The Dark Side of Love (40 page)

Once again several shots rang out in the silence. Claire whispered, “Holy Virgin, I commit Farid to your hands. You know how I've suffered to bring a healthy child into the world. Holy Virgin, hear me. These are difficult times.”

The international situation was extremely uncertain. The French were still occupying Syria, but the Germans had invaded France in June. There were rumours that more and more German agents were being infiltrated into Damascus to prepare for the expulsion of the French. “More than a hundred Syrian nationalists, including that bastard Fausi Qawuqji, are already in Berlin with Hitler and will march with him. If he comes,” said Elias, “I shall pick up a gun. Better die with honour than live like a dog under Qawuqji.”

“Is he so bad?” asked Claire.

“He served here as an officer with both the French and the British. Such unscrupulous lickspittles are the worst. And he attacked Mala.”

“Holy Virgin, let's hope the Germans don't come,” she whispered.

Her gaze wandered from the drawing room window above the inner courtyard to the rather smaller room opposite. With the big dining room, it formed the north wing of the house. When she looked
through the open window, her eye fell on the large brown leather suitcase that had stood there, packed and ready for the last year, in case fighting spread to the whole of Damascus. It contained a few clothes for Elias and her, and a hundred pounds sterling in gold. “The sovereigns would last us a few months,” her husband had always said.

“Now we'll need another suitcase for Farid,” Claire whispered to herself.

The French occupying power had kept the country more or less peaceful for a long time after the great Syrian uprising of 1925. Elias admired the French high commissioner, whose firm hand had imposed order since the mid-1930s. The smallest misdemeanour was instantly punished with death, and the Arabs knuckled under. Now, however, the cards were being reshuffled.

General Louis Weygand, who had ruled Syria with a rod of iron until May, had been recalled to Paris to lead the French army against Hitler's forces. In Damascus the French had boasted that the Maginot Line was impregnable, and Hitler would perish miserably if he attacked it, but two weeks later the Germans were in the French capital.

The opinion of the colonial troops was split. Many wanted to collaborate with the Germans, and proclaimed their allegiance to Marshal Pétain's government, set up in Vichy by agreement with the Nazis. Others allied themselves with the Free French national committee led from exile in London by a young officer called Charles de Gaulle, to organize resistance to the Germans. There were violent confrontations between the two parties everywhere. The leadership of the French troops in Damascus came down on the side of the Germans, and declared war on Great Britain and the French exiles. There was chaos in the city, and trained German agents contributed to it.

It was said that large British forces were gathering in Palestine, on the southern border of Syria, to occupy the country again and free it of Nazi adherents. The Syrian administration governing under the French occupation didn't last two weeks. It fell, was formed again, fell once more. The chaos of war and the bad harvest brought the first famine since 1918.

The embittered masses carrying their dead to the cemeteries cried
out in pain, and saw the French and all other Christians as godless folk whom it was the first duty of Muslims to kill. Many Damascene Christians fortified their houses and kept large supplies of buckets full of water ready, for fire was the rabble's favourite weapon.

Every time she met her neighbours Claire could feel that they backed Hitler because they hated the French. Madeleine herself thought the French were barbarians, and told horror stories of humiliations inflicted by the soldiers. When Hitler's troops marched into Paris the Syrians hailed it as a victory. They were glad to see the hated French General Weygand, who had shed so much Syrian blood, overthrown by the Germans.

There were two foreign radio stations transmitting Arab news. One was located on Cyprus, and had close links with the British. It reported even the most appalling incidents factually, calmly, and in monotonous Arabic, as if it were reporting the yield of the wheat harvest in Argentina. Elias liked it because it gave detailed information. The other station broadcast from Berlin, and Claire listened to it when Elias wasn't around. The announcer was called Yunus al Bahri. Madeleine had told her about him. People tuned in only in secret in the Christian quarter, for fear of French informers, but in the Muslim quarter Claire saw a large group of men, over forty of them, sitting around a radio set and listening to the tinny voice of Yunus as he breathed out fire and brimstone against the British. The worst he called the French was bastards; the principal targets of his tirades of hatred were always and exclusively the British. They were a race of liars, he cried, hoarse with excitement. He was a master of passionate oratory, he recited poems and suras from the Koran, he reported news and gave vent to insults more freely than Claire ever heard anyone let fly before or indeed later. Yunus did not shrink from crying, after the music of an Austrian march rang out, “You English, here's some good news for you, Hitler's going to fuck your mothers. That's right, fuck
your mothers,” he repeated, in case any of his hearers thought they couldn't believe their ears.

On another occasion Yunus announced that, in a confidential interview, Hitler had said he was going to convert to Islam after his victory, just as Napoleon, Goethe and all other great men had done before him.

Claire knew that the tale of Goethe's conversion was only a myth, but Napoleon had indeed said he was converting and wore a turban when he was in Egypt, in order to deceive the Egyptians. She was surprised to hear that Hitler was going to become a Muslim, but the news rejoiced the hearts of millions of Arabs.

It was nearly four when the women, talking volubly, arrived at the door. After Claire had taken them into the drawing room and crossed the courtyard to fetch lemonade, she heard a bang in the distance again. She stood still for a moment, then went into the kitchen, took a block of ice out of the big drawer, and used a hammer to strike off a piece of it. Then, wrapping it in a white cloth, she broke the piece of ice into many small splinters.

