The Brides of Solomon (2 page)

I walked on the deserted quay, regretting that I should never see my Helena again, for she would have married some village notable long before I came out of gaol. True, they might treat me more
leniently. We old soldiers of the Fighting French were charitable to one another. But the best I could hope for was the mental hospital. And indeed I had well deserved that I, a sergeant-major,
should spend five years sewing rabbits upon babies’ nappies under the eye of the occupational therapist.

The black mass of Lebanon showed up against the red of dawn. It was not a cloud. It stood upon eighty miles of steel sea and striped haze, and so solid it was that I prostrated myself like a
Moslem praying upon the quay, and bowed my farewell to Helena and to Ferjeyn and to Asia. I must admit that I was very drunk.

Then a voice hailed me from the dock:

‘Brother, that is not the direction of Mecca!’

I looked up. A caique was drifting out on the dawn wind, her captain at the great tiller. Her sail was half hoisted, and she was painted blue and yellow. I asked the captain where he was
bound.

‘To Beirut,’ he said, ‘if it pleases God. Come with me, brother, and learn the difference between east and south!’

He took me for a fellow Moslem, you see. And they do not care about passports and police controls, those chaps in the caiques.

All the same, he intended a mere sailor’s jest, I suppose, rather than a serious invitation. But I did not wait for him to change his mind. I would have obeyed any sensible suggestion from
any quarter. I dived in, and he luffed and picked me up. I told him with much detail that I was a Turk who had escaped from an English prison. That amused him so richly that he did not ask too many
questions.

And there I was condemned by a single impulsive act to the life of a deserter, and presented at the same time—for luck cuts both ways—with a chance of permanent freedom, since it
would be assumed for at least a week that I was still in Cyprus.

The west wind was fresh and steady, and by sunset we were close under the land. Part of our cargo, like that of any caique in wartime, was contraband. In the night the captain rowed his crates
ashore on the beach of Batroun. Half an hour later he had resumed his voyage to Beirut, and I was walking to the coast road through a darkness that smelt of the spring rains.

By bus and lorry—and detours on foot around the control posts of the military police—I reached Damascus, where I had banked for years the economies of my military pay. It was a
little account which I had kept quiet. Not that it was dishonest. Far from it. Custom demanded that when an Arab trooper was posted to the squadron of his choice or recommended for promotion he
should give a little present. That was something which everyone knew, but of which no one spoke. So it was only decent that I should not flaunt my bank account before the eyes of the military
authorities.

I was sure that there would be no enquiry for me yet in Syria. After all it was only forty-eight hours since I had deserted. So I presented myself at the bank without fear. There was a clerk on
duty who knew me, and it was not the first time he had seen me in civilian clothes.

The sum was small. It would not have bought a decent tobacco stall in France; but it was enough for a house and farm at Ferjeyn, and something over. Provided I presented myself as a prosperous
man, well-dressed and careless, I had no doubt that John Douaihy would give me his daughter. They are easily impressed, the Syrians. So long as nothing is stinted at the marriage, they do not much
care what happens to a daughter after.

The journey along the edge of the desert to Hassetche was arduous. I had no papers—beyond a good French military map—and so it was essential to avoid all roads and public transport.
Stained with dust and salt water as I was, I resembled the poorest of Arabs. I bought a camel and pretended to be taking it to market—always at the next town along my route. I have had charge
of many animals in my time, but I tell you a camel is the only one it is impossible to love. One receives a more civilised response from an intelligent jeep. Sometimes I rode my camel and sometimes
I led her. She was only a stage property and of little use to me. Perhaps she knew it.

At Hassetche I sold my camel and bought a fine pony and dressed myself decently. Then I rode to Ferjeyn and was received by John Douaihy with that superb hospitality which the Christian Arab
reserves for the elder European brother—provided, of course, that he behaves like a brother. John knew what I wanted from him, though we did not yet mention it. There was a difficulty to be
disposed of first. He expected me to tell him that I had had enough of the war.

