The Dark Side of Love

by Rafik Schami

  When the friends separated again at the parliament building, he decided to follow Silvia, and the relieved Rana was able to continue on her way home. But that afternoon Silvia told her that when he began pestering her she had stopped and slapped his face. From then on he stalked Rana like a troublesome shadow. Early in the morning, at twelve noon, after the midday break at two o’clock, and when school closed at five. He was always waiting by the same street lamp, and the girls at school soon thought he was Rana’s boyfriend. He seemed to have an endless supply of chewing gum. However, he kept in the background, merely getting a friend of his to call out his name from the other side of the street, as boys often did, to make sure that she knew it: Dured, an unusual name, made famous only years later by a popular comedian.

  She began to hate him. Rana liked school, and felt liberated from her family as soon as she stepped outside their front door. Going out, to her, meant plunging into the stream of passers by who populated the streets. She was surrounded by cheerful, attractive faces, school students, office workers, army officers. Best of all she liked the look of the old people who seemed to have all the time in the world.

  Fashion boutiques, flower shops, cafés, and cinemas lined her way to school, along with well-tended trees and pretty street lamps. She took her time, was never in a hurry, met up with girlfriends who lived nearby, first Salma, then Silvia, then Fatima, Mona, and the others. Sometimes there were ten of them in the party by the time they reached the school gates.

  Now all that was over. She felt hunted, and hurried to school and back every day looking cautiously around her. After Silvia had slapped the stalker’s face he stuck to Rana, probably guessing that she would never strike a man.

  “Just don’t let him know where you live, or he’ll be standing beside your bed, and your parents will think you’re in a relationship with him,” Silvia warned her. A nightmare! Rana was rescued by chance. One day, not far from the street where she lived, she saw him coming closer and closer. Desperately, she fled into a large building with its front door open. He had never come so close and been such a nuisance before. She stood in the stairwell, breathless, and watched him through a dusty window pane. He took up his position right opposite the front door.

  “What’s the matter, my dear?” she heard a kindly voice behind her, and jumped. A middle-aged woman was looking down at her from the door of her second-floor apartment.

  “There’s a man who pesters me following me around,” explained Rana.

  “That’s no problem,” the woman reassured her. “You’re in the right building. If you open that door,” and she pointed to her left, “you can go down another staircase and get out into the alley behind this house, and it will take you to the tram depot. Do you live a long way off?”

  “Not far from the depot,” Rana replied, thanked the woman, ran upstairs, opened the door to the other, providential staircase, and breathed a sigh of relief when she was back home and in her room.

  That had been six months ago. Since then he had believed that she really lived in the big building, and she disappeared into it every day to escape him. She meant to do the same when she came out of the cinema that afternoon, but Dured the stalker caught up with her just outside the building. “Don’t make a scene. You don’t live here. I found that out yesterday,” he said.

  She felt a strange fear that she was never able to explain to anyone later, not even Farid. As if Damascus were suddenly empty of people. As if this character was the most powerful man on earth, and she was only a little beetle to be trodden underfoot any time he liked. She stopped, feeling as if she no longer had feet, just two lumps of lead in her shoes. Rana wanted to scream, but she couldn’t utter a sound.

  “I won’t hurt you. I just want you to have a coffee with me and be friendly. Is that too much to ask?” he said, standing squarely opposite her, immovable as a mountain.

  “Let me by, please,” she begged, trying to keep calm.

  “I’m not going to touch you, but if you won’t have a coffee with me I’ll follow you to your front door and tell your parents you go out every morning with a whore who’s the daughter of a well-known belly dancer, and you were at the cinema with a man today, and I won’t be lying. I can describe him in detail.”

  “Silvia isn’t a whore.” Those were the only words that Rana could utter in her indignation.

