The Dark Side of Love

by Rafik Schami

  He hadn’t been frightened until the smaller boy took out his knife, but the sight of the sharp blade paralysed him, and he was unable to tear himself away. The smaller boy, who had one eye half stitched up, came towards him. He pressed the point of his knife into Farid’s navel and asked, enveloping him with wafts of bad breath, “Are you a Christian?”

  “Yes,” said Farid, with his throat dry, trembling.

  “Trousers down!” cried the stout boy, laughing like someone possessed. He held Farid’s head firmly between his legs. A few seconds later his trousers were on the ground.

  “Now your underpants!” he shouted. The girl suddenly attacked the smaller boy. He hit back, but she fought grimly to free Farid. Her words still echoed in his ears years later: “Castrate your own friends, not the only friend I have!”

  After a while the smaller boy had Farid’s underpants down too. This humiliation dispelled the last of Farid’s paralysis. He freed his right arm and hit the stout boy in the balls with all his might. The boy bellowed like a steer and writhed in pain. Then Farid ran to the smaller boy, who was slapping the infuriated beauty, grabbed a chair and brought it down on the boy’s back until he fell over.

  Suddenly a man entered the courtyard and stared wide-eyed at the exhausted combatants. “What the devil’s going on here?” he cried in alarm, and fell on the stout boy and the smaller boy. They flew through the air. The lighter boy landed next to the fountain, the larger one head over heels beside the mattress.

  “They were going to circumcize me,” said Farid, crying and covering his penis with both hands.

  “For God’s sake! That’s the last time I tell you, you dogs!” cried the man. He ran into the kitchen and came back with a long bamboo cane. The stouter boy began whimpering, but the man lashed out at both of them, hardly minding where he hit. “How often do I have to tell you not to touch that knife, how often?” he bellowed.

  Farid put his clothes on and was going to slip away. The man stopped for a moment and looked at him with a smile. “You won’t tell your parents, will you? They’re just a couple of stupid boys and a feeble-minded girl.”

  The girl laughed and lifted her dress above her head, exposing her buttocks. She was shaking with laughter.

  Farid promised not to tell his parents, and at first he didn’t want to accept the five-piastre coin held out to him. But the man urged him in friendly tones to take it. So he finally put it in his pocket and ran out. He bought himself a packet of chewing gum and went back to his mother, who was just saying goodbye to her friend.

  “Well, did you have a nice time?” she asked.

  “You bet!” he muttered. His groin hurt.

  On the way home Claire suddenly stopped at a barber’s shop where men had gathered around a radio set. The barber had turned the volume right up. “War,” Farid heard. He didn’t understand.

  “Come on, we must get home, quick,” said Claire, and her face was clouded.

  A few days later he saw the first refugees arriving in Damascus. Someone said they were Palestinians and the Jews had driven them out. People were saying they’d go home again in a few days’ time. But Elias shook his head.

  71. An Oasis Called Antoinette

  Antoinette Farah was dark-skinned and smelled of almonds. Farid had been playing with her as long as he could remember. She lived not far from him, in the blind alley leading to Josef’s house.

  Antoinette’s mother liked Farid very much. She often kissed him, much more often than she kissed her own son. Her husband, on the other hand would rather have seen Farid playing not with his daughter but with his lethargic son Djamil, who was two years older than his sister, but more interested in jam sandwiches than playing games. Farid and Antoinette soon found a way to get rid of Djamil. They told him which of the neighbours was cooking something really delicious that day, and he would be off like a shot to stand at that neighbour’s door with a pleading look in his eyes. Everyone liked his generous parents, and accepted greedy Djamil for their sake.

  Like Farid, Antoinette thought their own street very boring. She didn’t know any other girls of her own age there. It wasn’t until later that she made friends with Josef’s sister Josephine, who couldn’t stand her own brother either.

