The Dark Side of Love

by Rafik Schami

  But George Mushtak realized that his love for her crippled him. She wasn’t well, she complained and wept all the time, as if Laila had died and Sarka was only her wretched husk. He didn’t know what to do. When he was with her, she begged him not to go away. But life outside wouldn’t wait. He couldn’t sit at her bedside for ever, holding her hand, while that bastard Jusuf Shahin was trying to destroy him.

  Jusuf had married a clever woman from Aleppo. She was his closest confidante, and the secret leader of the anti-Mushtak campaign. Her name was Samia. She was a witch, but she lent her husband wings, whereas Sarka had been like a leaden weight clinging to George’s feet ever since their arrival in Mala. When little Salman began crying at night, he had another room prepared for her, on the first floor at the other end of the house, and from then on he slept more peacefully.

  One night soon after the birth of her second son Hasib she felt that she couldn’t breathe. She rose from her bed and quietly went out. The wind refreshed her face. She took deep breaths of night air. The moon was shining brightly; you could almost hear the silver silence. Suddenly the yard gate sprang open, and she felt a strange current drawing her away. Like a feather with no will of its own, she flitted through the gateway and on past the church of St. Giorgios to the terraced fields. Only when she reached the distant threshing floor did she realize that she was barefoot. She turned and went back to bed, and next day she would have thought the whole thing was only a dream, but for the thistles still clinging to her dress.

  A little while after that, people began whispering about a ghost that haunted the fields on nights of full moon, softly singing nursery rhymes. Those who heard that song, they said, fell victim to a spell that turned them too into children and led them to their ruin.

  Sarka was indeed always out and about now when the moon was full. One night she was walking over the hill near the graveyard when she noticed a man following her. She stopped and turned to face him. He stood rooted to the spot in the moonlight. He was slender, and as beautiful as a youth. Sarka went on singing, and he listened to her song like a child.

  “What do you want?” she asked. He trembled with fear, and stammered as he said he had never touched a woman yet, he would like to lay his head in her lap just once. She laughed and reached her hands out to him, but then he ran away.

  He came back every night when the moon was full, but he never ventured to touch her. Instead, he always whispered, “Holy Virgin, stand by me.”

  After that the villagers of Mala spoke of two ghosts. At first they laughed at the strange couple, but when the shepherd Ismail was found hanged close to the graveyard one morning the peasants were afraid. Three days before, Ismail had been saying that he was going to listen to the nocturnal singing. The ghost was a friendly one, he said, and surely they could see that nothing had happened to him yet.

  The shepherd died a month after the birth of Malake, Sarka’s third baby. George Mushtak took a dislike to the child from the first, and his arch-enemy Jusuf Shahin knew why and was happy to tell other people what he thought. The baby’s father, he said, wasn’t Sarka’s husband but the handsome shepherd Ismail, who had hanged himself for love.

  But many in the village believed that the ghost who wandered the fields had turned the shepherd’s wits, and they felt fear weighing them down. For it was at this of all times that they had to go out at night, because the water from the spring was running short, and was shared out between families according to a precise timetable. That way, every farmer could irrigate his field at an allotted time, and those times alternated between day and night.

  So after the shepherd’s tragic death they stopped up their ears with wax by night, and if they heard a sound all the same they exclaimed, “Holy Virgin, stand by me!” As they couldn’t hear how loud they were speaking, their cries rang out from the terraced fields and echoed all the way down into the valley.

  After the difficult birth of her fourth child Elias, Sarka was unwell for a long time. The midwife Sofia had to spend the night with her, in case she was needed. George Mushtak paid her generously, but he refused to listen when Sofia said it would soon be impossible for his wife to be left alone. And when the catastrophe happened, it was too late.

  One hot June day in 1916, Sarka suddenly appeared in the large field. Itinerant reapers always came to Mala for the wheat harvest at the end of June, and found plenty of work for two weeks. They were badly paid, but poor pay was still better than starvation. This was the middle of the First World War, and poverty and misery reigned in the Ottoman Empire.

  George Mushtak was a harsh taskmaster. Not only did he pay badly, he didn’t hesitate to whip his reapers if he caught them idling – or what he took for idling. On the other hand, he gave them employment from the first to the last day of the harvest, and he paid money, which was better for many of the reapers than the usual payment in kind. These itinerant workers went from village to village with their womenfolk, offering their services. There were many tales about the women reapers who earned five piastres for ten hours’ work by day, but three times as much by night. In Mala, harvest was also the fornication season, and for many young men it was the one chance they had in the year to satisfy their sexual urges. They saved up their piastres for those last two weeks in June.

  So on that hot June day Sarka came to the field where the reapers were at work. She looked with feverish eyes at the men bending, sickle in hand, to cut the blades of wheat and lay them on the ground in bundles. Younger men then gathered them into larger sheaves, and finally carried them to the threshing floor on the backs of donkeys.

  Suddenly Sarka crouched down, and to the horror of the reapers raised her dress, bared her buttocks, laughed out loud and pissed. The men looked away. One of the shocked women asked, “Aren’t you ashamed to bare your backside in front of men, mistress?” Sarka laughed and cried, “I’m never ashamed in front of cockroaches. What does it matter if they see my backside?”

