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Father Basilius was a good language teacher who made French lessons lively and amusing. The fact that he also looked like a vulture lent a touch of comedy to everything he told them. The language came easily to Farid, and when he began dreaming in French he realized that he was making good progress. Music was different. He didn’t care in the least for highly-strung Father Constantine, who had an aura of great unrest about him, and he couldn’t get on with the musical instruments. There was no doubt that the Father was a musical genius, said to have composed several hymns, as well as the music for all the plays performed annually on the feast day of St. Ignatius. But like many another genius he was incapable of explaining anything to other people. Marcel told Farid that the musician, who was still a young man, was in love with the cook Josephine, and had suggested her for the part of Joan of Arc.

One day Brother Gabriel, who was still keeping an eye on Farid, came up with a wonderful idea. In his despair at getting nowhere with music lessons, Farid had told him about the pleasures of learning calligraphy in Damascus, and Gabriel persuaded the monastery administration to let him give up music in the afternoons and instead take the advanced calligraphy course, since he had already mastered the basic rules. The art of calligraphy was very highly regarded in the monastery, for although French was spoken as the everyday language and in lessons, the liturgy and the Bible were in Arabic. The monks were anxious to use perfect script for the products of their own printing press, and were always looking for new young talent. The monastery press had received major commissions from outside because of its high reputation.

Gabriel’s idea was Farid’s salvation. After the end of August, he found life in the monastery rather more tolerable. Father Makarios the calligrapher, who also ran the printing shop, was both as down to earth as the printing presses and as fanciful as Arabic script. He had such a sure hand that he never hesitated for the fraction of a second in his calligraphy, as if he already saw the words he was going to write on the blank sheet of paper before him. Farid soon became his star pupil.

The mists of disappointment and opposition dispersed, and he began to pay more attention to his surroundings. To his own surprise, it was only now that he got to know Butros, who sat opposite him in the refectory, always ate in silence, and hardly ever laughed. He was shy and suspicious. But at the beginning of September he began telling Farid about himself.

The brothers Markus and Luka sat one on each side of Farid. They were twins, a boring couple who had been in the monastery for three years, always accepting everything and approving of it like good boys. Marcel knew why. “They have to be ultra-obedient, they’re here only through the bishop’s good graces. Their father ran off to America and their mother can’t feed them. It’s because she’s the bishop’s distant cousin that those two are here at all. Outside, all they can expect is work in the fish factory and beatings from their mother’s lovers, and they know it.”

In spite of their sad story, Farid thought they were a dismal pair, and once it occurred to him that if Jesus had been obliged to sit between those two in the refectory, he’d have died not on the cross but of boredom.

121. Joan of Arc

Everything was to be bright and shining on the feast day of St. Ignatius. The floor, the columns, the walls of the inner courtyard were scrubbed, the car park outside the monastery was whitewashed, and all the windows were cleaned.

Then the big stage was erected. A play was traditionally performed on 31 July in honour of the order’s founder, and here in this desolate part of the country it was a great event. Over five hundred chairs already filled the inner courtyard, although only the seats in the front row were upholstered.

In the afternoon all the employees, peasants, and labourers who worked for the monastery came streaming in. Everyone was still talking about last year’s play, Pietas victrix. The translated title hung above the stage in Arabic had proclaimed, “The Victory of Piety”.

Father Samuel the language teacher had written the play, and Father Constantine had composed the music, but the best part came from the workshop of ingenious Father Antonios. He taught physics, and his brilliant ideas had made the play into a positive firework display to delight the senses. He used steel wires, lights and stage effects to bring thunder and lightning down from the sky to the stage. Swords, angels, and spectres hovered weightlessly in the air and took the audience’s breath away. He had also stationed two monastery pupils behind the stage to howl like wolves or hoot like owls. It was truly gruesome, and gave even the most sceptical of the audience goosebumps.

This year the play was to be Joan of Arc. A magnificent show was anticipated, but it all went wrong. Marcel had already whispered to Farid at midday, “Theodore wants his revenge on his teacher — he hates Samuel.” At the end of July it was still vacation, so Farid knew neither the teacher nor his pupil.

“Why?” he asked.

“Why? Because Samuel’s horrible. But Theodore is wily. He’ll play his trick so cleverly that he won’t get punished.”

“How?”

“I don’t know exactly, I just know Father Samuel has been tormenting poor Theodore for four years. He made him repeat a school year twice, in grades nine and ten. You don’t get far here without good marks for language, and Samuel is in charge of teaching both French and Arabic. Theodore is twenty and still only in grade eleven.”

That evening St. Ignatius himself seemed to want to celebrate, and tempered the fierce July heat with a pleasantly cool temperature. Soon medieval torches were flickering on stage. Two violins played a soft melody, and then the play began.

The audience fell silent. The curtain went up. Soldiers and peasants stormed forward, crying, “Long live the good Catholic country of France!” But then English soldiers entered left and attacked them, and there was a battle scene involving over forty pupils and monks.

The English won. The French troops took their dead and wounded into a corner. Now the music was slow and heavy, and a guitar imitated bells tolling for a funeral. Wounded men said their last prayers. A priest, played by a twelfth-grade student, gave them absolution and his blessing.

Then Joan of Arc came on stage, and the audience loved everything she did and said. Josephine was acting very well. When she said that she must die a martyr’s death for Christ, the Virgin Mary and France, many a tough Father wiped a tear from his eye and blew his nose loudly, while women in the audience wept with emotion.

Farid admired the cook, who spoke her complicated part in French so well that he could understand everything. He felt attracted by her. And when, at the coronation of Charles VII in Reims Cathedral, she knelt before the King with the banner of victory in her hand, and cried, “Noble lord, now is God’s will fulfilled!” the audience clapped so loud and so long that no one could hear what the King said in reply.

Farid was beginning to doubt what Marcel had said, for the play was three-quarters over, and nothing untoward had happened. He glanced at his friend, sitting a few chairs away from him. Marcel caught his eye, and made a gesture which said: just wait, any minute now.

Soon after that Joan of Arc was taken prisoner, and the judge ordered her to be tortured until she confessed to being a witch. She was to tell her followers to surrender to the English, he said. Joan of Arc bravely refused.

The torturer came on stage, and Farid knew who was under the mask he wore. Theodore seized the cook by her long blonde hair and laid her down on a table that was doing duty for a rack. Then he tied Josephine’s hands to a large metal ring.