The Dark Side of Love (35 page)

That morning in July 1935, Elias was badly frightened. He had to make up his mind: if he married Samira, he would be doing his father a great favour, as old Mushtak had told him in friendly tones. He didn't have to love Samira, added Mushtak. He just had to get her pregnant, thus making the Mushtak clan more powerful. With his great virility, he could make love to as many women as his heart
desired. Elias knew he would be the richest of George Mushtak's sons, for Samira would inherit as much money as the cash and property of all the Mushtaks put together were worth.

Time was short. Two days ago, the servant Basil had given him away. He had seen him coming out of Claire's house by night, Elias told her. Mushtak had ranted and raged and struck him in the face. He had shouted that city girls were all whores of the French, and he'd have Elias shot if he went to see her again.

“So I've been roaming the mountains for days. I know my father. He might not kill me, but he'll certainly disinherit and disown me if I decide for you and not Samira,” he said quietly.

Claire held him close. They were lying naked in her bed now, with Elias's hands moving as light as butterfly wings over the landscape of her body. While he told her the whole story she sensed that he had long ago chosen her, and she felt a wild longing for him.

It was already light in the room, but the curtains dimmed the daylight. He thrust into her, expecting a scream of horror, but she welcomed him, twining her arms and legs around his back.

Two days later Claire and Elias fled to Beirut, where they married in a small chapel. Their witnesses were Elias's sister Malake and her husband, who had been living in Beirut since their own elopement in 1931.

At first Elias and Claire hid away in a little hotel by the harbour. They didn't want to stay with Malake, because it was embarrassing to show their love and passionate longing in her house. They made love, wandered along the boulevard by the sea, and ate grilled fish in small restaurants. Then, as if it were a ritual, they lay in the warm sand on the beach and looked up at the sky for a long time.

“What did your fiancé do for a living?” asked Elias.

“He was a bodyguard,” said Claire, a little surprised, because she had told him that on the first day they met.

“Thank God he wasn't a good bodyguard, or I wouldn't have had a chance,” laughed Elias.

They hid in the harbour city for three years. At the time it sheltered thousands of refugees, soldiers of fortune, and adventurers. For many of them Beirut was the final stage on their journey, the last they would see of Arabia before they left for America.

Elias thanked his sister for all her help, but he was careful not to spend too much time in her house. He was afraid his father would soon get on his trail. Claire had enough money for the first few months. After they had left their first hiding place, the hotel, they lived in two modest rooms in the Daura quarter. And they still lay on the beach every evening and enjoyed the sight of the infinite starlit sky.

Only Lucia had been taken into the secret of their plans for flight, and she fell for none of the charming tricks employed by George Mushtak when, with his injured pride, he tried to find out where the couple were hiding. She put on a convincing performance as an indignant mother, and in private laughed at the old farmer.

Claire found work as an interpreter for a shipping company. Elias took a job with a confectioner called Gandur, the father of one of his old school friends in the Jesuit monastery. At first Elias just worked as an assistant, but soon he was enjoying it so much that he learned the trade and its mysteries thoroughly. Before two years were up he was a master of the craft himself.

Gandur the confectioner was a clever businessman. He recognized his young employee's talents, but Elias was far too ambitious to agree to run the branch shop that Gandur was planning. He wanted to go back to Damascus.

When Claire had her first miscarriage, Lucia too urged them to return. After the second miscarriage she came to Beirut herself, and was horrified by her daughter's condition. She wasn't happy with the treatment Claire was getting at the hospital, and talked earnestly to Elias until he gave Lucia his word to return to Damascus as soon as possible, for the sake of his wife's health.

“But what will my father do?” he anxiously asked.

“Oh, we'll bring him around to it. His feelings are a little hurt, that's all,” she said. “Apart from that he wouldn't hurt a fly.” But there she was wrong.

They were lying on the beach surrounded by the warmth of the spring night. It already felt like summer. An easterly breeze carried the fragrance of flowers from the mountains out to sea. Elias held Claire's face in his hands and kissed her eyes. At that moment she felt that a second little heart had begun beating inside her.

“I think I'm pregnant again,” she whispered. Elias could have embraced the whole sky. But an invisible hand clutched her heart. She was anxious. Her two miscarriages were still too close: the pain, the fear, and the empty feeling when it was all over. Elias felt for her, and was very affectionate.

Claire remembered the times after her miscarriages. Elias came to the hospital straight from the confectioner's after work every day, exhausted, and sometimes fell asleep on the floor beside her. He felt for her hand again and again in the night, whispering quiet words of love so that the others in the ten-bed ward wouldn't wake up.

