The Dark Side of Love (62 page)

Near the entrance of every dormitory a monk slept in a small room, furnished in extremely Spartan style with a bed, desk, and medicine cabinet. The only ornament was a picture of the Virgin Mary illuminated by flickering light. A different monk was on duty supervising the pupils every week; only Brother John was excused that duty.

The monk on duty on Farid's first night stood at the big window
in the dark for a long time, keeping an eye on the dormitory. Then he did his rounds, stopping briefly by every bed. Farid closed his eyes and did his best to breathe regularly.

“Try to sleep,” whispered the monk, and went on. He said something quietly to a boy at the end of the aisle near the washroom too. When Farid slowly opened his eyes again a little while later, he had disappeared.

How beautiful his time with Rana had been, thought Farid. “Love tastes and smells so wonderful,” she had said one night. He had laughed then. Was she thinking of him now? She had promised not to let a single hour of her life pass without thinking of him. And what Rana promised she always performed. He was ashamed to realize that he sometimes forgot her for hours at a time.

Now he was thinking of her breasts. He had never seen anything so lovely before. They didn't look like the apples or pomegranates so often mentioned in Arabic poetry, no, Rana had breasts with nipples like the tips of a lemon, pointing slightly upward and outward. The mere sight of them aroused him.

He turned on his side and pressed the light blanket between his legs.

The sea slipped away on velvet soles.

Next morning Marcel showed Farid a piece of paper on the door, setting out the timetable for the day during the vacation:

“6.30, get up. Wash. Make beds. Leave lockers open. Brother to close them after checking. Short morning prayers. Breakfast. Work. Lunch eaten at work place. End of work 15.00 hours. Wash. Summer academy from 15.30 hours. Evening prayers. Supper. Games. Night prayers. Bedtime. Sunday is free.”

The days followed this pattern, and after a time they all merged into each other. If it hadn't been for Sundays, Farid would soon have lost all sense of time.

During the first week he was sent to work with the builders who repaired any damage to the monastery walls during the summer months. He and two other school students took them the construction materials. It was hard work climbing ladders in a habit, carrying stones and mortar, and the builders laughed at the boys' clumsiness.

A week later Farid changed to the metalworking shop. The master in charge here was an unassuming, silent man. This work was hard too, but interesting. Master Rimon liked the boy at first sight. He told him that he had once been a priest himself, but then he fell in love with a young widow. He had confessed it at once to the abbot of the time, so he was allowed to go on earning a living in the monastery metalworking shop. Two years after the wedding, his wife died when their son was born, and he had brought up the boy on his own. But at the age of twenty his son had emigrated to America, and Rimon now lived by himself down in the village at the foot of the mountain where the monastery stood.

Farid could happily have spent the whole summer with Rimon, but that wasn't permitted. Every pupil at the monastery had to take his turn with all the different jobs. Next was farming. Working with the reapers was hell; following them through the fields day after day in the blazing sun drained all his strength. He had hallucinations. The reapers were usually strong, experienced older pupils and monks who cut the blades of wheat with sickles. A troop of younger pupils went behind them, fanning out over a broad front, gathering the blades into sheaves and piling them up on carts to be taken to the threshing floors, where hot dust filled your mouth and nose, and husks and chopped straw stuck in your collar, rubbing your skin sore. Those days seemed endless.

Again and again, Farid's loneliness overwhelmed him. The older monastery pupils took no notice of him, the childishness of the younger boys bored him. He saw Marcel and a few other familiar faces only at supper, and was never in the same working group with any of them. That was intentional, so that everyone would get to know everyone else, according to the monastery administration. “So that we don't gang up together and refuse to work,” was how Marcel put it.

Sometimes Farid thought he was going crazy. Not only did most
of the monks remain strangers to him, he felt that this Barnaba going around in a habit, staring back at him from the mirror with his sunburned face and the ugly, peeling skin on his scalp, was a stranger too. His hands were covered with painful weals and blisters.

When Farid was moved from reaping to the joiner's workshop he felt as if he had won a prize, for he loved working with wood. The master joiner was a gloomy man who said not a word all day, but his journeyman understood all his gestures, and passed the gist of them on to the newcomer.

Every evening Farid was jolted by the sight of monastery pupils who had been lumbered with the signal kneeling in the centre aisle of the refectory. Apparently there were three of the little disks in circulation, although no one was quite sure of that.

“What, even in the vacation?” cried Farid indignantly at the sight of one pupil who was almost falling asleep with weariness and couldn't even eat. His sore, limp hands were dangling.

“The signal takes no vacations and never sleeps,” said Marcel, who was often handed it himself, but was clever enough to pass the little wooden disk on again in good time. Only once did Marcel fail, and then he had to eat his supper kneeling. Farid was horrified to find his neighbours at table suddenly turning spiteful. He snapped at them to shut up, but they went on taunting Marcel.

As a newcomer, Farid couldn't yet be given the signal himself, so he didn't have to kneel if he spoke Arabic, but whenever he did the others looked at him in alarm, as if he came from another star. So he said as little as possible, and was soon regarded as a silent boy. That showed him even more clearly what a stranger this shy boy Barnaba was, for Farid's effervescent loquacity had been famous in Damascus.

Father Basilius was a good language teacher who made French lessons lively and amusing. The fact that he also looked like a vulture lent a touch of comedy to everything he told them. The language came easily to Farid, and when he began dreaming in French he realized that he was making good progress. Music was different. He didn't care in the least for highly-strung Father Constantine, who had an aura of great unrest about him, and he couldn't get on with the musical instruments. There was no doubt that the Father was
a musical genius, said to have composed several hymns, as well as the music for all the plays performed annually on the feast day of St. Ignatius. But like many another genius he was incapable of explaining anything to other people. Marcel told Farid that the musician, who was still a young man, was in love with the cook Josephine, and had suggested her for the part of Joan of Arc.

