The Brides of Solomon

by Geoffrey Household

  It was more dignified than gay, our feast. Naturally there was still some reserve. But manners were effortless since our customs were the same. Sometimes it seems to me a pity that Arabs ever divided themselves into Christians and Moslems. They should have remained idolaters like the Hindus.

  I had hidden my rifle on a roof-top across the square. None of us carried arms beyond those for pure decoration. Between John and me was sitting an old fool of a Sheikh, a man of the utmost stupidity and kindliness. He resembled French generals I have known. He was so harmless that it was incredible anyone should outrage his feelings. A great dish of rice was placed in front of him. At that moment I seized him by the back of the neck and plunged his face and beard in it. For good measure I emptied the cream salad over my father-in-law. Then shouting and laughing I leaped over the heads of those who sat opposite me on the ground, and lost myself in the alleys on the other side of the square.

  When I reappeared upon the roof they had not recovered from their surprise. John Douaihy was screaming apologies, and swearing that I was more Frenchman than Syrian and that I had lost my wits in the sun like any dog of a European. Bareheaded and clothes torn, I capered upon the roof-top firing shots. The Moslems were in panic. It was an unmistakable echo of the night of the raid. I think it had occurred to them, minutes before my friends took oath on it, that I might have been their only serious enemy.

  I began to curse Ferjeyn and the wife who had brought me there, and I shot in the general direction of Helena. It was not difficult to miss her, but to appear mad and to miss all the other women too—well, I doubt if that scene alone would have been convincing. But Helena acted magnificently. She ran like a terrified chicken. And then, according to our arrangement, she stood still in the middle of the square and raised her arms to me for mercy.

  It was a moment more tense than any crisis of war. I forced myself to concentrate. I found afterwards that my teeth had bitten deep into my tongue. I fired. She fell like a dead woman. I shall never forget how the cries of the people in the square were all at once silenced. I watched her face, which they could not see, and she made me a little smile of congratulation. Another second, and I should have blown my brains out.

  She told me, when I saw her again, that the bullet had passed through the great wings of her arms as she lifted them, and close to the body. And then what did she do, my well-beloved? She passed her left hand under her robe and ripped the flesh from a rib with the nail of her middle finger so that it would appear she had been grazed. That will seem to you barbarous, M. le Consul, but it was for her children.

  They chased me, but not too close—for John and Boulos deliberately led the pursuit up the wrong alley. Meanwhile, I dropped to the ground in front of the saddler’s shop. He had left his stable open, as if by accident, and his horse saddled. A pretty price he charged for it, too. But he had the right, and one must not ask too much of one’s friends.

  I rode through the olives and up across my own land by a little path, where no one who did not know every stone of it would dare to follow at the gallop. There were several shots fired after me—perhaps by our guests, perhaps by men of Ferjeyn who were horrified as much by the breach of hospitality as by my treatment of Helena. I passed my house and waved to my boys. Their dear faces were full of conflict as those of men. They were wildly excited by my speed, but they could not help knowing that the bullets which cut the leaves and whined were meant for me.

  By God, when it was all over, I think my four friends themselves were mystified. There had been, I must admit, a certain gusto in my acting—in all, that is, that did not concern Helena. It was a relief, for once, to be permitted to have the manners of an apache and push a venerable beard into the eternal rice. There is no doubt, M. le Consul, that in the long run it is a strain for us to behave as formally as Arabs. I am ashamed of it, but I cannot deny it.

  All the night I rode east towards the frontier, skirting the foot-hills of the Jebel Sinjar. The western end of the range is in Syria, and at the tip of it is the isolated mountain on which stands Ferjeyn; the eastern end is in Iraq. I had no idea what would happen or what pursuit there would be. The only certainty was that the notables of Ferjeyn would inform the authorities, and that the gendarmerie would be on the look-out for a madman with a rifle. I laid a trail that they could follow into Iraq.

