by Rafik Schami
And that dwarf wants me as his fifth wife, thought Laila, fretting. “But I want to be the first,” she said, and didn’t understand why her mother was horrified.
“For God’s sake, my child!” replied that gentle and devout woman.
Laila hardly knew her father. She addressed him as “sir”, and knew that his name was Muhammad Khairi. He was hardly ever there, and when he did come home he didn’t want to see his children. He ate alone, slept alone, and talked to no one. Laila’s mother, on the other hand, slept in a small room with the children. Sometimes she slipped into her husband’s room in the night, and then her daughter heard the wooden bedstead creaking while her mother groaned in pain. Laila had hated her father for that.
He dealt in spices and dried fruits, and often had to make long journeys to see his suppliers. Their large orchard and vegetable patch, however, was left to the care of Laila’s mother and the children. Although Laila had never known the real hunger that plagued many families, they had sometimes been forced to live on meagre rations.
When she told her father that she wanted to be a first wife he didn’t answer at all. But her mother told her that he had already given Hassan Kashat his word. That night Laila was so scared that, for the first time, she found it difficult to breathe. You’re going to die, an inner voice had whispered to her. I must run away, Laila told herself. At that moment her mother came over to her to pick bloodsucking bugs out of the bed. She was holding a small oil lamp in one hand, and she plunged the plump bugs in a bowl of water.
“Oh, child, you’re awake,” she had said in surprise. In the darkness Laila’s eyes looked to her larger, unfathomable.
“Tell me, Mother, how many hearts does Kashat have?”
Her mother did not reply.
Laila could no longer remember when she had first seen Nassif Jasegi, but oddly enough, on the day he spoke to her she immediately saw that this was the only man who could save her. He was the son of a rich Christian who was not particularly good at managing his fortune. The peasants cracked jokes about the “unbeliever” who had served the Sultan so long, and in return was given landed property but didn’t know what to do with it. His farm lay only a few hundred paces from Laila’s home, but her family kept its distance from the “impure” Christians.
Laila heard that these Christians prayed to blocks of wood, ate pigs and drank wine. Their shameless women sat unveiled in the company of men, and they never let their husbands take a second wife.
“Mother,” Laila had said, “those unbelieving men have only one heart, just like Muslim women.”
Her mother was scared almost to death. Her husband was asleep in the next room. She took the girl by the ear and hauled her outside. “Child, you’re out of your mind. It’s better if you marry soon. I’m dying of fear for you,” she whispered.
When Laila, undeterred, told her father for the second time that she wanted to be a first wife, he slapped her face. After that her brothers Mustafa and Yunus beat her, although they were younger than she was. Their blows came thick and fast as mosquitoes on the humid summer nights of Damascus, and as they increased and multiplied so did Laila’s questions. Her mother wept. “Child, you’re playing games with your life. We can’t break the word your father has given.”
And the midwife, seductively, told her, “Once you have a husband, you know, you’ll have his fortune, and you can send your mother lovely things every day.”
Ganging up together, they told Laila that what little prosperity her grandfather Mustafa Khairi had achieved came only because he kept his word and gave the governor of Damascus the hand in marriage of Laila’s beautiful Aunt Balkis, her father’s sister. She was the governor’s twelfth wife, but then she had turned the old man’s head with her charms and her skill in the art of love, and in less than a year he had promoted her to be his first wife.
A voice inside Laila, cold as night, told her that this story was a lie. If Balkis had been the governor’s first wife, then why did she kill herself at the age of twenty-five? Laila’s cousin Fatmeh didn’t believe Balkis had been happy either. Her grave was quite close, and Fatmeh’s family often made a pilgrimage to her resting place.
I want to come first and I want to be happy, Laila kept telling herself, and she swore not to marry Hassan Kashat.
18. Laila and the Madman
“What’s your name, lovely one?” were the first words she had heard Nassif Jasegi say. He came riding along beside the stream. She hadn’t noticed him at all, being far away in her thoughts again while her hands pulled weeds out of the radish bed. She started, and turned around. A window opened in her heart. She took a deep breath, and felt the relief of fresh air blowing in.
