The Dark Side of Love (54 page)

Each season had its own game. Who decided when one period of games began and when it ended remained a mystery of childhood. Only marbles could be played at any time of the year.

In winter the children played with nuts and olive and date stones.
The winners ate the nuts and took the olive and date stones to the briquette factory. They burned well, and the children earned a few piastres that way. And they played cards more in winter than in spring.

Just before Easter they played with hardboiled eggs. Farid was never allowed to join in, because Elias and Claire thought egg-cracking was a primitive game of chance played only by the lower classes. They didn't mean harmless egg-cracking at home, something all Christians did as an Easter custom, but cracking eggs in competition, when you won or lost the eggs you had staked. All the same, Farid slunk off to the road junction with Jews' Alley, so that at least he could watch.

The game involved all kinds of cheating and fixing, and no day ever ended peacefully. Someone was always caught cheating, and then there was shouting and sometimes fighting. Suleiman was an artful devil. He purposely went looking for innocent children who had brought one or two hardboiled eggs from home to try their luck, and challenged them. Azar had once given him an Easter egg that couldn't be cracked because of the clever way its young inventor had prepared it. Only he could have thought of such a thing. First he bored a tiny hole in the shell of the raw egg and sucked out the contents, then he filled it with liquid plaster and waited for the plaster to dry hard as stone inside the shell. But Azar himself didn't have the nerve to cheat, so he gave Suleiman the prepared egg, and Suleiman won at least fifty eggs with it every Easter. If a grown-up got suspicious and asked to look at the egg he quickly disappeared into the crowd.

Just after Easter they began playing with apricot kernels, which were in great demand because they brought in a lot of money. There were the expensive sweet kernels, which were ground to a kind of marzipan, and almond oil was pressed from the rather smaller, bitter kernels.

Then the season came for balls to come flying out of the houses, while the children ran after them to work off all the pent-up energy of the winter months. Football and basketball were the two favourite games. There were always jokers playing in the ball games. Jokers – called after the joker in a pack of cards and known in some streets as “migrant birds” – were children who were too small and too young for the game, but wanted to play all the same. They could go out on
the pitch with the others, run around with them, and fling themselves into playing for one team or the other. They kicked the balls all over the place, threw themselves into the spirit of the thing and were accepted and always treated kindly, as they didn't belong to either team. Their goals didn't count, but they played, changed sides, and were happy in the belief that they were really part of the game.

When school closed at the end of June, and the streets were hard as stone in the drought, the children played with pebbles. There were all kinds of different games with both pebbles and marbles, all of them calling for stamina, a sure aim, and a good sense of height and speed.

There was constant cheating and trickery. A joke even claimed that Jesus, who wouldn't work miracles to save himself even on the cross, fell for the temptation when he was playing a game. One day, so the children in Farid's street said, Jesus and Muhammad were playing backgammon in heaven. When Jesus was losing and had reached the point where his last throw couldn't win the game even if was two sixes, Muhammad scoffed at him. “Give up, lad!” he said. “Nothing can help you out of this fix!” But his broad grin froze when Jesus, smiling, threw the dice and they landed on the board – two sevens! Muhammad was furious. “You just listen to me,” he spat. “That's no miracle, that's cheating!”

Josef's neighbour Halime had finally borne a healthy baby after three miscarriages. She was just twenty-two, and Josef said she was very superstitious. During her pregnancy she had done everything the midwife advised, and although she was a Christian she even went with her mother to a sheikh who lived nearby to get talismans from him.

Her mother-in-law had driven her nearly crazy, for she had been against the marriage all along, and was always trying to turn her son against his wife. Whenever he visited his mother he came home in a bad temper, and would shout at Halime for the least little thing.

Her own mother was an attractive woman of forty who looked younger and more feminine than her only daughter. She worried about Halime terribly, and was ready to do anything for her. She gave the Virgin Mary candles, she gave St. Anthony incense, she gave St. Barbara a silver heart. And she donated to charity three times running, because the sheikh said it was possible that the soul of some female ancestor of hers was in need of grace. In such cases the people of Damascus donated food or drink to passers by in the street. The charity offered in summer was usually
sus
, a black, bitter-sweet brew that tasted of liquorice. The passers by refreshed themselves with it, and wished for God to have mercy on the dead.

When Halime was in her sixth month of pregnancy she donated a huge vat of
sus
every week. The drinks sellers stood in Abbara Alley and generously handed it out to passers by, until one day a neighbour went to see the expectant mother and told her he kept dreaming of his dead father, who had seen Halime's ancestors, and they were in Paradise too. But they were calling for help, because great waves of
sus
were flooding the place. Many of the saints were already up in the treetops, begging for the charitable donations to stop. Halime listened to this request, and in the end she had a pretty and most important of all a healthy baby.

But her mother wanted to take precautions, and hurried off to visit the sheikh again. In the meantime, however, he had died, and his son was running the business now. He told her to be very careful to protect her grandchild from attack by the envious, and sold her large quantities of talismans to hang around the little baby. When the attractive woman left he held her hand for a long time and looked deep into her eyes. “We ought to get to know one another better in the baby's interests,” he said in conspiratorial tones. She felt her heart racing, but she suppressed her excitement and hurried back to her daughter. By night, however, as she lay beside her husband, she thought of the young sheikh.

Halime hung the talismans all around the baby. The attack would come from a blue-eyed woman, so the stars had told the sheikh. Her mother carefully kept watch on every woman who came to call, and if someone looked at the baby too long, or was too fulsome in her
praise of his good health, she would nudge Halime and prompt her to say, “God protect the boy and blind the envious.” And as soon as the visitor was gone Halime's mother softly recited two sayings from the Koran for protection against envy.

