by Rafik Schami
But he often doubted whether Claire loved him back, for she could suddenly be very reserved, keep her distance, sound noncommittal, and then she was only a cold cloud of perfume. So one day he summoned up all his courage and asked her if she loved him.
She gave him a more direct answer than he had ever read in any book about love. Claire spoke softly, but she looked him straight in the eye. She loved him very much, she said, and wanted nothing more fervently than to hold his hand, kiss him, and hold him close. But she didn’t know what she was to do without causing a scandal and putting him, Elias, in mortal danger, because she was engaged to a dangerous boxer who worked as a bodyguard.
He wasn’t so much alarmed by Claire’s frankness as by realizing that he could scent no desire in her. Furthermore, Nasibe warned him against Claire and described her in forthright terms as “that Damascus whore.” She was ready to kill the woman, she said, if Claire tried taking Elias away from her.
But when his father had a private conversation with him one morning, saying he would like him to seduce Samira with his charms and make her submissive, because after that she’d be bound to want him, Mala seemed too hot to hold Elias. His father and the powerful Mobate on one hand, Claire’s injured fiancé on the other, and then there was the infatuated Nasibe, who was claiming to be pregnant. He knew he mustn’t waste another second.
Only flight was left, but to be sure of the girl he wanted to take with him he went to Claire, and made his love and strong feelings for her very clear. He enjoyed the touch of her smooth skin, and although this first sexual experience of hers hurt, she held him close and wouldn’t let him go until she had entered Paradise with him several times.
They eloped next morning. Elias never guessed that his flight had saved his life, for Jusuf Shahin had just heard of the plan for him and Samira to set up a stud farm in competition with himself. So old Shahin had sent two men to lie in wait for Elias by night. They were to leave him alive, but mutilate his face. Then the vain Samira wouldn’t like the look of him any more, and George Mushtak’s son would be nothing but a burden to him.
The two men had waited opposite Tamam’s house, where the Surur family was spending the summer. They knew that Elias visited every evening. But they waited there in vain until after midnight. George Mushtak too had been waiting up for his youngest son until dawn. He thought Elias was with Samira, and smiled as he imagined her surprise and pain when that small, slight man thrust into her. He almost felt something like love for his difficult son. He was going to use him to ruin old Shahin.
If he had had the faintest idea of what had already happened by then, he would have wept bitterly at his worst defeat.
34. Defeat of the Master of the House
George Mushtak shut himself up in his bedroom for days on end. He cursed everyone, and he reviled Elias with particular ferocity. Mushtak knew that Shahin would strike now, and he told Salman to tell his men to be very careful and never leave the house unarmed. Many of them smiled at the fears of the master of the house, but soon after that they witnessed an attempted murder, and realized that George Mushtak had not been exaggerating. Shots were fired at Salman.
Mushtak’s eldest son was the only one allowed to see his father, and they spent many hours together every day. Salman kept urging his father to show himself to his people, because the wind was turning, blowing against the Mushtaks from a very dangerous quarter.
Shortly after the Feast of the Holy Cross on 14 September, Salman entered his father’s room again. That day, he had had a distressing quarrel with three young fellows lounging idly about, who made no move to go back to their work when they saw him coming.
“Father, you must go out to the men,” he said. There was sorrow and determination in his voice. “Elias doesn’t matter so much. It’s a pity that we’ve lost a supporter now that he’s gone, but you have a new son in Basil, which is more than we could have hoped for. The men are waiting for you outside. Of course I’ve had everything you ordered done, but I can tell that they need your word, your hand.”
Salman waited. He did not tell his father that the Shahins had fired on him, or that they were spreading word around the village that Mushtak had suffered a stroke. He passed one hand over the basil plant growing in a pot by the window, and thought how powerful his father was, when his mere absence seduced their enemies into rash confidence. He had recognized the marksman, despite the distance he kept. It was Butros, Jusuf Shahin’s eldest son. And Salman thought he would pay him back for that cowardly attack.
“Then let’s go out,” said George Mushtak, interrupting his son’s dark thoughts. He sensed that Salman urgently needed him.
