Kamal Sabuni didn’t really stand out at school, where he was considered rich but dim. For that very reason, his mother and siblings were glad to meet the pale boy Farid who, so Kamal had told them, was top of the class. They wanted him to come back often, and visit by visit he learned to know more about the differences between the lives of Christians and Muslims. The Sabunis had been textile merchants since the Middle Ages, so they were seriously rich. They dressed like Europeans, but still seemed a hundred times more Arab than his own parents. Strange how near and yet how far they often appeared to him. It wasn’t like visiting his friend Josef, whose home lost all interest for him as time went by; when Farid stood at Kamal’s door it was always like visiting for the first time. The maid knew him well, but every time she impersonally asked what he wanted.
Here, as in no other Muslim house, all rooms were open to him, even the most private, and in no other family was he so confused by the switch from Islamic to European ways and back again. The same family that strictly segregated the sexes in public enjoyed sensuous physical contact within their own four walls. Once Kamal’s eldest sister Dalal even became so aroused by flirting with her husband during a meal that she had to leave the room with him. When they had been away for some time Farid guessed what was going on. To make sure, he asked to go to the bathroom, and on the way heard Kamal’s sister moaning in orgasm. The bed creaked, and his heart raced. He felt guilty, like a child who has stolen something entrusted to him. In the bathroom he calmed down, and finally went back, hoping to hear more, but this time all was quiet. The couple took their time, and no one else at table paid any attention to their absence. They didn’t return until the dessert course, and although their hair was combed and they were freshly perfumed, they looked a little drowsy.
Baker Sahed, a well-known painter who was President of the Damascus Academy of Art, had spend months portraying members of the family. He sat at his easel in the drawing room and painted and painted; his work never came to an end. Farid had a feeling that the artist was going slow on purpose to keep up his intimate association with the family and their rich friends, and in fact many commissions were said to have come his way through the Sabunis.
Kamal couldn’t stand the painter. The man was a closet gay, he told Farid, and kept pawing him “down there” as if by accident. There was something feminine about the artist’s movements, his voice was high as a eunuch’s, and the look in his eyes betrayed his desire for young men. As for his elaborately phrased request — how would the young gentleman like to pose naked in his studio, as model for the statue of Youth that he was planning? — Kamal could only laugh nastily. Strangely, his mother had no objection to the idea at all. Somehow, thought Farid, Muslims have a healthier attitude to their bodies than we Christians do, they enjoy them more. They wash themselves before cleansing their souls, evidence in itself of their high regard for the body.
After that first visit when Kamal proudly played his latest records, Farid went to see him almost every week, and his family made it very obvious that they approved of his friendship with their son. For one thing was clear to them: Kamal didn’t take school seriously, or his teachers either, men whose salaries were less than his own pocket money. His mother, however, realized that his classmate was ambitious and her son respected him. Farid enjoyed the affection of the Sabuni family. Soon they wanted him to stay for a while when he called, even if Kamal had forgotten that they were to meet and was out somewhere in Damascus. One of his three sisters Dalal, Latifa and Dunia, or their mother would insist on his coming in to drink lemonade or tea before he left again, and they kept him company meanwhile. Sometimes this was rather too much of a good thing for Farid, because he could see how agitated the family usually became when a man visited. With him, however, the sisters would begin to wander around casually after a while, often clad only in a thin neg-ligée or a see-through house dress, which always made him leave in a hurry, to avoid feeling that he was sexless and they didn’t need any protection from him.
One day in January 1953 Farid went to help Kamal with an essay. The black maid, indifferent to him as usual, took him to the drawing room. This time Dunia, the youngest of the three sisters, was sitting for the painter. A group of four or five young people were fooling around and making faces to tease her. The artist despairingly appealed for peace and quiet. Kamal was leader of the gang. Suddenly, Farid saw Rana. He later found out that this was her first visit to her friend Dunia’s home.
Curiously enough, he took her for a Muslim girl at first, and she too took him for a Muslim. Unlike purely Muslim names such as Muhammad, Ali, Ayesha, and Fatima, or the typically European names like George, Michael, and Therese that were given to Christians, the names Farid and Rana said nothing definite about anyone’s religious affiliations. Farid means unique, valuable, and Rana means the beauty who attracts the gaze.
She thought he was related to the Sabuni family. She was particularly fascinated by his voice and his hands, but then she felt sudden alarm, painfully aware that she was stumbling into something for which her aunt Jasmin had paid the bitter price of death. Jasmin too had first fallen in love with her Jalal’s voice and hands. When he spoke, so she had told Rana just before she was murdered, she felt weak, and when he touched her with his finely shaped fingers she was lost.
Rana tried to ignore Farid. Ever since her arrival she had been busy keeping Kamal at arm’s length anyway, while he made eyes at her and indulged in suggestive remarks. He claimed boldly that if a Christian like Rana loved him, he’d convert to Christianity at once even if it cost him his life. And he laughed brazenly and said then at least he’d be a true martyr to love. Rana didn’t like such jokes. She took very little notice of Kamal, but did not answer back sharply either, not wishing to risk her friendship with his sister. For secretly Dunia was opposed to her family’s Westernization. Following the Islamic tradition, she wanted to marry a powerful Muslim and look up to him. “Everything passes — love, virility, beauty. What matters to me is feeling deep respect for a fine man,” she had told Rana even before she was fourteen. She was one of those people who know, by the time they are ten, exactly what they want and who they will be.
But unlike Kamal, this other boy couldn’t simply be overlooked. Soon the essay was finished, and the two of them came back to the drawing room. Farid was preceded by his laugh, infectious laughter that almost pushed the windows open. The whole room suddenly seemed full of fresh air. Even years later Rana often remembered that moment, and how ever since then she had thought of her love for Farid as opening a window to let in fresh air. He surrounded her with his laughter, beguiled her with his attentions, bewitched her with his brilliant talk. It was strange, but she felt both restless and at rest when he was there, and after her first two meetings with him she caught her heart racing whenever she was visiting the Sabunis and the doorbell rang. And if Farid really did come through the door she felt the blood shoot into her face, and didn’t know where to look.
As either chance or her friend Dunia would have it, Rana and he sat beside each other at one of these encounters, when everyone was drinking tea.
“Where are you from?” asked Farid circumspectly, for whatever part of town she named could be a clue to her religion. Something Kamal had said made him wonder whether Rana was a Muslim after all.
“We live in the Salihiye quarter,” she replied. It was a high-class district where both Christians and Muslims lived. “What about you?”