The Dark Side of Love (16 page)

He wondered whether it might not have been wiser to go about the matter as his arch-enemy did. Very few people knew about the large quantity of guns stored in the convent.

At the end of August he woke from a nightmare, bathed in sweat. Day was only just dawning. The children were still asleep. He dressed and left the house with his revolver and his field glasses strapped to his belt. It was still dark when he reached the gate. He looked left, as if he knew that someone over there was watching him. His manservant Basil, relieved, waved from the window of the little hut where he lived in the yard of the property. He kept better watch on the place than
the three dogs who roamed free there at night. Mushtak could sleep easily now that he knew nothing escaped Basil's eyes. He had given him a gun and permission to shoot any intruder. His blood feud with the Shahins left no room for any carelessness.

Soon word of this arrangement had gone around the village, and when two young men tried to play a trick on the watchman, apparently for a bet, Basil fired his gun without warning. He hit the pair of them in the buttocks. They had to endure the mockery of the villagers for weeks on end, and from then on no one ventured to set foot in the yard without sending word first. Even when a complaint was laid with the police and they came to search the place, the police chief politely informed Mushtak the day before, telling him that the CID from Damascus was going to search his property for hashish in the morning.

Three jeeps drove down the quiet street to the house at dawn. The ten policemen had brought chisels, a large axe, and saws to dispose of any obstacles they might find in their way. But the gate was open and the dogs in their kennel. Sullenly, the officer went all over the property with his men, but of course they found nothing.

“George Mushtak has dealt in anything that makes money, but never hashish. It is beneath his dignity,” George told the police officer, “and so whatever bastard laid that complaint knows.” He always spoke of himself in the third person when addressing a social inferior.

The officer, disappointed by his failure, said nothing. He drank the coffee that the housekeeper had given him, and as he left gratefully pocketed the ten lira pressed into his hand by Mushtak, who said almost paternally, “Buy your children some candy.” The police officer took the strong hand of the master of the house and whispered, “Jusuf Shahin.” George Mushtak merely nodded.

The CID officer knew that by giving away the name he might cause a murder, but he hated peasants and the very smell of them. In the city, he would never have revealed the identity of a man who had laid a complaint, not for all the money in the world.

That incident was now two years in the past. Ever since, Mushtak's men had been doing their utmost to repay Jusuf Shahin in his own coin, but none of what they had suggested so far pleased their master.
He didn't want his enemy's horses or barns, his house or his yard, all he wanted was to strike him to the heart so that the scoundrel would finally keep quiet.

That morning at the end of August 1926, when Mushtak set out at dawn, he closed the gate behind him and walked towards the ravine. It was very quiet, but his mind was seething. He quickened his pace. He was sweating. Soon he was struggling for breath, for the path climbed more steeply all the time.

It was half an hour before he reached the top of the rocky ridge. Mala lay in its shadow, and he had a wide view from here. Still breathing heavily, he raised his field glasses and turned them south. His dry lips moved. Almost inaudibly, he said, “I know you're coming. Here I am, come along. You'll find your grave here. I know you're coming!” There was a pleading note in his voice.

But the distant prospect disappointed him. The rising sun swept the grey from the sky, and a soft blue replaced it. George Mushtak, however felt nothing but an oppressive emptiness. He lowered the hand holding the field glasses, looked around him, and walked slowly home.

Resistance in the south of the country was weakening by the day. The men who had assembled in the village elder's house heard the news on the radio, and breathed a sigh of relief. Two days later, when even Great Britain officially stepped in against the fleeing rebels, ranging itself on the side of France, the entire rising collapsed.

Mushtak withdrew into his property and kept to his darkened bedroom. His son Salman was anxious, but Malake reassured him: the old patriarch was sound as a bell, she said, it was just that his heart was full of longing for something, and none of them, not even she, knew what it was. This time at least it was nothing to do with Shahin. It seemed as if he wanted to answer someone back, settle an old score with him, and he was sick with that longing because he feared he would take it to the grave with him unsatisfied.

