by Rafik Schami
Twenty men rose briskly to their feet and followed him to his house. The village elder was left behind, ignored, and at that moment, although he was only sixty, he felt older and frailer than the ninety-year-old widow Nasrin in the pew at the back.
Even before Mushtak reached his house, the bells were ringing in all the church towers. It was an ancient signal of danger. People streamed out of their houses into the village square. Many of them were afraid, but there was no sense of panic anywhere.
He stood at his gate deciding which men were to have rifles and which were not. Salman wrote down the names of the men standing ready, rifle in hand. Then the armed men stormed out to the hills that had a good view of the village from the south.
Mala was a rich Christian village. High in the mountains, it had been well protected from most of the adventurers who roamed the country during four hundred years of Ottoman rule, looting and burning. Its inhabitants had also been spared the Bedouin who attacked the villages of the plain in successive waves, trying to escape starvation. Mala had thus become a pearl among villages. Even in the 1920s it had electric light, mains water, and four coffee-houses. Many rich emigrants from Mala had gone to America, Canada, and Australia, and sent money home. The monastery of St. Giorgios and the convent of St. Thecla were famous for their miracles. Prosperous Christians from all over Arabia came to ask the saints for children, a cure, or success, and had given generous donations, transforming those religious houses into rich citadels.
The bandits knew that, and they had descended like the locusts that come out of nowhere and devour everything, before disappearing into nowhere again. It had been like that in 1830, 1848, and 1860. The battle of 1860 was famous all over the country, for not only did the little village hold out for four weeks while it was besieged by over three thousand heavily armed bandits, it then put them to flight. It was such a devastating victory that after it the bandits had avoided Mala for sixty-six years, until now.
Soon the first shots fired at the bandits by the horsemen up in the hills were heard in the village. The line of men at Mushtak’s gate was a long one. Even the village elder had to wait his turn. He was given a rifle, not with solemn ceremony, as he had hoped, but not peremptorily either, as he had feared. Mushtak handed him the gun without a word, and was already looking at the next comer.
Mobate envied the man his household servants, who showed him dog-like devotion. Finally, Mushtak himself carefully folded up the list that Salman had handed him, and gave it back to his son. “They are all in your debt. You can always remind them of it later,” he said. “Man is a forgetful animal.”
Then, accompanied by his son and shouldering a Mauser, he walked out to the village square with his head held high. Many of the men kissed his hand emotionally, as if he were a saint, and thanked him for the rifle, but he just stood there listening to the distant sounds.
Suddenly his glance fell on the line of men forming in the Orthodox quarter. The Shahins were distributing rifles to their own supporters, who were soon perched on the rocks like black ravens, keeping watch on every part of the northern and eastern routes to the village, while the Catholics guarded the roads to the south and west.
Late in the afternoon all the children, old people, and most of the women were safely in the great rocky caves that surrounded the village. Only about fifty women stayed with the men, helping to construct the huge mounds of rubble with which they were trying to block the one weak point in the fortifications, the Damascus road.
Mushtak rode to the hills with a Mauser over his shoulder and his field glasses hanging in front of his chest, giving him the look of a military commander.
It was nearly evening when the men took their first prisoner, a little man with a southern accent who had apparently been scouting around to spy out the village’s defences. The furious guards hit and kicked him, and one of them actually wanted to shoot him out of hand.
“Leave the man alone,” ordered Mushtak. He turned to the trembling spy, and said, “Have no fear, we’ll send you back. Who’s your leader?”
“Hassan Kashat, sir,” replied the man anxiously.
“Are you sure of that, or do you know it only by hearsay?” Mushtak asked, and before the man had even nodded he was going on, “What mark does Hassan Kashat have on his left hand?”
“Mark?” said the man in surprise. ‘”He has no mark on his left hand. That hand’s crippled. I swear by God I’ve seen it. He hides it well by resting it on his dagger, but it’s crippled.”
