by Rafik Schami
Yet again he thanked the unknown man, but he stayed there under the window of the bus, and people looked at him and laughed. When the bus finally moved slowly off on its way out of the village, the madman ran after it. Elias was embarrassed. He had a feeling that the bus driver was going extra slowly because he disliked the Mushtaks, and wanted to spin out what Elias felt was his own humiliation. The people in the village square fell about laughing when the madman tried to stop the bus.
“God protect you, brother!” he cried, weeping aloud, and at last he stood still. Only then did the driver step on the gas.
29. Loneliness
Early that evening, Bab Tuma Street, leading to the Jesuit monastery, smelled of jasmine. The bus journey had taken forever; the driver had to stop again and again because the overheated engine was boiling the water in the radiator.
Who, Elias wondered, was the madman? He felt embarrassed that he of all people had called him “brother”, while Salman wouldn’t give him a brotherly kiss and hadn’t even come to see him off. Why was Salman so cold towards him, so harsh?
He knocked at the monastery gate, and was pleased to see Brother Andreas’s face. Andreas smiled at him. “You’re back early. I thought you were staying two months,” he said in surprise. Elias did not reply. He just said good evening to the monk, went to the dormitory, left his case there and then hurried to evening prayers. The bell was just ringing.
As time went on he could find no peace in the monastery. At first he thought it was because he felt guilty about his father. He wrote letter after letter, saying that he prayed daily for his return to health. He was sorry to have caused him such pain, he said. His father did not reply. Two months later a letter came from Salman. It was disappointingly short, cool, and matter-of-fact: Don’t write so many letters, pay attention to your books. Father is well and happy. Your brother, Salman.
At least this brief missive freed Elias from his fears for his father’s condition. Yet still he was not at peace. There was a great deal to do in the monastery, and he flung himself into his work. But he never again felt the old happiness he had known before he went away. He tried not to let anyone see that his thoughts were elsewhere. The women of Mala had taught him another kind of happiness, a wild desire that plagued him, especially at night, when he lay alone in his room. He prayed to withstand the temptation, but as if he had been praying for more temptation instead his longing for women now attacked him by day, as well as following him into his dreams at night.
The monastic life seemed to him more and more like the quiet onset of senility. There were a hundred men there, and not a single woman worth a glance. Three ancient ladies from the neighbourhood came in to clean, cook and wash the dishes, and then went home again. The windows of the building led nowhere; it was as if no female creature lived anywhere near the monastery. He thought of the seething life somewhere beyond its walls. Damascus wasn’t a city to him any more but a woman, and the monastery was trying to keep him away from her.
When Elias imagined a woman it was almost always Nasibe, the butcher Tuma’s widow, whom he saw in his mind’s eye. Merely thinking of her passionate nature aroused him. She wasn’t a native of Mala; Tuma had seen her at the cattle markets he visited, and she was twenty years his junior. At the time Tuma had quickly come to an agreement with her father, who was glad to have one of his eleven daughters off his hands. The butcher was rich. He had inherited money and he worked hard. All seemed well, until the day when a bullet struck him in the forehead during the siege of Mala. He was just forty at the time.
After his death Nasibe dressed modestly in black and lived a very quiet life. There had been plenty of would-be suitors for a while, but she didn’t want to know about any of them. So after some time the men stayed away, since the grieving widow seemed inconsolable. She was left alone, and women praised her, no longer seeing her as a threat. Nasibe prayed a great deal. She made a living by fattening up kids and lambs which she sold cleverly and at a high price not to the village butchers, but to private customers who had something to celebrate and wanted to serve good meat at a festive meal. She soon had such a high reputation for her wares that she had more than enough work to keep her busy.
Elias had been told to go to the widow Nasibe early in the morning of the eighth day of the wedding feast, to ask if she could let the Mushtaks have another five well fattened lambs and three kids. His father had noticed that the cooks were economizing on meat to make it last through the extended festivities.
So Elias had knocked at the widow’s door and delivered his father’s request, she quietly asked him in, and when he passed her into her pretty little living room he suddenly smelled her ardent desire. It was only later that she told him how, not long before he arrived, she had overheard two women talking quietly about him under her window, and that had suddenly aroused lust in her again.
Elias sat down on the couch. She knelt on the floor between his feet, caressed him, and looked amorously at him. Slowly, she took off her black dress. It was the greatest surprise of his life. Nasibe seemed to grow out of the fabric. Her body, a moment ago nondescript, stiff and flat, rounded out as she cast off her fetters, liberated into a femininity that Elias had never before seen in such perfection. Nasibe told him that she wore tight clothes to hide her curves from men’s eyes. She was almost twenty-five, but her body looked no older than seventeen.
Then she undressed her visitor and led him into the bedroom. A large bed filled the little room. Nasibe quickly pulled the curtains, pushed Elias down on the bed, laughing, and lay on top of him. At that moment he doubted whether she had ever lived without men. She made play with her tongue, and he tasted her saliva, which was sweet as honey. Her lips wandered down his body, tickling him like butterflies. From time to time the tickling became too much to bear, and then he would push her up with both arms and kiss those lips passionately.