  Farid went to visit her whenever possible. As soon as Djamil had a sandwich in his hands, or was off tracking down a good meal, the two of them disappeared into the children’s room. The game that Farid liked best was lying on top of Antoinette, particularly on her back, which made him feel pleasantly hot between the legs. But she didn’t like that. It was Djamil who told him one day that Antoinette loved chocolate and would do anything for it. On his next visit Farid brought a chocolate bar with him and showed it to her. Of course she wanted it at once, and he stammered out what Djamil had told him to say. “You can have it if you’ll let me do what I want to you.”

  Antoinette glared furiously at her munching brother, but agreed, and lay on the carpet enjoying the chocolate while Farid rocked back and forth on her back.

  Djamil’s eyes were glued to the chocolate bar, and he ignored Farid entirely. When Antoinette had finished it and licked her fingers with relish she shook Farid off. “That’s enough for today. Bring me another bar and then you can ride on me again,” she said calmly, adjusting her clothes.

  “That didn’t last long,” he protested.

  “You can ride me for an hour for every chocolate bar,” said Djamil. Revolted, Farid turned away from him.

  “It may not seem very long to you on top, but it’s ages for me underneath. Want to try?” she asked.

  He lay on the carpet and Antoinette climbed on top of him. At first he thought it was amusing, but then her rocking weight felt uncomfortable, and the minutes seemed an eternity.

  One summer night the Mushtaks visited the Farah family, and after a leisurely meal the grown-ups played cards. Farid had asked to be allowed to sleep over with the Farah children, and the three of them went off to the children’s room next to their parents’ bedroom on the second floor and played games, looking out of the window now and then at the grown-ups enjoying the cool night air down in the courtyard.

  Soon Djamil was asleep, and Antoinette showed Farid her latest discovery. She crawled under her blanket with him and raised her legs to make a tent. Where the wool was thick the roof of the tent was dark, but in some places the blanket let the light of the bright lamp in the room come through.

  “Look at the sky, and those are the clouds,” she said in the dim light, and then pointed to a tiny hole in the blanket. Light fell through it. “And that’s my star. It visits me every day before I go to sleep.”

  Farid wasn’t sure later how long they had played under the blanket. At some point he fell asleep, and his parents had long ago gone home when he suddenly woke up. He heard moans and laughter. When he sat up in the bed he saw that Antoinette was awake too. He could see her face in the light coming into the room from a lamp in the inner courtyard. She put her forefinger to her lips.

  “What’s going on? Where am I?” he asked softly.

  “In our house. Perhaps …” she said, and hesitated as a loud moan came from the room next door. Her mother was begging for more, and her father was crying breathlessly, “Yes, yes!” again and again.

  “They’re making love,” said Antoinette, smiling. “They do that almost every night.”

  “Is your Papa hurting your Mama?”

  “No, no, he’s necking with her. And she wants more.”

  The sound of the woman’s laughter reassured Farid. Antoinette put her head on his chest and stroked his hand. Finally she crawled over to him and kissed him on the lips. Her mouth tasted of peppermint, probably because she had to clean her teeth every evening. It was nice, and Farid kissed her cheek. Her face was hot, and she kissed him on the lips again, holding his hand tight in hers, almost as if she were praying. He pressed it, and felt that she was perspiring. For the first time he smelled her sweat. That night she smelled of almonds and coffee.


  She bared her breasts. “You must kiss me here and then they’ll grow,” she said in the dark, raising herself until her little nipple pushed into his mouth. Farid sucked it, and she laughed because it tickled. “Not so hard, or they’ll grow too big,” she whispered, giving him her other breast.

  72. The Hammam

  Later, the word Paradise always made Farid think of the time when he was still a little boy and could go to the hammam with his mother. They went to the Hammam al Bakri, near Bab Tuma. Wednesday was the women’s day. Antoinette and her mother were always there.

  The hammam was a world of its own. In later years, when Farid saw the paintings of the French Romantics idealizing women in the hammam or the harem, he thought their pictures boring by comparison with what he remembered.

  The two most beautiful girls there were Jeannette and Antoinette, although they looked very different. Jeannette had pale skin and green eyes. Antoinette’s skin was dark, almost black. Both were maturing rather early, and at the age of ten they already had small breasts and round little backsides.