Mushtak beamed. “You weren’t lying. Bring the man a piece of bread and a dish of fresh yoghurt,” he told his followers, and then turned back to the prisoner. “Well, my lad, you will eat under my protection now, and after that I’ll show you what your friends can expect here. And then you can go back to your leader Hassan Pasha Kashat and tell him: the man who crippled your left hand is waiting for you. Do you understand?”
“The man who crippled your left hand is waiting for you,” repeated the man, to show Mushtak that he had learned the message by heart. His voice sounded fearful and uncertain.
While he greedily ate the yoghurt they had brought him, Mushtak hurried away and gave orders for all the men whom the spy was about to pass to keep their faces muffled up, and as soon as he had gone by they were to go and station themselves elsewhere, so that after a while he wouldn’t be able to estimate the number of fighting men any more. The spy was released after nightfall, and he hurried away in the darkness down to the plain.
“Will Hassan Kashat withdraw when he learns that you’re here?” asked Salman next morning.
“No, he’ll stay,” replied Mushtak, and he hadn’t even finished what he was saying before the besiegers opened fire. The men entrenched in Mala replied, and Hassan Kashat’s troops, although they suffered great losses, moved closer and closer. The first villager fell at about ten in the morning. It was Tuma, one of the three village butchers of Mala. A bullet hit him in the forehead just as he was rising to his feet to fetch a crate of ammunition.
Around midday the first cannonball sailed over the men’s heads and smashed the window of the church of St. Giorgios. A second cannonball hit the back yard of George Mushtak’s house and left a small crater. Two window panes in the grain store were broken. The explosion of the cannonballs and the impact as they struck frightened the beleaguered villagers. Some of the men in the front line began firing at random. Hassan Kashat’s troops answered them with more cannon fire, and moved to within five hundred metres of the old mill at the entrance to the village.
Both sides fought fiercely for ten days, but they couldn’t get anywhere. The bandits could advance no further towards the village, the defensive ring stood firm as rock. And the climb up from the valley, which wasn’t so steep near the village itself, no longer offered the enemy good cover.
But the defenders of Mala could not break through the rampart their enemies had built from rocks and felled trees. The bandit Kashat’s troops had entrenched themselves in their positions. Mushtak’s face grew darker every day. Finally he told Habib Mobate to summon all the leading men of the village.
“Jusuf Shahin too?” asked the village elder.
“Him too,’ replied Mushtak dryly. The village elder turned pale.
Mushtak spoke bitterly to the assembled men. He never for a second looked at his rival; it was enough to have had to greet him with a handshake. That was the condition made by the two priests, Catholic and Orthodox. He sensed Shahin’s reluctance to be reconciled. The man’s hand was cold, as if he had drained the blood out of it.
Mushtak told the assembly that the French were not about to send the village any help, and he expected the besiegers to stay until the people of Mala starved to death.
Shahin waited until everyone else had spoken. Then he said, “No one will starve,” and turned his gaze on the priest of his Orthodox community, as if paying attention to no one else. “I’ve stuffed three of the caves in the rock full of wheat, dried meat, raisins, and nuts from the L
ebanon, and two more with maize and lentils, salt and olive oil. That will last us for a while.”
Secretly, Mushtak admired his quiet enemy. Shahin had sent all that food to the caves, and not a soul in the village had noticed. Everyone knew, however, that he was an experienced smuggler, and it was said that he had often muffled the hooves of his mules by wrapping them in cloth so that they could pass border guards in silence.
“Tomorrow,” Shahin went on, “everyone can take what he needs. The nuns of the convent of St. Thecla will supervise the distribution.”
Mushtak quickly pulled himself together again. “And I will make sure this siege doesn’t last much longer,” he told the assembled men before they dispersed. It sounded more like a loser’s defiance.
Jusuf Shahin rose and went away without any leave-taking, but with the dignified bearing of a victor. Followed by his son Salman, who stuck to his side like a shadow throughout the siege, George Mushtak himself set off for home.