Her skin was dark and smooth as a child’s. He bent over her; she laughed and yielded to him. He kissed her feet, let his own lips wander over her soft knees and along the insides of her thighs to the source of her perfume. He licked the aroma of her insatiable desire. Nasibe spread her legs and raised them in the air, and then drew Elias to her.
“Slowly,” she begged in ecstasy, as if to hold the moment fast. She laughed flirtatiously. He sucked her right breast. Nasibe groaned in a strange way, her voice like the soft whinny of a mare, and he tenderly bit her lip. “More, more,” she repeated lustfully. He thrust in, licking her earlobe as he did so. “No, bite me, blow your breath into my ear. Do it, do it, please,” she begged.
He lost consciousness, he was flying with her like a feather. She clasped him in her arms to regulate the rhythm of his thrusts, and then they were united, almost bodiless, far from the earth and its force of attraction.
Later he didn’t know how often he had made love to her that day, but after that she clung to him. She was eight years his senior, but in her forthright peasant way she had told him he ought to leave the monastery. “I’d suit you better,” she had said, laughing. But Elias was aware of the grave intent that showed through her laughter lines.
She kept seeking him out during the wedding festivities and wanting to make love. Sometimes they were very careless about it. Finally he had chosen the safest place he knew, the drying chamber at the back of the yard, for their next rendezvous. And as chance would have it, that was the very place where they were discovered by his father.
When Elias thought of Nasibe now that he was back in the monastery, his loneliness grew high as a mountain, and he wept quietly into his pillows.
30. Arson
One cold February day in 1933, Elias returned to Mala with a suitcase in his hand. No one in the Mushtak household seemed interested in his arrival.
He got out of the bus and walked slowly home. The gate was closed. His sister-in-law Hanan, Salman’s wife, opened it and brusquely showed him his room on the first floor near the back entrance. It was the room where his mother had spent her last days, and
after that servants had slept there. The room was only sparsely furnished, with a bedstead made of old wooden lathes and a mattress stuffed with dried maize leaves and straw. The mattress stank of urine and sweat, the bedclothes were grey with dirt. Only the pillows and two threadbare towels were at least clean.
“I’ll bring you your meal in this room at noon every day. You know the master of the house doesn’t want to see you, but you can stay here until you’ve found somewhere else.”
It was Hanan’s voice, but the words were his father’s, so he couldn’t blame her for those two incredible sentences. All the same, he felt humiliated. Here was a stranger showing him where to go in his own father’s house, explaining that he must stay in this dismal room and would get only one meal a day. He had to summon up all his strength to keep back the tears.
“What about Salman?” he said, not sure what to ask first: why his brother hadn’t come to greet him, or why he was allowing him, Elias, to be treated like a mangy dog.
“Salman’s very busy,” replied his wife, and left. She fits into the Mushtak household perfectly, he thought, watching Hanan go. She had a strange way of walking, like an old woman. He sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at his brown case.
The burning monastery rose before his mind’s eye again. He could clearly hear the screams. Three Jesuits had perished in the flames, the bravest of the Fathers. They had rescued all the students before they burned to death themselves.
The whole dreadful business had begun as early as the summer of 1932. When the unrest started, Elias was on the point of leaving the monastery to find some kind of job working for the French, so that he could live in Damascus and make love to women. There were demonstrations of some kind every day, and they were all against the French in one way or another. Even if they were just demonstrating against the decline of morals, the march ended in anti-French violence every time.
The French governor of the city responded by letting his most brutal forces loose on the demonstrators. The Senegalese were notorious for their ferocity, and struck without mercy. Demonstrators were killed and injured every day.
Brother Andreas was the first to realize that the riots would lead to the closing of the Jesuit mission in Damascus. Everyone laughed at him. As a great power, so Abbot Rafael Herz, an arrogant and greedy man, told him, France was putting all its weight behind them.
“France?” said Brother Andreas in surprise. “France is much too far away, and the rabble are too close.” But no one understood what he meant.
On the seventh of October, the Feast of St. Sergius, the first wave of the disaster reached the monastery gates. About a hundred men were shouting as they fled from the cudgels and bayonets of the Senegalese soldiers. “Down with France! Down with the Christians who pray to the cross, down with them, the swine!” They threw stones. One stone hit the cross above the monastery gateway, and it fell to the ground.
There hadn’t been a drop of rain throughout the autumn in the south of the country, and when the seed corn dried up in winter thousands of people set off to go north. With images of beautiful green cities before their eyes, they whispered their prayers and hoped to escape starvation.
From then on the rioting was worse and worse. Wherever it raged, it left sheer devastation behind, flattening everything like a desert storm. The French soldiers struck back without mercy. And when the demonstrators retreated, they took their wounded away with them, cursing and swearing revenge.
