The Dark Side of Love (108 page)

She ran happily into the kitchen.

“Everything all right?”

“Everything all right,” she said. And while the homely lentil dish mujadara was cooking, Saliha took her up to the second floor to show her pictures of her childhood. Rana pretended to be interested, but her thoughts were far away. Gradually darkness fell over Damascus. The sky was quiet now. From where they stood they could see into a nightclub with its windows open because of the heat. An Oriental dancer was moving between the tables, all of them occupied. Early as it was in the evening, the men seemed to be drunk already.

“That's Rihane. My husband sits here for nights on end. That window is his television,” said Saliha.

“How does he get up to this floor?”

“He had a special elevator from France built in. That way he can follow me right up to the third floor.”

Rihane was still looking across at Saliha's house, as if she missed her audience there. She didn't seem to be moving her feet but hovering
between the tables, and she elegantly avoided the many hands trying to grab parts of her body.

“Disgusting, isn't it?” said Rana on the way to the kitchen.

The Arab media kept the lie going for another whole day before it collapsed like a house of cards. The defeat had been devastating. Within six hours, Israel had destroyed all the airfields and air forces of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan without meeting any resistance worth the name.

Ahmad Said had fallen silent. On the radio they began preparing the population to face the worst disgrace in its history. Josef had his most severe crisis yet. His beloved Satlan turned out to be a fool, the man mainly responsible for this defeat. Josef didn't want to see anyone. Even Farid couldn't get through to him. Nadia said on the phone he needed peace and quiet.

On the third day Rana called Farid. Surprisingly, Rami had come home. He was hiding away in the bedroom, crying like a little boy who has lost his toys.

All the members of the government had fled from Damascus. They were hiding in Aleppo, or according to many news reports even in Baghdad. On the third day of the war, when the first Israelis reached the Suez Canal, the Egyptian government had asked for a ceasefire. Thereupon the Israelis attacked Syria and Jordan. Within two days they took the West Bank and the Golan Heights. They were less than a kilometre from the village square and the school in Shaga. Not a single high-ranking Syrian army officer was to be seen anywhere along the whole front.

White bedlinen fluttered on all the rooftops of Damascus. But the Israelis didn't arrive. They had conquered three times the area of their own country, and long-term occupation of great cities like Cairo and
Damascus could have devastating consequences, so they refrained. Farid walked the streets, observing the people of the city. They were depressed and ashamed. He couldn't make up his mind where to go, he drank a coffee here, a tea there, and listened to conversations. Then he phoned his cousin Laila, who was delighted to hear that he wanted to come and see her.

Later, he wandered with Laila through the houses of the quarter where the rich lived. She had the keys of her customers who had fled from Damascus and asked her to water their flowers. None of them had forgotten to leave white sheets fluttering from their balconies or rooftops, as the Israeli radio station had advised.

“I'm their night watchman and housekeeper at the moment, but normally they're my customers.”

Those were wonderful hours with Laila. Her husband Simon was recording in Athens, and would be there all June. After doing her rounds, Laila suggested spending the night in a rich architect's magnificent villa. They bathed together, slipped into white towelling robes, made themselves an excellent supper, drank a bottle of champagne, and sat in the drawing room like a couple of housebreakers.

She comforted him when he told her about his cowardice in not taking up arms with the Radicals. Laila said his decision was very sensible. “And good sense,” she added, “is the sister of cowardice.” Sensible people were out of place at the front in wartime. “I despise heroes who paralyse others by speaking for them and saying they'll accept death, instead of cooperating with them to make death impossible.”

Farid breathed freely again for the first time in days.

“Why should you die when a whole army that we've been feeding since Independence runs away in time of need? How would you win a victory with officers who aren't even allowed to choose the woman they'll love and marry? Their clans marry them off instead. Our officers have never practised conquering or liberating a village, they've just learned to strike out at their own people, and everyone knows how easy that is. And now we discover that the government in Egypt
knew about the planned attack ahead of time, through Russian espionage, even knew just when it would come. But did Satlan negotiate? Not he, he relied on what his field marshal Abdulhakim Kahban said.”

“Poor Josef.” The words escaped Farid as Laila was lighting a hashish cigarette.

“Would you like one of these, former comrade?” she asked with a seductive smile.

Farid didn't answer, but took the cigarette and drew deeply on it twice.

Laila fetched a second bottle, and they put out the many wall and ceiling lights. It wasn't quite dark, all the same. A little light fell through the open doorway into the drawing room, where she and Farid were sitting on an enormous couch, nibbling salted pistachios and drinking chilled champagne.

