The Dark Side of Love (100 page)

The first trouble was over a joke that the Central Committee misunderstood. It was in the answer to a riddle in the first issue. The riddle was: how do you make four evangelists into three musketeers? The answer, allegedly sent in by a reader in Damascus with the very common woman's name Farisa, was, you cut out Stalin. The merging of the names Farid and Isa was an easy conundrum for the Committee to crack. Farid was made to feel the disapproval of those in high places at a short meeting with a member of the Central Committee, but he also saw how cowardly the man was; he didn't dare to say he was angry because, as a Stalinist, the answer to the riddle insulted him. Farid told Isa about it, but instead of being pleased his co-editor suddenly turned pale.

Years later, when he thought back to this period, Farid was still wondering whether the Central Committee had been asleep, or whether it let those three issues come out uncensored on purpose to get rid of him for good.

In the second issue, Isa published his first translation from the works of Wilhelm Reich. And Farid brought up the question of the principles of civil disobedience as he had put them together from his wide reading. Laila's short but extremely radical discussion of marriage and oppression found a place in it, as well as the urging of the Marxist philosopher Ismail Hadi to find Arab roots for justice and democracy instead of coming out with bad imitations of European theories. But Farid couldn't accept Josef's essay on myths about the penis in the minds of Arab men. “The title on its own,” he told his friend, “could get me a life sentence:
You Can Find a Homeland
Anywhere But Not A Penis
.” Farid laughed, and Josef swallowed his disappointment. “It's just that the time's not right yet,” he muttered quietly.

The new issue aroused lively interest again. The Central Committee remained silent. That troubled Isa, although Farid saw it as no reason for anxiety. Six months later he was to discover his mistake.

One fine spring day General Mutamiran made a speech promising to liberate Palestine and build up Arab socialism. As the first step towards this goal, all seventeen national newspapers and eleven journals were banned. Elias was cross at supper because now he wouldn't be able to read his favourite paper
al-Ayam
any more. Only the papers of the Ba'ath Party were still available. Elias glanced at them twice, and after that he stopped buying newspapers at all. This was in the summer of 1963, and from then on he listened to BBC London instead. Claire couldn't have her magazine
Dunia
, which told her so much of what was going on in the world, and Farid and Josef missed the satirical magazine
al-Mudhik al-Mubki
.

There were two failed coups that summer, and General Mutamiran showed no mercy. All involved were executed.

Farid and Isa spent three nights discussing love as the next main subject for
Youth
.

“It will be difficult to get that through,” said Isa despairingly, when he realized how determined Farid was. “Our Party has deep-rooted inhibitions about sex. They don't just derive from Stalin and Lenin, they go right back to Marx himself.”

Farid knew that Isa was right. All meetings were attended by men sitting together, and they seemed to him like the members of a club of eunuchs. Even at parties they acted in a pious, asexual way. No one brought a wife or even mentioned her in conversation. “Yet they're all thinking of women the whole time,” said Isa sadly.

Even Amin, when Farid asked him why the Party didn't take up the
cause of women, said there were more important things to do. First communism must be strengthened, the workers and Palestine must be liberated, and the Arab countries united under communist leadership. After that they could talk about the emancipation of women, if their problems hadn't been solved anyway when the revolution was ushered in.

Somehow work on the magazine had opened Farid's eyes to a number of contradictions. He kept seeing a certain image in his mind's eye: the Communist Party sitting in smoke-filled rooms with the curtains drawn, talking about Hegel, while life outside kept on changing. He couldn't help thinking of the sad cardinals of Constantinople debating how many angels could dance on the head of a pin as the Ottomans captured the city.

Just before Christmas there was a party at the club. Farid invited not just Isa but the comrades from his Party cell and the co-ordinating centre. All six men came, but three of them sat on their chairs all night as stiff as plaster statues. They were horrified by the behaviour of the club members and the people who lived in the street, always hugging each other and talking at their ease and without inhibition. Isa laughed at the three of them. “They look as if they were in Siberia. These are the people you want to liberate, gentlemen,” he said quietly.