I should explain to you that our commune, isolated for centuries among hostile Mohammedans, saw nothing at all disgraceful in being a deserter. No fighting had ever counted for them but the long
bickering between Christian and Moslem, which in their soil was native as the mulberry. War between Christian nations was to them as irresponsible as the jealousy between the House of France and
the House of Anjou must have seemed to a sensible Crusader. A free fighting man who withdrew himself from participation in any such lunacy was not to be blamed.

But why tell them at all, you will ask. Because I had to prevent them from chattering far and wide that there was a real Frenchman in Ferjeyn. If they understood that I had deserted and was
wanted by the police, they would be as untruthful about my past as if I had been one of themselves. And it was not difficult for them to accept me. They think in terms of religion, not, as we do,
in terms of nationality. I was Christian. I spoke Arabic. Therefore, if I wished to be, I was one of the commune. It is true that they were Maronites and I (according to that enthusiastic
socialist, my father) was an atheist. But Ferjeyn and Helena were well worth a mass.

M. le Consul, I married Helena and I bought my few hectares of good land. My father-in-law—for, being headman, he had the right—gave me the identity card of a man of Ferjeyn who had
gone to Morocco twenty years before and never returned. I am no longer Valentin Lecormier. I am Nadim Nassar. I permit myself to bore you with these details, since I hope that you will wish to
check the truth of my story. My sons, though they bear the name of Nassar, are in fact three little Lecormiers, and, I repeat, they look to France and to you to claim them in due season.

You have no interest in a renegade? M. le Consul, I plead my long service, such as it was, and I would beg you to understand that there is not all the difference you would think between Ferjeyn
and a mountain village of France. I was happier there than I have ever been. True, I was ravished by my little Helena, but ravishment is not necessarily content. I will try to tell you how I could
be content, and still remain a Frenchman.

Where there is stone for wall and paving, one is not wholly a barbarian. My house was well above the commune, and three hundred metres below the top of the mountain. In a hard winter the lowest
tongues of snow felt for the limit of my land and melted into the stone channels that irrigated my terraces. When the sluices were open, the water ran on an even slope, quite silent and without
foam; but the rush was so fast and smooth that a leaf falling into the channel vanished to eternity as swiftly as a human life.

When you looked up from the plain of the Duck’s Bill towards Ferjeyn, you saw nothing but stone, and strips of green. Terrace rose over terrace, and above each was the bare rock from which
the earth had been stripped, and packed into the narrow fields that girdled the mountain. But when you looked down from my house over the grey walls and flat roofs of Ferjeyn, there were only green
tops, falling in steps, of orchard and vineyard and olive and wheat. I find that civilised, M. le Consul.

The life—well, it was a little primitive but not unfamiliar. We had our group of village notables, and the café where we gathered at the end of the day’s work. True, when I
first knew it, our café was nothing but a hole in a ruin furnished with bench and counter. So I set into the pavement three tables which I had made with my own hands, and planted a vine to
give shade. There we played our games and drank our wine and araq—as good fathers of families, of course—and watched the life of the commune on the flagstones of the little square.
There were John Douaihy and his brother Boulos, and the priest, the saddler, the grocer and myself.

The square was my delight. On the north side was an ancient, tumbledown colonnade with a roof of red tiles supported by slender pillars of stone. It had been built by a Greek architect exiled
from Constantinople to our remote province. In your travels for France, M. le Consul, you must often have lived in some alien and melancholy spot which, all the same, became a home for you because
of an avenue of trees or the satisfying proportions of a single house or perhaps a garden. You will know then what I felt for our square. It was the link with my civilisation.

I cannot say that outside the square the streets resembled those of France. To tell you the truth, they did not exist. The houses were separated by mud in winter and dust in summer. As an old
sergeant-major with a taste for tidiness, I did my best for proper streets, but without success. All the same, I persuaded Ferjeyn to establish a rubbish dump and pay a collector and a cart. That
was a triumph. Admittedly he was the village idiot, but he was the only garbage man within a hundred miles.

