The cousins all laughed when I fastened my seatbelt.
‘Shou ya, Pierre?’ Nabil asked. ‘The war over, now you afraid the traffic in Beirut?’
I shrugged from the backseat and unbuckled. They laughed again. Nabil jolted the car across three of the unlined lanes. The seatbelt dangled and swayed, knocking between my collarbone and the window with a clink as the car weaved through traffic. I rolled down the window and let the hot, wet air inside.
‘Where are we?’
‘Near the port,’ Charbel said in Arabic.
‘Not far,’ Shireen added, squeezing my hand. She was the only other cousin who had been guilt-tripped into coming from Sydney. I would stay a month to help Shireen sort through sixty-odd years of accumulated detritus while she would remain indefinitely until a new home owner was found. She started pushing down my cuticles with her thumbnail, like she’d done when we were kids. I turned to her with a limp smile to signal I was okay. She gazed away, out at the glittering sea.
‘Yallah!’ Nabil skidded off the highway on another car’s tail and half-mounted the footpath as the road narrowed. The traffic thickened, the horns started as we stopped. Nabil’s own horn jammed and wheezed, as if in pain.
‘Zih, ya kalab!’ Charbel yelled, winding down his window. Move, you dogs! The horns kept beeping like Morse code. Nabil zigzagged us towards a side street while Charbel hung out the window clearing a path—practically howling until the congestion had evaporated.
Beige high-rises streamed past. Buttery sunshine glistened across the facades; the laundry strung from balconies looked pearlescent. And along the street, people scurried home in the shade, their sturdy hands full of shiny fruits and vegetables that drooped in delicate plastic bags.
‘Don’t worry,’ Shireen said as we pulled up at the church. Nabil and Charbel jumped out, slamming their doors. She gave my hand a pat. ‘You’ll feel at home in no time.’
‘Yallah, ya foufou,’ Charbel shouted from the boot. Sissy? Shireen laughed and left me alone in the car. Had I already acted fruity?
My vision blurred.
Nabil and Shireen disappeared behind the sandstone church.
Charbel shook a flaccid wrist at me. ‘Come on, writer.’
He headed in the other direction, walking towards the concrete staircase leading up to our grandparents’ house.
I got out of the car, turning my back on the church. People slowed as they passed by, swivelling their heads to appraise me, one child even pointing until his mother swatted his hand away. I puzzled over a store sign across the street: lines and squiggles and dashes and dots. I never learned to read or write more than my own name.
*
I recognised the house from photos. It was unchanged, untouched, as if hermetically sealed. The same whitewashed walls and shiny tiles. The same corduroy lounges and clunky armoires. The same dining table covered with a crocheted cloth, encased in a thick plastic sheet. The same smell of coffee and stale cigarette smoke. The same shrine of porcelain Mother Mary statuettes—the only thing Teta swore wasn’t broken when they bombed the Phalange headquarters across the street and everything shattered. The only difference was the faces of many strangers that filled the house and courtyard: a solemn queue of mourners who filed in to dish out mechanical condolences for the passing of my aunt Agathe. Because of course my month-long return coincided with a funeral—and tonight was just the preview.
We sat on a row of plastic chairs in the terracotta courtyard beneath a canopy of vine leaves. As the mourners bowed their peppery heads, I stayed silent, straining to translate their condolences. I stared at the rosaries knotted around their swollen knuckles. Some of them studied my face and my hair, trying to place me. When they were finished offering sympathy, they looked harried, as if they’d been recently slapped. They found the closest shrine—a walnut cross, a charred glass St Maroun candle, a posy of cyclamen—and genuflected before it, their sheer veils rippling in the breeze. The men had annexed a far corner next to a sandpit where a handful of candles were buried like white tombstones, their flames already extinguished by the warm wind. They patted one another on the back and doled out cigarettes to twitchy fingers. Every few seconds, I scanned the courtyard for the woman in the photo.
‘I need a drink,’ Shireen said when the queue had thinned. I nodded, wishing there was something stronger around. We rose and slinked between the mourners towards the narrow kitchen. Shireen took two tumblers from the cupboard and I fished ice cubes from the freezer.
‘When are you meeting that photojournalist?’ she asked, pouring out the spirit.
‘Once this wraps up,’ I said, dropping three ice cubes into her whiskey. ‘At the St Antoine Hotel.’
