The Dark Side of Love

by Rafik Schami

  “It’ll just be a little limbering-up exercise for Musa before he goes to Paris,” Nagib reassured his daughter. He was standing at the second-floor window, watching his wife prune the roses in the garden on this cold but sunny day. “I’ve hidden some money in a purse under your mattress. It’s for you. Perhaps the two of you will like Paris and want to stay there. Life will be very difficult for us Christians here over the next few years. The Muslims are going to slaughter us.” There was grief and despair in his voice. His daughter didn’t understand him.

  Then on 14 May, a Tuesday and exactly a week after her birthday, he was arrested. Ismail Ballut, a young man in his mid-twenties, had gone to the police station of the Muhayirin quarter just before midnight on Monday 13 May. He was well-dressed and identified himself as an employee of the Banque de Syrie et du Liban in Damascus. He had a large suitcase with him, and said he couldn’t sleep at nights. One of the police officers asked why not? Another laughed, and added, “Love or a quarrel with your wife, is it?”

  “No, it’s the money,” he replied, opening the case, which proved to contain fifty-two million Syrian lira. The policemen stared blankly at the money. They were sure the man before them must be a complete idiot. “Nagib Surur is the devil incarnate. He’s tricked the machine that stamps old, worn-out, badly damaged banknotes to make them worthless before they’re burned in special furnaces. Then the bank produces new notes with the same numbers as the old ones and puts them in circulation,” the man painstakingly explained as they took his statement. In answer to a question he further explained that there were now doubles of those notes that Nagib had not destroyed, and they weren’t forgeries because both series of banknotes were genuine. They just had the same numbers. The man couldn’t say exactly how that devil Nagib had managed to fool the machine. His part in the business, he said, had been only to keep his mouth shut, and sign papers saying that the procedure in the room where the old notes were destroyed had been correct. “The inspector who checks the ashes wasn’t allowed into the room, so he never knew anything about it. Nagib gave him newsprint ashes instead, weighed out precisely to the last milligram. How he fixed it all only he knows. He fooled me too.”

  “Easy enough, with such a simpleton!” whispered a freckled police officer to his colleague as the duty NCO went on interrogating the man, taking down his statement in person. He wrote slowly, and kept asking him to repeat what he had last said.

  He, Ismail Ballut, said the man, was supposed to keep the money safe for a few weeks, and then Nagib was going to let him have one-third of it, and use the other two-thirds to bring Syrian boxing up to world-class level. The policemen looked at each other incredulously.

  “And as for you, you bastard, I suppose you were just planning to make a bunch of orphaned kids happy with your share of the money!” bellowed the NCO, who had no idea that he was a mind-reader. For Ismail Ballut had indeed wanted to start and run an orphanage. He merely added, quietly, that he had been given a very religious upbringing, for his father was the well-known Sheikh Hassan Ballut. But the devil, disguised in the body of that Christian Nagib, had tempted him, and now he, Ismail, repented of his crime.

  The policemen didn’t know who Hassan Ballut was, nor did they fully understand the trick allegedly used by the perpetrator to circumvent all the French bank’s security systems, so they put the man in the cells, recorded the amount of money in the files, and called their boss Lieutenant Fakhri. For a start Fakhri had the bank clerk tortured, allegedly to find out whether there was more money hidden anywhere else. Torture was a routine police measure at the time.

  By the early morning of 14 May, however, it had produced no further information. Three hours later the police arrested Nagib. Unlike the loquacious Ballut, Claire’s father was saying nothing, but all Lieutenant Fakhri’s incoming phone calls showed that it was incumbent on him to go carefully with the Christian.

  Since the entire sum of money was still intact, the verdict of the court, when it came later, was mild. Ballut was given a suspended sentence of six months; Nagib was jailed for five years. He was free again after three of them. Claire welcomed her father as if he had come home from a long journey. But much was to happen before that time.

  Just after her father’s arrest Claire felt miserable. The others often bullied her at school now, and she had to put up with all kinds of sharp remarks. Sometimes she wept in the washrooms because some of the girls attacked her like a swarm of hysterical wasps. The nuns of the Besançon School acted blind, deaf, and dumb. Only her friend Madeleine stood staunchly by her. Claire never forgot that to her dying day.

