by Rafik Schami
have them read out in all churches and mosques,
and put in all the newspapers.
The earth, like the sun, belongs to all men.
Every farmer may plant and eat as much as he needs.
Every man may light a lamp whenever he wishes.
The right to the first night is repealed.
All peasants may wear patent leather shoes.
Colonel Shaklan smiled at the peasant’s naivety, but his advisers warned him that what Tanios was asking was the first step towards communism. Shaklan had better send his troops to kill the peasant leader, they said.
Three thousand infantry set out into the mountains in February 1953. Exactly a week later, Damascus had lost all contact with the expedition. Together with their cannon, military transports, and fifteen trucks carrying ammunition, they had disappeared into the impenetrable green vegetation of the mountains. Two weeks later, a truck reached the capital with the bodies of twenty-three officers. Rumour said that Tanios had cast a spell over the common soldiers, who had shot all the officers and gone over to the rebel side.
It was a devastating defeat. Colonel Shaklan swore revenge, but then, in May 1953, a great rebellion broke out among the Druses in the south of the country. So the colonel had to send his troops there, but he reinforced supervision of the roads in the north with checkpoints and mobile units of men.
The bus driver seemed to be experienced. At every barrier he had replied to the questions put by the NCOs, which were always the same, in a casual and almost bored tone. He seemed to have all the time in the world, and on their way had kept stopping at some shabby kiosk where only soldiers sat around on old wooden crates drinking tea. They all seemed to know him well.
But now that these armed civilians had stopped him he suddenly fell silent and huddled further and further back in his seat. The officer didn’t seem to trust him. He waved the driver’s ID in front of his face. “In my opinion,” he said, “a man who drives more than three times through the region of these godless folk and hasn’t been shot yet is one of them himself. But unfortunately the government in Damascus won’t listen to me, so you can enjoy your life for a little while longer,” he added with an unpleasant grin, and handed the bus driver his ID back. He did not speak angrily or in loud and threatening tones, but with quiet emphasis, and for that very reason his words had the ring of death in them.
When the officer asked Farid’s father his name, he replied in a hesitant, indistinct voice, “Elias … Elias Mushtak, sir.”
“Are you related to Mustafa Mushtak?” asked the officer.
“No, sir, certainly not,” replied Elias, and he felt a stabbing pain in his larynx.
“What makes you so sure?”
“We’re Christians, and Mustafa is a Muslim name,” said Elias, and he knew the officer was acting dumb on purpose to lure him into a trap.
“Your profession?” he heard the officer ask.
“Confectioner,” replied Elias quietly.
“And what’s a confectioner from Damascus doing here?”
“I’m taking my son to the monastery of St. Sebastian. He wants to be a priest.”
“A priest?” repeated the officer incredulously, scrutinizing Farid. “The boy doesn’t look to me as if he’ll be a priest.” He fell silent. Then he asked, casually, “The monastery is in the area controlled by the godless Salman Sufi, am I right?”
“We didn’t know that in Damascus. The news didn’t mention any unrest. I first heard that name in the bus this morning.”
Elias’s voice was gradually growing stronger again in his indignation, as he realized that the authorities were suppressing all news of anything like epidemics and rebels.
“Do you expect the government to put out propaganda for the criminals? We shall soon crush them, but by the Prophet Muhammad, your son’s never going to be a priest. Why would he want to? What’s your name, my boy?”
Elias Mushtak felt the derision in the man’s words like a knife stabbing him. Who gave this lousy Muslim the right to say whether or not Farid had a vocation for the priesthood?
“Farid Mushtak,” he heard his son answer fearlessly. The officer entered the name in his list, as he had with the other passengers. Farid thought it was all for show. Why bother to write down the names of hundreds of people who happened to be driving through rebel territory?