  On the second night I travelled north along the frontier and crossed back again into Syria. Then I rode north for a third night and forded the Tigris. Once over the river, a fugitive has only to follow the tangle of tributaries up into the hills. He is in country as green and wild as the Auvergne, but far less inhabited. And there is nothing but the uniform of the frontier patrols to tell him whether he is in Iraq or Turkey.

  The little money that I had was enough for my necessities. I slept on the ground—which is no hardship in August—and I bought my bread in the villages, telling lies to account for myself. Up there one does not ask questions of a man with a rifle if he can pay his way.

  But a rifle is more valuable than any gold. If you are to keep it, you must sleep on it. When I was in Weygand’s Army of the Orient, I remember that at night we chained our rifles to the tent-pole. Well, there were eight weary men sleeping in a tent. A clever Arab thief loosened the guy ropes and lifted the pole without waking one of them. In the morning there was not a rifle among the lot.

  I tell you this story, M. le Consul, that you may not think too hardly of me, a sergeant-major, for nearly losing my own. I was sleeping under the trees at the bend of a stream. Unlike the fast water on my land, it made a noise, that stream. It was impatient for the Tigris and the Persian Gulf. I surrendered myself utterly to the grass that was my bed. I was not over-weary, but I longed for Ferjeyn and Helena and my boys. When one is unhappy one takes refuge in sleep as in a drug.

  He had taken my rifle from under my body without waking me, but at the last moment the trigger guard caught on the buckle of my bandolier. I was festooned with cartridges like some damned Russian dancer in a cabaret. He pulled and ran for it, but I, I was only five yards behind. When he stopped to fire at me from the hip I dived under the barrel and drove home my knife in his stomach.

  I am no Good Samaritan, I assure you. But it grieved me to kill an honest man who was only stealing a rifle. I might have done the same, if I had had the skill.

  ‘When did you eat last?’ I asked him.

  My interest was technical. If there was anything in his stomach, he was a dead man.

  ‘The day before yesterday,’ he answered.

  ‘God is Great, brother!’ I said to him, and put him on my horse with his head-cloth wrapped round his guts.

  We were, I think, in Turkey, but the nearest town where there would be a doctor was Zakho in Iraq. It was not far—about thirty kilometres. And I knew the track. He was all skin and muscle like a dried herring. The stomach of the very poor is tough. I told him that if he would oblige me by keeping alive till morning we might save him yet.

  We talked a little on the way. He was a Yezidi from the eastern end of the Jebel Sinjar, and he knew Ferjeyn. The Moslems hate the Yezidis even more than Christians, but have no fear of them. They are few, and do not put up any competition. Devil-worshippers they are called, because they think it tactful to be just as polite to the powers of evil as those of good. That seems to me very reasonable.

  Times were hard in the Jebel Sinjar. The Iraqi end of the range is not so fertile as our little Syrian tip. So my Yezidi was going to live with his brother, who had a permit to cut and sell timber on the frontier. He had not wished to arrive empty-handed.

  M. le Consul, I must apologise for all these details. You cannot be interested in the banal stories of criminals, which are not in essence very different whether they take place at the Porte de Vincennes or the head waters of the Tigris. But I wish to show you the sort of people among whom I lived. They being what they are and I being an outlaw, my conduct becomes explicable.

  There was a sort of doctor in Zakho, for the Engli
sh had established a clinic there. The idea, I think, was public hygiene. But the people of Zakho are far more concerned with the cure of wounds. It’s experience that counts. Me, if I had a hole in my belly, I’d rather be patched up at the regimental aid post than the finest hospital in Paris.

  Well, whether it was the Iraqi doctor or a grateful devil, my Yezidi did not die. I remained in the neighbourhood. I had nothing to do, and to visit the sick-bed became an occupation. I met Merjan, the timber cutter. He was a man of magnificent moustaches, dressed in rags but well-armed. He told me that if his brother did not recover, he would send me to hell to be the dead man’s servant; and if he lived, then all of his clan would be my friends for ever. It was hardly logical, but those chaps are composed of nothing but emotion.

