The Dark Side of Love (111 page)

But why was the secret service on Farid's trail? Had old communist or Radical documents fallen into the hands of the police during one of their many raids, and had his name featured there? Or had someone informed on him? He was sure he hadn't committed any crime, but how was he to explain that to the men who were after him?

A thousand questions were racing through Farid's mind when he unexpectedly found himself standing at Matta's door. His friend had just been making tea.

“Brother, how pale you are! Come in. Faride and I will be happy to drink tea with you – come in!” Matta said in friendly tones.

“They want to arrest me again,” said Farid, and he didn't know why his tears were falling.

“You can stay here, brother, and anyone who touches you had better watch out,” replied Matta.

“No, that won't do me any good, or you and Faride either. They know that we're friends and come from the same village. But you could do me a favour. Can you go to our place on the quiet and see if my suspicions are correct? Here's a hundred lira, buy two sacks of potatoes and one of onions at a vegetable dealer, phone Claire and tell her you've bought what she wanted. Just to be on the safe side, so that
she won't show any agitation while the secret service men are in the house. Our own Fiat is parked outside it, Dr. Rahbani's Ford, and the pharmacist Sadek's new Renault. Do you know him?”

“Yes, of course. His beautiful wife Hanan is a good customer of mine,” said Matta proudly.

“Good. And right now there are two strange cars there too, not by chance, I'm sure. I'd like you to look at them carefully, but be sure not to say anything. They're not fools.”

“Don't worry, brother,” said Matta, and he turned to Faride. “And you look after my dear brother, little pigeon, and calm his fears.”

She kissed him on the forehead. “Look after yourself, dear heart. I'm very proud of you,” she told him.

Matta came back two hours later. The secret service men weren't in the house but sitting in their cars. They had searched him and tried to intimidate him with trick questions, but Matta had acted dumb. Finally he was allowed to take the potatoes and onions into the house, but not to speak to Claire. When he insisted that he wanted to be paid, and started shouting, the men allowed her to give him the money under their supervision.

Farid kissed him and Faride as he left, and went to Straight Street, where he took a taxi and gave the driver an address in the Midan quarter.

He was a hunted animal now. And the hunters after him were invisible; any civilian, including the taxi driver, could be one of them.

Why had everything gone wrong? Who was pursuing him?

“Hotel al-Nasim,” said the driver, rousing him from his thoughts.

The hotel belonged to a distant cousin of Josef's. He was discreet. When he saw Farid he understood without any need for words, and made no difficulties.

Farid had ten such addresses stored in his memory. People who could be relied on, who hated dictatorship, and who weren't directly connected to him in any way. But he couldn't stay anywhere for long. His best camouflage was to keep moving. Only the time between one and five in the morning was peaceful, and he would lie down to sleep exhausted, desperate, and often hungry.

He fled through Damascus, a hunted man. The secret service had
men checking all the ways out of the city. Farid soon forgot to think about his bad luck. He didn't think of Rana or Claire either, he thought of nothing at all, as if he had lost every idea except one: survival.

On the run, he came to know all the streets very well. Damascus, that beautiful, light, and spacious city had become an overpopulated village. Hundreds of thousands of peasants had fled to the metropolis. The men who had seized power were peasants like them, and that attracted people. Tenement buildings were going up everywhere, and the government turned not just one but two blind eyes to illegal construction work in the slums on the outskirts of the city.

Again and again Farid found friends who would quietly take him in, and in time he found that he could spot the secret service men sitting in cafés, pretending to read the paper. Reading the paper in a café is an art, and Farid could tell whether a man was doing it for pleasure or in the line of duty.

His money was beginning to run low, and after three days without food he called Laila from a café. It was a risk, of course, in spite of all his precautions. Who could tell whether informers didn't know everyone's secret signals by now?

She had told him a way to ask her for help in case of need, without saying a single give-away word: he was to let her phone ring three times, hang up, then let it ring five times, and finally three times again. That meant they were to meet at the Café Fredy near the Central Bank in an hour's time.

Laila appeared punctually at the appointed place, and inconspicuously approached his table. She was as pale as on the day of her father's death, and kissed Farid on the cheek.

“I've missed you,” she said. “How are you?” Then she felt ashamed of herself for asking such a question.

“Wretched. I have to find some way out of this,” he said. “I have three or four problems to solve at the same time. I must leave the country, and I want to get away to France with Rana as soon as possible. Claire has given me enough money for that.” Farid hesitated. “You might be able to help me by reassuring her, bringing me my papers from the embassy, and getting a good forger to make me a passport. Josef knows a brilliant man. He's expensive but he does good
work. When I have all those things I must get across the mountains to Beirut somehow. Once I'm over the border and I have my papers for the university, I can get a visa in the French Embassy there.”

“That wouldn't be difficult to start with, since no one's after me. The only thing is that as soon as I set foot in your house I'll be kept under observation, though surely not for long. When they see it was just a family visit and I'm going home again like a good girl, not acting as a courier, they'll leave me alone again. But you'll have to be patient. I won't get back to you until I've rustled up all the things you need. Meanwhile you can lie low in an apartment belonging to one of my best friends. She's in the US on a lecture tour at the moment, she won't be back for three months. Change your appearance, grow a moustache, let your hair grow longer than usual. And mingle with people. No one will recognise you. Go shopping, get some good clothes, cook yourself something nice, and relax. It will be all right.

