The Dark Side of Love (127 page)

In early June, Rana heard from Claire that Farid was soon to be granted an amnesty, and she, as his mother, was able to see him once a week. He was well, said Claire, and longing for Rana.

Three days later she asked the medical director to be discharged. She knew how she was going to live now, she said.

When her husband arrived with flowers she said a warm goodbye to Hanna Bishara, and hugged Edward Salam. “You've helped me so much. Thank you!” she whispered to him, kissing his right cheek. There were tears in the doctor's eyes. A daughter was leaving him, and he knew it was for ever.

DAMASCUS, BEIRUT, SUMMER 1969 – SEPTEMBER 1969

Matta was standing at the door, looking pale. Claire made him sit down by the fountain and brewed him a strong mocha. He was nervously cracking his finger joints. When she came back she also brought a plate of sablés, Matta's favourite cookies.

“Bulos lied to me,” he said after a while. Claire sat very still. “He swore by our sacred vow of brotherhood that he'd never seen Farid since the monastery, and then he wanted to know who gave me that information. It's terrible, just think of it! I risked my life for Bulos, and then I ask him a favour for my brother Farid, and …” Matta fell silent.

The doorbell rang. It was a neighbouring woman bringing a domestic still around for Claire. When she came back to Matta she saw that he was weeping.

“What's the matter?”

“I risked my life for him, and now he lies to me. Who knows, perhaps he was always lying to me,” he said, standing up. “I just wanted him to spare Farid. That's all. But I'll go to him again. Perhaps I'll take my wife, she can soften a heart of stone when she cries.” He smiled shyly.

Farid should be proud that there are people who love him so much, thought Claire. At the door she hugged Matta more tenderly than ever before. He was sobbing like a child. “Farid is my brother. Matta will see to it,” he whispered defiantly, and went out. Suddenly a strange feeling came over Claire. When he sat there like that, lost in thought, his features were very like Elias's. She too had heard the rumours that Nasibe, the young widow who was passionately in love with Elias long ago, had become pregnant by him and married the poor shepherd in a hurry to avoid scandal. Elias denied it all. Nasibe had had a thousand and one relationships with men, he always said. But Matta's aunt said that when her deranged nephew came back from the mental hospital, he was sure of only one thing: Farid was his brother.

President Amran returned from Moscow in a good mood, and next day pardoned seven hundred political prisoners, a hundred and eleven of them held in Tad. Two large buses took the freed men to Damascus. First they just sat deep in thought, looking almost sad. It was not easy to say goodbye to their companions in misfortune. Many wept, but when they understood that they were really free they almost all went crazy. They jumped up from their seats, sang in strange languages that no one could understand, danced in the central aisle, fell into each other's arms, clapped one another on the back and the shoulder and exchanged happy kisses.

“If you carry on like that the police will send us straight to the nuthouse. Calm down, we're in the suburbs of Damascus already,” begged the bus driver. The freed prisoners sat down again, looked out of the window at beautiful women, whistled, played at hiding, laughed like little schoolboys.

Farid reached his house around midday, and wanted to storm in through the front door, dance around the fountain with Claire, and shout for joy, but the door was locked. He rang the bell, and Claire
came to answer it in her cooking apron. “Holy Virgin!” she cried. Farid hugged her and carried her to the fountain. She was laughing.

“Since when have you been locking the front door?”

“Since the city filled up with so many anonymous strangers. They flock in and take anything that isn't nailed down. And others come along and involve you in shady business that could put you behind bars for ten years. Someone left a kilo of hashish in a flower pot at Suleiman's cousin Faris's house. He doesn't smoke and he despises drugs, but that didn't help him with the police. A number of people have had locks fitted to their doors since his arrest.”

Farid wanted to have a bath, but Claire said that first, as when he came home from Gahan, he must go and see his father, who was waiting impatiently for his arrival. And indeed, on this second occasion Elias was in transports of joy. He laughed and wept and kept stroking his son's face. Almost awkwardly, he offered him sweetmeats.

“Those bastards tortured him, although he isn't in any political party,” he told his old neighbour Nuri, who ran the flower shop and could make the most beautiful bouquets, even though he was drunk all day.

