The Dark Side of Love (17 page)

“Mark?” said the man in surprise. ‘”He has no mark on his left hand. That hand's crippled. I swear by God I've seen it. He hides it well by resting it on his dagger, but it's crippled.”

Mushtak beamed. “You weren't lying. Bring the man a piece of bread and a dish of fresh yoghurt,” he told his followers, and then turned back to the prisoner. “Well, my lad, you will eat under my protection now, and after that I'll show you what your friends can expect here. And then you can go back to your leader Hassan Pasha Kashat and tell him: the man who crippled your left hand is waiting for you. Do you understand?”

“The man who crippled your left hand is waiting for you,” repeated the man, to show Mushtak that he had learned the message by heart. His voice sounded fearful and uncertain.

While he greedily ate the yoghurt they had brought him, Mushtak hurried away and gave orders for all the men whom the spy was about to pass to keep their faces muffled up, and as soon as he had gone by they were to go and station themselves elsewhere, so that after a while he wouldn't be able to estimate the number of fighting men any more. The spy was released after nightfall, and he hurried away in the darkness down to the plain.

“Will Hassan Kashat withdraw when he learns that you're here?” asked Salman next morning.

“No, he'll stay,” replied Mushtak, and he hadn't even finished what he was saying before the besiegers opened fire. The men entrenched in Mala replied, and Hassan Kashat's troops, although they suffered great losses, moved closer and closer. The first villager fell at about ten in the morning. It was Tuma, one of the three village butchers of Mala. A bullet hit him in the forehead just as he was rising to his feet to fetch a crate of ammunition.

Around midday the first cannonball sailed over the men's heads and smashed the window of the church of St. Giorgios. A second cannonball hit the back yard of George Mushtak's house and left a small
crater. Two window panes in the grain store were broken. The explosion of the cannonballs and the impact as they struck frightened the beleaguered villagers. Some of the men in the front line began firing at random. Hassan Kashat's troops answered them with more cannon fire, and moved to within five hundred metres of the old mill at the entrance to the village.

Both sides fought fiercely for ten days, but they couldn't get anywhere. The bandits could advance no further towards the village, the defensive ring stood firm as rock. And the climb up from the valley, which wasn't so steep near the village itself, no longer offered the enemy good cover.

But the defenders of Mala could not break through the rampart their enemies had built from rocks and felled trees. The bandit Kashat's troops had entrenched themselves in their positions. Mushtak's face grew darker every day. Finally he told Habib Mobate to summon all the leading men of the village.

“Jusuf Shahin too?” asked the village elder.

“Him too,' replied Mushtak dryly. The village elder turned pale.

Mushtak spoke bitterly to the assembled men. He never for a second looked at his rival; it was enough to have had to greet him with a handshake. That was the condition made by the two priests, Catholic and Orthodox. He sensed Shahin's reluctance to be reconciled. The man's hand was cold, as if he had drained the blood out of it.

Mushtak told the assembly that the French were not about to send the village any help, and he expected the besiegers to stay until the people of Mala starved to death.

Shahin waited until everyone else had spoken. Then he said, “No one will starve,” and turned his gaze on the priest of his Orthodox community, as if paying attention to no one else. “I've stuffed three of the caves in the rock full of wheat, dried meat, raisins, and nuts from the Lebanon, and two more with maize and lentils, salt and olive oil. That will last us for a while.”

Secretly, Mushtak admired his quiet enemy. Shahin had sent all that food to the caves, and not a soul in the village had noticed. Everyone knew, however, that he was an experienced smuggler, and it
was said that he had often muffled the hooves of his mules by wrapping them in cloth so that they could pass border guards in silence.

“Tomorrow,” Shahin went on, “everyone can take what he needs. The nuns of the convent of St. Thecla will supervise the distribution.”

Mushtak quickly pulled himself together again. “And I will make sure this siege doesn't last much longer,” he told the assembled men before they dispersed. It sounded more like a loser's defiance.

Jusuf Shahin rose and went away without any leave-taking, but with the dignified bearing of a victor. Followed by his son Salman, who stuck to his side like a shadow throughout the siege, George Mushtak himself set off for home.

Salman kept turning, looking distrustfully to all sides, and surveying the situation. There had been an attack on the sixth day of the siege, allegedly by three men of the enemy troops. The shots had been fired from very close to Mushtak, and though they missed him the men had escaped unrecognized. No one discovered any more about the incident, or knew that their tracks led to the Orthodox quarter. But Salman feared that one of Shahin's killers would take any second opportunity to shoot his father in the general confusion. Salman always carried a loaded revolver under his shirt now, and after that incident he became harder and less approachable. And Mushtak went along with what his stern son wanted.

The cannonballs were falling in the village less frequently now, and had a less devastating effect on the peasants' minds.

Three days after the meeting at the village elder's house, Mushtak and his son rode out to the farthest-flung of the sentry positions at dawn, and observed the enemy camp down in the plain as if waiting for a signal. A tent, a particularly large tent at the far end of the camp near the wild oleander bushes, increasingly attracted his gaze. It was out of reach of the rifle bullets, and very well defended by two trenches, as well as soldiers and a couple of cannon.

On the twenty-third day of the siege, another man fell into the hands of the village guards. They caught him in the olive grove below
the mill. He was unarmed and disguised as a peasant from Mala – black trousers, striped shirt, waistcoat, and a black
kuffiyeh
headcloth. The man claimed to have had a vision a week ago in which he heard the voice of his brother, who had been living in America for the last ten years, and this brother, he said, was calling for him, so he didn't want to fight any more. He had bought the clothes from one of the besiegers, who had taken them from a Mala peasant.

