The Dark Side of Love (6 page)

DAMASCUS, MALA, SPRING 1953

Claire woke him. There was alarm in her voice. When Farid sat up in bed he heard screams in the village. He ran out on the balcony, with his mother following him barefoot in her nightdress.

He guessed at once that his father was already among the crowd by the village well, and he knew inside him why. Astonished, he looked at the burning elm tree on the distant hill.

The icy wind made him shiver, and only slowly did he realize that he himself was responsible for the fire. Its distant flames shone like a mighty torch, bathing the village in an infernal light.

Some of the peasants hurried across the village square and past the Mushtak house. One young man stopped opposite the balcony and stood there for a moment staring up at him, then shook his head angrily, spat on the ground, and hurried on. The inhabitants of Mala were well known for their gloomy reticence. Farid knew the spitting was meant for him.

His mother's cold hand made him jump. All her life Claire was a chilly mortal, just like his girlfriend Rana. He led his mother back to bed and lay down beside her. She fell asleep at once, and soon he heard her rhythmic breathing. Her features were finely drawn: she
had smooth black hair, a delicate little nose, almond-shaped eyes under those closed lids, and skin as white as snow. Farid stroked his mother's face.

He lay awake, looking up at the ceiling.

The Mushtaks were a powerful clan, but they were still strangers in Mala. George, the founder of the family, had taken refuge in this Christian mountain village forty-five years ago. Farid and his many cousins were only the third generation. You didn't really belong in the village until the seventh generation. That was the time it was supposed to take before you could speak the village dialect without any accent, and feel the characteristic pride deeply embedded in the hearts of even the poorest of the poor in Mala.

Farid had grown up in Damascus, and since his mother was a Damascene he had always spoken Arabic rather than the harsh dialect of Mala, which he understood without any difficulty but could never speak faultlessly. Nor was he for a moment proud of the village. Why would he be proud? Just because the ancestors of its modern inhabitants were said to have known Jesus in person, having fled from Galilee after his crucifixion? After that, as if obsessed by a secret mission, the peasants of Mala had defended their religion with their lives. You might have thought the fate of world Christianity depended on this one little village's readiness to fight for it.

Farid felt something of a stranger in the village church. And the gruff, silent villagers were strange to him too; they seemed to be in perpetual mourning in their black peasant garments, they smiled only rarely, but could always find an excuse for drinking and brawling. Even less did he understand the fanatical mutual hatred of the Mushtaks and Shahins, the two most powerful families in the village. And least of all could he see why deep-rooted hostility existed between the Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church in Mala. It was not uncommon for Muslims to mediate between quarrelling Christians.

One incident in particular had shaken Farid badly. A retired teacher and ten or twelve young people had renovated a dilapidated but attractive stable, put in new windows, doors and bookshelves, and wired it for electric light. The stable belonged to the Orthodox convent of St. Thecla, and the abbess had let the man have it free. The teacher, who had no children of his own, was a great booklover. He installed a village library in the renovated stable, donated all of his own seven thousand volumes as its basic stock, and then, over a period of months, went begging more from publishers and booksellers in Damascus. He finally came back with a truckload of books. By the time the library opened in the summer of 1950, he had accumulated twenty thousand volumes.

But the library was closed down again a month later, for the teacher had forgotten two things. He was related by marriage to the Shahin family, and in addition he was Orthodox. The Mushtaks and their Catholic supporters moved quickly. The teacher had been a communist in his youth, they claimed, he used to give the children candy and whisper that it came from Uncle Stalin. It was also said that he would take pretty children on his lap and indecently assault them.

None of this was true except that the teacher really had been a member of the Communist Party for three years. The rest of the claims were all malicious lies, but they spread like wildfire, because they had half the village behind them. After a short talk with Lieutenant Marwan, the new police chief, the abbess dropped her support for the teacher. The Mushtaks, and many other Catholics with them, celebrated the closing of the library with dancing, music, and wine.

The last remnants of any sympathy for the dusty village died in Farid that day.

Embittered, the old teacher withdrew to his little house, to come out of it again for the first and last time six years later – in a coffin. No one but his wife followed it, by her husband's express wish. He did not want either friends or relations at his funeral.

Farid's family didn't visit Mala only in summer, to escape the sultry
air of the capital city of Damascus so that they could sleep at night in the mountains; year after year they also came for a whole week at Easter to commemorate the founder of the family. Friends and relations prayed with them for the soul of that first Mushtak, not just in church on Easter Sunday but for all the seven days of Easter, hoping that in God's bosom he would find the peace he had never known in life. Most important of all, however, the guests, friends and strangers alike, were royally entertained for an entire week. Life in the village seemed to be one long orgy of guzzling. Columns of peasants converged on Mala from the countryside all around. Beggars and tricksters, gypsies and craftsmen, everyone came to join in the week of celebrations.

