The Dark Side of Love (79 page)

“Aunt Mariam,” cried Rana in one last attempt, stretching out her arms as if to embrace her aunt.

“Go away, go away!” the woman shouted, retreating from her. When Rana left the apartment, her infuriated aunt slammed the door behind her.

Farid didn't want to put the light on. They slowly went downstairs.

On the last landing, Rana placed herself in front of him and flung her arms around him. He kissed her lips. They tasted salty.

Farid was proud to be a part of the secret life that pulsated beneath the calm surface of the city. Since the autumn of 1956 he had been in the Communist Party youth organization. Meetings of the Young Communists were held at different places every time, and members went separately so as not to arouse suspicion. He liked that in itself. He felt like a secret agent, although owing no allegiance either to Moscow or its Communist Party, only to a future society in which he could live freely with Rana, their heads held high.

The whole idea had the magnetic attraction of forbidden fruit. Like the others, he had a cover name for security reasons, and he regularly attended training courses. The young people he met there came, like himself, from rich families. Communist writings spoke of the workers and proletarians, but he never met one of them in all those years, and he didn't much like that. How could the workers in Russia,
England, and Germany come out on the streets with such militant self-confidence, going on strike, even forming something called the Labour Movement, while here they trudged submissively from home to work and back again, in fear?

When, at a meeting of his own Party cell, he suggested explaining communism to the workers, he was warned not even to try it. It would just scare people. He discussed the matter with the members of his old gang, Rasuk, Azar, Suleiman, and Josef, and encountered outright opposition. Josef was the only one who bought the illegal Communist Party journal
Youth
from him. The others wouldn't touch it. But in his own mind, Farid felt this was the right way. He was full of impatience in his early years in the Party, and genuinely believed that the revolution was imminent. In his daydreams, he imagined himself at Rana's side, storming palaces of some kind in which dictators, feudal lords, and also (rather comically) Catholic priests who had been overthrown begged for mercy. Tears came to his eyes at the idea of himself standing before these defeated enemies, showing magnanimity and sending them all off to an agricultural commune to live by the labour of their own hands at last. But if he so much as hinted anything of the kind to Josef, his friend laughed at him. “A bad Russian movie,” was Josef's succinct comment.

Farid read a great deal, and since his French was perfect he was able to translate short texts for his comrades. Before a year was up he was voted onto the editorial committee of the youth magazine. His job was to write about literature and culture; other members wrote on economics and history, and others again on contemporary politics.

Working on
Youth
was a great responsibility, and one that spurred him on to try gathering together the best, most audacious, and most revolutionary short stories and poems of world literature, and offering them to the journal's young readers. A few months later he was praised by the Central Committee, which reported that many readers turned to the literary page first.

In those weeks he lay awake at night, wondering why people didn't fight for their freedom. The basic principles of socialism, as he gleaned them from his reading, were so illuminating, and not at all far from Christ's own ideas, yet when he tried to talk about them, people acted
as if he were offering them drugs or pornographic pictures. Some were polite, others snapped angrily and asked him to spare them such dangerous naivety.

Farid liked working on the journal, but after a year he still couldn't describe anyone on the editorial team as a friend. He felt a strange chill, a wall dividing him from them. Quite unlike the infuriating Josef, who worshipped Satlan, hated communists, and yet was still close to Farid.

The communists were convinced that the union of Syria and Egypt, which was rushed through in 1958, had been a bad and over-hasty idea. Satlan, they pointed out, was a confirmed anti-communist, and the government had brought him to Damascus in such haste only to crush communism. Sure enough, persecution of the Party soon began, and the majority of its Syrian leadership went into exile in Moscow.

When Satlan came to Damascus, Josef was keen to seize his chance and approach that charismatic figure. He begged Farid to go with him, because he was afraid to be on his own. However, the Communist Party had strictly forbidden any of its members to attend occasions held in honour of Satlan. All the same, Farid went to the ceremony with Josef, and when one of his Party comrades claimed later to have seen him from his balcony among the jubilant crowd, Farid denied it and mollified the suspicious underground fighters by pointing out, “Every other Damascene looks like me.”

It was a beautiful spring day when Satlan was to drive through the city streets in an open car. Schools took the day off, packed their pupils into buses, and went to join the happy throng. Factories and offices were closed. The Christian elite schools were not enthusiastic about union with Egypt, but as everyone knew that the leadership was firmly in pro-Egyptian hands, and the majority of the government were close to the Muslim Brotherhood, they too gave their students
and teachers the day off, leaving it to them to decide whether they took part in the rejoicings or stayed at home.

The streets of the New Town were lined with crowds even at nine in the morning. Soldiers stood along the carriageway, making sure that no one left the sidewalk. Josef and Farid managed to push and shove their way through to the front row. Finally they were standing in a good spot, and agreed that as soon as the President's big limousine showed up they would rush forward to greet him. Recently the newsreels had repeatedly shown pictures of a smiling Satlan shaking hands with his admirers. To shake hands with the President himself was Josef's dream.

Along came the black Cadillac. Josef ran that way, with Farid after him. The car was surrounded by rejoicing, dancing men, all shaking the President's hand. Farid pushed Josef closer to the car, which was moving forward at the pace of a tortoise. They avoided the soldiers who were now busy trying to keep the rest of the happy crowd away from the road. “Let us through,” cried Josef, reaching out his arms to Satlan. Farid saw the President close up. He was much taller, and his skin much darker than they had expected. And he was talking to his two vice-presidents, while he shook the hands held out to him.

