The Dark Side of Love (38 page)

“Rimon weeps every night because he wants a boy. Men are such children, they always want boys because they don't know how to play with girls,” Madeleine told her.

“It doesn't matter to my husband which we have, so long as I hang on to the baby for nine months, and I've never yet managed that.”

“Oh, it will be all right, and the way I see it you'll have another twelve healthy, beautiful children. I'm afraid all mine take after Rimon. But never mind, I'm sure there are enough short-sighted men around to marry my daughters,” said Madeleine, laughing.

Claire was heavily pregnant again, and Elias prayed for her every night. Then, at last, Farid was born. He was healthy, and only a few days after his birth he looked like a little copy of Claire's father, which did not particularly please Elias Mushtak.

And it was Nagib who urged Lucia to sell the expensive villa in Arnus Avenue and move into the old Christian quarter, so that they could live close to their only daughter. Lucia gave way to him, and with Elias's help they found a handsome house in quiet Misq Alley. Nagib was delighted; only a walk of five minutes now separated him from his daughter, or rather from his grandson Farid. But to her dying day Lucia lamented her loss of status in moving to what she thought a far too modest part of town.

“Anyone who trusts men,” said Madeleine, and a painful tremor crossed her face, “would trust a sieve to hold water.” She smiled, but her eyes were bright with the tears she was holding back.

Claire sat quietly on the sofa in Madeleine's sitting room, lost in her own thoughts. It had come so suddenly. She felt paralysed. Hadn't all the pain of her three miscarriages been enough? At last, six months after her baby's birth, she had begun to enjoy some happiness again. She liked being called Um Farid, Farid's mother, as the custom was in Damascus. The personal names of fathers and mothers were lost as soon as they had their first child. They became Abu and Um, Father of or Mother of, with the name of the firstborn child was added. Elias didn't like it. He preferred to be known as Monsieur Elias, as the French called him, but Arabs did not adopt the European style of address. They went on calling him Abu Farid. Elias kept putting them right for a year and then gave up.

Her father's joy made Claire happy too. He visited her daily, and would look after his grandson for as long as she liked. After a while, the old man even learned to change the baby's nappy, feed him and wash him, and then she could get out of the house – often with Madeleine – to enjoy a few hours of the vibrant life of the city. She had thought for a long time, wondering whether she wanted to have more children, and decided that she did. Farid had opened the gate, said Elias, and ten more would follow. And then, suddenly, came the
discovery that her husband had been cheating on her, and she was on her own.

“My love,” her mother Lucia had said, “men need that to cool their blood, or else their seed rises to the brain and then they fight wars.” She lit herself a Hanum, a brand of cigarette popular with women.

For the first time in her life, Claire had shouted at Lucia. She tried to say that life wasn't lived solely between your legs, and love was something to be cherished and cared for. Lucia remained calm. She stroked her daughter's face. “Eternal love, my child,” she replied, “is found only in novels and poems, and the more I think about it the more I believe that those who write about such things are the true cheats, not we real men and women with all our weaknesses. That's life, the rest is just paper. Elias is the best man in Damascus, and if you're clever about it you'll get him back. You must open your arms yet wider, make even more of your looks, fix up his home to be even more attractive and inviting, and then he'll come back to you.”

For the first time Claire felt curiously ill at ease in her parental home. She could hardly draw breath there, she went out, and only in the street could she breathe deeply again. She didn't reply when her mother called to her. Lucia hadn't understood at all. My mother doesn't even have the courage to look into the depths of my wound, she thought on the way home. She was in despair. Her father, sitting by Farid's cradle in the nursery, looked up and saw her sorrow.

“Can I help you?” he asked quietly.

Claire shook her head. “I have a headache,” she lied. Her head had never been so clear or so full of grief.

Nagib went home, and as she prepared the evening meal despair vied with rage in her mind. She wandered around her house. There was no one she could lean on, not her mother, not her father either.

