by Rafik Schami
148. Matta’s Ordeal
Matta remembered hardly anything, except that Farid had given him warm clothes, stout boots, money, and provisions. His flight from the monastery had ended suddenly and in great confusion. The police were already waiting at the checkpoint on the main road. When he saw them he jumped out of the bus window, stumbled, and fell. His father, seething with fury, was waiting for him at the police station. After that it was all a blank.
He woke up in a shabby bed. His head hurt, but he could sit up. The walls of the room were smeared with graffiti and dirt. There was a white door and a narrow, barred window. Everything here was strange, so obviously he wasn’t in the monastery’s detention cell. He cautiously stood on the only chair, and found himself looking down at a park where men were walking around, laughing or talking to themselves. One of them kept banging his head against the trunk of a birch tree.
What is this place? he wondered. There was a knock at the door, and a young male nurse in a grubby white coat came in to put a bowl of vegetable soup and a piece of bread on the small table. The man’s right eye was fixed and motionless, like the eye of a slaughtered sheep. “Feeling better now?” he asked, and then he was gone again.
Matta felt extraordinarily weary. He saw himself in the middle of a flock of snow-white sheep and lambs, playing a flute. The lambs looked up inquisitively, while the sheep kept their heads bent and went on grazing. Aida appeared in the distance, with a blue bundle full of provisions. As she came closer she stopped, and her expression became thoughtful, almost sad. “Why are you herding pigs? Surely you always wanted to be a shepherd, keeping sheep and lambs?”
“What pigs?” asked Matta, and then he looked and saw, to his horror, that his flock really had turned into a herd of pigs, all grinning at him. He woke up with a bad taste in his mouth. He couldn’t swallow, his throat was too dry.
A red-haired young nurse came into the room. Without a word, she gave him two tablets and a sip of water. The medicine tasted bitter. When the nurse went out again she was marching like a soldier.
No one spoke to him. Where was Aida? He shouted for her, but it was the male nurse with the fixed eye who came in. At least he was kind and didn’t beat him, like Brother John, but smiled. He held Matta firmly, saying that Aida was far away and couldn’t hear him. Matta wouldn’t eat any more. He was convinced that Aida had been killed. The male nurse tried to calm him, without success. “Bring her here, then, if she’s alive,” Matta shouted at him. The male nurse did not reply, but looked fixedly at him again. Only later did Matta realize that the man had a glass eye.
Matta asked the red-haired nurse why he had been brought here, but she didn’t answer, just turned and marched away. Perhaps she’s a mute, thought Matta.
He was allowed to spend an hour in the gardens to get some fresh air, and met some odd people there. A wild-eyed young man in pyjamas approached him. “I wrote the Bible. I did, I was the one who wrote it!” he claimed. Another man took Matta’s sleeve and drew him behind an old birch tree. “Listen carefully. I know the secret of the factory,” he whispered. His teeth were just black stumps.
“What factory?” asked Matta.
“The underground factory where they make human beings. Oh yes, I know about it, and if the United Nations find out the whole world will explode. Crash! Bang! But don’t tell anyone.” As he spoke, he kept looking anxiously around. Saliva dribbled from his mouth. Then he stood to attention and saluted. “Step forward!” he called. A man in military uniform with a twig tucked under his arm was coming towards them. “How’s it going at the Front?” asked the uniformed man, making the V for victory sign.
“Good morning, Sir Churchill,” said the man who knew the great secret of the factory.
Later, Matta learned that the man addressed as “Churchill” had once been an army officer, but an explosion had blown his wits away.
Two days later, the male nurse came to take him to a large room containing a huge, dark desk. The notice on the door said “Dr Salam”.
A dwarf with a bald patch and a red tie was sitting at the table. When Matta saw him he thought the man looked funny, and chuckled. Then he laughed louder and louder, wagging his forefinger at the male nurse to show that he’d better watch the dwarf, because he was about to do a handstand on the desk. However, the man with the glass eye was not impressed. The mute red-haired nurse was there too, standing motionless by the door.