Salman kept turning, looking distrustfully to all sides, and surveying the situation. There had been an attack on the sixth day of the siege, allegedly by three men of the enemy troops. The shots had been fired from very close to Mushtak, and though they missed him the men had escaped unrecognized. No one discovered any more about the incident, or knew that their tracks led to the Orthodox quarter. But Salman feared that one of Shahin’s killers would take any second opportunity to shoot his father in the general confusion. Salman always carried a loaded revolver under his shirt now, and after that incident he became harder and less approachable. And Mushtak went along with what his stern son wanted.
The cannonballs were falling in the village less frequently now, and had a less devastating effect on the peasants’ minds.
Three days after the meeting at the village elder’s house, Mushtak and his son rode out to the farthest-flung of the sentry positions at dawn, and observed the enemy camp down in the plain as if waiting for a signal. A tent, a particularly large tent at the far end of the camp near the wild oleander bushes, increasingly attracted his gaze. It was out of reach of the rifle bullets, and very well defended by two trenches, as well as soldiers and a couple of cannon.
On the twenty-third day of the siege, another man fell into the hands of the village guards. They caught him in the olive grove below the mill. He was unarmed and disguised as a peasant from Mala – black trousers, striped shirt, waistcoat, and a black kuffiyeh headcloth. The man claimed to have had a vision a week ago in which he heard the voice of his brother, who had been living in America for the last ten years, and this brother, he said, was calling for him, so he didn’t want to fight any more. He had bought the clothes from one of the besiegers, who had taken them from a Mala peasant.
In tears, the man told his captors how Kashat was torturing men who tried to run away. A troop had been stationed to shoot the deserters, or bring them back to camp and torture them to death in front of the others.
“And what about the man whose clothes you’re wearing?” one of the villagers asked him.
“He was shot… Kashat takes no prisoners. They cost food and water,” the man replied, diffidently.
The men from Mala lost their tempers. One young fellow drew a knife, but Mushtak raised his hand. The prisoner’s words dried up in his mouth with fright. He turned pale.
“If you are an honest man,” said George, ignoring his followers’ indignation, “you’ll be taken over the mountains tomorrow, and from there it’s two days’ journey to Beirut and the sea. But if you are lying you’ll wish for death not once but twenty times over.” Then he sat down on a stool in the middle of the circle that his men had formed around the prisoner.
“Now, tell me something in confidence. Since you say you hate Kashat, you won’t mind what happens to him. So when does Hassan Kashat always leave his tent?”
“Only once. At midnight exactly he inspects the front to make sure his sentries are on watch. He has two adjutants with him, no more.”
“What are the adjutants’ names?” asked George Mushtak.
“Ahmad Istanbuli and Omar Attar,” replied the man.
“What about the Khairi brothers?” asked Mushtak, to the surprise of his men.
“Mustafa fell in the first week, and Yunus a few days ago,” replied the prisoner.
That same night, George followed hidden ways winding through the terraced fields of the green valley to the bandits’ camp. He knew the narrow paths like the palm of his hand. He often had to go to his fields by night and divert the water of the little river to his land.
Mushtak loved the night hours. By day, he left the irrigation of the crops to his men, but after dark he liked to be in charge of the water himself. He would leap, light-footed, from sluice to sluice, smiling when the water followed him. Sometimes he ran along the dry bed of the channel, anticipating the gush of water that must go the long way around through the sluices before it raced forward like a flock of hungry sheep.
This evening he was accompanied by his son Salman; Nagib, the village elder’s bold youngest son; and Tanios, the baker from the Orthodox quarter. Not only was Tanios one of the strongest men in the village, Mushtak also wanted to use him as an eyewitness to report back to his enemy Shahin’s supporters on what he, Mushtak, was planning to do in the next few hours.
Even years later, Salman would say how his father suddenly looked young again. On the way to met his deadly enemy Kashat he strode out so fast and vigorously that his son and the other two men had difficulty keeping up with him. Soundless as shadows, they moved past the guards of both front lines that night, and finally they lay in wait for Kashat. He appeared around midnight, a small figure on his way to the furthest outposts of his guards. There were two tall men with him.
