The Dark Side of Love (11 page)

The old midwife Kadriye, who was visiting that day, drew on the water pipe that Laila's mother had prepared for her. Water gurgled in the belly of the pipe. “And his thing isn't as big as all that. There's nothing for you to fear. Besides, he'll go far in the world. A famous soothsayer has prophesied a great future for Hassan. When she saw him,” said the midwife, suddenly waxing enthusiastic, “she seized his hand and kissed it. Alarmed and nauseated, the young gentleman pushed the woman away from him, but she clung to his cloak saying she must do it, she wanted to be the first to kiss the hand of a future king of the Arabs. The young gentleman, oh, wasn't he just astonished! He gave her a lira and thought she would run off with the reward for her flattery, but the woman looked him straight in the eye
and said she didn't want his money, but he was not to forget her when he became king, as he would one day. Now she was holding both his hands. He would have to climb over a thousand dead bodies to reach his throne, she said, but he was to marry a fifth wife whose sign was the moon and whose name was the night, and that's you, my child,” the midwife ended her eloquent speech in a kindly tone of voice. She knew that Laila had a birthmark shaped like a crescent moon above her heart.

Laila knew the rich farmer Kashat's son. He was short, and had a long, dark beard and big ears which didn't seem to fit his almost dwarfish face at all. His eyebrows were comically crooked. He had an ugly mouth, with the huge lower lip split like a camel's. Although he was always elegantly dressed, as if he were going to a party, he never laughed, and always walked with a stoop, as if he had all the cares of the world on his shoulders.

And that dwarf wants me as his fifth wife, thought Laila, fretting. “But I want to be the first,” she said, and didn't understand why her mother was horrified.

“For God's sake, my child!” replied that gentle and devout woman.

Laila hardly knew her father. She addressed him as “sir”, and knew that his name was Muhammad Khairi. He was hardly ever there, and when he did come home he didn't want to see his children. He ate alone, slept alone, and talked to no one. Laila's mother, on the other hand, slept in a small room with the children. Sometimes she slipped into her husband's room in the night, and then her daughter heard the wooden bedstead creaking while her mother groaned in pain. Laila had hated her father for that.

He dealt in spices and dried fruits, and often had to make long journeys to see his suppliers. Their large orchard and vegetable patch, however, was left to the care of Laila's mother and the children. Although Laila had never known the real hunger that plagued many families, they had sometimes been forced to live on meagre rations.

When she told her father that she wanted to be a first wife he didn't answer at all. But her mother told her that he had already given Hassan Kashat his word. That night Laila was so scared that, for the first time, she found it difficult to breathe. You're going to die, an
inner voice had whispered to her. I must run away, Laila told herself. At that moment her mother came over to her to pick bloodsucking bugs out of the bed. She was holding a small oil lamp in one hand, and she plunged the plump bugs in a bowl of water.

“Oh, child, you're awake,” she had said in surprise. In the darkness Laila's eyes looked to her larger, unfathomable.

“Tell me, Mother, how many hearts does Kashat have?”

Her mother did not reply.

Laila could no longer remember when she had first seen Nassif Jasegi, but oddly enough, on the day he spoke to her she immediately saw that this was the only man who could save her. He was the son of a rich Christian who was not particularly good at managing his fortune. The peasants cracked jokes about the “unbeliever” who had served the Sultan so long, and in return was given landed property but didn't know what to do with it. His farm lay only a few hundred paces from Laila's home, but her family kept its distance from the “impure” Christians.

Laila heard that these Christians prayed to blocks of wood, ate pigs and drank wine. Their shameless women sat unveiled in the company of men, and they never let their husbands take a second wife.

“Mother,” Laila had said, “those unbelieving men have only one heart, just like Muslim women.”

Her mother was scared almost to death. Her husband was asleep in the next room. She took the girl by the ear and hauled her outside. “Child, you're out of your mind. It's better if you marry soon. I'm dying of fear for you,” she whispered.

When Laila, undeterred, told her father for the second time that she wanted to be a first wife, he slapped her face. After that her brothers Mustafa and Yunus beat her, although they were younger than she was. Their blows came thick and fast as mosquitoes on the humid summer nights of Damascus, and as they increased and multiplied so did Laila's questions. Her mother wept. “Child, you're playing games with your life. We can't break the word your father has given.”

And the midwife, seductively, told her, “Once you have a husband, you know, you'll have his fortune, and you can send your mother lovely things every day.”

Ganging up together, they told Laila that what little prosperity her grandfather Mustafa Khairi had achieved came only because he kept his word and gave the governor of Damascus the hand in marriage of Laila's beautiful Aunt Balkis, her father's sister. She was the governor's twelfth wife, but then she had turned the old man's head with her charms and her skill in the art of love, and in less than a year he had promoted her to be his first wife.

A voice inside Laila, cold as night, told her that this story was a lie. If Balkis had been the governor's first wife, then why did she kill herself at the age of twenty-five? Laila's cousin Fatmeh didn't believe Balkis had been happy either. Her grave was quite close, and Fatmeh's family often made a pilgrimage to her resting place.

I want to come first and I want to be happy, Laila kept telling herself, and she swore not to marry Hassan Kashat.

“What's your name, lovely one?” were the first words she had heard Nassif Jasegi say. He came riding along beside the stream. She hadn't noticed him at all, being far away in her thoughts again while her hands pulled weeds out of the radish bed. She started, and turned around. A window opened in her heart. She took a deep breath, and felt the relief of fresh air blowing in.

“Laila,” she replied. “And yours? What do they call you?”

