by Rafik Schami
But the master of the house was in charge of the wine and arrack. He himself brought bottles up from the cellar and poured drinks for his guests. Josef said his father had enough wine and arrack in the cellar to get the entire Republic drunk – all excellent vintages that he had ordered when he was still earning well.
Josef’s cousin Nawal kept touching Farid when he went into the kitchen. She wore a comical pair of nickel-framed glasses with round lenses, and squinted slightly.
“You be careful, that girl’s a loose cannon and fires powerful shots,” commented Josef. Nothing escaped him. “She’s been having affairs with one or other of her teachers ever since she was eight.”
Nawal heard him speaking ill of her, and threw a radish at him. He swore, and called out to his mother that now she knew why he’d rather keep out of the kitchen. The girls fell about laughing.
“You’re cute,” Nawal whispered to Farid from behind him. “Give me a call some time,” she added quietly, as he put down a tray of empty coffee cups. And when he turned to look at her, she quickly slipped a note into his trouser pocket. This rather embarrassed Farid, who didn’t think much of her.
What he did appreciate, however, was the fact that the food at the engagement party tasted as fantastic as it looked. Over twenty cold starters and five hot dishes were enough to make anyone’s mouth water. In addition, there were three pyramids of fresh fruit standing around the fountain. Madeleine and Rimon had always been generous hosts.
Josef whispered to Farid that the guests were eating the apartment that his father had sold especially for this stupid party, room by room. “Can’t wait to see when they’ll get to the WC,” he added. Farid didn’t entirely understand what he was talking about, but joined in Josef’s laughter. It went on like that: most scraps of conversation were drowned out by the noise of the party, and there was no time for explanations.
The skills of the singer who had been booked for the party left something to be desired, but she was pretty as a picture, and the men liked that. The more they drank the better they liked her voice, and they even began comparing her with Feiruz, the best woman singer in Arabia. Many of their wives, on the other hand, said sharply that the singer would get no further than the nearest bed.
Around midnight two large groups of guests were still lingering at the party. Farid and his parents had already left. Then something happened to cheer Josef as much as if he’d won a game of chess against the world champion Mikhail Botvinnik.
One group, consisting of about twenty of his father’s friends and relations, was sitting under the old vine on the south-facing terrace. The members of the other group, his mother’s relations and the pharmacist’s family, were sitting around the large fountain in the inner courtyard.
The wine was running out. Madeleine signalled to her husband, and he set straight off to fetch more. The cellar vault, made of white stone, was kept at the right temperature by a clever system of small windows let into it at ground level. Bronze lamps on the walls, handsome shelves, and oak tables, chairs, and cupboards gave it almost the look of a sacred building.
Josef’s father had been keeping his best vintages for this late hour. The storeroom under the south terrace was well stocked with wines from Lebanon, every bottle worth a fortune. He hesitated briefly in front of the shelves, and finally chose ten bottles of red wine. As he was standing under the three little windows, he suddenly heard his brother Farhan’s voice. “Rimon always liked to show off. Even as a child he just had to be the strongest all the time. Well, as you all know, he was only a third-rate boxer.”
Rimon froze. His failure of a brother, whom he had helped out financially several times, was laughing at him at his own daughters’ engagement party! Rimon was furious; the blood went to his head. He felt like shouting, “You envious, ungrateful sod!” when he heard his favourite cousin Maria’s voice.
“And his wife, too! She’s ruined the idiot entirely, and now she’s riding high on his back. My cousin was always a donkey. The idea of marrying her daughters to those two feeble-minded pharmacists was hers, and Rimon goes along with anything she says. And Madeleine isn’t beautiful or a good mother either, let alone a good housewife. My God, did you notice? Most of those dishes came from a restaurant so that our fine lady wouldn’t ruin her fingernails,” she said venomously.
Maria! Soft-spoken Maria, who was always telling Rimon, when they were on their own, what luck he had with Madeleine, quite unlike his brother Farhan, whose wife was a silly goose.
“Not only is it expensive,” Rimon heard his old aunt adding her contribution, “it tastes horrible too. I hardly touched a bite.” She was lying. He hadn’t counted, but every time he topped up her glass of arrack she had a new plate heaped high with delicacies in front of her.
“Nor did I,” said one after another of the company.
“No wonder, with such nasty stuff, and I’ll tell him so to his face,” announced his brother, stepping up his indignation a notch.
“Oh, don’t do that, you’re always sacrificing yourself, and then his wife just says you’re envious. Let him alone. What is it they say? If your enemy is suffering then wish him long life.”
They all roared approval, instead of slapping the speaker’s face – that slut who cuckolded his brother!
“And now, now,” cried Rimon’s cousin Girgi, a lawyer, “here we’ve been sitting for ages in the dry. I told Madeleine her guests needed something to drink, but she just gave me a silly smile.”
“You know something?” Rimon heard his brother reply in a low voice. “I hear he’s ruined. I wouldn’t be surprised if he declared himself bankrupt soon.”
