The Dark Side of Love (41 page)

DAMASCUS, 1940 – 1953

Saitun Alley was short compared to other streets in the Old Town. It was broad and light, and came to an end before it began to get interesting. It lay as open as a weathered seashell, containing no mysteries, only the residence of the Catholic Patriarch of the entire Middle East, the largest Catholic church in Syria, and the Catholic College, one of the three elite schools in Damascus. Beside it, small and unpretentious, stood the elementary school for poor Christian children, which aptly bore the name of St. Nicholas. According to the legend, St. Nicholas saved some children from a wicked man who was going to slaughter and pickle them, and a sculptural group showing him with the three children in the pickling tub stood at the entrance to the school. But unlike the pupils at the elite establishment next door, the children here were taught by an army of sadistic and useless teachers, and often wondered whether they wouldn't rather be pickled than subjected to daily beatings.

The street divided into three narrow blind alleys. One ended at the gate of the big Catholic elite school, the other led to the entrances of private houses. Farid didn't know many people in Saitun Alley. The boys from the neighbouring houses were either much older or
much younger than he was. Only Antoinette seemed an oasis in this barren desert for a while, but in the end she turned out to be a mirage, because when she was eleven and he was nine she didn't want to play with him any more. Even years later he remembered the loneliness of the long summer days when he ran up the street to the bus stop and back down to the church over and over again, in what little shade the façades of the buildings offered in the afternoon. All was still, everything seemed to be asleep. Later his cousin Laila told him that far away in Beirut she had heard him calling every day at siesta time.

Farid wasn't allowed out of Saitun Alley. There were a thousand rumours around. It was said that gangs went about kidnapping Christian children and selling them to rich, childless oil sheikhs abroad. So he was a prisoner of the street and his mother's anxiety.

Only one incident from that time stuck in his memory. He was standing in the shade of a building and wanted to play with the dog dozing beside the wall of the house opposite. Suddenly he heard the sensuous sighing of a woman from above. At first he thought that because it was siesta time she was groaning in her sleep, but then he clearly heard a man whispering, and after a little while the woman uttered an alarming cry. It was only much later that Farid realized what had been going on behind the curtains over that window.

Josef, a thin and gloomy boy at his school, fascinated Farid, although many people avoided him because he was so ugly. He talked nineteen to the dozen, but as he had no idea how to defend himself he was always losing fights. One day Farid saw two other boys beating him up. He found a good strong branch and hit out at Josef's two assailants until they ran away, howling. Josef half sat up. “Not bad, confectioner's boy. I thought you were just a little sugar dolly. But why did you have to go barging in? I'd have dealt with those two arseholes on my own.”

He certainly talks big! Farid thought. But the boy invited him home that afternoon, which was something special, because Josef didn't trust many people. For the first time in his life Farid saw a house with doors opening on two different streets. It was just right for Josef. “Ideal when you're escaping from secret agents,” he whispered. The building was huge; over ten families lived there, sharing the inner courtyard and all the noise.

Josef's room was on the second floor, and smelled pleasantly of aniseed; the window was right above the flat roof of a broad, single-storey aniseed warehouse. Not until he leaned out of the window did Farid realize that this flat roof linked his own house with Josef's, so he had only to climb over the banisters on the second-floor landing at home to go straight across to visit his friend.

Josef didn't even look up from the toy fire engine he was investigating when Farid excitedly told him this news. “I've known that for ages. I've been over to your place twice,” he said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

“Smells good here,” said Farid awkwardly, to hide his surprise.

“Smells horrible. Aniseed all day long, it's like living in a barrel of arrack,” grumbled Josef.

“And who lives in the house over there?” Farid pointed to a small building in the middle of a garden that seemed to belong to the aniseed warehouse.

“Two old men, lonely and miserly old men,” replied Josef. “They cry every night and call for their wives, who left them. Sometimes I feel sorry for them when it's cold and they stand at the window side by side in their pyjamas.” Farid was surprised to find how much he knew about the men.

Josef's room was large and light, and the shelves were laden with foreign toys. He was obviously his father's favourite: the much-wanted son who had finally been born after four daughters. In his first few years of life his mother had been terrified of the neighbours' envy, and she never cut Josef's hair, so that even the devil would take him for a girl and spare him. He filled all her thoughts and feelings so much that when she had yet another baby, another girl this time, she couldn't think of anything to call her but Josephine.

In his youth, Josef's father Rimon had been a famous boxer and a good stonemason. But his wife had faced him with a choice: “It's me or the boxing ring.” And while he was still thinking it over she kissed him. That made up his mind.

However, Rimon was allowed to hang a picture in the drawing room, showing him as a boxer with his torso bare, wearing boxing gloves, a proud young man with a strangely gentle, melancholy
expression better suited to a poet than a muscle-man with swelling biceps.

One day the bishop, who was enthusiastic about Rimon's skill in carving stone, suggested he might set up as a building contractor. He could get him any number of contracts, said the bishop, for most builders were Muslims. Rimon liked the notion, since he had many ideas for building handsome, solid houses. And the bishop kept his word, so that Josef's father was soon almost overwhelmed with work. By the beginning of the 1940s he was one of the most successful building contractors in the city, and he married Madeleine Ashi, the daughter of a leather exporter.

Claire had no objection to Farid's friendship with Madeleine's son. But after that first visit it was two years before Josef let him come again, and then Farid discovered that he had turned suspicious when his parents congratulated him over-effusively that evening on the new friend he had made.

“I thought,” he said apologetically later, “you were one of those creeps – dear little nicely brought up boy and all that – who get to know all about someone and then tell tales of him. They praised you so much I thought you were bound to be an arsehole. But I know now you're okay.”