“Laila,” she replied. “And yours? What do they call you?”
“They call me Nassif, the Righteous Man, but I’m not righteous at all,” he replied, smiling.
“What are you, then?” she asked.
“I,” said the man, “am Madjnun Laila.”
Like all Arabs, she knew the legend of the unrequited love of her namesake Laila and the poet who went mad for love of her, singing his beloved’s praise until the day he died. His poems made the woman immortal. Very few knew his real name, and he was known simply as Laila’s madman, Madjnun Laila.
“And are you really mad?” she asked.
“Only for you,” said the man.
“You don’t look like a lunatic,” she said, examining him from his shining shoes to his clean white headcloth. Hamdi, her crazy cousin, screamed like an animal in his room with its barred window, threw his filth at everyone, and kept banging his head against the wall.
What happened next opened three more windows in her heart. Nassif Jasegi, so elegantly mounted on a noble Arab horse, said softly, “I’d run mad three hundred times over to hear you laugh.” And he jumped off his horse, stood on his head in the brook, leaped to his feet again, made faces like a monkey, climbed a tree like a cat, and from there jumped back on to his horse which, apparently used to such extraordinary behaviour, hadn’t moved from the spot.
Laila laughed out loud, and when Nassif stood on his saddle, flapped his arms and cried, “Look, I’m a little sparrow,” she could no longer keep on her feet. With a single leap he was down beside her. He squatted on the ground and looked into her eyes. He was a playmate, even though he looked like a man of mature years.
“And how many hearts do you have?” she asked quietly, and he touched her lips.
“Only one, and you have filled it entirely,” he replied.
“Nassif,” said Laila, in an almost pleading tone, and he immediately understood everything.
Years later the wild joy of those days was still fresh in her mind. Even when her brain was almost entirely eaten away she remembered the happiness of that time, an eternity ago. But when Laila met her madman and the world seemed to shake beneath her feet, what she didn’t know is that joy is very treacherous.
Her brother Mustafa was the first to see her happiness in her face. Clumsily, like a careless puppy, it gave everything away. He faced Laila, and his knife flashed. But although death was staring at her from that knife she wouldn’t deign to give it so much as a glance. Nassif alone lived in her eyes.
“You marry Hassan or you die,” said Mustafa. He was not fifteen yet, but as the firstborn son he bore his grandfather’s name and acted like a pasha. He had spoken to Hassan, said bandy-legged, snot-nosed little Mustafa, and he acted as if Kashat were a friend of his. Mustafa’s face, so like Laila’s own, was suddenly as grave as if the “jug-eared dwarf”, as Laila called Hassan Kashat to herself, had unloaded on her brother some of the grief that kept his back bent all the time. The boy had learned the words he spoke to her by heart, the way he could chant the words of the Koran sura by sura, without understanding them.
“Love or death! One is in my hand, the other in yours,” she whispered softly. Their mother, coming back from a neighbour’s at that moment, threw herself on her son, and pleaded with him until he gave her the k
nife.
Nassif just nodded when Laila told him all this.
Three days later a horseman muffled in a heavy cloak attacked Hassan Kashat on his way home from hunting gazelles. He struck both Hassan’s hands with a stick for so long that one of them, the left hand, was permanently crippled.
An extensive search for the man who had done it came to nothing. Only Laila knew who he was, and she smiled, but this time secretly under the covers, for she was afraid that her delight would give her away again.
The wedding was to be in March, when the almonds were in blossom. But one cold morning in February Laila, disguised as a man, mounted the black horse that Nassif was holding for her not far from her house. They rode south for two weeks, and Nassif intentionally left a trail leading to Jerusalem. Then they crossed the Holy Land going north, and continued their journey in Lebanon, but now without leaving any trail at all. Arabia was an Ottoman province at the time, and Sultan Abdulhamid had ruled with an iron hand until he was deposed in 1909, but the French had exerted pressure and Lebanon eluded his grasp. Nassif knew that, but he didn’t guess that his rival had seen through his clever idea. Kashat’s men went on hunting Nassif in Lebanon. Their master wanted him alive. By now he had found out that the horseman muffled in the cloak was none other than that Christian man from his own neighbourhood.