‘And did you find the woman from the photo?’
Shortly after my aunt’s death, a distant relative visited Sydney and left us a cardboard box full of Agathe’s belongings. Each of us was gifted an item or two. Shireen’s house had also been gifted a similar shipment but since she was one of the only girls born into our extensive extended family, theirs mostly contained jewellery. Shireen had got the gold cross and bangles Agathe was always seen wearing, while I was bequeathed a battered copy of Sitt Marie Rose by Etel Adnan and an unremarkable little album that only contained one photograph of the woman it was supposed to commemorate.
‘No. Nabil and Khalo Albert said she might’ve worked with Khalto Agathe at the school.’
‘Maybe.’ She pulled a cling-wrapped plate of sambousek out of the fridge and offered it to me. I shook my head.
‘You don’t think it’s weird?’ I asked.
‘No. Do you?’ She tossed back her drink quickly and placed the glass down on the counter, the ice already melting.
‘Obviously.’ There were plenty of empty sleeves in the album, yet this picture was concealed under another of Mum on her wedding day, my aunt fussing at her side, Teta and Jedou a busy blur in the background.
Shireen removed the steel raqweh from under the sink, filled it with tap water, and placed it over the bright blue flame. Tiny bubbles began to form and float to the surface as the water boiled.
‘Well, would your brothers or parents know any of your work friends?’ She added three heaped tablespoons of ahweh to the coffee pot and stirred.
‘No. But maybe she wasn’t her friend.’
Shireen rolled her eyes. ‘Peter…’
‘I’m serious. Maybe Khalto Agathe was queer.’
The coffee began to foam and spit, rising to the very rim. Shireen removed it from the heat, stirring until the liquid settled and subsided, and then replaced it on the stove, repeating the process until the granules had fully dissolved.
‘Why? Because she never got married and had no kids?’ She started organising the cups and saucers on a tray, avoiding my gaze.
‘Because there was a hidden photo of a woman in her album. And no one knows who she is.’
‘You gays think everyone’s gay, though.’
I couldn’t argue with that. Charbel appeared in the doorway, his black shirt too tight across his chest and biceps. This is what my father expected of me: muscles and silence.
‘Emtin fina trouh?’ he asked.
‘When this finishes,’ Shireen responded for me. Charbel grabbed a handful of sambousek from the plate and skulked down the hallway, clearly disappointed he couldn’t leave sooner. Shireen opened the kitchen window and then left with the coffee. The room filled with chatter from the courtyard, shrill and indecipherable.
*
‘Un autre, Monsieur?’ the waiter asked. He’d been speaking French ever since I arrived. A yummy little thing, leonine, eager to please. He was bent at the waist so his mouth almost grazed my ear.
I nodded—too hot for much else. ‘Avec beaucoup de glace.’
The hotel bar was shiny and elegant, high-ceilinged with hexagonal pendant lights hanging from a steel lattice frame. The tables were glass, the chairs wicker. Panelled windows faced out onto a quilt of greying rooftops. Cigarette smoke curled up towards spinning fans.
I guzzled down the remnants of my drink and removed the photo from my pocket. The woman was looking up at the photographer behind the camera. Her mouth was frozen in an angular smirk. She wore a white shirt tightly clasped at the neck with twin hieroglyphic illustrations stitched in vertical panels. Her hair was long, dark and curled. I traced my fingers over the old fold lines.
‘Peter?’
I coughed in my drink. The journo was tall, broad, bearish. His onyx hair was gelled back and his watery green eyes were fixed on me. He was haloed from behind by the afternoon sun flooding the bar.
‘Mohammed? How did you—’
‘It’s Mo. Steve said you are insanely blond.’
My face burned. ‘Pasty’ was what the Anglo kids at school had preferred. The other wogs had called me Whitey.
‘Steve also said—and this is a direct quote—sectarian unrest fucking better not appear in the article.’
My old boss had enlisted me to write one last piece when he heard I was going to Lebanon.
‘As a favour,’ Steve had said, for getting me the promotion. It’d been assigned to someone else, but he thought I’d be more authentic. ‘Plus, it’ll be a nice little segue into your new life as an art critic,’ he’d added, teasing me.