  She told Madeleine about the bad dreams that tormented her by night. For one thing, she knew that her father had been kept in solitary confinement for months to make him talk. Neither she nor anyone else was allowed to visit him, and one day someone started the rumour that Nagib Surur had died under torture and lay buried in the desert. For another, Musa’s fight against Rimon Rasmalo, the man with the steel fists, was to be at the beginning of June.

  “It’s crazy,” said Madeleine one morning, “here are the two of us, best friends, and our menfolk are planning to knock each other’s heads in.” At first Claire didn’t understand. Of course she had told her friend all about Musa, and how they would probably be going to Paris. And of course she knew that Madeleine was also engaged, but her friend didn’t talk about her fiancé much, and when she mentioned his job she had just said he was a stonemason. If Nagib or Musa had ever mentioned the name of Musa’s opponent to her, reassuring her by saying that he was strong but technically a poor boxer, she had registered it only in passing, and hadn’t realized that Musa was to fight her friend Madeleine’s fiancé. Only now did the scales fall from her eyes. She was horrified.

  Madeleine laughed. “I feel like someone in a trashy novel,” she joked. “All it needs is for the two of us to go for each other tooth and nail and climb into the ring ourselves, screeching. But luckily we’re not in a novel. I never go to fights. As far as I can see, they’re just a silly way to stage a brawl. Why would anyone want to watch that?”

  “I wish I were as strong as you,” replied Claire. “I always have to go, not because I’m brave but because I’m a coward. I feel as if I might be some help, if the fight’s going badly for him, and if he wins he’ll be happier because then he can celebrate his victory in front of me.”

  The fight had been fixed for Sunday 16 June. The boxing club was in the Muslim quarter, but both the defending champion and his challenger were Christians, and they had insisted on Sunday as the day of the match. Claire made up her face and put on her yellow dress, a particular favourite of Musa’s. But she didn’t feel happy on the way to the club, even when the whole committee welcomed her ceremoniously, expressing their sympathy with her father, an innocent man in jail.

  Claire’s stomach lurched when her fiancé came into the big hall with the boxing ring in the middle of it. And before he and his large retinue disappeared into the changing rooms, Musa reassured her with his smile. “I’ll be a butterfly, you just wait and see,” he said. But it didn’t turn out that way.

  Her fiancé made a majestic entrance by comparison with his opponent’s pitiful effort. Musa strode to the ring like a film star, with music and a whole team escorting him. He climbed elegantly up the steps and jumped through the opening in the ropes that his companions had made for him. Up in the ring, he ran a round of honour. The whole hall roared. He blew Claire a kiss and smiled.

  When the spectators had calmed down again Rimon Rasmalo appeared. He was short and sturdy. Claire had to stand up to see him. He came in accompanied only by his trainer, who was carrying a worn old bucket. Rimon earned laughter and insulting catcalls. He walked leaning slightly forward, and his arms looked much too long. “Hey, is that ape here just to give Musa a laugh or what?” called a sweating, fat man three seats away for her, and another man replied, “No, he’s Musa’s hors d’oeuvre, but where’s the main dish?”

  Rimon climbed into the
ring with a grim look, raised his hand reluctantly in a brief salutation, and went to his corner. He seemed to consist entirely of bulges. His neck, his arms, his legs – there were no straight lines about the man. He looked darkly at his opponent as his trainer urgently whispered last-minute advice to him.

  None of the speeches, greetings, and expressions of gratitude preceding the fight penetrated Claire’s mind. Only the bell aroused her attention again.

  From the first, Musa didn’t stand a chance.

  Rimon made for him like an enraged bumble-bee. The referee kept trying to separate the boxers, but during each clinch Rimon punched Musa mercilessly. Musa did his best to keep his opponent at arm’s length, and when he succeeded he too excelled with his elegance and the stylish series of hooks he threw to the other man’s head. At those moments the crowd rejoiced in relief. But Rimon took the punishment and then went straight as an arrow past his opponent’s fists to get him in a clinch again, neutralizing the advantage of Musa’s long arms. When Rimon kept so close to him, Musa was helpless. His adversary’s movements had none of that dancing beauty that he himself saw as essential to the sport of boxing. Rimon was rough and square-set, and the ring judge had to warn him three times in the first round for head-butting his opponent.