Laila and Nassif only just escaped a trap set for them by a monk whom Kashat had bribed. But they got away. They rode through the mountains by a circuitous route in order to reach Mala.
Only years later did Nassif discover that on one of those nights when he desired his lover, and was embracing her tenderly in their warm bed of furs, his entire family had been butchered. His two younger brothers Butros and Fuad were killed in a shoot-out, his mother and his sister Miriam were brutally murdered. The family’s possessions were robbed, and their farm burned down to its foundations. The slaughter had been carried out by Laila’s brothers and Kashat’s men. Laila’s family had thereby saved its honour in the eyes of its neighbours, and atoned for its guilt to the powerful Kashat.
Later, when Kashat mustered a whole army to try bringing as many villages as possible under his control, the girl’s brothers Mustafa and Yunus were his lieutenants and marched at the head of the troop.
And on one of the nights that Laila and Nassif spent under assumed names in inns, with Bedouin, in caves, or with village elders, she suddenly sensed something inside her. It began to throb. She took Nassif in her arms and kissed his eyes. “What will we call our son?” she asked, as if she were sure it would be a boy.
“Salman,” replied Nassif, with tears in his eyes. “The name of my father, who died far too young. I will conquer death with my son’s birth.”
On the rest of their journey Laila laughed a great deal with the man who always had death riding hard on his heels, but still thought up countless crazy ideas for his lover’s delight. He claimed that her laughter sounded like the gurgling water of a brook, and whenever he heard it he was thirsty for her. She once said, later, that during those months before they arrived in Mala, she had used up all the laughter that was meant to last her life.
19. Hyenas
Wherever they rode they met with misery and starvation. The tax collectors of the Sultan in Istanbul drained the last coins from the people’s purses, for Sultan Abdulhamid was deep in debt to the West. But a pitiless drought had descended on many parts of his Ottoman Empire, and there was nothing to be harvested but dust. Epidemics had spread, tuberculosis, plague and cholera were raging, and whole areas of the country were already depopulated. No talisman offered any hope of an end to these hardships. People were dying like flies.
Laila and Nassif had not known such wretchedness in the lush countryside south of Damascus, which was like a garden. But on their flight north, the roads were full of people who didn’t know where to go to escape the cholera. Malaria drained the light from children’s eyes.
A few young men were making their way fast in the direction of Damascus, hoping that salvation might yet be found there. It was winter. In spite of the cold weather, they walked barefoot, carrying their shoes on a string tied around their necks to save the leather. When they came close to the city they were going to wash their feet and then put their clean shoes on again. They firmly believed that they would attract more attention with a good pair of shoes.
Laila and Nassif turned away from the main roads. Their journey to Mala took them over high mountains, down through deep ravines again, and from there along winding paths up to the top of the next mountain. The winter landscape made nature harsh and forbidding. The cold was unbearable. Laila had never known anything like it. The further they wound their way into the mountains, the more she froze, yet they had only reached a thousand metres, and they would have to climb almost as high again. Laila’s heart failed her at the thought of it.
Nassif joked with her, saying that there were wolves and bears in the mountains, creatures who would eat a human being up within seconds. She begged him to stop, but he went on teasing her until the day the hyenas appeared. They were on a mountain ridge, letting the horses follow the path slowly. In many places it wasn’t even a metre wide, and the ever-hungry maw of the abyss gaped to their left. Nassif was riding a little way in front of Laila, singing softly and gazing into the distance.
The morning light had banished enough of the darkness of night for them to be able to see across the valley to the top of the next height. Suddenly Laila saw the hyenas on the other side of the abyss. They had attacked a woman walking to the nearby village with a bundle of firewood on her head. To the eye, the rising ground lay so close that not only could Laila count the hyenas, she could also see the woman’s face clearly.
