The Dark Side of Love (76 page)

He sat on the edge of his old camp bed with a bottle of arrack in one hand and a cigarette in the other. About ten young men sat on the floor of his poorly furnished room, all of them smoking. A dense cloud of smoke floated out of the open window, as if Gibran's room were a kebab restaurant.

It was the first time Farid had joined them. Josef had been pressing
him to go almost every day since his return from the monastery. He was really missing something, Josef said, for when Gibran was drunk he could tell a story better than the best of the
hakawati
storytellers in the city. And today Gibran was so drunk that he never even noticed when they came in. Farid found a place near the window where he could get some fresh air.

“My story today is about a tragic love affair. The tale of Laila and Madjnun is sweet lemonade by comparison. The heroine and hero are Juliana and Arnus, and you must remember those names.”

“Why?” some of the young men asked.

Gibran took a large gulp from his bottle and drew on his cigarette. “Arnus. Arnus and Juliana,” he repeated.

“Isn't that the name of an avenue in Damascus?” asked Toni. Gibran took another large gulp and grunted.

“And wasn't Arnus the son who went to war against his father?”

“What war?” asked Suleiman. “I thought Arnus meant a corn cob.”

“No, my boy. Arnus may sound like the Arabic for a corn cob, but it's a Roman name. Sultan Aziz of Damascus was a young and very clever ruler in the days when the crusaders had occupied the entire coastline.”

That was the beginning of the long love story that Gibran told. He talked and talked, and never stopped drinking all the time, holding the normally restless young men so spellbound that they all listened in silence. One of them even shed tears when the Sultan's son Arnus was put in prison, and Sultan Aziz saw around his neck the medallion that he had given his beloved wife Juliana many years ago.

Gibran ended his story, put the empty liquor bottle down on a crate where a full ashtray and several crumpled books already lay, and fell backward on the bed. He began snoring at once, and the young men stole out of his room.

The new club in Abbara Alley, founded during Farid's absence in the monastery, had been there for some time now. It had its premises in a large backyard belonging to the Catholic Church.

Its founders, a handful of young men, were proud of having made a pleasant place out of a dilapidated yard full of mountains of rubbish and old junk. Determined to make their idea succeed, the members had collected donations from the Christian community, reminding the rich that it was time to do something for the young if they were to hold their own with the Muslim majority in Damascus. When they approached atheists, nationalists, and communists, on the other hand, they pointed out the advantages of having healthy young people around, brought in from the street by the club to keep them from drugs, gambling games, and knife fights. Instead they could play basketball and volleyball, table tennis and chess on the club's new premises.

Such lavish donations had come in that, besides a well-equipped playing field, the club also had an office, a large table tennis room, and ten modern showering and changing cubicles in the single-storey building next to the yard. There was even a café.

From the first everything had been open to boys and girls alike, and as prices in the café were affordable it became a favourite meeting place for young people. In less than three years the club had acquired two hundred active members and a hundred honorary members, including the minister of culture, who was a Christian and could always call on the club members as voluntary assistants in election campaigns.

All Farid's friends were already in the club, and his father was an honorary member and generous with his donations. Two weeks after he came home from the monastery, Farid joined. He played chess well, he was reasonably good at basketball, and very good at table tennis.

All the inhabitants of the buildings around the square took down the boards that had been nailed over their windows. Vermin, the penetrating stink, and the unappetizing garbage lying around the yard
had made it impossible for them to have them open before. Now they sat at their windows, cracking roasted nuts and drinking tea, while they watched a strange, foreign game in which young men struggled for possession of a large red ball, aiming to throw it up and through a dangling, basket-like construction. Before two years were up, all the neighbours knew so much about the game that they sometimes even whistled derisively at the referee.

Now that this new meeting place was available Farid's friends seldom met in the attic or at Rasuk's place. They preferred going to the club. And someone else started coming to it every day: the old seaman Gibran. He became best friends with Taufik, who leased the café. It turned out that they had known each other in their youth, but then lost track of one another for decades.

Gibran helped Taufik to clean the café, water the flowers, and buy supplies. In return he could eat and drink as much as he wanted there. He stopped wandering around town and cast anchor at the club. There was only one thing he couldn't do there, and that was to drink alcohol. Taufik was inflexible on that point. He himself never drank, and one day when Gibran turned up tipsy Taufik wouldn't let him in, hard as the young people begged him. They had hoped to hear one of the old seaman's spicy stories.

Farid met Amin in September over a game of chess. He said of him later that no one else apart from Claire and Rana had such an enduring influence on his life as the small tiler. Even years later, Farid remembered their first meeting. He had of course seen Amin at the club before, but only that day, during their game of chess, did he first talk to him. At the time there were no very good chess players in the club, so Farid, with the sketchy knowledge of the game that he had picked up in the monastery, was like a one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind and beat everyone. One September afternoon, Amin came over and asked him to teach him how to play chess.

Amin was five years older than Farid, he worked laying tiles, and he laughed a great deal at the evening meetings. You could tell from his sharp comments that he knew a lot about politics. Josef had always kept a respectful distance from him. Now and then they did argue, but they always stayed friendly.

Amin got Farid to tell him all about chess, and learned with an eagerness and gratitude that were all his own, marvelling at the thought processes behind the moves. He was an emotional player who swore volubly when he lost.

On that first day the game lasted only ten minutes. Amin invited Farid to have a tea, and when Taufik served the slender glasses, the tiler sipped his and then asked, with interest, “I hear you were in the monastery, is that so?”

“Yes, but it doesn't mean anything to me. I had a horrible time there, and the place was anti-Christian anyway.”

