserted by its panic-stricken nightwatchmen, and of meeting a youth of about fifteen when they entered the wicket gate. He was the bookkeeper’s son, set to unlock the gate for any members of the family who might not have a key.

In answer to Charles Al-Khoury’s inquiry, the boy said that nobody had come, except his own parents and younger brothers and Mr James Al-Khoury.

Charles Al-Khoury told him to continue to keep watch through the grating in the main door and to hurry to the boat if he heard or saw anything suspicious.

The whey-faced boy had nodded assent, and Charles hurried Helena and her mother between bales wrapped in cotton cloth and through the silk carpet section, which smelled of hemp and dust.

They had emerged onto a covered wharf on the seaward side of the building, where a small sailing boat with an Egyptian rig bobbed fretfully on the sunlit water.

Charles’s brother, James, was already in the boat. He looked up at the new arrivals and exclaimed fervently, ‘Thank God you’ve come! Nobody came to work this morning – I tried to get back to the house to warn you that something was up; but the whole town seemed to be rioting – and drunk. So I returned here to alert the boatman to be ready. I guessed you’d hear the racket in the town and be warned.’ He gestured towards the bookkeeper, and added, ‘Then Bachiro, here, brought his family.’

‘We got out by a hair’s breadth,’ Charles responded sombrely, as he took the hand of the Nubian boatman and jumped into the little craft. He turned to help his wife into the boat, and went on, ‘I’m afraid Leila’s family is lost.’

As James stared unbelievingly up at him, Leila balked and held back, as she cried out in horror, ‘Mama and Papa dead? Oh, no! And my sisters – and Auntie and my cousin?’

James said gently, ‘We’ll wait a while; they may have got out.’ He hoped fervently that her women relations were burned in their house rather than thrown to the mob.

Petrified and exhausted, Leila allowed her husband to lift her down into the boat. Uncle James turned to a benumbed Helena. ‘Come on, my little lemon blossom, you’re safe now.’

Without a word, she sat down on the edge of the wharf and jumped into her uncle’s arms. He caught and held her to him for a moment, while the boat bounced unhappily on the water. Then he put her down beside her weeping mother, who snatched her to her. Bachiro’s wife began to wail and was hastily hushed by her husband.

‘When I went to see him this morning,’ Charles muttered to James, ‘Leila’s father said it wouldn’t be the first riot he’d seen, nor would it be the last. I reminded him that I’d had this felucca standing by for a week, in case of emergency, and he as good as told me I was a craven fool.’

His back to Leila, James made a rueful face, while Charles berated himself that he had not transferred money abroad.

‘With the Turks watching every move, it would have been almost impossible,’ James comforted him.

The wind showed signs of changing, and the boatman said it would be dangerous to linger any longer; the Turks would undoubtedly soon arrive to sack the warehouses along the waterfront. Better to leave while the wind held.

‘For Jesus’ sake, make him wait,’ Leila whispered urgently to her husband. ‘Mama – Papa – somebody – may come.’

Charles agreed, and argued heatedly with the stolid black seaman until, encouraged by some silver coins, he agreed to wait until the sun had set.

They waited anxiously through the afterglow, until shouts from the landward side of the warehouse and the sound of heavy thuds on wood brought Bachiro’s eldest son speeding to the wharf. ‘They’re coming,’ he shouted breathlessly, as he leapt into the little craft, his eyes starting out of his head with fright.

The felucca slipped seaward, while Leila crouched on a coil of rope and wept unrestrainedly for parents and sisters she would never see again. Charles Al-Khoury stared dumbly landwards. He was numb with horror, unable, as yet, to accept his parents’ fiery death.

Seated on the end of her bed in a small apartment in a Chicago slum, putting on her garters over her black stockings, Leila had pointed out in defence of her husband that he had done quite a lot to protect his family. Her deep, vibrant voice shook as she told Helena, ‘Papa arranged that a shipment of French silk he was expecting be redirected to our friend, Mr Ghanem, here in Chicago – and he began to wear his special moneybelt with gold coins in it, as did Uncle James. I wore my jewellery all the time.’

Helena sighed, and then she asked wistfully, ‘When will we be able to go home, Mama?’

Her mother stood up and shook down her long black skirt. ‘Some day, perhaps, dear.’ She did not tell her that there was nothing and nobody to go home to. Her courage faltered for a moment, as she said, ‘It was a terrible massacre – it’ll never be forgotten.’

Helena rubbed her face wearily, and remembered again how they had sailed all night, seasick and then hungry.

As they worked their way from Beirut to Cyprus, there to be sheltered by business friends of her father’s, all the certainties of her life had vanished. She had been an ordinary middle-class young girl, happy in a gentle routine of lessons from her mother and social occasions shared with her uncle and grandparents. There had been books to read, festivals to keep, music to listen to and to learn to play, forays into the mountains and walks beside the sea; and, in her father’s warehouse, fabulous fabrics and carpets to be admired and carefully caressed, until one could unerringly recognize quality and fine workmanship. And tentatively, beginning to be mentioned in her mother’s conversation, was the excitement of deciding who she should marry in a couple of years’ time.

