Arms for Adonis

by Charlotte Jay

  Then, mounting a slight rise, they came within sight of the valley’s end.

  Sarah, looking out through the windscreen between the heads of her captors, saw below her a wide, shallow lake shining in the sunlight within a green girdle of poplars and willows. The flat, white houses of a town mounted the rising land on its far bank, each house set above the other in a series of such distinct layers as to appear from a distance like the steps in a gigantic staircase. Above the town, and looming solemnly over it, rose up a precipitous wall of rock, barren and treeless, its face marked with fissures and the white threads of water falls.

  A quiet lake; a cliff, towering and angry like the brow of a god; summer had come late to the valley and almond and apple trees were still flowering. Sarah, looking about her, felt soothed and for a moment forgot her danger. There was something painfully strange and sweet in the gentleness of the lake discovered in that harsh loneliness.

  But as they drew nearer and the features of the place became more distinct, she felt fresh alarm. She seemed to know the place, though she had never been there. She looked in an anguish of inquiry at the two sturdy peasants on either side of her, seeing them now not as chance strangers, but as people that she had been destined to meet.

  She thought of Colonel Ahmed, fainting in her arms, his face pallid and beautiful. And now he lived again, through the vigour of his prophecy.

  They drove along the side of the lake. The still waters shone silver, too shallow to take the blue of the sky. The air was laden with the ghosts of gods and goddesses; here Astarte had changed herself into a fish to escape from the pursuing Typhon, and here, two thousand years ago, the worshippers of Adonis, descending the mountain road from Akfa, had cast themselves into the sacred waters. She had come to Ain Houssaine.

  The jeep stopped in the village near a church. Sarah thought it ominous that no village people gathered around them while they got out; women carrying baskets of washing on their heads were walking up a lane toward them, but seeing the jeep they hesitated, and turned into an alley.

  The blue-eyed man gave her a gentle shove in the back. They moved forward, crossing the street on the uneven cobblestones. They passed the church and mounted a rough stone staircase leading up into the house next door.

  This was built around a courtyard and had an arcaded verandah. The dark green, pleated leaves of loquat trees shaded the steps; from a pump in the corner, water dripped into a stone basin, and a brown and white goat, speckled like a currant bun, drank from it greedily.

  Crossing the courtyard they reached the shade of the verandah. A door opened; Sarah passed through it and swung around to face her captors. But the door slammed shut; she was alone.

  She sank on a low divan spread with a woven rug; the room lurched and disintegrated as dizziness overcame her. She closed her eyes and fought panic.

  But the moments flowed silently, smoothly by, and, as nothing happened to increase her fears, they began to recede. She looked about her.

  The room in which she was prisoner was long and narrow with a high ceiling and one barred window from which she could look out onto the verandah and courtyard. There was little furniture or ornament; some couches covered with cushions, a rug on the floor, a Madonna in a small recess. The whitewashed walls looked as clean and fresh as the inside of a shell; they were cool and uneven and friendly, and like all rough country things appealed in their simplicity. One would have expected hospitality and kindness in such a place—with the women in the cobbled streets, the church next door, the white friendly walls.

  Yet Ishmael had been dragged from the car and perhaps killed by the roadside; she herself kidnapped, held prisoner.

  The letter, she thought, I must read what it says and destroy it. She took it from her handbag and quickly tore open the envelope. But the letter was in Arabic. She searched the room for a hiding place, but there was nowhere that was not conspicuous.

  Should she tear it up? But perhaps this was just what they wanted her to do. If the letter betrayed them and if Emile Khalife was a member of the security police, their first concern would be to keep it from falling into his hands; by tearing it up she would simply be doing their work for them.

  Still undecided, she tucked it into her brassiere. Steps sounded on the verandah outside.

  Well, this is it, thought Sarah. For God’s sake let me keep my dignity and not behave like a cowardly schoolgirl. But her heart began to thud against her ribs and she felt stupid with fear. She waited, but the steps passed the door. A moment later she heard voices and a familiar, sharp, cracking sound outside.

  She looked out of the window. Two men were seated on low stools outside her door, their heads bent over a game of trictrac.

  On the bright stones of the courtyard the shadows grew longer; the sun moving slowly across to its far corner touched a pomegranate tree and lit up its brick-red blooms. The warm afternoon silence was broken only by an occasional murmur from one of the guards and the explosive crack of the trictrac counters. A woman carrying a water jar on her shoulder crossed the yard, the brown and white goat trotting at her heels. A little later this same woman brought Sarah a cup of Turkish coffee flavoured with cardamom seeds, some lebne, hard–boiled eggs and Arab bread, but when Sarah tried to question her she only smiled and shook her head, and one of the guards, a tall, burly-looking man with a drooping Edwardian moustache, stood up, peered through the window and shook his head admonishingly.

  Sarah had ceased to be afraid, but a feeling of almost unbearable excitement had taken hold of her, so that it was agony—like some painful stricture of the mind—to remain in that little room, silent and alone, while somewhere outside momentous events were moving to their climax. She paced the room to give relief to her impatience. If only something would happen! she thought, when a few moments before she had been only too glad to be left alone.

