The Dark Side of Love (8 page)

She thought he was related to the Sabuni family. She was particularly fascinated by his voice and his hands, but then she felt sudden alarm, painfully aware that she was stumbling into something for which her aunt Jasmin had paid the bitter price of death. Jasmin too had first fallen in love with her Jalal's voice and hands. When he spoke, so she had told Rana just before she was murdered, she felt weak, and when he touched her with his finely shaped fingers she was lost.

Rana tried to ignore Farid. Ever since her arrival she had been busy keeping Kamal at arm's length anyway, while he made eyes at her and
indulged in suggestive remarks. He claimed boldly that if a Christian like Rana loved him, he'd convert to Christianity at once even if it cost him his life. And he laughed brazenly and said then at least he'd be a true martyr to love. Rana didn't like such jokes. She took very little notice of Kamal, but did not answer back sharply either, not wishing to risk her friendship with his sister. For secretly Dunia was opposed to her family's Westernization. Following the Islamic tradition, she wanted to marry a powerful Muslim and look up to him. “Everything passes – love, virility, beauty. What matters to me is feeling deep respect for a fine man,” she had told Rana even before she was fourteen. She was one of those people who know, by the time they are ten, exactly what they want and who they will be.

But unlike Kamal, this other boy couldn't simply be overlooked. Soon the essay was finished, and the two of them came back to the drawing room. Farid was preceded by his laugh, infectious laughter that almost pushed the windows open. The whole room suddenly seemed full of fresh air. Even years later Rana often remembered that moment, and how ever since then she had thought of her love for Farid as opening a window to let in fresh air. He surrounded her with his laughter, beguiled her with his attentions, bewitched her with his brilliant talk. It was strange, but she felt both restless and at rest when he was there, and after her first two meetings with him she caught her heart racing whenever she was visiting the Sabunis and the doorbell rang. And if Farid really did come through the door she felt the blood shoot into her face, and didn't know where to look.

As either chance or her friend Dunia would have it, Rana and he sat beside each other at one of these encounters, when everyone was drinking tea.

“Where are you from?” asked Farid circumspectly, for whatever part of town she named could be a clue to her religion. Something Kamal had said made him wonder whether Rana was a Muslim after all.

“We live in the Salihiye quarter,” she replied. It was a high-class district where both Christians and Muslims lived. “What about you?”

“In Bab Tuma, not far from the gate,” said Farid. His answer was not strictly accurate, for the Bab Tuma gate was over fifteen hundred
metres from his house. He should really have named the eastern gate, Bab Sharqi, less than a hundred metres from the entrance to their alley. But saying “Bab Sharqi” told no one anything. All religious communities lived together in that part of town, whereas Bab Tuma was the quintessentially Christian quarter. The reply did not fail to take effect. Rana pricked up her ears.

“Oh, so you live among Christians?” she asked, smiling.

“What do you mean, among them? I
am
a Christian,” he replied. Rana's heart was racing. She began to laugh.

“What's so funny?” he asked, surprised.

“Nothing. I'm laughing because I thought you were a Muslim. I'm a Christian too,” she said quietly, so that only he could hear her. She blushed.

“I'm glad, although religion doesn't really make any difference to me,” Farid replied. His relief made his assumed indifference less than plausible.

“I feel the same, although it makes a difference to the rest of the world,” said Rana, and grief immediately came into her face. Farid looked at her, and at that moment he was lost. He had to take a deep breath in case his heart stopped beating.

He sought her hand under the table, and when he touched her Rana jumped, just for a moment, but then placed her hand firmly in his. And for a minute the earth stood still and the world became a place of infinite peace. At that moment there were only two people in all Damascus, sitting there holding hands. A deep calm hovered almost audibly above their heads. Then the normal world came back, with its noise and the tea-drinking and Rana's friend's laughter.

“The rest of us are still here too,” whispered Dunia with a meaning look as she handed the two of them their tea. Rana and Farid woke up, quite shocked to find that the world was still in full swing. Even before leaving the Sabuni house, they had arranged to meet again in Sufaniye Park near Bab Tuma.