Instead, she was being shifted nightly from one alien house to another, in an effort to stay hidden from the ruling Turks. Then, when she began to think she would go out of her mind, they sailed one night in a stinking fishing boat to Nice, where they were, at last, safely outside the Turkish Empire. From there, they had travelled by train across France to Hamburg, where a Jewish friend of her father obtained a passage to Liverpool for them.

They had waited several anxious weeks in Liverpool in a boarding house packed with other immigrants, while a passage for America was arranged. Charles and James Al-Khoury, with Helena pattering along behind them, had filled in the time by exploring the city. In the course of their walks, Uncle James had been most enthusiastic about the modern, gaslit city, and despite his elder brother’s advice against it, he decided to remain in it. Partly because of the valuable consignment of silk awaiting him in Chicago, which would help him to start a new business there, and the fact that there were already Lebanese refugees in that city, Charles Al-Khoury stuck to his original plan of settling in the United States.

Leila had nearly died during the passage to America in the steerage section of the cramped immigrant ship. Their small funds had dwindled during their journeying and Charles dared not spend any more than he did. Tended by other Christians who had fled the Turkish Empire, Greeks, Cypriots and Armenians, as well as Lebanese, her mother had lain weeping helplessly and muttering with fever. Huddled together in an unventilated hold, on a straw palliasse spread on a shelflike fixture above another family, Helena was very seasick. She wanted despairingly to die herself, as she watched her father grow more haggard each day, and listened to the horrifying stories of other refugees, of wholesale murder all over the Middle East.

When her nausea eased, her father took her up on deck and they walked together, too exhausted to say much.

After that, there was the incredible noise and smell in the great immigration shed, while the United States Immigration authorities worked their way through the anxious, pressing crowd washed up on their shores. Leila kept a firm hold on Helena’s hand, in case, by some awful misfortune, they should become separated, so Helena sat by the listless bundle in black which was her mother and listened to the jabber of a dozen languages round her, amid the maelstrom of noisy, smelly humanity.

The three of them had made an effort to learn a few words of English while in Liverpool. The immigration officials, though harried, were not unkind, and eventually a bewildered Helena was hustled onto the Chicago train by a father who, for the first time, seemed more relaxed. The bookkeeper had decided to stay in New York with another Lebanese family from the same immigrant ship. They said an impassioned farewell and vanished into the turbulence of the great port.

It was only towards the end of her time in Chicago, when her life was again about to change completely, that Helena realized that, to her parents, Chicago had been yet another nightmare. Being young, she had herself begun to adapt to her new life. As she went to the shops for her mother, and helped her father as he tried to establish a little business in wholesale dress materials, she began to pick up some English.

In contrast, her gently nurtured mother, though educated, was used to being much at home, secure in the knowledge that her parents had married her to a comfortably placed, kindly man. She had rarely been stared at by strangers, never been hungry, never done much except to order her servants and adapt herself to her husband. In Chicago, she was, at first, shattered, unable to make much effort.

Another refugee, arriving after them, confirmed the death of Leila’s parents and sisters and, indeed, it seemed of everyone they had known. As she mourned her loss, the fever she had suffered aboard ship returned to her, and Charles Al-Khoury’s face grew thinner and grimmer. Helena tried to comfort her mother and not to cry herself. She closed her mind off from any thought of Beirut, feeling that if she allowed herself to contemplate what had happened, she would go mad. In those early weeks in America, the child grew into a stony-faced young woman, physically hardly formed, but mentally aged beyond her years.

Not daring to part with so much as a garnet from his wife’s jewellery, unless he was starving, Charles Al-Khoury used the remainder of his little store of gold coins to augment his bales of silk with some dress lengths in other good materials. He found a tiny niche of a store on a main street crowded with immigrants. The door was strong and the windows had good wooden shutters. He paid a week’s rent on it to a Greek immigrant, who had been in Chicago rather longer than he had.

Before opening his precious purchases, he bargained for cleaning help from a young negress who lived nearby.

Sally earned her living as a daily cleaning lady, and she came for two successive evenings to give the store a thorough scouring. As Helena said to her, ‘You can’t sell material for clothes if it’s got dusty.’

A quick grin flashed across the black woman’s lined face, as she agreed. On her second evening, she brought a toffee apple with her for Helena, and she watched with pleasure when the grim little face lit up at the sight of the gift.

Sally enjoyed working for people who treated her politely. She became interested in the fortunes of the tiny store and continued to clean it, though sometimes Charles Al-Khoury had to defer paying her during bad weeks. She would tease him good-naturedly about his broken English, which he took in good part, being anxious to improve it. She drilled Helena in the English names of everything around her, and Helena became devoted to the strong, graceful woman.

Mr Ghanem, the Lebanese who had kept Charles’s bales of silk for him, was very nearly as poor as Charles himself. He had been in the States for a number of years with his own small business as an importer. He had, however, speculated in land and had gone bankrupt. He now had a small fruit and vegetable shop. Because they had been at school together, he had kept in touch with Charles sporadically over the years, and it was his presence in Chicago that had first given Charles the idea of beginning life again in that city.

