Rafik Schami - The Dark Side of Love

“But I’ve strayed away from the subject. I was going to talk about Israel. Well, the Israelis are supposed to be weaker than we are — and oh yes, you bet they are, because we’re a hundred and twenty million courageous Arabs with a heroic history. And how many Israelis are there? Three or four million, so let’s suppose that’s fifty Arabs attacking one Israeli. My God, people would be standing in line like they were buying butter! Is that honourable for an Arab? Is it manly, fifty to one? Certainly not, my mother says. A victory like that doesn’t even gladden the heart of the dead.

“Arabs give refuge to the weak, so if they aren’t exactly weak then let’s give the poor Israelis some of the mighty land of Arabia. They’re a small and ancient people, and we’ll be praised for treating them so well.

“My mother never thinks about religion when she’s judging what someone is like. For instance, she always called the olive oil dealer Samman an arsehole without ever asking about his religious beliefs. He gives his best oil to light the lamps in church, and sells us the low-quality blends.

“His father was just the same, a devout robber. He robbed the rich of their money, he spent half of it on drink and whores, and gave the other half to the poor to pray for the salvation of his soul. So he thought God would weigh his sins against one rich man that he’d robbed in the balance against the prayers of five hundred poor.

“But forgive me, I’ve strayed off the subject again. That hashish cigarette was too strong. My mother loves our President. Didn’t he say he’d even attack America if the crunch came? My mother says a war against the Americans would be a really good idea. If they defeat us, they’ll rebuild our land again better than ever, the way they did in Germany and Japan. It’s an old American custom: they flatten countries and then rebuild them. And if we beat them, then we can finally emigrate to America without needing a visa.”

Presidents come and go, but the records on file remain.

TAD, DAMASCUS, SPRING 1969 — SUMMER 1969

274. Bulos

When Farid came back to his senses he was lying on a plank bed, with a bright neon light shining down from the ceiling. There was no window in the room, and no light switch. A chair and a small table stood by the wall. The cell was clean, with a concrete floor and whitewashed walls. But the iron door was rusty and reminded him of the doors of other solitary confinement cells. So here he was in the Presidential Suite, as the prisoners called this particularly large one.

There was a curiously bitter taste in his mouth. He remembered the injection and looked at his arm. The place where the needle had gone in had a reddish rim.

Had he fainted, or had he told Mahdi all he wanted to hear in his delirium? He tried to reach the door, but had to cling to the wall because his legs were too weak. Farid closed his eyes and breathed deeply. Then he put his ear to the cold door. The soldiers on guard were telling each other jokes about the Bedouin and their women. He knocked at the door, waited, and then heard footsteps.

“What do you want?”

“What day is it today?” asked Farid.

“Somewhere between Monday and Sunday,” replied a deep voice. Another man uttered a high laugh.

“Can I have a little water, please?” asked Farid.

“With ice and soda or neat?” asked yet another man in an artificial falsetto, like a barmaid, and snorted with laughter.

A day later he was given water and allowed to use the lavatory. When he came back Mahdi was sitting on the chair, grinning at him. The soldiers chained Farid’s hands and feet, and fastened the ends of the chains to iron rings welded to the head and foot of the plank bed. Farid remembered the camel he had seen as a child.

Mahdi slowly took off his sunglasses. At that moment Farid recognized him, and at last he was able to identify the voice that had seemed familiar to him all this time.

“Bulos,” he whispered, near tears.

“So we meet again, but in the right circumstances,” retorted Bulos, grinning. Paralysing fear took hold of Farid.

“Bulos,” he whispered again. “It’s you.”

“Yes, indeed, Mr. Mushtak, it’s me. Your clan murdered my father, you betrayed and almost destroyed me. Now I’m about to pay you and your clan back.”

“What do you mean, murdered? Who murdered whom?” asked Farid with the last of his strength. He was utterly baffled.

“Your uncle Hasib shot my father just for a moment’s joking with Hasib’s wife, an American whore. Don’t you know about that? My father was unarmed. Never heard of it?”

Farid shook his head.

“I actually believe you. Yes, how would you know? My father was Musa Shahin from Mala, Jusuf Shahin’s fifth son. Does that mean anything to you?”

Farid was knocked backward by the shock. He nodded, as if dazed. Of course. Rana’s Uncle Musa had been shot dead that Easter Sunday in 1941 when the bishops were trying to reconcile the two clan leaders.

“And then my mother, my sister Mona, and I were plunged into misery. I was five. As a widow, my mother had to go back to her skinflint of a father, who humiliated her and us day and night, until she married that monster who forced us to turn Catholic. It was misery of the genuine Mushtak kind, my mother always said. All those nights when I was tormented, all the tears my mother shed, all the wretchedness I had to bear — I swore I’d pay a Mushtak out for it some day, and what do you think? When I was almost on the point of forgetting, following the way of Jesus Christ and loving my enemies, up popped a Mushtak who betrayed me. You did all you could to ruin me, but you were out of luck. I bore the torture and the questioning, I hated you every second of it, as much as I’d loved you every second before that. There’s nothing worse on earth than discovering that you love a traitor.” Mahdi’s face was dark and pale at the same time.

“I never betrayed you. You wouldn’t stop to hear that neither Gabriel nor anyone else ever learned a word about you from me. Stupid coincidences must have confirmed your ideas all that time, they fed your suspicions of me, but I suffered badly enough myself. In the end I left the monastery in a much worse state than you,” said Farid.

But his hopes of explaining, or at least arousing a little pity, disappeared when Bulos merely grinned unpleasantly and shook his head. “So there you are. My mother was right when she said the Mushtaks were master liars and slippery as vipers, but it does me good to listen to you now, seeing you chained up like a dog. It was a lot of work getting you taken to Tad. You won’t escape me now. No one can hear you. This is the only place where no microphones or cameras keep watch. You’re going to live for a long time here, suffering so much that you’ll wish for death ten times a day.”

He stood up, knocked twice on the door, and then calmly sat down again. Two large guards came in and hit Farid until he lost consciousness.

Farid went through hell for four days. And every day he hoped to reach Bulos’s heart and arouse some pity in him, but his archenemy came back again and again only to tell him about the torments inflicted on him, Bulos, by the Mushtaks. Sometimes he talked about his stepfather, and the merciless revenge he himself had taken on the man later, when he was an old, broken failure. Humiliated by Mahdi, he had hanged himself in the cellar of his factory after it was closed down.

One morning Farid heard a soft knocking. He listened. “Farid,” said a familiar voice, but he couldn’t quite identify it.