by Rafik Schami
Elias was betraying her with Alexandra, one of the silliest women in the world. She and Claire had been at school together, but in those ten years Claire had spoken to her at the most on three occasions, and even that had been a waste of time. She had heard from Madeleine that the woman was married to a member of parliament twenty-five years her senior. After the wedding Alexandra had insisted on being called Madame Makram Bey, even by her relations and her women friends. Her husband was the latest scion of a rich family of large landowners, and hoped to have a son to carry the name of Makram on into the future. Even if she hadn’t been having an affair with Elias, Madeleine couldn’t stand the woman.
“Alexandra, of all people!”
She could well imagine how Alexandra had made a conquest of Elias. That woman’s backside got her everything she wanted. Even the proud Elias.
Madeleine suggested a trip to the hammam together. Claire hadn’t been to a public bathhouse since her wedding. She had her own beautiful bathroom in Damascus, a wonderful bathroom with coloured tiles, showers, and a huge white marble wash-basin. Next Wednesday morning she went along to the hammam with her friend. Silent, lost in thought, she clung to Madeleine’s arm.
Her father was happy to look after Farid by himself for a few hours. He didn’t even look at her as she left, just turned his transfigured gaze on the sleeping baby.
They were going to the Hammam al Bakri in Bab Tuma, not far from Elias’s confectionery shop.
“I once trusted a man myself, but he went away to America, taking my heart and a rich woman with him and leaving me alone with our engagement ring,” Madeleine suddenly said quietly, as if to open her own heart just a little.
“You were engaged before Rimon? I never knew,” said Claire, amazed.
“I had to keep it secret. I took the engagement ring off every morning and put it on again every evening, because that was when my lover came to see us. My mother liked him. I think she was in love with him herself. He was a charming, witty man,” added Madeleine, but then waved the subject away.
“Why did he go off with the other woman?”
“Because she promised him her whole fortune and I had nothing to offer. My father said it was un-Christian to give women a dowry to induce men to come along and marry them. You love either the woman or her money, he thought. But he sometimes went too far. He played a practical joke on Said – that was my fiancé’s name – and told him he’d lost everything. I realized that Said wasn’t so sure what he wanted then, and asked my father to stop talking such nonsense. After all, he’d made pots of money in the leather trade, but I could see that the love was leaking out of Said’s heart now, and however much I filled it up the tank up with more, it was soon empty again.
“Then along came this young widow with all the money she’d inherited, and he went off to America with her, and not a word to me. I lied to everyone, saying it had all been very sudden. But I’d known for months that he was moving away from me. Love is like childhood. When it’s gone, it’s gone for ever. My father was triumphant, delighted to think he’d seen through the man from the first, he’d known it was money he was after and not love. But I was crushed. Two weeks later I fell sick and I was away from school for six months, do you remember?”
“We thought you had pneumonia, maybe TB as well,” Claire recollected.
Madeleine laughed. “That was the official explanation, so that no one in school would know. I tried to take my own life twice, but I was too much of a coward to do it properly. My mother took me to Beirut, and we spent three months with an uncle there. I feel today as if he wasn’t an uncle at all, he was a magician who knew all about love and the soul. He spoke to me so understandingly, we talked night after night, and I almost fell in love with him, but I stopped myself just in time. He was happily married and much older than me. He wasn’t gentle with me, he was honest, he could even be harsh. And a time came when I realized I ought to be glad to be rid of my fiancé at an early stage. He might not have left me until later.
“Since then I’ve lived sensibly with Rimon, who thinks himself lucky to have married a daughter of the distinguished leather exporter Antoine Ashi. He wants children, I give him children, and the rest of the time he leaves me alone.”
At this moment they reached the hammam. Madeleine was a frequent visitor, and knew not only the woman who owned it, the strong masseuse, the old lady who soaped customers and all the assistants, but many of the women who were bathing there too. They came to meet her now with open arms. And Claire was amazed to see how Madeleine changed as soon as she undressed. She shed her reserve along with her clothes, played around and joked with the women. Her laughter broke out in waves, echoing back from the walls and infecting other women sitting further off.