  When the man was up, with no more entrances to his stomach than the good Lord provided, I went to work with the brothers. As I had suspected from Merjan’s heroics, timber-cutting was not his only occupation. It is incredible, the life between Lake Van and the frontiers. Into those remote hills the law penetrates so seldom that the tribesmen in their spare time are amateur cattle thieves and smugglers, and even professional criminals can sow and gather a crop before they have to move on. Merjan, under cover of his wood-cutting, was a sort of Thomas Cook for brigands. He was guide, intermediary and warehouseman.

  I had little to do with all that. It was I who cut the wood, with two half-wit Turks to help me. I was allowed to make a living. I sold my horse to buy better tools, and often I had more cash in my belt than Merjan and his brother. The district is so poor and so wild that even by breaking the law there is little money to be gained.

  M. le Consul, I am not naturally an outlaw. I cannot live away from my fellows; perhaps it is because my father was so long mayor of his town. I began to make the disastrous habit of going down to Zakho once or twice a week when the day’s work was over. It was not so handsome a village as Ferjeyn, but more European, with shops of a sort and good paved streets. The landscape was not that of Syria and Iraq. There were willows and poplars everywhere, and meadows by the river that were green even in September. I dreamed of bringing Helena and my boys to Zakho, for I had begun to feel at ease across the Tigris. I had forgotten that to Arabs a line drawn on the map is of no importance. For us, to cross a frontier is to be safe; for them, a frontier is merely a god-sent convenience for making money.

  I sat at the entrance to a wine-shop, talking with two friends. When business was over, Zakho was a silent little town. A footfall, the murmur of the streams, the low voices of women behind shutters and courtyard doors—those were all one heard. I did not expect the harsh voice of an Arab, calling me by the name of Nadim Nassar.

  I looked up. It was a certain Zeid, a dealer in sheep and mangy camels—a wild-eyed barbarian who knew no law but what he misconceived to be his religion. I had seen him in the square of Ferjeyn, with foam on his villainous mouth and an old sword that had been used on women. I had unfortunately missed my shot at him. He was regarding Zakho with disgust, for it was a town of heretics: Yezidis, Shias, Kurds, Alaouites—let alone Christians and a few Jews.

  ‘You do not appear very mad, Nadim Nassar,’ he said.

  ‘My mind has cleared, thanks be to God,’ I answered, and my friends stared—for it was a pleasant bit of scandal that my name was Nassar and I had been mad.

  ‘It has cleared very quickly. God is indeed Great,’ Zeid replied.

  M. le Consul, there was irony in his voice that would have befitted a university professor—except that it lacked subtlety.

  I hailed him as an old friend and took him by the hand and asked him where he meant to spend the night. The idiot was so full of contempt that he thought I was afraid. I left my friends and led him round the corner into a street where, I said, there was good coffee. He went with me, continuing to give thanks for my deliverance. His poor brain was pleased with the simple jest. He could not have told me more plainly what he meant to do on his return to his village. There was no one in the street, and it was nearly dark. I killed him quickly and mercifully, and laid his body behind a pile of dung and rubbish.

  It was hardly the act of a respectable Frenchman. But what else could I do? Was Zeid to be allowed to return home and scream that Nadim Nassar had been pretending madness? He was just the type to conceal himself among Helena’s olives with his rusty sword.

  Beyond Zakho, it is true, there was a convenient lack of law and order, but in the town itself were more or less civilised police. I had to be far away before Zeid’s body was discovered. Merjan, by good fortune, was at our timber camp. I told him what had happened. It was unnecessary to give details. I had only to sketch the character of Zeid, and explain that there was a blood feud between us.

  The Yezidis meet with so few friends that they give absolute loyalty to those they have. Merjan on the instant took food, water and arms, and marched me off through the hills to seek a party of his clients from whom we could borrow ponies. Before dawn we had crossed into Syria. The next night we rode south parallel to the frontier—it was routine, that—and crossed back again into Iraq. By the third dawn we were among the rocks of the Jebel Sinjar, and exchanging shouts with Merjan’s own people.

