by Rafik Schami
“Music and thinking don’t go together. Music wants to get into your body, make your nerves swing and your heart beat like a drum,” said Dunia, who danced with wonderful eroticism. But Rana was not to be persuaded.
Later, the women all prepared a refreshing tabbouleh salad, the dish for which Damascus is famous, but she had no appetite. She just sat there trying to be polite, but the women’s cheerfulness got on her nerves. After a while she asked her friend to drive her home. Dunia was one of the first women in Damascus to hold a driving licence.
“I long so much for Farid,” said Rana when they stopped outside her house. “I haven’t seen him since he went to the south. Somehow he’s going further and further away from me. I feel so lost. And then there’s my husband demanding his rights as if I were his slave.”
Dunia tried to soothe her friend, helped her to undress, and was about to leave when Rami came in. He was surprised to find her visiting, but was charming and polite. Finally he accompanied her to the door and offered her his hand.
“Rana needs a doctor, urgently. She’s sick,” said Dunia quietly.
Rami withdrew his hand. “She has everything she could wish for. She’s just bored,” he replied, narrow-lipped, and all trace of friendliness vanished from his face. Dunia was afraid that if she said any more he might take it out on Rana for letting him down in front of other people. She swallowed. Rami looked at her, incensed, and closed the door after her without another word.
228. Radicals
Farid was glad to get out of the bus intact when it arrived in Daraa. The driver had been overtired. He had a night shift behind him, and then had to go on driving without a break because his colleague was sick. Farid, sitting to his right, had noticed how he kept nodding off at the wheel, so he talked steadily to him for two hours.
The dusty town of Daraa was the last stop of any size in the dry Hauran plain. From here, the road wound up towards the Golan Heights. The landscape became more precipitous, but also more colourful because of all the little rivers. The uniform brown of the steppes disappeared as soon as they were past the first bend in the road. Not only was the land fertile in the triangle between Jordan, Israel, and Syria, smuggling flourished more than any other trade. But like the wretched town of Daraa, the shabby villages along the way were evidence not so much of poverty as of the absence of any pleasure in life. Despite the fertility of the region, the houses were dilapidated, the roads neglected. Children ran barefoot after the bus, throwing stones. The peasants’ children had no underwear at all, those of the Palestinian refugees wore whatever their mothers had made from the white cotton sacks which contained the flour and rice donated to them. The coloured emblems of the donors stamped on the sacks lasted for ever: the famous American hand-print, the Australian hopping kangaroo, the Canadian maple leaf.
The little bus had been cobbled together, with much Syrian ingenuity, from parts of at least fifteen brands of vehicle. Amazingly, this technical marvel stayed in one piece as it groaned its alarming way up the mountains, and jolted like a rock falling unpredictably down to the valleys again. After exactly two hours the bus had reached the village of Shaga. The passengers applauded enthusiastically.
It was Friday and the school was closed. Farid was to start teaching on Saturday. There was no hotel or boarding house in the village, and only a few buildings had electricity. Strangers spent the night with the village elder, so Farid asked the way to his house. The bus driver told him to get in again and drove him to the door. It turned out that the village elder was a generous host, who offered to let the new teacher stay with him for free, but Farid thanked him and declined.
In the spring of 1965, the village was still twenty kilometres from the Israeli border. The area was under strict military control; the bus had been stopped three times, while soldiers carefully checked the passengers’ papers and asked where they were going. The peasants knew just what to expect, and no one was travelling without ID. Shaga had both an elementary school and a large new middle school, the only one in the whole region. Many of the pupils had to cross valleys and climb mountains on their way to school early in the morning, and arrived for lessons exhausted.
Farid didn’t have to explain that he had been transferred for disciplinary reasons, for it appeared that no teacher ever came willingly to Shaga. All twelve of the staff were exiles, and they all said they had been unfairly banished.
Husni the principal, a gentle-natured man of gloomy appearance, gave him a sobering account of the situation. It was downright impossible to teach properly in Shaga, he said. The other teachers nodded, with wry smiles. The pupils had no money for books, and those sent by the Ministry of Culture for this poverty-stricken region had been lost somewhere on the way. Moreover, there couldn’t be anything like a normal school day when operations by Palestinian guerrillas on the border, followed by punitive Israeli actions and manoeuvres by the Syrian armed forces, turned the area into a battlefield every other week. In addition most of the children had to help their parents by night, smuggling arms, hashish, and cigarettes. He could only ask their new colleague not to pitch his expectations too high, said Husni, but at least to teach the poor devils the bare essentials.
The principal talked non-stop, but humorously, and since he mentioned Allah and his Prophet more often than necessary Farid guessed he was a Muslim Brother, and that was why he had been sent here.
The other teachers listened, looking relaxed, and drank the dark, sweet tea brought by the janitor. “Einstein himself,” said Husni, in conclusion, “would have grown up to be nothing but a smuggler or the member of a Palestinian commando group if he’d lived here.”
