The Dark Side of Love

by Rafik Schami

  “Suppose I don’t tell him anything?” asked Farid.

  “Then he’ll keep asking questions and get people to spy on you. That man works hand in hand with the monastery administration, and they’re keen to pick out potential troublemakers.”

  So Farid went for a session of spiritual welfare, presenting himself as a boy plagued by minor anxieties. And yet again it worked exactly as Bulos had said it would.

  At the beginning of 1955 the Syrian Brothers had fifteen members. Bulos felt like a little ruler. He had come up with the idea that if an informer was caught at it twice, next time he would be beaten up and then the punishment squad would pee all over him. A week after the first such punishment was carried out the news spread like wildfire, and the authorities lost most of their informers. The monks were going around in circles. They knew nothing about the Syrian Brothers, and that gave the group the power of which Bulos always dreamed. He was a genius when it came to choosing his supporters. The group grew slowly, but it stuck together like a block of marble.

  Over the next few weeks and months Bulos didn’t say much about Gabriel. Farid thought his friend had finally realized that he was wrong about the monk. It was a long time before he found out that he himself had been mistaken.

  132. Fire and Water

  A playwriting competition for the eleventh and twelfth grades was held in January, and Bulos won it with a work entitled The Sufferings of the Christians in China. Apparently Brother Gabriel was the only member of the jury to have voted against his victory.

  Rehearsals began in early March. Farid and Marcel joined in out of friendship for Bulos. The other members of the Syrian Brothers declined to take part; they weren’t interested in the theatre. Bulos swallowed this rebuff, but he was obviously disappointed, although there were more people in the monastery who wanted to be in the play than he needed.

  Farid was to act the part of a devout Catholic who was imprisoned at the end of the play. The communists were ruling the country, all of them small of stature and wearing uniform, with conspicuous red stars on their caps. They drank rice wine and mistreated the missionaries and their pupils. Bulos picked tall boys from the upper school to play the missionaries, while the youngest of the monastery pupils acted the parts of small Chinese.

  Producing his play was a considerable strain on Bulos, particularly as the secret society was involved in its first serious crisis just then. In May, Farid and the other members found out that Bulos had secretly formed a second group to operate in the monastery without the knowledge of the first. Bulos explained that his secrecy was intended to protect all concerned. But this time the crack that Farid heard inside himself was ear-splitting. His faith in Bulos was badly shaken. However, he kept quiet, and only Andreas, an eleventh-grade student, left the society of his own accord. He said he didn’t want any more to do with the group, but they could count on him not to give anyone away. Andreas had been one of the bravest of the members.

  Bulos controlled his fury with difficulty, and repaid the defection with contempt. He felt sure that only the threat of harsh punishment could prevent betrayal, not the integrity of someone like Andreas.

  Unlike Gabriel, who quietly followed his own route like water, taking the long way around where necessary, Bulos was blazing fire, instantly burning all doubts and obstacles in his path. He and Gabriel, each in his own way, were recruiting supporters. Farid gradually realized that their ideals were irreconcilable, and thought how agonized and hypocritical his friendship for two people at such odds with one another made him personally feel.

  But a letter from his father at the end of May took his mind right off these matters. Claire had been in hospital in March, said the letter, for an operation. Farid felt dazed, and breathed a sigh of relief only when he read that she was now in very good health again, and was coming to see him at the end of July.

  The letter ended with the news that Matta Blota, the strong boy from Mala who had been one of the party when the elm tree burned, and who ran away over two years ago, had now been caught and had seen sense. He would soon be entering the monastery of St. Sebastian.

  Farid smiled at his memories of the boy who had been supposed to join the monastery as a pupil in the summer of 1953, and he remembered Matta’s ability to swing like a monkey from branch to branch in the trees, as if he were Tarzan. Two days later, Gabriel confirmed the news that Farid had heard from Damascus.

