The Dark Side of Love (49 page)

That day Farid was wearing a dark brown shirt with a broad collar showing above a fawn jacket. In the photo his shirt looked black and his jacket grey. His wavy hair was combed back.

A week earlier Sarah, Saki's sister, had told him he had beautiful hair, but it would look even better if he rubbed hair oil in and then combed it. That way it would look more elegant, and its black would be more brilliant than his natural muted near-black.

He couldn't find any hair oil at home. He fished a lira out of his piggy bank and went to the Armenian barber. Claire beamed at him when he came home, and went straight to find her in the kitchen to see if she'd notice.

“What a handsome boy,” she said, hugging him. Then she looked at him again and kissed him on the forehead. “If I were a young girl I'd fall in love with you on the spot. But alas, I must make way for others now.”

He was rather surprised to see so many baking sheets in the kitchen, full of meat pasties and stuffed flatbreads, and the mountains of vegetables waiting to be cooked. The table was also laden with generously filled dishes of salad, rice, and pine kernels. But Farid had no time to linger and ask questions. He went straight over to see Josef, and was surprised to find that his friend didn't notice any change in him. Then he met Rasuk, Suleiman, Aida, and Antoinette in Abbara Alley, and they didn't marvel at the new glory of his hair either. He couldn't go around to Sarah's place because her brother was in the street with the others at this moment, explaining why he couldn't invite anyone home. “We can go there again tomorrow, but today they're all cleaning like crazy because of this big Jewish festival coming up, and the moment they see someone just sitting they find him work to do.”

Disappointed, and cursing his bad luck, Farid mooched off home again, unaware that his father had invited twenty other confectioners to supper. It was only in the front hall of the house that he heard the
cheerful noise from the drawing room. He stood still for a moment, glancing at the inner courtyard. There was no one there. He hurried to the right, past the store-room, and into the kitchen. Claire was there, eating by herself at a small table.

“What's going on?” he asked breathlessly.

“Your father has invited his colleagues to supper to thank them for electing him.”

“Electing him to what?” asked Farid, looking through the kitchen window and into the drawing room, where the tipsy men had just burst into a roar of laughter.

“Your Papa is the top confectioner in Damascus now. It's a great honour. No Christian has ever held the post before.”

Farid nodded his head in acknowledgement, and hungry as he was quickly put a flatbread stuffed with meat into his mouth. Then he took a second stuffed with sheep's milk cheese.

“You should sit down to eat,” said Claire. “Or better still, go and say hello to your Papa and his guests first, and then come back here to have a proper meal.”

“Must I?” asked Farid unwillingly. “Why aren't you with them?”

“It wouldn't do. They're Muslims, and it's not the Muslim custom to eat with strange women. Off you go, now. You only have to say hello and then come back.”

To please her, he went, although he didn't want to. When he entered the drawing room, a cloud of smoke and the aroma of aniseed met him. The men were laughing.

“Ah, here comes the crown prince,” cried a fat confectioner with bushy eyebrows. Silence followed his words.

“Good evening,” Farid greeted them, almost inaudibly.

“What on earth do you think you look like?” b ellowed his father, who was enthroned at one end of the table, and he pointed to Farid's oiled hair. “Say hello nicely to the gentlemen and then come here to me.”

Elias was drunk. Farid felt miserable with rage and shame. He shook hands with all the guests one by one and tried to ignore their mocking remarks about his hair, although he also heard some of them speaking up for him. He went on to where his father was sitting, walked past him to go down past the other half of the confectioners'
association, saying good evening to all the men there as well. He began to feel less flustered, for by now the men had stopped taking any notice of him. They were talking to each other again, and merely gave him limp handshakes. But the last man, who was sitting by the door, held Farid's hand tightly in one of his own and stroked his cheek with the other.

“Won't you give me a little kiss? Uncle Hamid likes good boys,” he said, his wet lips smiling to show yellow teeth.

