by Rafik Schami
She was a city-dweller born and bred, and as a young girl she thought village life boring. She shared her aversion to all things provincial with her father. He made no secret of the fact that he preferred a newspaper and a morning cup of coffee in Damascus to the fresh mountain air. Unlike Claire, however, he could always get out of visiting Mala by claiming that, sad to say, he couldn’t take the time off work.
Her mother seemed indifferent to her father’s presence or absence. She liked the rugged country life and the primitive villagers who obeyed her slavishly, did everything she asked, and kept calling her “Signora”, because she liked to hear the word so much.
Claire’s brother Marcel, two years her senior, could imagine no better way of spending the summer than in Mala either. For that very reason Claire took a dislike to the village. But one thing was true: you slept better in the mountains than in the sticky heat of Damascus.
Her mother Lucia was half Venetian. Her father, Antonio Sciamico, had come to Damascus in 1850 with a trade delegation, fell in love with the city, and stayed. He was said to be a nobleman. Large parts of the Italian city of Venice, Lucia liked to say, belonged to his family. However, the only certain fact was that he was a flâneur and a playboy.
Antonio Sciamico learned Arabic fast, and renamed himself Anton Shami, which sounded rather like his Italian name, but helped him to blend in more easily. In Arabic, Shami just means Damascene, and is a very common surname. Many Jews, Christians, and Muslims bear the name.
After a while he married Josephine, the daughter of Zacharias Asfar, one of the largest silk manufacturers in Syria. Shami himself became a famous trader in the Suk al Buzuriye, the spice market near the Ummayad Mosque. He made a large fortune from spices, silk, and fine woods. But his greatest source of pride was that in 1871 he had eaten supper with his favourite composer Giuseppe Verdi in Cairo, where the Italian genius was giving the première of his opera Aida for the opening of the Suez Canal. Anton Shami had the photograph showing him sitting at table with a laughing Verdi greatly enlarged and hung it in the drawing room of his magnificent house, which united Italian and Syrian stylistic features to very beautiful effect. To this day the building bears his name, and is the finest in the whole quarter. When the last German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, visited the East in 1898 he stayed there while he was in Damascus. At the time Lucia was already engaged to Nagib Surur, son of a prosperous family of cloth merchants, but Anton Shami had the betrothal ceremony repeated and photographed in the Kaiser’s presence. These pictures hung in Lucia’s bedroom, along with those of her Venetian forebears.
She could tell wonderful stories about her grandfather Doge Paolo Sciamico’s glass eye and the last German Kaiser’s withered hand. And the older she grew the more stories she told. Her fund of stories grew even greater after her husband’s death. She began indulging in flights of fancy about a great collection of glass eyes owned by her family in Venice. The glassmakers had had to produce countless eyes, she claimed, until they made one that suited the Doge. She wrote letters to the Italian authorities in Rome and Venice, demanding the return of this valuable collection. But that was not until just before her death in 1959.
In 1900 she married Nagib. Anton Shami liked the elegant, well-connected young man, and hoped that he would help him to expand his business. But Nagib didn’t want to work with his father-in-law, or his own father either. First he took a post with a money-changer, and later, after two years of training in Paris, he became technical director of the quality and control department of the Banque de Syrie et du Liban, which as a central bank was allowed to print lira notes. The notes came with an imprint stating that the French government guaranteed the value of the Syrian and Lebanese lira to a maximum of twenty French francs.
In 1910, cholera carried off Anton Shami and his wife. Lucia survived because she and her husband happened to be visiting her family in Venice that summer. She inherited a large fortune which Nagib invested securely with the bank.
His wife was intent on having a large family, and she duly bore ten children, but eight of them died just after their birth. Only Marcel, and two years later Claire, lived.
Until her mid-fifties, Lucia habitually had affairs with young men. Later, her daughter often laughed to think how as a girl she had innocently believed that all her mother’s visiting lovers were family members, and called them Uncle, until one day a girlfriend explained it to her. Claire was seventeen by then, and her mother had long since given up the young men.