Isa liked Josef from the first. They sat together all evening. At a late hour, when old Gibran was in the table tennis room telling an erotic story of an experience that he said he once had in Havana, the seated comrades rose and warned Farid, as they left, to beware of this anti-communist, anti-Cuban propaganda. He was horrified by their narrow minds.

“Those aren't Communist Party members, anyone would think they had
no
members,” snapped Josef, laughing. Isa thought this an excellent joke, and laughed too. Before Farid said goodbye to Josef that evening, his friend told him that Isa had persuaded him to write an article on the problems of the streets of Damascus for the fourth issue of the magazine.

Farid was speechless with delight. But Number 4 was never published.

Society was becoming militarized. Within nine months, General Mutamiran forced school students to wear uniforms, and no one who had passed his final examination could claim his high school diploma without doing a month's course in a military camp first. Isa told Farid it was all humbug, and a nauseating spectacle. The magazine
Youth
undertook not just to write about love and sexuality, but to ask questions about the purpose of this imposition of military discipline on schools.

Issue 3 came out at the end of March 1964. The front page showed a child holding a white dove. The dove seemed to be asleep with an olive branch in its beak, as if it had reached its journey's end and felt safe in those small hands. The subject of the article was less peaceful than the picture suggested: it was a study of children and war, a plea against the arming of young people. But that wasn't all; there was also a long translation from Wilhelm Reich about power and the suppression of sexuality. In addition, there were caricatures from all over the world opposing military dictatorship and exploitation.

Two days after the journal came out, Farid and Isa were invited to a special meeting, which soon turned out not to be a meeting at all, but a lawcourt with eleven prosecutors led by a furious judge. Comrade Jakub came from the Euphrates region, and was responsible for culture in the Party. He was also Osmani's right-hand man.

Farid was alarmed. He had never dreamed that his efforts to change society would bring him before such a ruthless committee of his own Party, obliged to listen to accusations against himself. He and Isa were naïve, they were unwittingly serving imperialism by weakening the revolutionary Communist Party. Because of their journal, Comrade Secretary General Khalid Malis had been summoned before President Mutamiran, and had to apologize for a communist magazine that was putting out propaganda on behalf of a Jew by the name of Wilhelm Reich, was questioning the army, and calling for disobedience – and all this at a time when General Mutamiran was trying to come closer to the Communist Party and the Soviet Union, and had offered the communists two ministerial posts in his Popular Front coalition.

Jakub spoke for half an hour without pausing for breath. Isa was slumped in his seat, looking miserably at the floor. It took Farid some time to turn from fury to contempt, but then he looked closely at the men's faces. The three comrades who had sat through the club's cheerful party with gloomy expressions on their faces looked perfectly relaxed here and were smiling all the time, nodding agreement, and reinforcing the accusations against the magazine by interpolating comments.

Farid, who had now been a Party member for nearly eight years, knew almost all those present. They were the most pitiful figures ever to have been set up by a political party for such a purpose. Who else would agree to act as an Inquisition without any sense of shame? One of them said, during a tea break, “Better stay in the Party and go wrong with it than be outside the Party and be right.”

Farid said not a word of apology during this hearing. Instead, he accused Jakub of grovelling, for as a young man he himself had published poems on Stalin, praising the occupation by the French as an act of civilization. Farid defended the magazine, line by line, and declined to discuss what the dictator had said, offered, or whispered to the Secretary General. The point that mattered was whether the magazine enlightened young people in this country. “And listen to this, Comrade Jakub,” he cried, raising his voice now, “I'll still be in favour of enlightenment in ten years' time, unlike you – or are you going to reissue your hymns of praise to General Weygand and the heroic Stalin?”

A grey, veiled look came over Jakub's face. Farid was sweating in his excitement.

