by Rafik Schami
His grandmother Samia had heard the shouting in her room, and suddenly the rancour vanished from her heart. Smiling broadly, she said with malicious glee, “This is about to go wrong, like everything Amira touches!” And if anything she was understating it.
Out in the square, the President was still asleep. Soon Captain Tallu, who seemed to know just how long his master’s slumbers would last, followed his example. But the guests couldn’t even talk, and when all the carafes and jugs of water were empty they were offered nothing more to drink. They just sat there in an oppressive silence, staring into space.
A room in the left wing of the convent, with a window looking out on the square, was commandeered as a temporary control centre. The security officers sat feverishly discussing every step to be taken. It was something new, even for them, to see their lord and master suddenly fall asleep in public. But they knew how bad-tempered he was when woken from a nap. Messengers ran down to the officers in the square to whisper instructions, soldiers hurried upstairs with news of the latest developments.
At about one in the morning, when it grew cold, the nuns found lightweight blankets in the convent so that two soldiers could cover the President up carefully, leaving only his head free.
Opposite the control centre, in the right wing of the convent building, the lieutenant with the tattooed nose sat alone in a room that he had requisitioned as his office. From there, he watched the comings and goings in the square. He too had to be asked for permission to bring the blankets, to allay any suspicions he might have.
Amira was running back and forth, and when the nocturnal cold increased she asked the officers whether at least the older guests, still sitting on their uncomfortable chairs, might not be allowed to go home. The officers sent a soldier to ask the control centre. He quickly came back with the answer no. Amira felt contempt in the peasants’ weary eyes.
Her husband Louis had already dropped off to sleep. He was never awake after midnight, even at the club. Her brother Faris grinned at her. She went over to him. “What am I to do? Please help me,” she pleaded.
“He who leads a donkey to the top of a minaret must lead it down again,” he replied. She hated this proverb, much-cited by her mother: quintessential coldness of the heart wrapped up to look like wisdom. Her brothers Basil and Bulos were just sitting there too, but at least they showed some sympathy. The hours dragged slowly by.
Amira was standing in the middle of the circle of tables. Lost in thought, she looked up, and suddenly thought that the abbess had smiled at her and signed to her to come closer. Later she realized that in her weariness she had just imagined it, for even the mistress of the convent had fallen asleep with her eyes half-closed. As Amira took a step towards her she suddenly felt a strong hand pulling her back by her shoulder. A young soldier was smiling awkwardly at her, and showed her where she was to go. Looking up, she saw the lieutenant with the tattooed nose standing at his window. He beckoned her to come up to him.
Ever suspicious as he was, he probably feared she might assassinate the President, she thought, and she laughed on her way up the marble staircase leading to his room. Perhaps she ought to pretend a little, and then ask his advice. Many primitive, small-minded people feel obliged to show magnanimity if you flatter them enough.
She knocked. The door immediately opened, and a rough hand reached for her soft arm. He pulled her into the room so brutally that she lost her balance and stumbled. A blow to her neck sent her flying forward over an empty desk.
“Christian whore! Why are you always stirring up trouble? Why can’t you let it alone?”
She didn’t understand. She couldn’t straighten up either, because he had grabbed her by her long hair, twisting it swiftly into a ponytail, and was keeping her upper body pushed down on the desk top with his free hand. “Don’t move or I’ll kill you,” he spat. She didn’t know what this was all about, but next moment the Bedouin was pulling her panties down and thrusting himself into her. She felt pain. Everything inside her was dry; she couldn’t even weep. A slap stifled her scream. “Be glad I’ll waste my time on you. I ought really to have you shot. You lured our President into a trap. It’ll be the worse for you if his enemies discover that our master drank strong liquor in this Christian dump. I’ll slit you open with my own hands,” he groaned in a savage voice, hitting her on the back of her head.
She felt terrible fear rising in her. Suddenly she understood why her lover Shukri hadn’t wanted to come to the birthday party for the President. He had explained his reasons, but she had reacted indignantly and said he just wanted to let her down. However, Shukri had repeated patiently, “I love you, but I don’t like attending such occasions. Rulers are beasts of prey, and when they eat and drink deep, they can strike out blindly and break your neck. I’m not taking part in anything like that until I’m a colonel, and then I’ll be a beast of prey myself.”
“This is the only kind of language the likes of you understand,” said the lieutenant with the tattooed nose, bringing her back from her thoughts into this dark room where she lay on her stomach over the desk, while this monster thrust faster and faster into her from behind. Suddenly he grunted like a boar.
When the man with the tattooed nose let go of her hair and collapsed into an armchair, she pulled up her torn panties and ran out. He didn’t try to stop her. She hurried downstairs and along a corridor to the lavatories, where she threw up. Then she spent a long time washing herself, rinsed her mouth with gurgling water, spat it out, and finally ran a broken comb lying beside the mirror through her hair. Finally she left the place.
About four in the morning Colonel Shaklan woke with a start. Amira was sitting hunched on a chair beside her husband. She had stayed awake the whole time, afraid that the lieutenant with the tattooed nose might attack her again. She had chosen a place where the monster couldn’t see her from his window.