I’d decided to write about the exhibitions that had been springing up in Beirut over the past few years, a decade after the Taif Accords’ ratification. I’d selected pieces that grappled with the injustices of widespread amnesty and the residual amnesia in the aftermath of the Accord, rather than the atrocities committed during the war. Once Steve heard my angle, he insisted I use some of Mo’s photos to, in his words, add an element of historicity. ‘Besides, Mohammed breathes Beirut,’ Steve had said. ‘He’ll be useful.’
‘That sounds like my fearless editor,’ I replied. ‘So, he still wants me to double down on the third-world, war-torn, renaissance-through-art angle?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Of course. Sad stories sell.’
He sat across from me. Our knees knocked. Neither of us moved. The waiter arrived with a glass half-filled with clear liquid, and a sweaty carafe. He placed the glass on the table and filled it with cold water. The aniseed liquor clouded over, shimmering like glossy milk. Mo pointed at the glass and muttered in Arabic. The waiter turned on his heels and marched back to the bar.
‘So, who is that?’ He waved at the photo.
‘Dunno,’ I said. ‘Maybe my aunt’s friend.’
‘You can’t ask her?’
‘She’s dead.’
The waiter reappeared and prepared Mo’s arak. When he was done, he placed a plate of sliced cucumbers sprinkled with salt and a wooden bowl of pistachios in their shells at the centre of the table. He winked at me as he dropped the ice cubes in my drink with steel tongs and then vanished among a family of American tourists who were loudly recapping their recent visits to the cedar trees in Bcharre and the ruins in Baalbek.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘What was her name?’
‘Agathe.’
‘To Agathe.’ He raised and tilted his glass. I raised my own and gulped down half. Something stuck in my throat.
‘She had a good life…I think.’
‘I never understand why people say that when someone dies.’ He wedged a slice of cucumber between his front teeth and bit down with a crunch.
I began to fidget with an impossibly closed pistachio before abandoning it in the empty ashtray. ‘How come?’ I asked.
‘You never know. Maybe she was always miserable.’ He scooped up a handful of cucumber slices and chewed them all with his mouth open.
‘Maybe.’ I gripped my drink.
‘When you last saw her?’ he asked. The way the sunlight shone on his soft, square face revealed a terrible sadness pulling at the corners of his mouth.
‘When my jedou sent her to Sydney. I was five or six. She stayed with us a few months.’ I jangled the ice around in my glass. ‘All I remember is she liked to sit by the window, like a cat. Always smoking and drinking coffee. And pinching me if I came too close.’
‘Me, I never visited Sydney,’ he said. ‘Just Melbourne.’ He took the discarded pistachio from the ashtray and broke it open without much effort. For a moment, it looked like he would hand it to me as he held it out and inspected it between his thumb and index finger. Instead he lobbed it into his mouth with a look of accomplishment.
‘That how you first started working with Steve?’ I asked, trying not to smile.
‘Yes. We met at university,’ he said. ‘We worked on a terrible student newspaper together. It was Steve who first tell me to start taking pictures.’
‘Why Melbourne though?’
‘My dad sent me there. To stay with his brother. He said: If you want to ruin your life, do it somewhere else.’ He raised his glass to his lips and sipped, licking away the sweet residue. ‘Anyway, he’s dead now.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry,’
‘It’s fine. He did not have a good life.’ He looked down at his hands. ‘You come just for the funeral?’
‘Yes and no. A kind of pit stop. I’m transferring to London next month.’ My colleagues all beamed when they heard of the promotion. Back to the ‘motherland’, they said with uniform glee. It was the first time I’d heard the expression.
‘Why you leave so soon? Steve told me you only finish university one year ago.’
‘Because the news is depressing,’ I said.
‘And?’ he asked, taking a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and lighting one.
‘And I want to write about beautiful things now. Like I did at uni.’
‘Wait until you see my pictures,’ he said. ‘You don’t find any beauty there.’
He slid the pack across to me. I nodded, grabbing his lighter. He cupped his hands around my mouth so that the flame wasn’t blown out by the fans. They were cold and wet from the glass.
‘My dad sent me here too,’ I said, exhaling. ‘He insisted I needed to come here and learn to be a man.’ I could still feel him shaking me awake, I could still hear him yelling, but all I could see was the screen on the shared PC monitor in the family room: a muddle of pictures and flashing with instant messages. He hadn’t read the messages but the pictures had said enough. I felt my face flame again as I finished my drink. The ice cubes clattered against my teeth. I raised the empty glass to the waiter. Mo caught my gaze and did the same.
