The Dark Side of Love (86 page)

“So next time he visited I told him that I really trusted him now, and I was going to tell him a secret. He pricked up his ears. I went on
to say that for a year I'd been a member of a religious group which firmly believes Jesus was really a woman in disguise, and the Gospels were forged later, by men. ‘We're fighting for there to be priestesses in the Orthodox Church, and we won't just have female bishops and matriarchs, we're aiming for a female Pope to head the Church some day, and she will terrify the Catholic Pope.' He might like to join us, I suggested. Several carefully selected men had been accepted into the group already.

“Kafi backed out of the drawing room without even saying goodbye, and he never came to visit again. He hasn't said a word to my mother since that day either,” Rana finished her story, and she embraced Farid, gurgling with laughter.

How Azar came by all his ideas was a mystery. There wasn't a single book on technology in his home. While Farid was in the monastery, all the same, he had built a water clock that kept perfect time. Similarly, he had already found out how the gang could tell the time at their nocturnal meetings in the attic, even without a watch. He used to bring a candle with small pins stuck into it all the way up, at a distance of about two centimetres from each other.

“When a pin falls out, an hour has passed,” he had explained, and indeed his method worked. The principle was simple, but the brilliance of Azar's inventions lay in their very simplicity.

The big water clock stood in the inner courtyard of the Catholic bishop's palace until it was stolen in 1965. You could tell the time by it almost to the minute. A valve with a float ensured that the water pressure in the upper compartment was constant.

“And what did the Patriarch give him for it?” asked Farid.

“His blessing,” replied Josef, with a wry smile.

Later, Azar built solar collectors out of old barrels which he painted black. He put them on the roof, and they provided his family with hot water for the kitchen and bathroom. At the age of seventeen he
invented a small vacuum pump in physics at school, thereby astonishing his teacher.

At the same time he developed another brilliant idea for his family's use. They were living in a large tenement block with ten neighbours, and had two rooms on the second floor. Every time someone knocked at the front door of the building, all the neighbours emerged from their apartments to see who it was.

But there was no need for Azar's family to do that any more. They went downstairs only if the visitor really was for them. Just how they knew was a mystery to the other families for months, but it was all done with a length of pipe and two mirrors that Azar connected up so that you could stand in the kitchen and see who was downstairs.

“That'll protect you from annoying strangers,” said Azar.

“And annoying relations too,” agreed his mother.

Next he made an automatic flatbread press out of the old roller from the drum of a washing machine, adding a tiny engine. It saved his mother a lot of hard work.

A neighbour saw this device and bought it from her for the fabulous sum of a hundred lira. Azar's father didn't earn that in a whole month, and Azar could easily build another machine from materials costing ten lira.

But he hadn't reckoned with one thing: soon after buying it, the neighbour put the dough roller on the market as a mass-produced item. It cost a lot of money, and all the bakeries bought one to help with making flatbread. The man made a fortune, and moved into a villa in the new quarter north of the Old Town. There was nothing Azar could do about it. He ended up as a poor vegetable dealer.

“I was just drinking my coffee this morning when I saw all the women of the quarter streaming into Samira's inner courtyard to see her.” Gibran sipped his tea. “You all know Samira, the traffic cop Maaruf's wife. At first I was afraid Maaruf might have died. I expect you heard he's been in hospital for a week after stopping a driver who went over the pavement, the flower beds, and a traffic island. Maaruf asked for the man's papers, but he was hopelessly drunk, he didn't have either his driving licence or his vehicle registration document with him, and he swore at Maaruf and told him to clear off. Maaruf looked at this young man in his sharp suit, thinking there might be money in this – well, you all know Maaruf, he'll turn a blind eye any time if the colour of your money is right. And the blue of the hundred-lira banknote is his favourite colour.” Gibran grinned. “But the man shouted that he wasn't going to pay anyway, he called Maaruf a bastard and told him just to write out a parking ticket. Then, at the very latest, Maaruf ought to have woken up to the facts. I mean, who calls a cop a bastard? But Maaruf was slow on the uptake that morning. Samira said later he'd been absent-minded for days, she thought he had a relationship with some woman.

“Whether he did or not, Maaruf checked the front of the car and there was no number-plate, he went around behind the car and there was no number-plate there either. He really ought to have given up then. Well, who drives over pavements and traffic islands in a car without plates? But no, friend Maaruf was dead set on that blue hundred-lira note. Very well, he thought, if this driver keeps on being so obstinate he'll get to know Maaruf better. ‘Drunk at the wheel, no driving licence, no papers for the car, no plates! That'll add up to more than I guess you have on you, kid,' he said, leaning over to the man at the wheel. He was going to haul him out of the car and take him to the nearest police station, but the driver hit him full in the face. He was lashing out like crazy. It was none other than Colonel Adnan, one of the worst of that secret service bunch.

“I visited Maaruf three days ago. He's slowly recovering, and he's grateful not to have been thrown out of the police.

“Well, like I said, I thought he'd died, but I was wrong. His wife Samira just wanted to celebrate with her women friends. They made tabbouleh, they drank arrack, they sang and danced and played games like little girls. They didn't notice me at all. I might have been air.

“Finally Samira began to sing. She sang the song that's a single question repeated over and over, with witty replies from the chorus. I'm sure you know it. Samira has a wonderful voice, so she sang the questions.

