Rafik Schami - The Dark Side of Love

“What’s so funny?” he asked, surprised.

“Nothing. I’m laughing because I thought you were a Muslim. I’m a Christian too,” she said quietly, so that only he could hear her. She blushed.

“I’m glad, although religion doesn’t really make any difference to me,” Farid replied. His relief made his assumed indifference less than plausible.

“I feel the same, although it makes a difference to the rest of the world,” said Rana, and grief immediately came into her face. Farid looked at her, and at that moment he was lost. He had to take a deep breath in case his heart stopped beating.

He sought her hand under the table, and when he touched her Rana jumped, just for a moment, but then placed her hand firmly in his. And for a minute the earth stood still and the world became a place of infinite peace. At that moment there were only two people in all Damascus, sitting there holding hands. A deep calm hovered almost audibly above their heads. Then the normal world came back, with its noise and the tea-drinking and Rana’s friend’s laughter.

“The rest of us are still here too,” whispered Dunia with a meaning look as she handed the two of them their tea. Rana and Farid woke up, quite shocked to find that the world was still in full swing. Even before leaving the Sabuni house, they had arranged to meet again in Sufaniye Park near Bab Tuma.

He had picked up the information that her father was a lawyer and her surname was Shahin. As Shahin is a common name in all Middle Eastern countries, it told him nothing at first, but later that night he was overcome by anxiety: could Rana be a daughter of the Shahin clan of Mala, his family’s arch-enemies? The forty-year-old feud between them had only recently flared up again. Since January, in fact, all hell had been let loose, and his father was now triumphantly celebrating some severe setback or other suffered by the Shahins.

Farid tossed and turned uneasily in bed. He woke early next day. His mother was surprised by his grave face, and even more by his first remark to her.

“Do you know which of the Shahins are on bad terms with our family? Is one of them a lawyer?” he asked even before taking his first sip of tea.

Claire stroked her son’s head. “If you’ve lived with a Mushtak for as many years as I have, you know about their enemies the Shahins from great-grandson to great-great-grandfather. Why?”

“Oh, nothing. I was only asking. I met someone whose surname is Shahin,” he said, glossing over the facts. She smiled at his poor attempt at camouflage.

“There are Shahins everywhere, but it’s only the Mala family that the Mushtaks hate. Let me think,” said Claire. “Yes, I believe one of them is a lawyer or a judge. I don’t know for sure, but I could soon find out. A friend of mine knows him. Shall I ask her?”

“No, no, never mind,” replied Farid. He had made up his mind to ask Rana himself.

He was absent-minded all day. His chemistry teacher was the first to notice. “Our promising chemist has gone missing today,” he said, when he had asked the class a question and Farid just went on staring into space. This remark too passed him by. Only the laughter of the class roused him.

“What? Why?” he stammered.

“I was asking about the difference between olefins and paraffins,” said the teacher patiently, without a trace of sarcasm.

“Paraffins are saturated hydrocarbons and olefins are unsaturated.”

“Correct,” said the teacher, admiring Farid’s ability to come up with the right answer even when his mind was on something else, while the rest of the class were concentrating hard and still couldn’t reply. That boy will be a chemist some day, he thought to himself, smiling with satisfaction.

11. An Obstacle

He couldn’t eat lunch. Claire had laid the table for him and then went to her neighbour’s, to help prepare the house for the arrival of a hundred mourners in a few hours’ time. Faris, the neighbour’s husband, had been fifty-nine and sound as a bell when his head suddenly dropped on his chest as he drank his morning coffee. “Faris! Oh God, Faris!” his wife cried out, full of foreboding. But her husband had taken her cry away with him into eternity.

Many of the neighbouring women were hurrying to the house to help. Some cooked food, others brewed huge quantities of coffee. Claire and her friend Madeleine were busy arranging borrowed chairs in the inner courtyard, with a sofa and an armchair for the bishop and the priest. The late Faris had been an important man in the Catholic community of Damascus, sitting on almost all the church committees.

Farid smartened himself up and finally rubbed his face with some of his father’s eau de toilette. It had a pleasantly fresh orange-blossom scent. When his mother came home in the afternoon, she found his lunch untouched.

Sufaniye Park is next to the Christian Bab Tuma quarter. Farid gave himself plenty of time to get there, and still it took him only ten minutes. He was sweating. It was March, but almost as hot as summer. There was no sign of Rana anywhere.

After a while she came walking through the park, and saw him sitting lost in thought on one of the benches. She thought he looked wonderful in his white shirt, white trousers and beige leather shoes. His brown skin gleamed in the sunlight. Tall and thin as he was, he looked almost like an Italian, as if he might be a foreigner among the other rather stout figures out in the park on this warm day.

Suddenly Farid looked up. He saw her, and they both laughed. He kissed her for the first time, though only on the cheek, but his lips briefly brushed her mouth.

“Ooh, look, he kissed her,” a boy told his mother, who was playing cards with him on a brightly coloured quilt spread on the grass.

“They’re brother and sister. Anyone can see that. Your turn to play a card,” she reproved him.

Farid was slightly disappointed when he told Rana how his thoughts had kept him awake last night, and heard that she herself had slept better than ever before. Obviously the question of his own surname hadn’t yet occurred to her. Damascenes were not particularly interested in surnames. He asked what her father’s first name was.

“Basil. Why are you interested?”

“Because I want to know which Shahins you are,” he replied. And he felt even more vexed with himself as he mentioned his suspicion that she might be one of the Shahin clan from Mala, his own family’s enemies.

“So you come from Mala? And you’re one of those Mushtaks?” asked Rana in surprise.

He nodded.

“I thought you were half-European. So my feet haven’t carried me very far from that dunghill of a place,” she said, with disappointment in her voice.

“You’re from Mala too?” asked Farid, barely audibly, because he already knew the answer.

She nodded in silence. Her laughter was gone.

He took her hand. It was cold, and he felt that Rana was trembling.

“He’s not her brother,” Farid heard the boy on the quilt tell his mother.

“Play your cards,” she crossly told her son. “It’s none of our business! Are you playing cards or setting up as a marriage broker?”

Rana looked at Farid. She saw longing and sorrow in his eyes, and although she was very much afraid, she knew for certain at that moment that she wanted to live with him. But next minute she remembered her mother’s words: “A Muslim is still a human being, but the Mushtaks are rats! Rats! Rats!” The voice echoed through her head.

“Did you hear about my family’s latest catastrophe?” she asked.

He nodded, and he realized she knew that the Mushtaks were held to blame for the arrest of Rana’s uncle and the financial ruin of the entire Shahin family.