Easter week was very much the Mushtak family's affair. Christmas, however, was firmly in the hands of the Shahin clan, which was involved in a blood feud with the Mushtaks. The village was split: half its inhabitants followed the Greek Orthodox rite and with it the rich Shahin family, while the other half belonged to the Roman Catholic Church. In Mala, the Roman Catholic Church was almost entirely financed by the Mushtaks.

Since the two churches celebrated their festivals according to different calendars, Easter often presented an extremely macabre spectacle. No soon had Jesus risen from the tomb and ascended into heaven by the Western, Gregorian calendar of the Catholics than the Orthodox Christians were having him arrested, tried, and crucified on Good Friday by the Eastern, Julian calendar. The Muslims had cause for mirth every year.

At Christmas, however, the windows and the church in the Orthodox quarter were brightly illuminated, and the Shahins celebrated all week until the second of January. Family members even came all the way from America just to be at the party. The Mushtaks' houses, on the other hand, remained dark at Christmas, and the Catholic church celebrated the day as modestly as if Jesus were only some third-rate saint.

Farid's mother, a typical city dweller, regarded the whole thing, her husband's behaviour included, with some amusement as earthy peasant folklore. In all these years, she had never found her way to
anywhere near the true soul of Mala. Nor did she want to. Instead, she made the villagers respect her for her generosity, and she also distanced herself from the Mushtaks. She was the only woman in the clan known everywhere by her first name, as “Madame Claire”.

The local dishes of Mala, which always smelled of sheep or goat urine, were not to her taste, nor were the cakes baked there, and certainly not the dried fruits that the village people offered visitors. She amused herself by watching the comings and goings in the streets and the village square from her balcony as if she were in a theatre. Claire loved vaudeville drama.

Together with autumn, Easter was the best season in Mala. There was summer sunshine, but without the disadvantage of summer heat. A fresh breeze blew from the mountains of Lebanon, still snow-covered at this time of year. Nature was already in full bloom, and the picturesque rocks on the outskirts of the village were surrounded by young green shoots.

But Farid felt ashamed of his father, who underwent a metamorphosis every Easter. The man who played the part of distinguished and elegant city gentleman in town, larding his Arabic with French words, changed on arrival in Mala and became a grunting, bawling, quarrelsome peasant who staggered home night after night on the verge of alcohol poisoning. At home he seldom laughed; in the village street he was a clown and a tiresome, sentimental groper of women.

Farid was embarrassed when he was with the villagers because, particularly when drunk, they were free with their comments and gibes, always on the same subject: his father's affairs with women and the outsize thing that Elias had between his legs. The assembled men of the village often laughed at Elias's shy son. Only Sadik the village miller, who was hard of hearing, never bothered him with sly digs – but talking to Sadik was hard work. You had to shout the whole time. Sadik was funny when he was telling secrets. He acted like a man whispering, but in fact he broadcast his allegedly confidential news at such loud volume that even the dead in the distant cemetery must have heard it.

“The ones who laugh loudest are the men whose wives your father's already screwed,” Sadik had shouted in his ear at the barber's
last year. Farid had gone red in the face, and hated the village, where life seemed to consist solely of working in the fields, guzzling, drinking, and crapping everywhere. The villagers were also puffed up with pride because Jesus Christ had, allegedly, saved them from ruin.

“If I were Jesus,” Farid had said to his mother when he was only ten, “I'd appear above the altar on Sunday – even if it was only for a minute – and shout in their hypocritical faces: ‘You can all kiss my arse, you and your horrible Christianity.'”

Farid could always find interesting children to play with in Mala in summer. They came to spend the vacation here with their parents, prosperous city dwellers. In the company of those children, he could feel that the village was a place for adventure after all. They turned the rocky landscape into the film set of a Western, and played cowboys and Indians or cops and robbers all day, quite often riding real horses and donkeys.

But at Easter he thought Mala a dreary place. He was just nine when his mother saw him hanging around the apartment one day, counting the hours until they went back to Damascus. She suggested taking a nice picnic and going for a long walk with some of the village children, saying they could show him the local countryside and the trail of his forebears.

At first he didn't want to, but then he joined the other children after all, and soon they were out and about in the mountains every day. The village boys hadn't the faintest notion of his forebears or the history of the place, but Farid, whose physical speed and stamina were considered outstanding back in Damascus, had to admit that hard as he might try, he couldn't compete out here in the wilderness. In the village square these boys looked slow and ponderous, but out in the open country they suddenly became lithe and fast. They ran like young gazelles, scrambled up smooth, erect tree trunks like lizards, chased hares and rock partridges like hounds. Thirteen-year-old
Abdullah could kill any living creature, however swift, with a pebble from his sling. His first catch when Farid went out with them was a rock partridge. Soon after that he brought down a hare. The boys fell on his prey, and within a very short time the partridge and the hare had been plucked, skinned, neatly gutted, and washed. They broiled the meat over a fire near the old elm tree, throwing thyme and other herbs into the flames, and a pleasant aroma rose into the air. Farid had never tasted such deliciously seasoned meat before.