  Musa sat in his corner in the short break between the first two rounds, looking dazed. The trainer was urging him to keep his opponent at a distance, while his second cooled his face with water. But as soon as the bell went Rimon got going like a clockwork tin toy. He shoved, he punched, he pushed and bellowed at his adversary, moving forward like a road roller all the time. Musa stopped dancing. He sought safety in distance, trying to gain a few seconds to pull himself together and remember his technique, but soon a hammer blow from that gorilla Rimon destroyed any kind of technique at all. Rimon battered his head with uppercuts, while digging his elbows into Musa’s stomach.

  These first rounds lasted forever, and at the end of the third round Rimon landed a punch on Musa Salibi’s left temple. It wasn’t a hook but a jab, and it was like a chunk of granite flinging Musa away from his challenger. He staggered sideways and fell to the floor. The referee held back Rimon, who in defiance of all the rules was trying to rush his opponent like a beast of prey. Musa struggled up again, and the referee allowed the fight to go on, but the two boxers hadn’t had time to make another move before the bell rang.

  “You just wait,” an elderly gentleman sitting near Claire told his wife, “Musa’s worn that appalling amateur out. Now he’ll really show what he can do.”

  Musa dragged himself to his corner, and Claire called out to him to stop fighting. He heard, and looked at her with empty eyes. A man caught her arm roughly. “Hureime, little lady, this isn’t for women and children. You just sit down or go out in the fresh air.” And he pushed her unceremoniously down in her seat. The man hadn’t even looked at her. His gaze was fixed on his idol, sitting up there in the right-hand corner of the ring with his eyes swollen.

  The fourth round lasted seven seconds. That was the time it took Rimon to get from his corner to the middle of the ring and slip below his adversary’s outstretched fists. Then, in the fraction of a second, he planted the full force of his left hook against Musa’s chin. A second later his right glove landed a thunderous blow on his tottering opponent’s left temple. Musa not only lost his balance but sailed through the air to his right, dropped like a stone, slid half a metre across the ring, unconscious, and came to rest on his back at an awkward angle. Rimon knew there was nothing the handsome man on the floor could do now. Arms outspread, he leaped up in the air, uttering a yell that shattered two light bulbs and did permanent damage to the referee’s right eardrum. The audience changed sides, and was now acclaiming Musa’s savage conqueror.

  Claire didn’t know what to do. A number of men jumped up to go and help the ex-champion lying on the floor. She tried climbing into the ring too, to be with Musa, but her uncongenial neighbour held her back. “No women go up there except whores,” he said. She could smell his nauseating sweat, and was only just able to keep the contents of her stomach down. Then she shook her arm free. “Don’t you touch me,” she said, trying to keep calm, “not unless you want trouble.” The man showed his bad teeth in a grin, and moved away.

  She stood there by herself; no one offered to help her, not even the committee chairman. The men carried Musa past her, one of them calling for a doctor. But when Claire tried following them to the changing rooms, the little caretaker who had always been so deferential to her father planted himself four-square in front of the entrance. “No women in here,” he said, staring into the distance. She couldn’t take it in; she had always called the man “Uncle”, she’d known him since her childhood. How often had he patted her head, how often had her father pressed five lira into his hand, telling him to go and have a good meal out with his wife? At that time a labourer didn’t earn as much as five lira for two days’ work. And now the caretaker didn’t even call her by her name, just spoke of “women”.

  “But Uncle Sharif, don’t you recognise me? I’m Musa’s fiancée,” she said softly and sadly, for she knew deep down that he had recognized her perfectly well.

  “No women allowed in. You’ll have to wait here for Musa. We have decent morals here, not like you Christians.”