All of a sudden Claire was among strange women who smiled at her and immediately included her in their conversation, as if she had always been one of them. And soon she too was giving her opinion of some husband or other who was being picked to pieces in his absence. After an hour she was pleasantly tired, and went to sleep on the warm floor. When she woke up she was surprised to find how peaceful she felt. The room was almost empty, the women she had been with had moved on into the next room, where it was warmer. She lay where she was, looking up at the dome with the little stained glass windows that muted the sunlight. She felt safer than she had been for a long time. The world was far away, Elias and Alexandra were far away. Only Farid looked at her with his beautiful eyes that were so strangely like her father’s.
If it were possible to feel as secure as she did here, and live with no one but her son, life would be all right, she thought after a while, slowly sitting up. She heard Madeleine laugh again. The assistant – a dark-skinned woman with a friendly face and terribly bad teeth, mere stumps – appeared suddenly, as if she had been waiting for Claire to wake. She handed her dry, snow-white towels, and took away the wet and sweaty ones. Slowly, Claire went into the next room.
She talked for hours with Sarifa and Baraka, two women of wide experience. Sarifa was married for the second time, and very happy with her new husband, the way you can only be in movies. She was the more outspoken of the two, and advised Claire to leave her husband and throw everything into the lap of fate.
Baraka was almost sixty, and was quieter but also more inscrutable. The other women joked about her, calling her Mashnakt Rigal, “a gallows for husbands”. Her fourth husband had died a year ago of some strange stomach disease, and his family had accused Baraka of poisoning him. Baraka recommended her to fight back against her rival Alexandra; she mustn’t let the other woman off the hook for a moment.
Claire laughed a great deal, and she felt lighter at heart with Madeleine and the other women, as if she had washed off not only her dirt but her grief as well. She liked the company of Sarifa and Baraka, but her love for Elias was something different, so she couldn’t take their advice. But she did take something home with her that afternoon: she knew she wasn’t alone any more. Both women understood her, and Sarifa made it clear, as they said goodbye, that she would be happy to see Claire in the baths again next Wednesday. And Claire went there with Madeleine not only the following week but almost every Wednesday after that for years.
After the hammam Claire went home feeling relaxed, stepping lightly. But as soon as she was back, and had picked Farid up and said goodbye to her father, her dismal thoughts returned. All the lightness of heart she had felt with the women was gone.
How could Elias do this to her? Why did it have to happen to her? Wasn’t what she’d been through with three miscarriages enough? And why did he choose that cackling goose Alexandra who’d already been wiggling her bottom about like a whore at the age of thirteen, and always used to say she knew where a man’s brains were: in his balls, semen was his brain-juice and that was why it looked so milky?
How could Elias find happiness between the legs of a stranger, a stupid woman like that? Hadn’t she satisfied him? What all his protestations of faithfulness? Perhaps part of t
he trouble was those long periods of abstinence after her miscarriages. Elias needed sex every day; he had joked about it often enough, hinting at his appetite. She was always tired in the evenings now, after the boy’s birth, because she had to get up to feed him three or four times in the night. Elias sat alone, drinking his arrack in silence. Had that driven him into that woman Alexandra’s arms? Her head was buzzing with questions all afternoon. She couldn’t answer any of them.
She washed and made her face up, but when Elias came home she looked at him with grief in her eyes. He didn’t even try to lie to her when she asked, “Is it true about Alexandra?”
“Yes,” he said. “I have a relationship with Madame Makram Bey.”
In spite of his embarrassment, Elias felt relieved. He had wanted to tell Claire again and again over these last few months. But her silence had left him confused. It was a deep lake threatening to drown him bit by bit. Three times he had brought out Alexandra’s name, but Claire had stifled any other words by showing her undisguised contempt for the woman.