One day Brother Gabriel, who was still keeping an eye on Farid, came up with a wonderful idea. In his despair at getting nowhere with music lessons, Farid had told him about the pleasures of learning calligraphy in Damascus, and Gabriel persuaded the monastery administration to let him give up music in the afternoons and instead take the advanced calligraphy course, since he had already mastered the basic rules. The art of calligraphy was very highly regarded in the monastery, for although French was spoken as the everyday language and in lessons, the liturgy and the Bible were in Arabic. The monks were anxious to use perfect script for the products of their own printing press, and were always looking for new young talent. The monastery press had received major commissions from outside because of its high reputation.

Gabriel's idea was Farid's salvation. After the end of August, he found life in the monastery rather more tolerable. Father Makarios the calligrapher, who also ran the printing shop, was both as down to earth as the printing presses and as fanciful as Arabic script. He had such a sure hand that he never hesitated for the fraction of a second in his calligraphy, as if he already saw the words he was going to write on the blank sheet of paper before him. Farid soon became his star pupil.

The mists of disappointment and opposition dispersed, and he began to pay more attention to his surroundings. To his own surprise, it was only now that he got to know Butros, who sat opposite him in the refectory, always ate in silence, and hardly ever laughed. He was shy and suspicious. But at the beginning of September he began telling Farid about himself.

The brothers Markus and Luka sat one on each side of Farid. They were twins, a boring couple who had been in the monastery for three years, always accepting everything and approving of it like good boys.
Marcel knew why. “They have to be ultra-obedient, they're here only through the bishop's good graces. Their father ran off to America and their mother can't feed them. It's because she's the bishop's distant cousin that those two are here at all. Outside, all they can expect is work in the fish factory and beatings from their mother's lovers, and they know it.”

In spite of their sad story, Farid thought they were a dismal pair, and once it occurred to him that if Jesus had been obliged to sit between those two in the refectory, he'd have died not on the cross but of boredom.

Everything was to be bright and shining on the feast day of St. Ignatius. The floor, the columns, the walls of the inner courtyard were scrubbed, the car park outside the monastery was whitewashed, and all the windows were cleaned.

Then the big stage was erected. A play was traditionally performed on 31 July in honour of the order's founder, and here in this desolate part of the country it was a great event. Over five hundred chairs already filled the inner courtyard, although only the seats in the front row were upholstered.

In the afternoon all the employees, peasants, and labourers who worked for the monastery came streaming in. Everyone was still talking about last year's play,
Pietas victrix
. The translated title hung above the stage in Arabic had proclaimed, “The Victory of Piety”.

Father Samuel the language teacher had written the play, and Father Constantine had composed the music, but the best part came from the workshop of ingenious Father Antonios. He taught physics, and his brilliant ideas had made the play into a positive firework display to delight the senses. He used steel wires, lights and stage effects to bring thunder and lightning down from the sky to the stage. Swords, angels, and spectres hovered weightlessly in the air and took the audience's breath away. He had also stationed two monastery pupils behind the
stage to howl like wolves or hoot like owls. It was truly gruesome, and gave even the most sceptical of the audience goosebumps.

This year the play was to be
Joan of Arc
. A magnificent show was anticipated, but it all went wrong. Marcel had already whispered to Farid at midday, “Theodore wants his revenge on his teacher – he hates Samuel.” At the end of July it was still vacation, so Farid knew neither the teacher nor his pupil.

“Why?” he asked.

“Why? Because Samuel's horrible. But Theodore is wily. He'll play his trick so cleverly that he won't get punished.”

“How?”

“I don't know exactly, I just know Father Samuel has been tormenting poor Theodore for four years. He made him repeat a school year twice, in grades nine and ten. You don't get far here without good marks for language, and Samuel is in charge of teaching both French and Arabic. Theodore is twenty and still only in grade eleven.”

That evening St. Ignatius himself seemed to want to celebrate, and tempered the fierce July heat with a pleasantly cool temperature. Soon medieval torches were flickering on stage. Two violins played a soft melody, and then the play began.

The audience fell silent. The curtain went up. Soldiers and peasants stormed forward, crying, “Long live the good Catholic country of France!” But then English soldiers entered left and attacked them, and there was a battle scene involving over forty pupils and monks.

The English won. The French troops took their dead and wounded into a corner. Now the music was slow and heavy, and a guitar imitated bells tolling for a funeral. Wounded men said their last prayers. A priest, played by a twelfth-grade student, gave them absolution and his blessing.

Then Joan of Arc came on stage, and the audience loved everything she did and said. Josephine was acting very well. When she said that she must die a martyr's death for Christ, the Virgin Mary and France, many a tough Father wiped a tear from his eye and blew his nose loudly, while women in the audience wept with emotion.

Farid admired the cook, who spoke her complicated part in French so well that he could understand everything. He felt attracted by her.
And when, at the coronation of Charles VII in Reims Cathedral, she knelt before the King with the banner of victory in her hand, and cried, “Noble lord, now is God's will fulfilled!” the audience clapped so loud and so long that no one could hear what the King said in reply.

Farid was beginning to doubt what Marcel had said, for the play was three-quarters over, and nothing untoward had happened. He glanced at his friend, sitting a few chairs away from him. Marcel caught his eye, and made a gesture which said: just wait, any minute now.

Soon after that Joan of Arc was taken prisoner, and the judge ordered her to be tortured until she confessed to being a witch. She was to tell her followers to surrender to the English, he said. Joan of Arc bravely refused.

The torturer came on stage, and Farid knew who was under the mask he wore. Theodore seized the cook by her long blonde hair and laid her down on a table that was doing duty for a rack. Then he tied Josephine's hands to a large metal ring.