When her friend enlightened her in the spring of 1935 Claire felt furious, not because of her mother’s escapades in themselves but because of the lies and derision to which she had exposed Claire, her own daughter. But she felt truly humiliated and isolated only when she tackled her brother on the subject. He was nineteen, and had been studying law since the beginning of the year. He unfeelingly told her to her face that he had known about it all along, and was glad to see his mother find the love their father couldn’t give her.
“But what about me? Why didn’t any of you tell me?” asked Claire, close to tears.
“You take after Father, you’re as sentimental as he is. You can’t accept hard facts,” he claimed.
From that moment on her love for her mother and her brother died. She wouldn’t give them away, all the same, although when she went into Damascus with her father a week later to eat an ice she broached the subjects of love, faithfulness, and jealousy. She said she’d like to hear his opinion so that she would know more about the way to behave with her fiancé Musa.
Nagib looked askance at his daughter and smiled. “Why does love always have to imply possession?” he asked, shaking his head. Then he fell silent for a while, as if wondering what he should tell her. Claire gave him time. “You should love with composure,” he said. “Love should bestow sublimity. It lets you give everything without losing anything. That’s its magic. But here people want a contract of marriage concluded in the presence of witnesses. Imagine, witnesses, as if it were some kind of crime,” he repeated slowly, allowing her to appreciate the ridiculous aspect. “State and Church supervise the contract. That’s not love, it’s orders from a higher authority to increase and multiply.”
He smiled at his own words. “And any idiot who can’t even add up one and one to make two knows, when he loves someone, that he wants to possess that person body as well as soul. He guards his property jealously to ensure that neither heart nor brain, neither liver nor stomach, nor …” Nagib hesitated for a moment. “Well, you know what I mean,” he added, “…will be touched by any other thought, hand or feeling. Jealousy and unhappiness are programmed into the arrangement in advance.”
They sat there quietly, and Claire looked at her father as he spooned up his ice, smiling. What a wise man, she thought. He seemed to her like a visitor from a strange world that was now at peace.
She didn’t feel like that; it did matter to her when women gazed adoringly at their fiancés or indulged in vulgar behaviour with them.
A week after this conversation in the ice cream parlour, her father was arrested. He was accused of embezzling large sums of money from the bank where he had worked for five years, and he spent three years in prison, until the Catholic Patriarch successfully intervened on his behalf. But he was never exonerated, even by his own wife. However, that was a matter of indifference to Nagib.
52. Tamam and Sarkis
The large house stood on the village square, opposite the gate of St. Giorgios’s churchyard. Lucia had the second floor entirely renovated, equipped with the most modern technological devices, and furnished in the latest fashion. The rent was so cheap that she paid it for a whole year in advance, so that she could visit Mala any time she liked.
Tamam, who owned the house, liked her tenants from Damascus because she enjoyed talking to Lucia. She never exchanged a word with the other villagers. She had a large vegetable garden and several vineyards, and bought the rest of her provisions in the neighbouring village of Ainyose, bringing them home on
the back of her donkey. So whenever Lucia came to Mala she brought an extra case full of the finest foodstuffs, including chocolate and canned meat. Nothing could have given Tamam greater pleasure.
At the time Claire, like all girls in love, was reading love stories non-stop, especially French novels, but their landlady’s own love story cast all those books into the shade.
Tamam was a strange woman. She lived alone with her son Djamil. The villagers thought her eccentric, and people whispered that she was to blame for her husband’s early death. She had loved him from her childhood. He and his parents lived in a little house near her family’s large property. Her father was a prosperous farmer then. She wasn’t beautiful, but several men proposed to her. She turned them down, and her father was glad that she stayed with him when his wife died, and he didn’t have to share her with any other man. But when he discovered that she was in love with his neighbours’ son, he forbade her to have anything to do with the young man, who barely scraped a living by working in the stone quarry. Tamam loved her father, and was torn between her feelings for him and for her lover. Night after night she wept with longing for Sarkis, who had sworn not to touch any other woman. He suggested elopement, but Tamam didn’t want to expose her lonely father to the mockery of the villagers. She hoped that death would bring him release, but death took its time.
