The Dark Side of Love (32 page)

She didn't feel like that; it did matter to her when women gazed adoringly at their fiancés or indulged in vulgar behaviour with them.

A week after this conversation in the ice cream parlour, her father was arrested. He was accused of embezzling large sums of money
from the bank where he had worked for five years, and he spent three years in prison, until the Catholic Patriarch successfully intervened on his behalf. But he was never exonerated, even by his own wife. However, that was a matter of indifference to Nagib.

The large house stood on the village square, opposite the gate of St. Giorgios's churchyard. Lucia had the second floor entirely renovated, equipped with the most modern technological devices, and furnished in the latest fashion. The rent was so cheap that she paid it for a whole year in advance, so that she could visit Mala any time she liked.

Tamam, who owned the house, liked her tenants from Damascus because she enjoyed talking to Lucia. She never exchanged a word with the other villagers. She had a large vegetable garden and several vineyards, and bought the rest of her provisions in the neighbouring village of Ainyose, bringing them home on the back of her donkey. So whenever Lucia came to Mala she brought an extra case full of the finest foodstuffs, including chocolate and canned meat. Nothing could have given Tamam greater pleasure.

At the time Claire, like all girls in love, was reading love stories non-stop, especially French novels, but their landlady's own love story cast all those books into the shade.

Tamam was a strange woman. She lived alone with her son Djamil. The villagers thought her eccentric, and people whispered that she was to blame for her husband's early death. She had loved him from her childhood. He and his parents lived in a little house near her family's large property. Her father was a prosperous farmer then. She wasn't beautiful, but several men proposed to her. She turned them down, and her father was glad that she stayed with him when his wife died, and he didn't have to share her with any other man. But when he discovered that she was in love with his neighbours' son, he forbade her to have anything to do with the young man, who barely scraped a living by working in the stone quarry. Tamam loved her
father, and was torn between her feelings for him and for her lover. Night after night she wept with longing for Sarkis, who had sworn not to touch any other woman. He suggested elopement, but Tamam didn't want to expose her lonely father to the mockery of the villagers. She hoped that death would bring him release, but death took its time.

The couple waited for twenty years. When Tamam's father did die, Sarkis was forty and she was in her late thirties. They waited another year, until Tamam could put her black mourning clothes aside. Until that day Mala had never known a tale of self-sacrificing lovers with a happy ending. Such stories always ended in tragedy; you couldn't reconcile the harsh peasant life with the tenderness of great love affairs out of fairy tales, set in lush gardens where people wore flowing silken robes, probably because those tales made life in the bleak mountains seem even less bearable.

Tamam was afraid of the wedding night. Her neighbour, an experienced midwife, told her horror stories of the first night when the bride wasn't in her first youth and had a hymen harder than leather. Husbands, she said, quite often needed her, the midwife, to help by sticking her forefinger through it.

Relishing the bride's fears, the woman told her about one man in the village who had fractured his prick when he deflowered his bride. It had a right-angled bend in it ever after. Another husband, she said, thrust in with all his might, but because his bride was thirty-five her maidenhead resisted, bouncing back like a trampoline, and he fell out of bed and hit the back of his head on the floor. The blow left the man's mind confused. He spoke nothing but Spanish thereafter, and he avoided all women.

Tamam felt the iron claws of fear squeezing her heart, and she hoped the midwife was telling lurid tales just to show off. But her own wedding night was worse than all the stories. Sarkis had been drinking to give himself courage. Tamam, who never drank alcohol, was horrified by the stink of her husband, who was sweating heavily, and by his rough hands as he tried to pull her panties off under her dress. She begged him to remember that she wasn't very young now. That infuriated him even more. “I don't need any midwife,” he cried, as if
he too had heard the neighbour's stories. “I've hardened and sharpened my chisel these thirty years.”

Not a word of love, no tender caress. His fingers, although covered in scratches from his work in the quarry, had always been softer than a rose petal when he touched her skin. But now Sarkis's face wasn't fragrant any longer, nor was he her shy lover, but a stranger lying on top of her with all his weight, pressing the air out of her.