You will have gathered, M. le Consul, that my advice was respected. I gave it rarely. If there were anything I wished to change, I was well content to spend a patient year in changing it.
Peace—that was all I asked. Peace for my Helena and myself.

After Syria was given her independence, the first thought of the simple Moslem peasants around us was to raid the Christians. A sort of celebration. It was very natural. Had the Christians been
in the majority, they would have endeavoured to raid the Moslems. But the government, in those early days, was determined to be as efficient as the French. They strengthened the garrison at
Hassetche, and they reminded the fanatics that Syria was a land of many religions, all with the same rights of citizenship. A massacre—even though a little one and carried out for pure
sport—could not be permitted.

Then, as you know, the honeymoon ended and the politicians returned to the making of money. At Damascus there were revolutions. Over here, in the lost corner of the country, there was
discontent. And with us when one is discontented, one distracts oneself by taking action. The gendarmerie is weak and scattered, and there is little to prevent a criminal from escaping into Turkey
or Iraq. For my part I prefer Turkey.

Day and night Ferjeyn began to talk of danger. I have never understood how the Arabs can be called fatalists. In a crisis they are hysterical as women. One must admit that there was a little
danger, but only of stones thrown, of rifles fired too high to do much damage, of a house burned and cattle stolen and a woman raped—an excitement of spirit which two of my old
Arabic-speaking corporals could have extinguished by mere calm and authority!

We, the notables, met at night conspiratorially, behind closed shutters in my house or the house of John Douaihy or the priest’s. That made a good impression on the village. But my
venerable colleagues had no more sense than children. They wanted me to make a fortress of the mountain.

‘Willingly,’ I answered. ‘If I have twenty men who shoot to kill, I will hold Ferjeyn from one harvest to the next.’

Ah, yes, I could have them. What did I think? That they were no soldiers? Of course I could have them, and the boys and greybeards too—

But they knew and I knew that this was all talk. The truth was that they dreamed of constructing an impassable Maginot Line, for they wished to hold Ferjeyn with the least possible bloodshed.
And they were right. We were sixteen hundred men, women and children, surrounded by two hundred thousand Moslems. The only tactics by which I could hold Ferjeyn—cunning and ambush and
ruthless slaughter—would have meant blood feuds with the Christians that might endure a hundred years.

When I had pointed out that even a Chinese wall would not stop Moslems unless we had men on top of it trained to kill, the priest begged me to go to Palestine and buy a tank. For him a tank was
a piece of magic that would make Ferjeyn invincible. He might have been talking of a sort of beetle that could move itself and fight.

I soon had enough of these councils of war which were only exclamations. I refused to take command. I wasn’t having any. I was content to eat and drink and till my land. That was my
life.

They did their best to persuade me. The priest waggled his fingers at me as if I had been a child he were about to baptise, and told me to fight for my religion. I was polite, for I had to
appear impressed. But I could not share his opinion that it was a service to God to murder Moslems. All my life I have been unwilling to anticipate the intentions of the high command.

Another night John Douaihy warned me that he and I might lose our property. He was at his most dignified; he spoke like a governor of the Bank of France. I shrugged my shoulders. What could we
lose? We were not rich. And a crazy band of Moslems is not an army of occupation. They do enough damage to boast about, and then go home. They cannot take away the soil in wheelbarrows.

Then the women and children. I must defend them. That was the excitement of the saddler, who, in his old age, had married a wife nearly as pretty as Helena. Well, the appetites of raiders are
not a matter upon which one should let imagination rest—unless one is the wife of an old man—but someone has to be sacrificed, and memory is short.

‘Brothers,’ I would say to them, ‘let us endure the chastisement that God sends us in the firm faith that it will quickly pass—so long as we have bribed the civil
administration, given feasts to Moslem notables and assured the interest of the gendarmes.’

All that we had done. We knew how to look after ourselves. Without any government at all, Ferjeyn would have got on very well with its neighbours. No need of proof. We Christians had been on our
mountain since the Arab conquest. The flagstones of our little square were Roman. That was the strength of my argument. I appealed to history.