In tears, the man told his captors how Kashat was torturing men who tried to run away. A troop had been stationed to shoot the deserters, or bring them back to camp and torture them to death in front of the others.

“And what about the man whose clothes you're wearing?” one of the villagers asked him.

“He was shot… Kashat takes no prisoners. They cost food and water,” the man replied, diffidently.

The men from Mala lost their tempers. One young fellow drew a knife, but Mushtak raised his hand. The prisoner's words dried up in his mouth with fright. He turned pale.

“If you are an honest man,” said George, ignoring his followers' indignation, “you'll be taken over the mountains tomorrow, and from there it's two days' journey to Beirut and the sea. But if you are lying you'll wish for death not once but twenty times over.” Then he sat down on a stool in the middle of the circle that his men had formed around the prisoner.

“Now, tell me something in confidence. Since you say you hate Kashat, you won't mind what happens to him. So when does Hassan Kashat always leave his tent?”

“Only once. At midnight exactly he inspects the front to make sure his sentries are on watch. He has two adjutants with him, no more.”

“What are the adjutants' names?” asked George Mushtak.

“Ahmad Istanbuli and Omar Attar,” replied the man.

“What about the Khairi brothers?” asked Mushtak, to the surprise of his men.

“Mustafa fell in the first week, and Yunus a few days ago,” replied the prisoner.

That same night, George followed hidden ways winding through
the terraced fields of the green valley to the bandits' camp. He knew the narrow paths like the palm of his hand. He often had to go to his fields by night and divert the water of the little river to his land.

Mushtak loved the night hours. By day, he left the irrigation of the crops to his men, but after dark he liked to be in charge of the water himself. He would leap, light-footed, from sluice to sluice, smiling when the water followed him. Sometimes he ran along the dry bed of the channel, anticipating the gush of water that must go the long way around through the sluices before it raced forward like a flock of hungry sheep.

This evening he was accompanied by his son Salman; Nagib, the village elder's bold youngest son; and Tanios, the baker from the Orthodox quarter. Not only was Tanios one of the strongest men in the village, Mushtak also wanted to use him as an eyewitness to report back to his enemy Shahin's supporters on what he, Mushtak, was planning to do in the next few hours.

Even years later, Salman would say how his father suddenly looked young again. On the way to met his deadly enemy Kashat he strode out so fast and vigorously that his son and the other two men had difficulty keeping up with him. Soundless as shadows, they moved past the guards of both front lines that night, and finally they lay in wait for Kashat. He appeared around midnight, a small figure on his way to the furthest outposts of his guards. There were two tall men with him.

When Hassan Kashat reached the ancient walnut tree a moment before his companions, Salman and his father leaped out and flung him to the ground. The other two men from Mala killed the adjutants in silence. Hassan Kashat was frightened to death. He couldn't even call for help, for Mushtak was already stuffing his headcloth into his mouth as a gag.

“You filthy rat, what did I tell you? I'll get you, I said! It's taken me twenty years, but I have you now. All those nights I've been waiting for this moment, and now you're in my hands. You'll die like a dog on a dunghill,” he cried, hoarse-voiced, and with Salman's aid he actually did drag the bandit leader, who seemed paralysed, to a heap of dung that he had brought to his field before the siege began. This particular field was just beyond the walnut tree.

It was a clear night, and the full moon shone brightly. The bandit leader looked pitifully pale now. “Do you see this lion my son?” Mushtak continued, clapping Salman's shoulder and kicking his enemy in the kidneys at the same time. “I got him on Laila. I slept with her and she gave me four children. This lion is my firstborn. Look at him! Can you see his eyes? Aren't they the eyes of Laila?” he asked, kicking Kashat again and again.

His captive shook his head, and desperately tried to avoid the kicks as he lay on the ground.

“How could my mother help it if Laila and I were crazy for each other? Why did you kill my mother? And my sister Miriam? Why did you torture her like that? Before my mother's eyes!” cried Mushtak, and then he rammed his knife into his prisoner's belly, pushed him down in the dunghill, and pulled the gag out of his mouth. Kashat widened his eyes, tried to gasp for air and scream, but a fistful of dung was stuffed into his jaws, and Mushtak went on stabbing until his victim's body went limp. At last he stood up, exhausted and weeping.

Only when he felt Salman's hand on his shoulder did he say, quietly, “Let's go.” But Nagib the village elder's son had another good idea. After brief discussion, all four of them began shouting in Arabic with a southern accent, “The Christians have attacked us! Our leader Hassan Kashat and his adjutants Ahmad and Omar have been murdered! Listen, everyone! Our leader is dead! Run for your lives!”

Slowly at first, then faster and faster, loud cries from Kashat's own men echoed through the camp. Panic broke out. Mushtak and his three companions made haste to get back to their village. Once there, they quickly summoned all the men, lit torches, and rode down into the valley on their horses and mules, guns in their hands. They drove the fleeing bandits ahead of them, killing many.

When day dawned, the valley was full of corpses down to the Damascus road. All the abandoned horses and weapons were taken to the village square of Mala, but the bodies were put in one of the remote caves. They were walled up inside it, and the entrance was covered with earth. One of the dead was the chief of the Rifai clan, Muhammad Abdulkarim, who had been at the harvest festival.
Kashat had obviously persuaded him that there was good loot to be had in Mala.

People were already coming to the village square at dawn to dance, drink wine, and shout for joy. They had all entirely forgotten the prisoner, but Mushtak finally found the man lying tied up under a fig tree.