It was just before nine when the teachers went to their pupils, who had been waiting for an hour. On the way they introduced themselves by their names, subjects, and the reasons why they had been sent here. Farid was to teach chemistry, physics, and mathematics to the seventh, eighth, and ninth grades, thirty-two hours in all over six days. He soon realized that so far as the students’ achievements were concerned, they were hopelessly backward, but their curiosity was great, and in practical matters they were equal to any young Damascene of eighteen.
“Children here grow up very quickly. They don’t just live every day, they have to survive it. That’s sad, but it matures them quickly. If you see death before your eyes all the time you want to taste life as soon as possible,” said Adib, a pleasant man who taught Arabic. He had been moved here from Daraa after calling for an uprising against the corrupt governor of the southern province. First he spent a year in prison, then he was banished from Daraa for five years.
Farid tried to teach his pupils the essentials, and was amazed to see how fast they picked things up. At the end of every lesson he gave them ten minutes to ask questions and look for answers with him. He tried to satisfy their curiosity about natural phenomena, which made him realize how slight his own knowledge was.
They asked how rainbows were made, and why water in the sea looks blue although it is has no colour. They wanted to know why Eskimos went on living in the biting cold instead of moving to warmer climates, or why the Bedouin almost died of thirst in the desert, yet still stayed there. They asked where the wind comes from, and why we don’t all fall over when the earth turns. They wanted to know how and why the borders of countries were drawn, and who had taught bees all over the world to build hexagonal honeycombs. Soon Farid’s pupils were ready to give up their break period to go on talking in the classroom, and he felt that he was really teaching for the first time in his life.
But he also realized that their questions were stretching him to his limits, and he saw all that Damascus University had failed to do in educating him. He had followed the equations of Einstein, Planck, Rutherford, and Schrödinger, he had passed tests and written essays on them. But what use was that in Grade Seven of this God-forsaken school, a place with no proper chalk, a place where the pupils had to manage without textbooks and exercise books, but all the same wanted to know why the sun goes on
burning and never gets any smaller?
He went wearily back to his modest furnished room, lit by a sooty oil lamp that smelled of kerosene. But he was glad of his friendly landlady, an old widow who often went to Daraa to see her married sons and daughters there. Then the house with its little inner courtyard was all his. He liked to sit in the shady corner under a vine, looking at the old apple tree and the poor flower pots.
Claire and Rana complained that he hardly came to Damascus at all, but his only day off was Friday, and ten hours of travelling there and back were too much of a strain for him to get through the whole week after it, teaching three classes with forty pupils in each. So he usually stayed in Shaga, exploring its surroundings so far as the army would allow. Most of his colleagues did the same; only the principal and two other teachers came from Daraa, and went back to their families at the weekend.
Since Shaga was a very boring little place, with no café or restaurant or cinema, the teachers met almost every evening in someone’s room. Their antipathy to the government was a link that held them together despite their very different views. They played cards or backgammon, and when they had played games long enough they drank tea and told jokes, or confided their sorrows to one another.
Farid soon became particularly close to three young teachers: Adib taught Arabic, Salman taught history and geography, and Fadi was the art and sports teacher.
Outside school he discussed politics, morality, and violence with them. One day Adib cautiously asked him if he’d like to read the Radical movement’s newspaper. Farid couldn’t believe his eyes. It was called Now, and it was the logical and indeed the radical continuation of his own ideas as expressed in Youth. The paper was poorly printed, but the articles were full of wit, and frankly criticized conditions in the Middle East. The newspaper deliberately leaned on the Qarmates who had founded a Soviet-style republic in Arabia in the tenth century.
After reading it carefully, Farid decided that the ideas of the Radicals were somewhere between Russian anarchism and Cuban armed conflict. They wanted to make Syria a country without exploitation, without an army, and without privileges. Men and women were to be given absolute equality in all their rights and duties, particularly in the right to divorce. Religion was to be separate from the state, and declared the private business of every individual. Marriage would be performed by the state independent of any religious affiliation. People were to live and love freely, without fear and without war, they were to be able to say what they thought openly, and determine everything themselves through direct democracy, rather than being ruled by parties or clans. Farid had dreamed of just this for a long time. Now he suddenly saw young people with weapons in their hands trying to put his ideas into practice.
229. A Meeting
“If you really love Rana, then either run away with her or make a clean break,” said Dunia vehemently. She had found out that he was in Damascus, called him, and now they were sitting in a café near the parliament building. Dunia had grown very plump, and only her face still reminded him of her former beauty. “Her love for you is making her sick. She’s reached the point where she thinks of living with her husband as unfaithfulness to you, and it makes her suffer. Every time she meets you she feels hopeful, but then you disappear again. I don’t need particularly sharp eyes to know when you’ve been with her. Do you think this is any way to behave?”
“What are you trying to say? We have to be patient until we can find a way to be together. Rana didn’t want to give me up, and I’ve stayed unmarried for her sake myself.”
“Yes, but you go out, you have work, you’re politically active, and she’s a prisoner here within her own four walls. It’s unjust. And that’s not all. There’s also the fact that she can’t come to terms with the situation. Here’s my husband on one side, she says, there’s my lover on the other. She’s living on a high springboard, and every time it sways she feels sick. I’ve tried and failed to get her to go easy, take life as it comes. She’s waiting with her bags packed, but you never bring the air tickets to set her free.”
