The Dark Side of Love (50 page)

It was a sunny February day, and as Grandmother Lucia told the story, Nagib had found one of his rabbits sick that morning. Grandfather loved rabbits, and had built his pets a beautiful hutch. He never
had many of them, at most six or seven. Farid didn't like the rabbits, so he never went to the east-facing terrace of his grandparents' house where the hutch stood, although hutch was hardly the word for it. Grandfather had lovingly built a natural enclosure with a stream of water, caves, and sunny terraces, all surrounded by wire netting. There was a bench opposite the hutch where he often sat for hours on end, happy as a child as he watched his rabbits running about. Grandmother Lucia hated them.

So that morning Grandfather had been sitting on his bench, as he so often did. There was a big black rabbit on the old man's lap. He was worried; it wasn't well. Grandmother had looked out of the kitchen and saw Nagib sitting there without a scarf. She opened the kitchen window and called to him to put something warmer on, but he told her he'd come in soon. Lucia made coffee. When she turned to look again, he was sitting there all hunched up while the black rabbit hopped merrily about the terrace.

“Nagib,” cried Grandmother, full of foreboding. But Grandfather couldn't hear her any more.

Farid had just come home from school when the phone rang. “Oh, no, for God's sake! I'll come at once!” Claire called down the receiver, and she rushed out of the room.

“What's happened?” he asked.

“My father's dead.”

Grandfather was lying on the bed. Neighbours and relations were there already, and Claire was crying like a little girl. Farid had never seen her shed tears before. She reacted to neither friends nor family members, and he had a feeling that she didn't even recognise him. She just wept and kept kissing her father's hands and forehead, and she was talking to him. “Why did you leave me so quickly, why didn't you say goodbye?” Nothing could comfort her.

Claire heard nothing and no one. Even when Elias arrived and embraced her lovingly she didn't notice him, but sat lost in her thoughts beside Grandfather's body.

“I'll have to go now, there's a lot to organize,” Elias whispered to his son. “You stay with Mama and help her.”

Even when Lucia went to bed, Claire and Farid stayed with the dead man. Farid didn't feel at all tired. “Do you see his smile?” Claire asked in a low voice at about midnight. And indeed Grandfather was smiling with as much amusement as if his death were a joke. Farid noticed Grandfather's new shoes, and he remembered other corpses who had worn brand-new shoes in their coffins. Presumably God set great store by cleanliness.

“Do you know why he's smiling?” asked Claire, with the ghost of a grin around her mouth. “He's laughing at Grandmother's superstitions and our own horror.”

“What superstitions?” asked Farid.

“She believes the rabbit was mortally sick, it palmed its own death off on Grandfather, and that cured it. She told everyone so, and late this afternoon she gave the butcher all the rabbits for free.”

“But that's stupid,” he said. “The poor creatures can't help it.”

“Come out with me a minute, but put something warm on,” Claire said suddenly.

Farid put on his jacket and followed her. She left the second-floor drawing room, went along the arcades around the inner courtyard to the terrace on the east of the house, wrapped herself in a rug, and sat on the bench. Shivering, Farid sat down beside her. It was full moon.

“This is where he was sitting with the rabbit on his lap, and then his head tipped a little way forward as if he'd gone to sleep. Grandmother knew at once that he was dead, because he never fell asleep when he was with his rabbits. He was always far too curious and interested in everything for that.”

The enclosure was empty. Even the little stream of water had stopped flowing. Farid felt a strange loneliness. He pressed close to his mother, and Claire wrapped her rug around him.

Farid's had strange feelings when he went to church. He took little notice of the Mass itself; in spite of the incense and gorgeously coloured vestments, it left him cold. But his gaze strayed, and when it fixed on one of the pictures on the walls, he wandered back in time to the dramatic events recorded there in oils.

It was obligatory for the pupils at the elite Catholic school to show up in the school yard washed and neatly dressed on Sundays, and then proceed two abreast to the church. He was happy enough to go, but he didn't like having his presence checked on the way into church every Sunday. Anyone who didn't come was punished first thing in the morning on Monday in front of the whole school. Only Muslims and Jews were excused attendance at Mass.

For years he made the church service into a memory game. He divided the Mass up to fit the fifty kilometres of road between Damascus and Mala. Both Mass and the journey to Mala lasted about an hour. The idea of the game was to suit every sentence spoken or act performed in the service to one of the various places that the bus passed on the way to Mala. Farid assigned a village, a factory, a ruin, or a tree to every
kyrie eleison
and every hymn.

He also liked to imagine the bus constantly losing parts of itself along the way, cutting curves so that women and children screamed and the chickens who always travelled under the seats with their feet tied flapped their wings. And when his bus finally reached Mala, clattering, hooting its horn and raising dust, he was glad because the church service was over.

But after a while his imaginary bus ride bored him, and he found wandering among the pictures and statues in the church more exciting. For almost three years he always sat in the same place, a pew with a good view of almost all the paintings hanging near the altar.