The officer turned to the next passengers. Now Elias took out his handkerchief with a steady hand and mopped his face dry. Soon the officer got out, and the armed men disappeared as quickly as they had come. The column of cars, carts, and trucks that had been waiting behind the bus in silence all this time gradually moved on up the narrow mountain track.
When the bus driver reached the next stop, he parked in the shade of an ancient elm tree and joined the customers in the kiosk. “Fifteen minutes’ rest for everyone!” he called to his passengers. His voice sounded friendly but exhausted. The passengers were grateful to him.
Farid tried not to look at the elm tree. He didn’t want to get out. His father, however, joined the men in the kiosk. Farid closed his eyes, and suddenly he saw the elm surrounded by tall flames.
Back in the Easter vacation in Mala, the flames had blazed through the night. The fire hadn’t gone out until nearly four in the morning, when only the green, right-hand half of the tree was left. No one except his father thought Farid had set fire to it. At the time, however, in the village elder’s house, Elias Mushtak had decided with all the severity of a judge that his son would atone by entering the monastery of St. Sebastian.
Farid was alone in the bus now, except for three chickens cackling faintly and wearily under one of the front seats. They sounded like a distant radio station transmitting in a foreign language.
After a while the engine roared again, and the travellers were quick to get back into the bus. The driver looked in the rear-view mirror and saw that one seat was still empty. He hooted three times, and a pretty young peasant girl climbed in. Farid thought she had the most beautiful ears, eyes, and lips he had ever seen.
Later he kept thinking of what lay ahead of him. He had been told just before they left that the former Jesuit monastery was notorious for its strict discipline, but the most important bishops of Syria and Lebanon had studied there.
Elias Mushtak considered it important that the monastery of St. Sebastian, although officially in Arab hands, still trained its students in the modern but strict Jesuit manner. Strict discipline was exactly what his son needed, everything came too easily to him, Elias had said in defending his decision to Claire. Farid was wasting his clever mind. And he didn’t want him ending up as priest in some lousy little village, he had the makings of a great theologian.
None of these ideas cut any ice with Farid. As he saw it, entering a monastery was a punishment. And what for? The rotten half of a miserable elm tree at the back of beyond.
A bitter taste, acrid as smoke, rose in his throat and tears came to his eyes. His father had fallen asleep. For a second Farid toyed with the idea of getting quietly to his feet, jumping out of the large, open window and disappearing into the undergrowth. Any chance-met robber would understand him better than the man beside him. The bus was going very slowly, because there were small rocks and large branches all over the road. The driver had to steer past these obstacles at snail’s pace.
Most of the passengers were sleeping, exhausted, in the pleasant cool breeze with its fragrance of resin, thyme, and damp soil. Farid peered into the impenetrable green. He couldn’t see the faintest trace of any human figure, yet he was sure that sharp eyes were keeping a close watch on the bus. Soon the forest became so dense that Farid could actually touch the leaves and branches of the trees if he put his hand out of the window.
The driver stopped and climbed out. Farid saw him take a jute sack from a hiding place under the bonnet and put it under a tree by the roadside. After that he got back in and drove on. Farid was just in time to see two men slipping out of the bushes and disappearing again
with the sack, quick as a flash of lightning.
116. Elopement
Rana was sitting on a park bench with Farid, staring into space. She had just heard that he was to go into the monastery, and tears were running down her cheeks. “Why are they taking you away from me? What will I do without you?” she asked.
Rana never talked much, but her words were always harbingers of her deeds. Nor did she say much at this meeting, as usual, but she told Farid she had decided to run away with him. Only now did he see her little case beside the bench.
Her words touched Farid, and the sight of that case made him feel both deeply uneasy and furiously angry with his father. When those two emotions clashed, there was only one thing he could do: he agreed to the elopement.
If this delicate girl was brave enough, why must he always be a coward and do as he was told? He hurried home, packed his pyjamas, two pairs of trousers, two shirts, a large quantity of underwear, all Rana’s love letters and his entire savings: 100 Syrian lira. Finally he wrote a single sentence on a piece of paper and put it in his mother’s cosmetics bag: Mama, I love you.
