Rafik Schami - The Dark Side of Love

Suddenly Sarka crouched down, and to the horror of the reapers raised her dress, bared her buttocks, laughed out loud and pissed. The men looked away. One of the shocked women asked, “Aren’t you ashamed to bare your backside in front of men, mistress?” Sarka laughed and cried, “I’m never ashamed in front of cockroaches. What does it matter if they see my backside?”

“Cockroaches?” cried several of the reapers. “Cockroaches?”

“Yes, what else are you? They whip you, they screw your women, and as for you, you twirl your moustaches with pride in the evenings, thinking of the money your wives will bring home!” cried Sarka in a hoarse voice.

At that the men suddenly all shouted at once. They felt that they and their wives had been mortally insulted. A little later they killed two of George Mushtak’s men in their rage, and set his fields and some others on fire. That was the beginning of the biggest riot in the history of the village.

The reapers went through Mala, looting and murdering, setting fire to houses and to the church of St. Giorgios. The blaze quickly ate its way through the dry wood of the buildings. The villagers had difficulty keeping the flames in check and saving any neighbouring houses. As if by a miracle, however, the church survived, and only the porch and a part of the east wing burned down. The fire went out in front of the altar of its own accord.

There was fighting everywhere, and crowds of reapers from nearby villages hurried in to help their comrades. On the third day, they were clearly in the majority as they faced the men of Mala. Mushtak only just escaped an attempt on his life.

Infuriated, he gathered his loyal supporters together, and with the help of Mobate’s men he attacked the reapers. Jusuf Shahin and other rich farmers now joined the fray too. The fighting went on for days, and over seventy of the itinerant workers were killed.

There was no police station in Mala at the time, and the Ottoman governor of Damascus refused to send reinforcements. He was afraid of being thought a traitor if his troops defended a Christian village against Muslim workers.

The reapers took plenty of loot. They went off with horses, jewellery, money, furniture, and crockery. All they left behind was their dead, who lay lifeless and nameless in the streets.

Many of the farmers were left lamenting the destruction of their entire harvest. Others had lost their houses and all the valuables in them. But it was worst of all for Mushtak. The news that Sarka had disappeared hit him harder than the loss of his possessions. She was not among the dead, nor could she be found anywhere else.

Sofia the midwife helped Sarka’s housekeeper to look after the four children. The firstborn, Salman, was just eight, and Elias the youngest was not yet two years old.

All attempts to trace Sarka failed. Two years passed, and Mushtak never had a good night’s sleep. When he closed his eyes, he saw her lying naked on a heap of wheat. During the day he longed for her fragrance. Sofia saw him pace up and down her room and heard him crying out in pain. He would take out Sarka’s clothes, smell them, tear them up and then gather the pieces together and put them in a big box. When lovesickness began to cut him like a knife, he went to the church of St. Giorgios, where he opened his shirt and showed the Catholic priest, Father Timotheus, a deep cut in the region of his heart.

Timotheus was the son of a rich Damascene family who had fled from the world to find peace in Mala. The villagers regarded the monk as a saint, and it was said that he sometimes levitated, hovering in the air for over an hour while praying. Just before Easter his hands always showed the stigmata of Our Lord, and bled. Timotheus was both modest and stern with himself. That day he laid his hand on the suffering George Mushtak’s wound.

“No, not that wound, reverend Father, not that one,” said Mushtak. “Pray for Sarka to come back to me, and I’ll give the church my thousand-year-old elm tree.” Everyone knew the elm that stood on a distant hill, easily visible from the village square.

“If your prayers help me to warm myself on Sarka again, then the firewood from that ancient tree will keep the church and the presbytery warm for years,” Mushtak told the priest as he left.

And Sarka did come back three days later, as if out of a clear blue sky. She was wearing plain but clean peasant clothes, but her mind was hopelessly deranged. Her husband welcomed her with tears of joy.

No one knew where she had been all that time, or how she found her way home. She never spoke another word until the day she died. All she did was wander around the village looking for something. Whenever she heard children’s voices she ran towards them, only to collapse in disappointment and shed tears.

Legend upon legend formed around Sarka, but all the tales were just gossip. Some people claimed to have seen her with one of the reapers who had been wounded, going about with him looting and burning. Others were sure she had been abducted out of revenge by the brother of a reaper who had been murdered in the village, and was then driven to madness by poison.

Sarka brought George Mushtak no joy now. He would lie silently in his room, weeping. And so time passed, and the church never got a single branch of that elm tree. When the monk lost patience and reminded the forgetful Mushtak of his promise, Mushtak roared indignantly across the village square, “All that your saints gave me back was a lunatic. She’s only half a human being, and for that you’ll get only half the tree!”

That very night lightning struck the distant hill. For several long minutes, Mala was as brightly lit as if a thousand suns were shining. The elm tree was struck by the lightning and split in two. In time, one side dried up while the other remained green. Over the years, the two assumed a strange shape. The dead half looked like a waning crescent moon, the green half like a waxing moon. Rain, sun, and human hands carved the split down the middle of the tree into a kind of cave, where lovers and children liked to hide.

Sarka often spent days on end there. Travellers and peasants, passing the elm, had a shock when she suddenly emerged from inside the tree.

Just before her death there were rumours that she had borne a son, but hid the child for fear of her husband, and now she had forgotten where, hence her desperate searching. Children ran after her pulling at her dress and crying, “Here’s your son, you blind madwoman!” And they crowed and hit her and threw stones. When she was near the Mushtak property no one dared molest her, but as soon as she was a little way from the walls of the house she became a target for all who really wanted to hurt the founder of the clan, but dared not attack him openly himself. However, when a boy hit the crazed woman with a stone, everyone applauded. Sarka cursed the stone-thrower in her heart, and you could see the hatred in her eyes, but her mouth remained mute.

This time, said Sofia, was the hardest of Mushtak’s life. His enemies rejoiced at his suffering, and encouraged everyone to tell more tales of his wife.

Two years after Sarka’s return to the village, a peasant woman going to quench her thirst at the little spring near the elm found Mushtak’s wife inside the tree. She seemed to be sleeping with a blissful smile on her face. But she never woke again.

Arab clans and pyramids ignore the passing of time.

DAMASCUS, MALA, BEIRUT 1907 — 1953

22. The Gulf

The gulf between the Mushtak and Shahin families was deep. Later, no one could say just how their hostility had begun, but even the children of both families were convinced that they would sooner make friends with the devil than one of the enemy clan.