The Dark Side of Love

by Rafik Schami

  214. Coincidence

  It really was coincidence, although Josef wouldn’t believe him either then or ten years later. Farid had fixed to walk from the university with him through the Suk al Hamidye and so to the Ummayad Mosque. Josef wanted to enjoy the atmosphere there. “Unlike a Christian church,” he said, “a mosque has a lot of life and not too much sanctity about it. You feel at ease there.” And he joked that it would do a Young Communist like Farid good to experience the sensuality behind the façade, and see more in life than materialism and the economy. So around midday, after lectures, they set off. They stopped on the way at a snack bar, drank juice, ate a falafel each, and then sat for a while with a boy who was selling cactus figs chilled on a block of ice. They tasted best in the autumn.

  It was indeed more comfortable in the mosque than in a church. The floor itself, covered with beautiful carpets, looked far more welcoming than the hard pews in church. A church had always been a place for prayer, while mosques were meeting places. The carpets invited you to linger. Several men were asleep, lying by the walls, others were reading or walking quietly around, deep in thought. A number of believers had gathered around the tomb of John the Baptist. They were quietly murmuring requests and prayers, touching the walls, columns, and grille of the tomb, and transferring the blessing of the touch to their faces. In one corner, a scholar was delivering a lecture to a small audience as he sat on the floor, leaning back against a column. There was a sense of deep peace. No one asked Josef and Farid what they wanted here, or whether they were Muslims. It was taken for granted that anyone could sit in the mosque.

  “If all of Islam were like this mosque,” whispered Josef, “I’d convert today, but then I’d find myself in cahoots with oil sheikhs and members of the Muslim Brotherhood. So I’d rather stay a Christian.”

  “Which means you find yourself in cahoots with all the dictatorships of Latin America, and those wonderful Christian colonialists, Fascists, and Falangists. No, I don’t really want to be their brother. You’d better join us or you’ll miss the new dawn,” said Farid. Josef choked with laughter.

  “Nicely put, little Stalinist, but I don’t see any dawn coming with your bunch. More like dusk.” Suddenly someone dug him in the ribs. An old man was reproving the two of them with a look of displeasure.

  As they left, Farid decided he would like an ice in the famous Bakdash ice cream parlour near the mosque. At first Josef didn’t want to join him, but then he let himself be persuaded. As they entered the ice cream parlour they saw Rana, sitting at a table with Dunia, and quite by chance there were two more seats free there.

  “Very cleverly contrived,” muttered Josef, unable even to manage a weary grin. He greeted the girls dryly and sat down opposite Dunia, whom he knew only from a visit to her brother Kamal and from Farid’s many stories.

  “So what do they call you and me?” he boldly asked. Dunia didn’t understand his question. “I mean, are we go-betweens or extras? Is it a marriage or a movie being made?”

  Dunia laughed at the ugly young man’s irony. She didn’t remember anything at all about him.

  When Farid took Rana’s hand, Josef called, “Lights, camera, take 376, Romeo and Juliet eating ices.”

  Farid was furious, but when Rana smiled at him and whispered, “A Mushtak thundercloud,” he quickly suppressed the volcano inside him, although it went on seething deep down. Rana had often told him that he was getting more and more like his father, who sometimes lost his temper for moments on end. Claire called those moments “Mushtak thunderclouds”. Farid had the same fits of temper. But Rana, unlike his mother, didn’t know how to deal with them, and hated them. She herself, like Claire, had an equable nature.

  Josef was unbearable that day, making snide and venomous remarks the whole time, so that Farid wondered why the two young women didn’t just get up and walk out.

  Dunia told them that after the family’s former textiles factory had been denationalized again, her brother Kamal had tried to increase his own share in it by selling stock. Dunia didn’t think this was a good idea, because you could never rely on governments, but Kamal had been very sure of himself. He wanted to be an industrialist, of course in the family business. The country grew its own cotton, but instead of selling it as a raw material he was going to have it made into fine textiles and then export it. Dunia smiled at her brother’s dreams.