His silence had been a lie. How often had he lied? He thought back, remembering how he had sometimes felt he was standing outside himself, as if he were two men. One Elias was talking just to please people, the other Elias said nothing, but registered the lies. Had it happened once or a hundred times? How often had he agreed with Claire that Arab women needed freedom and equal rights? He had noticed that she liked to hear him say so. She had confused love with the attitudes he adopted.
Now he felt relief. “It’s not the way you think, though,” he said. Claire had promised herself all afternoon to keep calm, but when he said that and put out a hand to placate her she struck it away and wept. “You’ve deceived me, Elias. I never loved anyone in my life as I’ve loved you, and now you pay me back by deceiving me. Oh, Elias,” she cried, almost inaudibly, as if to say: help me, please, I’m dying. But it was a long time before she could get another word out.
“Elias,” she whispered at last, weeping as if for the death of someone she had loved dearly. He sat beside her, lost in thought, and dared not try to touch her again. And for a moment she hoped he would explain that it was all a mistake and put his arm around her shoulders, and then she wouldn’t shake it off. She felt he was about to do just that, but then he merely stood up and went to the window, and she knew that he belonged to Alexandra now.
She was intimidated, and said no more. It was more than ten years before she recovered from the shock.
61. Pangs of Conscience
No one was buying the idea that Elias had been very devout since he left the Jesuit school. Many regarded him as a hypocrite. He was on the committees of all the Catholic associations of the city of Damascus and the village of Mala, he dutifully went to church on Sunday, and then he slept around for the rest of the week.
He thought his first affair during his marriage stupid at both the beginning and the end of it, but Alexandra – or Madame Makram Bey, as she liked to be called – was hot as a wasp in full sunlight and smelled of unsatisfied lust for many metres around her. And since he could hardly make love to Claire at all at the time, he fell for the temptation.
It was at a party given by her husband for the deputies who had elected him their parliamentary president. Elias and three of his employees, clad in snow-white coats and caps, were to serve the delicious sweetmeats. Suddenly Alexandra came delicately tripping up to him and said it was she who had persuaded her husband to choose Elias’s shop to supply them. And that same evening, as the new parliamentary president was smoking his Cuban cigars, drinking French champagne and talking to the deputies, Alexandra was enjoying her first love-play with Elias in a small bedroom on the third floor of the big house.
Claire refused to believe that he suffered every time he satisfied himself with a woman, but he did. Quite often, when he came away from one of them, he looked for the nearest church, knelt down before Christ, and asked for forgiveness. It was like that with Alexandra. The morning after their night of pleasure he was tormented by pangs of conscience, and begged the supreme judge of all for justice and mercy. For after all he, the creator of all the worlds, had given Elias his prick and his eternal lust for women. So he must surely have a heart open to the sins of his suffering servant.
But with Alexandra, and only with her, Elias felt he was very close to power, and he wanted to prove himself to his father through power and importance. Elias knew that Makram Bey was a slave to his wife and would do anything she wanted, and now Alexandra herself had fallen for Elias in a big way.
By devious means, he let his father know directly after the party that he was friendly with the parliamentary president. Soon after that Salman and his wife had a chance to see the truth of it for themselves when they looked in at the confectioner’s shop. Elias had them given a coffee, and while they were drinking it a large limousine drove up, the parliamentary president’s wife stepped out, came into the shop, greeted the confectioner himself warmly, and told him her husband would like Elias to visit him that evening for a game of chess. Then she took the elegantly packaged sweetmeats that Elias had prepared for her, and left. The car had been blocking the street outside all this time, but no one waiting behind it dared to hoot or shout angrily, as drivers usually did in Damascus. It had no licence plate, and that was something not many people could afford.
