The Dark Side of Love (89 page)

Gibran was a huge, gnarled oak tree. He might let her get him into a good suit, a new shirt, and new shoes, he might let her persuade him to shave his stubbly chin, but inside he was still the same wild, undomesticated tree. But now he was asking her to leave the protection of her familiar snail shell. She felt weak at the knees. Suppose the young people laughed at her and cat-called? It wasn't considered normal for old people to fall in love. Her neighbour Alime, whose venom made a cobra's appear like mild and milky coffee, had seen Gibran in a pair of silk pyjamas on her balcony, and next thing she was shouting abuse of the enamoured widow to another woman three buildings away. Her voice was loud enough for not only Karime and Gibran to hear her but even the President of the country away on his state visit to Moscow. Gibran took it calmly. “We'll be famous. The names of Karime and Gibran will go together like Madjnun and Leila or Romeo and Juliet,” he said encouragingly.

In the end she went with him, trembling, and suddenly it had all seemed quite simple. After five minutes she felt the warmth among the young people. And when they were home again she made love with Gibran for many hours, until the dawn of day. At last she fell asleep in his arms, and felt as if she were in a sailing boat.

Karime also loved Gibran because she liked to care for him. She thought it a shame for such a fine man to live in poverty. When she first visited him she had wept. A room, bare apart from a shelf with a few books that were falling apart, an iron bedstead with a stinking mattress and pillows stiff with dirt, a bedside table and two or three raffia stools, and that was all. He didn't even have a wardrobe; his few worn-out shirts and trousers hung from nails. A man who had seen the world as Gibran had couldn't possibly stay in this dump.

And in addition she liked him because he wasn't bitter. He loved humanity. “In spite of everything?” she asked. “Because of everything,” he replied.

Most of all, however, she appreciated Gibran because he knew how to treat women. He could caress Karime with his eyes so that she burned beneath her skin with longing for the touch of his hands. And he could always make her laugh. She loved him because he spoiled her as her husband never had; he had slept with her merely to satisfy himself. Loveplay with Gibran had been a bridge for Karime, a way to forget how much had separated her from her husband. She had been young when they met, and he had lavished gifts on her that made her soft and willing, but he could never work on her senses to make music as Gibran did.

And unlike her late husband, Gibran liked listening to her. She had told him more in a single year than she ever told her husband in twenty. With her husband, she had never been able to speak of her past. Her adventurous youth was interred on the altar of marriage. From then on, she had been obliged to play the part of happy wife to a rich, respected man.

Gibran, on the other hand, always encouraged her to tell him about her experiences as a young singer. At that time she had called herself Bint el Sahra, “daughter of the desert”, not just to arouse the curiosity of the public but also to spare her family shame, for women singers were then regarded as whores. Karime told Gibran how she had sometimes started brawls when she appeared in cafés and nightclubs, when one of the men drank a glass too many and climbed up on stage to kiss her, thus making the others envious or even jealous, and chairs would go flying through the air. Karime and her accompanists
joined in with a will until the place was wrecked. Gibran never tired of hearing such stories.

Their happiness, however, lasted only two years, and during those years Gibran and Karime seemed to be growing younger and closer together all the time. The two of them would even sing duets for a whole evening, and you could hear that Karime still had a wonderful voice. But early in the summer of 1960, a terrible thing happened and ruined everything.

Rana had expected anything but the stalker that late afternoon. She had been to the cinema with Farid. The chance came out of a clear sky, and Farid had responded at once. Half an hour after her phone call, he was holding her hand in the dark auditorium of the cinema. Friends had recommended Kazan's film
East of Eden
, with James Dean in the lead. Rana thought the story harsh, and unlike her school friends she didn't find James Dean virile, but rather effeminate. But she was deeply moved by the character of the rebel Cal whom he played, a man who both respected and fought his father, as Farid did.

