The Dark Side of Love (104 page)

The principal left the room without a word, and never came back again. Jusuf's statement turned out to be correct, but the principal never said another word about that either. In the middle of March, however, Farid was transferred for disciplinary reasons to a village on the southern border with Israel. Among themselves, the teachers called it Syrian Siberia.

Farid was furious. The reprimands were down in writing, and thus official, but no one had given him a hearing, and it made no
difference to the young head of the education department in the Ministry of Culture whether the rest of the teachers and the pupils contested them or not. He, Farid, was accused of having incited and encouraged school students to make fun of the Ba'ath Party and the principal. Probationary teachers had almost no rights at all.

His request to be allowed to stay until the end of the school year met with a curt refusal. He was to report to the middle school in the village of Shaga within a week, or he would be summarily dismissed.

The Grade Seven pupils wept when he said goodbye, and Jusuf, the boy with the heart defect, came up and offered him his hand, with two hardboiled eggs in it. “Something for the journey, from my grandmother,” he said. Farid could no longer hold back his tears.

Shaga was 200 kilometres from Damascus, and almost half the way to the village was through impassable country. Going there and back every day would be impossible. He had to change buses twice and then go in a shared taxi for some distance to get back to Damascus from the village, and the journey took four hours.

Rana was very sad. “I want you to know,” she said, “that even if I have to wait all my life to live free with you for a single day, I won't regret it.”

With a heavy heart, Farid gave up his rented apartment and packed his things. Josef and Nadia came to see him off in the bus, and Matta insisted on taking him and his case to the bus stop himself. He wept as he said goodbye, and then rattled away fast on his Suzuki.

“It won't be long before they transfer you back to Damascus for disciplinary reasons instead,” said Josef, watching Matta go. “Hell's here, not down south where they regard teachers as demigods. Here they think they're crap. They know a teacher doesn't even earn as much as their family chauffeur, so how would they respect him? Knowledge doesn't count for as much as the make of car you drive. And I don't even ride a bike. Sometimes my pupils see me get out of a crowded bus and shake their heads as they sit in their Mercedes. And you always have some of the sons of the top brass to teach here,
so too bad if you provoke one of those uneducated apes. Punish him and you're attacking the Foreign Minister, or even worse the head of the secret police. The kids are always showing you they know it, too.”

“You know how Josef is!” Nadia intervened. “Never happy. I keep telling him he ought to be giving private tuition to one boy at a time instead of educating these hordes, and he'd earn twice as much, but he won't listen to me.”

Josef laughed. “Nadia doesn't want me to die of a heart attack, she'd rather I died of a stroke. Those kids and private tuition! They just don't want to learn anything. They've already been to Venice and New York, London and Paris, they're burned out at the age of fourteen. And you think they'd want to learn geography?”

“Calm down,” said Farid. “I don't know if they need teachers or tractors more down in the south, but I'd have liked to stay here,” he added, and boarded the bus, because the driver was already starting the engine.

He looked gloomily out of the window, envying everyone who could stay in Damascus. He had no idea that one of the most exciting periods of his life was just beginning.

Dunia was the first to notice that Rana wasn't well. Four weeks after Farid had left, she visited her friend without phoning first, and was alarmed. Rana seemed desperate, and was letting herself go. She said she hurt all over, but the doctors hadn't found anything, and her husband was always cross with her. He said she was plain lazy and addicted to reading books. Rami had locked the books away, and he locked her studio on the flat roof too. She wasn't even allowed to read newspapers and magazines. Instead, she had to learn crochet and knitting from his cousin Majda, and his sister was supposed to teach her to bake cookies and iron properly.

Rana showed Dunia her efforts. They were very clumsy. “An elephant could knit better than me.” She laughed and cried by turns.
Dunia was bewildered, but she knew Rana couldn't stand that stolid housewife Majda.

Finally she encouraged her friend to get up, wash, and smarten herself up, and by the time Rana was ready Dunia had brought some kind of order into the apartment and cleared up the garbage lying around everywhere. Rana seemed to have lost all her
joie de vivre
, as if she had given up entirely.

They went to Sibki Park. “You ought to go on vacation with Rami,” said Dunia. “You need a little fresh air, that's all, you want to get out of your own four walls.”

“Rami can't take a vacation. He has to stay here and make sure he keeps his job.”

“But you're not yourself at all,” Dunia told her forcefully. “Why don't I talk to him?”

Dunia knew that discussing his wife's psychological condition with a Syrian was like trying to square the circle. Psychological sickness was regarded as a disgrace to the whole family, in particular a woman's husband. So all psychological problems were denied, only total derangement was recognized – and for that there was the al-Asfuriye mental hospital. All the same, she was prepared to speak to Rami. Rana shook her head. She felt guilty because she couldn't love him but was just a burden.

“Are you sure?” Dunia pressed her.

“Yes, thank you, I must deal with this by myself. First I have to get his cousin off my back. I have to or I'll kill myself with one of those knitting needles.”

Dunia began phoning her friend every day. After some time she thought Rana seemed better, and invited her to come around to her place when several other young women were visiting.

When she arrived five or six of Dunia's neighbours were sitting around her new record player, drinking coffee and talking. Rana didn't know any of them. Dunia put a new Beatles record on and invited her friends to dance. She'd been to London with her husband, she told them, and she learned the new dances there. The women were delighted, and once their hostess had cleared away all the vases and little tables she showed them the latest steps. Rana smiled wearily, but
didn't feel like joining in. Even when the women, led by Dunia, tied scarves around their hips and began swaying in an oriental dance, she stayed where she was. “I have to think,” she said.