  On the way home through the spice market and down Straight Street, Farid and Josef were silent. Then Josef suddenly said, “I’d never have thought that spoiled idiot Kamal could think on such a scale. Good for him.”

  When they reached the Kishle intersection, they saw an ambulance standing at the turning into Abbara Alley. It was too wide to get right into the alley itself. The blue light was flashing all the time. A large and pale-faced crowd surrounded the vehicle.

  “Rasuk’s father went crazy,” said Sadik the vegetable dealer, when Josef asked what had happened. And out came the paramedics already, pushing the stretcher to the ambulance. Rasuk’s father lay strapped to it under a blanket, unconscious. His black-clad wife was running after the men, wearing a single slipper – she had lost the other on the way – weeping and striking herself in the face.

  “I thought she’d go crazy,” said Sadik, “but it was his father.”

  “He’s been so fond of his son ever since he was born,” whispered Josef. Farid had already heard at the club that he’d been going to the cemetery at night, barefoot, taking his son his favourite food: sheep’s cheese with olive oil wrapped in a thin flatbread.

  And Rasuk’s father had taken to going up to the flat roof of his house more and more often, waiting there for his son with a quilt and a pullover. He had been sure that Rasuk would come back to him by parachute.

  When the ambulance raced away, his wife could no longer stand upright. She fell to her knees. Josef and Farid ran to her, took her under her arms, and helped her home. A pale girl followed them with the lost slipper.

  215. One Of Us

  Josef had an incredible story to tell. Suleiman’s father Abdallah, that quiet, unobtrusive man, he said, had almost stabbed a Muslim with a pair of scissors. The man was taken to hospital just in time for them to save his life. “It’s not the stabbing itself that surprised me, it’s how the tailor found out he was a Franco supporter,” he added.

  It was well known in the quarter not only that Suleiman’s father was under his wife’s thumb, but also that he was a fervent supporter of the Spanish General Franco, whose picture hung in the family’s sitting room next to the Virgin Mary. It was years before the neighbours realised how deep Abdallah’s veneration of Franco went. They thought it was mere opportunism, and the Spanish consul’s chauffeur was making himself out to be more Spanish than the consul himself. But Farid also knew that the man hated Muslims and dreamed of Syria’s return to the pre-Islamic period. A mistake, but he and several thousand Syrians firmly believed it would be a good thing.

  That day, so Josef learned a week later, Suleiman’s father had been on the way home when he saw a Muslim outside the tailor’s shop calling another man a “Christian swine” and an “idol-worshipper”. He didn’t know either of them. All the same, he went straight into the tailor’s workshop, picked up a pair of scissors, and stabbed the Muslim twice in the back with them. The wounded man fell to the ground and his Christian rival fled, for fear that he would be accused of the assault. Suleiman’s father put the scissors in a bag, left the man lying on the ground, and went calmly home.

  A day later he brought the scissors back to Khuri the tailor, who had told the police that yes, the attack had taken place just outside his shop, but he hadn’t witnessed it himself because he was standing with his back to the door at the time, listening to songs by Um Kulthum on the radio while he pressed a suit. The radio was turned up very loud today too. Suleiman’s father could hardly hear what the young tailor was saying.

  Josef was bewildered. Khuri was an ardent pro-Satlan man, like himself, and a radical socialist.
As they were friends, he went on asking questions until Khuri admitted that yes, he had in fact seen it all, and the weapon hadn’t been a knife but scissors. Finally he found them and showed them to Josef.

  “So why did you lie about it?”

  “I can’t get one of us into trouble,” said Khuri, and Josef was just about to correct him, saying that Suleiman’s father had never supported Satlan, when he understood. By “us” the socialist Khuri did not mean adherents of Satlan, but the Christian community.

