The Dark Side of Love (12 page)

Wherever they rode they met with misery and starvation. The tax collectors of the Sultan in Istanbul drained the last coins from the people's purses, for Sultan Abdulhamid was deep in debt to the West. But a pitiless drought had descended on many parts of his Ottoman Empire, and there was nothing to be harvested but dust. Epidemics had spread, tuberculosis, plague and cholera were raging, and whole areas of the country were already depopulated. No talisman offered any hope of an end to these hardships. People were dying like flies.

Laila and Nassif had not known such wretchedness in the lush countryside south of Damascus, which was like a garden. But on their flight north, the roads were full of people who didn't know where to go to escape the cholera. Malaria drained the light from children's eyes.

A few young men were making their way fast in the direction of Damascus, hoping that salvation might yet be found there. It was winter. In spite of the cold weather, they walked barefoot, carrying their shoes on a string tied around their necks to save the leather. When they came close to the city they were going to wash their feet and then put their clean shoes on again. They firmly believed that they would attract more attention with a good pair of shoes.

Laila and Nassif turned away from the main roads. Their journey to Mala took them over high mountains, down through deep ravines again, and from there along winding paths up to the top of the next mountain. The winter landscape made nature harsh and forbidding. The cold was unbearable. Laila had never known anything like it. The further they wound their way into the mountains, the more she froze, yet they had only reached a thousand metres, and they would have to climb almost as high again. Laila's heart failed her at the thought of it.

Nassif joked with her, saying that there were wolves and bears in the mountains, creatures who would eat a human being up within seconds. She begged him to stop, but he went on teasing her until the day the hyenas appeared. They were on a mountain ridge, letting the horses follow the path slowly. In many places it wasn't even a metre wide, and the ever-hungry maw of the abyss gaped to their left. Nassif
was riding a little way in front of Laila, singing softly and gazing into the distance.

The morning light had banished enough of the darkness of night for them to be able to see across the valley to the top of the next height. Suddenly Laila saw the hyenas on the other side of the abyss. They had attacked a woman walking to the nearby village with a bundle of firewood on her head. To the eye, the rising ground lay so close that not only could Laila count the hyenas, she could also see the woman's face clearly.

“Nassif,” she screamed in horror. Startled out of his thoughts, he stopped his horse, but could not turn it. He carefully dismounted and turned to Laila, and at that moment he too saw the hyenas.

The woman was trying to drive the beasts off with a stick. They retreated briefly, then attacked again, and through their greedy howls, which sounded like laughter, the two travellers heard cries for help.

Nassif shouted and cursed, but only a single hyena looked back at him in surprise, while the others attacked the woman yet more fiercely, and no one came to her aid. Laila had no strength left. She slipped from her saddle. Nassif tied his horse to a bush, went to her and held her tight.

“I love you, Laila,” he said, and kissed her. His kiss made her frozen blood flow again.

“Can you go on?” he asked. She nodded. He helped her back into the saddle, then remounted his own horse, and sent it trotting slowly down the narrow, dangerous path. She followed him. It was the last time he ever called her Laila.

Three hours later they reached Mala. Later she said that the hyenas had been the warning sign that her days in Mala would begin with misfortune and end in misfortune too, but she ignored the sign.

After her early death in 1920, the villagers spoke ill of Sarka. Years before her death, they said, she had betrayed George Mushtak and
Mala by encouraging the reapers to revolt. But Sofia the midwife defended her, saying it was her husband's fault. A week before the birth of her first child, Sarka had fallen sick with a strange fever. It lasted two days, and she had talked nonsense. Then, soon after the delivery of the baby, she fainted and lay unconscious for hours. That had been with Salman, and later it was the same with her second child Hasib. And at Hasib's birth, said Sofia, when the young woman came back to her senses after several hours, she herself had heard her making sounds like a wounded animal for half a day. No one could understand her. With her third child, her daughter Malake, Sarka fell into a dreadful state of derangement for a while. She screamed that her husband would hate the girl and kill her because she had the mark of a crescent moon just below her left breast, like her mother. As an experienced midwife, Sofia told George Mushtak that he should either stop getting his wife pregnant or take her to doctors in the city, but he just said angrily, “Women's foolishness!” Sarka, he said, had nine lives, like a cat, and could bear twenty children. At the birth of their fourth child Elias, however, she fainted away again, and when she regained consciousness she didn't recognise anyone for a while. After that she was afraid of the baby, and cried out that he was an elephant. At this point Sofia guessed that the woman had lost her wits, but George Mushtak still wouldn't hear of it.

“The fever's eaten her brain away,” said the midwife, and she thought that was the only reason why Sarka's husband was able to forgive her everything later. “When she came back she was out of her mind, just a miserable creature deserving not punishment but pity.”

The great elm tree, with the rotten half that burned down at Easter in 1953, had a story that had imprinted itself like no other on the collective memory of the village.

Sarka had felt unwell in Mala from the first. The climate was too harsh for her, the peasants too crude, and George Mushtak didn't love
her any more now that hatred of his rivals increasingly filled his heart, leaving no room for his wife any more. Obsessed by that hatred as he was, he was no longer the Nassif who loved her laughter and understood every stirring of her emotions. Instead, he followed his instinct, which no longer saw the difference between his beloved Laila and any other woman. Hatred also left its mark on his pride, for he realized that the more women he took, the more virile he would seem to the men of the village.

A year after Salman's birth, chance or the devil took her to the granary where George was making love to Saliha, the barber's wife.

