The Dark Side of Love (103 page)

Josef was ranting, and Farid listened. Arab society, he raged, hadn't moved on since the time of the Mongol hordes. Not only had it been mummifying its ancient customs for generations, it taught you to lie and deceive as well. Just as if cities had never been built but we were still living in the desert, the clan was everything and the individual nothing.

“But not an endless nothing,” Farid said, trying to make his friend laugh. It didn't work. Josef was head over heels in love with Nadia, but he hardly knew her, and their engagement had taken her further from him rather than bringing them closer. More and more often, she struck him as a split personality. With her family she was conformist and docile, at the university she was an enlightened, lively woman.

And now he was to marry in haste just to get rid of her pest of a brother Girgi. “In Europe a couple can be happy or not, live together or part from each other, just as love dictates. Here you get married or divorced for hundreds of different reasons, and none of them has anything to do with love.”

The trouble was he couldn't decide what to do, and that put him in a bad temper.

“Come on, let's go to the cinema. They're showing
West Side Story
. You asked me to tell you when they were screening it again …”

“Exactly, that's what I need now,” Josef interrupted his friend. “A film to make me forget this ghastly society of ours for a couple of hours.”

The film was moving. It wasn't just that it was yet another version of the Romeo and Juliet story, this time set in the slums of New York. They were both fascinated by the dancing of the young cast and Leonard Bernstein's music. When they came out of the cinema Josef was in a much better temper, and invited his friend to the Havana for a coffee, hoping to pick up some unofficial news there.

But before they had finished their coffee, a man of dwarfish stature climbed on a table in the middle of the room and tapped his empty glass with a knife. The place fell silent. “I have to announce, gentlemen,” he cried in emotional tones, “that the Damascus brothel is closing its doors for ever at eight sharp tomorrow morning.”

Expressions of outrage were heard.

“You omen of bad luck!” said the café owner angrily, for within a few minutes the men were rushing out.

“How much money do you have with you?” asked Josef.

“Twenty lira.”

“That ought to be enough.” He paid for their coffee and left the café with Farid. They were the last to go. The proprietor just shook his head.

There was chaos in the brothel that last evening. Farid had never been there before. Josef had gone three or four times, he couldn't remember the exact number. Farid's own ideas of a brothel were abruptly terminated that evening. He had always imagined such a place as something like a palace out of the
Thousand and One Nights
.
You went in, you were bathed in scented water and massaged with aromatic oils. You were dressed in magnificently coloured flowing robes, led to a room where semi-veiled women awaited their suitors, you inspected them and chose one, then you plunged into an erotic orgy, surfacing only occasionally to bathe and recover your strength. In Farid's imagination, there were also naked dancing girls whirling about.

None of this bore the slightest resemblance to what he saw in the Damascus brothel. The plain yellow building, not far from the university campus, was surrounded by a high wall, impossible to scale, against which all and sundry had pissed. There was a small shelter for a doorman at the entrance. Two police officers usually stood at the gate to check that no men under twenty came in.

That last night, however, both officers were drunk, staggering about the small inner courtyard, so there was no one on the gate. Young men and ragged children were running about the corridors open-mouthed, trying to catch a last glimpse of the women's naked bodies. The place did brisk business that night. Men stood in line outside the doors of the whores on offer for five, ten, or twenty lira. Only on the top floor did peace and calm prevail. A few customers waited here in comfortable armchairs, and the women cost between fifty and a hundred lira.

Josef borrowed ten lira from his friend and waited in line for his favourite whore, a dark-skinned Egyptian girl. Farid saw her as she glanced briefly out of the door and shouted for a matron called Badria.

Next moment he heard the woman Badria's deep, masculine voice reply. She exceeded all notions of obesity as she came rolling along, hung about with massive, tasteless gold jewellery.

Farid didn't feel attracted to any of the whores. Some of them were really pretty, but the idea of man after man emptying himself into a woman at ten minute intervals made him feel nauseated rather than sexually aroused. However, he was glad to have satisfied his curiosity. He had never thought he would ever walk about a brothel so freely.

Josef thought he would have to wait at least two hours, so they agreed to meet in the café on the top floor.

Farid sat down at a small bistro table. A man in his fifties was
amusing himself with a young whore at the next table, drinking a bottle of red wine with her. He seemed to have known her for a long time, spoke to her in friendly tones, and didn't keep touching her like all the other men, who missed no opportunity to paw a passing prostitute.

Suddenly another girl stormed into the café, brought a bouquet of red roses down on a young man's head, and pursued him to the bar, where she flung the now battered bouquet in his face, shouting, “I never want to see you again, never, understand?”

The man protested pitifully, but the whore, a small, wiry girl, turned and marched out.

“The coward,” said the young whore at the table next to Farid. “He only wants Fatima here in the brothel. First he says he loves her, and when she finally believes him, he won't even take her to the cinema in case someone sees them together. I've seen enough of his sort.”

A little later, the young whore suddenly laughed out loud and pointed to a thin man just coming into the café, who went to the bar and ordered a coffee. This gentleman, who was extremely elegant but had a rather dusty look about him, seemed deeply offended by the idea that the President was going to close the brothel down.

“Do I interfere with his politics? Do I tell him not to take money from Saudi Arabia? Of course not. So why does he want to deprive me of my only pleasure?”

“That's Hassan Sabbat, notary, multi-millionaire, and lover of our matron Badria,” said the young whore, giggling.