“My wages as housekeeper,” she said cheerfully, leaning against him. She stroked his head and clinked glasses. As usual, he was fascinated by her and wanted to kiss her forehead, but his lips suddenly fixed on her mouth.

Her saliva tasted sweet. She held Farid very close. Her fragrance intoxicated him, and he kissed her again. Laila embraced him and slid underneath him. Their robes fell to the floor of their own accord. His hands sought something to hold and found the soft skin of her thighs.

When he was finally lying beside her on the carpet, exhausted, he wasn't sure why he had suddenly wanted so much to make love to Laila. It was a new, strange sense of closeness that he didn't know even with Rana.

“You sang as beautifully as a dolphin when you came,” he said, looking at the ceiling.

“I love dolphins,” she replied, kissing him tenderly.

“Do you regret this?”

“No, comrade. There are many things that Moon Women regret, but never love. Particularly not love with the lost halves of themselves.”

Laila uttered a peal of clear laughter, tickled him, and when he was about to get up and sit on the couch again she flung herself on him and forced his shoulders back on the carpet with all her might. They scuffled like two children. He sensed her excitement from her goosebumps. His lips wandered like a butterfly thirsty for dew, and closed around one nipple. Laila quivered and uttered an ecstatic cry.

Later they lay still. His head was resting on Laila's belly, he breathed in her sweat. A sense of happiness came over him, but at the same time he felt profoundly sad. Then he suddenly saw the half-moon. It lay there blue before him, as if it had just risen, embedded in the soft skin beneath Laila's left breast. Farid sat up and kissed the place.

“Hello, moon,” he whispered.

“Do you know when you first sucked at my breast?” she asked, crossing her arms behind her head.

He thought the question was a joke. “Sixty-five minutes and thirty seconds ago,” he said, laughing.

“Wrong. The first time was twenty-six years ago.” Farid looked at her disbelievingly. “You were one year old when your mother brought you to Beirut. My mother had invited her to stay with us and convalesce by the sea. I think Claire was going through a crisis at the time and urgently needed rest.”

“Yes, she's told me about it. Elias had a mistress. Some parliamentarian's stupid wife.”

“Well, however it was, you two were staying with us, and because I'd loved you from the first, and you'd keep quiet for me, they left you with me when they went out of the house. I was seven, and a very independent child. One day I was sitting on the balcony of my room with you. You were on my lap, looking at you with your big eyes. I was madly in love with you. It sounds crazy, but that's how it was. I told you stories for hours, and I was convinced you understood everything. Suddenly you started sucking my forefinger, and as if I were playing with dolls I said: there, there, baby, you can have some milk. I was wearing a summer dress that unbuttoned down the front. And suddenly you had my breast in your mouth and you were sucking at it
like a hungry puppy, and I was in the seventh heaven. My breasts have been very sensitive ever since that day.”

Rami never took any leave. He was married not so much to Rana as to the army logistics corps. He was in charge of transportation, purchases, and new ways to make the army more effective and faster. The defeat by Israel, he claimed, was mainly because the enemy had organized everything very rationally and had moved extremely fast.

He had been out and about all the time since the end of the war. Sometimes he didn't come home for weeks. Rana was allowed to know only how long he would be away, never where he was going and why. Now and then he let slip that he had been on the border, or in East Berlin, Prague, or Moscow. But she wasn't much interested in what he was planning, buying, or negotiating.

That summer of 1967 was unbearably hot. Rana slept badly and kept waking from nightmares in which Farid, his face bleeding, was crying out for help. She prayed for him. Her husband, if he was there, slept on beside her undisturbed.

At the end of August she had her fourth abortion. She knew the midwife by now. Rana did not want to bear Rami a child; she'd sooner die. The abortions weren't as bad as she had feared, and every time she was able to leave her bed a week later.

She felt constantly depressed. Sadness was her prison. Not that anything much had happened, far from it. Nothing at all had happened, except that she had lost seven or eight years of her life. She looked at her goldfish in its round bowl, and whispered, “Hello, sister.”

When she sought comfort in the novels she had once loved so much, the lines blurred. She asked herself whether the life she lived now was worth living. Dunia said she ought to eat more yoghurt and take valerian to relax her. As if she needed to feel even wearier than she did already.

She kept wondering what way out there still was for her. Sometimes her thoughts were like a carousel, and she couldn't get off.

“You ought to use a depilatory,” said Rami when he stroked her legs. She laughed to herself. Those aren't hairs, those were my prickles he felt. The desert spread all around her, and the silence was suffocating. Dunia had once been like an oasis, but now that friendship was fading, and the closer Dunia came to her the more it dissolved. Like a mirage.