‘You learn nothing here,’ he said.
‘Why not?’
‘The men here, they are useless. Like dirty water when you are dying of thirst. Hariri, Hrawi, Lahoud—they’re all the same. Evil puppets with bottomless back pockets.’
‘That’s all politicians though. It’s all about economic growth—at any cost. They only see dollar signs. Not people.’
‘Maybe. But here, things don’t change. We keep finding new ways to kill each other. And ourselves.’
I stared at him and he stared back, blinking. We stayed like that until the waiter brought us another pair of drinks.
‘Yallah, finish your drink,’ he said. ‘And after, we party.’
‘A party?’ I shook my head. ‘I don’t know if I should. The funeral’s tomorrow.’
‘That’s tomorrow. I’m talking about now.’
He patted my knee under the table. Three wide-palmed taps.
‘Okay,’ I said, waving for the bill. Steve could shout. I necked my drink. It stung my throat and made my eyes water.
‘Maybe there you learn what it means to be a man.’
*
A pothole shook me awake. As the taxi hurtled through the empty streets, I glimpsed only the ghostly blur of buildings and my own static reflection.
‘Honeh?’ the driver asked.
‘Here,’ Mo echoed. The taxi skidded to a stop.
I hopped out and slammed the door. The air was thick with jasmine. Mo loitered at the window and spoke to the driver. The taxi ambled a few metres away from the house and parked.
‘Where are we?’ I tugged at his elbow.
‘The edge of the city.’ There were no signs, no numerical markings, no windows. The building’s sandstone facade was crumbly, pockmarked. A square peeper was cut into the ebony door. It opened with a creak.
‘Shou ismak?’ the voice asked.
‘Oscar Wilde,’ Mo replied.
The peeper shut and the door swung open. Inside was an industrial, dilapidated space, awash in red light and abuzz with a rhythmic electronic pulse that seemed to be punctuated by whispers. Mo took my hand as we passed through the crowd. I felt eyes—gazing, inspecting, devouring. Conversations quietened and some heads spun. The heat rose in my body.
Mo turned and started massaging my shoulders from the front; my skin loosened.
‘Habibi, relax,’ he said. I dug my hands deep in my pockets. His eyes swept across my face, my hair, my body. He looked hungry.
‘I am.’
He kissed me. He tasted of cucumbers. I pulled away. No one was looking—or they pretended they weren’t.
‘A drink please.’ He pulled me behind him. I rested my hands on the bar while he ordered.
In the mirror behind the bar, I studied the crimson outlines of various men and listened carefully. All I made out were fragments of scratchy Arabic sandwiched between occasional murmurs in French, all fired in such rapid succession that my mind whirred with translations. I felt disarmed, unsteady—certainly drunk. Were the eyes really glued to the mirror, watching us?
A whiskey appeared before me. I downed the whole thing.
‘Is it a gay bar?’
‘More of a men’s club. But with a twist.’
My mouth was suddenly ash. ‘Water,’ I muttered.
‘Come,’ he said, taking my hand. I stared at the ground. I felt the eyes follow us towards the exit.
We crept down a dark corridor, bumping into each other as it curved, and entered an airless room: cool grey concrete, a wall of chestnut drawers, a shrine of dribbling candles atop a stone basin, a mound of soggy white towels. It smelled strange, like the frankincense they sometimes burned in dull gold censers at church. With his back to me, Mo started to strip. He kicked off his shoes and tore off his socks and shirt. He unbuttoned and dropped his pants to his ankles: more hair, more meat—quite a feast.
He turned to face me as if he’d just remembered I was there.
‘Shlah tyebak,’ he said.
I began to peel off the black clothes my mother had insisted I wear until I left Lebanon. He watched. I suddenly felt too shiny and pale and drunk. He nodded towards another dark corridor. We left our clothes and shoes in piles on the floor.
The room was slick, bright, spherical. A sparkling turquoise pool spanned almost the entire circumference. Creamy clay walls stretched up to a convex ceiling. The walls were embellished with droplets of moisture and segmented by kaleidoscopic columns of spiralling tiles. In the arched doorway, a circular table held a stack of impossibly clean towels.
‘What your father say if he saw you here?’ he asked.
‘My father? He’d have died from shock before the door closed.’
‘Wa beye kaman. I think he would have preferred go to prison.’
