The Dark Side of Love (87 page)

“Oh no, a fake, like everything else in this house,” said Rana, and put one hand quickly in front of her mouth as if the remark had slipped out by mistake, but she was laughing through her delicate fingers. Farid loved the sound of her laughter, which reminded him of distant bells. He put both arms out to her.

It was Rana's idea to open a bottle of the best Lebanese red wine. As they drank it, they pictured the life they would lead together some day. Rana kept breaking into her clear laughter, and Farid heard in that recurrent note the twittering of cheerful sparrows, which amused him. After about an hour, however, he noticed that she was tipsy. A little later she could hardly speak, and after another glass of wine she fell asleep, smiling blissfully. Alarm abruptly drove the alcohol out of Farid's own veins. Rana was lying on the couch like a corpse. When he touched her she uttered a whistling sound, like a rubber duck.

What was he to do? It was already after ten in the evening. He sat her up, but she kept falling back again. Finally he bent down and put her over his shoulder. Her weight was no problem, but the alcohol suddenly rose to his head again, making him sway. His view of the stairs was blurred. None the less, he made it up to the first floor and then the second floor. Once there, he found her room and laid her carefully on the bed.

He began laughing himself, and fell on his knees beside the bed, with his upper body over Rana's stomach.

A little later a sound roused him from his drowsy state. He felt as if he had just heard someone closing the front door of the house. For a second he thought of hiding in the wardrobe, but then he realized that no one had come in after all. It was probably the wind blowing the cellar door shut. He undressed Rana, got her into her nightdress, laid her in her bed again and kissed her forehead. In her dreams she moaned.

The bottle, he suddenly thought, and he ran down to the cellar, picked the wine bottle up, cast a glance around the room to check for any other traces, switched off all the lights, and left the house.

He kept his head bent until he reached the next side street. Finally he stopped, disposed of the bottle under the dense branches of a bush, and went to the bus stop. On the way back he imagined the expression on Rana's mother's face if she had entered the house just as he was coming up from the cellar with her daughter over his shoulder. He couldn't stop chuckling, until two women sitting in front of him moved to sit elsewhere.

“Not quite right in the head, if you ask me,” said one of them.

They were sitting in an apartment on the outskirts of the city. Judging by the stuffy atmosphere and the overflowing ashtrays, it must be a bachelor pad. This was Farid's first meeting as a full Communist Party member.

The comrade who led this cell of the Party, which had four members, called himself Said. Apparently he was a bank clerk. Apart from him, only Farid had an important function in the youth organization ; the others were ordinary members. Comrade Kamil, a Kurd, had abandoned his studies and now worked as an olive oil salesman. He had a slightly rancid smell about him. The Shi'ite Comrade Samad, on the other hand, always turned up freshly shaven. He was
a ladies' hairdresser, and there was something slightly feminine in the way he himself spoke. Comrade Edward, an Assyrian from the Euphrates region, was a maths teacher and an eternal sceptic who doubted everything, especially himself.

“I am happy to open the first meeting of our Party cell. Between you, you represent the living image of our country,” said Comrade Said happily, overlooking the fact that the majority of the country's population, Sunni Arabs, was not represented among them at all. “Before we begin our meeting we will swear to be loyal, to die for one another, and to live for the working class. We despise anyone who betrays us. Your word will be enough for this oath now. When I was still young, members of the Muslim Brotherhood placed their hands on the Koran and a pistol. We communists had the hammer and sickle lying beside Marx's
Das Kapital
and a picture of Lenin. But those days are gone now. We had neither cars nor telephones, but we were clever and had nerves made of steel. I still remember a raid on my apartment. I don't mean to boast, but I was famous for my strong nerves and my quick repartee. When the police stormed my place, they saw the big picture of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, and one of the policemen asked me who the three men were. I told him in friendly tones, ‘The man with the beard is St. Anthony, the man with the bald patch next to him is the Apostle Butros, and the man with the big moustache is the Apostle Bulos. The policeman nodded and told his colleagues that I couldn't be a communist. It was a fact, he said, that Christians prayed to pictures of their saints. But time changes everything, even us. So your word alone will do for me. Who's volunteering to go first?” he asked.