One afternoon in September he emerged from his room, sat down on the bench outside the house, took a deep breath and said, “They'll soon be here.”

“Who'll soon be here?” asked Salman, who was mending a rent in
a saddle on the terrace. He was planning to ride out and pick a basket of ripe grapes. The best grapes in Mala were September grapes, which tasted like drops of honey surrounded by a thin, aromatic skin.

“The bandits. They attacked Daisa today, plundered the village and set fire to the convent of St. Mary. It was on the radio. Those ungodly villains shot fifty men and abducted over twenty women,” replied his father almost cheerfully.

“Who was it? And what did the French do?” asked Malake, stirring a spoonful of honey into her peppermint tea.

“It was Hassan Kashat, who else?” replied her father, looking into the distance and shaking his head. “The French, ah, well, the French,” he added.

“You know Hassan Kashat, am I right?” asked Salman. He knew that his father hated the man, but not why.

‘You're right,' replied Mushtak, and his eyes narrowed. “I know him very well, and I hope he will make the mistake of coming to Mala. But you children wouldn't understand that,” he added, dismissing the subject.

Two days later, on the fourteenth of September, the village celebrated the Feast of the Holy Cross. The village elder came to the great bonfire, together with Imam Yunis from the nearby district town of Kulaifa, and Muhammad Abdulkarim, head of the Rifai family, one of the most powerful Muslim clans in the country. Their residence was in the village of Aingose, ten kilometres from Mala. The village elder hoped to show that the religions lived at peace with one another.

Mushtak stayed away from the festivities. Instead, he was oiling the hundred rifles behind closed doors with Salman, Malake, and his faithful manservant Basil. Then he had the guns carefully wrapped in linen cloths and packed in wooden crates, five to a crate. He had given his other ten men twenty piastres and let them have the day off to celebrate as they pleased. He spent all evening cursing the village elder's yielding character, and not until late at night did he let Salman and Malake join the noisy crowd dancing happily in the village square.

Only his servant Basil stayed with him. Even though he had permission to go, he would not leave his master's side. Mushtak was fond of his faithful servant, who was sometimes closer to him and
understood him better than his own children. Basil was an orphan. He had grown up with the Mushtak family and venerated the patriarch of the clan.

Salman and Malake were glad to be among the other young people at last. Everyone was gathered around the bonfire in the village square now. The two Muslim dignitaries were joining the celebrations too, and enjoying the presence of the cheerful girls who stayed in the square, mingling with the men, until far into the night. Now and then one of them disappeared into the darkness with a young man, and came back after a while giggling. Even most of the children were still up.

George Mushtak was missed, since he usually donated plenty of wine and three lambs for the spit on this occasion every year. But even when the village elder knocked at his door and invited him to join them in the square, he merely replied dryly that he didn't feel like celebrating anything, and would not open the gate.

Three days later, a Sunday, a cold north wind blew over the village square and the air smelled of snow. Suddenly, during divine service, a shepherd came running down the central aisle of the church of St. Giorgios.

“They're coming, they're coming!” he cried, waving his hands in the air. The priest interrupted his prayers, but not before concluding the last verse of the hymn of praise to the Lord with a
kyrie eleison
.

“Calm yourself, my son. Who are coming?”

“The bandits. The whole plain's black with them. I set off at dawn for the hill beyond the mill with my sheep. When I saw them, I couldn't believe my eyes.”

The man was breathing noisily. Apart from that, there was a deathly hush in the crowded church. Someone hushed a crying child. Then nothing could be heard but the congregation whimpering desperately behind their hands.

“How many are there?” asked the village elder.

“Thousands. They're advancing through the whole valley along a wide front,” replied the man, tracing a horizontal line in the air with his hand.