He leaned back into me, taking my arms on either side and wrapping them around his wide fuzzy chest. I felt my heart beat against his back, as if it would rip through my flesh and then burrow into his. He lifted my index finger to his lips and kissed it before letting it drop.
‘But look. We have some fathers here tonight.’
The men were mostly preoccupied. Scattered about the water, tangled in various angles of ecstasy. At our feet, a pair of ancient men dangled bony shins in the water, towels draped across their laps like napkins. They gazed up at Mo, mouths agog. Then they rested on me, their eyes absorbing, taking me in slowly from head to groin to toe.
‘Should we go somewhere else?’ I asked, stepping behind Mo.
‘Why?’ He turned to face me. I nodded towards the men. He placed a thumb under my chin and drew my face back to his. ‘It’s peaceful in here,’ he said. With his hands on either side of my face he kissed me. I ran my fingers through his hair; he tussled mine and then yanked it. I felt myself shiver as we swelled. He lowered his mouth to my ear: ‘Come.’
‘But I’m not accustomed to an audience.’ I wasn’t accustomed to much.
‘First, badna nethamam—we clean. Then we go back down there for your lesson.’
‘What lesson?’
‘There a dark room down there. Down there you see—down there you learn.’
‘Exactly what will you teach me?’ I was starting to think we should have split at the hotel. He was suddenly very serious.
‘In the dark, you learn to feel. Not the past or present—you feel the future.’
I laughed nervously just to make noise. When he still said nothing, I added: ‘What does that feel like?’
He stepped forward and dropped into the water, swimming towards its vacant epicentre. I looked around at them: their impossibly familiar faces, their flesh that wasn’t mine but which I’d somehow inherited. Then I looked at Mo. His eyes twitched from side to side, almost roaming, until he held my gaze. I jumped in with both feet and swum into the circle of his arms. Then I stood—I could reach the bottom. I wanted to cling to him like land.
He placed a soft hand at the back of my head and dunked me underwater. I stayed submerged for several seconds. Silent, blissful, dark.
His laughter was the first thing I heard.
More men were spilling into the pool. I twisted to watch them. They slid and rubbed and writhed and looked—the water thrashed and rippled. They knotted around us, their torsos glistening and squelching with each symbiotic reconfiguration. They did nothing to conceal their stares.
And I let them.
I wanted to feel something, I knew that much, even though I was irrevocably lost. But what could I feel—what was I allowed to feel?
Mo wrapped around me from behind. Between us, there was only heat.
I let myself sink deeper. I let myself feel untethered.
‘It feels like freedom,’ he finally said, his breath a wet, hot ringing in my ear.
*
I hesitated at the door, unsure what would happen when I passed inside my grandparents’ house.
‘Ibn il leil,’ my uncle and cousins all sang as I walked in. The early morning heat inside was already stifling. They were all seated on the same side of the table, drinking ahweh around a glossy plate of baklava. Charbel had left a cigarette burning in a marble ashtray and the smoke hung about the room like a fine mist, mingling with the hazy sunlight that streamed in through the white gauze curtains. For a moment, I thought I’d be sick.
‘What does it mean?’ I finally asked.
‘Son of darkness,’ Nabil said, stirring a third spoon of sugar into his coffee.
‘Son of the night,’ Shireen corrected, pouring her coffee into a glass filled with ice cubes that crackled and cracked with the hot liquid. ‘But both are technically right.’
‘Wain kinet?’ my uncle asked, taking the raqweh from Shireen and pouring me a steaming shot of coffee in what used to be Teta’s favourite cup: a porcelain thimble featuring a cartoonish man and woman locked in eternal embrace against a rosy backdrop.
‘At a party, Khalo. I’m not sure where.’
‘Taarefet a binit?’ he asked. Did I meet a girl? That was all anyone in my family ever wanted to know.
Charbel wailed, bent forward with laughter, started slapping his knees.
Before I could react, Nabil’s face went violently red.
‘Shou, inta majnoun?’ he snapped. What, are you crazy? He smacked Charbel over the back of the neck, yelling things I didn’t understand.
I looked over at Shireen. She knew what I wanted to say, what I was about to say. She shook her head. No one else noticed; I understood. She leaned in for a piece of sticky baklava and then lifted it with both her hands like communion: ‘Badaak?’
I left the room without another word and went to my suitcase to retrieve the small prayer cards mum had got printed for the occasion, letting the front door slam shut behind me.
