A vigorous peasant girl who matured early, Aida had been turning the heads of bachelors in Mala since her thirteenth birthday, but she didn’t want any of the men who proposed to her. She loved only this boy who looked like a gorilla, and had only just managed to make it into the fourth grade at school when he was fourteen.
Farid was sorry for Matta, who looked like a lost child. He helped the newcomer through his first few days in the monastery. At least he had been allowed to keep his own name, since none of the other pupils was called Matta, after the Evangelist.
“You’re my one piece of good luck,” Matta kept saying. He had difficulty with French, and indeed with books in general.
When Bulos first met Matta, he liked the boy at once. He seemed like a force of nature, wild, strong, and lovable. Bulos thought of him as a brother, and soon after his arrival he was admitted to the secret society of Syrian Brothers.
Summer and outdoor agricultural work helped Matta to settle in. Out of doors, he was better than anyone else at harvesting crops and milking livestock. Once Matta had fresh air in his nostrils he was in his element. Bulos admired his strength as he worked, climbed trees as nimbly as a monkey, and then fooled around like a circus artiste up in the branches.
A jute sack full of wheat weighed over sixty kilos. That was no problem to Matta. He did a dance with the sack on his back, making even Brother Jakob applaud and laugh until the tears came to his eyes.
But the moment Matta was back in the monastery he was useless. He couldn’t even write a short essay about the day he had just spent out of doors. Farid gave him coaching daily, with increasing desperation as the beginning of the school term approached.
Matta’s mind was somewhere else entirely, not only in lessons but during Farid’s coaching. He couldn’t get the simplest calculations into his head. Instead, he told Farid at every opportunity that, without fail, he was going to run away. “The time will come,” he said mysteriously.
Only in the secret society of the Syrian Brothers was he wide awake and full of energy. And he did everything that Bulos asked him to do.
136. Brother Nicholas
Rana was dancing naked. Her body glowed pink in the firelight from the elm. Farid, also naked, was sitting in the damp grass. Everything was dark except for Rana. But his back was warm from the heat of the burning tree. Suddenly Rana sat astride his lap with her legs spread. Her face was burning. Someone sprayed cold water on Farid’s thighs, and a shudder ran through all his limbs.
He woke up. It was still dark. Farid felt that everything under him was wet. He quickly took off his underpants, wiped his wet balls with them, put a clean pair on, and then put his pyjama trousers over it. He placed the wet underpants between his mattress and the iron bedstead. There was no way he could hand them in to the laundry.
Brother Nicholas was a small, dark-skinned man. It was said that as a pupil he had been outstanding with his bold essays on difficult theological questions. But shortly before he was to be ordained priest, he fell out of a tree at harvest time. He lay in a coma for a long time after that, and when he came out of it he was simple-minded and, although he wanted to go on serving the monastery, was capable only of basic tasks. So now he worked in the laundry.
Every week, the pupils had to hand in their dirty washing in a laundry bag. To avoid getting clothes mixed up, every item was marked with its owner’s date of birth and initials. Marcel said that Nicholas sniffed all the garments in turn, and as soon as he detected the smell of semen on anything he handed it over to Father Istfan. And Father Istfan gave the pupil concerned a lesson “liable to keep his prick down and out for good, believe you me,” concluded Marcel. Farid thought he was joking.
But one day he actually saw Brother Nicholas sniffing pair after pair of underpants with his eyes closed, and then throwing them into a big laundry cart with the vests. He came to one, and suddenly stopped, sniffed it again, and then let out a yelp. It sounded like a whinny of “Yes!” Then he looked for the owner’s initials and date of birth, and noted them down.
Farid’s erotic dreams came more and more often these days. He felt Rana closer to him than ever before, and when it was over he stuffed his sticky underpants beneath the mattress.
Some people washed theirs in secret after a wet dream and hung them in the attic to dry. Farid was revolted by the sight of the dried garments hanging there rigid as boards. And he knew from Marcel that it didn’t help. “Brother Nicholas gets them anyway,” he said. He himself got an uncle to keep bringing him new underpants, and he threw the soiled ones, well wrapped up, into the big rubbish bin, cutting out his initials to be on the safe side.
When Farid had buried fourteen pairs of underpants under his mattress, he wrote his mother a letter and sent it by the secret route via the bus driver. In it he asked her for a dozen pairs of underpants with the usual mark FM230640.
Three weeks later Bulos brought him the package.
Dear heart,
Here are the underpants. That’s a funny sort of monastery. What on earth do you do with so many pairs? Laila was here and helped me sew the initials in. We laughed a lot, and she said that if your father heard you were getting through more pairs of underpants than rosaries he’d probably convert to Islam.
Laila suspects you must all be so hungry there, you have to nibble your underpants.
With love, your devoted provider of underwear,
Claire
Farid happily put the new undergarments away in his locker and then ran out into the courtyard, where the other monastery pupils were spending the short time before the bell went for supper.
“You can visit me more often now,” he whispered softly in his mind to Rana as he went downstairs, and he took the last four steps in one great leap.
137. Spectres by Night
Matta and Bulos were different in every way, but complemented one another perfectly. Each admired the other’s abilities. Matta was brave and had enormously powerful hands. He was trusting, straightforward, and believed everything he was told.
And it seemed miraculous that Matta, who tied himself in knots trying to finish a single sentence in French, turned out better than anyone at learning Bulos’s secret language. That was another reason why Bulos liked him. As soon as Matta heard a new word in the secret language it was imprinted on his memory, and he spoke it without any accent. Soon he could converse easily in it with Bulos.
At the end of August, Bulos had a violent argument with Father Athanasius, an unpleasant and short-tempered theologian whom most of the monastery pupils avoided. After their quarrel, Athanasius went to the Abbot and accused Bulos of calling Jesus a bandit leader.
That wasn’t true. Bulos thought Jesus the greatest revolutionary of all time, but the dull-minded theologian thought revolutionaries were exactly the same as bandits.
Maximus showed no mercy. He didn’t let Bulos finish his explanation, but pronounced sentence at once: either he left the monastery or he did penance. Bulos accepted penance. It was extremely humiliating. He had to kneel in the inner courtyard and ask pardon of the tale-teller Athanasius in front of all the pupils and all the Fathers.
Bulos repeated his request for forgiveness twice, parrot-fashion and with an unmoved expression, because Athanasius claimed not to have heard the words properly. Tears came to Matta’s eyes at the sight of his friend, and Farid cursed the priest from the bottom of his heart.