The Lemon Tree. Helen Forrester
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