“No,” muttered Farid, pulling his hand away with a jerk. Then he went back to his father.

“Good evening, Papa,” he said. Elias turned his vacant gaze on him, took a fabric napkin in his left hand, grabbed his son's collar with his right hand and pulled him close.

“My son is no American sissy.” His aniseed-laden breath was horrible. It made Farid retch. But his father pulled him even closer and began rubbing his head with the large napkin as if towelling it dry. The men laughed.

“Young people have to be brought up properly,” announced one of them.

“Yes, the saying goes: God's blessing be on the man who beat me, not the man who indulged me.”

There followed a babbling of confused voices, and Elias's grip tightened. Farid's scalp was burning. His father's hand was holding the collar of his shirt so tightly that he could hardly breathe. He felt he was choking. With a violent movement he freed himself, and fell over backward. Elias was alarmed when he heard his son hit the floor.

“You fool!” he stammered in alarm. “You could have broken something!”

Farid got to his feet and rushed out of the dining room to the sound of laughter from the men. He saw Claire coming out of the kitchen, ran past her to his room and locked himself in.

She followed and knocked softly on the door, but he didn't want to see her. In this humiliating defeat, he would feel ashamed to meet her sympathetic eyes. And he was angry with her for sending him in to his father. Farid felt lonely and desperate. The world had turned its back on him.

After a while, however, he straightened up again and saw his hair in the mirror, looking as windblown as a wheatfield after a stormy night. Suddenly he couldn't help laughing. That one crucial second stayed in his memory for ever. He decided to get the better of his father. “I'll keep my hair like this even if you die of rage,” he whispered.

Claire was surprised to see him storm out of his room, and when she heard the door of the house bang a little later she knew that her husband had handled the situation badly yet again.

Farid didn't have to look far. The photographic “Studio of the Stars” was just before the Kishle road junction. Basil the photographer was not a little surprised when the boy paid him the price he asked in advance, and without haggling either, bringing out a heap of piastres which, as the photographer rightly suspected, was all his savings. The boy carefully counted the money, put the remaining piastres back in his pocket, looked proudly at the photographer, and said, “And for that, I want the best photo you ever took. I'm going to keep it all my life.”

The photographer had no idea what the boy wanted the picture for, but somehow he felt tremendously keen to take a good photograph, so much so that it made him slightly dizzy. He suggested that the boy might like to comb his hair, because the camera would record everything. He himself took a sip of water and then watched closely, rather taken aback to see Farid carefully arranged his oiled hair in front of the mirror, putting every lock in order.

“You look like that famous young actor; his name escapes me for the moment,” he flattered the boy.

Three days later the photo was ready. Farid was more than satisfied, and from then on he took it with him wherever he went.

As they were sitting on the ground outside Josef's house, listening with bated breath to the story Suleiman was telling, a woman neighbour called out to Azar: would he come and mend her broken iron? Azar
wasn't thirteen yet, but he was as efficient as if he were a mechanic, an electrician and a joiner all in one.

Suleiman had just seen the latest Errol Flynn movie, and was telling his friends about
The Adventures of Don Juan.
Since children weren't allowed in to see the film, Suleiman had bribed the doorman with Spanish cigarettes.

Farid was sure that the movie was only half as exciting as his friend's account of it, for once Suleiman got into his stride he used only the basic outline of any film and made up his own story on that foundation. The story changed track even more when his audience interrupted him.

Azar, who never tired of Suleiman's stories, called back to the neighbour, “It'll cost you twenty piastres.”

“My God, you're getting pricier all the time. Look, come around here, I'm sure we can reach some agreement,” the woman said.

“No, twenty piastres or I'm not doing it,” replied Azar. “Last time,” he muttered quietly, “she fobbed me off with an orange and a slobbery kiss on my cheek. Talk about a nightmare! I can't stand the way she stinks of fish and oranges.”

“All right,” called the woman, “but I'm only paying fifteen piastres, that's all I have.”