  “Oh yes, she is. Who else would hit a man in the face? Only women of that kind, and she’s learned it from her mother,” he said in a quiet but venomous voice. Enormous anger suddenly freed Rana from the clutches of her fear. “And you carry tales,” she cried, striking him in the face so hard that he almost fell over, but regained his balance at the last moment. Before he knew what she was about, however, Rana kicked him in the balls. Silvia had shown her how to do it.

  “Well done!” said an old man who happened to be passing. “That’s the only kind of language such pests understand.”

  Dured limped away, groaning. Deep in her dreams, she could still hear him shouting, “Christian whore!”

  193. Moon Woman

  Something had happened. He sensed it very clearly.

  Farid was just eating lunch when the bell rang. He was alone in the house. Their neighbour Gurios was standing at the door, out of breath.

  “What’s going on in the city?” he asked without preamble. “My daughter’s just come home terrified. The police stopped her bus, all the passengers had to get out, and they were searched for weapons. People are saying there’s been an attempted coup. Is that possible?”

  “Attempted coup?” repeated Farid incredulously. Damascus had been on constant alert since January. It was said that Damian the Iraqi dictator was likely to attack the country, and there was increasing hostility between him and President Satlan. Not a day went by without bitter accusations. President Satlan, obviously with his reputation in mind, had spent a month travelling around the cities of Syria, making fiery speeches against Iraq and the Syrian communists who were flirting with Baghdad. Rumours were rife, and said that Damian was preparing to fight for Damascus with the aid of communist guerrilla troops.

  Gurios wouldn’t come in for a coffee, so Farid went back to his lunch, but he had no appetite now. Something made him feel infinitely sad. He phoned Rana. “I’m sorry, you have a wrong number,” she said calmly, so he knew that she wasn’t alone.

  The sense of happiness that just hearing her voice gave him was soon gone. A coffee later, he called his cousin Laila. She was taciturn. When he asked what was going on she burst into tears and could say no more. Farid dropped everything and went to see her.

  There was no one at the bus stop just outside her street. The bus itself hadn’t been as crowded as usual, and the driver had turned up the volume on his radio. It was broadcasting a report on the catastrophe in Morocco, where an earthquake and an extraordinary spring tide had destroyed the harbour town of Agadir at the beginning of March, and ten thousand lives had been lost.

  Farid saw several army trucks in Abbasid Square. Armed paratroopers in camouflage uniform were standing around everywhere. Even in the New Town, soldiers were posted at every street intersection.

  Laila wasn’t well. She had given her employees the day off so that she could rest; she was running a temperature and looked very pale. Her husband was on tour in the north with the Radio Orchestra. The apartment looked like a dump. Farid kissed Laila and made her get back into bed. Then he spent two hours busily tidying and cleaning the place, opening all the windows and letting in fresh air.

  “My goodness, if Claire could see this!” said Laila faintly when she went to the lavatory, and saw the results of Farid’s labours. She was smiling.

  “She mustn’t hear a word about it. I wouldn’t do it for anyone but you. Usually I act like a pasha,” called Farid from the kitchen, where he was making tea after all those chores.

  Funny, he thought, how love alters people. After taking her high school diploma Laila had begun to study history, and wanted to write about the histor
ical development of Arabia from the women’s viewpoint. Although she was a Christian, she knew a great deal about the Sufi philosophy, and men had swarmed around her at the university, not least because of her erotic aura. However, she turned down both Djamil the professor of philosophy and Samuel the architect.

  The Mushtak clan derided her for failing to take her university finals because she had fallen in love with her musician, and for thinking that she was a good dressmaker after only a short training course. Laila was trying to make a name for herself, and she did indeed have many customers, but unfortunately her abilities were limited. Farid was convinced that his mother ordered a dress from her every year only to bolster her morale, for Claire never wore the dresses. Elias laughed at Laila too.