Sofia the midwife told anyone who would listen that she didn't understand the man, whoring around like that but still consumed by jealousy. He ought to have been a Muslim, she said, then he would have hidden Sarka from all eyes behind a veil. He felt wretched when other men looked at his beautiful wife and she let them share in her clear laughter. But Sarka loved him alone, and as long as she could still put two and two together she was faithful to him. She had a heart as pure and transparent as glass. When her lover betrayed her, however, that glass was left with a crack the size of a star in it. She wept for four days. “You don't love me, you don't love me,” she repeated countless times, long after he had left the room, and she flung her head back and forth and took no notice of anything going on around her.

But George Mushtak realized that his love for her crippled him. She wasn't well, she complained and wept all the time, as if Laila had died and Sarka was only her wretched husk. He didn't know what to do. When he was with her, she begged him not to go away. But life outside wouldn't wait. He couldn't sit at her bedside for ever, holding her hand, while that bastard Jusuf Shahin was trying to destroy him.

Jusuf had married a clever woman from Aleppo. She was his closest confidante, and the secret leader of the anti-Mushtak campaign. Her name was Samia. She was a witch, but she lent her husband wings, whereas Sarka had been like a leaden weight clinging to George's feet ever since their arrival in Mala. When little Salman began crying at night, he had another room prepared for her, on the first floor at the other end of the house, and from then on he slept more peacefully.

One night soon after the birth of her second son Hasib she felt
that she couldn't breathe. She rose from her bed and quietly went out. The wind refreshed her face. She took deep breaths of night air. The moon was shining brightly; you could almost hear the silver silence. Suddenly the yard gate sprang open, and she felt a strange current drawing her away. Like a feather with no will of its own, she flitted through the gateway and on past the church of St. Giorgios to the terraced fields. Only when she reached the distant threshing floor did she realize that she was barefoot. She turned and went back to bed, and next day she would have thought the whole thing was only a dream, but for the thistles still clinging to her dress.

A little while after that, people began whispering about a ghost that haunted the fields on nights of full moon, softly singing nursery rhymes. Those who heard that song, they said, fell victim to a spell that turned them too into children and led them to their ruin.

Sarka was indeed always out and about now when the moon was full. One night she was walking over the hill near the graveyard when she noticed a man following her. She stopped and turned to face him. He stood rooted to the spot in the moonlight. He was slender, and as beautiful as a youth. Sarka went on singing, and he listened to her song like a child.

“What do you want?” she asked. He trembled with fear, and stammered as he said he had never touched a woman yet, he would like to lay his head in her lap just once. She laughed and reached her hands out to him, but then he ran away.

He came back every night when the moon was full, but he never ventured to touch her. Instead, he always whispered, “Holy Virgin, stand by me.”

After that the villagers of Mala spoke of two ghosts. At first they laughed at the strange couple, but when the shepherd Ismail was found hanged close to the graveyard one morning the peasants were afraid. Three days before, Ismail had been saying that he was going to listen to the nocturnal singing. The ghost was a friendly one, he said, and surely they could see that nothing had happened to him yet.

The shepherd died a month after the birth of Malake, Sarka's third baby. George Mushtak took a dislike to the child from the first, and his arch-enemy Jusuf Shahin knew why and was happy to tell other
people what he thought. The baby's father, he said, wasn't Sarka's husband but the handsome shepherd Ismail, who had hanged himself for love.

But many in the village believed that the ghost who wandered the fields had turned the shepherd's wits, and they felt fear weighing them down. For it was at this of all times that they
had
to go out at night, because the water from the spring was running short, and was shared out between families according to a precise timetable. That way, every farmer could irrigate his field at an allotted time, and those times alternated between day and night.

So after the shepherd's tragic death they stopped up their ears with wax by night, and if they heard a sound all the same they exclaimed, “Holy Virgin, stand by me!” As they couldn't hear how loud they were speaking, their cries rang out from the terraced fields and echoed all the way down into the valley.

After the difficult birth of her fourth child Elias, Sarka was unwell for a long time. The midwife Sofia had to spend the night with her, in case she was needed. George Mushtak paid her generously, but he refused to listen when Sofia said it would soon be impossible for his wife to be left alone. And when the catastrophe happened, it was too late.

One hot June day in 1916, Sarka suddenly appeared in the large field. Itinerant reapers always came to Mala for the wheat harvest at the end of June, and found plenty of work for two weeks. They were badly paid, but poor pay was still better than starvation. This was the middle of the First World War, and poverty and misery reigned in the Ottoman Empire.

George Mushtak was a harsh taskmaster. Not only did he pay badly, he didn't hesitate to whip his reapers if he caught them idling – or what he took for idling. On the other hand, he gave them employment from the first to the last day of the harvest, and he paid money, which was better for many of the reapers than the usual payment in kind. These itinerant workers went from village to village with their womenfolk, offering their services. There were many tales about the women reapers who earned five piastres for ten hours' work by day, but three times as much by night. In Mala, harvest was also the
fornication season, and for many young men it was the one chance they had in the year to satisfy their sexual urges. They saved up their piastres for those last two weeks in June.

So on that hot June day Sarka came to the field where the reapers were at work. She looked with feverish eyes at the men bending, sickle in hand, to cut the blades of wheat and lay them on the ground in bundles. Younger men then gathered them into larger sheaves, and finally carried them to the threshing floor on the backs of donkeys.

Suddenly Sarka crouched down, and to the horror of the reapers raised her dress, bared her buttocks, laughed out loud and pissed. The men looked away. One of the shocked women asked, “Aren't you ashamed to bare your backside in front of men, mistress?” Sarka laughed and cried, “I'm never ashamed in front of cockroaches. What does it matter if they see my backside?”

“Cockroaches?” cried several of the reapers. “Cockroaches?”

“Yes, what else are you? They whip you, they screw your women, and as for you, you twirl your moustaches with pride in the evenings, thinking of the money your wives will bring home!” cried Sarka in a hoarse voice.