That’s it, thought Rimon. Leaving the wine where it was, he stormed up the steps and made for the south terrace. But at the sight of all those people suddenly beaming at him in the friendliest fashion, he could only laugh. He laughed and laughed, until his relations thought he was out of his mind. Rimon had to sit down, laughing harder than ever at the stupidity of all these people who had no idea that he had overheard their slanders.
When his brother Farhan leaned over him and asked, with pretended concern, if he was drunk, Rimon, still laughing, gave him his famous upward hook. Farhan flew backward, landed on his aunt’s lap, and fell to the ground with her.
He stood up indignantly, collected his wife, and left. “And you can take our dear auntie home too,” called Rimon, spluttering with laughter. He turned his back on the sour, stony faces of his family, and without another word went to join his wife and the guests by the fountain.
178. Masculine Honour
By the autumn, Rasuk’s English girlfriend Elizabeth spoke Arabic remarkably well. She had an English accent, but it sounded amusing, and she could swear like a street urchin.
Rasuk loved Elizabeth more than ever. Proudly, he told his friends about all the men who had made eyes at her, only to be turned down flat. She loved no one but him, and they suited each other perfectly.
He wanted to get his military service done as quickly as possible, because then he could apply for a passport to travel. “No passport without military service first, and I don’t want to travel illegally. If only because Elizabeth loves Damascus so much, I want to be able to come back any time,” he said. With her help, he was planning to open an Oriental bazaar in England, and he already had ten Damascus suppliers lined up who would be glad to sell their craft products abroad: items made of wood, brass, steel and textiles.
When Rasuk talked about Elizabeth he praised her frankness, courage, and above all her respect for his freedom. “We don’t have that kind of thing in Syria. If people here love you, they cling. Your personal freedom is a disruptive factor, it endangers love. That’s why we try to give our partners as little freedom as possible. Elizabeth is just the opposite. She sees my freedom as sacrosanct,” he told Amin and the others one afternoon at the club.
“But somehow Europeans don’t really fit in with us,” said Amin. It surprised Farid that he of all people said so. He had alwa
ys believed that Amin thought nothing of ideas like nationalism and the Fatherland. However, he didn’t comment.
“Yes, perhaps they love freedom more, but they don’t understand the concept of honour,” claimed Badi, an elementary school teacher from the south.
“Every human being has honour. It’s stupid to think we have a monopoly on it,” replied Rasuk brusquely.
“That’s not what I meant,” responded the teacher. “Every nation lives with its own scale of values. To some, conquering new territory for the Fatherland comes first, to others it’s the happiness of the family, to others again it’s the honour of their women, don’t you understand?”
“And here we come to the heart of the matter,” said Taufik. “Would anyone like more tea before the debate begins? I don’t want to miss something later.”
Four wanted tea, the rest ordered water or coffee.
“Then keep quiet and wait for me. I’ll be back in a moment.”
When Taufik had brought the drinks and been paid, he sat down in the back row, where he could keep an eye on the café, and said, “Fire away.”
“What Badi was saying is exactly the kind of honour I can live without,” said Rasuk, taking up the thread of the argument again. “We’ve been beaten, humiliated, and robbed for five hundred years, and we confine our idea of honour entirely to a scrap of skin in a woman’s most private place. That’s not normal, is it?”
Protests broke out.
“He’s been going out for a few months with an Englishwoman,” cried Michel the joiner, “and now he won’t hear of masculine honour any more.”
“You listen to me, young man,” added Sadik the vegetable dealer, “you can take everything from an Arab except his honour. Europeans may be in advance of us in many ways, but not on that point. Where honour is concerned we’re way ahead of them.”
Rasuk cast Farid a glance that spoke volumes. Sadik, of all people, who was always cheating his customers! And that skinflint spoke of Arab honour!
“In your place,” Farid told him sharply, “I wouldn’t talk about Arab values so much. Do you know what quality our ancestors most abhorred?”
“Well, what was it?” asked Sadik with his naïve expression.
“Avarice,” replied Farid, and a chorus of laughter and chuckling, catcalls and whistles broke out against the vegetable dealer.
“But Sadik is right all the same,” cried Badi the teacher and Basil the construction worker above the din. “We’ve had everything taken from us, but our honour remains. I’d rather die than marry a woman if other men had slept with her first,” added Basil. Several of the company nodded. They included Amin, who was friendly with Basil and Badi.
“And you don’t think that’s odd?” asked Azar quietly.
“Louder,” Taufik demanded. “I can’t hear a word.”
“Don’t you think it’s odd for virginity to be so sacred to us?”
“What’s odd about it?” growled a small man whom Farid didn’t know, but whose name was Edward.
“The odd thing is for men, who pay hardly any attention to women in the usual way, to situate all their honour in the place where they pee! What miserable, dishonoured men those Europeans are, conquering the air and the seas, venturing into the world of atoms, while our proud men twirl their moustaches and live with antiquated ideas – but they can feel superior because they’ve married women who were still virgins.”
Angry murmurs of protest against Azar were heard from several quarters.
“And I’m sure you all know,” said Rasuk, coming to his aid, “that a few gynaecologists here do nothing but sew up the hymen again. They study in America, they sacrifice years of their lives, just to come home and spend all their time cobbling up the damage for the sake of masculine honour.”