At the end of September he rode out into the mountains, breathing deeply. He stopped on a hill, and let his eyes wander from his property to the Damascus road.
35. Samira and Shams
Mobate was by no means as unhappy as Mushtak when he heard of Elias’s flight. He had been very anxious about his daughter, who wouldn’t hear of marrying Mushtak’s son. She had actually threatened to die rather than become the wife of a dwarf who couldn’t even speak the village dialect properly, and instead tried to babble French in a pretentious way, as if his mother came from Paris.
When George left his room again Mobate immediately came to visit, assured him of his friendship, and said that marriage was a matter of fate, not planning. Mushtak did not agree, but he was relieved that the village elder bore him no grudge for his son’s flight.
Mobate knew he would have gained power if Samira had become Mushtak’s daughter-in-law, but at the same time he would also have lost it through being so clearly related to Mushtak. Clarity in that respect would make him less acceptable in others. The more open to him all houses were, the stronger he was as village elder. And then there was that eternal bloodshed between the Mushtaks and the Shahins. The marriage would have left him constantly involved in it himself.
As for Samira, he wasn’t worried about her future. And he was right. After a short, stormy infatuation with the handsome lunatic Shams, she had decided in favour of a marriage that would take her into calmer waters. Shams disappeared from the village and was never seen there again. Some said they had seen him begging in Damascus, others claimed to have come across him preaching in a mosque.
Samira met a man from Damascus who loved horses, and took herself and her fortune off to join him. The couple founded a stud for noble Arab horses that was to become one of the most successful in the country. But that was later, and much was to happen in the village before then.
As already mentioned, two weeks after Elias’s flight a marksman shot at Salman for the first time, although he missed. But then, in October and just after the Feast of St. Sergius, the attacker fired another bullet at Salman, and it hit him in the upper arm. It was only a glancing shot, but this time old Mushtak heard about the attack and massively over-retaliated. The Shahins’ stable was set on fire. Six horses perished miserably, and the watchman’s charred body was found with a hole the width of a finger in his right temple. Everyone knew that the Mushtaks were behind it, but the operation had been so efficiently carried out that no trail led to them. For months Jusuf Shahin mourned his horses, which he loved more than his own children. Old Mushtak knew just where his enemies were most vulnerable.
A counter-attack in the early summer of 1937 failed, thanks to Basil’s watchfulness. He set a trap for the three men who climbed into the yard by night after tricking the guard dogs with poisoned meat. The men were caught. After being cruelly tortured at the police station, they finally confessed everything. Jusuf Shahin had to pay a fortune in bribes to avoid going to jail, as the man behind the three of them, and was obliged to sign a humiliating document stating that he would be liable to prosecution for incitement to murder if anything happened to George Mushtak, one of his sons, or even just one of his employees. The verdict would inevitably have been a death sentence.
That evening the Mushtaks celebrated victory with their friends at a meal in the cour
tyard of the big house, and Mobate, who was sitting beside George, was not exaggerating when, in drinking his health, he said that after this no one, not even Salman or Basil, would take such good care of his safety as his arch-enemy Jusuf Shahin. Everyone laughed.
His old enemy did indeed forbid his sons to make any more attempts on Mushtak’s life. And they respected that prohibition until their father’s death in the summer of 1938.
BOOK OF THE CLAN II
The clan saved the Arabs from the desert, and at the same time enslaved them.
DAMASCUS, MALA 1907 – 1953
36. Jasmin and Mariam
When Jusuf Shahin died in the summer of 1938, his testicles crushed by an accurately placed kick from his mare Sabah, his arch-enemy George Mushtak told the old village barber who brought him the news that while the snake’s tail might be dead, the snake itself was still alive. The barber understood those words as an insult to a dead man. The hostility between the two families didn’t even respect the dignity of death. He silently nodded and moved away.
But George Mushtak had told the truth. He feared Samia, the real ruler of the house of Shahin, far more than his old rival Jusuf, who might be unprincipled and malicious but had never been able to see further than the end of his own nose. Samia, on the other hand, was the daughter of a family of considerable importance. She came from Aleppo, and had seen a good deal of the world before finally marrying the rich horse-breeder from Mala who was twenty years her senior.
