by Rafik Schami
For over six years Salman had been trying to prove to the village – friend and foe alike – that he was George Mushtak’s true successor, but Mala took no notice. He wasn’t even invited to take part in discussions. When his father was still alive, no one would have dared to make a decision without the old man.
Salman believed that several people in the village were hatching a plot. Dogs like that man Ismail would never have dared to ask old Mushtak if he wanted to sell his farm. But now they guessed that in three to five years there would be no stopping him, Salman; he would be the richest farmer in the whole region then. So they were doing all they could to bring him down just before he achieved his ends.
Ismail was only a tool of the widow and her son, that devil Faris. Hadn’t he been punished enough by God? Faris’s wife, the daughter of a despicable secret service agent, who had married into the Shahin clan just to make her family even more menacing, brought only deformed children into the world. It was said privately in the village that they were the living images of the torture victims in the secret service’s cellars. Allegedly Faris and his wife hid their children away in dark rooms and treated them like animals. Two of them hadn’t survived their fifth year of life, and the third son, folk said, howled so loud by night that many in the Orthodox quarter woke in alarm. But obviously Faris didn’t understand the wrath of God. His heart grew harder and harder.
How lucky, on the other hand, Salman had been with his own sons! He thought of his firstborn, Nassif, who was now working successfully in Damascus as a motor mechanic, along with his three brothers.
Salman’s thoughts wandered further back in the depths of time, to the day when George Mushtak had noticed Hanan’s belly swelling in her fourth month of pregnancy. He had summoned his son, congratulated him, and then took him walking in the mountains. Out there the sky was wide, the air was pure, and no one would overhear them, his father had said, and then at last he told him the secret of his own life.
His real name was not George Mushtak at all, but Nassif Jasegi. He had called himself George when he reached Mala in flight with his lover Sarka, and discovered that the patron saint of this village was St. Giorgios. And he had thought of Mushtak because at the time he had been obsessed with death, which is the meaning of mushtak lalmaut, but he had spared the stupid peasants the mention of death, and just said his name was George Mushtak. Then the name was finally recorded as his during the registration after Syrian independence in 1946.
Here Salman’s father had paused for a long time, as if he were suppressing memories. “So I was called Nassif Jasegi,” he repeated at last. “My family belonged to the nobility. My father had been a governor in the mountains of Lebanon, and was loyal to the Sultan. His first name was Salman, like yours. After a peasants’ uprising against the Sultan he fled and took refuge in Damascus. The peasants’ revolt was overthrown with much bloodshed after three years, but my father couldn’t go back to the mountains. The Sultan gave him estates south of Damascus, but after being high up in the civil service all his life he knew nothing about farming the land. His tenants and servants soon realized that, of course, and they cheated him wherever they could. He died an embittered man, among other reasons because the Sultan had never given him an office of state again. I learned a lesson for my own life from that: I would never serve anyone. None of my brothers ever wanted to enter the service of the state either. It’s an ungrateful master to us Christians.”
Once again George Mushtak paused for a long time. Salman kept quiet. “My three brothers, I, and my sister Miriam had to go out early to the fields and the stables, and toil like poor peasants to pay off the debts our father had left on his death. It was my mother who turned the tenants out and took charge of everything herself. She was a lioness who feared nothing, and she passed that attitude on to her sons. Love death, and your enemies will fear you – that was her motto.
We toiled for ten years, and at last the farm was free of debt, and a magnificent sight. We were the main local producers of silk and apricots. The soil was fertile and the irrigation system we had built made us independent of the weather. We grew rich, very rich, and lived well, until that man Kashat ruined everything.”
And after that his father told him no more.
Later, Salman gave his own firstborn son the name of Nassif. The boy took after Hanan in looks and after Salman’s father-in-law in character. He had been good with his hands since childhood; he wanted to be a mechanic, and hated farming. Salman smiled when he remembered that at eighteen Nassif had been set on joining the army.