“That's what happens when peasants get power,” said Nuri scornfully. “My father always told me: if you have just two piastres, then spend one on a piece of bread and the other on a fragrant rose. But fewer and fewer of us do that kind of thing now. I've noticed it for years, people only want flowers for funerals. Peasants don't think flowers are necessary. They won't pay good money for such things. Last week one of them was telling me how many kilos of wheat he could buy for a bouquet like this. I told him he'd better give his wife not flowers but a bagful of wheat. And do you know what he said? That was a good tip, he told me.”

It was about three when Farid reached Rana on the telephone. She was at home alone, and he told her the plan he had been working out for months.

“Wonderful,” said Rana, feeling that she was near the gates of
heaven. “There's only one thing I want to ask you: let's not leave before September the 6th.”

“Why not?”

“Because my husband is flying to Moscow for two weeks on the 5th. I shall need a day's rest before we finally leave.”

“Right, but by then you must have your passport and all your documents translated into German by a sworn interpreter.”

“I already have my passport, but why German? I thought we were flying to Paris.”

“Officially we still are. I'll tell you all the rest of it once we're in safety,” said Farid.

It was easier than Farid expected to get hold of two skilfully forged passports. Josef didn't ask why he needed them. “Muhsin will do them for you, they'll look more genuine than the real thing,” he joked, “but he's expensive.” Farid didn't mind about the price.

The forger did not have a sophisticated workshop, but was the possessor of a brilliant mind and felt no respect at all for his employer. He was a hard-working civil servant with the registration and passports office, and had a taste for overtime unusual in such jobs.

Muhsin Sharara was a Muslim, but as he was a bookworm he happened to have read the Gospels, where he found the story of the raising of Lazarus. That had been in the early sixties, when President Satlan began on his great wave of arrests. People would pay a thousand dollars – a fortune then – for a “good” passport. He listed all registrations of the deaths of children, and began selling passports. Only two things weren't quite right about them: the passport photo and the fact that the real bearer of the holder's name had died decades ago. Muhsin had erased the entry of his or her date of death from the register with an ink remover that was little known at the time. Everything else in his passports, including the rubber stamp and the signature of the head of the passport office, was genuine.

So at the end of August Farid was in possession of four passports: two real ones and two forged ones in the names of Sarkis and Georgina
Shammas, a married couple. The two real passports contained visas to go and study in Germany.

Farid soon settled in again. The voice of Feiruz on the radio was part of every morning, like the first coffee with Claire and the cry of the muezzin from the nearby mosque. But he noticed that the Damascenes had withdrawn into a cocoon of silence, because they were afraid. They talked a lot and were always cracking jokes, but only to cover up for that silence.

One hot August day Farid didn't feel like doing anything much. He was standing in the doorway of the house, watching two dogs scuffle for a bone in the shade. Suddenly Matta came running down the street, stopped in front of him, and told him, still breathless, that he knew for sure now that Bulos had betrayed him in the monastery.

“Let's not talk about it. It's over,” said Farid, for Matta had already spent the whole of the last few days searching like a man possessed for the proof of Bulos's treachery. Only Bulos could have given him up to the police when he ran away from the monastery that second time. Matta's tone was not heated. His voice was cold, and he set out his evidence meticulously.

“The police must have known. They were waiting for me at the last barrier before the main road. And I can do my sums well enough to be sure that only two people knew I was running away: you and Bulos,” Matta ended his argument, and nodded thoughtfully. “Why does he want to destroy us? Why? What have we ever done to him?”

“Perhaps because in his own way he loved us and couldn't hold us. He didn't want you to leave. You were his greatest support, and he loved you. At first he liked me too, but he got on my nerves, and then he found out that I'm a Mushtak, while he was and is a Shahin.”

“My dear brother, what on earth do all those books of yours teach you? Bulos loved no one, not even himself. He abused my trust, and I was a fool,” said Matta bitterly.

But he had a touch of the wily fox about him now. Mahdi discovered nothing of what he was thinking, but Matta had acquired Bulos's wife as a customer, ran errands and carried purchases for her, asking little money. Since then she had taken to telling him about her husband's loveless ways and her own loneliness.