  During June and the last phase of rehearsals, Bulos had been very irritable. He doubted everything and was satisfied with nothing. His anger was more and more clearly aimed at Gabriel, whom he suspected of being behind everything that went wrong. In mid-June came the first major dispute, when Gabriel criticized him in public during a rehearsal. Bulos rejected the criticism brusquely, and in the attic that night he raged against the monk. The Syrian Brothers said nothing. Bulos was beside himself. Gabriel was a communist, he said, and the only reason why he didn’t like the play was that it called the communists to account. He was gay as well, said Bulos, he needed two boys from the top grade to satisfy him every night.

  Farid exploded. His voice breaking, he shouted at Bulos, “So why would we be interested in Gabriel’s arse? Tell me that, will you? What business of ours is it who screws or who gets screwed? Gabriel, Gabriel, Gabriel. Can’t you think of anything but how much you hate him?”

  Bulos froze. His face was pale and his lips quivered. He had never before looked so ugly. He held his breath and stared back at Farid. There was a deathly hush.

  “You’re right,” he said quietly, his voice icy cold. “I must control myself. We ought to occupy our minds with something more worthwhile than Gabriel.”

  After that calm returned to the group for some days, and the name of Gabriel wasn’t mentioned again.

  Matta did not arrive until the end of June. On those hot June nights, Farid thought of his own arrival two years ago. That first year had seemed to him endlessly long, the second was fainter in his memory and was going fast. Time appeared to him to pass not as a linear series of hours and days, but like the squeezing of an accordion.

  133. Claire’s Second Visit

  About ten days before the Feast of St. Ignatius, Brother John told Farid, in his usual uncouth way, that his mother had arrived. Farid was startled. He was in the middle of a game of chess against the invincible Bulos, who laughed. “Mothers are reliable guardian angels. Yours has turned up just two moves before you were bound to be checkmated! Oh well, off you go. Give her my regards,” he added.

  Farid ran out of the games room feeling that he wanted to do three things at once: wash his face, pick some flowers from the garden, and shout for joy. In the inner courtyard he hesitated for a moment and then, walking slowly, made for the visitors’ room near the front entrance.

  When Farid opened the door, Claire smiled radiantly at him and spread her arms wide. There was a large box of sweetmeats on the table in front of her.

  “My little priest!” she cried.

  “Mama,” said Farid, but his voice failed him. “Mama,” he whispered again, hugging her. When she lovingly ran her hand over his shorn hair, he began crying.

  Claire turned to the monk sitting silently on a stool in the corner. “Could you ask in the Abbot’s office if I may go for a walk with my son? The weather is much too fine for us to sit indoors,” she said in perfect French.

  “That is not permitted, madame,” said the monk curtly.

  “I was asking Abbot Maximus’s permission, not yours. So would you be kind enough to bring me his answer, or shall I go and look for him myself?” replied Claire firmly.

  The monk stood up and slowly went to the door.

  “As always, you’re wonderful.” Farid hugged his mother again.

  “Your father has given me five thousand lira as a donation for the monastery. If they won’t let us go for a walk, well, too bad, they won’t see a single lira of it.”

  The monk returned to the visitors’ room with his head bent. “You may walk as long as you
like with Brother Barnaba. But Abbot Maximus would be glad if you would visit him for a little while when you come back. He has a letter he’d like to give you for your husband,” he said, and went away again.

  “A letter?” asked Farid.

  Claire laughed. “I believe I’ve already brought the answer.”

  They left the monastery hand in hand, and walked down the path to the sea in silence. When they came out on the beach, Claire took her shoes off and ran along the water’s edge, dancing about happily. Farid took off his own sandals and ran after her.

  “And how are you, dear heart?” asked Claire, sitting down on a weather-beaten bench.

  “Not too good. Life in a monastery isn’t right for me,” said Farid.

  “What is it you don’t like here?”

  “Everything. They’re dreadfully strict, and …” Farid hesitated only for a moment, and then took his mother’s face in his hands and kissed her ardently. “And there are no kisses like that here.”