  She was confused. Of course she knew the boxing club was in the conservative Muslim quarter, but that was still in the heart of her native Damascus. Where had Musa brought her? Obviously her mother had not been wrong to say, as Claire left, that she didn’t like letting her go to that rough part of town, but she supposed her daughter would be under Musa’s personal protection the whole time. And now he was lying helpless on the floor himself.

  The place emptied, the stream of spectators crowded out through the distant main entrance. Claire found herself at the other side of the hall, near the little back exit next to the changing rooms, showers, and toilets. The hollow silence alarmed her.

  The minutes crept by, heavy as lead. She seemed to wait for hours. Even later, she couldn’t believe it had really been less than thirty minutes. She heard laughter and other sounds beyond the heavy door. They reached her as if they came from a deep cavern with its entrance blocked.

  Two men were coming out of the auditorium, approaching her. A small sturdy man and a tall strong one, with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth.

  “Hey, how about us having a nice time together?” asked the tall man, waggling his eyebrows up and down in what he took for a seductive manner.

  “Go to hell,” said Claire with difficulty. Her voice was failing. Her heart froze to a sharp splinter of ice.

  “No need to act like that, we’ll pay,” replied the small man, thrusting his right forefinger back and fourth through the circle he made with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand.

  “Please go away,” she begged, but that just encouraged the men. The tall man reached for her breasts. She kicked his shin and swung her bag at the smaller man, who was grasping her buttocks. She screamed, because hitting them wasn’t going to get her anywhere. The pair of them quickly seized her arms, one each, and pushed her towards the toilets.

  But then something she was never to forget happened, and she often told the story. A man came hurrying out of the door to the changing rooms.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he shouted, and without waiting for an answer he picked up a short length of hosepipe lying under the washbasins and began lashing the two men with it.

  “Leave the girl alone, you bastards!” The hosepipe whistled through the air and came slapping down on the heads and shoulders of her repulsive assailants. They let Claire go and stumbled away. The smaller man turned just before he reached the exit and shouted back, “Whore!”

  Her rescuer stood there looking almost shy, breathing heavily. The man’s name was Barkush; he was a police captain and an enthusiastic if unlucky boxer. He kept his distance from her so that she could recover her self-control.

  “
Thank you,” said Claire, and she began to cry.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m … I’m waiting for my fiancé. He’s unconscious.”

  “Who? Musa? You’re Musa’s fiancée? He came round some time back, he’s drowning his sorrows in chilled arrack with his friends. You can go home, don’t worry.”

  She wanted to ask him to find Musa for her, but suddenly her tongue wouldn’t obey her. A rift the size of the rocky ravine in Mala opened up inside her, splitting her heart. She had to make an effort to preserve her composure in front of the man, and dragged herself out.

  At the time her mother was living in a villa in Arnus Avenue, an exclusive area. It was about two kilometres away, but she decided to take a cab. Several horse-drawn vehicles were standing ready near the Hidjaz train station. She picked the best and didn’t haggle over its price. When the cabby wondered aloud what a woman was doing out and about on her own by night, however, she snapped at him to mind his own business and take her to Arnus Avenue, near the French gendarmerie.

  As soon as the old cab driver heard that address he cheered up, for only the rich and powerful lived there. Fares to that quarter always gave generous tips.

  “Just as you say, miss, I won’t meddle, but I’m a father myself, I’d be worried about such a beautiful young lady. I have three children, you see, my daughter Hayat, she’s about your age, and if you’ll permit me I’d say she’s as pretty as you, not that I mean to give any offence.”

  Cabbies are always talkative, but this one could compete with my mother’s new radio set, thought Claire. His name was Salim, he said, and in the normal way he drove between Beirut and Damascus, but there wasn’t much money in it these days, for hardly anyone travelled that road now, so he’d switched to the city, which wasn’t so easy, because the regular town cabbies didn’t like to see the bread taken out of their mouths. They attacked cabbies from the country and robbed them of their day’s takings. But he had no choice, he said, he had those two horses ahead of them to feed, not to mention a wife and three children. That made him braver than a lion, he told her, and the town cabbies sensed it, riffraff that they were, so they left him, Salim, alone if they had any sense.