by Rafik Schami
He talked and talked, and suddenly she didn’t mind any more. The cab was driving through the mild summer night. A cool westerly breeze was blowing into the back of the vehicle, and the horses’ hooves beat out a soothing rhythm on the cobblestones of the streets.
Claire heaved a sigh of relief when she saw the lighted windows of her home, and paid the cabby generously. Even before she reached the door she could hear the Italian songs that her mother listened to on the radio night after night.
Two weeks later she was sitting beside her mother in the bus to Mala, feeling utterly miserable.
She loved Musa, but something had broken for ever that night at the boxing club. He had come to see her, he’d been very nice to her, and he tried to explain that he’d been ashamed to look her in the face that night. But for the first time she felt a void in her heart not when he left, but while he was sitting there with her.
The village felt bleaker than ever to Claire that summer. Only the French novels and books of poetry that she had brought with her proved to be life-rafts. For days on end she followed Julien Sorel’s fate in Le Rouge et le Noir, she sought comfort in Verlaine’s love poems. She also took refuge in André Gide’s Les Faux Monnayeurs, George Bernanos’s Sous le Soleil de Satan, Guy de Maupassant’s Bel Ami, Colette’s Chéri and La Vagabonde.
Her mother left her alone, was out and about all the time, saw visitors, or stayed close to her radio. For the first time, in her loneliness, Claire felt some kind of kinship with Lucia. And for the first time she briefly sensed a certain closeness when they ate or went for short walks together.
One sunny day in early July, she met Elias. She always laughed about it later, for their meeting place was anything but romantic. It was in the vegetable dealer Tanius’s store on the village square. Claire liked Tanius, who was always kindly disposed to her. Whenever she went to the shop he had a joke ready, bringing it out in his broken standard Arabic. As a rule Tanius, like all the villagers, spoke the local dialect.
That day she had just finished reading Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir, and oddly enough was more moved by Mathilde’s fate than by the tragic, dramatic death of her lover Julien Sorel.
In the store, she put a few tiny cucumbers on the scales handed to her over the counter by Tanius. One little cucumber fell to the floor, and suddenly a slender hand was giving it back to her. Claire hadn’t noticed the young man before, and now he was looking at her with the eyes of a child who had all the sorrows of the world within him.
“Merci bien, monsieur.”
“Avec plaisir, mademoiselle,” said the man. He wasn’t much taller than Claire herself. He had left the shop again by the time she was through with her mother’s order. Tanius smiled when she turned around, expecting to find the stranger still standing behind her. “That’s Elias, a fine young man. Amazing that a prickly thistle like George Mushtak could bring such a flower into the world.”
When she left the store, with a small errand boy carrying the heavy basket of vegetables for her, she saw Elias walking down the street by himself. He had just reached her house, and she wished he would stop so that she could catch up with him.
And sure enough, he did turn to look at her. Her heart fluttered with joy as if she had just won a prize. Claire was never to forget that moment and the sense of delight that she had never known before. She was rejoicing in a magical power that, at that moment, she had at her command.
“You called to me?” he asked in fluent French. She felt she had to tell him the truth.
“Yes, monsieur, I wanted to ask what an educated man like you is doing in this dusty village?” She sent Butros the errand boy on ahead with the basket of vegetables, telling him to leave it at the door, and gave the boy ten piastres. Butros beamed all over his face, for that was as much as he earned in a week working for the vegetable dealer.
Claire and Elias talked to each other for a long time outside the Sururs’ vacation house. Elias knew many of the books she loved, and he could recite Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal by heart. When she told him she went to the Besançon school, he smiled. “Besançon is a small town, but it gave mankind a great gift: Victor Hugo.”
Claire felt hypnotized. She would have liked to put out her hand and touch Elias, because she could hardly believe all this was real. Here in the middle of a village at the end of the world, a young man had said lovelier things to her in the short time since they met than anyone else in her whole seventeen years of life. She felt a need to sit down and listen to this fascinating man, tell him all the things she kept locked in her heart. She had to make up her mind quickly.
“Will you come in for a coffee in an hour’s time?” she asked. And Elias simply said, “Avec plaisir.”
In the brief hour before she came back she knew in her heart that she had fallen under this man’s spell. She took off her engagement ring and put it away in a little box.
54. Purgatory and Paradise
It was something that Claire had never in her life expected: from visit to visit, she realized that she was counting the hours until Elias came to see her again. Her heart betrayed her, wrecking her intention of waiting for their meetings with calm composure. When he touched her with his gentle hands, she felt violent excitement in every vein. But his mere presence excited her too. He was witty, he could laugh on the slightest provocation, but he could also be very jealous, although that was just an expression of his feelings for her.
They read a great deal together, and talked of love and grief, fulfilment and abstinence, loyalty and longing. Claire felt as if she had only half existed until the day she met Elias, and now had found her missing other half. It did not escape her mother’s notice.
“That young man is your own kind – forget about your father’s primitive friend and send him back his engagement ring,” Lucia advised her at breakfast two weeks later. Claire’s jaw dropped with surprise, and her mother remarked dryly, “You’ll have to chew, you know, food doesn’t go down of its own accord. Elias is from a distinguished family,” she continued. “The Mushtaks are real men, rich, generous, made of granite, not like that feeble chauffeur who’ll let a dwarf knock him about in the ring.” Lucia shook her head. “But Nagib always did keep such dreadful company.”