The sun outside blinded as it danced across the chalky buildings that surrounded my grandparents’ house. I slunk down the staircase to the church in the hopes that I could comb through the arrivals and maybe catch sight of the woman from the photo.
The faces were all the same. In silence, I offered up the stack of prayer cards on my sweaty palm to each arrival. The mourners each slid the topmost card off the pile. As they inspected it, my aunt’s matte black-and-white portrait stared at me from the reverse—cherubic and grave.
‘Allah yerhama,’ they each said, slipping the souvenir away into pockets or handbags before they briskly entered.
The smell of frankincense started to spill out from inside the church. I peered in through the door and spotted the plume of smoke by the altar, its sweet, woody scent almost suffocating, even at a distance. Across my mind’s eye flashed scenes from the night before: the syrupy strands of spit that caught the light and ran like gossamer from my body to his and back again; the pearls of sweat that seemed to fuse our bodies together. The mouthfuls of flesh, vice grips, the cupping and thrusting and biting and sucking. The moaning and groaning for More! The endlessness of it all.
How I felt everything at once; how I felt I would never feel again. How I left my body and watched from the ceiling; how I blacked out as I came.
And the breathless laughter when it was all over.
‘It does not matter,’ Mo had said to me afterwards when I’d told him what I thought about the woman in the photo. I laid in his arms in the dark, but his voice sounded incredibly distant.
‘Why not?’ I’d asked.
‘Because. Even if she was, she don’t tell you. I don’t know your family, but mine, it’s not normal to talk about this.’
‘No, you’re probably right.’
‘Besides,’ he said. ‘You don’t need a photo to tell you who you are. Only a mirror.’
‘I guess,’ I’d replied. ‘I just wanted confirmation. You know, that I’m not alone.’
He’d laughed again then, and our bodies shook in harmony. ‘Alone! Did you look where you are tonight?’
Then silence in the taxi ride home. And shame.
From inside the church, the organs chimed. I couldn’t wait for the woman any longer—the mass would start soon.
Heat snaked up from the road before me in thick blurry waves. Someone cloaked in black turned the corner into the white-hot sunlight across the street, face shielded by sunglasses and hair veiled in silk. A thin brown cigarette wisped smoke from between her index and middle finger. She seemed to be staring straight at me.
As I stepped away from the shade of the church and started to cross the street, a man arrived behind the woman. He carried a bouquet of long-stemmed pink roses bound in twine that hung upside down by his knees. They kissed each other three times on alternating cheeks—left, right, left. The man clumsily handed over the bouquet of flowers to the woman who received them in a fit of silent laughter, tossing her cigarette to the ground and vigorously stamping it out. I couldn’t tell what passed between them, but the man kept pointing his free hand in different directions while the woman nodded, adjusting and smoothing her outfit, pausing every now and then to admire the roses. When she was done, she lit a fresh cigarette. Then they started off down the street, one of many in Beirut that was sure to lead to the sea.
My father’s tie suddenly felt like a noose around my neck. It flapped in the breeze back towards the church; I turned to follow it like an obedient golden retriever.
Shireen had been standing behind me as I watched the woman and the man. We looked at each other and said nothing. The triangular church framed her from behind, and she looked martyred and indignant as she looked down at me.
‘She’s not coming,’ she finally said.
‘I know that,’ I lied.
‘I know what you wanted to believe,’ she said. ‘But honestly, maybe it’s better this way.’
‘Maybe,’ I responded. I could feel the sting in my throat. Given the context, it was surely fine to cry. But what would my father say? I raised my head towards the sun in the hopes it would dry my tears before they had the chance to fall.
‘Yallah, come on,’ she said, holding her hand out for me to take, the gold bangles jangling at her wrist. I put my hand in hers and dragged my feet, crossing myself out of habit as we passed inside the church. The cool holy water dribbled down my forehead and into my eyes as we walked down the aisle.
Allah yerhama, I thought, genuflecting behind Shireen when we reached the front pew. Rest in peace. Khalo Albert, Nabil and Charbel avoided making eye contact as I sat down next to them, instead staring at their own hands already entwined in prayer. As the hunched organist delivered the final hymnal notes from the wings, I stood in unison with the congregation to say goodbye to Aunt Agathe. A woman none of us really knew; a woman who was finally free.