“Why would we want to go into delicate matters back in the past when you were still in nappies?” An older comrade came to Jakub's aid. Such a reply was not the kind of thing you found in any of the Russian, Chinese, or Cuban novels about social intercourse among comrades.

The man who had spoken was a textiles worker and had spent many years in prison for the Party, but even prison, Farid thought whenever he met him, is no cure for stupidity.

“We're here to discuss your abuse of the Central Committee's confidence in you, and we must tackle the subject of the consequences.”

At that moment Farid realized that the verdict on him had already been learned by heart, for these last words were not those of a textiles worker, but of a bureaucrat of Osmani's kind.

Isa too understood what the remark disguised. He rose, trembling, and apologized volubly and submissively. As he did so, he died to Farid. The litany of self-accusation was demeaning.

Three years passed before Farid saw Isa again, by chance, in a cinema. Isa smiled at him, but the smile aroused only revulsion in Farid, who turned away.

The leadership was in a hurry in that spring of 1964. A week later, Farid was removed from all his posts in the Party. Even his membership was frozen for six months, the next harshest penalty to expulsion. And this penalty in itself showed that Osmani was behind the whole thing. He didn't want to make a martyr of Farid, which was what would have happened if he had been expelled immediately. Osmani was relying on his tried and trusted methods: humiliation first, then keeping his victim on tenterhooks until, driven by his own injured ambition, he left the Party of his own accord. That was Osmani's aim.

If there was ever a figure of authority who knew the way mean tricks would work, he was the man. Just under a year later, Farid left the Party when it was next shaken by disputes. This was early in January 1965, when the armed Palestinian resistance movement erupted under Arafat's leadership. The Communist Party had instructions from Moscow to be suspicious of armed conflict, and it ignored these events. Arafat was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and a Saudi agent, whispered the communists, like old washerwomen gossiping. Officially, they said nothing. At the end of January hundreds of young members left the Party. Farid justified the termination of his membership in a furious letter that no one ever read.

However, it was a step into the void. Low as the Communist Party had sunk, it was a community offering mutual protection, a club of like-minded people. Now he had to endure the feeling that he belonged nowhere. He roamed the city alone, with a record playing in his head and stuck in a groove: nine years for nothing, and all you get is failure.

He felt deeply ashamed. He dared not phone Amin, but he
immediately told Rana what had happened. She was glad that now he would have more time for her and their love, and he could finish his studies as soon as possible.

But the sense of being thrown off track accompanied him like a shadow. Curiously, he was ashamed to tell Josef about it. For six months, he never mentioned that he had left the Party. When he finally did pluck up the courage to do it, he was grateful for his friend's understanding. Josef never even hinted that he could have told him so.

Rana called early, and Claire joked with her for a long time. Farid came into the inner courtyard barefoot, guessing who his mother was talking to. “And here comes a beggar,” said Claire, “unwashed, unshaven, barefoot. You can see how much he loves you. He wouldn't have jumped out of bed so quickly for anyone else, even me.” Then she handed him the receiver. She was happy; his girlfriend had just told her that Farid had left the Communist Party, and from now on she would be able to sleep easily again.

Rana was in cheerful mood. The International Autumn Fair in Damascus opened its gates in a few days' time. Farid didn't understand why she was so pleased by the prospect of the exhibition, which bored him with all its stands of industrial exhibits. When he said so, she laughed. “Industrial exhibits? Stands? My love, who do you think I am, the Minister of Trade? No, they give the best concerts in the world at the Fair. Last year I saw Feiruz. I'd like to go to something like that with you this year. You can hear great international figures, people such as Duke Ellington, Miriam Makeba, famous Cuban and Hungarian groups.”

“Who's Duke Ellington?” he cautiously asked.

“Don't say you've never heard of him! He's one of the greatest jazz musicians in the world. But perhaps he was taboo for you – after all, he's an American imperialist. Last September people were dancing in
the auditorium, and they wouldn't let him leave the stage until he'd given them a tenth encore. That's why he likes coming to Damascus so much.”