  Jeannette liked playing in the hammam with a blond boy from Ananias Alley. Antoinette, on the other hand, was interested only in Farid. It was she who explained the difference between men and women to him in one of the empty cubicles. Opening her legs, she showed him her vagina. Farid thought it was a wound.

  “Have they cut off your little pigeon?” he asked. Children in Damascus called a penis a pigeon in those days, because they thought it looked as if it were sitting on two eggs.

  Antoinette giggled. “No, silly. Women keep their little pigeon and its eggs in a nest inside them.”

  He didn’t understand, and she giggled again, but promised to tell him all about it. However, she never did, for directly after this he was torn away from his dream of Paradise. Overnight, he wasn’t allowed to go to the hammam with the women any more. Years later Claire told him how the women would hint delicately to a mother that it was time she stopped bringing her son. He laughed, but at the time, aged nine and suddenly banished, he had wept in the courtyard for a whole hour.

  “Your son will soon be needing a bride.” That was how the coded information went. If a mother didn’t catch on, the women put it more clearly. “Next time you’d better bring his father too,” they would say.

  Claire had taken the hint. “You can go with Papa from now on,” she had told Farid next Wednesday, and set off alone with her things.

  So Saturday after Saturday he followed his father to the baths. Elias always went on his own, and if he met any acquaintances it was by chance. He didn’t mind who was there and who wasn’t. The men always conducted boring conversations about business and war, extravagant and unfaithful women, the government and the weather.

  And then there was the horrible man who did the soaping and whose eyes followed him every Saturday. He would soap and massage the men for a few piastres. He talked to Elias for a long time until he was persuaded to pay for a massage with his son. You never lay there naked, but always with a towel around you, and the masseur too had a thin apron around his hips. His bare torso was tattooed and not very hairy.

  Farid didn’t like the heavily built man, so he didn’t want to go into a cubicle with him, but said he’d rather stay in the large public room. The masseur muttered, but agreed. He worked away on Farid’s back for a while. Then, suddenly, he was lying on top of the boy with his penis erect, massaging him with a sisal glove.

  Farid tried to get up, but the man pushed him back on the wet stone floor. Elias was drowsing on a bench above the stove at the far end of the room. Everything went blurred before Farid’s eyes and suddenly looked dim and misty. His father appeared to be far away and out of reach. Then he felt the man removing the towel that covered his buttocks. “No!” he cried, rearing his upper body up. Only the man’s apron separated his excited penis from the orifice it desired.

  Elias briefly opened his eyes. “What?” he muttered, and dozed off again. But another man saw Farid’s plight, and emerged from the mists.

  “What are you doing with the boy?” he asked quietly. He wasn’t sure, because he couldn’t see properly in all the steam.

  The embarrassed masseur smiled. “He doesn’t like being rubbed down with sisal,” he claimed. “The boy has skin like a girl’s, but he’ll soon get used to it.”

  “No, I won’t,” protested Farid.

  Now the man did see what was going on. “And what’s that, then?” he asked, low-voiced, taking hold of the erect penis with the towel. The masseur flinched back, and Farid jumped up.

  His father was still asleep.

  Farid never let himself be overruled like that again. He didn’t want to be either massaged or soaped, and soon he stopped going to the hammam.

  But after he had been banished from that female Paradise, Antoinette didn’t want to play with him any more. “You’re a man now,” she said, “and it’s not a good idea for a girl to play with men.” From then on she spoke sharply to him, just as Josef’s sister did. And without Antoinette, Farid’s childhood was as boring as white cotton wool, until the day when Josef let him join the gang.

  73. The Gang

  He was to go to the attic at midnight. It was a warm spring night, and Farid lay awake in his bed. His heart was hopping with excitement like a scared rabbit. When the clock struck twelve he jumped up and slipped out of his room barefoot. He heard a brief cough, and froze beside the fountain. Then he went on to the stairway between the bathroom and the drawing room. At the landing on the second floor, a pleasantly cool breeze blew into his face, smelling of jasmine and aniseed.