At the end of October Rasuk was drafted into the army, expecting to have finished his military service in January 1961. Then he would marry Elizabeth a month later, and they would move to England. She would have finished her studies in Damascus by then.
But it all turned out quite differently.
179. Listening to Films
Claire loved films. She could never have enough of them.
“Films are magic,” she said. “There was a man sitting beside me in the cinema, weeping buckets of tears over the sad story of a woman prevented by her parents from marrying the man she loved. He went on crying until the end, when she was on her deathbed, and her last words were for her lover who was far away. But at home this man who wept floods of tears in the cinema would forbid his daughter to meet her lover. He’d even assure her that he knows who the right man for her is better than she does. I bet you anything he would.”
When Claire hadn’t been to the cinema for some time she would get Farid to tell her the plots of movies he had seen with the other young men. Claire called this “listening to films”. The only ones she didn’t want to hear about were Westerns, science fiction, and movies about the days of chivalry.
Once there had been some very good movies on for three weeks, but nothing suitable for Claire, although she was desperate to listen to another film. When Farid woke up from his siesta one hot afternoon, he found her in the inner courtyard. She had freshened it up by spraying water around, and in the shade there was a place to sit with a table, two comfortable bamboo chairs, and a large plate of pistachio nuts. Now he knew why his mother had asked three times at lunch whether he was doing anything that afternoon. She couldn’t go on any longer without listening to the story of a film.
For want of a suitable film, he told her the tale of a tragic murder case that he had just heard from Josef. It was the story of a woman who – like Josef’s own aunts – was prevented from loving because she had inherited a fortune, but lived under her brother’s thumb. He chased away any men who came too close to his sister. Cheated as she had been, the woman kept quiet for a long time, until she fell in love with a spice merchant and begged her brother to agree to the marriage. She was already thirty, but as usual her brother found about three hundred things wrong with the man, insulted him, and sent him packing. The woman took her revenge: she poisoned her brother and his family, and then hanged herself. It took the CID a long time to fit all the pieces of the puzzle together and solve the case.
Some time later, when Farid had left the courtyard and Claire was still wondering which of her own women friends might be capable of such an act of murder and suicide, the doorbell rang. Matta was standing outside the front door, with a woman who smiled at Claire.
“This … is Faride … my fiancée,” said Matta quietly. “Is my brother … Farid … at home?”
180. Fatima and Josef
Josef was in love too. Fatima had fascinated him from the moment when he first saw her. They had met at the big demonstration in October, when half a million people gathered in the streets to show their support for President Satlan.
As time went on, Josef came to love Fatima as he had never loved anyone before. She had what he lacked: courage, cheerfulness, and spontaneity, and she showed him what she was thinking and feeling. Fatima also read countless books, and Josef had to work hard to keep up with her. When women fall in love with an idea, he sometimes thought, they can be more fanatical than any man.
He met her some ten times in the six months after that first meeting, in the Café Vienna. They always sat at the same table, talked, dreamed of a strong, united Arabia led by Satlan, drank coffee, and kissed.
Fatima loved voices. She didn’t mind what people looked like at all, so long as they had good voices. She told Josef that even in her mother’s womb she had graded her relations by the sound of their voices, and she hadn’t changed her mind to this day. She couldn’t resist Satlan’s voice, or Josef’s either.
From a distance, Josef looked spectrally thin and ugly, but when he spoke Fatima felt elated, light at heart. And there was another reason for her to like Josef’s company: his clever mind left no room for boredom. He was amusing and laughed at himself. “The fire in his heart,”
Fatima told Farid once, “has melted any fat he ever had on him.”
Fatima was passionately pro-Satlan. He promised the rise of a great nation moving on to pastures new, and to her he was not so much a politician as a saint. He spoke directly to her and millions of other women in every speech he made, urging them to rise and fight. That was why she had been one of the first Syrian women to stand side by side with men, united in a sea of sympathy for Satlan. And suddenly some men at that October demonstration in 1959 had placed the thin boy whose voice made her go weak at the knees on their shoulders and carried him with them. She had loved him ever since.
One day her mother took her aside, and told her it had come to the ears of her brothers Isam and Ahmad that she was keeping company with one of those godless Christians. Fatima reassured her mother, saying those tale-bearers were just blinded by hatred. The man with whom she’d exchanged a word or so at the bus stop outside her school was her girlfriend Rashide’s brother. “Those two fools are so stupid they don’t even know that Rashide is a Muslim,” said Fatima scornfully.
Her mother, a kindly and devout woman, patted her head. “I told your brothers, Fatima is a good girl and a true believer! You just keep your mind on school and not on men.”
Fatima was sure that her brothers couldn’t have found out about Josef, and were just full of spite because their sister venerated Satlan, while they both belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood, which was equipped by the Saudis with money and arms to be used against him.
That stupid bearded couple of brothers would never get on her trail, she thought on the way to the Café Vienna.
It was a sunny but very cold March day, and she was looking forward to seeing Josef. She changed from one bus to another three times, always checking carefully in case anyone was following her. She felt that she was not observed. But appearances were deceptive.