  Then something did happen, which, although it did not set her free, at least relieved the monotony of the afternoon and gave her something to think about. The two guards finished their game of trictrac and went away, to return a moment later with a portable wireless set. An Arabic news broadcast now blasted the silence of the courtyard. Sarah could make nothing of it though she hurried to the window and listened intently, hoping to catch a word here and there. But soon the announcer broke into French.

  ‘Friends and brothers,’ he declared, ‘this is the Voice of Free Lebanon, bringing you the truth about the murder of Colonel Raschid Ahmed. Do not be put off with evasions and red herrings! The cowardly plan of the imperialist stooges has been foiled by facts and faulty imagination. The truth cannot be suppressed!

  ‘Colonel Raschid Ahmed came to Beirut two days ago to negotiate a trade agreement between Lebanon and Syria. Things were going along nicely, but it does not suit the books of the imperialists that two Arab countries should join hands in friendship and they decided to put a stop to it. Our hearts are panting for union with our Syrian brothers, but this is not the policy of our government, which was put into power not by the will of the people but by blackmail and vote forgery. Our government is not a people’s government. It is only interested in kowtowing and polishing the boots of the American warmongers and the French and British aggressors.

  ‘This cowardly gang did not dare to come out into the open with its plots, but hired assassins to shoot down Colonel Ahmed like a dog in the streets. Being alive still when he was picked up, the police finished him off on his way to hospital.

  ‘Last night a deputation of Free Lebanese demanded that they should be allowed to see the body of the martyr, but the President, who was in conference with his boss, the American ambassador, sent only his secretary to put these honest people off with cagey evasions. And what did he tell them? Listen to the coward’s criminal words.

  ‘He said that Colonel Ahmed was in hospital recovering from an attack upon his life by assassins hired by the Syrian government. This story is a figment of the imagination and has been exposed by the events that followed. A member of th
e deputation, a reporter of an outspoken and freedom-supporting Arab newspaper, did not swallow these lies. He broke through the resistance of the hospital authorities and made his way to the room where Colonel Raschid Ahmed was said to be lying. But the room was empty!

  ‘The truth is clear for all to see! Colonel Ahmed died in the night and the murderers have smuggled the corpse out of the hospital.

  ‘Now the whole world knows the facts of this murder and deception and a great cry of indignation has gone up from land to land.’

  The guard with the Edwardian moustache turned off the broadcast and rose to his feet. In the interval of silence Sarah heard the soft clip-clop of hoofs on the road outside, and a moment later a donkey caravan led by a tall peasant made its appearance at the entrance of the courtyard.

  She watched from her window. The little animals picked their way delicately up the stairs, zig-zag, to ease the strain of the climb, and came tripping forward. Bulging hessian bags swayed from side to side on their backs. Two foals, their chestnut coats shining in the sunlight, trotted at their mother’s heels.

  The guard stood talking with the donkey driver, then, advancing to the third animal in the train, began to unload it. Loosening the fastenings that held the sack in place, he dumped it onto the ground and slit the thong binding its top. Pink rose petals spilled from its mouth; he plunged his hands into them. He was standing with his back to Sarah, bending down, the long flapping folds of his trousers hiding the sack from view so that she could not see exactly what he was doing. He stirred the rose petals about with his hands. Then he straightened and stood erect, pulling something out of the sack as he did so.

  Joseph Jemali took his sight along the barrel of a rifle, aiming it at the milky blue eye of the goat which, balancing on the top of a small water jar, was nibbling at the lower branch of the pomegranate tree. Lowering the rifle Joseph flicked a finger at the end of the barrel and dislodged a rose petal.

  The donkeys stamped in the sun, twitching their long furry ears; from pools of pink roses that had flowed from the mouths of the open sacks a sweet scent, like the promise of summer, permeated the courtyard; from its perch on the waterpot the goat nibbled greedily, an expression of indifference on its ancient, satanic features; the guns lay one beside the other. Joseph regarded them with satisfaction.

  Every few days for the past month donkeys carrying arms and ammunition had entered his courtyard, and out of every load a certain percentage had remained in Ain Houssaine. For the people of Ain Houssaine, who were both Christian and Muslim living contentedly together, were not sufficiently interested in the coming revolution to be tempted into it without considerable inducement.

  Joseph Jemali, who now laid his chosen rifle aside to break open the mouth of another sack, was one of the better educated and wealthier men of the village and might be said to represent local opinion. A year before he had been an enthusiastic supporter of the Liberal Party, at present governing Lebanon, but recent events had brought about a change in his opinion.

  It happened that a certain Salem Farid, a member of the cabinet and a distant relative of Jemali’s, had been dismissed from office under circumstances which necessitated his quick removal from the country. He had taken refuge in Damascus, a city peculiarly sympathetic to discontented Lebanese politicians, and had since been bombarding his supporters and his numerous Lebanese relatives with impassioned messages urging the need for avenging his wrongs.

  Salem Farid had pursued an erratic political career which had done little credit to him or his party, but the Ain Houssaine people were proud of him. The fact of their being able to claim relationship, however distant, with a member of the cabinet constituted their sole stand against obscurity; through Salem Farid they had made their mark upon the world, and, when he was dismissed, felt personally affronted.