“Music and thinking don't go together. Music wants to get into your body, make your nerves swing and your heart beat like a drum,” said Dunia, who danced with wonderful eroticism. But Rana was not to be persuaded.

Later, the women all prepared a refreshing tabbouleh salad, the dish for which Damascus is famous, but she had no appetite. She just sat there trying to be polite, but the women's cheerfulness got on her nerves. After a while she asked her friend to drive her home. Dunia was one of the first women in Damascus to hold a driving licence.

“I long so much for Farid,” said Rana when they stopped outside her house. “I haven't seen him since he went to the south. Somehow he's going further and further away from me. I feel so lost. And then there's my husband demanding his rights as if I were his slave.”

Dunia tried to soothe her friend, helped her to undress, and was about to leave when Rami came in. He was surprised to find her visiting, but was charming and polite. Finally he accompanied her to the door and offered her his hand.

“Rana needs a doctor, urgently. She's sick,” said Dunia quietly.

Rami withdrew his hand. “She has everything she could wish for. She's just bored,” he replied, narrow-lipped, and all trace of friendliness vanished from his face. Dunia was afraid that if she said any more he might take it out on Rana for letting him down in front of other people. She swallowed. Rami looked at her, incensed, and closed the door after her without another word.

Farid was glad to get out of the bus intact when it arrived in Daraa. The driver had been overtired. He had a night shift behind him, and then had to go on driving without a break because his colleague was
sick. Farid, sitting to his right, had noticed how he kept nodding off at the wheel, so he talked steadily to him for two hours.

The dusty town of Daraa was the last stop of any size in the dry Hauran plain. From here, the road wound up towards the Golan Heights. The landscape became more precipitous, but also more colourful because of all the little rivers. The uniform brown of the steppes disappeared as soon as they were past the first bend in the road. Not only was the land fertile in the triangle between Jordan, Israel, and Syria, smuggling flourished more than any other trade. But like the wretched town of Daraa, the shabby villages along the way were evidence not so much of poverty as of the absence of any pleasure in life. Despite the fertility of the region, the houses were dilapidated, the roads neglected. Children ran barefoot after the bus, throwing stones. The peasants' children had no underwear at all, those of the Palestinian refugees wore whatever their mothers had made from the white cotton sacks which contained the flour and rice donated to them. The coloured emblems of the donors stamped on the sacks lasted for ever: the famous American hand-print, the Australian hopping kangaroo, the Canadian maple leaf.

The little bus had been cobbled together, with much Syrian ingenuity, from parts of at least fifteen brands of vehicle. Amazingly, this technical marvel stayed in one piece as it groaned its alarming way up the mountains, and jolted like a rock falling unpredictably down to the valleys again. After exactly two hours the bus had reached the village of Shaga. The passengers applauded enthusiastically.

It was Friday and the school was closed. Farid was to start teaching on Saturday. There was no hotel or boarding house in the village, and only a few buildings had electricity. Strangers spent the night with the village elder, so Farid asked the way to his house. The bus driver told him to get in again and drove him to the door. It turned out that the village elder was a generous host, who offered to let the new teacher stay with him for free, but Farid thanked him and declined.

In the spring of 1965, the village was still twenty kilometres from the Israeli border. The area was under strict military control; the bus had been stopped three times, while soldiers carefully checked the passengers' papers and asked where they were going. The peasants
knew just what to expect, and no one was travelling without ID. Shaga had both an elementary school and a large new middle school, the only one in the whole region. Many of the pupils had to cross valleys and climb mountains on their way to school early in the morning, and arrived for lessons exhausted.

Farid didn't have to explain that he had been transferred for disciplinary reasons, for it appeared that no teacher ever came willingly to Shaga. All twelve of the staff were exiles, and they all said they had been unfairly banished.

Husni the principal, a gentle-natured man of gloomy appearance, gave him a sobering account of the situation. It was downright impossible to teach properly in Shaga, he said. The other teachers nodded, with wry smiles. The pupils had no money for books, and those sent by the Ministry of Culture for this poverty-stricken region had been lost somewhere on the way. Moreover, there couldn't be anything like a normal school day when operations by Palestinian guerrillas on the border, followed by punitive Israeli actions and manoeuvres by the Syrian armed forces, turned the area into a battlefield every other week. In addition most of the children had to help their parents by night, smuggling arms, hashish, and cigarettes. He could only ask their new colleague not to pitch his expectations too high, said Husni, but at least to teach the poor devils the bare essentials.

The principal talked non-stop, but humorously, and since he mentioned Allah and his Prophet more often than necessary Farid guessed he was a Muslim Brother, and that was why he had been sent here.

The other teachers listened, looking relaxed, and drank the dark, sweet tea brought by the janitor. “Einstein himself,” said Husni, in conclusion, “would have grown up to be nothing but a smuggler or the member of a Palestinian commando group if he'd lived here.”

It was just before nine when the teachers went to their pupils, who had been waiting for an hour. On the way they introduced themselves by their names, subjects, and the reasons why they had been sent here. Farid was to teach chemistry, physics, and mathematics to the seventh, eighth, and ninth grades, thirty-two hours in all over six days. He soon realized that so far as the students' achievements were concerned, they were hopelessly backward, but their curiosity
was great, and in practical matters they were equal to any young Damascene of eighteen.