The Dark Side of Love

by Rafik Schami

  “It’s crazy,” she told Josef later in the café, still thinking of her mother. “Muslims and Christians can fight each other, trade, mourn, celebrate, live and die with each other, they’re just not allowed to love each other. And if a couple do dare to love all the same, the answer is death. Arabs are more consistent on that point than in anything else.” And she squeezed Josef’s hand so hard that his fingers hurt.

  “I hate the idea of delivering anyone up to death because I love them,” said Josef. “I’d feel like someone inviting an innocent person to come for a drive in a car, even though he knows its brakes aren’t working. The whole idea sends me crazy. A Christian does a Muslim woman no good by loving her. Sometimes I hate myself for it.”

  “And what about your own life? It’s not you luring me into danger, it’s love, but I wouldn’t want it any other way.”

  “Aren’t you afraid?” asked Josef.

  “No,” said Fatima, and she thought of her Aunt Sharife, who had fallen in love with a Damascene Jew and now lived happily with him in New York. In fact she was happier than anyone Fatima knew. She laughed.

  “What’s the joke?” asked Josef.

  “It’s said that your enemies’ curse is a blessing for forbidden love,” replied Fatima. “And there isn’t another woman in my entire large family who’s as happy as Aunt Sharife.”

  “Do you really think our love has any chance of surviving that pack of fanatics?” asked Josef. He had no idea that Farid would be asking Rana the same question a couple of hours later in the Sufaniye Park.

  “Of course,” said Fatima. “We just have to want it enough, as the great Satlan says. Without a strong will, love is just a longing felt by the weak.”

  Fatima’s answer sounded to Josef like a quotation from all the slushy love films that his mother saw week after week in the cinema. She always enthusiastically told him the plot later. As a rule, it was the man who said such things in the films. Josef grinned at the idea of finding himself in the wrong kind of movie.

  He paid, and was first to leave the café. Fatima wasn’t going to go out into the street and take the bus home until ten minutes later.

  Whistling, Josef strolled along the street to the stop for the Number 5 bus home, never guessing that he had just seen Fatima for the last time. Two bearded figures, silent as shadows, were following him.

  Near the Fardus bus stop, Josef passed the time by reading the headlines of the newspapers displayed at a kiosk. Suddenly a smell of decay met his nostrils. It came from a bearded man roughly pushing in between him and the newspaper stand. Nauseated, Josef took a quick step to one side.

  Years later, he was still blessing his sensitive nose for saving his life, for just as he flinched away from the stench, the bearded man turned around and stabbed him. The knife went into Josef’s right shoulder instead of his heart. Josef kicked his attacker in the balls and shouted, “Help, one of the Muslim Brotherhood is trying to murder me!” Three men standing near the kiosk rushed the bearded attacker, but his accomplice, lurking nearby, struck out at them with a chain, enabling himself and the would-be murderer to escape. They both got away unrecognized.

  Josef’s wound was worse than the doctors had thought at first. He was in hospital for weeks, and there was a danger that his right arm would be paralysed, but he was lucky, and it healed up, although the scar always throbbed badly in winter.

  When Josef first left home again without his arm in a sling, he tried to get in touch with Fatima, but it was as if the earth had opened and swallowed her up.

  Only much later did he discover that her brothers had kept her imprisoned in a dark cellar in their parents’ house for months, until she agreed to marry a rich relation in Kuwait. She went to live there with the man’s other three wives, and never saw her own city of Damascus again.

  BOOK OF LAUGHTER II

  Faith seldom moves mountains, but superstition moves whole nations.

  DAMASCUS, 1956 – 1960

  181. Nerves

  Rana phoned and said she had to see him. Farid was to keep the Sunday after next free, because Kamal Sabuni would be inviting him to a small party. “And Dunia has promised me to do all she can to make sure her brother doesn’t forget about you.”

  Two days later, sure enough, Kamal invited him. Dunia arranged for Rana and Farid to be able to get away from the party for an hour on their own.