It was Mr Ghanem who had met them at the station and had taken them in a borrowed horse-drawn delivery van to a room he had obtained for them. When Charles’s shop was ready, Mr Ghanem’s half-grown sons helped the new immigrant move the consignment of silk from their family’s basement onto the shelves of the new store. Mrs Ghanem had done her best to comfort poor Leila Al-Khoury, and she gradually emerged from her prostration, white and thin, but in her right mind.

Much later on, Leila told Helena, ‘I thought I’d go mad. There we were, in this strange country; nobodies, lost in a sea of nobodies. God curse the Druze – and may the Turks burn in hell!’ The words seemed extraordinary, coming from a beautiful seductive woman, once again restored to health; but Helena understood, and thought burning was too good for Turks.

Leila had continued sadly, ‘Outside that tiny room in which we existed, so few spoke Arabic – and nobody seemed to have heard of French! And the noise of screaming women and howling children in the other rooms seemed unending.’

Helena nodded agreement. Watching immigrant children struggle for existence had made her feel that the last thing she wanted in life was to be a mother.

‘When Mrs Ghanem suggested that I go to work like she did, I was really shocked,’ Leila confided. ‘But we needed ready money so badly that finally I agreed. It distressed your father very much.’ She giggled suddenly, at the memory of her hard-pressed husband’s agitation at the suggestion.

She giggled again, and then added, ‘I must’ve looked a sight. I wore a second-hand black skirt, a black blouse and second-hand boots. I wore a head veil, like I had done in Beirut, and I felt terrible. It seemed to me that every man I passed stared at me.

‘The attic we worked in was so badly lit that I could hardly see how to thread my needles. There, Mrs Ghanem and I sat on a piece of sacking for ten hours a day, stitching on buttons and finishing the buttonholes on men’s suits. I’ve worked harder since then, but never in such confinement; I had to watch that my tears didn’t fall on the fine cloth. What a time!’ She threw up her hands helplessly.

Helena put her arms round her mother’s neck. ‘Poor Mama,’ she said.

‘Well, I lived,’ responded her mother philosophically. ‘But I didn’t want you to be confined like that, so your dear father took you to help him in the store.’

‘And he taught me how to run a business,’ Helena had remembered gratefully. ‘How to organize it and be neat and methodical. Buy cheap; sell dear. Have the patience of Job. Have a first-class product for the money. Keep two sets of books – one for the tax collector, and one which tells you what’s really happening. Make friends – which I haven’t done very well. Do favours and collect on them when you need to. Never forget a name – and smile, child, smile.’ He would grin at her from under his black moustache. ‘And don’t trust anybody, unless you have to,’ he would reiterate pithily in Arabic.

She would laugh back at him. But she learned, and never quite trusted anyone – except Joe Black.

Afraid to trust a bank, afraid of his wife being attacked in the street if she wore it, Charles hid some of Leila’s jewellery in various spots in his tiny shop, a necklace wrapped in a scrap of black silk under a beam in the ceiling, several rings under a floorboard, a pair of hair ornaments in a box stuck to the underside of his long counter. He instructed Helena that, if he were out, she was never to leave anyone alone in the shop for a single second, including Sally.

Leila sewed two gold chains into the waistband of her ugly serge skirt, and her best emerald necklace was carried in a linen moneybelt round her husband’s waist. Spread out like this, they agreed, they were less likely to be robbed of all of it; it was capital, partly inherited and partly carefully bought since their marriage; it was not to be used, except in the expansion of the dress material business, if they had some success with it; or, if that failed, to keep them from starvation.

In the store, Helena was in her element. She watched with care how her father set about establishing his new business, learned how to set up the bookkeeping, how to find suppliers and, most important of all, how to find customers. She would sit unobtrusively in the background while he bargained for bankrupt stock from other businesses or cajoled a lady who wanted the price of a dress length reduced, and when his English failed him, she quietly translated – though her own grasp of the language was not very good. When they had a quiet hour, he would reminisce about the family business in Beirut, and, when he found she was interested, would go into detail about its organization, its employees, and its links with distant countries. He was astonished that she knew and understood much of its detailed running already. She laughed at his astonishment and reminded him how he used to take her down to the warehouses to give her a change. ‘I used to listen to you talking to people – and when I grew bigger, I used to ask Bachiro to show me the papers that seemed to be like oil flowing to facilitate the movement of everything coming in and going out.’

Her father laughed. ‘You did? You nosy little person!’

‘I wasn’t nosy,’ she replied indignantly. ‘I was really interested in what you and Uncle James and Grandpa were doing. I kept thinking that if I had been a boy, you would have begun to keep me by your side and teach me everything.’

‘Well, you’re a great help to me now, little flower. I don’t know how I would manage without you.’

Her big eyes shone at the compliment, and he thought that he should get her married as soon as he could, before the harshness of their life in Chicago toughened her too much. Men liked gentle amenable women; a ruthless trader would not appeal to them.

But, without realizing that he was doing it, he had already inculcated in her the basic principles of organization, enterprise, forethought and quick decision-making which were to be her strength in times to come.