  “Cockroaches?” cried several of the reapers. “Cockroaches?”

  “Yes, what else are you? They whip you, they screw your women, and as for you, you twirl your moustaches with pride in the evenings, thinking of the money your wives will bring home!” cried Sarka in a hoarse voice.

  At that the men suddenly all shouted at once. They felt that they and their wives had been mortally insulted. A little later they killed two of George Mushtak’s men in their rage, and set his fields and some others on fire. That was the beginning of the biggest riot in the history of the village.

  The reapers went through Mala, looting and murdering, setting fire to houses and to the church of St. Giorgios. The blaze quickly ate its way through the dry wood of the buildings. The villagers had difficulty keeping the flames in check and saving any neighbouring houses. As if by a miracle, however, the church survived, and only the porch and a part of the east wing burned down. The fire went out in front of the altar of its own accord.

  There was fighting everywhere, and crowds of reapers from nearby villages hurried in to help their comrades. On the third day, they were clearly in the majority as they faced the men of Mala. Mushtak only just escaped an attempt on his life.

  Infuriated, he gathered his loyal supporters together, and with the help of Mobate’s men he attacked the reapers. Jusuf Shahin and other rich farmers now joined the fray too. The fighting went on for days, and over seventy of the itinerant workers were killed.

  There was no police station in Mala at the time, and the Ottoman governor of Damascus refused to send reinforcements. He was afraid of being thought a traitor if his troops defended a Christian village against Muslim workers.

  The reapers took plenty of loot. They went off with horses, jewellery, money, furniture, and crockery. All they left behind was their dead, who lay lifeless and nameless in the streets.

  Many of the farmers were left lamenting the destruction of their entire harvest. Others had lost their houses and all the valuables in them. But it was worst of all for Mushtak. The news that Sarka h
ad disappeared hit him harder than the loss of his possessions. She was not among the dead, nor could she be found anywhere else.

  Sofia the midwife helped Sarka’s housekeeper to look after the four children. The firstborn, Salman, was just eight, and Elias the youngest was not yet two years old.

  All attempts to trace Sarka failed. Two years passed, and Mushtak never had a good night’s sleep. When he closed his eyes, he saw her lying naked on a heap of wheat. During the day he longed for her fragrance. Sofia saw him pace up and down her room and heard him crying out in pain. He would take out Sarka’s clothes, smell them, tear them up and then gather the pieces together and put them in a big box. When lovesickness began to cut him like a knife, he went to the church of St. Giorgios, where he opened his shirt and showed the Catholic priest, Father Timotheus, a deep cut in the region of his heart.

  Timotheus was the son of a rich Damascene family who had fled from the world to find peace in Mala. The villagers regarded the monk as a saint, and it was said that he sometimes levitated, hovering in the air for over an hour while praying. Just before Easter his hands always showed the stigmata of Our Lord, and bled. Timotheus was both modest and stern with himself. That day he laid his hand on the suffering George Mushtak’s wound.

  “No, not that wound, reverend Father, not that one,” said Mushtak. “Pray for Sarka to come back to me, and I’ll give the church my thousand-year-old elm tree.” Everyone knew the elm that stood on a distant hill, easily visible from the village square.

  “If your prayers help me to warm myself on Sarka again, then the firewood from that ancient tree will keep the church and the presbytery warm for years,” Mushtak told the priest as he left.

  And Sarka did come back three days later, as if out of a clear blue sky. She was wearing plain but clean peasant clothes, but her mind was hopelessly deranged. Her husband welcomed her with tears of joy.

  No one knew where she had been all that time, or how she found her way home. She never spoke another word until the day she died. All she did was wander around the village looking for something. Whenever she heard children’s voices she ran towards them, only to collapse in disappointment and shed tears.

  Legend upon legend formed around Sarka, but all the tales were just gossip. Some people claimed to have seen her with one of the reapers who had been wounded, going about with him looting and burning. Others were sure she had been abducted out of revenge by the brother of a reaper who had been murdered in the village, and was then driven to madness by poison.

  Sarka brought George Mushtak no joy now. He would lie silently in his room, weeping. And so time passed, and the church never got a single branch of that elm tree. When the monk lost patience and reminded the forgetful Mushtak of his promise, Mushtak roared indignantly across the village square, “All that your saints gave me back was a lunatic. She’s only half a human being, and for that you’ll get only half the tree!”

  That very night lightning struck the distant hill. For several long minutes, Mala was as brightly lit as if a thousand suns were shining. The elm tree was struck by the lightning and split in two. In time, one side dried up while the other remained green. Over the years, the two assumed a strange shape. The dead half looked like a waning crescent moon, the green half like a waxing moon. Rain, sun, and human hands carved the split down the middle of the tree into a kind of cave, where lovers and children liked to hide.

  Sarka often spent days on end there. Travellers and peasants, passing the elm, had a shock when she suddenly emerged from inside the tree.