‘Who, oh who's that handsome man?” she cried. “The lover who visits every night,' replied the women.

‘Who, oh who's that handsome man?' she repeated. The women laughed and replied, ‘Only your tired old husband, alas.'

“So the song went on for a while. When she was just repeating the question about the handsome man for the tenth or maybe the twentieth time – how would I know? – the postman came into the courtyard. You know him, vain as a peacock, knows more about winking at women than delivering mail. He heard the question and immediately thought they meant him. ‘Muhammad Ali, madam, at your service!' he replied, working his eyebrows up and down.

‘Then give him his due, girls! Fart for the gentleman!' sang their hostess in the same delightful voice.

“And the women, who had been sitting around and relaxing, stood up, turned their backs to the postman, and farted in a number of different registers.

“Startled to death, he took to his heels, with letters sailing out of the full bag he carried slung around him. And I laughed so much that I spilled coffee on my trousers.”

“My Uncle Salam was twenty when he decided to marry, but he didn't trust women,” Kamal Sabuni began his story, sipping tea from a slender glass. Farid had invited several of his old school friends to be his guests that day, as an advertisement for the club. But the young men just wanted to talk about sex.

“My uncle was very conservative,” Kamal went on, “and he thought it was a sin for a woman to go out in the street without wearing seven veils. But he was rich, so a good many girls dreamed of marrying him. However, that didn't make him happy, only more suspicious. In the end he told his mother that if she found him a suitable wife, he'd want to spend five minutes alone with her, talking to her, and after that he would decide if she was the one for him.

“Well, his mother found him a pretty girl, a virgin who was a teacher's daughter. Her parents thought the condition a strange one, but the man was a good match, and they went along with it.

“So there was my uncle sitting with the veiled woman, and he opened his flies, took out his prick, and asked her, ‘What's that?'

“The young woman was horrified, but she plucked up all her courage and said, with her throat dry, ‘It's a penis.'

‘Case closed,' he said, putting his prick back inside his trousers, and he went out.

‘She's not the wife for me,' he told his mother. ‘She's been with men.'

“The girl, who really was a virgin, assured her parents that she had not for a single moment raised her veil. But she dared not tell them any more except that the man had asked questions, and no, he hadn't touched her.

“The second candidate chose a synonym for the penis that we use widely in Damascus. She said it was a pigeon.

‘Case closed,' said my uncle, and he repeated this rejection with thirteen more women, all of whom offered one of the thirty-seven well-known synonyms for the word ‘penis'.

“Then came the fifteenth. ‘What's that?' asked my uncle.

‘A little worm, a little worm! Oh, how cute!' she said happily. He was delighted by her simple naivety, and he married her. On the wedding night he was rather surprised by the enthusiasm with which she entered into the game of love, but he thought she must have a natural talent for it.

“When he finally stopped for a rest, he took an apple from the fruit bowl and gave it to his bride. He felt like Adam about give his very own Eve the fruit of knowledge.

‘My dear, I must enlighten you. You are not a girl any more now,
but a mature woman. And this,' said my uncle kindly, sounding like a thoughtful teacher as he pointed to his limp member, ‘this is not a little worm, but a penis.'

“His bride laughed until she almost choked on the apple. ‘Call that a penis? Oh, my dear, you've no idea! Compared to the great big things I've known, yours really is a little worm.'”

He was to call Rana back at four when she would be alone. Phoning her at home was a strange idea. He saw her before him, throwing back her long, straight hair as she spoke over the phone, examining the ends to see if they were split.

He waited impatiently, and called at five to four. Rana disguised her voice. “Hello, this is Widad Kudsi speaking, Dr. Basil Shahin's wife. Whom have I the honour of addressing?”

Farid tried to keep a straight face. “George Mushtak in person, the avenger of lost honour. Will you marry me, madame?”

“Yes, of course, right away, monsieur. Pack your pyjamas and we'll meet at the taxi rank. Let's go to Venice or Honolulu this time,” said Rana happily. Her laughter tickled his ear. “My parents have gone to a wedding and Jack's away. I thought this kind of opportunity won't come again in a hurry. Will you come and see me?”

“Right away,” he replied.

“It's very romantic down in the cellar where my father stores olive oil and red wine, and no one can take us by surprise there. In an emergency the cellar even has its own way out of the house, but I don't think they'll be back before midnight.”

Farid hung up and went straight to the bus stop. His heart was in his mouth as he entered the house. Rana closed the door behind him and flung her arms around his neck. “You didn't expect a chance like this, admit it!” she said, kissing him on the lips and thus stifling his answer.

They went down the stairs. It wasn't the usual kind of cellar;
because the house was built on a slope, a door led straight from it into the garden, and beyond the garden lay a street. Rana had provided for all eventualities; the door was not locked.

“Doesn't your father ever come in through the garden?” asked Farid.

“No, he parks the car at the front of the house. Anyway, using a back entrance is beneath Dr. Shahin's dignity.”

The cellar contained a workshop, a storeroom for wine, another for olive oil and other provisions, two guest rooms, a large bathroom, and Rana's father's study.

The study was the best room. It had a large couch completely filling one wall, a small table in front of it, and the room was surrounded by bookshelves of walnut wood. A large picture by Miró hung on the wall behind the desk. A ventilator hummed in the ceiling.

“Is that an original?” asked Farid, pointing to the Spanish painter's blue picture.