Elias was betraying her with Alexandra, one of the silliest women in the world. She and Claire had been at school together, but in those ten years Claire had spoken to her at the most on three occasions, and even that had been a waste of time. She had heard from Madeleine that the woman was married to a member of parliament twenty-five years her senior. After the wedding Alexandra had insisted on being called Madame Makram Bey, even by her relations and her women
friends. Her husband was the latest scion of a rich family of large landowners, and hoped to have a son to carry the name of Makram on into the future. Even if she hadn't been having an affair with Elias, Madeleine couldn't stand the woman.

“Alexandra, of all people!”

She could well imagine how Alexandra had made a conquest of Elias. That woman's backside got her everything she wanted. Even the proud Elias.

Madeleine suggested a trip to the hammam together. Claire hadn't been to a public bathhouse since her wedding. She had her own beautiful bathroom in Damascus, a wonderful bathroom with coloured tiles, showers, and a huge white marble wash-basin. Next Wednesday morning she went along to the hammam with her friend. Silent, lost in thought, she clung to Madeleine's arm.

Her father was happy to look after Farid by himself for a few hours. He didn't even look at her as she left, just turned his transfigured gaze on the sleeping baby.

They were going to the Hammam al Bakri in Bab Tuma, not far from Elias's confectionery shop.

“I once trusted a man myself, but he went away to America, taking my heart and a rich woman with him and leaving me alone with our engagement ring,” Madeleine suddenly said quietly, as if to open her own heart just a little.

“You were engaged before Rimon? I never knew,” said Claire, amazed.

“I had to keep it secret. I took the engagement ring off every morning and put it on again every evening, because that was when my lover came to see us. My mother liked him. I think she was in love with him herself. He was a charming, witty man,” added Madeleine, but then waved the subject away.

“Why did he go off with the other woman?”

“Because she promised him her whole fortune and I had nothing to offer. My father said it was un-Christian to give women a dowry to induce men to come along and marry them. You love either the woman or her money, he thought. But he sometimes went too far. He played a practical joke on Said – that was my fiancé's name – and
told him he'd lost everything. I realized that Said wasn't so sure what he wanted then, and asked my father to stop talking such nonsense. After all, he'd made pots of money in the leather trade, but I could see that the love was leaking out of Said's heart now, and however much I filled it up the tank up with more, it was soon empty again.

“Then along came this young widow with all the money she'd inherited, and he went off to America with her, and not a word to me. I lied to everyone, saying it had all been very sudden. But I'd known for months that he was moving away from me. Love is like childhood. When it's gone, it's gone for ever. My father was triumphant, delighted to think he'd seen through the man from the first, he'd known it was money he was after and not love. But I was crushed. Two weeks later I fell sick and I was away from school for six months, do you remember?”

“We thought you had pneumonia, maybe TB as well,” Claire recollected.

Madeleine laughed. “That was the official explanation, so that no one in school would know. I tried to take my own life twice, but I was too much of a coward to do it properly. My mother took me to Beirut, and we spent three months with an uncle there. I feel today as if he wasn't an uncle at all, he was a magician who knew all about love and the soul. He spoke to me so understandingly, we talked night after night, and I almost fell in love with
him
, but I stopped myself just in time. He was happily married and much older than me. He wasn't gentle with me, he was honest, he could even be harsh. And a time came when I realized I ought to be glad to be rid of my fiancé at an early stage. He might not have left me until later.

“Since then I've lived sensibly with Rimon, who thinks himself lucky to have married a daughter of the distinguished leather exporter Antoine Ashi. He wants children, I give him children, and the rest of the time he leaves me alone.”

At this moment they reached the hammam. Madeleine was a frequent visitor, and knew not only the woman who owned it, the strong masseuse, the old lady who soaped customers and all the assistants, but many of the women who were bathing there too. They came to meet her now with open arms. And Claire was amazed to see how
Madeleine changed as soon as she undressed. She shed her reserve along with her clothes, played around and joked with the women. Her laughter broke out in waves, echoing back from the walls and infecting other women sitting further off.

