2. Drawn to the village square

 Opening the bottom gate and shutting it carefully behind me, I turned right, along the lower road of the village until I was next to the church premises, which overlooked the square. Every Saturday morning, the village square was packed with interest.

A large crowd of villagers were milling about outside the butcher’s shop. I knew this area would be teeming with activity and I, together with many other children, wanted to get as close to the action as we could. This was the butcher’s moment and he performed silently, with a flourish of flashing knives and solemn skill. We watched with fascination when Antoine’s father, the butcher, cut the throat of the cow and the blood dripped into the bowl under its severed neck. The time for killing the cow came once, sometimes twice, a week, and was accomplished very efficiently. Death was quick with a very sharp knife.

After leaving the slaughtered beast to drain for a while, the butcher skinned the carcass and cut it into portions, chopping through bone as needed, ready for sale to his customers. He hung the large joints of meat, such as the legs and the shoulders, on hooks. The leftover pieces and fragments were put through the grinder. Some of this was weighed into portions and was sold as mincemeat and some was stuffed into casings for sausages. Flies of different sizes buzzed around and settled on any meat left untended as the various cuts were put aside on the butcher’s bench.

One day, the butcher had a plaster on the upper part of his nose, which made us all curious about what had happened. Gradually the story came out that all the men had a bit too much to drink on Friday night and bottles had been flying around. One of the broken pieces of bottle had caught him on his nose but he hadn’t noticed the damage until after the brawl. On seeing blood all over himself, he thought he was dying but eventually realized that the wound was not fatal. By the morning all he had was a hangover, evidenced by his surly mood as he slaughtered the cow with a swift and skillful sawing motion, right through the neck.

At some point in the earlier part of the morning the village shepherd came through the village square with his flock of sheep and goats, taking them to the field below to graze. Two sheep and one noisy goat were chosen by the shepherd for slaughter and the butcher’s son Samir, took them to the butcher’s shop, one by one, where they were tied up until the butcher was ready.

Eventually the time came to slaughter one of the sheep and that was done efficiently with the sheep being silent right up to the time its throat was slit. Next came the goat and as it was dragged to the stone step it bleated and set up an outcry that sounded like a human screaming and crying. The noisy objections only stopped when the goat’s throat was cut. There was a general pervasive smell of blood and offal.

Another part of the butcher’s work was to kill and prepare chickens for sale. This is what we youngsters had been looking forward to with great anticipation. The chicken’s neck would be severed and then, on the strength of its reflexes, the bird would run off into the square. We would all run after one or other of the headless chickens and when it fell over, the closest of us would triumphantly bring the expended chicken back to the butcher.

The chicken’s body would be put in warm water and Antoine’s mother and sister had the job of plucking the birds and hanging the naked carcasses on a hook in a row, like washing on a line. The village women would be quick to buy them so they were not on display for long. The morning was full of bargaining and gesticulating for special cuts, smaller portions of mince and liras and piasters would exchange hands. Midday would arrive and there would not be much left.

Another feature of market day was to relate personal news and listen to what others had to share. Catching up with the latest village gossip was an essential part of the entertainment as well.

 

The aroma of baking bread gradually wafted over the village square and directed everyone’s gaze towards the bakery. Much earlier, the mothers, including Im-Fawzi, had taken their trays of prepared dough to the bakery, stepping awkwardly down some uneven steps and into the initial darkness of the bakery. They would leave their baskets in the informal queue, and carry on with their morning shopping, until it was their turn. There was not enough space for many of them to wait for long. The oven was a brick-built affair, like a long cave lined all round with firebricks. On the one side of the oven, logs were burning and the flames went in a circular fashion towards a flue on the opposite side, and then on up the chimney. The baker and his assistant would steadily feed the fire with wood and with bread to be baked.

As the baker was about to bake their bread, each woman would return and flatten out her balls of risen dough, rolling them out into large plate sized loaves and placing them ready for the baker to put in the oven. Sometimes the ladies waited to see their loaves being put in the oven and then left to come back when the process was over. There was only room for one or two women in the dark room to prepare their loaves.

As each set of round flat dough discs were lined up, the baker placed them on his long wooden paddle and shook them onto the oven floor, near the flames. Within a few minutes the discs puffed up into loaves, which were quickly removed, turned over and then placed near the fire again. One or two more minutes and the loaves were moved further from the flame and then pulled out again by the baker once he deemed them properly baked, and he would place them on the slate-topped wall constructed for that purpose. The owner carefully placed them all into cloths in her cane basket, covered the warm bread with another soft cloth and returned home with the basket on her head.

On multiple occasions, I was permitted to sit out-of-the-way in a corner of the bakery to watch in fascination. No one seemed to mind me being there as I sat asking questions or chatting about the process. Sometimes I would be sent to call the next lady, if she had not arrived on time. As soon as I appeared at the bakery entrance she would know to come. Naturally, I was given the chance to tear off some bread and eat it now and again. I grew to love warm loaves of khubz.

The more complicated savoury breads like mana-eesh, fatayer, samboosik and lahm-bi-‘ajeen, would need particular temperatures and had to be placed in strategic locations in the oven. The women would make separate arrangements with the baker for these specialties, as he did that kind of baking after all the regular bread loaves had been baked and collected. I was never offered any of those as they were only prepared for very special occasions such as feasts, weddings or the birthdays of the elders in the village.

As the mothers took their bread home they often watched their children’s antics in the village square. Some of the boys played marbles with each other setting up a shy near the side wall of the village store. Others competed with each other as they did one-arm push-ups over the stream running on one side of the square to pick up a match on a stone in the middle of the stream with their lips. There was great hilarity whenever someone failed and fell into the stream. There were always a few young ladies around to impress and they usually kept up giggling commentaries at the exertions of the young men.

Everyone would be involved in preparing the midday meal after they had picked up their baked pita bread. On their way home, the mothers gathered the various members of their family and somewhat reluctantly left the village square to go up the hill to the spring, where one of the young women collected a jar of water, to join the rest of the party back home to prepare for the midday meal.