Azar got to his feet and turned to Suleiman. “Don't go on with the story until I'm back.” Don Juan was just holding his beloved in his arms.

“Tell her to pay you the twenty and I'll screw her,” smirked Josef.

“Heavens above, she'd suck you in and spit out your bones, and then what do I tell your Mama?” sniped Azar.

Quarter of an hour later he was back, cursing the woman, who had paid him with just ten piastres and two oranges.

Farid had really met his Uncle Adel properly only on two or three visits to Beirut, and when he and his parents went to stay with Aunt
Malake he had eyes and ears only for Laila. He knew he had once seen Uncle Adel sitting at the end of the table at lunch, but even then Laila's father had failed to make any great impression. It was Elias and Malake who dominated the table. Back in Damascus, Farid could hardly even remember the man's face.

Laila always looked after her little cousin so lovingly that Claire could have those days in Beirut to herself, left at leisure to go on long shopping expeditions with her sister-in-law. In the 1940s Beirut was a window on the west, a city of exotic goods and customs from all over the world. By way of contrast, Damascus was still something of a sleepy provincial town in the middle of farming country.

One day in the winter of 1951 a telephone call brought the bad news that Uncle Adel had unexpectedly died of a heart attack. He had woken in the night and felt thirsty, but he obviously never made it to the refrigerator. He fell down dead in the corridor.

Elias sent telex messages to his brothers Salman in Mala and Hasib in America. Salman still bore his sister a grudge, and refused to come to his brother-in-law's funeral. Hasib wrote a few civil platitudes, and didn't come either. Elias himself, however, set off that evening with Claire and Farid, and reached Beirut late at night. Malake was grateful to them, for her husband's family was also hostile to her, so she and her daughters had no one else to stand by them.

Her daughter Barbara was nineteen. In temperament and strength of character, as Elias realized with amazement, she was the image of old George Mushtak. Laila was seventeen at the time, and Farid was surprised by the pallor of her face. He felt alarmed at the sight of her, and later, when she was resting on a sofa with her eyes closed, he actually thought she had died. Isabelle, the youngest girl, was just nine, and to Farid she was a silly little thing whom he ignored. He spent most of the time sitting with Laila and comforting her by stroking her hand.

Malake was lamenting the fact that next spring Adel had been going to give her the promised honeymoon they'd never had. He was planning to take her to Rome, Venice, Paris, Vienna, and London. Barbara had encouraged them to go, saying she and Laila could easily look after little Isabelle.

A year later Elias was helping his sister to find a house in the exclusive Salihiye quarter of Damascus. Malake had sold the factory and their villa in Beirut for a good price, and in the summer of 1953 she and her daughters returned to the Syrian capital. But she refused ever to set foot in Mala again.

They lived in style in a large, handsome house built in the eighteenth century by a relation of the Ottoman Sultan, and Farid, who knew the mysteries of calligraphy, was able to decipher all the sayings on the ceilings and walls for his aunt and her daughters. Poetic and religious Sufi quotations adorned the walls, columns, and ceilings of rooms in line with their functions. Barbara carefully wrote everything down, and Laila, her gaze transfigured, watched the boy. Everything he did touched her heart. He looked handsome and noble as a prince's son, she thought, as he stood there deciphering the Arabic texts word by word, and once he had disentangled the calligraphic labyrinth of a saying it was clear to her for ever. The bathroom alone had thirty of them, all to do with water and Paradise.

Malake was a capable woman. With her brother's help, she bought some large and dusty fields lying fallow to the north-east of the Old Town at a very reasonable price. Later on, this area became a large, elegant middle-class housing estate. After ten years plots of land here cost almost a hundred times what she had paid.

Normally Farid would have been glad of his favourite cousin's return to Damascus, but instead he bewailed his bad luck, for he had to leave the city himself.

“When the angels visit a house,” joked Laila, “the devils run for it.” She looked at him and laughed to hide her own regret, but she couldn't deceive Farid.