All of a sudden Claire was among strange women who smiled at her and immediately included her in their conversation, as if she had always been one of them. And soon she too was giving her opinion of some husband or other who was being picked to pieces in his absence. After an hour she was pleasantly tired, and went to sleep on the warm floor. When she woke up she was surprised to find how peaceful she felt. The room was almost empty, the women she had been with had moved on into the next room, where it was warmer. She lay where she was, looking up at the dome with the little stained glass windows that muted the sunlight. She felt safer than she had been for a long time. The world was far away, Elias and Alexandra were far away. Only Farid looked at her with his beautiful eyes that were so strangely like her father's.

If it were possible to feel as secure as she did here, and live with no one but her son, life would be all right, she thought after a while, slowly sitting up. She heard Madeleine laugh again. The assistant – a dark-skinned woman with a friendly face and terribly bad teeth, mere stumps – appeared suddenly, as if she had been waiting for Claire to wake. She handed her dry, snow-white towels, and took away the wet and sweaty ones. Slowly, Claire went into the next room.

She talked for hours with Sarifa and Baraka, two women of wide experience. Sarifa was married for the second time, and very happy with her new husband, the way you can only be in movies. She was the more outspoken of the two, and advised Claire to leave her husband and throw everything into the lap of fate.

Baraka was almost sixty, and was quieter but also more inscrutable. The other women joked about her, calling her Mashnakt Rigal, “a gallows for husbands”. Her fourth husband had died a year ago of some strange stomach disease, and his family had accused Baraka of poisoning him. Baraka recommended her to fight back against her rival Alexandra; she mustn't let the other woman off the hook for a moment.

Claire laughed a great deal, and she felt lighter at heart with Madeleine and the other women, as if she had washed off not only her dirt but her grief as well. She liked the company of Sarifa and Baraka, but her love for Elias was something different, so she couldn't take their advice. But she did take something home with her that afternoon: she knew she wasn't alone any more. Both women understood her, and Sarifa made it clear, as they said goodbye, that she would be happy to see Claire in the baths again next Wednesday. And Claire went there with Madeleine not only the following week but almost every Wednesday after that for years.

After the hammam Claire went home feeling relaxed, stepping lightly. But as soon as she was back, and had picked Farid up and said goodbye to her father, her dismal thoughts returned. All the lightness of heart she had felt with the women was gone.

How could Elias do this to her? Why did it have to happen to her? Wasn't what she'd been through with three miscarriages enough? And why did he choose that cackling goose Alexandra who'd already been wiggling her bottom about like a whore at the age of thirteen, and always used to say she knew where a man's brains were: in his balls, semen was his brain-juice and that was why it looked so milky?

How could Elias find happiness between the legs of a stranger, a stupid woman like that? Hadn't she satisfied him? What all his protestations of faithfulness? Perhaps part of the trouble was those long periods of abstinence after her miscarriages. Elias needed sex every day; he had joked about it often enough, hinting at his appetite. She was always tired in the evenings now, after the boy's birth, because she had to get up to feed him three or four times in the night. Elias sat alone, drinking his arrack in silence. Had that driven him into that woman Alexandra's arms? Her head was buzzing with questions all afternoon. She couldn't answer any of them.

She washed and made her face up, but when Elias came home she looked at him with grief in her eyes. He didn't even try to lie to her when she asked, “Is it true about Alexandra?”

“Yes,” he said. “I have a relationship with Madame Makram Bey.”

In spite of his embarrassment, Elias felt relieved. He had wanted to tell Claire again and again over these last few months. But her silence
had left him confused. It was a deep lake threatening to drown him bit by bit. Three times he had brought out Alexandra's name, but Claire had stifled any other words by showing her undisguised contempt for the woman.