“The army is no place for Christians,” Salman had told his son. He had been opposed to the army at the time less from fear than out of distaste for it, a distaste that he had inherited from his own father. “The army is the garbage heap of our country. Only failures join up. Muslims of distinction and their sons strive to get power in the cities, and look for high positions of state. Christians and Jews can live only by trade, by their knowledge and their wits.”
Nassif didn’t understand him at first, but then he discovered the technical world of motor cars and was absorbed by his new passion. Salman was very glad now that he had followed his father’s advice and made the boy change his mind. Since 1949 army officers had been carrying out coups that took them to the summit of state power and back down again into misery.
Who’d have thought that the first to lead a successful coup, Colonel Hablan, would die so miserably after only a hundred and thirty-seven days? Who’d have thought that Colonel Dartan, who overthrew him, would have to run like a rat to Beirut, where he was shot a year later after Colonel Shaklan toppled him in his own turn? And who’d have thought that Shaklan, who still had the people at his feet at the end of 1952, could find himself isolated so quickly and would now, at the end of 1953, be losing more power daily? Salman thought of the birthday party in July given for the colonel by the Shahins, and their humiliation. He smiled in the darkness of his bedroom, grateful for divine providence.
His other sons Latif, Shadi and Fadi were also solely interested in engines. Together with their eldest brother they had made ambitious plans. The future was motorized, they said, and consequently a good garage and workshop in Damascus would be a goldmine, because the Arabs had no car manufacturing plants or factories to make spare parts, so they depended on repairs and ingenious minds to keep the cars they had bought on the road.
Saba and Nasser were still much too young to choose a profession. But Ibtihal, Salman’s only daughter, loved agriculture and always wanted to go out to the fields with the men. Funnily enough, she was the only one who looked like a Mushtak. Who knows, thought Salman, his anxieties allayed, perhaps she carries her grandfather’s soul in her, and will be the first woman to become a successful farmer some day.
But until they saw whether, in a few years’ time, that happened he had to defend the farm alone against his enemies, and most important of all he must get rid of that troublesome Ismail.
What, he asked himself, will Ismail do? Attack the estate? He’d never dare. Side with those damn Shahins against me? A neighbour had told Salman at the barber’s that Faris wanted to get a rich man’s help to build up a farm twice as large as the Mushtak lands, and growing just the same produce as Salman: apples, almonds, roses, and vegetables.
Salman smiled in the dark. A rich man would be a fool to invest his money in these bleak mountains. Soon he fell asleep. He saw his father smiling at him, and handing him a branch of the pomegranate tree. It was covered with red blossom.
50. Ismail
It was an established fact in Mala: buying land from a Mushtak, even just a handful of earth, was completely impossible. The other farmers were selling off their acres because of the drought and the lure of the oil boom. The preferred to hire themselves out as workers in the Gulf states, where they did in fact earn a great deal of money. Many became millionaires overnight in the Gulf, but most of them lost their money again once they were home. Clever con-men persuaded them to invest in expensi
ve buildings in Damascus and then absconded with the cash. Their victims couldn’t return to Mala, because the price of land there had risen steeply in a very short time. Mala had become popular. The village lay high up in the mountains, and its good air and cool summer nights were famous. First the prosperous citizens of Damascus discovered it, then came other Arabs who had plenty of money in their pockets, and soon the price of building plots was as high as in the capital. Farmers who still had their land now grew rich from selling it. And the emigrants who hadn’t been conned out of all they had in Damascus, but came back to Mala in time to lay out their money there in the fifties, were the richest of the villagers ten years later.
Old Mushtak had never wanted his children to divide up his property. Division went against the principle of a strong clan, so after his father’s death Salman took over the farm uncontested. That was in 1947. Hasib was in America, and received nothing, Elias and Malake had been disinherited. Salman was a good businessman and lavished presents on his siblings, sending sackfuls of rosebuds, apples, raisins, dried figs, and almonds even to the disinherited brother and sister. He was earning extremely well, and even had plans for a perfume factory of his own in Mala. Then disaster suddenly struck.