  “I miss you badly,” she said, “and I’m not supposed to say so, because good mothers don’t do such things to their children in a monastery, but there you are, I never was a good mother.” She smiled, but her eyes were gleaming with unshed tears.

  They went back two hours later. Claire had quietly handed Farid a thousand lira for any necessary expenses, and decided not to give the Abbot anything but the sweetmeats from her husband’s shop.

  Next day she started her journey home with the abbot’s begging letter to Elias Mushtak, and the first time the bus stopped for a break she tore it up and threw it in a rubbish bin.

  But she gave the fat envelope with the letter for Rana, as Farid asked, to his cousin Laila.

  134. The Sufferings of the Christians

  Brother Gabriel didn’t attend the performance of the play in July. He thought it was stupid, but he had only one vote on the committee, and the other members had been enthusiastic. It was meant to show people living in freedom what sacrifices their brothers and sisters had to make to defend Christianity in a dictatorship.

  But it was a disaster. Bulos hated the communists so much that his play veered towards the ridiculous, arousing laughter in the hall instead of pity and terror. The mirth proved infectious, and by the end of the play even the actors on stage were laughing.

  Abbot Maximus had no option but to stop the show. Not only that, he immediately declared an end to all theatrical performances in the monastery for ever. In future, he said, the Feast of St. Ignatius would be celebrated with a magnificent church service and a long reading from Ignatius’s famous book Exercitia spiritualia.

  Bulos said nothing at all for several days. The first words he spoke, at a meeting of the Syrian Brothers, were a furious denunciation of Gabriel.

  135. Matta

  Matta arrived a week later. “They beat me as hard as if I were a mangy dog,” he told Farid.

  Matta hadn’t wanted to go into the monastery, but the bishop had been worried for years about the falling number of pupils. Almost no novices from the cities joined any more, so he had sent a circular letter to all priests asking them to search every Christian village for boys to be trained as priests at various monasteries. They would be fast-tracked in a course lasting only three years. Matta’s father had seized this chance to get rid of his son, but Matta refused to go. At that his father had beaten him so hard that he saw no alternative but to run away.

  He hid with a shepherd in the mountains. One day, however, a farmer recognized him and told his parents. His father kept him tied up in the stables until the papers for his admission to the monastery were ready.

  “Why would I want to be a priest?” asked Matta. “Spending my whole life in a monk’s habit and the confessional! I want to be free, I want to breathe fresh air and follow the sheep and goats with Aida, I want to run around and laugh with them.” He stopped, sighed, and glanced down at his habit. “I mean, just look at me,” he said, pulling up its skirts to show his big feet and bow legs. “I ask you, do I look like a priest?”

  Farid couldn’t help laughing. Matta did in fact look strange, and the scars on his head that Farid had never noticed before were unattractively conspicuous now that he had the tonsure. His face appeared even more simple-minded without any whiskers. Matta’s hands were as big and horny as any farmer’s.

  Farid knew about the passionate love between Matta and his cousin Aida. But it was a forbidden love, for Aida, who was exactly Matta’s own age, had had to be breast-fed by his mother. That made her and Matta siblings at the breast, and they were not allowed to marry.

  A vigorous peasant girl who matured early, Aida had been turning the heads of bachelors in Mala since her thirteenth birthday, but she didn’t want any of the men who proposed to her. She loved only this boy who looked like a gorilla, and had only just managed to make it into the fourth grade at school when he was fourteen.

  Farid was sorry for Matta, who looked like a lost child. He helped the newcomer through his first few days in the monastery. At least he had been allowed to keep his own name, since none of the other pupils was called Matta, after the Evangelist.

  “You’re my one piece of good luck,” Matta kept saying. He had difficulty with French, and indeed with books in general.

  When Bulos first met Matta, he liked the boy at once. He seemed like a force of nature, wild, strong, and lovable. Bulos thought of him as a brother, and soon after his arrival he was admitted to the secret society of Syrian Brothers.

