The Dark Side of Love (23 page)

Samer himself was now unhappily married. His father had chosen the daughter of the richest merchant family in Aleppo as his wife.

Samia knew exactly when and where she had conceived Jasmin. In the winter of 1919 Samer was able to welcome her to his own house for the first time. His wife had gone away with their three children, so Samia visited him daily, and they spent a week together in Paradise.

On the first day of their reunion they were hungry for each other, and had already made love in the dining room, on the stairs, in the bathroom, and in the passage under the arcades. When they reached the bedroom on the first floor, they were so exhausted that they fell asleep. Samia woke in alarm two hours later, and had to run back to her parents' house nearby. As a woman, she couldn't on any account spend the night out.

Next morning she went to Samer as early as she could. Her cousin was already waiting for her. He led her to the bedroom, where she stopped in surprise. He had covered the bed with a thick layer of snow-white jasmine flowers, picked early that morning and now filling the room with their intoxicating fragrance. He undressed Samia and carried her carefully to the bed, where he made love to her at length in the sea of jasmine. They perspired freely during their love play, and their bodies were saturated with the scent of the jasmine blossom.

Weeks later, however hard she scrubbed herself in the bath, Samia still smelled of their fragrance. Even her husband, who always stank of his horses and whose nose was anything but sensitive, wondered why she had given off such a flowery scent ever since her return from Aleppo.

So Samia gave the daughter she had conceived that day the name of Jasmin, and she was her favourite child. The girl looked like her
mother, but she moved, spoke, and laughed like her real father, although she never met him, for Samia's cousin Samer died in an accident in 1923, when the child was only three years old.

When her other daughter Mariam married Samer's eldest son in the summer of 1938, Samia stayed away from the wedding. She went to bed and claimed to be unwell.

Her husband Jusuf hated wedding festivities, but he was sure that his daughter had won a great prize in Jakub, the son of his father Samer's rich and highly regarded family. However, he was morose and bad-tempered when he went to the wedding with the bride and her older brothers Butros, Bulos, Faris, Basil, and Musa. All his sons were married now, and they brought not only their wives but also their parents-in-law with them. His daughter Amira and her husband Louis came from Damascus. A bus had to be hired just for the family, and another was reserved for Shahin's followers, neighbours, and the leading villagers of Mala.

Jasmin was eighteen at the time. She wanted to go to the wedding too, but she had to stay with her allegedly sick mother and help the housekeeper Salime to look after her. She wept for nights, but it did her no good.

Since Jakub's mother was a widow, his grandparents organized the festivities. The powerful textiles manufacturer Khuri gave a wedding party fit for the
Thousand and One Nights
. In between the lavish meals, dancing girls and conjurors entertained the guests for seven days and seven nights. The best Syrian cooks lived not in Damascus but in Aleppo.

Besides the rich gold jewellery that Jusuf gave his daughter, he had thought of a special surprise. He had a noble Arab steed brought to Aleppo, and it was led out by a slim stable lad wearing colourful Arab costume on the wedding day. The stable lad solemnly handed the astonished bridegroom the horse's gold-studded reins. Mariam whispered to him what he must do, and to the surprise of his grandparents and the applause of the guests Jakub, son of that distinguished
family, walked the horse around in a circle, with perfect self-assurance, before he gave the reins back to the groom, patted the animal's neck, and returned to sit on the raised seat beside his bride feeling wonderfully happy.

Jusuf looked at the horse with sadness in his eyes. “Go with the grace of God. Sabah will miss you very much,” his neighbours heard him whispering. No one guessed that the horse-breeder would pay for parting them with his life. Sabah, his finest mare, loved only this one stallion Shafak, and kicked out at any others.

Shortly after his return Jusuf tried putting a young stallion to his mare. The mare lashed out wildly and would not calm down. After a few days Jusuf lost patience and decided to break her resistance. When he approached her she kicked. Jusuf shot three metres through the air to meet his death.

Jakub was an able man, but he wasn't interested in his father's business dealing in exotic woods. His mind was set on his grandfather's trade, and at the age of twenty-two he opened his own small, modern textiles mill.

Samia was envious. To think that Mariam of all people, the very image of her father, had the luck to live with this wonderful man. All these years she had hoped that Jasmin would make the running, and kept sending her to stay with her grandparents in Aleppo during her vacations. But to Jakub the little girl had been only his pert young cousin, and he was all the more strongly attracted to Mariam, who wasn't particularly beautiful but was mature and energetic. When he was with her he felt a deep need to tell her everything, and he sensed that her readiness to listen in itself lured the words out of his mouth. Only with her would he allow himself to speak of his half-formed ideas, for when she listened they matured into convictions.

And whenever Mariam went home on a visit, Jakub felt a great void in himself. That was love. Not only her own mother but the whole village envied Mariam her happiness. She was also thankful to Jakub for catapulting her out of Mala, eaten up as the place was by quarrels and hostility, and showing her the great world of Aleppo, Venice, and Istanbul. She loved her tall, slim husband, who couldn't look at a woman without ideas of sex in mind, yet remained as faithful to
her as a dog. He was a genius, and like most geniuses he was also a grown-up child who needed a firm hand. But happiness is an unreliable companion. Jakub died of a stroke after only a year of marriage. One night he woke and asked for a drink of water. Mariam jumped out of bed. Something alarmed her. And even as she stood in the kitchen she knew that Jakub was dead. She came back with the water, and there was her happiness lying half off the bed with his back bare. He had stretched out his arms as if to save himself from falling. She screamed, the glass flew from her hand and shattered against the wall. Mariam never wanted to go back to Mala. She believed all her life that the jealous villagers had grudged her such happiness and killed her husband with their darts of envy.