  Aunt Malake had thought long and hard in wondering whether to agree to her daughter’s marriage. Musicians, apart from a few celebrities, were not highly regarded in Damascus. Many Christians were pioneers of the theater, film, and music. Famous women singers like Marie Gibran, Karawan, and Nadira Shami, the first Syrian woman to act in a film, were Christians too. They were all regarded as immoral. All the same, Malake had finally said she was happy for the marriage to take place, for she felt how much Laila loved Simon.

  Simon made Farid nervous, he didn’t know why. Sometimes he thought perhaps it was to do with his own guilty conscience, because his body was always forgetting that he must love Laila only platonically. Yet ever since he could remember, he had felt an enormous physical attraction to her.

  He was just bringing the tea from the kitchen when he saw Laila sitting up in bed, rolling herself a cigarette and crumbling hashish over the tobacco. He was shocked, but quickly regained his composure. “Smoking in bed?” he laughingly reproved her.

  “I smoke everywhere,” she said, without looking at him.

  “And what are you smoking now?” he asked, uncertainly.

  “Hash, Lebanese quality, the best from Baalbek. It’s food for my soul, and I won’t hide that from you anymore. I don’t let my husband know, or my family, or the rest of the world, but after all you’re the other half of my soul.”

  “But hashish is a dangerous drug,” he said in concern, handing her the tea.

  “Nonsense. The Arabs, Persians, and Indians have used it for thousands of years, and at the same time they philosophized, invented mathematics, observed the stars, and wrote the most beautiful poetry.” She licked the edge of her cigarette paper.

  “How long have you been taking it?” Farid asked hesitantly. He had never been able to pretend in front of Laila.

  ‘Calm down, Comrade,” she replied, “you’re starting to interrogate me. Commissar, I started at nineteen, I’m twenty-six now, that makes seven years. A lucky number, don’t you think? Yes, I know it carries a life sentence in the Syrian civil code, so you don’t have to preach morality to me.” She lit the cigarette.

  “Very funny,” snapped Farid. “But why do you want to dull your mind?”

  “Dull my mind?” she repeated defiantly. “My head is clear as glass when I’ve been smoking a joint. Only communists get befuddled, by order of the Central Committee. All mystics have eaten or smoked hashish, and do you know why? Because you can never get into other people’s souls if you don’t leave your own cocoon. Hashish makes a hole in the wall, opens up a way for you. It’s just your bad luck that Lenin didn’t smoke it.”

  “Leave Lenin out of this. Seriously, do you think it’s a good idea?”

  “Yes, a very good idea,” she insisted, her voice soft but firm. She drew on the cigarette. “Whenever I feel that sadness is stifling me, but I have some important problem to solve, I smoke a joint, and suddenly I find new hope and sometimes even a solution. Try it, go on,” she said, offering the cigarette in her hand. Farid waved it away.

  “No, never,” he said curtly. He drank his tea in silence. “Anyway, what problem did you have to solve today?”

  “A very important one, it’s been on my mind for days, and I think that’s why I’m feverish. Ever since I was a child I’ve always run a temperature in such situations.”

  She said nothing for a while, and Farid poured her more tea. The room smelled of hashish, and for the first time it struck him that the drug smelled rather like incense. He realized that his cousin was serious, and he let her take her time.

  “I wasn’t eight yet,” said Laila, “and as you know we were living in Beirut at the time. One day my mother took me by the hand and whispered, ‘Today is a great day for you.’

  We crossed several streets and soon reached the old quarter of the city of Beirut, where she went to the hammam. It was the first time in my life I’d been in a hammam – after all, we had two European bathrooms in my parents’ villa. But here was another world – and funnily enough I felt at ease in it from the first moment. Just before we went into the baths my mother had bought a great many salted pumpkin seeds, pistachios, and baklava and other sweetmeats.

  The bathhouse looked like a mosque from the outside, with a beautiful marble façade. When we were inside, the noise died away and we were surrounded by a silence that made my heart beat faster. We went in under the great dome, and I saw women bathing, soaping each other and themselves, laughing, pouring water over one another or drinking tea. Somewhere even further in about twenty women, young and old, were sitting in a circle, smiling at us in a friendly way as we joined them, wrapped in our white towels. That was when I met the Moon Women.”