  Two days later the army carried out its coup. General Mutamiran announced that Syria was now free, and nothing stood in the way of the liberation of Palestine any longer. It was 8 March 1963.

  216. “Youth”

  Drinking coffee with Claire by the fountain in the morning was a special pleasure to Farid. He always gave himself an hour for it, and then the rest of the day could follow. He would hear news from her about the seething life of the quarter, and the rumours going around the Old Town, rumours that the students did not pick up.

  But Claire was also a good listener. She always seemed to know his timetable, and asked sensible, interested questions about exams and practical work, his lectures and his grades. However, she never asked questions about his political activities, but waited for him to tell her of his own accord. His father took no interest in him. When he heard from Claire in 1965 that she was giving a small party to celebrate Farid’s diploma in natural sciences, Elias was amazed by the speed with which his son had completed his studies, even after losing two years during his time in the prison camp.

  Every day Farid was deep in a book as he travelled to the university. The bus ride was a good time to read. He always had a novel and a book of poetry with him, and every time the bus was about to pass the street where Rana lived he raised his hand, glanced quickly at the last house on the right, and murmured a soft greeting.

  One day in May he got out at the university bus stop, breathing in the scent of flowers in the nearby museum garden. He still had the taste of the cardamom which his mother added to coffee in his mouth. Then he saw skinny young Comrade Nagib who’d been snubbed at the Communist Party training course. He was already halfway up the steep path between the bus stop and the university gates. Farid quickened his pace to catch up with him, and as if Nagib had felt his eyes on his back he turned and stopped, suddenly recognizing his comrade.

  “Hello, how are you?” asked Farid, out of breath.

  “Fine. You’re studying here too?” asked Nagib.

  “Yes,” he said. “I was going to get in touch with you through the Party, because I’ve decided to take on Youth. What you said that day at the meeting fascinated me, but I was too much of a coward to say so.”

  “Who isn’t?” said Nagib quietly. “But are you sure you want to edit Youth?”

  “No, I’m not sure, but I’ll give it a go anyway. The Party leadership claims that the magazine is free, and produced by young people for young people. So I can always use that rope to hang the censors.”

  “Good heavens, and you call yourself a coward? God save us, or rather Lenin save us from your sort of courage,” he said. “By the way, in real life my name is Isa.” He offered his thin hand, which seemed to consist only of skin and bone. “I know you’re Farid. I’ve heard a lot about you,” he said, surprising his comrade.

  From then on they met in the cafeteria twice a week, and then went on long walks. Isa was a voracious reader and a sceptic.

  Farid’s official appointment by the Central Committee was some time coming. In the interim, he and Isa designed a complete issue of Youth. It was to have sixteen pages containing news, jokes, puzzles, accounts of historical events and contributions on sexuality, love, and other subjects. The second issue was almost ready too when Farid finally got the job. His request to have Isa on the editorial team was granted, but the committee rejected the idea of conscripting a woman comrade to write on women’s questions. Isa and Farid therefore thought up a way to get around the committee’s refusal. They would ask women friends of theirs to write on the subject, and then publish them under the pseudonym Farisa.

  The first issue came out in October 1963. Over five thousand copies were distributed, and requests for more came in from all over the country. For the first time in the history of the Syrian Communist Party, its secret press had to do a second print run. And for the first time the official Syrian organs of the press mentioned the illegal communist journal. The state cultural magazine printed a long quotation from a forceful article on the poor state of the Arab film industry, written by Farid after intensive discussion with Josef. “How is an Arab film ever to work up any credible tension,” he had said, “if every film has to satisfy all Sunni, Shi’ite, Druse, Jewish, and Christian censors from Morocco to Saudi Arabia? Never a word of criticism of Islam, no scene showing a Christian quarreling with a Muslim, no scene in which a Jew is right about something, none in which a woman invites a man to come to bed with her. No film dares to caricature a dictator, no film may show that its heroes can drink wine without actually being criminals. No film ever shows that a child can be right and its parents wrong. What’s left but a heap of garbage? And there’s really no need for Zionism to condemn that – which is the favourite explanation our directors give for their failure – or for imperialists to condemn it either, the favourite explanation given by our Minister of Culture. Such films fail entirely on their own demerits. Not just abroad, but here in our own country too.”