January was freezing cold, but the sky still grudged the country rain. Soldiers prevented a huge wave of peasants from the south from invading Damascus at the southern city gate of Bab al Sigir. The human torrent stormed on along the city wall, forced its way in through the two gates of Bab Sharki and Bab Tuma, and attacked the Christian quarter. Shops were wrecked, churches and houses set on fire. But only the Jesuit monastery actually went up in flames. Two trucks of soldiers cut off all escape routes and fired into the crowd. Three soldiers and seventy peasants died that day. The Jesuit monastery burned down to its foundations.
As already mentioned, Elias had been feeling for weeks that he must leave the monastery, but he realized that he shrank from explaining his decision to its administration and his father. The monks were too kind to him, regarding him as one of their best novices, while his father, the sphinx of Mala, was already embittered enough. Failure to make it in the monastery would have meant Elias’s death sentence.
He was waiting for a good opportunity to get away, and kept only the essentials, next day’s clean underclothes, in his small locker. Everything else was in his case under the bed. It was evening when Brother Andreas hurried into the church, crying, “The house is burning!”
Neighbours with buckets of water helped to put out the fire, or at least keep it from spreading to other buildings made of wood and mud. It was a miracle that only the Jesuit monastery went up in flames.
The monastery administration found the students rescued from the fire temporary accommodation in a nearby building belonging to the French Lazarist mission, but a few days later it was decided that the monastery was to be dissolved, the priests and teachers would go to Beirut, and the students must go home. Only Brother Andreas would stay to make the necessary arrangements for selling the site. The ruins could not be restored now.
Andreas waved goodbye with tears in his eyes.
31. Nasibe
Elias was bored in Mala. He had spent nine years studying natural sciences, philosophy, literature, and music, and suddenly he found himself back in a remote mountain village that hadn’t moved on at all in those nine years, and knew nothing of the outside world. Mala was intellectually stagnant. Its people seemed to be living on another star, where there were no table manners or mathematics, no civilized social intercourse or Molière. They knew as little of Aristotle as of the exotic plants of South America that Elias had read about in his lessons.
He couldn’t find a single book in the village apart from the Bible, which he knew by heart already. The folk music played at weddings and religious festivals could best be described as a shrill kind of snoring. The musicians were unacquainted with notation and the theory of harmony, and scorned purity of tone in playing. Elias couldn’t listen without feeling it was driving him crazy, and he thought of his music teacher Brother John, who played the piano and flute so divinely, yet was never satisfied with his performance. He would have had a heart attack if he’d met puffed-up Sarkis who stood with his legs planted wide apart, played out of tune, and was proud of it.
His only comfort at first was Nasibe. But although he could sleep with her – and she was magnificent in that respect – how was he to carry on a conversation about things she didn’t understand? She too was only a backwoods peasant woman. At least he could laugh with her, although even that hadn’t been so easy recently. For in the middle of their laughter she would suddenly turn serious, and suggest selling everything she had to go to Damascus with him and marry him there. He didn’t say no; he did not want to lose her. Her infatuation with him was all he had to cling to in the village.
But one day he heard of a job with the French administration in Damascus. He asked his brother to get him his father’s permission to go back to the capital. He still had to communicate through Salman, for even after six months George Mushtak wouldn’t say a word to Elias.
Salman told him curtly, “You can go. Here are five lira for the first few weeks, until you have a salary.” And he threw the coins in his lap.
Elias took up his post in Damascus early in July. The work wasn’t hard: he was running a provisions store for the French army. In three weeks he learned how to draw up lists and tables of everything that came into the store and went out of it, and a little later, like all his colleagues there, he found out how to earn something on the side as well as his official salary. It was simple: you set aside five kilos of rice and let the grocer have them, then you counted the five kilos in again with supplies for the soldiers’ canteen, and you shared the money thus earned fair
and square with the cook. Everyone did it. And if an officer came along – an officer with the rank of at least first lieutenant – and said he needed three litres of red wine you didn’t stop to argue, you smiled, gave him what he wanted, and added the missing bottles to the accounts for the next party. Who was going to check whether three hundred or three hundred and fifteen bottles of red wine had been drunk at a reception for the French High Commissioner or the governor of Damascus?
“No one,” explained his predecessor, giving Elias a list of the maximum quantities to be unofficially allowed to every rank of officer. “There’s order even in chaos,” the old man went on. “Only generals can have as much as they want.”
Elias was living in the Bab Tuma district, lodging with a tight-fisted old widow whom he hated as much as his boss. Neither of them could be described as a genuine human being. If his boss First Lieutenant Mauriac had really been human Elias’s life would have taken quite a different turn. But Mauriac was a sadist who enjoyed tormenting his inferiors, a slimy hypocrite who spent all day cleaning his uniform, tidying his desk, or polishing his boots. He had been transferred to administration as a punishment for cowardice on the field of battle, and even that was only because his uncle had been a famous hero in the First World War, or he would have been dishonourably discharged from the army. Every single one of his thirty-five underlings knew it. He was a corrupt, unprincipled man who delighted in humiliating his new employee every morning. “Well, little Syrian?” he would say. “So how are you going to defend France, eh? The rebels will just fart in your face. You’d better be glad we’re taking the trouble to put this dunghill of yours in order.”