The Dark Side of Love (18 page)

He had the prisoner released from his bonds, gave him three gold coins, and called out good wishes for his crossing to America as he left. Then he dropped on the bench outside the door of his house, exhausted and happy, in the firm belief that no less than God had been at work in this victory. And George Mushtak wept for the sublimity of that hour.

Little by little, Salman had taken over the farming of the land. At first he followed his father's advice and grew all kinds of crops: vines, maize, olives, tobacco, wheat. Like all the farmers, he also raised cattle. But then he went to visit his youngest brother at the monastery and met one of the monks who was an expert on agriculture, and advised Salman to mechanize his farm and switch to products for the export market. Salman made the change at the end of the twenties. Old Mushtak cursed the export market and the French monk's advice, and it took Salman years to convince him of the merits of the new idea. “You're either a big farmer or a big loser these days,” he kept explaining.

So he turned the farm into a modern agricultural business, right on the Damascus road, and specialized in roses, almonds, tobacco, and apples. He sold the rosebuds to the perfume industry in France, the almonds went to a marzipan factory in north Germany, and the tobacco to the Netherlands. Day and night, Salman lived for his dream of a thoroughly modern business. He was the first to bring a cross-country vehicle and a tractor to the village. The villagers laughed at Salman, but soon other farmers were wondering whether they too might not be able to take their produce to the capital as fast and get it
there as fresh as he did, thereby saving themselves the tedious drive with a donkey and cart.

In time old Mushtak came to trust his son, and enjoyed being driven by that strong, sun-tanned, blue-eyed young man through the village in the open jeep.

Young women liked Salman's blue eyes and dry humour too. When he was twenty, one girl even tried to commit suicide over him. Her life was saved, but her relations spread the story that Salman had made her pregnant. No one ever knew whether that was true. The one certainty was that she came from a penniless family, and that was also the reason for the rumour that old Mushtak had paid her cousin a large sum of money to marry her quickly.

When this tiresome business was dealt with, George called his son to order. “You're marrying Hanan in six months' time,” he told him. Salman knew the pale daughter of a rich engineer only distantly, but he knew his father very much better. He agreed. The wedding was to be on the first Sunday of August in 1931.

In addition, their father decreed that six months later Malake was to marry Adel the Lebanese cattle dealer. What he didn't know was that she had been having an affair with that same man for years. Whenever George mentioned him she appeared indifferent, or expressed nothing but contempt for Adel. Malake knew that as soon as she showed her love for him, Salman and her father would find some reason to prevent the marriage. The Mushtaks were nothing out of the ordinary in that respect. Since time immemorial, parents had refused to sanction a marriage if they found out that it would be a love match. A letter was enough, or a poem, for the lovers to be parted for ever. Half of all Arabic lyric poetry tells tales of such tragedies.

Malake was already over twenty, and she had loved Adel since she was fourteen. But the cattle dealer had to wait until Mushtak's firstborn son was married. That was what custom demanded in Mala, and Adel waited patiently, because he loved Malake.

They were all to come to Salman's wedding: Hasib, now studying medicine at the American University of Beirut; Elias from Damascus; and Adel from Beirut, who for years had been regarded by everyone as a good friend of the family. The wedding festivities were to last
seven days and seven nights. A bishop and six priests were invited from Damascus to celebrate the nuptial Mass. But the biggest surprise was the arrival of the Patriarch of the Catholic Church. George Mushtak kissed his hand, and was moved to tears when the head of the Church embraced him, laughing. “I know you only asked for a bishop, but I would like to bless your son's marriage myself in gratitude for all you have done for the Church.”

The villagers couldn't remember ever seeing a Catholic patriarch in Mala before. But since his great victory over the besiegers of the village, old Mushtak was thought capable of anything. And then he had an unpleasant surprise. The day before the wedding, quite by chance, he found his daughter in bed with Adel. He was extremely angry, not because his fiend of a daughter had seduced the simple cattle dealer, but because Malake ignored propriety and his orders, and insisted on having her own way, just like her mother. So after all Malake had been the first to celebrate her marriage in bed, before her brother, which showed that she didn't care in the least for any of her father's decrees or wishes.