  Summer and outdoor agricultural work helped Matta to settle in. Out of doors, he was better than anyone else at harvesting crops and milking livestock. Once Matta had fresh air in his nostrils he was in his element. Bulos admired his strength as he worked, climbed trees as nimbly as a monkey, and then fooled around like a circus artiste up in the branches.

  A jute sack full of wheat weighed over sixty kilos. That was no problem to Matta. He did a dance with the sack on his back, making even Brother Jakob applaud and laugh until the tears came to his eyes.

  But the moment Matta was back in the monastery he was useless. He couldn’t even write a short essay about the day he had just spent out of doors. Farid gave him coaching daily, with increasing desperation as the beginning of the school term approached.

  Matta’s mind was somewhere else entirely, not only in lessons but during Farid’s coaching. He couldn’t get the simplest calculations into his head. Instead, he told Farid at every opportunity that, without fail, he was going to run away. “The time will come,” he said mysteriously.

  Only in the secret society of the Syrian Brothers was he wide awake and full of energy. And he did everything that Bulos asked him to do.

  136. Brother Nicholas

  Rana was dancing naked. Her body glowed pink in the firelight from the elm. Farid, also naked, was sitting in the damp grass. Everything was dark except for Rana. But his back was warm from the heat of the burning tree. Suddenly Rana sat astride his lap with her legs spread. Her face was burning. Someone sprayed cold water on Farid’s thighs, and a shudder ran through all his limbs.

  He woke up. It was still dark. Farid felt that everything under him was wet. He quickly took off his underpants, wiped his wet balls with them, put a clean pair on, and then put his pyjama trousers over it. He placed the wet underpants between his mattress and the iron bedstead. There was no way he could hand them in to the laundry.

  Brother Nicholas was a small, dark-skinned man. It was said that as a pupil he had been outstanding with his bold essays on difficult theological questions. But shortly before he was to be ordained priest, he fell out of a tree at harvest time. He lay in a coma for a long time after that, and when he came out of it he was simple-minded and, although he wanted to go on serving the monastery, was capable only of basic tasks. So now he worked in the laundry.

  Every week, the pupils had to hand in their dirty washing in a laundry bag. To avoid getting clothes mixed up, every item was marked with its owner’s date of birth and initials. Marcel said that Nicholas sni
ffed all the garments in turn, and as soon as he detected the smell of semen on anything he handed it over to Father Istfan. And Father Istfan gave the pupil concerned a lesson “liable to keep his prick down and out for good, believe you me,” concluded Marcel. Farid thought he was joking.

  But one day he actually saw Brother Nicholas sniffing pair after pair of underpants with his eyes closed, and then throwing them into a big laundry cart with the vests. He came to one, and suddenly stopped, sniffed it again, and then let out a yelp. It sounded like a whinny of “Yes!” Then he looked for the owner’s initials and date of birth, and noted them down.

  Farid’s erotic dreams came more and more often these days. He felt Rana closer to him than ever before, and when it was over he stuffed his sticky underpants beneath the mattress.

  Some people washed theirs in secret after a wet dream and hung them in the attic to dry. Farid was revolted by the sight of the dried garments hanging there rigid as boards. And he knew from Marcel that it didn’t help. “Brother Nicholas gets them anyway,” he said. He himself got an uncle to keep bringing him new underpants, and he threw the soiled ones, well wrapped up, into the big rubbish bin, cutting out his initials to be on the safe side.

  When Farid had buried fourteen pairs of underpants under his mattress, he wrote his mother a letter and sent it by the secret route via the bus driver. In it he asked her for a dozen pairs of underpants with the usual mark FM230640.

  Three weeks later Bulos brought him the package.

  Dear heart,

  Here are the underpants. That’s a funny sort of monastery. What on earth do you do with so many pairs? Laila was here and helped me sew the initials in. We laughed a lot, and she said that if your father heard you were getting through more pairs of underpants than rosaries he’d probably convert to Islam.