The Dark Side of Love (107 page)

“Our comrades think the situation is very critical. If a Syrian government shows its famous cowardice once more, all we can rely on is a popular uprising, and we must stand shoulder to shoulder with the peasants. After that no one in Damascus will be able to govern without us. But the peasants are unprepared, and our men and women don't get more than four hours' sleep a day. There are far too few of us.”

Farid had never before heard a more comprehensive and credible analysis of a situation delivered within five minutes.

“Then we must do it, come what may. The peasants deserved our support against the Israelis,” said Adib, but his voice and his hesitant manner reflected his inner turmoil.

“I think it's a bad idea. I'm not going along with it,” said Farid, feeling as forlorn as if he were falling into a deep hole. “I'm not questioning your courage and bravery, but I'm afraid. I'm just plain afraid, and not ashamed of it, because my doubts are based on the superior forces of the enemy. Haven't we spent hours discussing what a guerrilla ought to do in his moment of weakness? Who says we have to die for a state that's repellent to us?”

“We'll die for our principles and the word we gave the peasants,” said Salman brusquely.

Farid wanted to reply that the peasants would probably have a better chance of survival if they refrained from joining such a hopelessly ill-armed resistance group, but he dared not.

“You know that cowards risk expulsion, comrade, fond as we are
of you,” said Salman, trying to prevent him from backing out. Farid felt deeply injured. No one had ever accused him of cowardice before.

“Then expel me. I'll have to live with it.” And he left without a word of goodbye.

The principal and the other teachers had all gone some time ago. He waited outside the school for the next bus, and saw his three friends walking away southward. Adib turned briefly once and waved. Farid waved back, biting his lip, for now he must admit to cowardice.

An hour later he was in the bus on the way to Daraa. Tanks and trucks were rolling towards them on the other side of the road, and the sky was full of Syrian fighter bombers and helicopters. The bus driver turned up the radio so loud that Farid's ears hurt. It wasn't only in the bus that voices were droning from transistor radios, it was the same at the central station in Daraa, where after a short wait he boarded a shared taxi going to Damascus. War bulletins and singers bawling out bellicose verses quickly cobbled together were coming from all the stores, cafés, and houses. They spoke of blood and the Fatherland, and above all the certainty of victory over “the bandits' mini-state”, meaning Israel. On the Egyptian “Voice of the Arabs” station, the shrill-voiced Egyptian broadcaster Ahmad Said was congratulating himself and the nation warmly on their chance to witness this historic moment, “when the Arabs will throw the Israelis into the sea.”

Around five in the afternoon, Farid left the taxi at the junction with Saitun Alley. When he opened the front door Claire leaped up from her chair by the fountain. “Our Lady has heard my prayer!” she cried, hurrying to embrace her only child. Elias Mushtak smiled; even he could no longer conceal his relief behind the mask of indifference. “Your mother has been worried sick about you,” he said in a voice that shook.

“A hundred and fifty million Arabs against three million Israelis, that's not really fair,” remarked Claire over coffee.

Elias grinned. “Subtract a hundred and forty-nine million who are glued to the radio, and half of the remaining million Arabs aren't fit for service.”

“And another thing,” Farid put in, “the Israelis know what they're fighting for and what they're defending. Do the Arabs?”

After coffee, Elias went to the bedroom, and soon Claire and Farid heard the calm voice of a newsreader and knew that he was listening to his favourite BBC London station.

The telephone rang. “That will be Rana,” said Claire.

The club was like NATO headquarters that evening. A large map was pinned to the wall in the table tennis room, with strong lights from standard lamps turned on it. Josef stood in front of the map with a long, thin, bamboo cane, with men in densely packed rows facing him. They were following news of the battles as it came over the radio, picking out the places mentioned with the help of the pointing bamboo cane in the hands of an expert on geography. When Farid appeared in the doorway, Josef broke off his presentation of the front line, leaned the cane against the wall, and hurried towards his friend.

“I've been terrified you'd be caught there on the front,” he said, hugging him warmly. Matta had appeared behind Josef. “Brother,” he said, kissing his eyes.

“Someone with sense at last in this bunch of lunatics,” said Gibran, who was sitting some way off, as if physically emphasizing his distance from the assembled company.

“He's had a bad day,” whispered Josef.

“Where's Nadia?” asked Farid, looking around. There were only four women from their street there, among about forty men.

“With her parents,” Josef replied. Farid shook hands with everyone, took Gibran's arm, and sat down with him and the others.

“Strike, brother, strike! Oh, Arab brothers from the Gulf to the Atlantic, strike now!” roared Ahmad Said hoarsely from the radio placed below the map.

Gibran began to laugh. “That bastard! How does he expect an oil sheikh or a poor Moroccan to strike? And strike where exactly?”

“Quiet!” Josef shouted at him. “This is no time for jokes!”

“… your hour has come, brother! Hear the Israeli fighters shot down from the sky like flies by our modern Egyptian anti-aircraft defence … I'm just getting news of the first train full of Israeli
prisoners coming towards Cairo. The prisoners are glad to have it all over and done with,” Ahmad Said continued.

Gibran looked at the windows of the nearby houses. Everyone was sitting by the radio this summer evening, rejoicing at the news of that first trainload of Israeli prisoners.

“I can't stand this,” said Gibran, and he rose and went out. But after a short walk down the street he turned, came back, sat down in a distant corner, looking concerned, and demonstratively put his hands over his ears. Taufik led him into the café and gave him a tea. “I'm surrounded by idiots,” Gibran whispered. “There's no helping them.”