Ismail Rifai was the son of that Muhammad Abdulkarim who had been at the harvest festival in Mala long ago and then, with his brother-in-law and son-in-law, went over to the side of the attacker Hassan Kashat when he surrounded the village. But after that George Mushtak had killed his arch-enemy Kashat. Muhammad Abdulkarim’s brother-in-law and son-in-law managed to escape; he himself had been hit by a ricocheting bullet and died.
Now Ismail, the dead man’s son, wanted to buy the Mushtak farm with all its wide lands, and make the place a vacation paradise with the financial support of a French tourist agency. He didn’t want just any plot of land, only the Mushtak property, not least because of its incomparable views and good supply of ground water. But there was another reason known to no one but Ismail himself and George Mushtak in his grave. Ismail wanted to settle accounts with the village whose bullets had killed his father.
By now he was a powerful man. Ismail had sold the idea of his father the martyr to the first Syrian government after the country gained independence, and the government, which couldn’t legitimately lay claim to any heroic battle for that independence, only to tough fighting for small, indeed tiny concessions, was in bad need of martyrs, as many of them as possible, so as to represent its rise to power as the natural reward for many sacrifices made in the struggle for the Fatherland.
Ismail, son of the alleged great martyr Muhammad Abdulkarim, seized his opportunity and rose to be a state secretary. His father, said the official records and his new tombstone, had fallen fighting French colonialism. In fact, as Ismail knew only too well, his father had been hit in the left temple by that ricochet and fell into a small, muddy pond surrounded by stinging nettles just below the Mala mill, a patch of ground on which no Frenchman had ever set foot.
Ismail’s plan to buy the Mushtak farm was like a bombshell dropped on Mala, especially in the Catholic quarter. The land lay on a high plateau reaching from the old elm tree to the mountains of Lebanon. Was it now to go to a stranger rather than someone from the village, to a Muslim whose father was a traitor?
Salman reassured his anxious friends in the barber’s shop. “A Mushtak never sells, and will bow to no one,” he said in a tone almost of indifference, trying to imitate his father.
“Your father would have cut the messenger’s balls off,” said a toothless old shepherd, adjusting his headcloth. Salman had always thought this shepherd an unpleasant know-all, and ignored him.
He gave a polite but cold reception to the messenger from the state secretary who wanted to encourage tourism. “Tell your master Ismail Rifai that this is a Christian village, and it’s grown neither larger nor smaller over thousands of years. We’re not selling. Not at any price. Syria is a large country, and there are plenty of other places for tourism.”
Two days later the go-between came back and, with dark hints and threats, offered twice the sum, but this time Salman didn’t even look up from the tractor he was repairing. He growled at the envoy, “Didn’t I tell you plainly in good Arabic, or is your boss as slow on the uptake as his father? We’re not selling.” And when the envoy got back into his black car Salman wondered briefly if the shepherd’s suggestion hadn’t been a good idea after all. The leaves on the trees had already turned brown that October day.
A week before Christmas, persons unknown destroyed all the trees on Mushtak land standing out of sight of the village. No one had heard anything, but later a pigeon-breeder said that his birds had been fluttered around restlessly for three nights on end. However, they calmed down again in the early hours of the morning, which they wouldn’t have done before an earthquake, and slept almost all day, only to batter themselves desperately against the walls of their wooden lofts again by night.
The police thought it had all been well organized, and then carried out according to plan during several days of icy December weather. All routes leading to the lands belonging to the Mushtak farm had been blocked by men claiming to be military police. If anyone asked why, they had said there were army manoeuvres on the high plateau.
Not until the third day did Salman and several other farmers in the village who wanted to ride out to their fields become suspicious. They asked at the Mala police station whether there was in fact any manoeuvre going on. The two local policemen, followed by several farmers, drove in Salman’s truck to the plantations some three kilometres away, where a terrible sight met their eyes.
