The Dark Side of Love (9 page)

So next day, soon after church, Farid and his five friends set off uphill to the elm tree. His mother had packed as much food as if he and all the others were emigrating to America. The contents were pure delight for the Mala boys, who these days brought nothing with them but their appetite for any number of strange delicacies.

When they reached the elm they lit a small fire on the spot where shepherds, stopping to rest on the hill, had lit their fires for decades.
Farid wasn't hungry, and gave the other his sandwiches. But he drank the strong, smoky tea and enthusiastically described the beautiful women of the capital city to his friends. The farmers' sons relished his exciting descriptions, and couldn't get enough of them.

They sat there for hours, feeding the fire with stout branches and thistles, and warming themselves even more on the women's bodies delivered up by Farid to their wild imaginations.

But suddenly the usually silent Matta said this was the last time he'd be with them. Hesitating slightly, he poked the embers of the fire with a twig. “My father's a distant cousin of the new abbot of some monastery in the north. I have to go into it. They need novices, and there are hardly enough priests these days for all the Christian villages. But I don't want to go.” And then he fell silent again.

“Oh, come on, what's the matter with that? It's better than this dump. All you can do here when you finish school is feed goats, grow wheat, and have children. It's worth leaving Mala for the good life in the monastery. I've heard everyone has a bed to himself there,” said Simeon the beekeeper Isaak's son, trying to encourage his friend.

“That's true, it's something to look forward to.” Butros, son of the shepherd Fadlu, joined in the conversation. “It'll be worth going into the monastery just to get away from your brothers and sisters farting at night.”

But Matta shook his head.

“No, really,” Butros persisted, “you ought to be glad. You'll get clean clothes and enough to eat. And you'll learn a lot more than in our lousy school here. What else do you want?”

Simeon went on cheering him up. “Yes, and these days priests live like millionaires.”

“But what's he going to do with the prick between his legs? Those monks in black aren't allowed to marry,” pointed out Ghassan, the vegetable dealer Tanius's son. Matta smiled grimly.

“Oh, he can put it in olive oil to keep it fresh and crisp,” joked Butros, “until one of those randy women comes along confessing that she needs three men a day plus her own husband or she can't sleep at night.” He turned to Matta himself. “And then she asks you, ‘What am I to do?' And you say, like the man of God you are, ‘My daughter,
consider your husband and the other three your main course, and have me for dessert.'”

Butros laughed a lot at what he considered his own excellent joke. The other boys laughed too, and even Matta smiled faintly. Only Farid was quiet.

“What's the place called?” he asked.

“The monastery of St. Sebastian.”

Farid knew that it was on the Mediterranean coast. “It's a good one,” he said, pretending enthusiasm out of sympathy. But Matta's face remained unmoved. He looked as if he were desperately trying to find a way out of an invisible maze.

When the sun set they rose to go home. Instead of fetching water from the nearby spring to put out the embers, the five others lazily pissed on the ashes. Only Farid refrained.

The boys laughed at him. He didn't dare piss just because he was superstitious, they said. For in the village it was thought that if you pissed on a hearth your pee would hit the Devil, who likes to swelter in any fire, and he'd be so angry that he'd strike men impotent and light an inextinguishable fire in their wives' cunts, forcing the women to cuckold their husbands. The goatherd Habib, who used to screw not only his wife and his maidservant every week but his forty goats too, had been impotent, so rumour had it, ever since he drank too much tea one night and was too lazy to move a few steps away from the fire on the hearth. Then the Devil hissed with anger, and his hairy hand shot out of the embers and scratched Habib's glans. The poor man jumped and felt a strange chill in his limbs, like a snowstorm sweeping through his bones.

Next day, so the story continued, he felt unwell and went to Damascus to be examined and cured. In vain. A week later his prick was dried up, wrinkled, and dark brown. It looked like an old fig. Ten days later it simply fell off. Habib didn't even feel any pain. He saw his prick lying in bed beside him early in the morning. At first he thought it was a black olive, but then he wondered how an olive could have come into his bed. All he had left was a hole above his testicles. And after that, so the tale went, his wife went flitting about like a fairy every night – in search of a man.

Later, a distant aunt told Claire the true story of the goatherd. Farid pretended to be asleep on the sofa, and heard that the wily man had served up this tall story about pissing on the fire to his simple-minded wife so that she wouldn't discover the truth.

“And what was that?” asked Claire, amused.

“The fact was that the goatherd was insatiable and visited the whores in Damascus every month. There he met the famous Nariman. All the citizens of Damascus are in awe of her, and it's not for nothing they call her She Who Sucks You Dry. And it was Nariman, of all people, whom the miserly goatherd refused to pay one day, saying she hadn't given him a good time. So she sucked his penis away to punish him, and sent him off with nothing but the husk of it,” said the aunt, laughing. “Now he has only a limp rag between his legs – you could dry your hands on it, but there's no pleasure to be had from it any more.”

Up on the hill under the elm, however, superstition was not Farid's reason for holding back. He was violently lovesick for the first time in his life. His lovesickness not only took away his appetite and left him sleepless at night, it even made him unable to pass water that day. But he couldn't and wouldn't tell the village boys about his love. They were between fourteen and sixteen, they'd have laughed at him and insulted Rana with their coarse remarks. Love doesn't tolerate coarse tongues, and the tongues of the village boys were coarser than a rasp.