Matta felt a painful pressure in his bladder. It wasn’t his fault; they had forgotten to let him go to the bathroom that day. He saw a potted palm in a corner of the room, and went over to pee in the container, but he hadn’t finished when a slap in the face knocked him down. Lying on the floor, he saw the male nurse standing over him, shouting something. Matta went on peeing. The jet of urine rose in a small curve and rained down on his trouser leg. The male nurse lifted him, stood him up, and tucked his penis back inside his flies.
The dwarf didn’t do a handstand, but went red in the face and shouted something incomprehensible. The mute red-haired nurse was already bringing a bucket and a cloth. They all calmed down again. Then they laid Matta on a bed at the other end of the room. He was terrified. The male nurse put broad leather straps over his shoulders, stomach, legs, and ankles, and tightened them. Matta felt even more frightened. He could hardly breathe, and thought they had wound a cocoon around him. As a child, he had watched spiders anesthetizing the flies they caught by stinging them, and then wrapping them in silken threads.
“I’m not a fly,” he told the male nurse gravely.
The man smiled. “Nor am I.” Somehow that was reassuring.
“I want to go home,” said Matta, thinking of an extraordinary moment one day at dawn, when he had been alone with his uncle’s sheep. The sun was just rising above the mountains to bathe the hilly landscape in light. The sheep were grazing, and he sat down under an old tree. At that moment, a butterfly tried to emerge from its cocoon which was wet with dew. The butterfly slowly worked its way out. It was a very large insect, hanging upside down. After a while it spread its brightly coloured wings and went on hanging there, swaying in the morning breeze, as if to let its wings dry, and then it glided weightlessly into the air.
The dwarf was standing close to Matta’s head. The mute nurse put a pair of forceps to his temples. The silence in the room laid a cold hand on his heart. Lightning flashed through his brain, he felt his head hitting hard rocks, stars sparkled before his eyes. It was like the time when he had slipped while climbing and a small rock fall came down on him. He clung to the bed and screamed.
When the nurse took the forceps away, his temples were burning, and he felt thick, warm liquid flowing over his mouth.
“He’s bleeding,” said the woman. Those were the first words she had spoken.
“Tell me your name,” said the man with the glass eye in a friendly tone. “Mine is Adnan. What are you called?”
He wanted to reply, “Matta”, but his tongue would not obey him.
The dwarf spoke to the woman, whom he addressed as Kadira, and she put the forceps to his temples again.
There was another flash of lightning. This time it felt like the sting of the scorpion that had once bitten his forefinger when he incautiously turned over a large rock. Fiery fluid chased through his veins, like lava looking for a way out. He flapped about like a slaughtered chicken and screamed, but soundlessly. The man with the glass eye put a piece of rubber between his teeth. Matta was falling apart, and felt nothing more.
He woke up in his little room, with his throat and his temples burning. The friendly man with the glass eye had left him a jug of water on the bedside table.
Two hours later, Adnan came back, helped him to get dressed, and led him to the hospital gates, where he gave him an envelope, explaining that it contained his papers. Then he pressed Matta’s hand. “You can go home now, your voice will soon recover,” he said, at the same time starting off after a patient trying to get out into the street in his pyjamas.
Matta ran and ran until, hours later, he reached his aunt’s house in Ananias Alley. The sight of him horrified her. She wept and hugged him. “It’s all right, nothing can hurt you here, dear boy,” she said. Although Matta was enormously relieved, he was still mute. His tongue wouldn’t obey him, and the sounds that came from his throat were like the hissing of a snake.
When his parents arrived two days later, he ran away. He roamed the rooftops of the Old Town, eating whatever he could find, sleeping in abandoned sheds, and didn’t come back for three days, an hour after his parents had left. His aunt flung her arms around him and told him she’d been afraid he might have fallen, or someone might have caught him on the rooftops and told the police. She said she’d asked her sister Nasibe and her brother-in-law not to come back for a while.