Mushtak did not rant and rage, nor did he hit Malake, as he often did when he lost his temper, because this time he feared a scandal. The house was full, the head of the Catholic Church was drinking his coffee in the courtyard under a sun umbrella. Hundreds of people were crowding around him, all wanting to get close to His Excellency, Patriarch of the entire Middle East and the holy city of Jerusalem. He was, after all, the second most powerful man in the Church after Pope Pius XI. They were grateful to the bridegroom's father for giving them this opportunity.

And now his own daughter was sleeping with that simple-minded cattle dealer. Mushtak swore he would hate Malake for it until the day he died. Today, however, he just stood in the doorway. Malake and her lover froze under the bedclothes when they saw him, and Adel regretted his stupidity in leaving his jacket with the revolver in its pocket out of reach. He expected to die, but nothing happened. Leaden minutes crawled by. Mushtak said not a word, just went on staring at the couple.

“We'll celebrate the nuptial Mass tomorrow,” he said after an
eternity that had, in fact, lasted three minutes. “And after that I never want to see either of you again.” His voice cracked. Those were the last words he spoke to Malake and Adel.

But the two of them ran away that night. Malake was afraid that her father's henchmen would abduct her and her husband directly after the ceremony, kill them, and bury them in some distant ravine. She knew her father very well.

When Mushtak's faithful servant Basil whispered the news to him next morning, while everyone was drinking to the wedding, he was surprised by the reaction of his master, who just smiled and nodded. “She's quicksilver, like her mother, she can't be held fast,” was all Malake's father said, and then he took the Patriarch's hand and led him to his place at the festive table. He was to sit enthroned there with Salman on his right and Hanan on his left.

The village had never seen a wedding like it before. Over a thousand guests celebrated for seven days on end, local people and strangers from the surrounding villages, from Damascus, Aleppo, Jerusalem, Baghdad, and Beirut.

Not since it was founded had the village seen so much meat and wine, so many pistachios and sweetmeats. It was said that for those seven days you could smell the aroma of roast meat and thyme ten kilometres away. For seven days, people drank themselves into a stupor on huge quantities of wine and arrack. And finally, at the end of the seventh day, when everyone thought the dream was over, George Mushtak announced that a man didn't bring a son like Salman into the world every day, and the party was to go on for another whole week.

As soon as he arrived for the wedding festivities, Elias Mushtak was surrounded by young men teasing him, asking if he'd poked all the cooks and cleaning women in the monastery yet. He didn't answer, but waved the jokes aside. Only once did he lower himself to saying,
“That kind of thing just goes on in your corrupt little minds. The brothers and sisters in the monastery are chaste and devout.”

In the village, he heard about his sister's love affair for the first time. Malake herself told him, asking for his blessing. And Elias kissed her and smiled awkwardly. “The way you describe Adel to me, it's a love that deserves the blessing of God himself.”

Malake was obviously relieved. She ran off to her lover and told him the good news. She had also taken the opportunity of telling her brother about her plan to escape, and Elias prayed all night that his sister would elude their father's guards.

On the wedding day, when Malake had gone, he was happy at the festivities for his brother's sake, but he wasn't at ease in all the noise made by the drunken guests. He often walked alone along the narrow paths through the terraced fields, and was surprised to find them even more beautiful than he remembered. He spent hours wandering in the hills and valleys, resting under large fig and mulberry trees, and drinking in the view of the landscape.

On the fourth day of the wedding festivities, he was watching a large black donkey in a field repeatedly mounting a pale brown female under an old walnut tree. The donkey was a stray; the remnants of his reins still dangled from his neck. The female donkey couldn't defend herself. She kicked, hitting the male so often that it must hurt him, but he was in a strange state of intoxication, and didn't stop until, after the fifth mating, he collapsed, snorted, and licked white foam from his muzzle. At that moment Elias smelled the sexual arousal of the female, who was probably just beginning to enjoy the love-play.

