by Rafik Schami
She went to Damascus, where she opened a fashion store in the high-class Salihiye quarter with the money she brought with her. From then on she spoke only French, and called herself Marie Shah.
37. Samia
Women meant nothing to Jusuf. He regarded marrying and founding a large family as a duty, important purely in the context of power calculations. On those few nights when he visited his wife, he came to her because she told him it was a good time for her to conceive. After that he left Samia alone in the large, comfortable, cedarwood bed with its soft wool mattresses.
Samia’s original infatuation with Jusuf quickly died, and never turned to love. She saw that this man had no place in his life for her. His heart was full of ambitious plans. She was allowed to join him in discussing them, but that was all. It was said in the village – and the Mushtaks encouraged the rumour – that Samia was unable to love because she had a shard of steel where others have a feeling heart, which made her the perfect partner for Jusuf.
George Mushtak hated the woman, sensing that the fortunes of the Shahin family had changed since she came to Mala. The blows Jusuf inflicted on him were suddenly of a different calibre. For instance, it had allegedly been Samia’s idea to lay charges of conspiracy against him with the Ottoman governor of Damascus. Mushtak was taken away by night and was already in danger of the gallows when the Catholic Bishop of Damascus intervened.
George was convinced that Shahin’s wife was a woman who ruled with a heart of iron. His insinuations about Samia’s influence were correct, but the idea that she had an iron heart sprang entirely from his resentment of her clever wits, since her heart was really loving and full of grief.
For she very soon understood that with the marriage ceremony Jusuf had achieved his aims. She had been pregnant with her first child, Butros, a month before the wedding. It was not that Jusuf did not respect her, but he wasn’t interested in her as a woman. He never called her Samia again, only “mother of my children”.
She lay alone in the great bed every night, wondering what Samer might be doing at this hour. She dared not tell anyone, even Samer himself, for she believed she was in a constant state of sin, she prayed and prayed and suffered from a terribly guilty conscience towards her husband, who never looked at another woman. So she tried to stand by him and lend him moral and practical support. She learned to love horses and hate Mushtaks. It was she who made Jusuf’s eyes light up when she told him her plan for giving his despicable adversary trouble. Jusuf looked at her, fascinated, and for a moment she hoped he would take her in his arms and kiss her, but he only smiled and praised her with the saying that he kept repeating for twenty-eight years, until the last day of his life. “The prophet Muhammad himself warned his followers of women’s wiles, and he knew what he was talking about.”
George Mushtak went to excess in everything, eating and drinking, grief and joy, but seldom in his estimation of his enemies.
38. Fifty-One and One
Jusuf Shahin respected his wife deeply, and was thankful for all her advice. He allowed her to choose their children’s names herself, which was unusual at that time. As a rich farmer and horse-breeder he had had many affairs before his marriage, but now he seemed to have cut all the threads linking him to his past. Samia’s present, on the other hand, appeared to be entangled in threads from the past, a thousand and one of them.
Like a child singing out loud to overcome its fear of the dark, Samia kept telling herself that she could live and laugh even without Samer. She made up her mind never to think of him again, and not to go back to Aleppo until she was firmly in charge in Mala.
She told her heart to stop looking for unhappiness, and held up her life full of family duties for its inspection. But her heart was deaf and wouldn’t see reason. When all was silent around her it kept repeating the same question, hour after hour: what is Samer doing now?
The quiet life of the village and the unforthcoming manner of the mountain farmers gave her time and space, and Samer filled them. Sometimes she felt her heart beating fast. Fear and shame filled her when she asked herself: does he think of me too? Such questions were born of her fear of the answer no, and her shame for her selfishness.
She rode through the mountains calling her lover’s name out loud to the wind, as if she didn’t just want to enjoy its sound in her ears but were telling the wind to carry her cry to him.
She stayed away from Aleppo for three years, but when her father fell sick she took her two children, Butros and Bulos, and went north, full of anxiety. Jusuf didn’t want to go with her. When she arrived, her father came to meet her with outstretched arms, smiling mischievously. Not a sign of sickness about him.
“If your husband had come along too, I’d have had to take to my bed,” said the old gentleman, confessing that he had longed to see her but didn’t like visiting Mala. Her mother had suggested the letter about his poor health. He spoke like a child describing a successful prank, slapping his thigh with delight.
He was a born city dweller. He didn’t mind in the least that he couldn’t tell the difference between mules proper, a cross born of a male donkey and a mare, and hinnies, the offspring of a stallion and a female donkey or jennet, nor could he distinguish between rye, wheat, spelt, and oats. Even with his eyes blindfolded, however, he could identify any variety of tea from the first sip. And he could also converse with a Turk, an Arab, a Frenchman, and an Italian in their mother tongues.