He had picked up the information that her father was a lawyer and her surname was Shahin. As Shahin is a common name in all Middle Eastern countries, it told him nothing at first, but later that night he was overcome by anxiety: could Rana be a daughter of the Shahin clan
of Mala, his family's arch-enemies? The forty-year-old feud between them had only recently flared up again. Since January, in fact, all hell had been let loose, and his father was now triumphantly celebrating some severe setback or other suffered by the Shahins.

Farid tossed and turned uneasily in bed. He woke early next day. His mother was surprised by his grave face, and even more by his first remark to her.

“Do you know which of the Shahins are on bad terms with our family? Is one of them a lawyer?” he asked even before taking his first sip of tea.

Claire stroked her son's head. “If you've lived with a Mushtak for as many years as I have, you know about their enemies the Shahins from great-grandson to great-great-grandfather. Why?”

“Oh, nothing. I was only asking. I met someone whose surname is Shahin,” he said, glossing over the facts. She smiled at his poor attempt at camouflage.

“There are Shahins everywhere, but it's only the Mala family that the Mushtaks hate. Let me think,” said Claire. “Yes, I believe one of them
is
a lawyer or a judge. I don't know for sure, but I could soon find out. A friend of mine knows him. Shall I ask her?”

“No, no, never mind,” replied Farid. He had made up his mind to ask Rana himself.

He was absent-minded all day. His chemistry teacher was the first to notice. “Our promising chemist has gone missing today,” he said, when he had asked the class a question and Farid just went on staring into space. This remark too passed him by. Only the laughter of the class roused him.

“What? Why?” he stammered.

“I was asking about the difference between olefins and paraffins,” said the teacher patiently, without a trace of sarcasm.

“Paraffins are saturated hydrocarbons and olefins are unsaturated.”

“Correct,” said the teacher, admiring Farid's ability to come up with the right answer even when his mind was on something else, while the rest of the class were concentrating hard and still couldn't reply. That boy will be a chemist some day, he thought to himself, smiling with satisfaction.

He couldn't eat lunch. Claire had laid the table for him and then went to her neighbour's, to help prepare the house for the arrival of a hundred mourners in a few hours' time. Faris, the neighbour's husband, had been fifty-nine and sound as a bell when his head suddenly dropped on his chest as he drank his morning coffee. “Faris! Oh God, Faris!” his wife cried out, full of foreboding. But her husband had taken her cry away with him into eternity.

Many of the neighbouring women were hurrying to the house to help. Some cooked food, others brewed huge quantities of coffee. Claire and her friend Madeleine were busy arranging borrowed chairs in the inner courtyard, with a sofa and an armchair for the bishop and the priest. The late Faris had been an important man in the Catholic community of Damascus, sitting on almost all the church committees.

Farid smartened himself up and finally rubbed his face with some of his father's eau de toilette. It had a pleasantly fresh orange-blossom scent. When his mother came home in the afternoon, she found his lunch untouched.

Sufaniye Park is next to the Christian Bab Tuma quarter. Farid gave himself plenty of time to get there, and still it took him only ten minutes. He was sweating. It was March, but almost as hot as summer. There was no sign of Rana anywhere.

After a while she came walking through the park, and saw him sitting lost in thought on one of the benches. She thought he looked wonderful in his white shirt, white trousers and beige leather shoes. His brown skin gleamed in the sunlight. Tall and thin as he was, he looked almost like an Italian, as if he might be a foreigner among the other rather stout figures out in the park on this warm day.

Suddenly Farid looked up. He saw her, and they both laughed. He kissed her for the first time, though only on the cheek, but his lips briefly brushed her mouth.

“Ooh, look, he kissed her,” a boy told his mother, who was playing cards with him on a brightly coloured quilt spread on the grass.

“They're brother and sister. Anyone can see that. Your turn to play a card,” she reproved him.

Farid was slightly disappointed when he told Rana how his thoughts had kept him awake last night, and heard that she herself had slept better than ever before. Obviously the question of his own surname hadn't yet occurred to her. Damascenes were not particularly interested in surnames. He asked what her father's first name was.

“Basil. Why are you interested?”