Later, when they left separately, Rana watched as her lover was making his way to the bus stop. It was at that moment that she saw the man. He was the same age as Farid and herself, he was leaning against a lamp post, and he wolf-whistled at her. He wore expensive American clothes and had combed his oiled hair into an Elvis Presley style. Rana didn't like either Elvis or Bill Haley, with their ridiculous greasy locks. Her favourite male singer was the Egyptian Abdulhalim, and most of the other girls in Damascus were his fans too. He had a warm, melancholy voice, and looked like any poor Arab boy in love, not like the smooth and slippery Elvis.

She had first seen the stalker at the beginning of the school year outside the parliament building, where she met her friend Silvia every morning. He had followed them, and Silvia made the mistake
of turning around. She had even smiled at him, and then he was glued to them until they reached the school gates.

He was still there at midday. Silvia said boys were like hunters and beggars. “Each of them has his own preserves. This one's obviously set his sights on us.”

When the friends separated again at the parliament building, he decided to follow Silvia, and the relieved Rana was able to continue on her way home. But that afternoon Silvia told her that when he began pestering her she had stopped and slapped his face. From then on he stalked Rana like a troublesome shadow. Early in the morning, at twelve noon, after the midday break at two o'clock, and when school closed at five. He was always waiting by the same street lamp, and the girls at school soon thought he was Rana's boyfriend. He seemed to have an endless supply of chewing gum. However, he kept in the background, merely getting a friend of his to call out his name from the other side of the street, as boys often did, to make sure that she knew it: Dured, an unusual name, made famous only years later by a popular comedian.

She began to hate him. Rana liked school, and felt liberated from her family as soon as she stepped outside their front door. Going out, to her, meant plunging into the stream of passers by who populated the streets. She was surrounded by cheerful, attractive faces, school students, office workers, army officers. Best of all she liked the look of the old people who seemed to have all the time in the world.

Fashion boutiques, flower shops, cafés, and cinemas lined her way to school, along with well-tended trees and pretty street lamps. She took her time, was never in a hurry, met up with girlfriends who lived nearby, first Salma, then Silvia, then Fatima, Mona, and the others. Sometimes there were ten of them in the party by the time they reached the school gates.

Now all that was over. She felt hunted, and hurried to school and back every day looking cautiously around her. After Silvia had slapped the stalker's face he stuck to Rana, probably guessing that she would never strike a man.

“Just don't let him know where you live, or he'll be standing beside your bed, and your parents will think you're in a relationship with
him,” Silvia warned her. A nightmare! Rana was rescued by chance. One day, not far from the street where she lived, she saw him coming closer and closer. Desperately, she fled into a large building with its front door open. He had never come so close and been such a nuisance before. She stood in the stairwell, breathless, and watched him through a dusty window pane. He took up his position right opposite the front door.

“What's the matter, my dear?” she heard a kindly voice behind her, and jumped. A middle-aged woman was looking down at her from the door of her second-floor apartment.

“There's a man who pesters me following me around,” explained Rana.

“That's no problem,” the woman reassured her. “You're in the right building. If you open that door,” and she pointed to her left, “you can go down another staircase and get out into the alley behind this house, and it will take you to the tram depot. Do you live a long way off?”

“Not far from the depot,” Rana replied, thanked the woman, ran upstairs, opened the door to the other, providential staircase, and breathed a sigh of relief when she was back home and in her room.

That had been six months ago. Since then he had believed that she really lived in the big building, and she disappeared into it every day to escape him. She meant to do the same when she came out of the cinema that afternoon, but Dured the stalker caught up with her just outside the building. “Don't make a scene. You don't live here. I found that out yesterday,” he said.

She felt a strange fear that she was never able to explain to anyone later, not even Farid. As if Damascus were suddenly empty of people. As if this character was the most powerful man on earth, and she was only a little beetle to be trodden underfoot any time he liked. She stopped, feeling as if she no longer had feet, just two lumps of lead in her shoes. Rana wanted to scream, but she couldn't utter a sound.