When Hassan Kashat reached the ancient walnut tree a moment before his companions, Salman and his father leaped out and flung him to the ground. The other two men from Mala killed the adjutants in silence. Hassan Kashat was frightened to death. He couldn’t even call for help, for Mushtak was already stuffing his headcloth into his mouth as a gag.
“You filthy rat, what did I tell you? I’ll get you, I said! It’s taken me twenty years, but I have you now. All those nights I’ve been waiting for this moment, and now you’re in my hands. You’ll die like a dog on a dunghill,” he cried, hoarse-voiced, and with Salman’s aid he actually did drag the bandit leader, who seemed paralysed, to a heap of dung that he had brought to his field before the siege began. This particular field was just beyond the walnut tree.
It was a clear night, and the full moon shone brightly. The bandit leader looked pitifully pale now. “Do you see this lion my son?” Mushtak continued, clapping Salman’s shoulder and kicking his enemy in the kidneys at the same time. “I got him on Laila. I slept with her and she gave me four children. This lion is my firstborn. Look at him! Can you see his eyes? Aren’t they the eyes of Laila?” he asked, kicking Kashat again and again.
His captive shook his head, and desperately tried to avoid the kicks as he lay on the ground.
“How could my mother help it if Laila and I were crazy for each other? Why did you kill my mother? And my sister Miriam? Why did you torture her like that? Before my mother’s eyes!” cried Mushtak, and then he rammed his knife into his prisoner’s belly, pushed him down in the dunghill, and pulled the gag out of his mouth. Kashat widened his eyes, tried to gasp for air and scream, but a fistful of dung was stuffed into his jaws, and Mushtak went on stabbing until his victim’s body went limp. At last he stood up, exhausted and weeping.
Only when he felt Salman’s hand on his shoulder did he say, quietly, “Let’s go.” But Nagib the village elder’s son had another good idea. After brief discussion, all four of them began shouting in Arabic with a southern accent, “The Christians have attacked us! Our leader Hassan Kashat and his adjutants Ahmad and Omar have been murdered! Listen, everyone! Our leader is dead! Run for your lives!”
Slowly at first, then faster and faster, loud cries from Kashat’s own men ec
hoed through the camp. Panic broke out. Mushtak and his three companions made haste to get back to their village. Once there, they quickly summoned all the men, lit torches, and rode down into the valley on their horses and mules, guns in their hands. They drove the fleeing bandits ahead of them, killing many.
When day dawned, the valley was full of corpses down to the Damascus road. All the abandoned horses and weapons were taken to the village square of Mala, but the bodies were put in one of the remote caves. They were walled up inside it, and the entrance was covered with earth. One of the dead was the chief of the Rifai clan, Muhammad Abdulkarim, who had been at the harvest festival. Kashat had obviously persuaded him that there was good loot to be had in Mala.
People were already coming to the village square at dawn to dance, drink wine, and shout for joy. They had all entirely forgotten the prisoner, but Mushtak finally found the man lying tied up under a fig tree.
He had the prisoner released from his bonds, gave him three gold coins, and called out good wishes for his crossing to America as he left. Then he dropped on the bench outside the door of his house, exhausted and happy, in the firm belief that no less than God had been at work in this victory. And George Mushtak wept for the sublimity of that hour.
27. Weddings
Little by little, Salman had taken over the farming of the land. At first he followed his father’s advice and grew all kinds of crops: vines, maize, olives, tobacco, wheat. Like all the farmers, he also raised cattle. But then he went to visit his youngest brother at the monastery and met one of the monks who was an expert on agriculture, and advised Salman to mechanize his farm and switch to products for the export market. Salman made the change at the end of the twenties. Old Mushtak cursed the export market and the French monk’s advice, and it took Salman years to convince him of the merits of the new idea. “You’re either a big farmer or a big loser these days,” he kept explaining.