The couple waited for twenty years. When Tamam’s father did die, Sarkis was forty and she was in her late thirties. They waited another year, until Tamam could put her black mourning clothes aside. Until that day Mala had never known a tale of self-sacrificing lovers with a happy ending. Such stories always ended in tragedy; you couldn’t reconcile the harsh peasant life with the tenderness of great love affairs out of fairy tales, set in lush gardens where people wore flowing silken robes, probably because those tales made life in the bleak mountains seem even less bearable.
Tamam was afraid of the wedding night. Her neighbour, an experienced midwife, told her horror stories of the first night when the bride wasn’t in her first youth and had a hymen harder than leather. Husbands, she said, quite often needed her, the midwife, to help by sticking her forefinger through it.
Relishing the bride’s fears, the woman told her about one man in the village who had fractured his prick when he deflowered his bride. It had a right-angled bend in it ever after. Another husband, she said, thrust in with all his might, but because his bride was thirty-five her maidenhead resisted, bouncing back like a trampoline, and he fell out of bed and hit the back of his head on the floor. The blow left the man’s mind confused. He spoke nothing but Spanish thereafter, and he avoided all women.
Tamam felt the iron claws of fear squeezing her heart, and she hoped the midwife was telling lurid tales just to show off. But her own wedding night was worse than all the stories. Sarkis had been drinking to give himself courage. Tamam, who never drank alcohol, was horrified by the stink of her husband, who was sweating heavily, and by his rough hands as he tried to pull her panties off under her dress. She begged him to remember that she wasn’t very young now. That infuriated him even more. “I don’t need any midwife,” he cried, as if he too had heard the neighbour’s stories. “I’ve hardened and sharpened my chisel these thirty years.”
Not a word of love, no tender caress. His fingers, although covered in scratches from his work in the quarry, had always been softer than a rose petal when he touched her skin. But now Sarkis’s face wasn’t fragrant any longer, nor was he her shy lover, but a stranger lying on top of her with all his weight, pressing the air out of her.
He thrust into her dry soul. Tamam screamed so loudly that the musicians, singers, and dancers stopped for a moment, but then they all raised their glasses in rejoicing. Tamam hated them. They were out there eating her bread and applauding her pain.
The night seemed endless. She felt near death, and wept, but that only encouraged Sarkis to push himself into her again and again. Late in the night, his old aunt knocked at the door with the laconic remark, “Proof of honour.” Sarkis tore the bloodstained white sheet proving Tamam a virgin from under her and gave it to the old woman. Once again rejoicing broke out among the guests, who went on making merry under the bedroom window until day dawned.
The marriage lasted only two months. Then Tamam summoned up all her strength and threw her husband out. Sarkis did not protest. He went back to his old home, bitterly disappointed in the woman for whom he had waited so long. She had always talked to him of love games with desire in her voice. Now she was acting like a nun, and what a nun! On the wedding night she began screaming the moment he touched her. And then she went to sleep before he had finished doing his conjugal duty.
A week later she had asked him to sleep alone in a small room, saying that when she slept beside him she had nightmares in which he was always raping her. Sleep by himself in a miserable little room? What was the point of getting married, then? Sarkis asked himself that question out loud at the barber’s, and the men there nodded with mingled sympathy and derision.
But Sarkis didn’t tell the men that he never went back to her because he hated himself. Why had he turned down all those beautiful, willing women? His neighbour’s daughter, soft-armed Saide who kept visiting him after his parents’ death, had given him a basil plant, saying that a man like him needed a good woman to warm him in bed and bear him fine children. “Look at my breasts, feel my belly,” she said. “Aren’t they just made for you?” And he had touched her; she had firm, round breasts, and a captivating navel. But in the end he sent her home. How could any man be so idiotic?