“Because I want to know which Shahins you are,” he replied. And he felt even more vexed with himself as he mentioned his suspicion that she might be one of the Shahin clan from Mala, his own family's enemies.

“So you come from Mala? And you're one of those Mushtaks?” asked Rana in surprise.

He nodded.

“I thought you were half-European. So my feet haven't carried me very far from that dunghill of a place,” she said, with disappointment in her voice.

“You're from Mala too?” asked Farid, barely audibly, because he already knew the answer.

She nodded in silence. Her laughter was gone.

He took her hand. It was cold, and he felt that Rana was trembling.

“He's not her brother,” Farid heard the boy on the quilt tell his mother.

“Play your cards,” she crossly told her son. “It's none of our business! Are you playing cards or setting up as a marriage broker?”

Rana looked at Farid. She saw longing and sorrow in his eyes, and although she was very much afraid, she knew for certain at that moment that she wanted to live with him. But next minute she remembered her mother's words: “A Muslim is still a human being, but the Mushtaks are rats! Rats! Rats!” The voice echoed through her head.

“Did you hear about my family's latest catastrophe?” she asked.

He nodded, and he realized she knew that the Mushtaks were held to blame for the arrest of Rana's uncle and the financial ruin of the entire Shahin family.

She didn't know much about the feud between the two clans, she
was just aware that there was one name her parents always repeated when they wanted to suggest something ugly, malicious, contemptible and hateful, and that name was Mushtak.

“Why does life have to be so complicated?” asked Rana.

“Because I'm a walking disaster area,” he replied. There were tears in his eyes, for at that moment he saw the mighty wall that was rising in front of him, and he was in despair because he couldn't get over it.

She kissed him, and he didn't know what to do. Her lips were cold; it was a strange feeling. He wasn't carried away as much as he had expected; instead, he saw himself like an actor on screen and tried to embrace Rana as an actor would. She laughed. He kissed her on the mouth.

“That's not the way a brother kisses his sister,” said the boy. His mother took no notice. She was dealing the cards again.

That spring of 1953 Farid didn't want to go to Mala for Easter, not at any price. He claimed that he wasn't well and wanted to rest. Couldn't his father, he asked, make an exception just for once?

Elias Mushtak wouldn't hear of any exceptions or compromises. The entire family must go to the village and publicly commemorate his father. They would also celebrate the latest ignominious defeat inflicted on his enemies of the Shahin clan.

“You can wear the city around your neck like a jewel the rest of the year, but we all belong in Mala for this one week,” he said calmly but implacably. Any further argument, as usual, was futile. What Elias said was law. Even Claire seldom protested.

So Farid obeyed, and went up into the mountains with the others in a very bad temper. That year he noticed for the first time how dangerously his father drove along the winding road. Three times, he almost crashed into vehicles coming the other way. Farid pictured himself falling into the abyss. It was always his father's fault, but Elias Mushtak cursed the other drivers at the top of his voice.

The higher up the mountain road the car made its way, the bleaker and more unattractive the boy found the landscape. And it seemed to be reflected in his face. A moment came when his mother noticed the grief in it as he stared at their surroundings. It was very unusual for him to look like that. He's in love, she thought, unhappily in love. And Claire was not wrong.

All the Mushtaks arrived in Mala on Good Friday, in relays, and light and music filled their long-deserted houses again.

As if they had been waiting all winter for this solemn moment, the five village boys came to the Mushtak villa in their best clothes next morning, making a rather shy and restrained noise under the big balcony until Farid heard them and asked them in for a lemonade, as he did every year. They liked it very much, particularly with ice cubes from the only electric refrigerator in the village at that time, which of course belonged to the Mushtaks. Sticking to their usual custom of the last few years, as they drank their lemonade on the balcony they decided to go for a picnic under the huge old elm tree on the hill after church on Easter Sunday. From that vantage point, you could think of the village as charmingly small and insignificant, the way the boys liked it. Furthermore, no one could catch them smoking up on the hill. They kept watch through the binoculars on anyone and anything moving further down. They didn't really have anything to fear during Easter week, for no one else felt like going up to the distant elm tree when festivities were in full swing in the middle of the village.