“And now you blame it all on me instead of her husband, who won’t let her study or paint! As if love and not the idiocy of men who beat and imprison their wives were a sin,” said Farid indignantly.
“No, I’m not blaming anyone. I’m only desperately trying to find some way out of this for my dearest friend, because I can see she’s getting more and more desperate. And I think you’re the only one who can save her, but you must act fast. Yes, perhaps I am blaming you for something, your cruel inactivity. What are you waiting for? In your place and hers I’d have been off and away long ago.”
“But you’re not in my place and hers. We ran away once and failed, that’s why I’m trying to change the dreadful conditions that destroy us all,” said Farid. However, he didn’t sound very convincing.
“You don’t mean that seriously, do you? Have you just swallowed Mao’s Little Red Book, or what? We’re in the heart of Arabia here, not China or Cuba. Nothing ever changes here. If you really want to save this wonderful love of yours for Rana, you’d better hurry up before it’s too late.”
“So what makes the Chinese any better than us? What do they have that we don’t? A third leg?” Farid’s voice was sharp, but he spoke quietly, because the café was full.
“Perhaps, perhaps,” said Dunia sadly, for she could see that she was getting nowhere. She said no more for a moment, and then, lowering her voice, went on. “I have about ten thousand dollars in a special account. If you two need it to run away, it’ll be my wedding present to you.”
“That’s sweet of you, and we’ll certainly ask you for help when the moment comes. But tell me, how are you yourself?” he said, changing the subject, feeling bad about speaking so angrily to Rana’s faithful friend.
“Oh, I’m fine. I’ve adjusted to life, and my husband does a lot to keep me in good humour. Successfully, as you can see.”
Farid left the café knowing that Rana’s friend was more human and approachable than he had ever thought. Dunia watched him go until the crowd swallowed him up. She marvelled at her clever friend Rana, who could love such an apathetic man so passionately.
230. Song of the Cicadas
Farid was still in the school building late in the evening. He was planning to correct Grade 8’s chemistry test and then look in on Adib for a game of cards. He had a solid table to work at here in the school, and electric light; his lodgings had neither. Husni appeared in the doorway saying he was going to make fresh tea in half an hour’s time.
When he came back, he sat down, stared at his tea glass, and said more to himself than Farid, “They sent us here to be rid of us. Either you give notice after a year of this hell, or the Israelis give you the coup de grace.”
Husni was certainly not a kindred spirit. He was conservative and strictly Muslim, but he was kind to the children and sorry for them. Every week lessons were interrupted for hours, if not days, because the Israelis or Palestinians were involved in some operation. For many children their way to school was dangerous, potentially fatal. A secret war was being waged in a strip of land twenty kilometres wide on both sides of the border, and as if by mutual consent Damascus and Tel Aviv never mentioned it. Before Farid’s arrival the pupils and their teachers had dug a trench where they sheltered during attacks. They had learned to run for it fast and crouch there close together. The sight moved Farid to tears. They kept their hands over their ears for fear that an exploding bomb might deafen them. Farid and two other teachers went into the trench with them every time; the others drank tea with the principal.
Once an Israeli helicopter hovered over the trench, and a soldier waved when Farid looked up. The helicopter was less than five metres above the ground, and made you feel as if a whirlwind might suck you up. Farid was furious, because the children were screaming in terror. He shook his fist at the pilot and yelled at him for God’s sake to go away, but his voice was lost in the infernal din. The Israeli showed his own middle finger
, and finally turned away.
In the village they told fantastic tales of special bombs that “pupped” and bore other bombs, and a cream that made you invisible. They said the Israeli soldiers rubbed it over themselves so that they could track down armed Palestinians in the villages and shoot them.
There were several camps of Palestinians around the village. The farmers disliked these irregulars because they trampled over their fields and held target practice among the fruit trees. To make matters worse, the Israelis moved into the area around Shaga after every Palestinian operation, pursuing their enemies all the way to the valley beyond the village, and the Syrians never fired a shot at the Israelis. Intent on striking at the irregulars, the Israelis dropped incendiary bombs into the fields where they suspected they might be lurking, and destroyed the harvest. The local crops were tomatoes grown for the canning factories in Damascus, wheat, tobacco, and fruit of particularly fine quality.
No one paid the farmers for the loss of their harvest, so many became smugglers and left their orchards and fields to the Palestinians and Israelis.
The principal poured tea. It was already after six in the evening.
“Aren’t you going home today?” asked Farid.
“I keep a thin mattress here, that’s all I need in summer. I have to write my reports for the Ministry, and I’ll never get it done at home. That’s why I’m working a night shift,” he explained, sipping the strong, sweet tea.
“What reports?” asked Farid, surprised.
“Oh, it’s a ridiculous business. I’m transferred here for disciplinary reasons myself, but I have to write a report on every single one of you others. I mustn’t be too positive, or they won’t trust me, or they’ll say I give a good report to anyone close to the Muslim Brotherhood. They know I’m supposed to belong to them, just because I’m a believer. I hate doing these reports, so I keep postponing them, but I’ve just had the second reminder. The third would mean my salary was docked.”