For the first time in his life, Matta realized that there was someone else in the world, besides Farid and Aida, who cared for him.
149. Rana
The muezzins’ chorus woke him. Farid was no longer used to the chanting of over two hundred sheikhs at once, calling the faithful to prayer from their minarets early in the morning, each of them trying to extend the range of his own Allahu Akbar as far as possible.
He knew that his father woke at this hour, spent half an hour reading the Bible that always lay open on his bedside table, and then got up and went into the bathroom. Quarter of an hour later he was in the drawing room drinking black tea with milk but no sugar, and talking to Claire for a little while. Only then did he leave the house, singing quietly.
That was always at six-thirty. Elias walked fast; he was freshly shaved, perfumed, and wore a clean white shirt and dark blue trousers. He had large stocks of both.
For some time now, all he had done at the shop was to weigh out the precise quantities of ingredients, leaving everything else to his employees, who thought very highly of him. He was popular with them for his cheerfulness. Claire often said that life with her husband would be like Paradise if only he were as cheerful at home as in his business.
In all those years Elias never once managed to go from Saitun Alley to his confectioner’s shop, just outside Bab Tuma, without stopping to crack a joke, exchange the latest gossip, or drink the coffee that one of the tradesmen along the way just happened to have ordered for him. But at seven on the dot he was always raising the iron grille over the shop front as he counted the chimes ringing out from the church of St Anthony of Padua, which rose above all the surrounding buildings.
At seven on the dot today, however, Farid was also out and about, dressed in summery white and boarding the Number 5 bus to the Salihiye quarter, where he planned to wait for Rana outside her school.
He had never seen so many of the military in the city before. There were armed soldiers everywhere, outside the banks, the post office, the radio station, at all the major intersections.
And suddenly here was Rana. She came running around the corner and collided with him. When she had recovered from the shock of it, she stammered, her eyes shining, “You? What are you doing here?”
“Looking for you,” he said, holding her hand tight.
“I don’t have my watch on today. I thought I was going to be late,” replied Rana, almost breathlessly. Farid seemed to have grown taller and more masculine.
“When can we see each other?” he asked, quickly kissing her cheek.
“Here in half an hour’s time,” she replied, looking around shyly. “I’m going to feel unwell the moment I get to school and ask permission to go home.” She pressed his hand, and he stroked her cheek.
“See you soon,” she called, and walked on slowly, turning back again and again.
It was over an hour before Rana came back. “It took longer than I expected, because the maths teacher we have for the first two lessons was away. So everything was chaotic, but now the time’s all ours,” she said triumphantly.
Rana was as tall as he was now, and wore her hair tied back in a ponytail. Her eyes seemed to him larger; her curves were not those of a girl any more, but the figure of a slender woman.
“Where are we going?” asked Farid.
“To Aunt Mariam’s apartment. My parents are in Beirut with her and Aunt Amira’s whole family. They’re going to celebrate the engagement of Aunt Amira’s son Samuel.”
“Your parents are away too?”
“Yes, and thank God they’ve even taken Jack with them, because he and Samuel are friends. Monsters always like getting together, so Mama took Jack out of school for a week.”
“Samuel? What Samuel? The one who murdered your aunt?” Farid inquired.
“Yes, that’s him.” Rana hesitated for a moment. “What kind of family is happy to have that spoiled murderer for a son-in-law I can’t imagine. He’s been thrown out of all the schools he ever went to, but his father’s connections got him a job as a sales rep with some kind of pharmaceuticals company.”
Rana took him home with her, and while he sat in her parents’ drawing room drinking cold lemonade she went to change her clothes. When she came back she looked completely different. She was wearing a summer dress instead of the ugly school uniform, and now her hair lay loose on her shoulders, thick and blue-black. Rana perched her sunglasses flirtatiously on her nose.