Saide had tried for two years, and then she gave up and married the village blacksmith. At the time the blacksmith had been a dirty, intolerably coarse man. But now? Now he looked well groomed, he had three sons, each more handsome than the last, and their mother was bringing up all three as good Christians. The whole village talked about Saide, who had made a miserable dog into the master of a fine household.
And there was the young widow Walide. She had wept for nights at his bedside, begging him to let her get in bed with him, but he was faithful to Tamam and turned down all her advances. “You and I, we’re both widowed,” said that far-sighted young woman perceptively. “The only difference is that your partner still lies above ground.” How right she was, thought Sarkis. Tamam is a living, breathing corpse.
Sarkis disappeared from the village overnight. Four weeks later, children playing found his body in a deep, long-disused pit in the stone quarry.
53. The Rift and the Meeting
The second floor had its own entrance, up a flight of wooden steps behind the house. The Sururs’ landlady Tamam lived on the first floor. They always arrived at their summer lodgings two days after the beginning of the long vacation, and usually stayed until the day before school began again in early October. Marcel had found a friend who was glad of his company in Djamil, Tamam’s son.
In the summer of 1935 Marcel was nineteen, and had begun studying law. And Nagib Surur had been in prison since May, which meant that Claire would have to go to Mala alone with her mother. So she sought her fiancé’s company even more than usual in the last weeks before they left.
But then, just before the last day of school, he shocked her. Just when she most needed him, he seemed to her so strange that she thought she must be losing her mind.
She had met Musa Salibi by chance in 1933, when she was out eating an ice with her father and he came up to their table, a tall, strong, well-dressed figure. He stopped politely and said good day to Nagib. Nagib invited him to join them. Musa looked at Claire, and she felt the ground sway beneath her. He was five years her senior, and looked as elegant as any actor. Her father liked Musa, who was both a good boxer and an excellent shot. With these qualities, he had found a job as bodyguard to the French governor of Damascus.
After that first meeting in the ice cream parlour, he kept visiting the family on one pretext or another. Claire’s mother didn’t like him. He was only a husk, she said briefly, handsome bu
t empty, and when he called she would leave the drawing room with a theatrical groan. But it was Nagib, not Lucia, who had the last word on Claire’s engagement, and he immediately gave his consent when Musa asked to marry his daughter. He took no notice of his wife when she pointed out that Musa had no proper profession; bodyguards were there only to deal with any trouble and die for the governor if necessary.
Claire loved her strong, handsome fiancé, and already saw herself travelling the world under his protection. And once they were officially engaged in the winter of 1934 he was able to drive her around in his car. It was a black Renault, the 1933 model, with leather upholstery, fine wood fittings, and curtains for the back windows.
She felt like a princess, dressed in her best and sinking into the soft back seat, while Musa drove the car through the streets of the New Town.
Claire went to boxing matches with him too. When he was in the ring himself, his athletic torso bared, he looked even more magnificent than he did in a suit. Musa fought elegantly, dancing around his opponent. Women adored him, and he enjoyed the glances they gave him from eyes that were moist with admiration.
Soon after their engagement he was to fight the legendary Syrian champion, Ali Dakko of Aleppo, and the talk at the boxing club was of their good prospects of sending Musa to the French contests in Paris next year. In her daydreams, Claire already saw herself living in that cosmopolitan capital. Her father, who had been to Paris three times, waxed enthusiastic about the metropolis.
In March it was all settled: Musa would go to Paris if he won a fight against a youthful challenger. This boxer didn’t have his opponent’s elegance and good footwork, but his fists were like steel. Once, for a bet, he had killed a fully grown bull with a single punch between the ears. The young boxer’s name was Rimon Rasmalo, and he was a stonemason by trade.