Being back home with her parents was a strange feeling for Samia in the first few days. She glided around the rooms of the big villa, light as a fairy. Her parents let her have the whole east wing, with its bathroom, bedroom and drawing room, and its own kitchen. She had the services of two women who looked after her sons Butros and Bulos all around the clock. It was only after a while that Samia saw, with alarm, how old her father had grown. He seemed to have shrunk, he was thin, almost frail, his hair was white as snow. Her mother, on the other hand, was the same as ever: reserved, stiff, correct in everything she did.
Suddenly there stood her lover in her drawing room doorway. She was just reading a French magazine. He was tall, slim, and had a breathtakingly beautiful smile on his face. She felt dizzy.
“Holy Mary Mother of God,” she whispered.
“No, only Samer Khuri,” he replied, laughing. She blushed and could hardly get to her feet. He took her hand and helped her up from the couch. Then Samia’s lips touched his mouth with its wonderful fragrance. She breathed in the scent of her beloved, and dissolved in transports of delight. When she came back to her senses they were lying in her bed, drenched in perspiration.
She went back to Mala tormented by her memory of those hours in his arms. She was hungry for him, and at night, when darkness and silence fell over the village, her heart fluttered like a bird trying to escape from its cage.
After that she went to see her parents every year. Soon both she and Jusuf thought of her the visit to Aleppo as normal. Fifty-one weeks of loneliness and one week of ecstasy.
39. The Struggle
For years she felt guilty towards Jusuf. He wasn’t jealous, he always showed her respect, and let her visit her parents every time without asking any questions at all. She felt she was behaving badly. Jusuf, on the other hand, seemed to her proud, lofty, and inscrutable, and that made him interesting to her, not that he cared in the least for her interest.
He liked the company of his pure-bred horses better than anything. He was a successful breeder; even the richest Arab and French owners had to go on a waiting list to get a horse from Jusuf Shahin’s stables. He had an infallible instinct for the mating that would produce generation after generation of even finer horses.
He seemed to live for his horses alone. His clan respected him and his enemies feared him. And unlike his arch-enemy George Mushtak, whose reputation as a fornicator was known to everyone, who had fathered at least sixty bastard children and even in his latter days was still grabbing at bosoms or behinds in a very undignified way, Jusuf, so t
he villagers considered, behaved properly around women. There were no whispered rumours about him.
One night Samia woke from a nightmare. The moon was full. She sat up in bed, bathed in sweat. At first she was afraid that something had happened to one of the children. In her dream she had seen the house burning and heard her children’s voices behind the impenetrable flames. But when, with her heart beating fast, she went into their room, which was close to hers, her two boys were sleeping as peacefully as little angels. She went back to her room, but a sense of uneasiness came over her again. “The horses!” She leaped up. Without a sound, she went downstairs and crossed the dark yard to the dimly lit stables. There she froze. At first she heard only her husband’s whispering and moans, then she saw him.
He was lying over the young stable lad Ahmad’s back. Jusuf was thrusting himself into the boy, caressing him all the time, lavishing on him the loving words and kisses that he had never given her. The boy was awkward and sullen, and wouldn’t keep still. Her husband, ruler of the large Shahin clan, was begging the stable lad for a little affection like a man deeply in love.
So that’s it, she thought on the way back to her room. He likes slender young men.
She never mentioned Jusuf’s inclinations to him, but after that night her conscience no longer pricked her, and her relationship with her husband was more serene. Jusuf enjoyed life with Samia at his side. She gave him eight healthy children, and brought them all up to became clever men and women. But now and then it struck him that in any quarrel all his offspring, except for his firstborn son Butros, took their mother’s side. He thought it was just the vagaries of fate, and because of it he avoided any argument with his wife in his later years.
The horse-breeder never realized that the children’s affection for their mother arose from her care for them in childhood. Samia had the midwife Amine’s insight to thank for that. “Only those who have their children’s hearts have the future,” the woman told her in passing one day. Amine was illiterate, but she had the wisdom of thousands of years behind her.
40. Faris the Patient
Jusuf was the undisputed head of the clan. After him came not his brother Tanius, who had tuberculosis, or his wily youngest brother Suleiman, but his firstborn son Butros, who used bribery and blackmail to unite all their relations behind him. In his lifetime Jusuf invited the most important men of his clan to visit him, and made them put their hands on the Bible and swear that they hoped their arms might wither if they turned against his son Butros after his death.
That was the worst day of Suleiman’s life. At the urging of his mother, a severe widow who was under the spell of her eldest son Jusuf, he had to promise his obedience in a loud, clear voice when it came to his turn. Suspicious as Jusuf was, he embraced him and called to those present, “You have been witnesses: my dear brother Suleiman will follow my son, in his own interests and those of us all. And the life of anyone who turns against him is forfeit, and not worth an onion skin to you. Are you of the same opinion?” And they all gave their consent.
Butros was brave and generous as long as you obeyed him. Unlike his father, however, he was pitiless as a scorpion to those who deserted him: silent, cunning, and deadly.
But Faris, Jusuf’s third son, considered himself the future head of the clan. He realized that the greatest obstacle in his way was not his father but his eldest brother. The second eldest presented him with no problems. Bulos was simple-minded, and didn’t seem to mind whether he held power or the udder of one of his many cows in his hands.
