The Dark Side of Love

by Rafik Schami

  She closed her eyes and breathed in the fresh breeze caressing her face. Then, at the top of her voice, she cried out, “Yes!”

  Farid, still lying in bed exhausted with his eyes closed, and enjoying the pleasure of drowsing briefly off, woke with a start. Rana turned and looked at him. He gazed back at her, surprised.

  How was he to know that her “Yes!” was an answer to the question he had asked her nine and a half years before?

  BOOK OF DEATH II

  Truth is a jewel whose owner is rich and lives dangerously.

  DAMASCUS, MEDITERRANEAN COAST, SPRING – AUTUMN 1970

  301. Rumours

  Colonel Badran was a passionate movie buff, and loved thrillers. He had written three screenplays himself, but they were now gathering dust in a drawer. Today he was wearing civilian clothes and sunglasses as he walked beside the widow Said, following her murdered husband’s coffin and filming the whole occasion with his new Super-Eight camera.

  When the little party of mourners left the widow Said’s apartment later, the colonel stayed on. He confided to her that her husband’s ambition had led him to join a conspiracy. Several high-ranking officers, he said, had been planning a coup, and they had promised Mahdi the job of Interior Minister. At first her husband had gone along with them, but then he had scruples, and tried to back out.

  The widow couldn’t help giggling. “Scruples!” she said, spluttering with laughter. “Mahdi and scruples? You must be joking!” The colonel hesitated, but when the widow fell backward on the couch because she was laughing so hard, it was too much for him. He sat down beside her and laid a hand on the knee she had bared. It was as soft as if she had no bones. She didn’t flinch away. He pressed harder, and the widow lay still, closed her eyes, and opened her legs.

  Badran caressed her tenderly and carefully, and was surprised to find what sexy lingerie she was wearing under her mourning. She was willing and ardent. Badran enjoyed their love-play on the couch, and when the widow was almost beside herself in her longing for the release of orgasm, he carried her into the bedroom, where he laid her carefully on the bed and made passionate love to her. When they had finished, the widow felt happy for the first time in what seemed an eternity.

  Badran lay in her arms, laughing and shaking his head.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t even know your first name, madame, and I’ve already slept with you!”

  She smiled. “I’m Balkis, and I don’t want to be called anything else.” And then she told him how cold Mahdi Said had been. “Just the opposite of you, brutal with his hands, but he was useless further down.”

  Their relationship didn’t remain a secret for long, and soon there was an ugly rumour going around that Mahdi had to die because the colonel was having an affair with his wife, and the two of them had strangled him for fear of scandal.

  302. Persistence

  Commissioner Barudi didn’t believe that Badran had anything to do with the murder. The man had too many mistresses in Damascus for that. Barudi had tracked down four of them.

  For a long time he thought it possible that there was a political motive for Mahdi’s death, but the evidence of the fingerprints failed to reinforce his suspicion. Paper is one of the few materials from which fingerprints do not disappear. So he had prints lifted from the note found with the murdered major, and in secret he also obtained the prints of the condemned officers from the army files. None of them resembled those on the scrap of wrapping paper at all.

  Was Badran covering up for something? And if so, why?

  After a few days the widow could be disregarded as a source of information, because she was the colonel’s lover. Commissioner Barudi put all his information into a folder and carefully kept it with him.

  Old Adjutant Mansur, who shared the room with him, noticed that the commissioner had a secret, but he was unable to find out what it was. Since the “Mahdi” case, the young first lieutenant was no longer as hard-working as before. He arrived late for work, and often didn’t seem to have his mind on it.

  “You wait, you peasant fool, Mansur will get the better of you yet,” whispered the adjutant, with a smile playing around his mouth.

  In summer Barudi launched out on a new line of research. He decided to discover where the paper found in the murdered man’s pocket came from. The answer was easy. Five souvenir shops in the Christian quarter used the pale grey paper in question, another ten used a yellowish wrapping paper. He wrote down the names of the owners and their staff, but this track led nowhere.