  Rana was very cheerful that afternoon. She laughed exuberantly at her brother, and just as much at a neighbour who, she said, was chasing all the married women of the neighbourhood, making very offensive remarks, even to her own mother. “And then he turns out to be jealous,” she went on. “Woe to any man who smiles at his wife. Most women don’t like these importunate advances of his at all, including Warde. But she’s a clever woman, with a tongue like pepperoni. First she tried politely turning him down, but that just made him keener than ever. One day he seized her by the arms and said he was going to have a nibble of her some time, just to compare her with his wife and see which of them tasted better. Warde smiled, freed herself from his embrace, and said, in as loud a voice as she could manage, ‘Not a bad idea, but you can always ask my husband’s opinion. He’s tried us both.’ After that he let her alone.”

  When Rana told a story Farid was always captivated. Her voice was soft but a little husky, as if she had a slight cold.

  They had settled comfortably on the couch in Dunia’s room. Farid, who was lying on top of Rana, tried to bite her lower lip, but she wouldn’t let him. “I have to tell you about something I did in the last two weeks.” She kissed him.

  “Later,” he said, kissing her back.

  “No, not later. I can’t tell you about it outside this room, or on the phone.” Rana tickled him to make him stop.

  Reluctantly, he let her go, sat on the edge of the couch and pulled her dress back down over her knees. Rana smiled, clasped her hands behind her head, stretched luxuriously, and then lay there, totally relaxed.

  “My mother’s been sleeping very badly these last few months,” she began.

  “My heart bleeds for her,” said Farid sarcastically.

  “Oh, do be quiet! Her mind was absolutely set on marrying me off, and finally she won my father over too, just as I’d feared. But who do you think they picked for me? Even in my worst nightmares I’d never have expected it to be my cousin Kafi. He’s my Uncle Sami’s son. Do you remember Sami Kudsi who was always doing shady business deals? That’s his father.”

  Farid shook his head at the mere idea.

  “Anyway, he has five sons and they’re all in the army. The youngest, Kafi, is my own age. A religious fanatic, quite dreadful. I always thought he was certain to found a sect of his own some day. As he sees it, the Catholic Church is a hotbed of atheists and you Catholics are well on the way to damnation. Once, much to my mother’s delight, he said that Catholics and Protestants are all devil-worshippers. He’s always trying to convert people. Very embarrassing – and to think someone like that is my cousin!

  “So my mother didn’t just want to be rid of me, she wanted to punish me by inflicting this fanatic on me. I knew making a fuss wouldn’t help. I had to keep calm about it.

  “On his first visit I made myself up like a tart. As for him, he came in uniform, looking incredibly old and stiff-necked. Of course my mother noticed my trick, and said thank goodness Kafi would cure me of all that vain frippery. And he smiled, very sure of himself, and launched straight into a sermon on the decline of morality.

  “Suddenly my mother went away, and Jack, who never usually takes his eyes off me, disappeared too. There I was, left alone in the drawing room with this bore. I was full of plans for making him dislike me. So I told him I didn’t really believe in anything, but I was thinking of converting to Islam just for fun, because I thought Christianity preached too much suffering and abstinence for this life, short as it is anyway.

  “Instead of being shocked, my cousin Kafi, who could send anyone to sleep, suddenly turned really enthusi
astic. He was dead set on preserving me from such a mistake. He didn’t come just once a week any more, he came every day, hanging around with a stack of religious tracts to convince me that Orthodox Christianity was the right way. And my mother beamed at me because her nephew praised my frankness and my clever mind.

  “When I was alone with Kafi again, I told him coldly that I couldn’t stand him, and any marriage between us would bring him only grief. But that made him even keener, and he said oh, that was as nothing by comparison with Our Lord’s suffering on the cross, and for love of the Lord he would bear the cross of my dislike.