He thrust into her dry soul. Tamam screamed so loudly that the musicians, singers, and dancers stopped for a moment, but then they all raised their glasses in rejoicing. Tamam hated them. They were out there eating her bread and applauding her pain.

The night seemed endless. She felt near death, and wept, but that only encouraged Sarkis to push himself into her again and again. Late in the night, his old aunt knocked at the door with the laconic remark, “Proof of honour.” Sarkis tore the bloodstained white sheet proving Tamam a virgin from under her and gave it to the old woman. Once again rejoicing broke out among the guests, who went on making merry under the bedroom window until day dawned.

The marriage lasted only two months. Then Tamam summoned up all her strength and threw her husband out. Sarkis did not protest. He went back to his old home, bitterly disappointed in the woman for whom he had waited so long. She had always talked to him of love games with desire in her voice. Now she was acting like a nun, and what a nun! On the wedding night she began screaming the moment he touched her. And then she went to sleep before he had finished doing his conjugal duty.

A week later she had asked him to sleep alone in a small room, saying that when she slept beside him she had nightmares in which he was always raping her. Sleep by himself in a miserable little room? What was the point of getting married, then? Sarkis asked himself that question out loud at the barber's, and the men there nodded with mingled sympathy and derision.

But Sarkis didn't tell the men that he never went back to her because he hated himself. Why had he turned down all those beautiful, willing women? His neighbour's daughter, soft-armed Saide who kept visiting him after his parents' death, had given him a basil plant,
saying that a man like him needed a good woman to warm him in bed and bear him fine children. “Look at my breasts, feel my belly,” she said. “Aren't they just made for you?” And he had touched her; she had firm, round breasts, and a captivating navel. But in the end he sent her home. How could any man be so idiotic?

Saide had tried for two years, and then she gave up and married the village blacksmith. At the time the blacksmith had been a dirty, intolerably coarse man. But now? Now he looked well groomed, he had three sons, each more handsome than the last, and their mother was bringing up all three as good Christians. The whole village talked about Saide, who had made a miserable dog into the master of a fine household.

And there was the young widow Walide. She had wept for nights at his bedside, begging him to let her get in bed with him, but he was faithful to Tamam and turned down all her advances. “You and I, we're both widowed,” said that far-sighted young woman perceptively. “The only difference is that your partner still lies above ground.” How right she was, thought Sarkis. Tamam is a living, breathing corpse.

Sarkis disappeared from the village overnight. Four weeks later, children playing found his body in a deep, long-disused pit in the stone quarry.

The second floor had its own entrance, up a flight of wooden steps behind the house. The Sururs' landlady Tamam lived on the first floor. They always arrived at their summer lodgings two days after the beginning of the long vacation, and usually stayed until the day before school began again in early October. Marcel had found a friend who was glad of his company in Djamil, Tamam's son.

In the summer of 1935 Marcel was nineteen, and had begun studying law. And Nagib Surur had been in prison since May, which meant that Claire would have to go to Mala alone with her mother. So she sought her fiancé's company even more than usual in the last weeks before they left.

But then, just before the last day of school, he shocked her. Just when she most needed him, he seemed to her so strange that she thought she must be losing her mind.

She had met Musa Salibi by chance in 1933, when she was out eating an ice with her father and he came up to their table, a tall, strong, well-dressed figure. He stopped politely and said good day to Nagib. Nagib invited him to join them. Musa looked at Claire, and she felt the ground sway beneath her. He was five years her senior, and looked as elegant as any actor. Her father liked Musa, who was both a good boxer and an excellent shot. With these qualities, he had found a job as bodyguard to the French governor of Damascus.