  Their grudge against the government was not, however, maintained and nurtured with sufficient passion to urge them into armed rebellion. Beirut, let alone Damascus, was a long way off. The lake, the orchards, the goats threading the stony paths, the buried treasure awaiting discovery in the foundations of Aphrodite’s temple, the village in the next valley—these were the Ain Houssaine world.

  For many years, indeed for as long as anyone could remember, Ain Houssaine had been engaged in a bitter feud with Chakra, the village beyond the escarpment on the rocky slopes of the next high valley. The feud began, so tradition said, in the late years of the Third Crusade, when a beautiful Chakra girl, a Christian of noble Frankish descent, was forced into marriage against her will with an Ain Houssaine Muslim. The girl’s three brothers, who had settled in Chakra after many years of wandering following the break up of the Crusading armies, pretended to agree to the marriage, but at the last moment her younger brother was substituted in her place; and in the privacy of the bridal chamber this youth, throwing off his disguise, thrust a dagger into the bridegroom’s heart.

  There seems some doubt whether these events actually took place, and variations on this story are told by a large number of Lebanese, who have an attachment for it and like to incorporate it into their family annals; but if not from this wedding night, then from some event similar to it, sprang the enmity that exists to this day between Ain Houssaine and Chakra.

  Every few years or so the feud explodes into brief and bloody warfare. An interval of surly peace ensues and then, on some dark quiet night, the brothers and sons who were killed in the last foray are avenged, another dozen men lie bleeding on the stony ground and the scales of vendetta tip to the other side.

  The last raid had come from Chakra and had been a rather mild affair with only two dead, one of these an idiot boy whom nobody missed, the other, Joseph Jemali’s younger brother. There had been no reprisal; not because the people of Ain Houssaine had learned the virtue of forgiveness but because the government had confiscated all arms, and they had found it difficult re-equipping themselves. Under the circumstances, a revolution providing them with quantities of arms that they did not have to pay for proved irresistible. They flung themselves into it enthusiastically, toiling long hours to rebuild the broken Roman road over the mountains so that donkeys, following the same way as the Adonis pilgrims of ancient times, might carry guns and ammunition down to Akfa and along the valley of the sacred river to the coast beyond.

  Of late, however, Joseph had been suffering qualms of alarm over his part in the impending political upheaval. This Syrian, for instance, who had turned up the day before after escaping the police trap on the Damascus road had settled himself in and was now ordering people around in an offensive manner. And he was not the first. Two other Syrians had arrived a week before and installed a transmitter in the abandoned house behind the mosque. It was not that a subversive radio station troubled the Ain Houssaine people—they enjoyed listening to the broadcasts, which were couched in a language qualified to stir the coolest heart—but they were beginning to feel that they were not masters in their own village.

  They had been particularly reluctant to undertake the kidnapping of the young foreign woman now a prisoner in Joseph’s house; abducting women was not one of their traditional practices and if they were going to take to it, they preferred to do so spontaneously and not at the behest of overbearing Syrians. Moreover, Joseph, who knew something of the world, suspected that in this matter they might have overstepped the mark. It was all very well to fight the Lebanese Liberal party, which had insulted them by dismissing Salem Farid, but foolhardy to fight Great Britain or America; Joseph particularly did not want to fight America, where his younger sister was happily settled on a citrus farm. The Syrians had tried to reassure him by pointing out that the English girl’s disappearance would not even be discovered until the revolution was well under way, by which time she would be released, and that the British would be eager to hush the whole affair up as her kidnappers would then be the established government, with whom Britain would find it expedient to come to terms. All this sounded reasonable to Joseph, and the Syrians had further assured
him that they would keep on the right side of the British by refraining from burning down their embassy or, if inadvertently it should catch fire, would make swift and adequate reparation.

  But supposing, thought Joseph, that the revolutionaries did not pull off their coup, what then? The majority of those who had assisted them, after handing over their arms, might be forgiven—forgiveness being a Lebanese virtue, indeed a necessity. But would Joseph Jemali, harbourer of Syrian spies and abductor of foreign women, be among them? Moreover, there still remained the unpleasant task of getting hold of that letter; suppose she should resist and declare afterward that he had assaulted her? He decided to leave this problem till the morning.

  In the meantime, these reflections had so troubled him that he told his wife to take Sarah a basket of the new season’s figs and a bottle of Ksara wine.

  She offered them so kindly and with such a pleasant smile, on the instant Sarah knew why she had been taken to Ain Houssaine.

  She was a hostage. But whose hostage? And what exchange would be made to secure her safety?

  C H A P T E R 1 2

  Over an hour after he had discovered the disappearance of Sarah and Ishmael, Alan, seated in the back of a battered Baalbek taxi, was bumping along the narrow lanes that led out of the town. He had had great difficulty finding anyone who would agree to take him to Chakra. There were few road-worthy vehicles in Baalbek, and their owners unanimously agreed that Chakra was a place which, on that particular day at any rate, they did not wish to visit; only extreme financial pressures, Alan guessed, had persuaded his present driver to undertake a journey so contrary to the general inclination.