  ‘Go where you will, freely,’ Merjan said to me. ‘And if you wish to visit Ferjeyn, you shall be passed from friend to friend as far as the last village of Yezidis, who will guide you across the frontier and receive you on your return.’

  He left me with his parents, and rode back to Zakho with the ponies. I stayed at his father’s house as long as politeness demanded, and then begged to be sent on to the western end of the Jebel. To my regret I saw none of the rites of their religion. The devil does no better or worse for them than for other mountain Arabs. They are hospitable, kindly and very poor. In the heat of their rocks there is a fine foretaste of hell—but if in the east one belongs to a sect that is hated it is as well to find an inaccessible home.

  From village to village I was passed along the upper slopes of the range into Syria. There, in the no-man’s land, I was still a long day’s march from my home, but the plain below me to the north was the same that for eight years I had seen from the heights above Ferjeyn.

  The Jebel between Ferjeyn and the frontier was worthless and eroded country, inhabited only by a few miserable goat-herds. I passed through it cautiously, seen only from a distance and, since I was armed, avoided. At dusk I arrived on the pastures above Ferjeyn. I was so excited that I could have embraced the nearest cow. But I contained myself. There were two horses grazing. They looked to me like gendarmerie horses. I was sure they belonged to no one in the commune.

  When it was dark I dropped from terrace to terrace and down the beds of streams. It was better not to take the path until I knew more about those horses. There was a light in my house behind the shutters, and I heard the voice of Helena singing to the children. I knelt in the shadows below the window and called softly to her. Her voice ceased. She thought it was only her singing which had summoned me. Then I called again, and she opened for me a window in a room that was dark.

  M. le Consul, I do not know if you are happily married, with a family. If you are not, and I should describe my feelings, you would accuse me of exaggeration. If you are, I have no need to explain. In any case, imagine that for two months you have lived my life and have had no chance to send or receive a message. We were all wet with tears. I think I have made it clear that we were a singularly united family.

  Helena told me that Ferjeyn was watched. It was said that Nadim Nassar had killed again in Zakho, and that he had taken refuge in the Jebel Sinjar. The Yezidis had sworn that they knew nothing of me, but Merjan had been seen returning north to the Tigris, and leading a saddled pony. Ferjeyn was terrified lest I should cross the Jebel and return. John Douaihy had not dared—in case some fool should talk—to tell them that I had only pretended to be mad.

  I calmed Helena. I was not going to lose the joy of homecoming for the sake of worrying about what might never happen. A fa
mily is much like a squadron. The last man to show fear must be the sergeant-major. We closed down the shutters and made a feast. The harvest, thank God, had been good, and Helena was not in want. She had even set by a small store of money for me. And so the little family jokes were repeated, and we laughed at them as though I had never been away. At last the children slept where they sat, and we put them to bed.

  In the morning it was a question where to hide. We did not live in luxury. There were four white-washed rooms in my house, all opening out of the little guest-hall. The furniture would not have concealed a frightened rabbit, and anyone passing could look in through the windows.

  Helena went up to the flat roof, and reported that there were men of Ferjeyn on the terraces and the path, and that those who were working their fields were armed. It was idiotic that they should be afraid of me. But all the poor fools knew was that on my last appearance I had tried to kill my wife.

  The children went to school. It was not necessary to tell them to say nothing; we warned them, however, not to show their excitement by a single look or word among themselves. Yes, M. le Consul, the priest has a sort of school at Ferjeyn. He teaches them to read and write Arabic, and such history as he knows. It is naturally somewhat specialised. They can read French, too, for I taught them myself. And I have always spoken French with them as much as Arabic. M. le Consul, I beg of you—take them when the time comes. They are fine youngsters, and they will be valuable to France.

  I had thought of going out to the barn, and making myself vanish among the fodder; but it was impossible to get there without being seen. Well, I am an old campaigner and I had need of sleep. What better than to take it, hiding under the bed? Sometimes I heard callers, and once Helena led a woman into the room and sat talking, being careful to wake me up lest I should snore. I did not care. I fell asleep again. The floor of my own home caressed my body.