After that first meeting in the ice cream parlour, he kept visiting the family on one pretext or another. Claire's mother didn't like him. He was only a husk, she said briefly, handsome but empty, and when he called she would leave the drawing room with a theatrical groan. But it was Nagib, not Lucia, who had the last word on Claire's engagement, and he immediately gave his consent when Musa asked to marry his daughter. He took no notice of his wife when she pointed out that Musa had no proper profession; bodyguards were there only to deal with any trouble and die for the governor if necessary.

Claire loved her strong, handsome fiancé, and already saw herself travelling the world under his protection. And once they were officially engaged in the winter of 1934 he was able to drive her around in his car. It was a black Renault, the 1933 model, with leather upholstery, fine wood fittings, and curtains for the back windows.

She felt like a princess, dressed in her best and sinking into the soft back seat, while Musa drove the car through the streets of the New Town.

Claire went to boxing matches with him too. When he was in the ring himself, his athletic torso bared, he looked even more magnificent than he did in a suit. Musa fought elegantly, dancing around his opponent. Women adored him, and he enjoyed the glances they gave him from eyes that were moist with admiration.

Soon after their engagement he was to fight the legendary Syrian champion, Ali Dakko of Aleppo, and the talk at the boxing club was of their good prospects of sending Musa to the French contests in
Paris next year. In her daydreams, Claire already saw herself living in that cosmopolitan capital. Her father, who had been to Paris three times, waxed enthusiastic about the metropolis.

In March it was all settled: Musa would go to Paris if he won a fight against a youthful challenger. This boxer didn't have his opponent's elegance and good footwork, but his fists were like steel. Once, for a bet, he had killed a fully grown bull with a single punch between the ears. The young boxer's name was Rimon Rasmalo, and he was a stonemason by trade.

“It'll just be a little limbering-up exercise for Musa before he goes to Paris,” Nagib reassured his daughter. He was standing at the second-floor window, watching his wife prune the roses in the garden on this cold but sunny day. “I've hidden some money in a purse under your mattress. It's for you. Perhaps the two of you will like Paris and want to stay there. Life will be very difficult for us Christians here over the next few years. The Muslims are going to slaughter us.” There was grief and despair in his voice. His daughter didn't understand him.

Then on 14 May, a Tuesday and exactly a week after her birthday, he was arrested. Ismail Ballut, a young man in his mid-twenties, had gone to the police station of the Muhayirin quarter just before midnight on Monday 13 May. He was well-dressed and identified himself as an employee of the Banque de Syrie et du Liban in Damascus. He had a large suitcase with him, and said he couldn't sleep at nights. One of the police officers asked why not? Another laughed, and added, “Love or a quarrel with your wife, is it?”

“No, it's the money,” he replied, opening the case, which proved to contain fifty-two million Syrian lira. The policemen stared blankly at the money. They were sure the man before them must be a complete idiot. “Nagib Surur is the devil incarnate. He's tricked the machine that stamps old, worn-out, badly damaged banknotes to make them worthless before they're burned in special furnaces. Then the bank produces new notes with the same numbers as the old ones and puts them in circulation,” the man painstakingly explained as they took his statement. In answer to a question he further explained that there were now doubles of those notes that Nagib had
not
destroyed, and they weren't forgeries because both series of banknotes were genuine.
They just had the same numbers. The man couldn't say exactly how that devil Nagib had managed to fool the machine. His part in the business, he said, had been only to keep his mouth shut, and sign papers saying that the procedure in the room where the old notes were destroyed had been correct. “The inspector who checks the ashes wasn't allowed into the room, so he never knew anything about it. Nagib gave him newsprint ashes instead, weighed out precisely to the last milligram. How he fixed it all only he knows. He fooled me too.”

“Easy enough, with such a simpleton!” whispered a freckled police officer to his colleague as the duty NCO went on interrogating the man, taking down his statement in person. He wrote slowly, and kept asking him to repeat what he had last said.

He, Ismail Ballut, said the man, was supposed to keep the money safe for a few weeks, and then Nagib was going to let him have one-third of it, and use the other two-thirds to bring Syrian boxing up to world-class level. The policemen looked at each other incredulously.