The Dark Side of Love (39 page)

His silence had been a lie. How often had he lied? He thought back, remembering how he had sometimes felt he was standing outside himself, as if he were two men. One Elias was talking just to please people, the other Elias said nothing, but registered the lies. Had it happened once or a hundred times? How often had he agreed with Claire that Arab women needed freedom and equal rights? He had noticed that she liked to hear him say so. She had confused love with the attitudes he adopted.

Now he felt relief. “It's not the way you think, though,” he said. Claire had promised herself all afternoon to keep calm, but when he said that and put out a hand to placate her she struck it away and wept. “You've deceived me, Elias. I never loved anyone in my life as I've loved you, and now you pay me back by deceiving me. Oh, Elias,” she cried, almost inaudibly, as if to say: help me, please, I'm dying. But it was a long time before she could get another word out.

“Elias,” she whispered at last, weeping as if for the death of someone she had loved dearly. He sat beside her, lost in thought, and dared not try to touch her again. And for a moment she hoped he would explain that it was all a mistake and put his arm around her shoulders, and then she wouldn't shake it off. She felt he was about to do just that, but then he merely stood up and went to the window, and she knew that he belonged to Alexandra now.

She was intimidated, and said no more. It was more than ten years before she recovered from the shock.

No one was buying the idea that Elias had been very devout since he left the Jesuit school. Many regarded him as a hypocrite. He was on the committees of all the Catholic associations of the city of Damascus
and the village of Mala, he dutifully went to church on Sunday, and then he slept around for the rest of the week.

He thought his first affair during his marriage stupid at both the beginning and the end of it, but Alexandra – or Madame Makram Bey, as she liked to be called – was hot as a wasp in full sunlight and smelled of unsatisfied lust for many metres around her. And since he could hardly make love to Claire at all at the time, he fell for the temptation.

It was at a party given by her husband for the deputies who had elected him their parliamentary president. Elias and three of his employees, clad in snow-white coats and caps, were to serve the delicious sweetmeats. Suddenly Alexandra came delicately tripping up to him and said it was she who had persuaded her husband to choose Elias's shop to supply them. And that same evening, as the new parliamentary president was smoking his Cuban cigars, drinking French champagne and talking to the deputies, Alexandra was enjoying her first love-play with Elias in a small bedroom on the third floor of the big house.

Claire refused to believe that he suffered every time he satisfied himself with a woman, but he did. Quite often, when he came away from one of them, he looked for the nearest church, knelt down before Christ, and asked for forgiveness. It was like that with Alexandra. The morning after their night of pleasure he was tormented by pangs of conscience, and begged the supreme judge of all for justice and mercy. For after all he, the creator of all the worlds, had given Elias his prick and his eternal lust for women. So he must surely have a heart open to the sins of his suffering servant.

But with Alexandra, and only with her, Elias felt he was very close to power, and he wanted to prove himself to his father through power and importance. Elias knew that Makram Bey was a slave to his wife and would do anything she wanted, and now Alexandra herself had fallen for Elias in a big way.

By devious means, he let his father know directly after the party that he was friendly with the parliamentary president. Soon after that Salman and his wife had a chance to see the truth of it for themselves when they looked in at the confectioner's shop. Elias had them given
a coffee, and while they were drinking it a large limousine drove up, the parliamentary president's wife stepped out, came into the shop, greeted the confectioner himself warmly, and told him her husband would like Elias to visit him that evening for a game of chess. Then she took the elegantly packaged sweetmeats that Elias had prepared for her, and left. The car had been blocking the street outside all this time, but no one waiting behind it dared to hoot or shout angrily, as drivers usually did in Damascus. It had no licence plate, and that was something not many people could afford.

Salman and Hanan were impressed, and when they went back to Mala that evening they told old Mushtak that Salman's little brother did indeed go in and out of Makram Bey's house. After that, George Mushtak was sick with a strange fever for a week. No one knew that Elias had staged the whole scene and asked Alexandra to come to the shop for that very purpose.

His desire for power was one compelling reason why he could tolerate Alexandra at all. Sometimes Elias took his penis in his hand and spoke to it. “My friend, you have more influence than certain powerful farmers.”

They parted not, as Alexandra said, because her husband left parliament to devote himself entirely to his large estate and his pure-bred horses, but because she insensitively told Elias what her spouse had said about him.

Makram Bey's private detective always kept him informed about his wife's affairs. He knew all her lovers by name, and even where and how often they met his wife. Why he wanted to know remained his secret. He showed her respect in public, and actually dedicated his reference book on Arab horses to “my loyal wife Alexandra”.

It was only in his cups that he called her names. Alexandra had told Elias all about it one day, with a detailed account of how, on this particular occasion, he had sent all the servants home and then laid five pieces of paper out on the drawing room table in front of her. Men's names were written on them. “These are your lovers,” her inebriated husband had told her, in a perfectly clear voice. “The photographer's a viper, the hairdresser's an ape, the interior minister is a chameleon and the swimming-pool attendant is a crocodile.” Then, she said, he
had paused, picked up the piece of paper bearing Elias's name, and fell into a fit of laughter that left her utterly bewildered. “And as for this one,” he went on, “he's a donkey from Mala. I ride Arab horses, and a donkey rides my wife.” And he had actually whinnied, and then left her standing there while he went to his bedroom. When she followed him he was already snoring. Next morning he was as kind and subservient to her as ever.

