It was a relief when they arrived down on the beach and the line could break up and scatter. There wasn’t another soul in the little bay. The pupils undressed. They had no bathing trunks; they were to bathe in their shorts and keep a second, dry pair to change into later.
Marcel was the first to run into the waves, but at that moment Father Constantine ordered them, in tones of alarm, to leave again. Just as the boys were laughing at Marcel’s leap into the water, a pair of lovers had come on the scene. A muscular man and a blonde woman tourist had chosen the bay below the monastery for their own outing. They ignored Father Constantine’s request to them to find another bay, and undressed. Reluctantly, the monastery pupils left, feeling furious, and all of them without exception thought nothing could be more ridiculous than Father Constantine’s suggestion that on the way back they should all pray for the lovers’ souls, and hope they would remain chaste.
“How such an idiot can make such brilliant music is a mystery to me,” whispered Bulos.
128. The Syrian Brothers
More and more often, Farid longed to hear the sound of Arabic. Sometimes he went off on his own to taste a few Arabic words, letting them melt one by one on his tongue. Twice he got so high on them that he forgot himself and recited some Arabic verses out loud. He was startled to feel someone slipping the little disk with the letter S into his pocket. As he refused to pass the disk on to anyone else, he had to eat his supper kneeling.
“I admire your noble attitude. I’ll be thinking of you,” whispered Bulos in passing, squeezing his shoulder. Marcel and Butros gave him an affectionate wave too, while the twins Luka and Markus acted as if they didn’t know him. Farid also refused to eat, but the monk on supervision duty took this gesture to be mortification of the flesh and not a protest.
A little later, as they were walking in the monastery grounds, Bulos told him about a secret society whose members were interesting boys, and would like to get to know him, Farid.
He was first admitted to a meeting of this secret society chaired by Bulos, the Syrian Brothers, in mid-November. The members were ten pupils from different grades. To Farid’s great surprise they included Marcel, who had had to leave the Nightclub in order to join. Bulos had insisted on it.
Farid didn’t understand what the aims of the society were, but it was an exciting change from routine, and when they swore loyalty in the twilight of the attic where they met, and Bulos spoke of the power of their association, Farid remembered that other attic back in Damascus and his friend Josef. Bulos appeared to be convinced that the Syrian Brothers would take over power in the monastery one day.
At first Farid thought Bulos was only joking, but when he insisted on the swearing of an oath against treachery and tale-bearing, he realized that his friend meant it seriously. Enemies of the Syrian Brothers were attacked in the lavatories after dark and beaten up without much discussion. The punishment squad consisted of Bulos and three strong tenth-grade boys. The victims could not identify their tormentors, who were well disguised, but afterwards they knew who they had to keep quiet about. And the threat of the signal was instantly reduced for the Syrian Brothers. If a member of the secret society was handed the hated wooden disk, all the others would go hunting until they caught someone else speaking Arabic.
One day Bulos explained that it was important for them to have a secret language that no one else would understand. Every week from then on, he taught his friends ten to twenty new words and phrases invented by himself. He hoped that within a year they would be able to talk to each other in this secret language. Farid was surprised to find how eagerly everyone set about learning it. And sure enough, they were very soon able to greet each other in it at their meetings or in the school yard, exchanging brief secret messages that no outsider could understand.
129. Discord
The January of 1955 was particularly cold. It snowed overnight, and the world seemed to be frozen under a sugar coating. Now the monastery building showed its structural faults. None of the big windows fitted properly; the wood of the frames had warped in the heat and drought of the long summer months. Farid froze in bed at night, even though the nearest window had been draught-proofed with old rags.
Outside, the ground was slippery as glass. No motor vehicle could venture up the narrow dirt road to the monastery. The inner courtyard had become an ice rink. The pupils, the cooks, and the Fathers slid about on it, and someone was always falling down.
Farid was standing near the stairway under the arcades, watching his breath emerging as vapour from his mouth, like cigarette smoke, when Marcel waved to him. “Bulos is looking for you.” And he added, in their secret language, “There’s a meeting this evening.”
Bulos was angry. Markos, a ninth-grade pupil and a member of the Syrian Brothers, had been turned, he said. The boy wouldn’t give the society away, but he wasn’t coming to any more meetings because he felt more comfortable with Gabriel’s Early Christians group.
These remarks reminded Farid how Butros had often warned him to avoid Bulos and attend the Saturday group instead. Bulos was waxing indignant about Gabriel, calling him a Jewish communist, and Farid was startled by the mounting hatred of his tone. The others just nodded. But when Bulos began contemplating a punitive operation against Gabriel out loud, Farid’s alarm changed to cold anger. The others were also paying more attention now, and didn’t go along with Bulos’s idea. Gabriel was frail and sick, said Marcel.
Farid felt something break inside him. “I won’t join in. I think we should leave Gabriel alone,” he said hoarsely, looking Bulos in the eye. Disappointed, Bulos shrugged.
“I tell you, he’s a snake in the grass, but if you don’t want to do anything about it, we’ll leave him alone for now.”
130. Epilepsy
He couldn’t wake up, although he heard the bell. Only when Marcel shook him did Farid slowly come to his senses and sit up in bed. He felt a painful throbbing in his right temple. He’d rather have stayed in bed, but he was afraid of his fellow pupils’ scorn, for laziness was regarded as disloyalty: the others would have to do his work as well as their own. It was a fiendish system, and meant that even the Fathers and the monks must turn up for work looking keen so as not to lose face. Farid was due to work in the orange grove with five other pupils after lessons.
So he tried to get up, and almost fainted. He clung to the bedstead until he felt a little better. Finally he staggered into the washroom and put his head under a jet of cold water.
He felt a little fresher in lessons. But then, soon after prayers for Nones at three in the afternoon, it happened. He was just marking out a circle around a young orange tree with a spade, as instructed by Brother Jakob, who himself worked hard enough for three, and then he was going to weed the earth inside it. Suddenly everything went black in front of his eyes, he lost consciousness, and collapsed. When he came to his senses the first thing he heard was Gabriel’s voice. He opened his eyes and saw Brother Jakob’s concerned face. At that moment Bulos walked past a little way off, taking no notice of him. “Where’s Claire?” asked Farid softly, but then he realized he had seen her only in a dream. The back of his head hurt where it had hit the ground. Brother Jakob told him he had fallen backward as stiff as a post. Farid wiped the saliva from the corners of his mouth. It’s the falling sickness, he thought, frightened, and remembered the street seller Hassan who sold ice in Saitun Alley in summer and sweetmeats in winter. Hassan fell down in a faint at least once a year, and people said that because the djinn loved him they sometimes stole him away to sing to them.