Then he slipped out at five in the morning, unwashed and without any breakfast, and went to work. It was touching to watch him leaving the ward with such a youthful spring in his step. Every day Claire fell in love all over again with the small man who could quote any French poet by heart, and now he was working in a confectioner's shop and still kept cheerful.

The other women envied her Elias, who brought them all chocolates every evening. And they loved his wonderful laugh.

Claire's third pregnancy came at a most inconvenient time. They had planned to return to Damascus early in June. Suddenly she was afraid to go back, but Elias's cheerfulness dispelled all dismal thoughts
and smoothed out the rugged mountains between Beirut and Damascus into gently rolling hills.

News came from Damascus that her father had been suffering from severe pneumonia since April. She cried a great deal, imagining him sitting in his prison cell and coughing. He had been in jail for three years, and didn't want his wife to visit him. Their only contact was through his cousins, who fetched money and clean clothes from Lucia for him, and told her how he was. He had a sunny cell, they said, and the prison governor played backgammon with him all day. With the money that Lucia sent him Nagib was able to pay an army of servants and bodyguards, who ensured his safety and made life much easier for him. But out of pride he wouldn't let his wife see him behind bars. Lucia was more than happy with that arrangement.

The move back to Damascus was the beginning of a lucky streak for Elias. He spent three hours explaining his plan to Claire's mother at her kitchen table, showed her his calculations, and asked her for a loan of a hundred thousand Syrian lira. Lucia said she wanted ten percent interest, but after tough negotiations she accepted five. Elias could offer only his handshake as a guarantee.

“But if I give you my hand it's worth more than an agreement with the National Bank of France,” he said quietly, and very courteously.

“The Mushtaks keep their word,” agreed Lucia, standing up. Ten minutes later she came back with a packet. “You can count them. There's a hundred and ten thousand there. The extra ten thousand are a present; even if you're just renting a place to live you should furnish it in style, because a confectioner lives by his reputation for prosperity. You'll bring me five hundred lira in interest on the first of every month.”

Elias was touched, and also full of admiration for his mother-in-law, who was so trusting and generous to him, while at the same time surreptitiously raising the interest by half of one percent. He smiled, and she understood without words that her son-in-law had already worked it all out to the third decimal point. Lucia patted him on the
shoulder and said, as he left, “No bank will accept your love for my daughter as surety for a mortgage, you know.”

Elias did not reply. Only on their way home did he tell Claire what had been going on in her mother's kitchen while she was reading in the drawing room.

“And she let you have the hundred thousand?”

“A hundred and ten, and now I'm setting to work on my plan,” replied Elias.

Autumn of the year 1938 was mild and long. Damascus is at its most beautiful in that season. It wasn't so hot now, and the swallows were filling the air with their farewell songs before they left for Africa. Damascus was colourful for the last time, as if the city were showing its full beauty once more before falling into profound, grey hibernation. Claire had known that atmosphere from her childhood. But this autumn, she believed, would remain in her memory as the best of her life. Her father was freed from prison after serving three years.

To his dying day, Musa Salibi didn't believe it had been his fault. And after a long period suffering from Parkinson's disease he died, an embittered old man, in a hostel for indigent Christian senior citizens.

When Rimon Rasmalo defeated him in the ring, he had spent two weeks trying to make his peace with his fiancée, but he thought he could tell that Claire already had someone else.

Then she went off to Mala, and he followed her in the general's car. On the way he went over everything, preparing for a reasonable conversation. But when he reached the village no one would talk to him, and Claire had changed entirely. She turned him away as soon as he arrived. You have to be patient with women, he told himself, and kept calm. Then she threw the little box containing the engagement ring
out of the door. He was bewildered. She was acting outrageously, and someone in love never does that. To Musa, it was immediately clear that she was just a whore.

He found her mother as cold as ice too. When he tried getting her to explain herself, she said straight out that she had never liked him. He could always visit his friend in jail and complain to him, she added. Musa took his engagement ring and drove back to Damascus that very evening.

He had been tricked. Mother and daughter, both of them whores! And the malice in that old viper's voice when she told him Claire was in very good hands, so he had better look for a girl of his own class. Just whose hands was Claire in? The woman he had thought of as his future mother-in-law wouldn't say. She simply shut the door in his face.

For a long time he couldn't make out why they had treated him so shabbily, until it came to his ears six months later that Claire had eloped with the son of a rich farmer from Mala. Musa was seething with rage. Eloped – a likely story! The old procuress had fixed it all. He could forget a good deal, but not hypocrisy. Claire always used to say she found the primitive peasants in the village repulsive. Lies, all of it! Camouflage! He had just been used to inflame the desire of other, richer men who took special pleasure in robbing the poor of their women. Musa swore revenge, but until the day when a man came to the boxing club in the summer of 1938 and asked for him he didn't know how to go about it.