And by the way, the neighbours above you are rich students from Saudi Arabia. They're not interested in anyone else in the building, and they don't know any of the others there. The neighbours below you are old and hard of hearing, but I'll drop in today and let them know a cousin of my friend is staying in her apartment for a few weeks, and he needs to be left in peace because he's writing a book.”

Laila looked into Farid's eyes. She did not, as usual, feel his erotic attraction. He was a helpless child now, her child, and she would protect him as she had in the past when she first held him in her arms.

A flicker of hope flared up in him when he entered his new hiding place, and after a hot shower he slept soundly again for the first time in weeks. But two days later that hope was destroyed. By chance, a woman in the building next door saw someone slipping into the apartment by night. She took Farid for a burglar and alerted the police. The young CID officer who made the arrest, First Lieutenant Sidki, was astonished when a Major Mahdi Said of the secret service phoned later to congratulate him. “You have taken a dangerous terrorist out of circulation.”

Rana had heard only briefly from Laila, and suddenly she was alone with her horror. There was no one she could talk to. Dunia was away, Claire was too desperate herself for Rana to hope for any comfort from her, and Laila wasn't answering the phone or opening her door. Claire explained that she felt guilty about Farid's arrest. She ought to have warned him about the over-zealous neighbour.

Night lay heavy on Rana. She couldn't sleep. What are they doing to him now, she wondered? The Radicals are in a worse position than anyone because they took up arms against the regime, like the Muslim Brotherhood. They'll torture him, and here I am lying in a soft bed next to a spineless army officer who'll do anything not to rub the authorities up the wrong way.

Her head felt as if it would explode. She got out of bed. I ought to have hidden Farid here, she told herself. No one would have thought of that, and if they did I'd have been arrested too, and my misery would have come to a fitting end. She drew aside the curtains over the bedroom window. The neon lights over the cinema sign were turned off, but she could clearly make out the striking face of Anthony Quinn as Zorba the Greek.

Barefoot, she left the bedroom, quietly opened the door leading up to the top floor, and stopped for a moment. A fresh breeze drew her on and up. On the roof, she breathed more easily. A few cars were driving by down below, nearly all of them taxis picking up drunks from the nightclubs and taking them home at this time of night. Farid would certainly be in the camp for “dangerous elements”, as the government and her husband described their political opponents – somewhere far away in the desert. He might be asleep at this hour, but did he think of her when he was awake? She listened for his voice calling inside her, but she couldn't hear anything.

Someone in the building next door was trying to find a broadcasting station. His radio babbled a symphony of many different sounds. When it stopped abruptly, an alarming silence filled the sky. Rana closed her eyes, and imagined Farid lying on the couch in her studio.

Two cats were hissing at each other on a nearby roof. Then the
darkness swallowed them up. “Where are you, my darling?” she whispered. An airplane rent the silence. The windows of her studio vibrated. She wanted to take only one plane flight, with Farid out of this country, never mind where so long as she was with him. But his feet dragged so heavily. He clung to Damascus. The city was a part of his soul, though to her it was a cage. She saw the world outside, but couldn't get out through the strong mesh of the wire netting.

She went to the edge of the roof and looked through a gap in the wooden fence. All windows were shut now. People were sleeping behind them, with their daytime masks and their false teeth lying on their bedside tables. She had a mask too. She wasn't wearing it now, but it was always ready to hand, and she put it on whenever her husband or anyone else came near her.

“Farid,” she whispered, “can you hear me? You must stop wanting to change things! Listen to me. Let people live the lives of their own time, and let us save our love.”

Rain began to fall. She sat down on a chair; she wasn't cold. Over the last few years he hadn't been able to leave the rest of the world behind as he once did. He suffered when he was enjoying her company because the outside world was suffering. He wore a mask too, but he thought it was his real face, and that saddened her. When day dawned she began to freeze. Only now did she notice that she was wet to the skin.

“Come, my child,” said her father, taking her hand. She was happy, smiled at him, and went downstairs almost hovering, she felt so light. If her mother and Rami hadn't been standing there she would have thought she was in a dream.

“The doctor will be here soon,” said her husband, and for a moment she thought someone must have had an accident.

DAMASCUS, 1965 – 1968

When Josef's favourite poet, Nuri Hakim, was arrested, the intellectuals in the Café Havana said Hakim was lucky, for President Baidan, after all, was more humane than his predecessor, and hadn't had the poet's wife arrested too, or his three children, or his father.

Many of the guests in the Café Baladi didn't know who Hakim was, but they knew he was accused of blasphemy. He could consider himself lucky, for Al-Hallaj had been crucified for making similar remarks, and Hakim was still alive.

The intellectuals in the Café Kanyamakan, who sympathized with the Muslim Brotherhood, denounced President Baidan as weak, and suspected that he hadn't flung the poet into prison at all, but hidden him away in a villa with a bodyguard to protect him from the anger of the faithful.

The intellectuals in the Café Journal suspected provocation instigated by the Israelis. At a time when Damascus, under the courageous President Baidan, was challenging imperialism, along comes someone publishing a poem in a state newspaper full of linguistic errors, stylistic howlers, and injuries to the religious feelings of mankind, and getting it past the censor.