The Dark Side of Love (101 page)

Farid suddenly felt how much there was in the world for him yet to discover. And once again it was Rana who opened the door to life for him. She had already bought tickets for Feiruz. Her husband Rami often had to be abroad with delegations of some kind, why she wasn't allowed to know. She supposed he was buying weapons for the army.

Josef knew Duke Ellington's music. He had been at that legendary first appearance of the musician in the city in 1963, and Laila wanted to go as well. Through her husband, she bought seats in one of the front rows, at a discount too. The three of them went. Laila got on well with Josef at once, and soon they were joking together with as much easy familiarity as if they had been friends for ever. On the way back she even linked arms with him. Finally she invited him and Farid in for a glass of tea, and they stayed until midnight and then took a taxi home.

“How about doing a deal?” said Josef as they parted, and before Farid could ask what he meant he went on, “Your cousin for my entire tribe. What a wonderful woman!” And he laughed at his surprised friend.

Duke Ellington played wonderfully well. And Feiruz, the best of all Lebanese women singers, who had fallen in love with Damascus and appeared in the city every autumn, was fantastic. The Damascenes were at her feet. She sang softly, stood still, almost motionless, without any mime or gestures. He songs had great lyrics and catchy tunes. Unlike Um Kulthum, who sang of the tragedy of abandonment, of loneliness, and of unrequited love, Feiruz sang songs full of confidence, even cheerfulness, usually to a dance rhythm that had her audience tapping their feet. They roared with enthusiasm, perhaps partly because Feiruz was a strong woman, and in the middle of Arabia at that! Rana adored the singer. She held Farid's hand and kissed it fleetingly now and then. He could smell her intoxicating fragrance.

After the concert she asked him home with her. They went up to her little studio on the roof and made love until they were exhausted. The night filled them with peace and confidence. But when Farid
dressed again, Rana suddenly began shedding tears. He looked at her in concern.

“Don't worry, I'm only crying because this is such a beautiful moment. I'm crying because I can never manage to hold such moments and keep them.”

Threads of light were beginning to weave the day. He held her close once more. “I want to live with you and no one else,” he said.

A new craze had broken out in Damascus in the early sixties: searching for hidden or buried precious metals. Treasure hunting was strictly forbidden, since the government regarded any finds as state property, and private appropriation of them counted as theft.

But people still went out at night searching, some of them with beeping devices, many with magic spells and mysterious cards. They tapped walls and floors everywhere, trying to find any hollow spaces. When they did turn up, however, they were seldom evidence of a lucky find, and generally just showed that repairs were urgently needed.

Josef laughed at his aunts, tapping their way around the house. His father threatened, in desperation, that if they broke so much as one of his expensive tiles he'd make them sell their own gold bangles to pay for the damage. After that his aunts did their tapping with a rubber hammer.

“People want to get their hands on money quickly, and do you know why?” asked Josef, as so often not waiting for an answer. “The emigrants have turned their heads. My cousin Nicolas goes about in midsummer looking like a really big shot, all dandified in a suit. He drives the fifty metres from his house to the vegetable store in his Mercedes, parks it in the middle of the street, and no police officer dares take his number down. Then he stands there, shouting his order for vegetables over the heads of the people waiting in line, and the vegetable seller doesn't even object to such discourtesy, he leaves all his other loyal customers to serve Nicolas. And do you know why?
Because Nicolas will tip him a whole lira. The neighbours have never done any such thing. I mean, imagine tipping a vegetable seller. And would you like to know what Nicolas did before he emigrated?” asked Josef bitterly.

Farid nodded.

“He was breaking stones for my father at three lira an hour. Two days ago he invited my parents around to his place and showed them his gold bath taps. Madeleine hated it, but you should have seen the wonder and amazement in the eyes of my father and my aunts – they were bowled right over.”

At the end of November Kamal came to drink tea with Farid. He was devastated; he had lost his entire fortune overnight. The government had nationalized his factory again, leaving him with nothing but his debts. The whole thing was like some English comedy, but Kamal didn't feel like laughing.

Soon after that he went to join his father in Saudi Arabia, and came back ten years later a multi-millionaire. But he wanted no more to do with textiles, and instead opened new casinos everywhere in partnership with the new President of Syria's cousin.

DAMASCUS, 1961 – 1965

Josef said that a good friend had given him two tickets to an interesting event being held by the Muslim Brotherhood, and asked Farid if he would like to go along. “Space From the Viewpoint of the Muslim Brotherhood” was the title of the event.

“And here you see again how backward our church is,” he said, with a trace of envy in his voice.

“Aren't you afraid?” asked Farid, who couldn't stand the extremely conservative Muslim Brotherhood. They were financed by Saudi Arabia, and were the most brutal of anti-communists and misogynists.