He gave a wolf-whistle, laughing. “You could be straight out of a movie.”
She sat down on his lap and flung her arms around him. “Well, now I want to kiss you and go back into the movie. It’s called A Thousand and One Nights of Dreams Come True. Or were you away longer than that?”
“Yes, longer,” he said, kissing her nose and then her lips. He took her sunglasses off again. She kept perfectly still. Her cheeks flushed pink.
The colour of love, he thought, and kissed her mouth.
“Let’s go to Aunt Mariam’s. I have to water her flowers every day, I can even stay there overnight if I want. I don’t feel comfortable here. It all smells of my family, it’s not good enough for you. I feel as if the furniture, the radio, the bookshelves and the books were all watching us. Come on,” she said, kissing him on the forehead and jumping up.
150. Three Days of Dreams Come True
When Rana’s parents came back they were surprised to find their daughter so happy, but they were still too elated after the big engagement party to entertain any real suspicions. Only Jack, out of sheer spite, came dangerously close to the truth with his dig at her. “She always gets pink cheeks when she’s been meeting that rat of a Mushtak,” he said.
“Oh, come on, the old goat’s son is a novice at a monastery in the north now,” his mother pointed out.
Rana didn’t have to strain her ears to overhear their conversation in the kitchen. Jack was bellowing, and her mother too was shouting to make herself heard, because the kerosene stoves used for cooking in Damascus made a terrible noise. Rana went into the bathroom. Her cheeks were red.
Three days with her beloved Farid. She had felt his breath on her skin from morning to night. His voice had found its way deep into her heart. His hands on her body were so gentle.
He had gone through so much, and his love was so great, making him cry out for her so often! She had told him about her own nights, when she couldn’t sleep and there was no one she could talk to about her feelings.
They spent all day in her aunt’s apartment, cooking and eating properly with knives and forks, but sitting at the big table naked. They kept going back to lie down on the bed, playing under the covers like two small children. When Farid embraced Rana she lost herself in him.
“For a girl who’s off school sick,” said Farid, gasping for air, “you’re remarkably fit and well!” And they went on tussling with each other.
“I’ve had plenty of time to think about our love,” said Rana, lying across the bed with her head on Farid’s stomach. “I’m myself only when I’m either with you or completely alone. Others complain of loneliness if they’re on their own for five minutes together. I like being alone, and I long for you and your love, I’m addicted to
it.” Rana paused for a moment, turned over on her front, worked her way up to Farid’s face and kissed him until she felt dizzy.
“I thought of you every day,” Farid told her. “I was desperate, because I didn’t think I’d ever get out of there again. But now I’d do anything to stay close to you.” He paused briefly. “And I never want to set foot in that horrible village Mala again.”
“Let me hold your hand,” said Rana, because a memory had come into her mind, and it frightened her. About a year ago the elder brother of a friend of Jack’s began calling to see them rather often, always making out it was just coincidence. Her mother pretended to be dim, and often left Rana alone with this man. He was courteous, so she was all the more shocked when he told her one day that he’d like to sleep with her. She replied that she was only just fifteen and she wanted to study. “Studying just makes women ugly,” he said. “It would be a pity to lose your femininity.”
Rana left him sitting there and went straight to the kitchen to find her mother and Jack.
“That man’s randy. I can’t stand him. How can you let him tell me what I ought to do and what not? I don’t want to meet a man looking out for a wife, and I’ll tell Papa so this evening.”
“Silly cow! How about being civil to a guest?” said her brother angrily, making haste to take his acquaintance a coffee by way of mollifying him.
There was a scene that evening, but this time her father was clearly on her side. If Jack ever got to be half as good at school as Rana, he said, then he would allow him to be the judge of whether or not girls should study. The fact was, he added, that he had to pay good money for special coaching for her brother, and he still wasn’t getting anywhere at school.
When Rana remembered all this she felt afraid. Suppose her father weakened when the next man came along? And what would Farid do if he was urged to marry another woman?