“How do you mean, anti-Christian?” asked Amin in some surprise.

“Because Christ preached love but they practise hate, pure hate. Jesus never tortured anyone, and shared his bread with all comers. But the monks torture people until they collapse or get to be as heartless as they are.”

Amin lit a cigarette. “It's odd what the Church has made of Jesus, don't you think?” he said. “He sided with the poor of this world, but the Church is always on the side of the rich and powerful.”

“You're right. A friend of mine in the monastery said the Church makes the way to God not shorter but longer.”

“Building in curves, barriers, and detours along the route,” added Amin grimly. “And charging tolls and admission tickets whenever it likes.”

Josef came in and went up to them. “Hello, Amin, trying to palm a Stalin icon off on him?” he joked.

Amin shook his head, grinning. “No, they're all sold out, and I'm not selling any of Satlan.”

Josef forced a smile, but there was discord in the air. Soon Rasuk, Toni, Suleiman and a number of others joined the two opponents. Farid had no idea what it was all about, but he sensed that each was trying to hold the other's ideas and convictions up to ridicule.

Suddenly they were all talking at once, and Farid couldn't keep up. He felt like a small child, inferior to the rest of them as they pronounced instant judgement, juggled names and events, and defended their claims with fanatical zeal. He could think of nothing and no one, apart from Rana and Claire, whom he could defend knowing so certainly that he was in the right.

Unobtrusively, he withdrew from their circle and sat down in the café.

“It's all just froth,” said Gibran, who was sitting there too, nodding in the direction of the fighting-cocks out on the terrace. “All just froth,” he repeated after a while. His voice faltered, and sounded as lonely as Farid's soul.

Farid read a magazine lying on the counter. Taufik kept carrying tea and coffee out to his customers on the terrace, where over thirty men and women were now involved in a debate that was getting nowhere, but was frequently interrupted by roars of laughter.

“Do you feel like a walk?” he suddenly heard Amin say. “We can't hear ourselves speak any more here.”

“Good idea,” said Farid. He paid, and waited for Amin, who had to go to the men's room first.

“Off already?” asked Josef, suddenly materializing behind him.

“Yes,” replied Farid.

“Will you drop in at my place later?”

“What if it's late?”

“Doesn't matter. I'll wait for you upstairs.” Farid realized that he meant in the attic.

Amin seemed to know Farid's family. He lived close to Grandmother Lucia, near the Ananias Church. When Farid went home three hours later, he was feeling remarkably cheerful. He knew that he had made a friend who talked to him like a big brother that evening. Amin was knowledgeable and very witty, yet he could well have complained day and night of the hard times his family had suffered. They had been resettled time and time again over the generations, and every time they lost all they had. His father, descended from a highly regarded Christian nobleman, worked as a doorman in Damascus, and his wages only just paid for his cigarettes and
arrack. Amin had had to leave school early and start work to feed the family, including three younger sisters who were still at school. But none of that could quench his love of life. He saw his poverty not as a private misfortune, but as part of even greater wretchedness all over the world that left millions of people starving and suffering. He said he would lend Farid books about world poverty, and they agreed to meet again.

Farid's parents were already asleep when he came home. He went quietly up to the second floor and from there to the attic above the aniseed warehouse. Josef was sitting at the table, reading.

“There you are at last,” he said.

“Have you been waiting long?”

“No,” said Josef, and then there was a long silence that troubled Farid. “Amin's a nice guy,” said Josef at last, without looking at his friend, “but he's a dangerous communist. You want to go carefully with him.”

“Why?” asked Farid, who hadn't thought the tiler seemed at all threatening, but was very sensitive and straightforward.

“Because communists never love their country. They get their orders from Moscow and carry them out, and if the comrades there tell them, ‘Kill your sister,' they do just that.”

“Thank God I don't have a sister, but I do have you. And comrade or no comrade, if the Pope himself tells me, ‘Kill Josef,' I'll convert to Islam right away. Satisfied?”

“Don't act so stupid. First they train you, then they inject a love of Moscow into you, and after that you have no will of your own. They're not naïve enough to order you to do something that repels you, they do it much more subtly, telling you to do things you don't think bad at all. And suddenly you may be a decent, honest human being, but you're a murderer and a traitor all the same.”

“But I'd never do anything to harm my country, my family, or my religion.”

“My God, how simple-minded can you get? The communists don't even recognise God, religion, and the family. They'd sleep with their own sisters.”

“Nonsense,” growled Farid angrily, remembering that Amin was
sacrificing his life for his parents and siblings, while the pampered Josef couldn't stand any of his sisters.

“I only wanted to warn you because I'm your friend and I'm fond of you,” said Josef. He sounded sad and resigned.

“Then calm down, Papa, going for a single walk with Amin doesn't make me a communist,” replied Farid cheerfully.

“Not yet, not yet,” whispered Josef despairingly. For he was firmly convinced that Farid had taken a fatal step.

And he was not mistaken.

One night just before school began again in early October, Gibran played the part of
hakawati
, the traditional Syrian storyteller.

Members were still at the club after midnight, but only sitting in the café and in the table tennis room. Out on the terrace, the noise they made would have disturbed the quiet of the night. However, they could stay in both rooms as long as Taufik let them, and he kept late hours himself. He was always glad to have company, for he felt lonely all by himself in his tiny room in the tenement block at the end of the street.

There was room for ten people in the café, but the big table tennis room would take a hundred chairs. Michel the joiner's clever design for the large green table meant that it could be folded up in a couple of moves and wheeled away to be stored in a cupboard, leaving a spacious lecture hall. Chairs and benches were stacked in a nearby room.