“Afraid? What would I be afraid of? That they'll persuade me to convert? I don't even believe in my own religion, why would I believe in theirs? Or do you think I ought to fear they'll beat me up for being a Christian? First, I'm not a communist; second, I'm not a woman; and third, even the government courts their favour these days. They've turned moderate and socially acceptable. They probably want to prove that we were in space long before the Russians and Americans.” Josef laughed. “You know how Orientals have been in space for thousands of years. Way back we had that old Syrian liar Lucian, who said
he flew through space. Remember Sindbad's flying carpet, and how the Prophet Elijah went up to heaven in his fiery chariot, remember the ascension of Christ and the Virgin Mary, and Mi'raj, Muhammad's ride to heaven. A Muslim Brother told me the other day, in all seriousness, the French were calling their most powerful warplanes the Mirage after it.”

But no one talked about any of that in the lecture hall of the chemistry faculty. Farid was annoyed. The Muslim Brothers always got the best hall in the university for their events so that they could make propaganda out of it. It was said that over half the university authorities sympathized with them.

When the bearded speaker entered the hall the audience rose and said a short prayer. Then they sat down again. After a brief introduction about modern times the scholar, who held two doctorates, came quickly to his subject. He put the central points of his lecture in the form of questions and answers. “Where does a Muslim direct his prayers when he is in space? How can he locate Mecca when he is in space? How will he fast in space? How often should he pray when his rocket orbits the earth ten times, how often if he flies twice as fast? And may a Muslim astronaut marry a being from another planet?”

Josef looked in astonishment at Farid, who had a hand over his mouth to keep from bursting into laughter.

The scholar provided all these questions with answers that appeared in all seriousness to be giving religion a modern face and yet keep it Islamic, but there was no way of sitting through too much of this. After quarter of an hour, the two friends quietly left the hall.

If you didn't know Munir well you would have thought he was a Swede or a Dane, for he was blond and blue-eyed. But he was born in a village on the Euphrates, a long way from Europe.

His parents, however, had been living in Damascus for over twenty years, not far from the French hospital. They owned the biggest bakery
in the Christian quarter. Munir was studying mathematics. He was far too down to earth and rational to be religious, but in the Middle East religion is more than just your faith, it is a part of your cultural identity. The overwhelming majority of students of the natural sciences were Muslims. When Munir found out that Farid came from Mala he was pleased to know another member of the Christian minority, and from the first called him “my cousin”.

One day he came into the cafeteria when their fellow students happened to be telling jokes about their parents' generation, which still wasn't politicized in spite of the turmoil in the Middle East. Munir didn't like that.

“It wouldn't be exaggerating to describe my father as the best-read baker in Damascus,” he said. “Bakers have a tough life. They wake up when everyone else is still fast asleep, and then they have to go to bed just as the evening's getting interesting. Day in, day out, seven days a week. But my father wasn't going to give up reading every evening, writing down wise things, putting them in order, and he was proud that he could recite them without making any mistakes.

“Three of his customers in particular noticed: a communist lawyer, a nationalist teacher, and a third man called Khalid, who worked in a bank. Khalid's political affiliation? Well, for the sake of simplicity let's say it was liberal.

“The three of them admired my father and listened to him when he spoke of the mood among the people. His bakery was large, and made two tons of flour into bread every day. Anyone who serves so many customers, day after day, can tell exactly how people are feeling.

“Of the three men, the communist was the cleverest, the nationalist the hardest. What about the liberal? For the sake of simplicity, let's say he was the most astute.

“My father liked the lawyer best. As a communist from a distinguished family, he often visited my father, a baker from a rich family of bakers, and they always argued about the role of property. My mother liked the lawyer, but she didn't believe a word he said.

“My paternal grandmother couldn't stand the lawyer, and tried to warn my father of the dangers of communism, but he soothed her, saying that the lawyer, who was among the leaders of his Party, had
assured him that under communism the property of bakers wouldn't be touched.

“When the communists were persecuted, Father was asked to hide some important documents, Party papers, and a number of red flags with the hammer and sickle on them. The lawyer disappeared. He wouldn't hide with us, presumably for fear of my grandmother.

‘But I am always with you in spirit, fighting with you against dictatorship,' Father read out from his friend's letter to us all. ‘A communist is the first to set to work and to be martyred, the last to sit down and eat.'

“Tears rose to my father's eyes at these words, and his mother had to bite her tongue to keep from making sharp remarks about communists. She knew her son, who wouldn't hurt a fly except when he turned sentimental, and then he was unpredictable and everyone took care not to cross him.

“A week later, to his horror, my father heard the lawyer's voice on the radio. In trying to tune into the BBC station broadcasting in Arabic from London – he always liked to listen to the news on it, to find out what was going on in Damascus – he had chanced upon the Voice of Moscow wavelength. We were sitting at supper, and my father, stunned, let his bread drop on his plate. It wasn't words his friend was spewing out, it was revolutionary lava. He was calling – from Moscow! – for the people of Damascus to rise and rebel.