“They call me Nassif, the Righteous Man, but I'm not righteous at all,” he replied, smiling.

“What are you, then?” she asked.

“I,” said the man, “am Madjnun Laila.”

Like all Arabs, she knew the legend of the unrequited love of her namesake Laila and the poet who went mad for love of her, singing his beloved's praise until the day he died. His poems made the woman
immortal. Very few knew his real name, and he was known simply as Laila's madman,
Madjnun Laila
.

“And are you really mad?” she asked.

“Only for you,” said the man.

“You don't look like a lunatic,” she said, examining him from his shining shoes to his clean white headcloth. Hamdi, her crazy cousin, screamed like an animal in his room with its barred window, threw his filth at everyone, and kept banging his head against the wall.

What happened next opened three more windows in her heart. Nassif Jasegi, so elegantly mounted on a noble Arab horse, said softly, “I'd run mad three hundred times over to hear you laugh.” And he jumped off his horse, stood on his head in the brook, leaped to his feet again, made faces like a monkey, climbed a tree like a cat, and from there jumped back on to his horse which, apparently used to such extraordinary behaviour, hadn't moved from the spot.

Laila laughed out loud, and when Nassif stood on his saddle, flapped his arms and cried, “Look, I'm a little sparrow,” she could no longer keep on her feet. With a single leap he was down beside her. He squatted on the ground and looked into her eyes. He was a playmate, even though he looked like a man of mature years.

“And how many hearts do you have?” she asked quietly, and he touched her lips.

“Only one, and you have filled it entirely,” he replied.

“Nassif,” said Laila, in an almost pleading tone, and he immediately understood everything.

Years later the wild joy of those days was still fresh in her mind. Even when her brain was almost entirely eaten away she remembered the happiness of that time, an eternity ago. But when Laila met her madman and the world seemed to shake beneath her feet, what she didn't know is that joy is very treacherous.

Her brother Mustafa was the first to see her happiness in her face. Clumsily, like a careless puppy, it gave everything away. He faced Laila, and his knife flashed. But although death was staring at her from that knife she wouldn't deign to give it so much as a glance. Nassif alone lived in her eyes.

“You marry Hassan or you die,” said Mustafa. He was not fifteen
yet, but as the firstborn son he bore his grandfather's name and acted like a pasha. He had spoken to Hassan, said bandy-legged, snot-nosed little Mustafa, and he acted as if Kashat were a friend of his. Mustafa's face, so like Laila's own, was suddenly as grave as if the “jug-eared dwarf”, as Laila called Hassan Kashat to herself, had unloaded on her brother some of the grief that kept his back bent all the time. The boy had learned the words he spoke to her by heart, the way he could chant the words of the Koran sura by sura, without understanding them.

“Love or death! One is in my hand, the other in yours,” she whispered softly. Their mother, coming back from a neighbour's at that moment, threw herself on her son, and pleaded with him until he gave her the knife.

Nassif just nodded when Laila told him all this.

Three days later a horseman muffled in a heavy cloak attacked Hassan Kashat on his way home from hunting gazelles. He struck both Hassan's hands with a stick for so long that one of them, the left hand, was permanently crippled.

An extensive search for the man who had done it came to nothing. Only Laila knew who he was, and she smiled, but this time secretly under the covers, for she was afraid that her delight would give her away again.

The wedding was to be in March, when the almonds were in blossom. But one cold morning in February Laila, disguised as a man, mounted the black horse that Nassif was holding for her not far from her house. They rode south for two weeks, and Nassif intentionally left a trail leading to Jerusalem. Then they crossed the Holy Land going north, and continued their journey in Lebanon, but now without leaving any trail at all. Arabia was an Ottoman province at the time, and Sultan Abdulhamid had ruled with an iron hand until he was deposed in 1909, but the French had exerted pressure and Lebanon eluded his grasp. Nassif knew that, but he didn't guess that his rival had seen through his clever idea. Kashat's men went on hunting Nassif in Lebanon. Their master wanted him alive. By now he had found out that the horseman muffled in the cloak was none other than that Christian man from his own neighbourhood.

Laila and Nassif only just escaped a trap set for them by a monk whom Kashat had bribed. But they got away. They rode through the mountains by a circuitous route in order to reach Mala.

Only years later did Nassif discover that on one of those nights when he desired his lover, and was embracing her tenderly in their warm bed of furs, his entire family had been butchered. His two younger brothers Butros and Fuad were killed in a shoot-out, his mother and his sister Miriam were brutally murdered. The family's possessions were robbed, and their farm burned down to its foundations. The slaughter had been carried out by Laila's brothers and Kashat's men. Laila's family had thereby saved its honour in the eyes of its neighbours, and atoned for its guilt to the powerful Kashat.

Later, when Kashat mustered a whole army to try bringing as many villages as possible under his control, the girl's brothers Mustafa and Yunus were his lieutenants and marched at the head of the troop.

And on one of the nights that Laila and Nassif spent under assumed names in inns, with Bedouin, in caves, or with village elders, she suddenly sensed something inside her. It began to throb. She took Nassif in her arms and kissed his eyes. “What will we call our son?” she asked, as if she were sure it would be a boy.

“Salman,” replied Nassif, with tears in his eyes. “The name of my father, who died far too young. I will conquer death with my son's birth.”

On the rest of their journey Laila laughed a great deal with the man who always had death riding hard on his heels, but still thought up countless crazy ideas for his lover's delight. He claimed that her laughter sounded like the gurgling water of a brook, and whenever he heard it he was thirsty for her. She once said, later, that during those months before they arrived in Mala, she had used up all the laughter that was meant to last her life.