“You can't be serious! Badria? Surely he couldn't even offer himself as a wick to light her fire!” said the man with her. The whore giggled. “Very true, but love is blind.”

Here in the café, Farid learned how mistaken were all the myths in Arab novels and films about honest girls turning whore in desperation. My father raped me, they said, and forced me into prostitution. Or my wonderful husband, my mother, my sister fell ill, so I just had to sell myself to get money for medicine and doctors. These ridiculous moral tales ended with some old actor regretfully telling the fallen woman, “My child, a woman's honour is a match that will burn once only.” And at almost all screenings of such films young
men would call out, in the dark auditorium, “But a lighter will burn thousands of times.”

The young whore at the next table had already packed her bag, she said. She was moving to Beirut, to work in an establishment in Mutanabi Street. Sad as her fate might be, she sounded more self-assured than most of the married women in Damascus.

When Josef came up to the café it was after midnight, and they were just in time to catch the last bus to Bab Sharki.

“I'm going to marry Nadia, but I won't celebrate the wedding with any of those bastards in her family. And I want you to be my witness,” he said. Farid must have been looking at him with such a baffled expression that Josef asked, quite concerned, “Did something upset you here among the whores?”

A day after the brothel was closed down, Matta came to see Farid, his chest swelling proudly. “My brother,” he said, “you must come for a ride with me.”

“A ride? On your bike?” asked Farid, whose imagination stretched no further.

“Oh no,” laughed Matta. “I've bought myself a Suzuki. Brand new! A superbike.”

Sure enough, outside the door stood one of the motorized three-wheeled scooters that were buzzing about the Old Town like wasps, making a terrible noise and stink, but very useful. They could get down any narrow alley, delivering goods to the most remote back door. Italians and Japanese were competing for this lucrative market, but independently of the manufacturer these little vehicles were all called Suzukis.

The Syrians welded a kind of mini-seat on the Suzukis, next to the rider's saddle. Farid sat on this, and Matta rode up and down Saitun Alley, grinning proudly.

“My wife sold her jewellery so that I'd never have to push a handcart again,” he said, and there was a happy gleam in his eyes.

Through Nadia's eldest brother, Josef had soon found a job as a teacher in Rauda Street, a high-class part of Damascus. The brother had been a member of the Ba'ath Party since his youth, and was now high up in the Foreign Trade department. He had a good friend in the Ministry of Culture. He also liked Josef and Nadia and wanted to see them properly provided for.

Farid, on the other hand, got a post allotted at random in the pool of hundreds of available candidates that late summer of 1965, people who had no government contacts who didn't want to bribe anyone. His contract was for two years as a probationary teacher in a school south of Damascus, not forty kilometres away. He could go home in the evenings either in a shared taxi or by bus.

Katana was an ugly garrison town; take away the barracks and you were left with a large, dusty village with dirty streets and rusty snack bars. But the school building was new. Farid began teaching there in October with enthusiasm. He taught the seventh, eighth, and ninth grades. The pupils were strictly brought up, and thought it a heaven-sent miracle that the new teacher didn't hit them.

It was time to leave his parents' house, and with Josef's help, he found a tiny apartment. It was dark, consisting only of one room, a kitchen alcove, and a lavatory, but it wasn't far from where Rana lived. Claire was sad, but she knew her son must lead his own life now. Within a week he had furnished the new apartment, and he enjoyed a long afternoon there with Rana. They cooked together, made love, and were as happy as two children keeping a secret.

“Let's run away,” she said quietly, before she said goodbye.

In mid-March, three weeks after a coup by the leftist General Taisan had overthrown his conservative colleague Baidan, Farid unexpectedly suffered a harsh setback. It came after his quarrel in February with the school principal, a sadist and bootlicker who had come into the classroom during physics and hit out, sputtering with fury, at one of the pupils. Apparently the boy, whose name was Ismail, had insulted the Syrian flag at break.

Farid swallowed hard, and after school he brushed up his
knowledge of the new legislation on schools. It gave the teacher and no one else authority to discipline his own pupils. An older colleague told him that the principal always tried to intimidate new teachers, laying claim to the grades they taught as his own preserve. “Of course a principal has the right to summon any pupil to his office, but turning up unannounced during lessons to humiliate a child is just malice,” he said.

Less than a week later, the principal appeared again. This time he wanted to punish a boy called Jusuf. During the patriotic slogan that the Ba'ath Party required all schoolchildren to recite in the morning, he was said to have insulted the Arab nation. Instead of calling out, “Nation with an eternal mission!” Jusuf had apparently called, “Nation with a flatulent mission!” The principal flourished his bamboo cane. Jusuf turned pale. Farid knew that the boy had a heart defect, and he knew that the principal knew it too.

“I'm sorry, but you can't do that in my classroom. First, beating pupils has been forbidden for two years, and second, you're disturbing lessons over an unproven accusation. Jusuf,” he asked, turning to the boy, “did you say what the principal says you called out?”

Jusuf leaped to his feet. “No, sir. I never insulted our Fatherland. But Yunus from Grade Eight said if I didn't give him ten marbles as protection money he'd tell the principal I did.”

“That will do, Jusuf, you can sit down,” said Farid, turning to his boss, who was rooted to the spot. “As you see, my pupil is not guilty of anything. It's the tale-bearer who ought to be asked why such notions of the Fatherland enter his head. And if you don't mind, I have very little time for teaching even without interruptions, so please let me go on.”