Faris did not think his two younger brothers Basil and Musa were dangerous either. Basil was a boarder at the French school in Damascus, and wanted to go to Paris and continue studying there when he left school. And Musa planned to start a haulage company. His father gave him his first truck when he was nineteen. Jusuf Shahin saw this as a way of bringing the transport routes between Mala and Damascus under his control. However, to the end of his life, which was a short one anyway, Musa thought more about women than his business.
Their father was well aware of his son’s love affairs. He gave him a year’s leeway and then made him marry Rihane from the seaport of Latakia, a pretty woman who hated life in the village. The wedding was in 1933, and when they were married Rihane kept pestering her husband to move to Latakia. He could build up his haulage business there, she said. To bind Musa to her she bore him two children. The first was a girl called Mona, after the mother of Jusuf, the head of the clan. The second child was a boy. Musa called him Said, “the happy one”. But the children made Musa neither domesticated nor faithful. He was said to have a mistress in every village on the Damascus road. And in the end it wasn’t his dangerous driving over potholed winding roads, but a pretty blonde American woman who, unintentionally perhaps, summoned the angel of death to Musa. The angel came on 7 April 1941.
Soon after Musa’s death his widow received a large sum of money for her husband’s share in the family property, and in the village elder’s house she signed a document giving up any claim to the inheritance for herself and her children. She moved to Latakia with Mona and Said, before long she married the manager of the arrack distillery there, and from then on she bore his surname, Bustani. She wanted no more to do with the Shahin clan.
Faris’s three sisters were no danger to his ambitious plans either. Women had no say in affairs out in the country. For that very reason, Samia had sent all three girls to the boarding school run by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Damascus: first Amira, then Mariam, and finally her youngest daughter Jasmin. So Faris knew that only Butros need be regarded as a serious rival. But it was also clear to him that if he, Faris, tried to oust him, his brother wouldn’t for a moment hesitate to kill him. So he set about it very slowly. Faris first formed his plan in the summer of 1935, when he was only twenty-one years old. He had to wait nearly twenty more years before his chance came. But then he took it without hesitation.
41. Musa and Hasib
Plenty of attempts were made in Mala to reconcile the two clans, but none of them came to anything, and the last, undertaken by two bishops, ended in disaster. Yet it had been hoped that a sign from heaven might perhaps bring the blood feud to a peaceful conclusion.
The bishops of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches of Damascus felt that the enmity between the two families was disgraceful, particularly as the village lay in the middle of a Muslim region. Increasingly dramatic reports of events there greatly distressed the two dignitaries. Visitors from outside were stigmatized as enemies of one of the churches just for donating a piastre to the other. Quite often nuns and abbots refused to let foreign delegations visit their convents and monasteries because the foreigners had been to see their rivals first.
In 1941 there was only a week between the Catholic and Orthodox celebrations of Easter Sunday. The Orthodox Church was celebrating the resurrection of Christ in accordance with the Julian calendar on April 7th, the Catholic Church in accordance with the Gregorian calendar on April 14th. So the two bishops had agreed that festivities to mark the reconciliation should go on all week and thus remain in the peasants’ memory for ever. As a sign of fraternization they agreed to celebrate Mass together on Easter Sunday at the beginning of the festivities, close to the Catholic church of St. Giorgios, and later have lunch in the Orthodox convent of St. Thecla. On the following Sunday the village priests would celebrate divine service near the convent of St. Thecla with both clans, and have lunch outside the church of St. Giorgios.
On that Sunday, 7 April 1941, many of the inhabitants of Mala wept tears of emotion, for there had never been such a fine, magnificent church service in the village in their lives. It was held out in the open, in the village square.
All the Mushtaks and Shahins had travelled to Mala, and invited all their friends and allies. There were not two thousand but seven thousand people in the village that day. The sky was blue, the sun shone as if it were summer. After the solemn service, both bishops gave the assembled congregation the
ir blessing and opened the Easter celebrations. Musicians played flutes, lutes and drums to accompany the dancing. Then, at about midday, there was to be a long, solemn procession to the great convent of St. Thecla, where cooks had been preparing for the arrival of the crowds for a week. But it all went wrong.
Around eleven, three shots were heard. The first killed Musa Shahin. His murderer was Hasib Mushtak, George’s second son, who had come to Mala from Beirut especially to be with his father on this difficult day.
Hasib had studied medicine at the American University of Beirut. He had been a gifted schoolboy, and Mushtak sent his son to study in Beirut rather than Damascus because in his opinion, “You won’t learn to be anything better than a butcher in Damascus.” Hasib had completed his studies with the highest distinction in 1937. After that he was going to work at a Beirut hospital for another three years while his American wife Dorothea finished her studies of Arabic. He came home to Mala as often as he could, for he loved the village and his father. And Mushtak was fond of his clever son and his wife, who spoke better Arabic than many an Arab.