The baby stayed healthy. His mother fed him from full breasts. But then the inevitable happened. Halime's mother-in-law took her chance while the baby's other grandmother was in the kitchen making coffee. She glanced at the child, who had milk trickling from one corner of his mouth, and hissed like a snake. That was when it happened. Halime felt a stabbing pain in her nipple.

Next day her breasts were hanging as flat and limp as two empty bags, and she couldn't squeeze a drop of milk out of them. Her mother raised the alarm, the sheikh came at once, and listened to the story with a gloomy expression. It was clear to him at once who had hissed the spell specially designed to draw the milk out of a mother's breast. He asked for one of the mother-in-law's dresses with her smell still on it, or even better, three items of her clothing. He would see to the rest, he said.

Once Halime's mother had found a neighbour who was a nursing mother and could suckle her daughter's child too for a while, she hurried off to call on the mother-in-law and made up an excuse to go into the bathroom. There she abstracted two pairs of panties and a dress from the laundry basket. The sheikh burned the clothes in a copper cauldron, muttering something incomprehensible, while Halime's mother recited the suras from the Koran that were supposed to fend off the envious woman's ill will.

Finally the young sheikh sat down on the sofa with Halime's mother, murmured a mysterious spell, and looked at her with his large dark eyes in a way that made her feel weak at the knees. Taking her hand, he laid it on his heart. His ardent gaze rested on her nipples, and she felt like tearing off her clothes. The young sheikh spoke softly and urgently to her, while the room gradually filled with dense incense smoke.

“Now you must be very strong. Only you and your loving heart can help me to reach your daughter. You must pass through the spiral, and I will pass into it through you, and together we will free your
daughter.” So saying, he moved the woman's hand down from his heart to his lap. She didn't know what spiral he meant, but she felt his penis and found herself gasping for air.

“For heaven's sake, God protect it from envious eyes, but it will tear me apart,” she said, stroking his prick without looking down. It was huge, and hard as a stone. The woman could tell that the sheikh wasn't wearing any underpants.

“Then let's hang a couple of sesame rings between us,” said the sheikh, rising to his feet. His prick made his robe stick out like an Arab tent. He fetched five of the hand-sized sesame rings that are eaten in the morning and with tea in the afternoon in Damascus. Each ring was almost three centimetres thick. The woman glanced at the rings, and she thought she could just about manage the length that would be left.

“Good,” she said, relieved. “What must I do?”

The sheikh brought a large sheet of paper, the size of an unfolded newspaper, and the woman saw a saying in black ink written on it in the form of a spiral. The sheikh spread the paper out on the rug and asked the baby's grandmother to lie down on her belly so that her mouth was exactly over the word at the centre of the spiral. Then she was to begin slowly reading without moving the paper. This was the crucial part, he said, and she must concentrate on the words. He himself would have to work through her to reach her daughter, and she mustn't stop reading the saying aloud whatever happened.

“But put the sesame rings on,” she begged him.

The words of the spiral were written in Arabic characters, but apart from her daughter's name at the centre she couldn't understand a word of it. However, she tried hard to decipher the chain of written words, for she fervently desired to help Halime. Suddenly she felt him. A cry escaped her, but she read on. Soon she felt the fire inside her, and began thrusting in response. A little later she got up on her knees, propping her hands on the large sheet of paper.

“Break off one of the sesame rings,” she begged, for the fire was blazing higher and higher. Her longing grew ever greater, and the sheikh broke off ring after ring. Halime's mother came to the end of the spiral and entered a heaven she had never known before. Suddenly
she felt light as a feather. She was airborne, dazed half by pleasure and half by the incense.

Three days later the milk came back into Halime's breasts. After that her mother visited the young sheikh every week, and she never forgot to take five sesame rings with her.

Suleiman's grandfather read a single book over and over again all through his life: the Bible. He read slowly, very slowly. His image was indelibly imprinted on the memory of all who saw him: bending over the big book, stealing a little more light to read by from the last rays of the setting sun. He would never read by artificial light.

And when he was asked what he wanted most he would reply, “A good copy of the Bible in heaven.” He would sit under a tree there, he said, and read day and night, for in heaven the sun never sets.

As the years passed his eyes grew weak, and he bought a pair of glasses. There were no opticians or eye specialists around at the time, you just went to the general stores where all kinds of glasses were hanging, and tried them on until you found one that was right for you.

The glasses changed Grandfather's face. He didn't look kindly and wise any more, but tense, fearful, and constantly surprised. When Suleiman said so to his grandmother, she laughed. “Yes, he's sometimes tense with fear, and he's been surprised ever since he was born.”

One day Grandfather died. Suleiman had been away for three days with his mother. When they came back he was lying in the living room, already stiff in death. The boy grieved for a long time. The old man had been the best grandfather in the world, an excellent and patient craftsman, and a good friend to his grandson.

Two weeks later Suleiman found Grandfather's glasses. They were lying on the shelf behind the Bible. He hurried to his grandmother with them. “Grandma,” he cried breathlessly, “Grandfather won't be able to read in heaven.”

His grandmother looked at him for a moment, rather confused, and then she smiled. “He'll be finding his way around heaven for now, and when I join him I'll take him his glasses.”

Six months later Grandmother fell very ill, and when Suleiman heard his mother tell his uncle at lunch that she was afraid Grandma would soon follow Grandpa, the boy heaved a sigh of relief. He ran to his room, fetched the glasses, and put them down on his grandmother's bed.

“Don't forget the glasses,” he whispered, and she laughed so much that she had a coughing fit. Then she stroked his head and picked the glasses up.

Three days later she was dead. The neighbours were not a little surprised when they saw what was in the coffin with her. Usually people put a rosary in a dead woman's hands. But Grandmother's hands were holding Grandfather's glasses.