Farid and Rana quickly agreed on their destination: Beirut, the Lebanese capital. Once there, they planned to earn money and travel to America with forged passports.
They found a taxi. The driver, a young man with a practised eye, knew after they had gone ten kilometres that they were eloping. He had to smile, because he himself had once done something similar. In his case, he told them, the love story had ended with a reconciliation and not a hole in the head. He too had hidden in Beirut with his wife for five years, until the storm at home died down with the birth of his first child. Today his father-in-law, who had once sent a killer to track him down, positively idolized him, he said.
Farid and Rana felt more hopeful. The taxi driver was willing to help them. He knew an old woman in Beirut, he told them, very discreet, he was sure she would rent them a room.
Twenty kilometres before the border, however, his smile froze as he sat behind the steering wheel, when he found out that naïve as they were, Farid and Rana expected to get into Lebanon without any papers. But in spite of his initial horror, he went on being helpful. He drove a long way around through several villages, dropped them off at an abandoned mill, showed them an old, ruinous railroad embankment, and told them how to find a secret path into Lebanon. He promised to wait for them on the Lebanese side of the border.
They both ducked into the tall grass, waited until the border guards had finished their hourly patrol, and then ran across the embankment and easily climbed over the rusty barbed wire fence, which was falling down anyway. After that they had to cross an open field. They ran for their lives. Twice Farid imagined that he heard someone calling, “Stop, this is the police!” but nothing was going to stop him now.
At last they reached a road leading to a village. It ran through orchards, and the taxi was parked in the shade of a house. Their guardian angel was sitting in it.
“Welcome to Lebanon!” he said, beaming, and he got out of the car to greet them. “You made it. No one will bother you any more here,” he said as he raced away with them. Only now did Farid realize that his case had been in the back of the car the whole time. All his money was in it.
“Where’s yours?” he asked Rana quietly. She smiled at him, and patted her stomach. “Here, in a thin leather bag.”
They were brother and sister, said the taxi driver, and they had to live in hiding for a few months because of a blood feud. This story was necessary, for otherwise no one would have taken in such young lovers. The old widow looked at them with narrowed eyes.
“A blood feud,” she repeated, and nodded.
That first night with Rana was so exciting that Farid couldn’t sleep at all. They kissed, feeling very nervous. He had never seen Rana naked before. He knelt down by the bed and adored her body, which was shivering with excitement and got goosebumps whenever he touched her. Farid had found her most sensitive spot, her nipples, and when he tenderly sucked them the demons of inhibition slunk out of the room. The two of them licked and kissed each other, curious and hungry for more. Suddenly Rana’s body was like a wave of the sea. She swayed up and down and let out a soft cry. It sounded like the cry of a gull, and satisfied Farid to the depths of his heart. Only at dawn did they fall asleep.
They did not guess that their landlady, who had been shut out of this Paradise ever since her husband’s early death fifty years before, was listening to it all outside the door. An inexorable knocking woke Farid abruptly. For a moment he didn’t know where he was and why Rana was lying naked beside him.
He asked the widow to wait a moment and dressed. The woman nagged about immorality and her conscience. For twice the rent of the room, however, she said she was prepared to let the two of them go on staying there.
When they had negotiated this deal, their days in Beirut were wonderfully peaceful. Rana and Farid felt that they belonged together. Every conversation, every plan, every touch brought them closer. Soon they found out that travelling to America on expertly forged passports was by no means impossible.
At the time the city of Beirut was a handsome seaport. Rana and Farid walked by the sea as often as they could. That spring was particularly cold, and the beaches were empty. They sang together in competition with the breaking waves, and talked about their future life in America. They ate very little, but Farid never again enjoyed eating as much as he did in those days, sitting on a park bench beside Rana and sharing a falafel with her.