For decades her father Butros Khuri had been the biggest textiles manufacturer in Aleppo, supplier to the court of the Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid. He bore the honorary title of Bey, which the Sultan seldom bestowed on Christians. Butros Bey had stipulated that the bridegroom, Jusuf Shahin, must be a strict adherent of the Greek Orthodox Church. He hated Jews, Catholics and the French, and blamed himself all his life for having backed the overthrow of the Sultan, toppled from his throne thirty years before.
Jusuf Shahin was Greek Orthodox but very far from devout, so he was hypocritical in presenting himself to his future father-in-law as a man who would campaign against the Catholics day and night. He got what he wanted: his wife and a great deal of gold in return for his courage.
“The Catholics are even worse than the Muslims. You have to knock their heads in, that’s the only language they understand,” said Butros.
“And so I will,” replied Jusuf unctuously, unaware that in his struggle with his rival Mushtak he was indeed going to become the greatest enemy of the Catholics.
After this conversation with Butros Bey, Jusuf used part of the money to renovate his large property. And he did it exactly as Samia wished, so that she would lack for nothing and could hold her head high in the company of her rich parents and the rest of her family. His was the only house in the village at the time to have a proper bathtub, and coloured marble tiles on the floors of the rooms. A year later Samia moved in.
Loyalty was alien to Jusuf Shahin in both his business dealings and his private life. He was faithful to Samia only because he hated all women. It was said in the village that he allowed her near him only four times in his entire life, on the occasions when he made her pregnant. None the less, she brought eight children into the world. The other four, rumour said, were the result of her love affairs with the young grooms. This, however, was the wildest of gossip. Only her youngest daughter Jasmin was the fruit of a passionate affair, but no one in the village knew anything about that in detail.
Samia went to Aleppo to spend a week with her family and relations there every year. Jusuf never accompanied her, and so she was able to meet the love of her youth secretly in Aleppo. Her cousin Samer was a highly regarded lawyer, although he had made his large fortune by importing exotic woods. Samia and Samer had grown up in the same big house and played together like brother and sister. They had loved each other since childhood, but they couldn’t marry because, as a baby, Samer had been breast-fed by Samia’s mother for several weeks while his own mother recovered from an inflammation of her nipples. According to the custom of the time, that made Samia and Samer siblings at the breast, and marriage between them would have been incest.
Samer himself was now unhappily married. His father had chosen the daughter of the richest merchant family in Aleppo as his wife.
Samia knew exactly when and where she had conceived Jasmin. In the winter of 1919 Samer was able to welcome her to his own house for the first time. His wife had gone away with their three children, so Samia visited him daily, and they spent a week together in Paradise.
On the first day of their reunion they were hungry for each other, and had already made love in the dining room, on the stairs, in the bathroom, and in the passage under the arcades. When they reached the bedroom on the first floor, they were so exhausted that they fell asleep. Samia woke in alarm two hours later, and had to run back to her parents’ house nearby. As a woman, she couldn’t on any account spend the night out.
Next morning she went to Samer as early as she could. Her cousin was already waiting for her. He led her to the bedroom, where she stopped in surprise. He had covered the bed with a thick layer of snow-white jasmine flowers, picked early that morning and now filling the room with their intoxicating fragrance. He undressed Samia and carried her carefully to the bed, where he made love to her at length in the sea of jasmine. They perspired freely during their love play, and their bodies were saturated with the scent of the jasmine blossom.
Weeks later, however hard she scrubbed herself in the bath, Samia still smelled of their fragrance. Even her husband, who always stank of his horses and whose nose was anything but sensitive, wondered why she had given off such a flowery scent ever since her return from Aleppo.
So Samia gave the daughter she had conceived that day the name of Jasmin, and she was her favourite child. The girl looked like her mother, but she moved, spoke, and laughed like her real father, although she never met him, for Samia’s cousin Samer died in an accident in 1923, when the child was only three years old.
