The Dark Side of Love (34 page)

“Who? Musa? You're Musa's fiancée? He came round some time back, he's drowning his sorrows in chilled arrack with his friends. You can go home, don't worry.”

She wanted to ask him to find Musa for her, but suddenly her tongue wouldn't obey her. A rift the size of the rocky ravine in Mala opened up inside her, splitting her heart. She had to make an effort to preserve her composure in front of the man, and dragged herself out.

At the time her mother was living in a villa in Arnus Avenue, an exclusive area. It was about two kilometres away, but she decided to
take a cab. Several horse-drawn vehicles were standing ready near the Hidjaz train station. She picked the best and didn't haggle over its price. When the cabby wondered aloud what a woman was doing out and about on her own by night, however, she snapped at him to mind his own business and take her to Arnus Avenue, near the French gendarmerie.

As soon as the old cab driver heard that address he cheered up, for only the rich and powerful lived there. Fares to that quarter always gave generous tips.

“Just as you say, miss, I won't meddle, but I'm a father myself, I'd be worried about such a beautiful young lady. I have three children, you see, my daughter Hayat, she's about your age, and if you'll permit me I'd say she's as pretty as you, not that I mean to give any offence.”

Cabbies are always talkative, but this one could compete with my mother's new radio set, thought Claire. His name was Salim, he said, and in the normal way he drove between Beirut and Damascus, but there wasn't much money in it these days, for hardly anyone travelled that road now, so he'd switched to the city, which wasn't so easy, because the regular town cabbies didn't like to see the bread taken out of their mouths. They attacked cabbies from the country and robbed them of their day's takings. But he had no choice, he said, he had those two horses ahead of them to feed, not to mention a wife and three children. That made him braver than a lion, he told her, and the town cabbies sensed it, riffraff that they were, so they left him, Salim, alone if they had any sense.

He talked and talked, and suddenly she didn't mind any more. The cab was driving through the mild summer night. A cool westerly breeze was blowing into the back of the vehicle, and the horses' hooves beat out a soothing rhythm on the cobblestones of the streets.

Claire heaved a sigh of relief when she saw the lighted windows of her home, and paid the cabby generously. Even before she reached the door she could hear the Italian songs that her mother listened to on the radio night after night.

Two weeks later she was sitting beside her mother in the bus to Mala, feeling utterly miserable.

She loved Musa, but something had broken for ever that night at the boxing club. He had come to see her, he'd been very nice to her, and he tried to explain that he'd been ashamed to look her in the face that night. But for the first time she felt a void in her heart not when he left, but while he was sitting there with her.

The village felt bleaker than ever to Claire that summer. Only the French novels and books of poetry that she had brought with her proved to be life-rafts. For days on end she followed Julien Sorel's fate in
Le Rouge et le Noir
, she sought comfort in Verlaine's love poems. She also took refuge in André Gide's
Les Faux Monnayeurs
, George Bernanos's
Sous le Soleil de Satan
, Guy de Maupassant's
Bel Ami
, Colette's
Chéri
and
La Vagabonde
.

Her mother left her alone, was out and about all the time, saw visitors, or stayed close to her radio. For the first time, in her loneliness, Claire felt some kind of kinship with Lucia. And for the first time she briefly sensed a certain closeness when they ate or went for short walks together.

One sunny day in early July, she met Elias. She always laughed about it later, for their meeting place was anything but romantic. It was in the vegetable dealer Tanius's store on the village square. Claire liked Tanius, who was always kindly disposed to her. Whenever she went to the shop he had a joke ready, bringing it out in his broken standard Arabic. As a rule Tanius, like all the villagers, spoke the local dialect.

That day she had just finished reading Stendhal's
Le Rouge et le Noir
, and oddly enough was more moved by Mathilde's fate than by the tragic, dramatic death of her lover Julien Sorel.

In the store, she put a few tiny cucumbers on the scales handed to her over the counter by Tanius. One little cucumber fell to the floor, and suddenly a slender hand was giving it back to her. Claire hadn't noticed the young man before, and now he was looking at her with the eyes of a child who had all the sorrows of the world within him.

“
Merci bien, monsieur.
”

“
Avec plaisir, mademoiselle
,” said the man. He wasn't much taller
than Claire herself. He had left the shop again by the time she was through with her mother's order. Tanius smiled when she turned around, expecting to find the stranger still standing behind her. “That's Elias, a fine young man. Amazing that a prickly thistle like George Mushtak could bring such a flower into the world.”

When she left the store, with a small errand boy carrying the heavy basket of vegetables for her, she saw Elias walking down the street by himself. He had just reached her house, and she wished he would stop so that she could catch up with him.

And sure enough, he did turn to look at her. Her heart fluttered with joy as if she had just won a prize. Claire was never to forget that moment and the sense of delight that she had never known before. She was rejoicing in a magical power that, at that moment, she had at her command.

“You called to me?” he asked in fluent French. She felt she had to tell him the truth.

“Yes, monsieur, I wanted to ask what an educated man like you is doing in this dusty village?” She sent Butros the errand boy on ahead with the basket of vegetables, telling him to leave it at the door, and gave the boy ten piastres. Butros beamed all over his face, for that was as much as he earned in a week working for the vegetable dealer.

Claire and Elias talked to each other for a long time outside the Sururs' vacation house. Elias knew many of the books she loved, and he could recite Baudelaire's
Les Fleurs du Mal
by heart. When she told him she went to the Besançon school, he smiled. “Besançon is a small town, but it gave mankind a great gift: Victor Hugo.”