However, there was another reason for him not to breathe a word about his love. Rana had sworn him to silence, for if the secret of their love came to light she feared for her life. And Farid knew from the evidence of his own eyes that her fears were not exaggerated. The previous summer young Ayesha had indeed paid with her life for love. She was a butcher's daughter, and the whole village was talking about her relationship with the bus driver Bassam, whose family were at daggers drawn with Ayesha's parents. Both families were Muslims, part of a small minority in the otherwise Christian village of Mala. Their dispute, which began over a large consignment of smuggled cigarettes, had led to three dead and over ten injured on both sides within the space of five years. The original cause of it, the cigarettes, retreated entirely into the background. The blood that had been shed now lay between the two families.

Ayesha's parents, relations, and friends urged her to leave Bassam, but he was the only man she wanted. In the end they wrote a letter to her brother, who was earning his living as a labourer in Saudi Arabia, and he came back in a hurry. He offered her immediate marriage to his school friend Hassan, who was in the police, but Ayesha wouldn't hear of it, and met Bassam secretly to tell him about her brother's threats. She hoped they would induce her lover to flee abroad with her until tempers had calmed down again, but she didn't guess that her brother was in the barber's on the village square at that very moment, keeping watch on her. Bassam drove out of the village with his lover. It was afternoon, and he had an hour's break before the next journey to Damascus. Where he took Ayesha no one knew, but an hour later they came back in the bus.

Farid was standing on the balcony drinking tea when Ayesha climbed out of the bus in the village square. Her brother marched out of the barber's shop opposite the bus stop, crying, “Treacherous woman, you have let an enemy of our family defile you!”

He fired three shots. Farid's glass fell from his hand. The bus driver, realizing his danger, stepped on the gas and saved his own life. Ayesha uttered a loud and terrified scream. “Mother, help me!” Then she died, there in the middle of the square.

The fire wasn't extinguished until midday. Then the crowd came home exhausted and dirty. Many of them, without naming names, were cursing “the boys”, meaning Farid and his friends.

Farid's father wouldn't say a word to him for two hours. Elias showered, dressed, and then went to the café in the village square, where the men discussed the matter until early evening. It was more the shock than any material loss that upset most of the farmers. Some of them were merely amused to think that one of the Mushtaks' own offspring had spoiled their Easter for them, others thought none of it worth mentioning. But the Shahins were triumphant.

Elias Mushtak didn't come back from the café until it was time for the evening meal. His face was grey and set. He muttered something to Claire, and she guessed that he had already come to a decision.

“After the summer vacation you're going into the monastery of St. Sebastian,” he shouted at his son. “And you can be glad I don't murder you on the spot. You're the first Mushtak ever to burn down a sacred tree. You've dragged the name of the Mushtaks through the mud, and you must atone for it. And when you're a priest later, saying your prayers, I hope you'll remember that you owe the village something.”

“But I don't want to go into a monastery,” said Farid, looking his father straight in the eye. Elias slapped his face. He fell over on his back, hitting his head on the floor.

“Stop it!” cried the horrified Claire. She began crying, ran to her son and helped him up.

“I didn't do anything!” he told his father, with tears in his eyes. The second slap hit him. Farid stumbled.

“If I say you're going into a monastery then you're going into a monastery, and you don't say another word, not even ‘yes'. Understand?”

“It's all right,” wailed Claire, “he'll do it, but don't kill him.”

Farid wanted to shout that he wasn't going to leave Damascus and Rana for a single second, but fear of his father paralysed his tongue.

His mother gently pushed Elias into the bedroom, where she talked to him for a long time. But Farid just heard his father repeating, over and over, that the monastery would do him good. Claire wept again. For a moment he was furious, and it occurred to him for the first time that he'd have to murder his father some day.

Next day, from the balcony, he saw his friends outside the house. They were playing marbles in the village square. He quickly dressed, but when he went to join them, they froze and avoided his eyes. Finally they quietly went away without a word. Only Matta stayed, smiling at him.

“What's the matter with them?”

“They're afraid.”

“Afraid? Why?”

“Because they're cowards. They don't want to be seen with you any more and be thought of as fire-raisers,” replied Matta.

“What about you?”

“To hell with the village. You're my brother,” said the boy quietly, almost indifferently.

“I want to go up to where the fire was again. Coming?” asked Farid.

“Of course,” said Matta, almost cheerfully.

Two hours later they were at the top of the hill, where a great surprise awaited them. The elm had been growing as two different halves for a long time. One half was fresh and strong, the other old and dried up. Now Farid and Matta saw that only the dried-up part of the tree had burned. The other part was intact, slightly blackened with soot, yes, but otherwise not even singed. The really surprising thing was that the unharmed part of the tree was the one right next to the site of their fire.

“That's odd, don't you think? The spark must have flown past this half of the tree in a semicircle and then set the other half on fire. That's practically a miracle,” said Matta, staring into space.

“Yes, it really is funny,” Farid agreed. His thoughts were with Rana again. Where are you? he whispered deep inside himself. I need you.

At that moment she was talking to her best friend Dunia Sabuni, because otherwise her thoughts would have choked her. She was telling Dunia about the feud between the two families, but she was disappointed by her friend's down-to-earth approach.

“That's all very well in a movie, but it doesn't work in real life. The family is stronger, it will crush you both. And then I'm afraid it's not as good as the stories of Madjnun Leila or Romeo and Juliet. You'd better steer clear of that boy and find a steady respectable man, one your parents will admire, and then they'll leave you alone and no one can stop you warming yourself on the memory of this romance of
yours,” she said, with a sudden clear peal of laughter. “But only in your thoughts,” she was quick to add. “Everything else will be your husband's, understand?” And she laughed again, but this time with much meaning.