  “I was beginning to panic now. For days I couldn’t think about anything but ways to shake off this leech. He brought me huge quantities of Arabic editions of Reader’s Digest, all going on about the miracle of love and marriage. The Reader’s Digest was where he got every miserable thing he knew. I was in a trap.

  “Then I found a chink in his armour after all. There’s nothing he fears more than strong-minded women. The kind of women he likes are poor weak souls who need him to save them, but he’d see a woman who has power, or would like power, as a major disaster. I’d listened to him long enough to find that out.

  “So next time he visited I told him that I really trusted him now, and I was going to tell him a secret. He pricked up his ears. I went on to say that for a year I’d been a member of a religious group which firmly believes Jesus was really a woman in disguise, and the Gospels were forged later, by men. ‘We’re fighting for there to be priestesses in the Orthodox Church, and we won’t just have female bishops and matriarchs, we’re aiming for a female Pope to head the Church some day, and she will terrify the Catholic Pope.’ He might like to join us, I suggested. Several carefully selected men had been accepted into the group already.

  “Kafi backed out of the drawing room without even saying goodbye, and he never came to visit again. He hasn’t said a word to my mother since that day either,” Rana finished her story, and she embraced Farid, gurgling with laughter.

  182. Azar’s Machines

  How Azar came by all his ideas was a mystery. There wasn’t a single book on technology in his home. While Farid was in the monastery, all the same, he had built a water clock that kept perfect time. Similarly, he had already found out how the gang could tell the time at their nocturnal meetings in the attic, even without a watch. He used to bring a candle with small pins stuck into it all the way up, at a distance of about two centimetres from each other.

  “When a pin falls out, an hour has passed,” he had explained, and indeed his method worked. The principle was simple, but the brilliance of Azar’s inventions lay in their very simplicity.

  The big water clock stood in the inner courtyard of the Catholic bishop’s palace until it was stolen in 1965. You could tell the time by it almost to the minute. A valve with a float ensured that the water pressure in the upper compartment was constant.

  “And what did the Patriarch give him for it?” asked Farid.

  “His blessing,” replied Josef, with a wry smile.

  Later, Azar built solar collectors out of old barrels which he painted black. He put them on the roof, and they provided his family with hot water for the kitchen and bathroom. At the age of seventeen he invented a small vacuum pump in physics at school, thereby astonishing his teacher.

  At the same time he developed another brilliant idea for his family’s use. They were living in a large tenement block with ten neighbours, and had two rooms on the second floor. Every time someone knocked at the front door of the building, all the neighbours emerged from their apartments to see who it was.

  But there was no need for Azar’s family to do that any more. They went downstairs only if the visitor really was for them. Just how they knew was a mystery to the other families for months, but it was all done with a length of pipe and two mirrors that Azar connected up so that you could stand in the kitchen and see who was downstairs.

  “That’ll protect you from annoying strangers,” said Azar.

  “And annoying relations too,” agreed his mother.

  Next he made an automatic flatbread press out of the old roller from the drum of a washing machine, adding a tiny engine. It saved his mother a lot of hard work.

  A neighbour saw this device and bought it from her for the fabulous sum of a hundred lira. Azar’s father didn’t earn that in a whole month, and Azar could easily build another machine from materials costing ten lira.

  But he hadn’t reckoned with one thing: soon after buying it, the neighbour put the dough roller on the market as a mass-produced item. It cost a lot of money, and all the bakeries bought one to help with making flatbread. The man made a fortune, and moved into a villa in the new quarter north of the Old Town. There was nothing Azar could do about it. He ended up as a poor vegetable dealer.