Mushtak rose from his seat in the front pew, went up to the altar,
crossed himself, and turned around. He looked over the village elder's head.

“I need,” he said, in a calm, firm voice, “five brave men on five good horses to hold the bandits back down there while we get our women and children to safety in the caves in the rock.”

Twenty men rose briskly to their feet and followed him to his house. The village elder was left behind, ignored, and at that moment, although he was only sixty, he felt older and frailer than the ninety-year-old widow Nasrin in the pew at the back.

Even before Mushtak reached his house, the bells were ringing in all the church towers. It was an ancient signal of danger. People streamed out of their houses into the village square. Many of them were afraid, but there was no sense of panic anywhere.

He stood at his gate deciding which men were to have rifles and which were not. Salman wrote down the names of the men standing ready, rifle in hand. Then the armed men stormed out to the hills that had a good view of the village from the south.

Mala was a rich Christian village. High in the mountains, it had been well protected from most of the adventurers who roamed the country during four hundred years of Ottoman rule, looting and burning. Its inhabitants had also been spared the Bedouin who attacked the villages of the plain in successive waves, trying to escape starvation. Mala had thus become a pearl among villages. Even in the 1920s it had electric light, mains water, and four coffee-houses. Many rich emigrants from Mala had gone to America, Canada, and Australia, and sent money home. The monastery of St. Giorgios and the convent of St. Thecla were famous for their miracles. Prosperous Christians from all over Arabia came to ask the saints for children, a cure, or success, and had given generous donations, transforming those religious houses into rich citadels.

The bandits knew that, and they had descended like the locusts that come out of nowhere and devour everything, before disappearing into nowhere again. It had been like that in 1830, 1848, and 1860. The battle of 1860 was famous all over the country, for not only did the little village hold out for four weeks while it was besieged by over three thousand heavily armed bandits, it then put them to flight. It
was such a devastating victory that after it the bandits had avoided Mala for sixty-six years, until now.

Soon the first shots fired at the bandits by the horsemen up in the hills were heard in the village. The line of men at Mushtak's gate was a long one. Even the village elder had to wait his turn. He was given a rifle, not with solemn ceremony, as he had hoped, but not peremptorily either, as he had feared. Mushtak handed him the gun without a word, and was already looking at the next comer.

Mobate envied the man his household servants, who showed him dog-like devotion. Finally, Mushtak himself carefully folded up the list that Salman had handed him, and gave it back to his son. “They are all in your debt. You can always remind them of it later,” he said. “Man is a forgetful animal.”

Then, accompanied by his son and shouldering a Mauser, he walked out to the village square with his head held high. Many of the men kissed his hand emotionally, as if he were a saint, and thanked him for the rifle, but he just stood there listening to the distant sounds.

Suddenly his glance fell on the line of men forming in the Orthodox quarter. The Shahins were distributing rifles to their own supporters, who were soon perched on the rocks like black ravens, keeping watch on every part of the northern and eastern routes to the village, while the Catholics guarded the roads to the south and west.

Late in the afternoon all the children, old people, and most of the women were safely in the great rocky caves that surrounded the village. Only about fifty women stayed with the men, helping to construct the huge mounds of rubble with which they were trying to block the one weak point in the fortifications, the Damascus road.

Mushtak rode to the hills with a Mauser over his shoulder and his field glasses hanging in front of his chest, giving him the look of a military commander.

It was nearly evening when the men took their first prisoner, a little man with a southern accent who had apparently been scouting around to spy out the village's defences. The furious guards hit and kicked him, and one of them actually wanted to shoot him out of hand.

“Leave the man alone,” ordered Mushtak. He turned to the trembling spy, and said, “Have no fear, we'll send you back. Who's your leader?”

“Hassan Kashat, sir,” replied the man anxiously.

“Are you sure of that, or do you know it only by hearsay?” Mushtak asked, and before the man had even nodded he was going on, “What mark does Hassan Kashat have on his left hand?”