The Dark Side of Love (31 page)

Two days later the go-between came back and, with dark hints and threats, offered twice the sum, but this time Salman didn't even look up from the tractor he was repairing. He growled at the envoy, “Didn't I tell you plainly in good Arabic, or is your boss as slow on the uptake as his father? We're not selling.” And when the envoy got back into his black car Salman wondered briefly if the shepherd's suggestion hadn't been a good idea after all. The leaves on the trees had already turned brown that October day.

A week before Christmas, persons unknown destroyed all the trees on Mushtak land standing out of sight of the village. No one had heard anything, but later a pigeon-breeder said that his birds had been fluttered around restlessly for three nights on end. However, they calmed down again in the early hours of the morning, which they wouldn't have done before an earthquake, and slept almost all day, only to batter themselves desperately against the walls of their wooden lofts again by night.

The police thought it had all been well organized, and then carried out according to plan during several days of icy December weather. All routes leading to the lands belonging to the Mushtak farm had been blocked by men claiming to be military police. If anyone asked why, they had said there were army manoeuvres on the high plateau.

Not until the third day did Salman and several other farmers in the village who wanted to ride out to their fields become suspicious. They asked at the Mala police station whether there was in fact any manoeuvre going on. The two local policemen, followed by several farmers, drove in Salman's truck to the plantations some three kilometres away, where a terrible sight met their eyes.

The bare, felled trees were covered by hoarfrost. The scene froze Salman's blood in his veins. All his trees and rosebushes lay on the ground as far as the eye could see. Twenty hectares of ravaged orchards, most of the trees grubbed up roots and all, a few old, well-established specimens simply sawn down. The entire irrigation system had been destroyed by bulldozers; pipes and hoses stuck up from the churned soil like skeletons. Several bulldozers, specially equipped trucks, excavators, and tractors must have been used in the operation.

Not a wall, not a water tank had been spared. The watchman's house had collapsed, and they found the poor man under its ruins. His corpse had two large, gaping holes in the chest. His murderers had torn it apart with dumdum bullets.

Salman's face turned grey, and he wept for the first time since his father's death. He just stood there, unable to utter a word. The sympathy of the people around him was no comfort.

In February 1954, two months later, he died of a heart attack, the first villager in Mala ever to suffer one. Heart attacks are almost unknown among the Arabs.

At the time, in the winter of 1953, all the clues pointed to Ismail Rifai, but the case was never cleared up. Ismail was powerful, and Salman's sons were not strong enough to act yet. Their mother Hanan knew that. She wore black for fifteen years, and kept reminding her children of the perpetrator's name. Her sons adopted her own quiet approach, and started planning too.

Hanan, who didn't once smile in all those fifteen years, was a pale woman of iron energy. After the attack she and her children wanted no more to do with farming. She leased the fallow land to several Mala farmers, and divided the rent equally between her husband's siblings. Hasib had disappeared without trace in America, so she donated his share to the religious houses of Mala in his memory. In return, they let her keep old Mushtak's house, which her sons later converted into one of the finest buildings in the village, with an artificial stream that wound its way through the extensive grounds and cascaded from a high rock into a swimming pool. Latif, Nassif, Shadi and Fadi were inseparable. They always liked going out together to Mala, where they
partied all night long, and then drove back to Damascus in their big deluxe American limousines.

But to conclude the story of Ismail: in the autumn of 1968, Salman's youngest sons Nasser and Saba, through go-betweens, tricked Ismail Rifai out of his entire fortune. At this time he was also under suspicion of having smuggled weapons and money into the country from Iraq to organize uprisings against the government. Collaboration with neighbouring Iraq was hated in Damascus even more than collaboration with Israel, and always had been.

Ismail denied all accusations, but the evidence was overwhelming. Guns, ammunition, and crates of money were found in his barn. The find had been faultlessly arranged by a secret service man to whom Nassif, Salman's eldest son, gave a 1967 Opel. Ismail was sentenced to life imprisonment.

That day Salman's widow Hanan laughed again for the first time and wore coloured clothing. She hailed her sons as heroes, and gave a lavish party for them in the expensive Ali Baba restaurant that had just been opened in Damascus. Elias and Claire were invited too. Farid wasn't there; he was already in prison at that time.

“It took fifteen years,” said Nasser, raising a glass of arrack to his mother, “but we've avenged our father.”

“Fifteen years?” asked Elias in surprise. He was sitting between Claire and Ibtihal.

“Yes, uncle,” replied Saba, the second youngest son, “it takes a long time to ensnare someone like that. He was a suspicious man.”

“A Bedouin,” joked Nasser, “would say: well done, lads, but why in such a hurry?”

VENICE, DAMASCUS, MALA 1850 – 1935

Claire's memory was not particularly good, but one event in the summer of 1935 was ever-present in her mind. She was seventeen, and had loved Musa Salibi with every fibre of her heart for the last two years. But then she suddenly met a pale young man with the most beautiful hands in the world in the God-forsaken village of Mala, and he spoke to her in French.

She was a city-dweller born and bred, and as a young girl she thought village life boring. She shared her aversion to all things provincial with her father. He made no secret of the fact that he preferred a newspaper and a morning cup of coffee in Damascus to the fresh mountain air. Unlike Claire, however, he could always get out of visiting Mala by claiming that, sad to say, he couldn't take the time off work.

Her mother seemed indifferent to her father's presence or absence. She liked the rugged country life and the primitive villagers who obeyed her slavishly, did everything she asked, and kept calling her “Signora”, because she liked to hear the word so much.