Josef was expecting the defeat of the Israeli air force at around ten in the evening. The Israelis had over four hundred fighter planes, it couldn't be much longer than that. All of a sudden joiners became anti-aircraft experts and tilers were rocket specialists. Names like Rommel, Montgomery, and Saladin flew around the room like table tennis balls in any lull between the reports of more victories coming over the radio.

“The news will come any moment now,” said Josef.

“What news?” asked Farid.

“News of the liberation of Tel Aviv. The Palestinian flag will be flying over the city.”

Gibran stepped out of the café, and laughed and laughed. They all knew he was crazy, but they still couldn't make out what had amused him so mightily. The old sailor pointed alternately to two women hanging up white sheets with clothes pegs on the rooftops of their houses. Still no one understood what was so funny about it. But when more women appeared on the roofs of another four houses, also pegging sheets to their washing lines, Josef turned thoughtful.

“Why are they all doing their laundry like that in the middle of the night? Let's hear BBC London,” he said, and there was uncertainty in his voice.

A heavy silence fell over the place.

Rana couldn't bear to listen to the radio any more. As if everyone had gone crazy, they were all singing for the war. She didn't know whether the planes thundering low over the city were Israeli or Syrian jet fighters, but she felt almost dead with fear. Her neighbour Saliha asked if she would like to come over. Saliha's house, unlike her own, had a cellar that would do duty as an air raid shelter, and her husband suspected that the Israelis would leave Damascus in rubble and ashes. Rana took nothing with her, she just hurried over. The cellar was full of people. Saliha's husband was sitting in his wheelchair, telling the assembled pale-faced neighbouring women about his own wartime experiences. He had once been a military officer, but a splinter from a hand grenade had caught him in the back during an exercise. Since then he had been paralysed, and a thorn in the flesh of Saliha, who prayed every evening before she went to sleep that the Prophet Muhammad would soon take her husband to him, so that she could have a few years of peaceful life. “But the Prophet is a man of good taste, why would he want that bore's company?” she had once said to Rana.

Another woman, whose husband was also an officer, was begging God to save him. Even if he came home without arms and legs, she'd a hundred times rather that than be left a widow. Saliha looked at Rana and rolled her eyes.

“You said it, dear neighbour, you said it,” remarked Saliha's husband, Captain Mahmud al Samawi (retired), encouraging the desperate woman. Rana drank a glass of fragrant tea, and felt safer under the solid vaulted roof of the cellar. You could hardly hear the airplanes here. Mahmud was sure the Arabs would win. “It's just a case of a couple of days, and then the Arab colossus will be washing his feet in the sea off Tel Aviv.”

The retired captain's voice drowned out the radio in the corner. As every news item came through he felt further confirmed in his beliefs, and lectured the women. Sometimes he corrected the newsreader.

The howl of sirens made its way down into the cellar. “There, hear that? Now the anti-aircraft defence is answering back,” he cried.
Drops of his saliva landed on the face of the woman next to him. Disgusted, she wiped her cheek. “We're already in the firing line,” she finally remarked.

“No, no. Those are ground-to-air rockets and high velocity four-bore guns sifting their way through the aircraft, ratatatam … ratatatam …” explained the captain, spraying the woman again with each “ratatatam”, until she moved elsewhere.

“Are you worried?” asked Saliha quietly.

“Yes,” said Rana. She was thinking of Farid. She had called his mother three times. Claire had been very nice to her, but was in dreadful anxiety herself. Her boy still hadn't phoned, she had said despairingly last time.

“I know, if my husband went away I'm sure I'd worry too, but then he never does,” said Saliha, who always had a feeling that Rana and Rami were not happy together.

Through the cellar window, they saw people hurrying by outside. Jubilant shouting was heard. If they had caught the gist of it properly, a hit had just been scored on an Israeli fighter. A nearby explosion shattered the building. Rana was grateful for Saliha for letting her sit here among the other women instead of having to stay in her house alone. Her mother had called that afternoon, asking if she would like to go to her brother Jack's place. Her parents had already gone there, after swiftly hanging up white sheets on their rooftop, as the Israeli radio station was advising the Damascenes to do. Of course no one in the capital would admit it, but it was a remarkable fact that hundreds of thousands of people thought of nothing but whiter than white laundry in these days of the war. Her parents were going to stay with Jack “until things clear up,” as her mother always put it when she was at a loss. Rana's brother had made a lot of money with shady import deals, and at the age of twenty-five, three months before the war, he had bought a villa in a village near Damascus. Rana never visited him.

An hour later Saliha exchanged glances with Rana. “We're going to fetch bread and cheese and a few olives. We'll be right back,” she called out. Rana rose to go with her just as a jet fighter was breaking the sound barrier above the buildings.

What would life be worth without Farid? Rana asked herself hopelessly as they went upstairs. It was almost two in the afternoon by now. “May I make a quick phone call?”

“Of course, the phone's in the drawing room. I'll be in the kitchen having a cigarette.”

Farid still hadn't come home. Her fear grew. She felt ridiculous as she hung up. It was childish to try to reassure Claire by saying nothing could happen to Farid because they both loved him.

Saliha carried the large tray with sheep's milk cheese, olives, preserved eggplant, tomatoes, and curd cheese, Rana the smaller one with the teapot and tea glasses rinsed with hot water. The women were delighted. Saliha's husband ate nothing, just drank tea.

Time crawled by, and the retired captain became more and more intolerable. He kept talking about his own heroic deeds. Rana noticed that Saliha seized every opportunity to go up into the house and smoke a cigarette. Around six in the evening they both went up again to prepare supper. Rana breathed a sigh of relief, for she couldn't rest down in the cellar. She asked Saliha if she could phone again, and shed tears when she heard Farid's voice at last.