“Who gave the murderer my address?” shouted the President, his eyes red and confused. He roared it out in such a loud voice that everyone who had nodded off woke up.
Captain Tallu hurried up and immediately took the President to his car. On the way Shaklan told him how he had dreamed, yet again, of a young Druse from the south shooting him at the door of a villa in Brazil. He was still dazed by this recurrent nightmare. So he took no notice of anyone, not even the abbess standing there in the light of dawn offering him her hand. He didn’t say goodbye to his hosts, but ignored them all as if they were insects or pebbles.
Captain Tallu, relieved that the party was over, laughed and told Shaklan at length about a book that he had just finished reading. It was called The Dreams of Rulers. “Napoleon,” said Tallu, “had a recurrent dream of swimming back and forth between Corsica and Sardinia. And Hulagu Khan, who conquered Baghdad in the year 1258 and had the greatest library in the world of his time thrown into the Tigris, was always dreaming that he had turned to stone and was a statue standing at the foot of a mountain, facing the sea. Longing for that unattainable distance stabbed him to the heart, and he was angry with the gulls that kept landing on his head and shitting on him.”
They both laughed and got into the armoured car. The other servants of the state and those representatives of its power who had come to Mala with the President followed in the other black limousines. And in the village, two hundred voices cursed both the President and the Shahin clan.
Basil, the Mushtaks’ faithful servant, had watched the whole thing from a place where he had been hiding. When the President and his men left, he waited a little longer and then went quietly down the alleys to the village square. Day was only just dawning when he opened the gate of the large Mushtak property. He couldn’t wait to tell his news, so he woke his master and told him, with a grin, about the humiliation of the Shahins and their supporters.
The grateful Salman kissed his faithful employee’s weary face, and felt stronger than ever before in his life. He decided to donate a large sum to the church of St. Giorgios next Sunday, the thirteenth of July, in thank
s for God’s grace.
Amira went back to Damascus with her husband without saying goodbye to Susan, who was still waiting. From now on she wore her hair very short, which suited her even better, and she never told her lover Shukri about the man with the tattooed nose.
Shukri, to bring this part of the story quickly to its close, truly loved Amira and remained unmarried for her sake. But Amira didn’t want to leave her husband. Shukri made his career in the army, and even rose to the rank of general in 1966. A year later, however, he and a handful of other officers were shot when they tried an amateurish coup, and failed miserably.
At the end of July 1952, two weeks after the disastrous birthday party, Butros Shahin was found stabbed to death in his prison cell. No one ever found out who did it. His widow left Mala for ever, and went to live in Damascus with her three sons and her daughter. She never wanted to see any member of her husband’s family again.
In December 1952, when Colonel Shaklan erroneously imagined himself at the height of his power, he arranged for a military parade to show off the latest tanks that he had just bought in France with Saudi money. He returned the salute of the officers driving past him even more punctiliously than usual, and felt proud of their shiny new weapons.
Suddenly one tank driver lost control of his modern vehicle, and the mighty tank went straight into the rows of applauding spectators lining the streets. Heart-rending screams reached the colonel, shaking him badly, and rose to the sky of Damascus. Swallows flew away in fright and didn’t come back to the city for days. The tank tracks crushed more than fifty men, women, and children before the fearsome machine crashed into a concrete pillar and finally came to a halt. The tank driver climbed out of his turret, saw the catastrophe, and instantly shot himself.
People said it was a divine portent of imminent downfall. And Colonel Shaklan agreed as he sat alone in the presidential palace that evening, eating his dinner and washing it down with chilled whiskey.
48. Dethroned
Rana never felt at ease in her family. Her father was a lawyer, her mother taught French in an exclusive girls’ school. Since they both had careers, they didn’t want more than two children.
Rana was pretty, with a delicate look rather like an Indian girl’s. She learned fast, and was already quite independent at the age of three.
The first bad experience of her young life was her child-minder, a dissembling woman with hairs on her nose. The girl hated her, and never liked being left with her.
Then her brother Jack was born and laid claim to everything, their mother and father and all the available space. He was fair-skinned, almost blond, rather plump, and he had a powerful pair of lungs. He disliked Rana from the first. She felt the same about him. She pinched him whenever she could, and he yelled blue murder when he so much as set eyes on her. That made their parents take the little boy’s side. When Jack came along Rana’s mother, who had gone back to teaching six months after her own birth, handing her daughter over to the horrible child-minder, suddenly wanted to give up work and spend all day at home looking after him. But she still sent Rana to the child-minder, at least until her daughter rebelled. A year after Jack’s birth the delicate little girl developed a strange fever whenever she went to the hairy-nosed woman, but it vanished as soon as she was home again.
Rana had got what she wanted. From then on both children stayed at home. But their mother had time for no one but Jack. Jack did such and such, Jack ate this, Jack said that, it was Jack, Jack, always Jack. Rana had to get by as best she could. As far back as she could remember, her mother had never once asked, “Is there anything you’d like me to explain?” or “Do you need help?” Never.