Claire felt hypnotized. She would have liked to put out her hand and touch Elias, because she could hardly believe all this was real. Here in the middle of a village at the end of the world, a young man had said lovelier things to her in the short time since they met than anyone else in her whole seventeen years of life. She felt a need to sit down and listen to this fascinating man, tell him all the things she kept locked in her heart. She had to make up her mind quickly.

“Will you come in for a coffee in an hour's time?” she asked. And Elias simply said, “
Avec plaisir.
”

In the brief hour before she came back she knew in her heart that
she had fallen under this man's spell. She took off her engagement ring and put it away in a little box.

It was something that Claire had never in her life expected: from visit to visit, she realized that she was counting the hours until Elias came to see her again. Her heart betrayed her, wrecking her intention of waiting for their meetings with calm composure. When he touched her with his gentle hands, she felt violent excitement in every vein. But his mere presence excited her too. He was witty, he could laugh on the slightest provocation, but he could also be very jealous, although that was just an expression of his feelings for her.

They read a great deal together, and talked of love and grief, fulfilment and abstinence, loyalty and longing. Claire felt as if she had only half existed until the day she met Elias, and now had found her missing other half. It did not escape her mother's notice.

“That young man is your own kind – forget about your father's primitive friend and send him back his engagement ring,” Lucia advised her at breakfast two weeks later. Claire's jaw dropped with surprise, and her mother remarked dryly, “You'll have to chew, you know, food doesn't go down of its own accord. Elias is from a distinguished family,” she continued. “The Mushtaks are real men, rich, generous, made of granite, not like that feeble chauffeur who'll let a dwarf knock him about in the ring.” Lucia shook her head. “But Nagib always did keep such dreadful company.”

For the first time in years, Claire felt a deep need to hold her mother close. She stood up, hugged her and kissed her. Lucia stroked her head. “You must be very generous in what you offer Elias. The Mushtaks are magnanimous in all they do, and I feel sure this latest sprig of theirs doesn't like people to be faint-hearted either.”

She had known and respected George Mushtak for years, and the old man respected the Signora too, although he avoided any close friendship with her. Rumours of her attitude to men kept him away.
She insisted that her lovers must wash thoroughly and shave their pubic hair, and was said to treat them like horses, riding and even whipping them.

Once, when Elias didn't visit for several days, Claire felt quite sick with longing. She summoned Butros the vegetable dealer's errand boy, gave him fifty piastres, and told him to look for Elias and ask him to come and see her at once.

“He goes up to the mountains at dawn and doesn't come back until after dark,” the observant boy immediately told her.

“What's he doing in the mountains?”

“I don't know, lady. My master says there was such a quarrel between father and son that everyone in the street could hear them.”

“Well, I want you to wait for him first thing tomorrow and ask him to come and see me before sunrise. And don't say a word about it to anyone else. Swear!”

“I swear, lady. I hate tell-tales,” said the lad, who wasn't even twelve yet, gratefully pocketing the money.

She couldn't sleep all night, and in those hours of darkness she realized that the purgatory they talked about in church consisted of waiting and longing.

When two roosters crowed by turns in the distance, she got up and went to the window. The night sky was growing pale in the east. Claire looked over at the village square and saw him hurrying along the street, a small and inconspicuous figure.

Her heart beat fast. She groped about for her dress in the dark, couldn't find it, and cursed her own untidiness. Suddenly she felt his hands. She was not alarmed, just surprised by the speed and silence with which he had made his way to her.

“I love you,” he said, and he was weeping. He held her close, and she felt his head. It was like the head of a child seeking protection.

“I love you too, dear heart,” she whispered, her voice breaking with emotion. Then she kissed his forehead and pressed him to her breast. After a while he calmed down and began telling her his story.

He told her everything, and Claire felt a great need to care for this boy who had stumbled from one misfortune to another. He told her frankly about his desire for women, and his bad luck when his father
had caught him with Nasibe. He described his wretched situation when the Muslim peasants, running wild in the hunger riots of 1933, set fire to the Jesuit monastery in Damascus. He had come back to Mala like a whipped dog. But his father wouldn't speak to him, and derided him at every opportunity. As if not the mob but he, Elias, had attacked the Jesuits in Damascus, his father had accused him of failure. And whenever he asked to be sent to study with the Jesuits in Beirut, he had met with a refusal.

He told her about his bad luck working in the French provisions store. Early this summer, however, his father had suddenly turned friendly to him, had even forgiven him for all his faults in front of the assembled family and forbidden his brother Salman to hit him. He wanted him, Elias, to start breeding horses; it was a gold-mine, said old Mushtak. You could get fine Arab horses at a good price from the Bedouin, and then build up a large business.

He had been willing enough, he said, because he loved horses, but now he had found out that his father's sudden change of heart was the result of a secret deal with the village elder Habib Mobate. He, Elias, was to marry Mobate's daughter.

“A miserable bunch of tricksters, that family, but they know how to cheat peasants. And I'm supposed to waste my life among them,” groaned Elias, telling her that Habib Mobate had made his money by secretly registering his name with the French as owner of all the land in the neighbourhood that had been common property under the Ottoman Empire. It consisted of fields, mountains, and valleys of incalculable value. The farmers never noticed, for Mobate let them go on using the land for grazing, but when anyone tried cultivating a plot of land, the village elder got the gendarmes to drive him off it, so it was two decades before the village discovered that entire hills and huge expanses of grazing belonged to the Mobate clan.