  At the end of August Barudi took two weeks’ vacation, for he noticed how the murder was obsessing him so much that it kept him from working on other cases. He wanted to find out exactly what had happened once and for all, and either chalk up a huge success or forget the entire thing for ever.

  Who was this man Mahdi Said?

  All Barudi knew was that he came from the small town of Safita in the north of the country, and had originally been a Christian by the name of Said Bustani.

  Was it, he wondered as he boarded the bus to Safita, a case of revenge by some religious Christian group?

  He arrived in Safita four hours later. The town was beautiful, which made him feel optimistic, and suddenly he felt he was very close to his goal. After two hours his presentiments were confirmed. The Bustani family was well known in town. The murdered man’s mother, Rihane Bustani, was a severe elderly widow who bore the marks of her hard life. She was withdrawn, and wouldn’t say a word to the commissioner, but suddenly her daughter Mona appeared in the doorway and invited the commissioner to her house. She thought well of his efforts, because he didn’t seemed impressed by the idea that her brother was supposed to have taken part in the political plot.

  “I’m here in a private capacity; I just want to know the truth,” said the commissioner, suddenly feeling ravenous. “You don’t have to answer any of my questions.” For he realized that he had no means of making her.

  “Wait a moment, and I’ll be right back,” said the woman, going back into her mother’s house. Barudi put her age at twenty-five. Later he found out that Mona was thirty-six, one year older than her murdered brother.

  She was of rather sturdy build, but had a smooth, broad face with plenty of room on it for her smile. “Come along,” she told him, when she came out again. “I’m sure you must be hungry. Didn’t you say you’d come all the way from Damascus?”

  Mona and her husband Faruk, who joined them later, were kindness and hospitality itself. They entertained Barudi to a delicious meal, and gave him all the information he needed about the murdered major. And when evening drew on, they insisted that he must spend the night with them.

  Barudi had really meant to go on to the monastery of St. Sebastian, but no bus went up into the mountains by night. He slept restlessly, constantly switching on the little bedside lamp and writing down everything that occurred to him. Next morning, after a hearty breakfast, he took his leave. Mona’s husband waved goodbye one last time from the bus station, and then disappeared in a dense black cloud.

  Barudi took out the little notebook containing his new discoveries. He underlined the following entries: the murdered man was known as Bulos in the monastery. His name as a child had been Said Bustani. Later, he converted to Islam in order to further his career, which grieved his sister. From then on he was called Mahdi Said.

  He transferred the latest facts he had gleaned, written on several scraps of paper, to the notebook, taking care to write neatly.

  Mona’s mother Rihane came from Latakia. She fell in love with the rich and dashing son of a farmer in the south, a man called Musa Shahin, married him, and moved to his village of Mala, never guessing that her husband’s family and another clan, the Mushtaks, were involved in a blood feud with each other. In the village, one Hasib Mushtak shot Mona’s father when the little girl was seven. She remembers her father, who liked to laugh and sing and was a handsome man. The widow moved back with Mona and her brother Said to their grandpare
nts’ home in Latakia, where she met Karim Bustani, then the manager of the Latakia arrack distillery. He married her, and made her convert from the Orthodox to the Catholic faith. She and her children took the name of Bustani. But the children’s stepfather disliked Said from the first, and sent him off to the monastery. In the same year Karim Bustani moved with his family to Safita, where he tried to open a small arrack distillery of his own. He failed miserably, because he was harsh and unfriendly by nature.

  Barudi received a cool reception at the monastery, but one of the Fathers did remember that about fifteen years before there had been a considerable problem in which Bulos Bustani was involved. Barudi had spent five days at the monastery’s guesthouse before a workman there told him about the three friends Bulos, Barnaba, and Matta. He, the workman, had been a pupil at the monastery himself at the time, and for a while he belonged to the secret society calling itself the Syrian Brothers that Bulos had founded. He also knew about the hostility that had suddenly sprung up between Bulos and the aforesaid Barnaba, and how after that Matta went crazy.