  Laila sipped her freshly poured tea, drew on her cigarette one last time, and stubbed it out in the ashtray.

  “They were celebrating my acceptance as one of them. I was the youngest member of their secret society. An older woman told me at length, and very emotionally, that from now on I was a special girl, and the sign I would carry on me from that day on represented not a privilege but a duty to commit my whole life to women and to love. I was so excited that I didn’t understand very much of it, but I was impressed to feel her warm, damp arm and see the circle of Moon Women sitting around me. In the distance a bluish glass window gleamed in the light of the sun falling on it. I held my breath, really thinking that the moon would come in.

  “And I felt very proud that of her three daughters, I was the one my mother had chosen. In the end they all kissed me. My mother was weeping for joy. Finally one of the women tattooed the sign of the secret society just above my heart. Then we all celebrated in the baths.

  “On the way back I felt that now my mother had become a wise woman and my comrade. We sang together so cheerfully that passers by turned to look at us, but that just encouraged us to sing louder. From then on I went with my mother to the hammam where the Moon Women met every Wednesday. There weren’t very many of them at the time, but they kept in close touch and helped each other out with advice and money.”

  Laila paused for some time, and Farid felt that she was struggling with herself. He kept quiet.

  “I was fourteen, and by now there were over three hundred of us Moon Sisters, when some of the members chose to go the wrong way. Out of sheer impatience, and driven by the hatred of thousands of years, they wanted to put things right all at once. The leaders of that group began carrying out punitive action against obvious misogynists. Their weapon was poison. They didn’t want to wait for the state to see justice done, they made their own justice, and it was deadly. More than ten men died of poisoning in Beirut – judges, a couple of pimps, the chief of police, and two rapists who had been given lenient sentences in the courts. They all died of a dose of the arsenic that women used as a depilatory on their legs in the public baths at the time.

  “Finding those responsible was child’s play for the CID after the diagnosis of arsenic poisoning. Several women were given life sentences, the others, including my mother, were shadowed. The whole Moon Women group was broken up.”

  “Sounds exciting,” commented Farid, still unsure just what to think of this story. Laila was looking at him with gentleness in her eyes, sensing his uncertainty. Finally she rolled herself a se
cond cigarette.

  “We don’t want to make that mistake again,” she continued her story, as if she hadn’t noticed Farid’s remark. “By now I’ve found out one reason why we failed to achieve our freedom as women back then. We know nothing about ourselves, our souls, and our history, or at least not enough. Men have described everything from their own point of view, and when they enslaved us a thousand and one years ago they said we ought to be glad, thankful that they would keep us and feed us.

  “Look at Damascus University. Any woman who wants to get a degree mustn’t break taboos or ask any awkward questions. We have to accept that as women we get knowledge as men have mastered it poured into our heads, and it stinks.

  “When I realized that, I left the university. It wasn’t because of Simon, as our family always claims, it was because the university wasn’t getting me anywhere in my quest. I wanted to be with other women, looking for our souls and our history, which means ourselves. And how do you get to meet a great many women in this country? As either a hairdresser or a dressmaker. I opted for dressmaking. Now you know.” Laila sighed with relief, sensing that Farid understood her.

  “So I’m a Moon Woman, and Moon Women choose their husbands not by the criteria of society, which approves of a man more if he keeps a woman under strict control, we choose by how far he’ll let a woman live at liberty. That’s what matters to me, not the university, not money. Simon knows all about me and accepts me without any ifs and buts, so that’s why he is my husband.”

  “And does he know everything about me too?” asked Farid.

  “Yes, he knows I love you. He didn’t care for that at first, but when he met you he liked you very much. He understood me, and didn’t feel jealous any more. He turned against you only when he learned that you’re a fanatical communist – he hates communists.”