  183. A Women’s Meeting

  “I was just drinking my coffee this morning when I saw all the women of the quarter streaming into Samira’s inner courtyard to see her.” Gibran sipped his tea. “You all know Samira, the traffic cop Maaruf’s wife. At first I was afraid Maaruf might have died. I expect you heard he’s been in hospital for a week after stopping a driver who went over the pavement, the flower beds, and a traffic island. Maaruf asked for the man’s papers, but he was hopelessly drunk, he didn’t have either his driving licence or his vehicle registration document with him, and he swore at Maaruf and told him to clear off. Maaruf looked at this young man in his sharp suit, thinking there might be money in this – well, you all know Maaruf, he’ll turn a blind eye any time if the colour of your money is right. And the blue of the hundred-lira banknote is his favourite colour.” Gibran grinned. “But the man shouted that he wasn’t going to pay anyway, he called Maaruf a bastard and told him just to write out a parking ticket. Then, at the very latest, Maaruf ought to have woken up to the facts. I mean, who calls a cop a bastard? But Maaruf was slow on the uptake that morning. Samira said later he’d been absent-minded for days, she thought he had a relationship with some woman.

  “Whether he did or not, Maaruf checked the front of the car and there was no number-plate, he went around behind the car and there was no number-plate there either. He really ought to have given up then. Well, who drives over pavements and traffic islands in a car without plates? But no, friend Maaruf was dead set on that blue hundred-lira note. Very well, he thought, if this driver keeps on being so obstinate he’ll get to know Maaruf better. ‘Drunk at the wheel, no driving licence, no papers for the car, no plates! That’ll add up to more than I guess you have on you, kid,’ he said, leaning over to the man at the wheel. He was going to haul him out of the car and take him to the nearest police station, but the driver hit him full in the face. He was lashing out like crazy. It was none other than Colonel Adnan, one of the worst of that secret service bunch.

  “I visited Maaruf three days ago. He’s slowly recovering, and he’s grateful not to have been thrown out of the police.

  “Well, like I said, I thought he’d died, but I was wrong. His wife Samira just wanted to celebrate with her women friends. They made tabbouleh, they drank arrack, they sang and danced and played games like little girls. They didn’t notice me at all. I might have been air.

  “Finally Samira began to sing. She sang the song that’s a single question repeated over and over, with witty replies from the chorus. I’m sure you know it. Samira has a wonderful voice, so she sang the questions.

  ‘Who, oh who’s that handsome man?” she cried. “The lover who visits every night,’ replied the women.

  ‘Who, oh who’s that handsome man?’ she repeated. The women laughed and replied, ‘Only your tired old husband, alas.’

  “So the song went on for a while. When she was just repeating the question about the handsome man for the tenth or maybe the twentieth time – how would I know? – the postman came into the courtyard. You know him, vain as a peacock, knows more about winking at women than delivering mail. He heard the question and immediately thought they meant hi
m. ‘Muhammad Ali, madam, at your service!’ he replied, working his eyebrows up and down.

  ‘Then give him his due, girls! Fart for the gentleman!’ sang their hostess in the same delightful voice.

  “And the women, who had been sitting around and relaxing, stood up, turned their backs to the postman, and farted in a number of different registers.

  “Startled to death, he took to his heels, with letters sailing out of the full bag he carried slung around him. And I laughed so much that I spilled coffee on my trousers.”

  184. A Little Worm

  “My Uncle Salam was twenty when he decided to marry, but he didn’t trust women,” Kamal Sabuni began his story, sipping tea from a slender glass. Farid had invited several of his old school friends to be his guests that day, as an advertisement for the club. But the young men just wanted to talk about sex.

  “My uncle was very conservative,” Kamal went on, “and he thought it was a sin for a woman to go out in the street without wearing seven veils. But he was rich, so a good many girls dreamed of marrying him. However, that didn’t make him happy, only more suspicious. In the end he told his mother that if she found him a suitable wife, he’d want to spend five minutes alone with her, talking to her, and after that he would decide if she was the one for him.

  “Well, his mother found him a pretty girl, a virgin who was a teacher’s daughter. Her parents thought the condition a strange one, but the man was a good match, and they went along with it.

  “So there was my uncle sitting with the veiled woman, and he opened his flies, took out his prick, and asked her, ‘What’s that?’

  “The young woman was horrified, but she plucked up all her courage and said, with her throat dry, ‘It’s a penis.’