When her other daughter Mariam married Samer’s eldest son in the summer of 1938, Samia stayed away from the wedding. She went to bed and claimed to be unwell.
Her husband Jusuf hated wedding festivities, but he was sure that his daughter had won a great prize in Jakub, the son of his father Samer’s rich and highly regarded family. However, he was morose and bad-tempered when he went to the wedding with the bride and her older brothers Butros, Bulos, Faris, Basil, and Musa. All his sons were married now, and they brought not only their wives but also their parents-in-law with them. His daughter Amira and her husband Louis came from Damascus. A bus had to be hired just for the family, and another was reserved for Shahin’s followers, neighbours, and the leading villagers of Mala.
Jasmin was eighteen at the time. She wanted to go to the wedding too, but she had to stay with her allegedly sick mother and help the housekeeper Salime to look after her. She wept for nights, but it did her no good.
Since Jakub’s mother was a widow, his grandparents organized the festivities. The powerful textiles manufacturer Khuri gave a wedding party fit for the Thousand and One Nights. In between the lavish meals, dancing girls and conjurors entertained the guests for seven days and seven nights. The best Syrian cooks lived not in Damascus but in Aleppo.
Besides the rich gold jewellery that Jusuf gave his daughter, he had thought of a special surprise. He had a noble Arab steed brought to Aleppo, and it was led out by a slim stable lad wearing colourful Arab costume on the wedding day. The stable lad solemnly handed the astonished bridegroom the horse’s gold-studded reins. Mariam whispered to him what he must do, and to the surprise of his grandparents and the applause of the guests Jakub, son of that distinguished family, walked the horse around in a circle, with perfect self-assurance, before he gave the reins back to the groom, patted the animal’s neck, and returned to sit on the raised seat beside his bride feeling wonderfully happy.
Jusuf looked at the horse with sadness in his eyes. “Go with
the grace of God. Sabah will miss you very much,” his neighbours heard him whispering. No one guessed that the horse-breeder would pay for parting them with his life. Sabah, his finest mare, loved only this one stallion Shafak, and kicked out at any others.
Shortly after his return Jusuf tried putting a young stallion to his mare. The mare lashed out wildly and would not calm down. After a few days Jusuf lost patience and decided to break her resistance. When he approached her she kicked. Jusuf shot three metres through the air to meet his death.
Jakub was an able man, but he wasn’t interested in his father’s business dealing in exotic woods. His mind was set on his grandfather’s trade, and at the age of twenty-two he opened his own small, modern textiles mill.
Samia was envious. To think that Mariam of all people, the very image of her father, had the luck to live with this wonderful man. All these years she had hoped that Jasmin would make the running, and kept sending her to stay with her grandparents in Aleppo during her vacations. But to Jakub the little girl had been only his pert young cousin, and he was all the more strongly attracted to Mariam, who wasn’t particularly beautiful but was mature and energetic. When he was with her he felt a deep need to tell her everything, and he sensed that her readiness to listen in itself lured the words out of his mouth. Only with her would he allow himself to speak of his half-formed ideas, for when she listened they matured into convictions.
And whenever Mariam went home on a visit, Jakub felt a great void in himself. That was love. Not only her own mother but the whole village envied Mariam her happiness. She was also thankful to Jakub for catapulting her out of Mala, eaten up as the place was by quarrels and hostility, and showing her the great world of Aleppo, Venice, and Istanbul. She loved her tall, slim husband, who couldn’t look at a woman without ideas of sex in mind, yet remained as faithful to her as a dog. He was a genius, and like most geniuses he was also a grown-up child who needed a firm hand. But happiness is an unreliable companion. Jakub died of a stroke after only a year of marriage. One night he woke and asked for a drink of water. Mariam jumped out of bed. Something alarmed her. And even as she stood in the kitchen she knew that Jakub was dead. She came back with the water, and there was her happiness lying half off the bed with his back bare. He had stretched out his arms as if to save himself from falling. She screamed, the glass flew from her hand and shattered against the wall. Mariam never wanted to go back to Mala. She believed all her life that the jealous villagers had grudged her such happiness and killed her husband with their darts of envy.