Of course no one wanted to be first. The four of them all looked around.

“The youngest of us should have the courage to be first,” said Kamil.

“No,” replied Farid. “I'll let you go first out of respect for your age.”

“Oh, very well, very well, I'll start,” said Edward. “I swear by Lenin and my eyesight that I will always be true to communism, and even under torture I will not betray my Party.”

“I swear by …” Samad said next, in his soft voice, “I swear by …” he repeated, not quite sure who or what to cite, “I swear by my love
for the Party that I will never betray my comrades, whether male or female,” was the solution he finally hit upon.

Samad was the only one to mention female comrades at all. Farid saw, from Said's slight smile, that this had not escaped the notice of the old Party fox.

“And I swear by my mother and my eyesight that I will never betray the Party or give a comrade away,” said Farid hastily, and felt relieved.

“I swear by my people,” said the Kurd, and was going to go on to protest his loyalty, but Comrade Said, leader of the cell, raised one hand.

“Wait a moment, what do you mean, your people? Are you going to claim that all Kurdish pimps, speculators, Ba'athists and nationalists are saints?”

“Oh, for goodness' sake! I swear by our General Secretary Comrade Khalid Malis, a Kurd like myself, that I will keep faith in life and in death,” Kamil proudly concluded.

Azar's neighbour Zachariah was a cook at a pumping station in the desert that sent oil from Iraq on through a pipeline to the Mediterranean. His wife Bahia, at home in Bab Tuma, suffered less from her husband's absence than from his stingy ways. He earned well, but gave her and the children nothing. All four of them were pale, undernourished, and dressed like beggars.

Bahia swore to her neighbours that if her husband died she was going to give a big party, and just to make him turn in his grave she would say out loud that it had been his express wish for her to spend a lot of money on her guests. The neighbours laughed with her, though out of pity rather than anything else.

When Zachariah came home for two days once a month he insisted on eating fish, because they never had fish at the pumping station. It was like a ritual. After the long drive through the desert, the bus arrived punctually in Bab Tuma at nine in the morning. The bus stop
was only ten metres from the fish stall. He went to it before going on home and bought a kilo of whatever was the cheapest on offer, paying in advance for another kilo that the owner of the stall was to store overnight in his refrigerator for him.

At home, Zacharia ate the two kilos of fish on the terrace by himself, and when he had eaten enough, his wife and the children might be allowed to scrape what was left off the bones.

His children hated this large, ugly man with the scarred face and huge nose who turned up once a month, put everyone in a bad mood for two days, and at twelve noon precisely on both those days sat on a stool, looking as round as a barrel, and ate all that fish, smacking his lips.

One day when their father came home again the three brothers Sami, Hani, and Kamil, with several other children from their street, searched the whole quarter for cats and caught over twenty. When Zachariah finally sat down on the terrace, waiting for his fish, the boys stole close to the steps up to the terrace with the cats. The animals could smell the delicious fish dinner and were restless, but the children petted them and calmed them down.

Then Bahia came out with the steaming, fragrant platter, and Zachariah hadn't swallowed his first mouthful before twenty hungry cats suddenly chased up. He was sitting with his back to the steps, and for a moment didn't know where all the mewing came from. When he turned around, he froze with his mouth full and wide open. The cats looked at the white flesh of the fish hanging out of this large creature's mouth, and mewed their hungry hearts out.

Zachariah's eyes were wide with anger, and he yelled so loud that even three buildings away the neighbours stopped whatever they were doing in alarm. The poor cats had never heard such roaring before either, and froze in mid-leap.