On his first visit Farid had met Josef's entire extended family, who all lived in the house. His two old aunts Afifa and Latifa were dressed like servants, and seemed to be there only to look after Josef's mother and her children.

“They're my father's sisters,” he explained. “They once had boyfriends, two brothers. But Afifa and Latifa kept cooking the brothers spaghetti, so they ran away to America.”

Josef hated spaghetti. It was only a decade later that he really understood his aunts' tragic story. They had both inherited a great deal of money, but their father's will stipulated that they must live in their elder brother Rimon's care until they married. And he immediately scared off any man who so much as looked at one of the sisters, until they were old and no one wanted them any more. That way he made sure that he kept his sisters' inheritance, and at the same time had two unpaid household helps to toil away for his family for over twelve hours a day.

Two more women also sat in the living room, these two very old indeed, doing crochet work in silence. Not just on this visit but also later, Farid felt as if he had stepped into a convent of nuns.

“Who are those?” he asked.

“My two deaf grandmothers. They hate each other.” Josef gave a nasty grin, and then, after greeting both old ladies politely, added, “And
they
cooked spaghetti until their husbands choked on it.”

“How come you have two grandmothers?” Farid had asked. Josef laughed at him for years over that question.

Later Farid could smile at his own mistake, but when he discovered it at the age of seven he was shocked. Up till then he had firmly believed that he had only one pair of grandparents who once upon a time had somehow produced both his parents, like rabbits and cats who breed together even when they're siblings. It wasn't just childish naivety: the main reason was that he knew only his grandparents Lucia and Nagib. He had neither seen nor heard of any others. Even his mother never mentioned that side of his family. And he talked to his favourite cousin Laila about everything else, but not their relations.

When Laila came from Beirut to visit, their time together was precious. Farid walked through Paradise with her to protect him. They were allowed to go beyond the high garden wall.

Once Josef had explained about grandparents, Claire had to tell her son that his paternal grandmother, a remarkable woman, had died very young. “Your grandfather George Mushtak is a hard-hearted man who hates your father. He hasn't spoken a word to him for ten years, because Elias disobeyed him and married me instead of the daughter of a friend of his. So he cursed your father and disinherited him. But now the Bishop of Damascus himself, who went to school with Elias and is a friend of your grandfather's, is doing all he can to get the old gentleman to bless his own son again. So it could be,” Claire concluded, “that you'll soon get to see him.” That was in April 1947.

The meeting between father and son was to take place on Sunday 15 June. The bishop had invited the whole Mushtak family to a solemn church service at ten that morning. After it they were all to eat together in Elias's house opposite the church and be reconciled.

George Mushtak died on Friday 13 June, and his son cursed all day long. He kept on shouting, “He bore me malice not only in his lifetime but even in his death.” And he went around looking the very image of an embittered man for weeks.

Farid insisted on going to Mala for the funeral with his parents. He wanted to see his other grandfather at least once. But all he saw was the closed casket, and there was such a strong smell of bitter almonds near it that it turned his stomach.

Now he really did have only one grandfather: Nagib Surur.

Some children look like their fathers or their mothers, others are a more or less fortunate mixture of both. Farid looked like neither his mother nor his father; he resembled his grandfather. He might have been descended straight from him without any intervention by his parents. From his mop of hair to his little toe, he was such a carbon copy of old Nagib Surur that it quite alarmed many of their relations at first.

Claire had inherited her looks mainly from her mother: her large green eyes, her smooth black hair, her rather broad but beautiful face, her small nose and snow-white skin. Her mother who, as already mentioned, came from a Venetian family, was even said to have aristocratic Austrian blood in her veins.

Nagib, on the other hand, was a Damascene born and bred. His ancestors had been textiles merchants who came from the Yemen in the twelfth century and settled in Damascus. All their descendants had the large dark eyes, finely carved features, and dark skin typical of Yemenis.

Nagib was a slender man, tall and dark-skinned. His general
appearance was extremely virile, although his attractive eyes looked feminine at close quarters because his brows naturally lay like two delicate lines traced above them. Nagib was always being compared to various Egyptian actors, which he didn't particularly like, for he preferred sport to the arts. As a young man he had been an enthusiastic boxer, but he was far too much of a gentleman to survive in the ring. His opponents at the time had been merciless hard-hitters on the fringes of the criminal fraternity; he lost all his fights, and after a while he gave up, but he still had a passion for boxing. Even in great old age he was a member of the boxing club and went to every fight.

His enthusiasm for boxing always led to quarrels with his wife, who was repelled by any kind of sport and much preferred going to large receptions. She and her son-in-law Elias agreed on that, and also on Nagib's involvement in the bank affair of 1935. Farid couldn't make out why it had landed his grandfather in prison for three years. Nagib would never talk about it.

Claire loved her father. She appreciated his gentle nature, his generosity, and in a way even his pliability, which her mother lacked. Lucia was always severe, rigorous with herself as well as others. “It's a wonder she's on speaking terms with herself,” her husband often joked.

He came to visit Claire for a coffee every day, since after his dismissal from the bank he had plenty of time on his hands, and his wife didn't want him hanging around the house. After the coffee, Nagib would sit for hours by his grandson's cradle, gazing at him blissfully.

“He's given me the best victory of all,” he told Claire, “a victory over death. I shall live on in him, and death itself will feel mortally injured.”

As soon as Farid could walk, his grandfather took his hand and showed him the world. He would walk slowly down the streets of Damascus, telling the little boy about the buildings, shops, churches, and mosques of the city. He talked about drinks and spices, sweetmeats and nuts, and let his grandson touch everything and taste much of it.

He kept stopping to call on friends and drink coffee. Then his grandson would sit on his knee, looking at the world around him
with wonder. Their friends always smiled at the sight: two versions of the same person, divided only by time.