  Barudi packed his case and went home. He had three names on his list: Bulos (Said) Bustani, Barnaba (Farid) Mushtak, and Matta (Matta) Blota.

  He was delighted. At last he was tying up the loose ends. So it was all to do with a blood feud. One of the couple, either Matta or Farid, must be the murderer, he told himself on the way back to Damascus. But which? Next day he went to Mala, where he heard from a loquacious barber that Matta was in fact a half-brother of Farid Mushtak. “His father Elias Mushtak made Matta’s mother Nasibe pregnant, and a poor shepherd married her, but he never would accept her firstborn son, he always just called him ‘Mushtak’s filth’.”

  With that the investigation came full circle. Barudi spent a night writing the case up in his room, putting everything in order, rephrasing sentences. He knew his boss would immediately refuse to reopen the case if the least little thing didn’t add up.

  He slept uneasily. When he woke, he washed and shaved with great care. He was expecting difficulties, although he didn’t anticipate the problems that were actually ahead of him.

  303. An Undignified Departure

  Barudi had been expecting almost anything when he entered the CID building, but not the new notice on his own office door. It said Commissioner Mahmud Sultani. Barudi stopped just for a moment, and then went on. He knew that his boss set great store by the formalities, and would sulk like an injured child if you didn’t come straight to see him on your return from vacation and shake his hand deferentially. He knocked on the secretary’s door. Mrs. Sukari gave him a pale smile, returned his “Good morning”, and appeared to be very busy. “You can go in to the boss,” she said. “He’s expecting you.”

  “Ah, so here’s our Sherlock Holmes,” Colonel Kuga greeted him venomously, shaking his head as Barudi came in. He offered a limp hand, and pointed to an old chair in front of his desk. Barudi sat down and placed his report on the desk.

  “You ought to be glad Adjutant Mansur has a kind heart and doesn’t tell tales,” Kuga began his speech. “Who do you think you are, First Lieutenant Barudi? I myself was keen to find out the truth as a young officer, but I never went behind my boss’s back. Do you know what will happen to you if I hand the papers that you secretly collected over to Colonel Badran? Well, do you? Do you know that Mansur could have claimed a reward if he’d passed on all the stuff you spied out to Badran instead of me? Mansur found it in a folder underneath your desk. If you’re going to make yourself out incorruptible, then please don’t be sloppy about it. All that folder shows is that you’re useless as a criminal investigator. It’s only out of friendship for your former boss Colonel Kalagi that I am now going to destroy the folder before your eyes, and then forget that you ever put the documents in it together behind my back.”

  The colonel rose, went to a safe, and took out Barudi’s folder. He pressed the button of some new-fangled machine and threw the folder in it. A noise like the sound of an electric mill grinding was heard, and then thin snippets of paper no more than a millimetre wide fell out. Barudi could barely keep back his tears. All his work was destroyed.

  “Your transfer to the Jordanian border came through yesterday,” said Colonel Kuga finally, in a rather calmer voice. “You’re to start in charge of the little border checkpoint there in three days’ time. It’s a quiet posting,” he said, offering his hand in goodbye, as if to express the fact that he wanted no more talk about it.

  Barudi dragged himself out. His feet were heavy. As he closed the door quietly behind him and went into the secretary’s office, Mrs. Sukari briefly looked up. “Your personal possessions are in a carton in your old office,” she said dryly, and went on noisily typing.

  He didn’t take a deep breath until he was out in the corridor. This was the worst day of his life. He had been betrayed by Mansur’s intrigues and fired from his job – downgraded to the border police.

  Barudi opened the door of his former office. A portly young commissioner sat there playing cards with Mansur, who pretended to be sympathetic, but Barudi couldn’t help seeing his triumphant smile.