Claire's brother Marcel, two years her senior, could imagine no better way of spending the summer than in Mala either. For that very
reason Claire took a dislike to the village. But one thing was true: you slept better in the mountains than in the sticky heat of Damascus.

Her mother Lucia was half Venetian. Her father, Antonio Sciamico, had come to Damascus in 1850 with a trade delegation, fell in love with the city, and stayed. He was said to be a nobleman. Large parts of the Italian city of Venice, Lucia liked to say, belonged to his family. However, the only certain fact was that he was a
flâneur
and a playboy.

Antonio Sciamico learned Arabic fast, and renamed himself Anton Shami, which sounded rather like his Italian name, but helped him to blend in more easily. In Arabic, Shami just means
Damascene
, and is a very common surname. Many Jews, Christians, and Muslims bear the name.

After a while he married Josephine, the daughter of Zacharias Asfar, one of the largest silk manufacturers in Syria. Shami himself became a famous trader in the Suk al Buzuriye, the spice market near the Ummayad Mosque. He made a large fortune from spices, silk, and fine woods. But his greatest source of pride was that in 1871 he had eaten supper with his favourite composer Giuseppe Verdi in Cairo, where the Italian genius was giving the première of his opera
Aida
for the opening of the Suez Canal. Anton Shami had the photograph showing him sitting at table with a laughing Verdi greatly enlarged and hung it in the drawing room of his magnificent house, which united Italian and Syrian stylistic features to very beautiful effect. To this day the building bears his name, and is the finest in the whole quarter. When the last German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, visited the East in 1898 he stayed there while he was in Damascus. At the time Lucia was already engaged to Nagib Surur, son of a prosperous family of cloth merchants, but Anton Shami had the betrothal ceremony repeated and photographed in the Kaiser's presence. These pictures hung in Lucia's bedroom, along with those of her Venetian forebears.

She could tell wonderful stories about her grandfather Doge Paolo Sciamico's glass eye and the last German Kaiser's withered hand. And the older she grew the more stories she told. Her fund of stories grew even greater after her husband's death. She began indulging in flights of fancy about a great collection of glass eyes owned by her family
in Venice. The glassmakers had had to produce countless eyes, she claimed, until they made one that suited the Doge. She wrote letters to the Italian authorities in Rome and Venice, demanding the return of this valuable collection. But that was not until just before her death in 1959.

In 1900 she married Nagib. Anton Shami liked the elegant, well-connected young man, and hoped that he would help him to expand his business. But Nagib didn't want to work with his father-in-law, or his own father either. First he took a post with a money-changer, and later, after two years of training in Paris, he became technical director of the quality and control department of the Banque de Syrie et du Liban, which as a central bank was allowed to print lira notes. The notes came with an imprint stating that the French government guaranteed the value of the Syrian and Lebanese lira to a maximum of twenty French francs.

In 1910, cholera carried off Anton Shami and his wife. Lucia survived because she and her husband happened to be visiting her family in Venice that summer. She inherited a large fortune which Nagib invested securely with the bank.

His wife was intent on having a large family, and she duly bore ten children, but eight of them died just after their birth. Only Marcel, and two years later Claire, lived.

Until her mid-fifties, Lucia habitually had affairs with young men. Later, her daughter often laughed to think how as a girl she had innocently believed that all her mother's visiting lovers were family members, and called them Uncle, until one day a girlfriend explained it to her. Claire was seventeen by then, and her mother had long since given up the young men.

When her friend enlightened her in the spring of 1935 Claire felt furious, not because of her mother's escapades in themselves but because of the lies and derision to which she had exposed Claire, her own daughter. But she felt truly humiliated and isolated only when she tackled her brother on the subject. He was nineteen, and had been studying law since the beginning of the year. He unfeelingly told her to her face that he had known about it all along, and was glad to see his mother find the love their father couldn't give her.

“But what about me? Why didn't any of you tell me?” asked Claire, close to tears.

“You take after Father, you're as sentimental as he is. You can't accept hard facts,” he claimed.

From that moment on her love for her mother and her brother died. She wouldn't give them away, all the same, although when she went into Damascus with her father a week later to eat an ice she broached the subjects of love, faithfulness, and jealousy. She said she'd like to hear his opinion so that she would know more about the way to behave with her fiancé Musa.

Nagib looked askance at his daughter and smiled. “Why does love always have to imply possession?” he asked, shaking his head. Then he fell silent for a while, as if wondering what he should tell her. Claire gave him time. “You should love with composure,” he said. “Love should bestow sublimity. It lets you give everything without losing anything. That's its magic. But here people want a contract of marriage concluded in the presence of witnesses. Imagine, witnesses, as if it were some kind of crime,” he repeated slowly, allowing her to appreciate the ridiculous aspect. “State and Church supervise the contract. That's not love, it's orders from a higher authority to increase and multiply.”

He smiled at his own words. “And any idiot who can't even add up one and one to make two knows, when he loves someone, that he wants to possess that person body as well as soul. He guards his property jealously to ensure that neither heart nor brain, neither liver nor stomach, nor …” Nagib hesitated for a moment. “Well, you know what I mean,” he added, “…will be touched by any other thought, hand or feeling. Jealousy and unhappiness are programmed into the arrangement in advance.”

They sat there quietly, and Claire looked at her father as he spooned up his ice, smiling. What a wise man, she thought. He seemed to her like a visitor from a strange world that was now at peace.