But when it came to that great hippopotamus Jack, even his first day at school was a major family event. All it lacked was a telegram of congratulations from the President of the state. And from then on Rana’s mother spent time with her son every day, following his progress through school. Woe to anyone who trod on the plump little boy’s toe; his mother, equipped with every weapon her teacher’s training could provide, would sally forth to his school and deal with the teachers there. She was an expert herself.
Jack was not stupid, as his teachers later came to believe. Far from it, he was highly intelligent, but his abilities went the wrong way. At the age of ten he was showing Rana that he had his mother entirely under his thumb. He could succeed in getting his sister slapped when he felt like it, he could have her pocket money docked, make sure she was forbidden to go out or listen to music – all through his mother. He used his mother for his own ends, and she became his slave.
Rana had just begun at high school when she found out for certain that Jack would never be her brother, but always her enemy. She was sitting quietly in her room, playing, when he came in and attacked her for no reason at all. After he had beaten her up brutally, he tore her favourite doll to pieces and ran away. Rana wept, and tried to gather up the rags of her doll. Suddenly her mother appeared and laid into her like a woman deranged. She’d been saying filthy things about the Virgin Mary, said her mother, her brother was sitting in the kitchen crying his eyes out with shame. Rana was baffled. The world was upside down. She had never in her life said a word against the Virgin Mary. Far from it; even as a little girl she had venerated the mother of Jesus.
Her father came home late. He went to see her, sat down on a chair, and looked at her sadly. “Girl, girl, what makes you do these things?” he asked quietly. Rana didn’t reply.
That evening she knew that her brother was dead to her, and now living in the family home was easier. Even Jack was nice to her when he sensed her cold indifference, but she didn’t care about that.
With much moaning and groaning and the help of three private tutors, he managed to pass the exam for his middle school diploma, and then he left. Rana had taken her high school diploma the same year, with distinction, but her mother didn’t even notice. She was busy letting every visitor know how enthusiastically all his teachers spoke of her brilliant son. But she’d decided to take him out of school all the same, she said, because he was such a talented craftsman and his ambition was to be a goldsmith.
He didn’t make it, however. He skipped classes for a year and gave up the training course, and after that he became a male nurse. His mother described him as the surgeon’s right-hand man. At twenty, to his father’s great disappointment, Jack became a professional soldier, and as he had his middle school diploma and was almost two metres tall he became a sergeant in the President’s special unit, which was in fact just the thing for him. But that wasn’t until much later.
Rana’s parents still took no notice of her, but there were advantages to that. It meant that she could make her own decisions, didn’t have to ask permission, and wasn’t accountable to anyone. She swore to herself that she would take charge of her own life.
When she fell in love with Farid in the spring of 1953, the feud between the Shahins and the Mushtaks was at its height. All the same, Rana ventured to hint to her mother that she had met a nice boy whose surname was Mushtak. Her mother threw a fit. “Mushtaks can’t be nice,” she shouted, as if Rana were hard of hearing. “They ruined your uncle and cost your father a million lira, and you call one of the Mushtaks nice?”
Her mother wouldn’t hear another word about the boy. That was sad, but much worse was to come later that afternoon. Jack pushed the door of her room open. “You listen to me, you stupid cow,” he shouted, planting himself squarely in front of her. “If I catch you with anyone even distantly related to the Mushtaks, I’ll kill you. Do your hear me? I’ll kill you! I’m the Samuel in our family, understand?” He shouted so loud that his mother came running and begged him not to over-excite himself.
The word “traitress” escaped from Rana, but no one heard her, because her brother was still ranting in a deafening voice. Later, when she told Farid about it and said she would have to be careful, he suddenly threw a fit and began shouting. What kind of life did anyone have in this filthy country, he
cried, you’d only just started loving someone and you were threatened with violence and murder! Only later did Rana discover that he had quarrelled with his father that day, and was still upset. He asked her if she had another boyfriend and was just looking for a way to get rid of him, Farid. That was too much. Rana rose to her feet and ran away. It was a week before Easter.
49. Salman
No one knew about his fear. He lay awake for nights on end, staring at the ceiling. His wife Hanan slept peacefully at his side. He went back over his life, searching for something he could hold on to. Since his father’s death in 1947 he alone had been at the head of the clan. That was six years ago, but he still hadn’t recovered from the loss of the man who was dearer to him than anyone. For thirty-nine years he had been able to shelter in the great Mushtak’s shadow from the icy wind blowing their way. Now he had to face it by himself.
Since the spectacular police raid and the arrest of his enemy Butros, the Shahins had been just waiting for an opportunity to get their revenge. Their new leader Faris was a snake, smooth and dangerous as his mother.
Times were changing. After a series of revenge killings, the government in Damascus had tried to control the situation by passing several death sentences on those who had egged the murderers on. The principle was that of French law, which regards the motive of revenge not as a mitigating circumstance but as incitement to murder, and punishes it with particular severity. These new laws had dealt the moral code of the Arab clans a heavy blow. But their rigour took effect, and feuding families were now trying to hit their adversaries hard some other way.
Salman was sure that the widowed Samia and her son Faris had only one purpose in mind: to ruin him completely.
“A pity you’re not here now,” he whispered in the darkness, as if his father could hear him. He had learned from George Mushtak that important things should be whispered, not spoken aloud.