He liked the angels best. They were not gentle but often looked positively violent, armed with swords, spears, and fire. They were strange beings, their faces radiating feminine charm, while their bodies and posture were warlike and virile. For Farid, however, their greatest fascination lay not in this contradiction but in imagining how it would
feel to be such a creature himself, both airy and of the earth, able to walk on foot or rise in the air with powerful wings, free of all earthly bonds.

He had favourite pictures, but the light decided which painting or which figure attracted his attention on any given Sunday. However, the great cross behind the altar where Jesus had died with an infinitely sorrowful expression on his face was always at the centre. The letters I.N.R.I. stood above the Saviour's head, and Farid always tried to understand this word INRI as a secret message.

Every time he saw the crucified Jesus he couldn't help thinking of his friend Kamal Sabuni, who like a few other sons of prosperous Muslim families went to the elite Christian school. Kamal thought Christianity interesting, but he could make nothing of the crucifixion of a God who could have turned the entire Roman Empire into a swamp and the Caesars and their soldiers into ants, just by lifting his little finger. And the young Muslim thought the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost a very strange idea.

“Muslims are too primitive to understand it,” said Farid's father, but even he couldn't explain the Holy Ghost, although he knew a lot about religion.

INRI. What message lay behind it? The religious instruction teacher at school explained the meaning of the letters in Arabic: Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. But that wasn't mysterious enough for Farid. Why did INRI have such an effect on him?

“It was all part of the big theatrical show,” said Josef portentously. “He had to be killed in the Roman way. They were the rulers, so the notice had to be written in their language.”

In his mind's eye, as Josef talked, Farid saw Pilate the Roman governor standing pale, slender-boned, and full of revulsion before the rabble of what, to him, was a strange and dusty province.

“Pilate found himself on a kind of stage,” Josef went on, “facing a trembling young man, and he, the Roman, quite liked him: a young Easterner condemned to death and abandoned by his whole clan. So there stood sensitive Pilate, a man who didn't like the death penalty, and opposite him was a young revolutionary who simply wanted to get dying over and done with and didn't even notice when he was
offered a way out. Anyway, but for the Romans his death wouldn't have had any INRI or the huge symbolical weight of the cross. Jesus would have died a miserable death by stoning, that was the usual kind of execution in the Middle East at the time. A heap of stones as a symbol wouldn't have lasted for even a century. But,” said Josef, lowering his voice as he always did when he was about to broach the subject of conspiracies, “I.N.R.I. didn't just mean Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudae-orum, it was a coded message to the Romans saying: Iustum necare reges Italiae: It is just to kill the kings of Italy. That's what it says in this book,” concluded Josef, showing Farid a work about Italian secret societies.

“Parents are weird,” said Josef. “They never ask if you want to be born, they just go ahead and produce you. And they don't often ask any children they already have if they want a new baby in the family. They have it off with each other and expect the rest of the family to be glad. But in terms of the actual results, the cost of those five minutes of pleasure would give even a math teacher goose bumps.

I mean, what harm did I ever do Rimon and Madeleine for them to dump me in this house full of females? Did I ask them to do it? I'd have liked to be an only child with two ordinary parents, mother and father, and then I'd have some peace now. ‘Mind what you're doing, Josef! That's not a thing to say to a girl! Josef, dear, we don't say that kind of thing when there are women in the room! Josef, that's no way to speak to your sister! Josef! Josef! Josef! The hell with their Josef! He's not me. I'm not him. I've been secretly calling myself Jacob for some time, so when they call for Josef I don't feel as if it's me they want.

And what about your own respected father? Did he ask the rest of us if he could put you in a monastery? He'd have had a shock if he did. Elias Mushtak, sir, we'd have said, we don't give a damn for your monks. Leave Farid here with us. He hates the monastery idea. We
don't mind praying for the elm tree that burned down, but leave your son here. I'm just beginning to like him. But what does your good father go and do?

I overheard Madeleine and Claire talking yesterday, and they're dead against it too, but they don't get a chance to open their mouths.”

Josef looked up, and for the first time ever Farid saw tears in his tough friend's eyes. This was at the beginning of June 1953, a week before he left for the monastery.

DAMASCUS, 1940 – 1953

Damascus isn't so much a city, a place marked in an atlas, as a fairy tale clothed in houses and streets, stories, scents and rumours.

The Old Town has fallen victim to epidemics, wars and fire countless times in its eight thousand years of history, and for want of anywhere better was always rebuilt on the same site. The hand that has moulded Damascus to this day was that of a Greek town planner, Hippodamos of Miletus. He divided the city into strictly geometrical quarters with fine streets, all laid out at right angles. The Greeks loved straight lines, whereas the Arabs preferred curves and bends. Some say it has something to do with their exhausting journeys straight across the desert. A bend shortens the distance, at least for the eye. Others claim that life is expressed in curves: the olive tree bows under the weight of its fruits, a pregnant woman's belly is curved, the branches of a palm tree form a rounded shape. The old Damascenes had a more prosaic explanation: the more bends in your streets, the easier they are to defend.