“Nassif,” she screamed in horror. Startled out of his thoughts, he stopped his horse, but could not turn it. He carefully dismounted and turned to Laila, and at that moment he too saw the hyenas.
The woman was trying to drive the beasts off with a stick. They retreated briefly, then attacked again, and through their greedy howls, which sounded like laughter, the two travellers heard cries for help.
Nassif shouted and cursed, but only a single hyena looked back at him in surprise, while the others attacked the woman yet more fiercely, and no one came to her aid. Laila had no strength left. She slipped from her saddle. Nassif tied his horse to a bush, went to her and held her tight.
“I love you, Laila,” he said, and kissed her. His kiss made her frozen blood flow again.
“Can you go on?” he asked. She nodded. He helped her back into the saddle, then remounted his own horse, and sent it trotting slowly down the narrow, dangerous path. She followed him. It was the last time he ever called her Laila.
Three hours later they reached Mala. Later she said that the hyenas had been the warning sign that her days in Mala would begin with misfortune and end in misfortune too, but she ignored the sign.
20. Sarka’s Fever
After her early death in 1920, the villagers spoke ill of Sarka. Years before her death, they said, she had betrayed George Mushtak and Mala by encouraging the reapers to revolt. But Sofia the midwife defended her, saying it was her husband’s fault. A week before the birth of her first child, Sarka had fallen sick with a strange fever. It lasted two days, and she had talked nonsense. Then, soon after the delivery of the baby, she fainted and lay unconscious for hours. That had been with Salman, and later it was the same with her second child Hasib. And at Hasib’s birth, said Sofia, when the young woman came back to her senses after several hours, she herself had heard her making sounds like a wounded animal for half a day. No one could understand her. With her third child, her daughter Malake, Sarka fell into a dreadful state of derangement for a while. She screamed that her husband would hate the girl and kill her because she had the mark of a crescent moon just below her left breast, like her mother. As an experienced midwife, Sofia told George Mushtak that he should either stop getting his wife pregnant or take her to doctors in the city, but he just said angrily, “
Women’s foolishness!” Sarka, he said, had nine lives, like a cat, and could bear twenty children. At the birth of their fourth child Elias, however, she fainted away again, and when she regained consciousness she didn’t recognise anyone for a while. After that she was afraid of the baby, and cried out that he was an elephant. At this point Sofia guessed that the woman had lost her wits, but George Mushtak still wouldn’t hear of it.
“The fever’s eaten her brain away,” said the midwife, and she thought that was the only reason why Sarka’s husband was able to forgive her everything later. “When she came back she was out of her mind, just a miserable creature deserving not punishment but pity.”
21. The Elm Tree
The great elm tree, with the rotten half that burned down at Easter in 1953, had a story that had imprinted itself like no other on the collective memory of the village.
Sarka had felt unwell in Mala from the first. The climate was too harsh for her, the peasants too crude, and George Mushtak didn’t love her any more now that hatred of his rivals increasingly filled his heart, leaving no room for his wife any more. Obsessed by that hatred as he was, he was no longer the Nassif who loved her laughter and understood every stirring of her emotions. Instead, he followed his instinct, which no longer saw the difference between his beloved Laila and any other woman. Hatred also left its mark on his pride, for he realized that the more women he took, the more virile he would seem to the men of the village.
A year after Salman’s birth, chance or the devil took her to the granary where George was making love to Saliha, the barber’s wife.
Sofia the midwife told anyone who would listen that she didn’t understand the man, whoring around like that but still consumed by jealousy. He ought to have been a Muslim, she said, then he would have hidden Sarka from all eyes behind a veil. He felt wretched when other men looked at his beautiful wife and she let them share in her clear laughter. But Sarka loved him alone, and as long as she could still put two and two together she was faithful to him. She had a heart as pure and transparent as glass. When her lover betrayed her, however, that glass was left with a crack the size of a star in it. She wept for four days. “You don’t love me, you don’t love me,” she repeated countless times, long after he had left the room, and she flung her head back and forth and took no notice of anything going on around her.