Once again she heard a bang, followed by hollow thudding sounds. She looked over the courtyard at the drawing room. Her sister-in-law was standing at the window. “They're firing again,” called Malake in concern, stepping back into the darkness of the room. Claire picked up the tray of lemonade glasses and went back across the courtyard.

Elias will probably soon be calling the hired cab to take us to Mala, she told herself. “Taking our own car would be suicide,” he had said. The road led through Muslim villages. These days only a reliable Muslim cab driver could offer them any security and get them through safely.

“Come here to me,” said six-year-old Laila, bending over the baby lying in his small white-curtained cot. Her mother Malake rolled her eyes as her sister-in-law came into the drawing room with the glasses.
The pieces of ice in them made a soft whispering that sounded a little like people chattering in the distance.

“Let her play with him,” Claire reassured Malake. “Laila's a sensible girl. She knows how to treat babies.” She offered her guests the cool lemonade and some sweetmeats.

Ten women and three children sat down on the heavy, satin-covered sofas in the spacious drawing room. But Malake's little daughter sat on a stool beside the cot, enchanted by the baby. The big chandelier hanging from the intarsia-work ceiling, and the large wooden table with the same inlaid pattern in the middle of the room, gave the place a slightly religious atmosphere, and the women and children sat there stiffly, as if they were in church. Only Laila and the pretty, pale cot seemed out of place in all this weighty solemnity.

Claire had filled her afternoons with the company of women since Farid's birth. She hadn't been prepared for quite so many visitors, and felt both proud and embarrassed. She would never have guessed that she and Elias had so many genuine well-wishers among their friends and relations, or that many of them would face the stress and strain of a long journey from Aleppo or Beirut to come and see her, despite the blazing heat of July and the unrest in the countryside. She was sorry that she had to accommodate those who had come such a long distance in hotels. It had struck her, for the first time, that the house was very splendid but didn't have a single room where a guest could stay. Over the last two months she had been obliged to book twenty-seven hotel rooms. Elias had complained a little of the expense, but he too was happy to have a healthy son after those three miscarriages that had left him not only fearing for his wife's health but anxious in general. He was superstitious, and his father's curse haunted him even in his sleep.

Laila had the baby on her lap now and was gazing at him, her face transfigured. “May Our Lady keep him from envious eyes! He's looking at me as if he understood everything.”

“You'll drop the baby. Put him back in his cot like a good girl, and sit down with us and the other children.” Her mother was trying to show good manners, but Laila knew her own mind that day.

“Can't I stay the night with Farid? Please, Aunt Claire, let me
change his nappy and give him his bath, and then I can sleep the night on the floor beside his cot. It's nicer here than in the hotel.”

The women all laughed. “The hotel is fantastic! Claire even thought of flowers for us. And the errand boy says every morning that all her guests are royally treated because she's a queen,” said Laila's mother, hastily saving the situation.

Claire smiled, because the errand boys often came three times a day to ask if there was anything else they should do or provide for the hotel guests. Every time they called meant another tip of a few piastres.

However, this was the one house that Elias had wanted to buy, a handsome little palace that was perfect for him. All his life he had aimed to put on a good show, and more than anything he wanted to welcome his father to this house if the bishop's efforts to reconcile them really came to anything. Their reconciliation would take place here, and his father would see that his curse hadn't worked.

Claire was particularly unhappy about the house because of her sister-in-law. The journey from Beirut to Damascus was difficult and sometimes dangerous; bandits and rebels attacked cars and cabs, robbing and murdering their occupants, but all the same, Malake had insisted on coming to congratulate Claire in person.

That afternoon she kept reprimanding her daughter, but Laila took no notice. She was deep in her first conversation with her little boyfriend, and was sure he understood her. The visit lasted two hours, and she was whispering secrets to the baby all the time. Farid looked at her in surprise. Sometimes he laughed, then he frowned again, and his eyes seemed full of grief.

When Claire picked up her son to wish the guests goodbye, he began crying and stretched his little arms out desperately to Laila. She turned back to him once again. “I'll come and see you soon,” she whispered softly.

It wasn't until an hour later, when Farid had finally settled down, that Claire was able to collect the glasses, coffee cups, and plates now empty of sweetmeats, and take them to the kitchen. When she looked at the little table that had been standing in front of Laila, she was astonished. The child's lemonade, sugared almonds, and pistachio rolls – Laila's favourite sweetmeats – had not been touched.

Elias was late home from work that evening. He looked tired and desperate. “Shahbandar's been shot,” he said quietly, taking a sip of water. It was the first time Claire had heard the name. “One of the leaders of the 1925 uprising. A Syrian agent of the Germans killed him because he wanted to do a deal with the British. They're about to march into Damascus.”

“Is that bad news for us?” she asked anxiously.

“The bad part is that people only have to hear a shot fired to start slaughtering each other. After Shahbandar's assassination there'll be gunfire everywhere. A French officer turned his cannon on a village near Damascus and shot the whole place to pieces. It seems that one of his comrades was killed there a year ago. This time there were over twenty dead and a hundred wounded. A whole part of the village lies in ashes,” said Elias. His voice was faint, and he ate little that evening.