  Just before her death there were rumours that she had borne a son, but hid the child for fear of her husband, and now she had forgotten where, hence her desperate searching. Children ran after her pulling at her dress and crying, “Here’s your son, you blind madwoman!” And they crowed and hit her and threw stones. When she was near the Mushtak property no one dared molest her, but as soon as she was a little way from the walls of the house she became a target for all who really wanted to hurt the founder of the clan, but dared not attack him openly himself. However, when a boy hit the crazed woman with a stone, everyone applauded. Sarka cursed the stone-thrower in her heart, and you could see the hatred in her eyes, but her mouth remained mute.

  This time, said Sofia, was the hardest of Mushtak’s life. His enemies rejoiced at his suffering, and encouraged everyone to tell more tales of his wife.

  Two years after Sarka’s return to the village, a peasant woman going to quench her thirst at the little spring near the elm found Mushtak’s wife inside the tree. She seemed to be sleeping with a blissful smile on her face. But she never woke again.

  BOOK OF THE CLAN I

  Arab clans and pyramids ignore the passing of time.

  DAMASCUS, MALA, BEIRUT 1907 – 1953

  22. The Gulf

  The gulf between the Mushtak and Shahin families was deep. Later, no one could say just how their hostility had begun, but even the children of both families were convinced that they would sooner make friends with the devil than one of the enemy clan.

  George Mushtak had met Jusuf Shahin on the evening of his arrival in Mala. The two men were almost the same age. They drank together in the house of the village elder Mobate, who had invited all the notables of Mala to meet the stranger seeking shelter there. It was said that George and Jusuf made friends quickly that evening, but came to blows a few days later because Shahin had slighted Mushtak’s young wife Sarka and treated her roughly. He didn’t like women, in particular blue-eyed women with quick tongues who laughed a lot. Sarka combined all those qualities.

  Mobate managed to reconcile the two men, and there was peace for a while. Then came the christening party for the village elder’s firstborn son. The christening wasn’t even over, so the tale went, before trouble flared up between the two rivals. Apparently Jusuf had made a coarse joke at Sarka’s expense; because of her blue eyes he was said to have asked whether her mother had conceived her with a Frank, his term for all Europeans. “Oh yes,” Sarka was reported as replying, “at the same time as your mother conceived you with a donkey.”

  “Whore!” he spat at the young woman. Then there was a riot. Jusuf was about to slap Sarka’s face, when George Mushtak came between them. Several others tried to part the two men. Jusuf left the house. He had been the only Orthodox Christian at the party anyway.

  George Mushtak was deeply offended and swore revenge. Perhaps the origin of all the hostility that followed lay in his disappointment. He had liked Shahin, and had great hopes of their friendship.

  When the priest spoke to him, trying to smooth matters over, he merely spat. “If I ever forgive that dog I’ll lick my spittle off the ground.”

  From then on he was always at pains to show who was the most powerful rooster on the Mala dunghill. Many tales were told of his wily tricks in buying everything he could lay hands on, until at last he owned a hectare of land, a house, a horse, a cow, a sheep, and a threshing floor more than his arch-enemy Shahin.

  From the very first day Jusuf’s wife Samia had seen more in Mushtak than just the threat of a rival for power in the village, which was Jusuf’s view of him until that christening party. Then she met the stranger for the first time, and later she told her husband that in his company she felt he was a beast of prey. He had an acquisitive, bloodthirsty look in his eyes, she said. She felt as if her skin were scorching when Mushtak looked at her, and she found his presence uncomfortable.

  Shahin’s pride was wounded by his initial misjudgement of his opponent. It was only Sarka whom he had despised from the first. So now he used her to strike his next blow at Mushtak. He claimed she was a Muslim woman, the stranger had brought her with him from a brothel, and that was why she never went to church. She didn’t even know how to cross herself. That taunt went home.

  Mushtak wanted to provide evidence to the contrary next Sunday, but Sarka refused to set foot in the church. They quarrelled bitterly; it was said that he had been very abusive to her during their argument, and that wa
s why she had done all the things she did later, which ultimately led to her early death.

  But before that sad event hostility between the two rivals went on steadily growing, and the village split into two clearly divided camps, the supporters of Mushtak and the supporters of Shahin. Attack after attack fuelled rage and hatred on both sides.

  For instance, a young man once went to work for Shahin as a groom. After a year he disappeared one night with five of his master’s most expensive Arab horses. When it came to Jusuf’s ears that George Mushtak had hired the runaway groom, Mushtak’s barn burned down two nights later with that year’s entire harvest inside it.

  In addition, the growing enmity between the two rivals ultimately gave their adherents, Catholic on one side and Orthodox on the other, a clear focus for their mutual dislike, and it took up permanent residence in their minds. Soon the village elder, Mobate, seemed only a pathetic mediator always trying to keep the two real rulers of Mala apart. But there was no chance of that, for the hostility between Catholics and Orthodox Christians is over a thousand years old in the Middle East. Too much blood had flowed in Mala now, and both clans had an excellent memory. Every grief suffered by one side was celebrated as an occasion for joy by the other.