  Readers’ letters were encouraging, and contained a great many unsolicited contributions. Isa and Farid were delighted, and included two excellent pieces from women living in the north of the country in the second number, one about forced marriage and the other about the role of sexuality in women’s liberation.

  It was a great surprise to Farid that while Rana refused to write for Youth, Laila was keen to do so. And Josef took enormous pleasure in providing a contribution. “I’m almost beginning to think of joining the Communist Party,” he said, “but I think I’ll wait, because after producing such a good journal you won’t grow old in the Party yourself.” And he laughed as he always did, not knowing that those were prophetic words. The Central Committee let only two more issues appear, and then came down heavily on Youth.

  The first trouble was over a joke that the Central Committee misunderstood. It was in the answer to a riddle in the first issue. The riddle was: how do you make four evangelists into three musketeers? The answer, allegedly sent in by a reader in Damascus with the very common woman’s name Farisa, was, you cut out Stalin. The merging of the names Farid and Isa was an easy conundrum for the Committee to crack. Farid was made to feel the disapproval of those in high places at a short meeting with a member of the Central Committee, but he also saw how cowardly the man was; he didn’t dare to say he was angry because, as a Stalinist, the answer to the riddle insulted him. Farid told Isa about it, but instead of being pleased his co-editor suddenly turned pale.

  Years later, when he thought back to this period, Farid was still wondering whether the Central Committee had been asleep, or whether it let those three issues come out uncensored on purpose to get rid of him for good.

  In the second issue, Isa published his first translation from the works of Wilhelm Reich. And Farid brought up the question of the principles of civil disobedience as he had put them together from his wide reading. Laila’s short but extremely radical discussion of marriage and oppression found a place in it, as well as the urging of the Marxist philosopher Ismail Hadi to find Arab roots for justice and democracy instead of coming out with bad imitations of European theories. But Farid couldn’t accept Josef’s essay on myths about the penis in the minds of Arab men. “The title on its own,” he told his friend, “could get me a life sentence: You Can Find a Homeland Anywhere But Not A Penis.” Farid laughed, and Josef swallowed his disappointment. “It’s just that the time’s not right yet,” he muttered quietly.

  The new issue aroused lively interest again. The Central Committee rema
ined silent. That troubled Isa, although Farid saw it as no reason for anxiety. Six months later he was to discover his mistake.

  217. Love of the Eunuchs

  One fine spring day General Mutamiran made a speech promising to liberate Palestine and build up Arab socialism. As the first step towards this goal, all seventeen national newspapers and eleven journals were banned. Elias was cross at supper because now he wouldn’t be able to read his favourite paper al-Ayam any more. Only the papers of the Ba’ath Party were still available. Elias glanced at them twice, and after that he stopped buying newspapers at all. This was in the summer of 1963, and from then on he listened to BBC London instead. Claire couldn’t have her magazine Dunia, which told her so much of what was going on in the world, and Farid and Josef missed the satirical magazine al-Mudhik al-Mubki.

  There were two failed coups that summer, and General Mutamiran showed no mercy. All involved were executed.

  Farid and Isa spent three nights discussing love as the next main subject for Youth.

  “It will be difficult to get that through,” said Isa despairingly, when he realized how determined Farid was. “Our Party has deep-rooted inhibitions about sex. They don’t just derive from Stalin and Lenin, they go right back to Marx himself.”

  Farid knew that Isa was right. All meetings were attended by men sitting together, and they seemed to him like the members of a club of eunuchs. Even at parties they acted in a pious, asexual way. No one brought a wife or even mentioned her in conversation. “Yet they’re all thinking of women the whole time,” said Isa sadly.