Suddenly one of the joyful crowd turned and struck out ferociously at Josef and Farid. It was confusing. Josef called him angry names, thinking he was just selfish and wouldn't let anyone else near the President, but that was a mistake. Speaking an Egyptian dialect, the man summoned another in a white shirt and told him to “deal with” these two troublemakers. Only now did Josef realized that all the dancing, happy figures were really secret service men. This realization came too late. Blows went on raining down on them both until the car had moved away. Then the men left them and ran after it.

Josef and Farid went home with headaches and a rushing in their ears. Just before they parted, and Josef turned into Abbara Abbey, he mumbled, through swollen lips, “But I did get to touch his jacket.”

The rain was pouring down outside, but it was warm in the table tennis room, for Taufik had kept the oil stove turned right up since that afternoon. Damp, chilly weather was very bad for his friend Gibran, who had a cold.

When he went to see if the stove was still on around seven o'clock, the hall was already full to the last row. There was only one person missing: Gibran. His chair on the knee-high platform that the joiner Michel had made for the club was empty.

Taufik went out once more to look up the street. A few dim street lights did little to illuminate the darkness, and there was no sign of Gibran. Taufik cursed him and went back into the hall, drenched. He was sure the seaman was getting drunk somewhere again.

However, he was wrong. Gibran turned up punctually at eight, with Karime. Many of the company knew her. Her late husband had been one of the richest jewellers in the city, and had left her a large fortune. She was now in her late fifties, but with the help of thick make-up, modern jewellery and clothes in bright colours tried to look at least two decades younger. Unfortunately she didn't succeed. The youthful beauty with which, as a penniless singer, she had turned the jeweller's head so that he cast his family's disapproval to the winds, had faded forever.

Gibran was a new man. He looked frailer and more elegant. This evening he was wearing a blue suit over a wine-red roll neck pullover of fine wool, with new shoes and a beret that suited him very well. He was even freshly shaved and perfumed.

“Gibran's been plundering the jeweller's safe,” Taufik whispered to Josef and Farid with a touch of envy.

The old sailor escorted Karime solicitously to the front row, and asked a boy there to give her his seat. Then, standing in front of the platform, he told a love story from the time of the Crusades. It was the first time anyone had heard Gibran tell a story standing up.

The story itself was not particularly exciting, but the staging of it by the two lovers was impressive. Gibran seemed to dwell in particular on all the scenes in which the hero held his beloved in his arms, or
caressed her, and enjoyed acting it out with Karime in front of the audience. It was touching and comical to see the old sailor come to life, so anxious to tell an impressive story that he exaggerated his postures, gestures and mimicry like an actor in a silent movie. He pressed both hands to his heart, and kissed Karime's hand so ardently that there was perfect silence rather than merriment in the hall. Karime played along, and the game really did rejuvenate her. You couldn't have wished for a better actress to play the Frankish girl who fell in love with an Arab prisoner in the crusaders' camp.

There was one particularly dramatic scene in the story. The girl fell sick, but the Arab prisoner who loved her was a doctor. He was horrified by the barbaric Frankish treatment of their sick with the axe and fire. In Damascus, which at the time had the biggest and most modern hospital in the world, patients were treated with medicaments and by the arts of language and music. So he offered to try to cure the girl, although he knew that if he failed he would die, and then she would have her head split with an axe to drive the devil out of it.

She was cured, and they both disappeared into the night before anyone who envied them could harm them and their love.

It had stopped raining outside, and as soon as he had finished his story Gibran left the club with Karime. Taufik was waiting with fifty steaming glasses of tea. Each member of the grateful audience put ten piastres on the tray and took a glass. Matta hesitated, but Taufik handed him one. “You're Farid's guest,” he explained. He had already made a mark on his list; after ten such marks, Farid paid him a lira. “Thank you, brother,” said Matta shyly, and he drank his tea and then left. Farid and Josef stayed behind, talking about the performance. “Gibran wasn't at his best today. He was thinking about his lady love more than the lovers in the story, but it went down well anyway, the audience liked his theatrically amorous show, and that's what counts,” was Josef's conciliatory verdict.

A little later, however, he started an argument in which Michel the joiner and Amin immediately joined. “We mustn't forget that before
the crusaders attacked the east, the Arabs were divided into a thousand sects and clans, all at war with each other. Almost like today. And whenever the Arabs were at odds, they offered their countries to foreigners for free,” he claimed. Then he sat down and waited. The fire had been laid.

Michel spoke up for the crusaders. “But we mustn't forget how the Christians and Jews had suffered for centuries before,” he said heatedly. “Caliph after caliph humiliated them. Caliph al Hakim the Deranged alone destroyed three thousand churches and chapels just before the crusades, forced all Jews to wear a large bell around their necks and all Christians a heavy cross. That needs to be said loud and clear,” he added.

Amin objected that both the Franks and the Arabs had been stupid, and they had both lost. Only the Vatican had profited. The Crusades had not just been wars against Islam, he said, but battles to set the seal on the power of Rome. “It was all about the destruction of power in Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. None of those centres meant anything after the Crusades, and Rome ruled the world.”

“That's Russian propaganda,” said Michel angrily.