To the right of the altar hung a large painting of St. Sebastian, a copy of the original Italian work of Guido Reni, as Farid later discovered. The altar itself was dominated by a magnificent statue of Jesus Christ. Tall arched windows surrounded the nave of the church.
Gabriel motioned to his charge to go further forward, while he himself found a place with the other monks near the door. Farid looked desperately around the sea of shaven heads and black habits for someone he knew. A slight nod of the head and a shy smile came to his rescue: Marcel. Farid made his way along the long pew, knelt down beside Marcel, and whispered, “Thanks!”
Night prayers didn’t last long. Then, silently and well disciplined, the monastery pupils, monks, and Fathers moved out in an orderly line. Farid followed Marcel. Out in the dark courtyard, the pupils dispersed into smaller groups and went on climbing the stairs to the dormitories in silence. Farid was strangely restless. His heart seemed painfully constricted, and he felt estranged from himself and abandoned.
There was absolute silence in the dormitory too. Farid unpacked his underwear and put it away in his small locker, washed, and got into bed.
Almost a hundred and twenty of the younger monastery pupils slept in the west wing. About a hundred older pupils and the novices slept in the east wing. The rooms for the monks and the Fathers lay in between.
It was a mild night, and the sea sounded closer in the silence and darkness. Farid couldn’t get to sleep for a long time. The dormitory was not entirely dark; several little lamps fastened to the wall gave a muted light.
Near the entrance of every dormitory a monk slept in a small room, furnished in extremely Spartan style with a bed, desk, and medicine cabinet. The only ornament was a picture of the Virgin Mary illuminated by flickering light. A different monk was on duty supervising the pupils every week; only Brother John was excused that duty.
The monk on duty on Farid’s first night stood at the big window in the dark for a long time, keeping an eye on the dormitory. Then he did his rounds, stopping briefly by every bed. Farid closed his eyes and did his best to breathe regularly.
“Try to sleep,” whispered the monk, and went on. He said something quietly to a boy at the end of the aisle near the washroom too. When Farid slowly opened his eyes again a little while later, he had disappeared.
How beautiful his time with Rana had been, thought Farid. “Love tastes and smells so wonderful,” she had said one night. He had laughed then. Was she thinking of him now? She had promised not to let a single hour of her life pass without thinking of him. And what Rana promised she always performed. He was ashamed to realize that he sometimes forgot her for hours at a time.
Now he was thinking of her breasts. He had never seen anything so lovely before. They didn’t look like the apples or pomegranates so often mentioned in Arabic poetry, no, Rana had breasts with nipples like the tips of a lemon, pointing slightly upward and outward. The mere sight of them aroused him.
He turned on his side and pressed the light blanket between his legs.
The sea slipped away on velvet soles.
120. Summer Days
Next morning Marcel showed Farid a piece of paper on the door, setting out the timetable for the day during the vacation:
“6.30, get up. Wash. Make beds. Leave lockers open. Brother to close them after checking. Short morning prayers. Breakfast. Work. Lunch eaten at work place. End of work 15.00 hours. Wash. Summer academy from 15.30 hours. Evening prayers. Supper. Games. Night prayers. Bedtime. Sunday is free.”
The days followed this pattern, and after a time they all merged into each other. If it hadn’t been for Sundays, Farid would soon have lost all sense of time.
During the first week he was sent to work with the builders who repaired any damage to the monastery walls during the summer months. He and two other school students took them the construction materials. It was hard work climbing ladders in a habit, carrying stones and mortar, and the builders laughed at the boys’ clumsiness.
A week later Farid changed to the metalworking shop. The master in charge here was an unassuming, silent man. This work was hard too, but interesting. Master Rimon liked the boy at first sight. He told him that he had once been a priest himself, but then he fell in love with a young widow. He had confessed it at once to the abbot of the time, so he was allowed to go on earning a living in the monastery metalworking shop. Two years after the wedding, his wife died when their son was born, and he had brought up the boy on his own. But at the age of twenty his son had emigrated to America, and Rimon now lived by himself down in the village at the foot of the mountain where the monastery stood.
Farid could happily have spent the whole summer with Rimon, but that wasn’t permitted. Every pupil at the monastery had to take his turn with all the different jobs. Next was farming. Working with the reapers was hell; following them through the fields day after day in the blazing sun drained all his strength. He had hallucinations. The reapers were usually strong, experienced older pupils and monks who cut the blades of wheat with sickles. A troop of younger pupils went behind them, fanning out over a broad front, gathering the blades into sheaves and piling them up on carts to be taken to the threshing floors, where hot dust filled your mouth and nose, and husks and chopped straw stuck in your collar, rubbing your skin sore. Those days seemed endless.
Again and again, Farid’s loneliness overwhelmed him. The older monastery pupils took no notice of him, the childishness of the younger boys bored him. He saw Marcel and a few other familiar faces only at supper, and was never in the same working group with any of them. That was intentional, so that everyone would get to know everyone else, according to the monastery administration. “So that we don’t gang up together and refuse to work,” was how Marcel put it.
Sometimes Farid thought he was going crazy. Not only did most of the monks remain strangers to him, he felt that this Barnaba going around in a habit, staring back at him from the mirror with his sunburned face and the ugly, peeling skin on his scalp, was a stranger too. His hands were covered with painful weals and blisters.
When Farid was moved from reaping to the joiner’s workshop he felt as if he had won a prize, for he loved working with wood. The master joiner was a gloomy man who said not a word all day, but his journeyman understood all his gestures, and passed the gist of them on to the newcomer.
Every evening Farid was jolted by the sight of monastery pupils who had been lumbered with the signal kneeling in the centre aisle of the refectory. Apparently there were three of the little disks in circulation, although no one was quite sure of that.
“What, even in the vacation?” cried Farid indignantly at the sight of one pupil who was almost falling asleep with weariness and couldn’t even eat. His sore, limp hands were dangling.
“The signal takes no vacations and never sleeps,” said Marcel, who was often handed it himself, but was clever enough to pass the little wooden disk on again in good time. Only once did Marcel fail, and then he had to eat his supper kneeling. Farid was horrified to find his neighbours at table suddenly turning spiteful. He snapped at them to shut up, but they went on taunting Marcel.
As a newcomer, Farid couldn’t yet be given the signal himself, so he didn’t have to kneel if he spoke Arabic, but whenever he did the others looked at him in alarm, as if he came from another star. So he said as little as possible, and was soon regarded as a silent boy. That showed him even more clearly what a stranger this shy boy Barnaba was, for Farid’s effervescent loquacity had been famous in Damascus.