Elias was seething with anger, but he kept calm. He didn't understand why such a despicable old man would call him a donkey. But then Alexandra told Elias she'd expect him next Thursday, when her husband would be away spending the night on his estate. “The old fool is so crazy about horses he can't wait for a couple of pedigree mares to foal,” she explained, laughing heartily, “and I want to ride my donkey.”

Elias felt deeply wounded and humiliated. He told her he didn't want to see her any more, and asked her to leave his shop at once. Alexandra fell silent, and her smile slipped sideways on her face, like a mask. “Lousy peasant,” Elias heard her saying angrily as she went out.

After that he never touched another Damascene woman. Instead, he made love to women in Mala, who were grateful for his presents and his money. Not that Elias paid them much, but it was important to him to know that he was buying their love, because he wanted to make the nature of the deal perfectly clear. He was the master, he was helping himself to lonely women whose menfolk had emigrated to the Gulf states in the late forties or early fifties, or were away driving long-distance trucks between Damascus and Kuwait or Riyadh.

He had more than ten mistresses in the village, and went to see them in secret whenever he wanted. And just as he bought olive oil, honey, wine, cracked wheat, raisins, almonds, and sheep's cheese for his household only from Mala, despising all the products on sale in the city, he did the same with women. It was rumoured in the village that many of the emigrants' children were really his sons and daughters, but rumour flourished in the imagination of the villagers.

However, no one in Mala knew that Elias Mushtak hated the women he made love to, because after the act, sober again, he suffered
from the pangs of his guilty conscience. He damned the women who had such power over him, and would often say, even before he had done his trousers up again, “You're costing me money now and the torments of Hell later.”

Farid was six when he came to Claire's bedside one night. “Mama,” he whispered, “Papa's talking to the cupboard.” And he pointed to the drawing room. He had woken up because he needed to go to the lavatory, and heard his father's voice.

His mother sat up and stroked her son's head. “Don't worry,” she whispered, sitting on the edge of the bed and taking Farid on her lap.

Then she listened, and clearly heard her husband's voice. He was sitting with his face turned to the cupboard. She could see his back from her bed. The cupboard, like the seats in the room and its ceiling, was made of walnut wood elaborately decorated with coloured intarsia work.

Elias was talking to an invisible visitor. He spoke in two voices, one his own, the other and deeper voice obviously his father's.

“So I see you've made your way in life, my dear son,” said the deep voice.

“Yes, Father. Thanks to your upbringing and most of all thanks to your blessing. Because I know, even though you threw me out, you loved me in the depths of your heart.”

“Congratulations, my son, but haven't you overdone it with this house – didn't I hear that it once belonged to a consul or an ambassador? Have you put any savings aside?”

“Father, I'm cast in the same mould as you. I spend only what I have in abundance. I've saved for everything,” said Elias, straightening his back. Then he said softly, “Look in the big drawer beside you.” And he sat on the chair where his father was supposed to be sitting.

“Which drawer, my son?”

“The nearest to you,” replied Elias.

“Oh, that one,” said the deep voice, and Elias pulled the drawer a little way out. It was heavy, for it was filled to the top with gold coins.

“I'm speechless! What an idiot I was!” said the deep voice remorsefully. “I was so wrong.”

Elias was weeping with emotion now, probably imagining his father's defeat.

He slowly rose and went back to the sofa, where he sat down and drank his arrack in silence.

“There, it's all right now. You can go to sleep again,” Claire whispered to her son, and Farid, barefoot, tiptoed his way back to bed.

But she herself lay awake for a long time.

DAMASCUS, JULY 1940

The copper-coloured turtledoves were beginning to sing their melancholy songs again, and the people of Damascus rose from their siesta. While the heat is unbearable the birds keep silent. Claire sprinkled water on the marble floor of the little inner courtyard, which was burning hot, and opened all the drawing room windows. Heavy heat weighed down on the city.

Farid was sleeping peacefully. His mother drew the curtain that protected his little cot from flies. The baby smiled in his sleep.

The midwife's words and clear laughter were still ringing in her ears. “What a masterpiece! But no wonder, after so much practice. Well, my dear, it was worth it. You wait and see, Nadshla is never wrong. He has the most beautiful eyes I ever saw. He'll soon be winning the hearts of all the ladies.” Claire knew that Nadshla was an excellent midwife and also an accomplished liar. Babies change, and Farid was only five weeks old.

She smiled, for she was suddenly wondering why Nadshla would specify the conquest of women's hearts in the child's future. Had it been a reference to her husband's many adventures? Some of the men in the Mushtak clan were obsessed by women: George Mushtak, his
son Salman – and indeed, hadn't the rift between her husband and her father-in-law been over a woman too – herself?

Thinking such thoughts, she had come over to the pot of basil in the window. She loved its refreshing fragrance, gently stroked the leaves, and then smelled the palms of her hands. After that she turned, drew the curtain over the baby's cot aside again, and looked at her son. “You will not be a Mushtak, and you'll never conquer anyone. You will be a Surur who loves women.” There was bitter determination in her voice.

Her sister-in-law Malake, her cousin, and a few women friends were coming at three. Claire heard shots fired, but far away, possibly in the New Town. The disturbances had been going on for weeks. Famine drove the poor to Damascus, where they looted and held demonstrations. The French soldiers shot at random into the crowd, and over a hundred people had been killed in the streets during the last three weeks. Elias had had iron roller shutters fitted to the confectioner's shop.