Then Zachariah ceremoniously reached for his slipper, which was too small for him and just hung from his toes for the look of the thing. His reaching for a shoe, a threatening gesture familiar to all the cats of Damascus, released them from their paralysis and sent them racing away again in all directions, like lightning. Only one scarred, black tom who had lost his tail jumped up on the table with a death-defying
leap, snatched a fish from the platter, and ran away. Zachariah went back to his fish dinner.

A year later he fell severely sick with fish poisoning. There was much whispering in the street. Some said Bahia had poisoned him, others spoke of “that disease”, without saying what it was, for they believed that if you said the word “cancer” out loud you would get it yourself.

When Zachariah recovered, the skinflint made bad worse by turning fanatically religious. He had given up his job as a cook, and now he went to Mass every day. One day he told his wife that he was going to leave half of all he had to the Catholic Church. As he couldn't read or write himself, he said he had already asked the priest to draw up a will.

Bahia consulted with her women neighbours for a long time, and in the end she made an ingenious plan. Josef's mother Madeleine, in her neat handwriting, drew up another document in which Zachariah revoked all previous wills. It was witnessed by three women: Madeleine, Azar's mother Aziza, and Suleiman's mother Salma.

Zachariah died early one morning in the summer of 1958. His widow Bahia sent the children to school, took her husband's right hand, which was still warm, and pressed his thumb down firmly on an ink pad and then on the will. That was the legally recognized signature of all illiterates at the time.

A week later Father Basilius politely asked the widow if she would like to discuss her husband's will with him. He had a copy of it himself, he said. “Many children in Africa and Asia are waiting hopefully for your late husband's generous donation,” he added unctuously.

“Oh, your reverence,” smiled Bahia, “you didn't know my husband and his moods. He drew up a new will and left his property to his three children, leaving me and the Catholic Church right out of it.” And she made a great business of looking for the document and showing it to the priest, who had turned pale. After that he had some difficulty in finding his way back to the Catholic presbytery in Saitun Alley.

Kamal and Josef had been playing backgammon with Farid, who lost. They had gone home and he had put the game away. He was just going to lie down for half an hour when the bell rang. Matta and his fiancée were standing at the door.

“Brother,” began Matta happily, and then stopped. The woman beside him greeted Farid with a hearty handshake and stepped into the house, almost dancing for joy.

“So you're Farid. Matta reveres you like a saint,” she said. Faride was much more feminine than her handshake and his mother's description had led him to expect. She was lively and bright, and had all the qualities that Matta lacked.

“Brother,” said Matta after a while, and his fiancée Faride stopped talking in mid-sentence to attend to him. “We're getting … married at Christ … Christmas. We're …” Farid sensed what a strain his friend found it to get the words out. “At … Christmas,” Matta repeated. “Brother, we'd like you to be … to be our witness.”

“There, what did I tell you? It's only with you that he speaks more than three words together. How happy I am!” rejoiced Faride, standing up to kiss Matta on the forehead and both eyes.

The atmosphere in the club was gloomy. Amin had been arrested as he left home. Rasuk was being interrogated because of Elizabeth, and two other neighbours from their street had been tortured for a week, apparently because they had been confused with a couple of dangerous criminals. But word was going around that there were arbitrary arrests in almost every street, to intimidate the population.

Spring had been very late in 1960, but now it was suddenly like summer. The nights were warm. At the club, they decided they could sit outside again.

It was after eight o'clock when Gibran came to the club that evening
on his own. “Karime is visiting her ancient old aunt,” he said briefly, when Taufik asked him. Josef was glad. He didn't like Karime, and thought she was eating Gibran alive. It was a fact that since the old seaman fell in love with her, he hardly came to the club any more.

But when Gibran said she was visiting her old aunt a number of the members laughed, for in the spring of 1960 to say, “So-and-so is visiting his aunt,” was code for, “So-and-so is in jail for political reasons.”

“Karime and politics?” he replied, shaking his head. “That's like fire and water. She can't even bear to hear the news. I have to come to the café to find out what's going on in the world.”