She went to Damascus, where she opened a fashion store in the high-class Salihiye quarter with the money she brought with her. From then on she spoke only French, and called herself Marie Shah.

Women meant nothing to Jusuf. He regarded marrying and founding a large family as a duty, important purely in the context of power calculations. On those few nights when he visited his wife, he came to her because she told him it was a good time for her to conceive. After that he left Samia alone in the large, comfortable, cedarwood bed with its soft wool mattresses.

Samia's original infatuation with Jusuf quickly died, and never turned to love. She saw that this man had no place in his life for her. His heart was full of ambitious plans. She was allowed to join him in discussing them, but that was all. It was said in the village – and the Mushtaks encouraged the rumour – that Samia was unable to love because she had a shard of steel where others have a feeling heart, which made her the perfect partner for Jusuf.

George Mushtak hated the woman, sensing that the fortunes of the Shahin family had changed since she came to Mala. The blows Jusuf inflicted on him were suddenly of a different calibre. For instance, it
had allegedly been Samia's idea to lay charges of conspiracy against him with the Ottoman governor of Damascus. Mushtak was taken away by night and was already in danger of the gallows when the Catholic Bishop of Damascus intervened.

George was convinced that Shahin's wife was a woman who ruled with a heart of iron. His insinuations about Samia's influence were correct, but the idea that she had an iron heart sprang entirely from his resentment of her clever wits, since her heart was really loving and full of grief.

For she very soon understood that with the marriage ceremony Jusuf had achieved his aims. She had been pregnant with her first child, Butros, a month before the wedding. It was not that Jusuf did not respect her, but he wasn't interested in her as a woman. He never called her Samia again, only “mother of my children”.

She lay alone in the great bed every night, wondering what Samer might be doing at this hour. She dared not tell anyone, even Samer himself, for she believed she was in a constant state of sin, she prayed and prayed and suffered from a terribly guilty conscience towards her husband, who never looked at another woman. So she tried to stand by him and lend him moral and practical support. She learned to love horses and hate Mushtaks. It was she who made Jusuf's eyes light up when she told him her plan for giving his despicable adversary trouble. Jusuf looked at her, fascinated, and for a moment she hoped he would take her in his arms and kiss her, but he only smiled and praised her with the saying that he kept repeating for twenty-eight years, until the last day of his life. “The prophet Muhammad himself warned his followers of women's wiles, and
he
knew what he was talking about.”

George Mushtak went to excess in everything, eating and drinking, grief and joy, but seldom in his estimation of his enemies.

Jusuf Shahin respected his wife deeply, and was thankful for all her advice. He allowed her to choose their children's names herself, which was unusual at that time. As a rich farmer and horse-breeder he had had many affairs before his marriage, but now he seemed to have cut all the threads linking him to his past. Samia's present, on the other hand, appeared to be entangled in threads from the past, a thousand and one of them.

Like a child singing out loud to overcome its fear of the dark, Samia kept telling herself that she could live and laugh even without Samer. She made up her mind never to think of him again, and not to go back to Aleppo until she was firmly in charge in Mala.

She told her heart to stop looking for unhappiness, and held up her life full of family duties for its inspection. But her heart was deaf and wouldn't see reason. When all was silent around her it kept repeating the same question, hour after hour: what is Samer doing now?

The quiet life of the village and the unforthcoming manner of the mountain farmers gave her time and space, and Samer filled them. Sometimes she felt her heart beating fast. Fear and shame filled her when she asked herself: does he think of me too? Such questions were born of her fear of the answer no, and her shame for her selfishness.

She rode through the mountains calling her lover's name out loud to the wind, as if she didn't just want to enjoy its sound in her ears but were telling the wind to carry her cry to him.

She stayed away from Aleppo for three years, but when her father fell sick she took her two children, Butros and Bulos, and went north, full of anxiety. Jusuf didn't want to go with her. When she arrived, her father came to meet her with outstretched arms, smiling mischievously. Not a sign of sickness about him.

“If your husband had come along too, I'd have had to take to my bed,” said the old gentleman, confessing that he had longed to see her but didn't like visiting Mala. Her mother had suggested the letter about his poor health. He spoke like a child describing a successful prank, slapping his thigh with delight.

He was a born city dweller. He didn't mind in the least that he
couldn't tell the difference between mules proper, a cross born of a male donkey and a mare, and hinnies, the offspring of a stallion and a female donkey or jennet, nor could he distinguish between rye, wheat, spelt, and oats. Even with his eyes blindfolded, however, he could identify any variety of tea from the first sip. And he could also converse with a Turk, an Arab, a Frenchman, and an Italian in their mother tongues.

Being back home with her parents was a strange feeling for Samia in the first few days. She glided around the rooms of the big villa, light as a fairy. Her parents let her have the whole east wing, with its bathroom, bedroom and drawing room, and its own kitchen. She had the services of two women who looked after her sons Butros and Bulos all around the clock. It was only after a while that Samia saw, with alarm, how old her father had grown. He seemed to have shrunk, he was thin, almost frail, his hair was white as snow. Her mother, on the other hand, was the same as ever: reserved, stiff, correct in everything she did.

Suddenly there stood her lover in her drawing room doorway. She was just reading a French magazine. He was tall, slim, and had a breathtakingly beautiful smile on his face. She felt dizzy.