It was a sweetish smell, like faded roses. He felt a curious arousal in himself, a sensation beyond his control. That moment changed Elias's life for ever. From now on he could scent a woman's arousal from over three metres away, and he was never wrong. Even if at the last moment a woman sometimes took fright and denied feeling desire, he knew better. His nose was a merciless guide, knowing no consideration or morality.

At that extraordinary moment watching the female donkey, however, he felt so beside himself, so aroused, that he rushed at her and penetrated her himself. She brayed under the thrusts of his
powerful penis. Elias felt the pulsating muscles inside the creature almost crushing his glans. Suddenly a huge tremor shook his body as if it had been struck by lightning. He cried out so loud that the female donkey froze in alarm, while the male watched with drowsy eyes.

Elias walked slowly home. He knew for certain now that the abstemious Jesuit life was not for him. But he had no idea that two young women had been standing behind a pomegranate bush all the time, watching him. Moist between the legs and giggling, they ran home, promising each other, as they parted, to keep the secret to themselves. In Mala, however, such promises were the surest guarantee that a story would spread like wildfire. It wasn't long before the news of Elias Mushtak's amazing prick was circulating among the village women, and that very night he was seduced by Munira, one of the two girls who had watched him with the donkey.

He spent the days of the wedding feast in a never-ending state of exhilaration. He couldn't get enough of women. So he went around in search of them, and as soon as his nostrils picked up that special aroma he was like a man hypnotized. Elias never found out whether it was their indulgence in meat, nuts, and wine that sent the women wild, or the forbidden thrill of an adventure with a sexually potent novice monk, but it was certain that he caught the sweetish scent more and more often.

The women laughed, pinched him, joked with him. They took him into remote corners and got to work without delay. Samia, the bus driver's wife, worried about his health. She fed him pistachios and the spinal marrow of lambs, foods well known to increase potency. Elias could have done with something to dampen his desires down instead. The women were carried away. When he took them, they often forgot themselves and shouted out loud in their ecstasies. So what was bound to happen finally did.

The whole village was given over to the wedding festivities. So many guests could never have been received and entertained with food and drink in a single house. Every corner of the Mushtaks' entire property was stuffed with provisions. Lambs and calves stood crammed together in their pens, quantities of different beverages were stacked on top of each other. Every day, at six in the morning, carts brought
fresh supplies to the churchyard, the village elder's house, and the village square, where bonfires were built ready to be lit. Apart from the Shahins and their allies, all the people of Mala offered guests from outside the village as many beds as their houses could provide. Hundreds still had to sleep out in the open, but the nights were mild, and apart from three or four cases of painful but harmless scorpion stings there was nothing wrong with that. Moreover, the mood remained extremely harmonious in spite of the crowds and the huge quantities of spirits and wine that they imbibed, and if George Mushtak hadn't had his strange accident on the penultimate evening everyone would gone home with the happiest of memories.

That evening he was going back and forth between his own property, the churchyard, the village elder's house, and the village square. He seemed a different man, affable to everyone. He said goodbye almost affectionately to those who were setting off that night. Suddenly he saw that the guests in the churchyard had run short of arrack. He decided to fetch them two canisters each containing five litres of arrack himself. His house wasn't far off, and he also felt strong pressure in his bladder, so he could kill two birds with one stone.

He took two canisters of arrack from the stores, put them down a little way to one side of the courtyard, which was full of guests, and went to the earth closet on the other side of the yard. The long tool shed divided the grounds of the property into two, the front half ornamental, with flowers in containers, fountains, arcades, and benches to sit on, the back half devoted to the farm. There was an earth closet for the farm hands here, a rather better one for the master of the house and his family, a large stable, a sheep pen, a granary, and a kennel for the dogs.