“I won't hurt you. I just want you to have a coffee with me and be friendly. Is that too much to ask?” he said, standing squarely opposite her, immovable as a mountain.

“Let me by, please,” she begged, trying to keep calm.

“I'm not going to touch you, but if you won't have a coffee with me I'll follow you to your front door and tell your parents you go out every morning with a whore who's the daughter of a well-known belly dancer, and you were at the cinema with a man today, and I won't be lying. I can describe him in detail.”

“Silvia isn't a whore.” Those were the only words that Rana could utter in her indignation.

“Oh yes, she is. Who else would hit a man in the face? Only women of that kind, and she's learned it from her mother,” he said in a quiet but venomous voice. Enormous anger suddenly freed Rana from the clutches of her fear. “And you carry tales,” she cried, striking him in the face so hard that he almost fell over, but regained his balance at the last moment. Before he knew what she was about, however, Rana kicked him in the balls. Silvia had shown her how to do it.

“Well done!” said an old man who happened to be passing. “That's the only kind of language such pests understand.”

Dured limped away, groaning. Deep in her dreams, she could still hear him shouting, “Christian whore!”

Something had happened. He sensed it very clearly.

Farid was just eating lunch when the bell rang. He was alone in the house. Their neighbour Gurios was standing at the door, out of breath.

“What's going on in the city?” he asked without preamble. “My daughter's just come home terrified. The police stopped her bus, all the passengers had to get out, and they were searched for weapons. People are saying there's been an attempted coup. Is that possible?”

“Attempted coup?” repeated Farid incredulously. Damascus had been on constant alert since January. It was said that Damian the Iraqi dictator was likely to attack the country, and there was increasing hostility between him and President Satlan. Not a day went by without bitter accusations. President Satlan, obviously with his reputation in
mind, had spent a month travelling around the cities of Syria, making fiery speeches against Iraq and the Syrian communists who were flirting with Baghdad. Rumours were rife, and said that Damian was preparing to fight for Damascus with the aid of communist guerrilla troops.

Gurios wouldn't come in for a coffee, so Farid went back to his lunch, but he had no appetite now. Something made him feel infinitely sad. He phoned Rana. “I'm sorry, you have a wrong number,” she said calmly, so he knew that she wasn't alone.

The sense of happiness that just hearing her voice gave him was soon gone. A coffee later, he called his cousin Laila. She was taciturn. When he asked what was going on she burst into tears and could say no more. Farid dropped everything and went to see her.

There was no one at the bus stop just outside her street. The bus itself hadn't been as crowded as usual, and the driver had turned up the volume on his radio. It was broadcasting a report on the catastrophe in Morocco, where an earthquake and an extraordinary spring tide had destroyed the harbour town of Agadir at the beginning of March, and ten thousand lives had been lost.

Farid saw several army trucks in Abbasid Square. Armed paratroopers in camouflage uniform were standing around everywhere. Even in the New Town, soldiers were posted at every street intersection.

Laila wasn't well. She had given her employees the day off so that she could rest; she was running a temperature and looked very pale. Her husband was on tour in the north with the Radio Orchestra. The apartment looked like a dump. Farid kissed Laila and made her get back into bed. Then he spent two hours busily tidying and cleaning the place, opening all the windows and letting in fresh air.

“My goodness, if Claire could see this!” said Laila faintly when she went to the lavatory, and saw the results of Farid's labours. She was smiling.

“She mustn't hear a word about it. I wouldn't do it for anyone but you. Usually I act like a pasha,” called Farid from the kitchen, where he was making tea after all those chores.

Funny, he thought, how love alters people. After taking her high school diploma Laila had begun to study history, and wanted to write
about the historical development of Arabia from the women's viewpoint. Although she was a Christian, she knew a great deal about the Sufi philosophy, and men had swarmed around her at the university, not least because of her erotic aura. However, she turned down both Djamil the professor of philosophy and Samuel the architect.