  Farid stopped by the wooden banisters for a moment, observing the inner courtyards, the gardens, and the roof of the aniseed warehouse below him. When he saw a shadow scurrying up to the attic, he climbed on the low banister rail and jumped.

  The attic door was open just a crack. Candlelight flickered. Farid slipped into the large room like a ghost, without opening the door any further. Josef and three other boys were sitting around a large wooden table on which two candles were burning. The only window in the attic was covered with a thick cloth so that the light wouldn’t give them away. The room was musty.

  Apart from Josef, Farid knew only one boy in the gang: thin Azar from the class above him at school. They were all barefoot and in their pyjamas. He sat down on a chair at the table with his back to the door. That made all of them except Josef laugh. It was only later that he realized why. No one but a beginner, a trusting child, sits with his back to the door.

  “This is Farid,” said his sponsor Josef in his dry voice. “I’ve sounded him out. He’s okay. I propose him as a candidate.” The others nodded agreement.

  “So if no one objects, he must take the oath now that he’ll never betray anyone from our gang and will keep faith with it for ever,” Josef went on. “And if he keeps his word, he’ll be a full member in six months’ time.”

  Word for word and parrot-fashion, Farid spoke the pompous sentences that Josef asked him to repeat. Even years later he remembered that meeting. It had impressed him greatly, and gave him experience of a political discussion for the first time in his life. A few days before, at the end of March, Colonel Hablan had led a coup against the civilian government. It was the first coup in Arabia. Rasuk, one of the members of the gang, said that Hablan had gone proudly to Faris Khuri, a famous and brilliant politician. “Well, what do you think of my coup?” Hablan had asked Khuri. “It succeeded without a single shot being fired. Isn’t that brilliant?” But the wily politician replied, “I can’t be the judge of that. However, you have opened a door that you’ll never be able to close again. Someone else will soon come through that door and overthrow you.” The colonel had laughed, and left. A few months later, Rasuk told them how another man had carried out a new coup and had Colonel Hablan shot.

  The gang met almost daily to discuss their operations, although what effect those operations had was not apparent. Far more important were the nocturnal meetings that strengthene
d their nerves and made them feel brave. Later, they exchanged banned books and secret plans and ideas. The gang opened the gates of life to Farid, and suddenly he felt as if he had spent his earlier years packed away in cotton wool, like a larva in its cocoon.

  74. Boxing

  Laila thought boxing the most stupid of all sports. “It’s just men making an art out of their wish to beat each other up,” she said, when Farid enthusiastically told her how he had been to a fight with his grandfather, sitting in the front row to have a really good view.

  Elias had gone to a friend’s funeral in Beirut, and Grandfather Nagib just happened to drop in that afternoon, or so he claimed. When Claire told him that her husband had gone away that morning for two days, he simply gave her a mischievous smile.

  “Then I can take my young friend for a good long walk in town again, and he can stay the night with us. That way you’ll have peace and quiet and you can do as you like for two days.”

  Claire laughed. “When the cat’s away the mice will play.”

  But she agreed, stipulating only that her boy must come home as early as possible next morning, because his cousin Laila would be passing through Damascus and was going to drop in.

  Nagib took Farid to a boxing match in the main hall of the club, where he always had the best, upholstered seats. The first fight was boring. “Beginners,” said a spectator to their right.

  Grandfather disappeared during the intermission, and didn’t come back even when the bell rang for the next fight. Farid, feeling anxious, left his seat and went in search of Nagib. He suddenly felt afraid that his grandfather might have fainted in the men’s room, so he ran that way. There were four or five cubicles in a large room. The first two were empty, but as he was about to open the third door he saw his grandfather coming out of a small room a little way off. There was a young man with him. Grandfather adjusted his jacket and checked his flies, then took out his wallet and gave the stranger some money. Obviously overwhelmed by his generosity, the young man kissed Nagib’s hand. Nagib took the man’s face in his hands and kissed him on the lips. Farid, who had just been going to hail his grandfather, felt strangely moved, and stood rooted to the spot in the shadow of the door.