For the first time in years, Claire felt a deep need to hold her mother close. She stood up, hugged her and kissed her. Lucia stroked her head. “You must be very generous in what you offer Elias. The Mushtaks are magnanimous in all they do, and I feel sure this latest sprig of theirs doesn’t like people to be faint-hearted either.”
She had known and respected George Mushtak for years, and the old man respected the Signora too, although he avoided any close friendship with her. Rumours of her attitude to men kept him away. She insisted that her lovers must wash thoroughly and shave their pubic hair, and was said to treat them like horses, riding and even whipping them.
Once, when Elias didn’t visit for several days, Claire felt quite sick with longing. She summoned Butros the vegetable dealer’s errand boy, gave him fifty piastres, and told him to look for Elias and ask him to come and see her at once.
“He goes up to the mountains at dawn and doesn’t come back until after dark,” the observant boy immediately told her.
“What’s he doing in the mountains?”
“I don’t know, lady. My master says there was such a quarrel between father and son that everyone in the street could hear them.”
“Well, I want you to wait for him first thing tomorrow and ask him to come and see me before sunrise. And don’t say a word about it to anyone else. Swear!”
“I swear, lady. I hate tell-tales,” said the lad, who wasn’t even twelve yet, gratefully pocketing the money.
She couldn’t sleep all night, and in those hours of darkness she realized that the purgatory they talked about in church consisted of waiting and longing.
When two roosters crowed by turns in the distance, she got up and went to the window. The night sky was growing pale in the east. Claire
looked over at the village square and saw him hurrying along the street, a small and inconspicuous figure.
Her heart beat fast. She groped about for her dress in the dark, couldn’t find it, and cursed her own untidiness. Suddenly she felt his hands. She was not alarmed, just surprised by the speed and silence with which he had made his way to her.
“I love you,” he said, and he was weeping. He held her close, and she felt his head. It was like the head of a child seeking protection.
“I love you too, dear heart,” she whispered, her voice breaking with emotion. Then she kissed his forehead and pressed him to her breast. After a while he calmed down and began telling her his story.
He told her everything, and Claire felt a great need to care for this boy who had stumbled from one misfortune to another. He told her frankly about his desire for women, and his bad luck when his father had caught him with Nasibe. He described his wretched situation when the Muslim peasants, running wild in the hunger riots of 1933, set fire to the Jesuit monastery in Damascus. He had come back to Mala like a whipped dog. But his father wouldn’t speak to him, and derided him at every opportunity. As if not the mob but he, Elias, had attacked the Jesuits in Damascus, his father had accused him of failure. And whenever he asked to be sent to study with the Jesuits in Beirut, he had met with a refusal.
He told her about his bad luck working in the French provisions store. Early this summer, however, his father had suddenly turned friendly to him, had even forgiven him for all his faults in front of the assembled family and forbidden his brother Salman to hit him. He wanted him, Elias, to start breeding horses; it was a gold-mine, said old Mushtak. You could get fine Arab horses at a good price from the Bedouin, and then build up a large business.
He had been willing enough, he said, because he loved horses, but now he had found out that his father’s sudden change of heart was the result of a secret deal with the village elder Habib Mobate. He, Elias, was to marry Mobate’s daughter.
“A miserable bunch of tricksters, that family, but they know how to cheat peasants. And I’m supposed to waste my life among them,” groaned Elias, telling her that Habib Mobate had made his money by secretly registering his name with the French as owner of all the land in the neighbourhood that had been common property under the Ottoman Empire. It consisted of fields, mountains, and valleys of incalculable value. The farmers never noticed, for Mobate let them go on using the land for grazing, but when anyone tried cultivating a plot of land, the village elder got the gendarmes to drive him off it, so it was two decades before the village discovered that entire hills and huge expanses of grazing belonged to the Mobate clan.
That morning in July 1935, Elias was badly frightened. He had to make up his mind: if he married Samira, he would be doing his father a great favour, as old Mushtak had told him in friendly tones. He didn’t have to love Samira, added Mushtak. He just had to get her pregnant, thus making the Mushtak clan more powerful. With his great virility, he could make love to as many women as his heart desired. Elias knew he would be the richest of George Mushtak’s sons, for Samira would inherit as much money as the cash and property of all the Mushtaks put together were worth.
Time was short. Two days ago, the servant Basil had given him away. He had seen him coming out of Claire’s house by night, Elias told her. Mushtak had ranted and raged and struck him in the face. He had shouted that city girls were all whores of the French, and he’d have Elias shot if he went to see her again.
“So I’ve been roaming the mountains for days. I know my father. He might not kill me, but he’ll certainly disinherit and disown me if I decide for you and not Samira,” he said quietly.
Claire held him close. They were lying naked in her bed now, with Elias’s hands moving as light as butterfly wings over the landscape of her body. While he told her the whole story she sensed that he had long ago chosen her, and she felt a wild longing for him.