The bare, felled trees were covered by hoarfrost. The scene froze Salman’s blood in his veins. All his trees and rosebushes lay on the ground as far as the eye could see. Twenty hectares of ravaged orchards, most of the trees grubbed up roots and all, a few old, well-established specimens simply sawn down. The entire irrigation system had been destroyed by bulldozers; pipes and hoses stuck up from the churned soil like skeletons. Several bulldozers, specially equipped trucks, excavators, and tractors must have been used in the operation.
Not a wall, not a water tank had been spared. The watchman’s house had collapsed, and they found the poor man under its ruins. His corpse had two large, gaping holes in the chest. His murderers had torn it apart with dumdum bullets.
Salman’s face turned grey, and he wept for the first time since his father’s death. He just stood there, unable to utter a word. The sympathy of the people around him was no comfort.
In February 1954, two months later, he died of a heart attack, the first villager in Mala ever to suffer one. Heart attacks are almost unknown among the Arabs.
At the time, in the winter of 1953, all the clues pointed to Ismail Rifai, but the case was never cleared up. Ismail was powerful, and Salman’s sons were not strong enough to act yet. Their mother Hanan knew that. She wore black for fifteen years, and kept reminding her children of the perpetrator’s name. Her sons adopted her own quiet approach, and started planning too.
Hanan, who didn’t once smile in all those fifteen years, was a pale woman of iron energy. After the attack she and her children wanted no more to do with farming. She leased the fallow land to several Mala farmers, and divided the rent equally between her husband’s siblings. Hasib had disappeared without trace in America, so she donated his share to the religious houses of Mala in his memory. In return, they let her keep old Mushtak’s house, which her sons later converted into one of the finest buildings in the village, with an artificial stream that wound its way through the extensive grounds and cascaded from a high rock into a swimming pool. Latif, Nassif, Shadi and Fadi were inseparable. They always liked going out together to Mala, where they partied all night long, and then drove back to Damascus in their big deluxe American limousines.
But to conclude the story of Ismail: in the autumn of 1968, Salman’s youngest sons Nasser and Saba, through go-betweens, tricked Ismail Rifai out of his entire fortune. At this time
he was also under suspicion of having smuggled weapons and money into the country from Iraq to organize uprisings against the government. Collaboration with neighbouring Iraq was hated in Damascus even more than collaboration with Israel, and always had been.
Ismail denied all accusations, but the evidence was overwhelming. Guns, ammunition, and crates of money were found in his barn. The find had been faultlessly arranged by a secret service man to whom Nassif, Salman’s eldest son, gave a 1967 Opel. Ismail was sentenced to life imprisonment.
That day Salman’s widow Hanan laughed again for the first time and wore coloured clothing. She hailed her sons as heroes, and gave a lavish party for them in the expensive Ali Baba restaurant that had just been opened in Damascus. Elias and Claire were invited too. Farid wasn’t there; he was already in prison at that time.
“It took fifteen years,” said Nasser, raising a glass of arrack to his mother, “but we’ve avenged our father.”
“Fifteen years?” asked Elias in surprise. He was sitting between Claire and Ibtihal.
“Yes, uncle,” replied Saba, the second youngest son, “it takes a long time to ensnare someone like that. He was a suspicious man.”
“A Bedouin,” joked Nasser, “would say: well done, lads, but why in such a hurry?”
BOOK OF THE CLAN III
Love is a wildcat with nine lives
VENICE, DAMASCUS, MALA 1850 – 1935
51. Lucia and Nagib
Claire’s memory was not particularly good, but one event in the summer of 1935 was ever-present in her mind. She was seventeen, and had loved Musa Salibi with every fibre of her heart for the last two years. But then she suddenly met a pale young man with the most beautiful hands in the world in the God-forsaken village of Mala, and he spoke to her in French.