  “You didn’t find my folder just by chance, you took it from its hiding place and gave me away,” he growled, feeling that he could sink no lower now.

  “Your turn,” Mansur told the young commissioner at the table. The commissioner put down the jack of hearts.

  Barudi took the carton containing his comb, the two ties he kept in the office for urgent official occasions, his nameplate, which he had had made of walnut wood, and a few journals and textbooks that he used to keep in his desk drawers. Then he left without saying goodbye.

  A small hope died in a distant corner of his heart.

  BOOK OF COLOUR

  The loveliest of all colours is the secret colour of words.

  DAMASCUS, BEIRUT, FRANKFURT, HEIDELBERG, MANNHEIM, MUNICH, MARNHEIM, 34 YEARS LATER, SUMMER 2004

  304. The Last Piece in the Mosaic

  In 1962 a young Muslim woman was murdered before my eyes and those of all our neighbours, because she had crossed the religious divide and loved a Christian man. The sad thing was that the man wasn’t worth it. He was a gigolo.

  I thought at the time, as a sixteen-year-old who saw the world as a never-ending chain of stories, that someone ought to write a novel about all the varieties of forbidden love to be found in Arabia, and I longed to do just that with all the naivety of a lover. But my armoury of narrative tools was not well enough developed yet for me to turn such an idea into a story. I made my first attempts from 1965 to 1967. They failed miserably.

  In the years that followed, I completed my university studies of chemistry, physics and mathematics. But censorship and political dictatorship showed me that my plans to live in Syria as a teacher and writer were not going to work out. A despotic regime leaves no room for any in-between shades; those who are not for it are against it.

  I felt close to suffocation when I left my family and my city of Damascus at the end of 1970. I had written off to several foreign universities applying for a further course of study there, and they still had not replied. But now that my university studies in Damascus were over, and my postponement of military service had thus run out, the authorities could draft me into the army any day. I had to get out of Syria fast and hope to be accepted by a university in another country.

  I went to Beirut, where I had friends and relations, which was lucky for me. Three days later my draft card arrived. If I had stayed in Damascus I would have had to report to one of the assembly centres for recruits within forty-eight hours. My name would have been given to all the border posts, and legal emigration would have been impossible. When it comes to subjugating human beings, the most dilatory of Third World bureaucrats are transformed into fast-moving and highly effective servants of the state. I would not have survived my three years of military service.

  At the time Beirut was teeming with political groups from all the Arab countries, which made that beautiful city on th
e Mediterranean a base for the overthrow of their terrible regimes, not infrequently with financial backing from another and yet worse regime. Consequently, the city was also a happy hunting ground for all the secret services in the world. Persecution mania was more infectious than the common cold. Anyone who hoped to survive in that jungle must be constantly on his guard and avoid all unnecessary contacts. Every day I read news in the paper of Arabs in exile who had disappeared or had been abducted or murdered.

  I had to wait three months before hearing that Heidelberg University would accept me. During that time I lived very quietly and inconspicuously in Beirut with my friend Samir, a fellow pupil at our elite Catholic school in Damascus from the first year to our final exams. His apartment was large and well furnished. I began on my novel again, but once more I failed. Beirut was full of unrest; the harbingers of the civil war were knocking at the city gates with bloodstained hands. Suddenly my story turned into a sentimental civil war romance, with a happy ending in which society was liberated.

  My host, Samir, was from a prosperous Christian family of goldsmiths. After his school studies he had gone to Beirut to build up a business of his own there. He had bought a large apartment for himself and the wife his father had chosen for him, a rich jeweller’s daughter. But a month before the wedding day the bride eloped with a young doctor. Samir was not upset. He hadn’t been in love with his fiancée anyway, he simply meant to marry her. At the time he was in love with a young prostitute and visited her almost every night. Then, a year later, he married a wife chosen by his mother, and this time it worked. But by then I was in Germany.