Salman and Hanan were impressed, and when they went back to Mala that evening they told old Mushtak that Salman’s little brother did indeed go in and out of Makram Bey’s house. After that, George Mushtak was sick with a strange fever for a week. No one knew that Elias had staged the whole scene and asked Alexandra to come to the shop for that very purpose.
His desire for power was one compelling reason why he could tolerate Alexandra at all. Sometimes Elias took his penis in his hand and spoke to it. “My friend, you have more influence than certain powerful farmers.”
They parted not, as Alexandra said, because her husband left parliament to devote himself entirely to his large estate and his pure-bred horses, but because she insensitively told Elias what her spouse had said about him.
Makram Bey’s private detective always kept him informed about his wife’s affairs. He knew all her lovers by name, and even where and how often they met his wife. Why he wanted to know remained his secret. He showed her respect in public, and actually dedicated his reference book on Arab horses to “my loyal wife Alexandra”.
It was only in his cups that he called her names. Alexandra had told Elias all about it one day, with a detailed account of how, on this particular occasion, he had sent all the servants home and then laid five pieces of paper out on the drawing room table in front of her. Men’s names were written on them. “These are your lovers,” her inebriated husband had told her, in a perfectly clear voice. “The photographer’s a viper, the hairdresser’s an ape, the interior minister is a chameleon and the swimming-pool attendant is a crocodile.” Then, she said, he had paused, picked up the piece of paper bearing Elias’s name, and fell into a fit of laughter that left her utterly bewildered. “And as for this one,” he went on, “he’s a donkey from Mala. I ride Arab horses, and a donkey rides my wife.” And he had actually whinnied, and then left her standing there while he went to his bedroom. When she followed him he was already snoring. Next morning he was as kind and subservient to her as ever.
Elias was seething with anger, but he kept calm. He didn’t understand why such a despicable old man would call him a donkey. But then Alexandra told Elias she’d expect him next Thursday, when her husband would be away spending the night on his estate. “The old fool is so crazy about horses he can’t wait for a couple of pedigree mares to foal,” she explained, laughing heartily, “and I want to ride my donkey.”
Elias felt deeply wounded and humiliated. He told her he didn’t want to see her any more, and asked her to leave his shop at once. Alexandra fell silent, and her smile slipped sideways on her face, like a mask. “Lousy peasant,” Elias heard her saying angrily as she went out.
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After that he never touched another Damascene woman. Instead, he made love to women in Mala, who were grateful for his presents and his money. Not that Elias paid them much, but it was important to him to know that he was buying their love, because he wanted to make the nature of the deal perfectly clear. He was the master, he was helping himself to lonely women whose menfolk had emigrated to the Gulf states in the late forties or early fifties, or were away driving long-distance trucks between Damascus and Kuwait or Riyadh.
He had more than ten mistresses in the village, and went to see them in secret whenever he wanted. And just as he bought olive oil, honey, wine, cracked wheat, raisins, almonds, and sheep’s cheese for his household only from Mala, despising all the products on sale in the city, he did the same with women. It was rumoured in the village that many of the emigrants’ children were really his sons and daughters, but rumour flourished in the imagination of the villagers.
However, no one in Mala knew that Elias Mushtak hated the women he made love to, because after the act, sober again, he suffered from the pangs of his guilty conscience. He damned the women who had such power over him, and would often say, even before he had done his trousers up again, “You’re costing me money now and the torments of Hell later.”
62. Practice
Farid was six when he came to Claire’s bedside one night. “Mama,” he whispered, “Papa’s talking to the cupboard.” And he pointed to the drawing room. He had woken up because he needed to go to the lavatory, and heard his father’s voice.
His mother sat up and stroked her son’s head. “Don’t worry,” she whispered, sitting on the edge of the bed and taking Farid on her lap.
Then she listened, and clearly heard her husband’s voice. He was sitting with his face turned to the cupboard. She could see his back from her bed. The cupboard, like the seats in the room and its ceiling, was made of walnut wood elaborately decorated with coloured intarsia work.