The Dark Side of Love (131 page)

When I arrived in Beirut, Samir was busy transferring his business as inconspicuously as possible to the USA, because he suspected that there would soon be civil war in the Middle East. There was a sum of over a million dollars to be moved, and he wanted to get it past the excise and revenue authorities as elegantly as possible. In two years, he succeeded. The civil war broke out after another two years.

So Samir was more than busy with transferring his money, conducting his daily business and visiting his girlfriend. I saw him every day, but there was no time for more than a coffee or a brief chat. I had seldom known such intense peace in my life. I was free all day, I lived with my fictional characters, I enjoyed the quiet life by the sea, yet I longed to emigrate. I had nightmares in which I was abducted and taken to a Damascus barracks. Captivity is never worse than when you must suffer it after learning to breathe the air of freedom.

But at last my acceptance from Heidelberg arrived, and a week later I had my visa. Just before I flew out my parents came to say goodbye to me. They stayed with my uncle Elias, my father's youngest brother, and we spent some emotional days together.

My father liked talking to his brother, whom he seldom saw, although he was very fond of him. They played backgammon or visited mutual friends. I invited my mother out for coffee on the beach or in town, and we walked for hours. One morning we were sitting in a café down by the harbour. It was stormy out at sea, with waves breaking against the harbour wall, tossing and roaring. Their foam was blown inland and sprayed the windows of the café where we sat safely in the warm, enjoying our mocha spiced with stories. I thought briefly that if we were in a film now, Anthony Quinn would surely come in, just the way he walks into the steamed-up café in
Zorba the Greek
. However, this was real life, and all kinds of people came through the door, but no Anthony Quinn.

“You like stories,” said my mother, looking out at the gulls struggling against the stormy wind. I nodded.

So she began on hers. “No one would believe a woman could be so strong.” She knew Farid's family only slightly, although they lived not far from our house. But in their inner courtyards and hammams all the women of the quarter were whispering about the elopement of the lovers Rana and Farid, and Rana's revenge when she sold the entire contents of her and her husband's apartment to a second-hand dealer. The core of my mother's story was clear, but there were gaps in the tale before that act of revenge. It drew its narrative power from the fascinating subject of a woman who had dared to play the part of a cactus, survive the desert, and then blossom. In Arabic the word for “patience” suggests courage and endurance rather than toleration.
Sabr
means both “patience” and “cactus”.

My mother described every moment as meticulously as a detective reconstructing a case from clues. But no CID officer in the world could have given such an exact idea of the look on the husband's face when he came back to his apartment to find it cleared right out. My mother described it with as much relish as if the revenge had been her own. She laughed till the tears came at the thought of the army officer going to the door of his apartment again, just to make sure he was in the right one, and then, still unable to work it out, seeing the torn wedding photograph on the floor.

She talked for over three hours. And before I went to sleep that night, I filled a small notebook with the plot of a story. I was wondering what course it must take to reach its end, the elopement that was recorded fact. Around three in the morning I had it all down, and I was absolutely sure that this was just the story I was looking for. I swore that as soon as I had reached Germany, unpacked my case, and put the contents away, I would begin writing my novel. But that was the plan of a naïve young man who had never lived in exile before. I had read a number of books on the subject, but you can't learn life in exile like mathematics. It is always an individual's story, and as unique as the exile's own fingerprints.

It was not until the early 1980s, one rainy April evening in Heidelberg, that I picked up that little notebook again and read through the sketch of my novel. The idea of a story about forbidden love that had come to me when I was sixteen lived on inside it like the pupa in its cocoon, neither a caterpillar nor a butterfly.

I badly needed information about the two feuding clans. As I couldn't go to Damascus myself, Salim Blota, a distant cousin from Mala, did some thorough research on the background of the story for me. After a year he sent me a thick book of notes. Much of the information in it couldn't be used in my novel, but it also contained a treasure: three detailed family trees, of the Mushtaks, the Shahins, and the Sururs, Farid's family on his mother's side.

I guessed now that the novel would take time as well as peace and quiet, and I began thinking of it as a secret project. I spent about four years writing the first draft. I finished that version in the autumn of 1986. But the story contained too much about the Crusades, and featured a deranged narrator who was seven hundred years old and couldn't die until he reached the end of his story. However, the story never did end, but always went back to the beginning again. Only traces of that narrator remain in the present version, in the person of the eccentric and loquacious seaman Gibran.

After a tour in autumn 1987, during which I told variants of the story and read extracts from it in over seventy towns and cities, I still wasn't ready to offer the novel for publication, although it had gone down well with my audiences. It wasn't quite right yet. Something was troubling me, but what? It was some time before I pinpointed the difficulty. In short, although I had studied Arab society closely, I still wasn't well enough informed about the way power functions in Arab clans, and still less did I understand how strong its supremacy is. I discovered that I had read mountains of politically motivated simplifications of history, which whether well-intentioned or not ultimately offered misinformation. Again and again I had been led astray by colonialist ideas of us, assuming that they were fact. So I had to go back and cleanse my brain by making a thorough study of the origins of Arab society. It was my good fortune that from the mid-1960s such studies and a number of bold critical analyses had been written, and more
were always being published, usually outside the field of university research. Let me mention five authors here as representative of many: Nawal Sa'dawi, who has written on the role of Arab women; Hussein Muruwa and Mehdi Amel (both of Lebanon); Hadi al Alawi (Iraq), who undertook a critical examination of the independent contribution of the Arabs to civilization; and Sadel Jalal al Azm (Syria), who has written soundly based criticism of contemporary Arab society.