As soon as they had closed the door of their room behind them, they fell into one another’s arms. At first Rana pecked at his tenderness like a pampered bird, and Farid swallowed hers like a hungry wolf, but as the days went by his greed was less demanding, while Rana became increasingly insatiable.
After a week Farid found work selling newspapers, and he bought Rana a wristwatch with his first wages. That same day the old woman turned up again, talking about the loss she was suffering with the rent they had been paying so far. She wanted to double what was already a high price for the room. Farid, alarmed to see how their reserves were dwindling, refused, and decided that they would move, but that point never came.
Just after midnight they were at the police station. It was a cold night. The officers soothed Rana and gave her tea to drink, but she kept on crying.
“Please let us go!” she begged the police officers. “We want to go to America.”
“I’m afraid you can’t, little one, you’re still a minor,” said the officer, a stout Lebanese with huge bags under his eyes. He hit Farid and accused him of seducing little girls. A woman took Rana into the next room with her, wrapped her in a blanket and held her close like an anxious mother. “You must say it was all his fault, and then they’ll let you go,” she said. Rana indignantly freed herself from the woman’s embrace. “He didn’t do anything. I was the one who abducted him,” she cried angrily.
Three hours later they were driven to the border and handed over to the Syrian police. “I’ll wait for you until eternity,” said Rana.
The two Lebanese officers were much amused. “Is someone shooting a movie around here?” one of them asked.
“No, the child’s seen too many Egyptian tearjerkers,” replied the other.
The Syrians police spoke angrily to the two young people at the border. A stout woman took Rana into a cell and once again tried to persuade her to say that Farid had abducted her. Rana screamed as loudly as she could, because she heard the blows raining down on Farid in the next room, where two police officers kept shouting, “Pimp!”
After half an hour, all was quiet at last.
When Farid came back to his senses, it was early in the afternoon. A middle-aged police officer led him out of the cell. “Your fiancée’s father isn’t going to bring charges, to avoid any scandal. My word, kid, you’re lucky! If it had been my daughter I’d have shot you.”
Elias Mushtak, his face dark, was waiting in the office of the police station to colle
ct Farid. In the dusty car park, blind with rage, he hit out at his son. Farid staggered and could hardly breathe. He dimly saw the concerned faces of the passengers in the buses waiting at the border to have their papers checked. A child cried and pointed out of the window at Farid. In spite of all his pain, he felt ashamed.
One of the bus drivers went up to Elias and tried to calm him. That made him even angrier. “It’s a disgrace. First a fire-raiser, now he abducts a minor.”
And so saying he hit Farid full in the ribs. Farid lost consciousness and fell to the ground.
At that moment Rana came out of the building. She saw Farid lying there and wanted to go to him at once, but her father – in his light summer suit, and carrying her case – pushed her courteously but firmly into his parked black Citroën.
Elias Mushtak watched the car drive away, then looked back at Farid, and went to his Fiat, bent with exhaustion. He dropped the small case on the back seat, got into the car, and started the engine. With difficulty, Farid hauled himself into the passenger seat.
They were home in an hour’s time. Farid was in so much pain that he could hardly get out of the car. His knees were grazed, his face was swollen, but his ribs hurt worst. He still found breathing difficult. Helplessly, he began to cry.
The Mushtaks, Claire often used to say in jest (but accurately hitting the bull’s-eye) have their moments of insanity. When Elias lost his temper he ranted like a madman, but never for more than five minutes. After that he was ashamed of failing to control himself better. Farid’s grandfather had been just the same.
Claire came out of the door. At the sight of her son she was rooted to the spot with shock, but only when they were all inside the house, and she had carefully closed the door, did she explode. “What have you been doing to my son? My only son!” she shouted at Elias. For the first time in her life she felt she actually hated this narrow-minded, deranged confectioner who was now sitting there in silence, staring at the fountain in the inner courtyard.