It was already light in the room, but the curtains dimmed the daylight. He thrust into her, expecting a scream of horror, but she welcomed him, twining her arms and legs around his back.
55. Beirut, or Deliverance
Two days later Claire and Elias fled to Beirut, where they married in a small chapel. Their witnesses were Elias’s sister Malake and her husband, who had been living in Beirut since their own elopement in 1931.
At first Elias and Claire hid away in a little hotel by the harbour. They didn’t want to stay with Malake, because it was embarrassing to show their love and passionate longing in her house. They made love, wandered along the boulevard by the sea, and ate grilled fish in small restaurants. Then, as if it were a ritual, they lay in the warm sand on the beach and looked up at the sky for a long time.
“What did your fiancé do for a living?” asked Elias.
“He was a bodyguard,” said Claire, a little surprised, because she had told him that on the first day they met.
“Thank God he wasn’t a good bodyguard, or I wouldn’t have had a chance,” laughed Elias.
They hid in the harbour city for three years. At the time it sheltered thousands of refugees, soldiers of fortune, and adventurers. For many of them Beirut was the final stage on their journey, the last they would see of Arabia before they left for America.
Elias thanked his sister for all her help, but he was careful not to spend too much time in her house. He was afraid his father would soon get on his trail. Claire had enough money for the first few months. After they had left their first hiding place, the hotel, they lived in two modest rooms in the Daura quarter. And they still lay on the beach every evening and enjoyed the sight of the infinite starlit sky.
Only Lucia had been taken into the secret of their plans for flight, and she fell for none of the charming tricks employed by George Mushtak when, with his injured pride, he tried to find out where the couple were hiding. She put on a convincing performance as an indignant mother, and in private laughed at the old farmer.
Claire found work as an interpreter for a shipping company. Elias took a job with a confectioner called Gandur, the father of one of his old school friends in the Jesuit monastery. At first Elias just worked as an assistant, but soon he was enjoying it so much that he learned the trade and its mysteries thoroughly. Before two years were up he was a master of the craft himself.
Gandur the confectioner was a clever businessman. He recognized his young employee’s talents, but Elias was far too ambitious to agree to run the branch shop that Gandur was planning. He wanted to go back to Damascus.
When Claire had her first miscarriage, Lucia too urged them to return. After the second miscarriage she came to Beirut herself, and was horrified by her daughter’s condition. She wasn’t happy with the treatment Claire was getting at the hospital, and talked earnestly to Elias until he gave Lucia his word to return to Damascus as soon as possible, for the sake of his wife’s health.
“But what will my father do?” he anxiously asked.
“Oh, we’ll bring him around to it. His feelings are a little hurt, that’s all,” she said. “Apart from that he wouldn’t hurt a fly.” But there she was wrong.
56. Autumnal Atmosphere
They were lying on the beach surrounded by the warmth of the spring night. It already felt like summer. An easterly breeze carried the fragrance of flowers from the mountains out to sea. Elias held Claire’s face in his hands and kissed her eyes. At that moment she felt that a second little heart had begun beating inside her.
“I think I’m pregnant again,” she whispered. Elias could have embraced the whole sky. But an invisible hand clutched her heart. She was anxious. Her two miscarriages were still too close: the pain, the fear, and the empty feeling when it was all over. Elias felt for her, and was very affectionate.
Claire remembered the times after her miscarriages. Elias came to the hospital straight from the confectioner’s after work every day, exhausted, and sometimes fell asleep on the floor beside her. He felt for her hand again and again in the night, whispering quiet
words of love so that the others in the ten-bed ward wouldn’t wake up.
Then he slipped out at five in the morning, unwashed and without any breakfast, and went to work. It was touching to watch him leaving the ward with such a youthful spring in his step. Every day Claire fell in love all over again with the small man who could quote any French poet by heart, and now he was working in a confectioner’s shop and still kept cheerful.
The other women envied her Elias, who brought them all chocolates every evening. And they loved his wonderful laugh.
Claire’s third pregnancy came at a most inconvenient time. They had planned to return to Damascus early in June. Suddenly she was afraid to go back, but Elias’s cheerfulness dispelled all dismal thoughts and smoothed out the rugged mountains between Beirut and Damascus into gently rolling hills.
News came from Damascus that her father had been suffering from severe pneumonia since April. She cried a great deal, imagining him sitting in his prison cell and coughing. He had been in jail for three years, and didn’t want his wife to visit him. Their only contact was through his cousins, who fetched money and clean clothes from Lucia for him, and told her how he was. He had a sunny cell, they said, and the prison governor played backgammon with him all day. With the money that Lucia sent him Nagib was able to pay an army of servants and bodyguards, who ensured his safety and made life much easier for him. But out of pride he wouldn’t let his wife see him behind bars. Lucia was more than happy with that arrangement.
The move back to Damascus was the beginning of a lucky streak for Elias. He spent three hours explaining his plan to Claire’s mother at her kitchen table, showed her his calculations, and asked her for a loan of a hundred thousand Syrian lira. Lucia said she wanted ten percent interest, but after tough negotiations she accepted five. Elias could offer only his handshake as a guarantee.