Although most of my characters are Christians, like myself, our culture is Arabic and Islamic. An understanding of that fact in all its aspects is essential for the credibility of my story, above all for the way in which the characters naturally act. A faithful portrait cannot be painted in the dark.

I also realized that I still had not found the right voice for the narrator. On my reading tour in 1987 it had struck me that in view of the thorny subject of “love and death”, the voice I had chosen was much too naïve and light. A naïve voice, smoothing everything over by cheerfully omitting the painful passages, was not what I needed.

I am no friend of what is called the political novel, but a character cannot live under one of the worst of Middle Eastern despotisms and be entirely untouched by it, which in this context would mean telling a story as if no abductions or wars ever happened, and there were no prison camps in which human beings are degraded. I wanted to tell a story of love in difficult circumstances. In the novel, politics and real history serve as the stage setting and props for a novel about forbidden love in the conditions prevalent in Damascus. As far as the props are concerned, I have taken the liberty of turning towns and villages upside down, lengthening streets and converting houses. Dictators interest me as a universal manifestation, and I introduce its Arab variant here in fictional terms. Similarities with living dictators were unavoidable, but they are of secondary importance. What mattered to me was to show how dictators interfere with the life of the individual. And as I am not describing reality but telling a fictional story, I have allowed myself to extend or curtail the lives of dictators as the story required.

Several experiments with a different narrative voice failed. I soon found myself preaching and moralizing, since the plot of the novel
led me into taking sides with the weak and oppressed. My search for the right voice was to take me a whole decade. It is odd, but I never had this difficulty in my earlier books.

The blue folder containing the chapters I had already written, with the plan of the book, was on the bookshelf in front of me. I wanted to see it every morning, so that I wouldn't forget how important this love story was to me. I looked at it for years.

Before I came to Germany I had not known that in exile you think of your own city every morning. For over thirty-four years, whenever I open my eyes I have thought of Damascus, the most beautiful city in the world, and since 1987 I have also thought every day of the love story I wanted to write.

I looked for ways to solve my problems, and researched details for every chapter. This research was so productive, thanks to help from many people, that I soon had a small library devoted entirely to the novel: about two hundred books, and a large archive containing photocopies of old texts and photographs of people, streets, houses, clothes and places, maps, and city plans of Damascus over the years. I gave this part of my library the title “Forbidden Love”.

In 1991 I offered a summary and two samples from the completed “Book of Loneliness I” (the monastery section: Ch. 114,
The Journey
, and Ch. 121,
Joan of Arc
) to the German Literary Fund, and was granted a stipend for April 1992 to March 1993. I was and am grateful. These samples have gone into the novel without major alterations.

But many more versions failed before I hit upon the final form of the story, which also determined its narrative voice. Some of those versions cost me only time, others were interesting experiences.

On 14 August 1995 I had a dream that influenced me a great deal. If you are to understand it, I must explain that I spent three summers in Damascus learning calligraphy from an old master of that art. This master also had another passion: he was an artist in mosaic, and created large works for mosques and rich Arabs. He collected brightly coloured leftover pieces of tiles from marble and tile factories, broke them up into tiny parts with incredible patience, and finally sorted them into different bowls by colour and veining. He had about a hundred such bowls containing all shades of colour.

He began by designing every mosaic in pencil on paper, and then laid out his picture on the sheet of paper with the mosaic pieces. With each piece, colour and life came into the pattern he had drawn. I was not allowed to touch anything, only watch. He did not glue the piece into place, as was usual at the time; that would have fixed the form of the mosaic far too soon for his liking. When the picture was complete it was time for tiny corrections, and he worked on them for weeks and months. To avoid any danger of disturbing them, he wrote a serial number on the underside of each piece. Number one was the first piece at the top right of the design, and from there on he filled in the picture, piece by piece and row by row, until the last one was placed at the bottom left-hand corner.

The structure of my novel resembled this process more than anything else. In my dream, my master was the spectator, and I was the mosaic artist.

“But I see only writing on the pieces,” he said, a little bewildered. “Where are the colours?”

“Each of these pieces tells a story, and when you have read them they show you their own secret colours. And as soon as you have read all the stories you will see the picture,” I replied proudly, and woke up with a happy laugh

Mosaic is the form for a story like this, I thought, a story with a thousand and one pieces in it, doing justice to life in Arabia with all its flaws. And like a mosaic, the further from the observer the picture appears, the smoother and more harmonious it will be.

I began setting out the stories, piece by piece, and as I was telling the first story I suddenly had my narrative voice. After that my work on the novel was not a problem any more, and called only for time.

In all these years I have been able to publish separate stories from the periphery of the book, so long as they did not give away the main action of the novel. “The Colour of Words” is the title of a volume in which Root Leeb painted watercolours illustrating a selection from my works. Some of the texts included there are Ch. 96,
The Scooter
, Ch. 104,
Grandfather's Glasses
, and Ch. 113,
Grandfather's Salt
, in the “Book of Laughter I”.