Rana looked at Farid. She saw longing and sorrow in his eyes, and although she was very much afraid, she knew for certain at that moment that she wanted to live with him. But next minute she remembered her mother’s words: “A Muslim is still a human being, but the Mushtaks are rats! Rats! Rats!” The voice echoed through her head.
“Did you hear about my family’s latest catastrophe?” she asked.
He nodded, and he realized she knew that the Mushtaks were held to blame for the arrest of Rana’s uncle and the financial ruin of the entire Shahin family.
She didn’t know much about the feud between the two clans, she was just aware that there was one name her parents always repeated when they wanted to suggest something ugly, malicious, contemptible and hateful, and that name was Mushtak.
“Why does life have to be so complicated?” asked Rana.
“Because I’m a walking disaster area,” he replied. There were tears in his eyes, for at that moment he saw the mighty wall that was rising in front of him, and he was in despair because he couldn’t get over it.
She kissed him, and he didn’t know what to do. Her lips were cold; it was a strange feeling. He wasn’t carried away as much as he had expected; instead, he saw himself like an actor on screen and tried to embrace Rana as an actor would. She laughed. He kissed her on the mouth.
“That’s not the way a brother kisses his sister,” said the boy. His mother took no notice. She was dealing the cards again.
12. In Love
That spring of 1953 Farid didn’t want to go to Mala for Easter, not at any price. He claimed that he wasn’t well and wanted to rest. Couldn’t his father, he asked, make an exception just for once?
Elias Mushtak wouldn’t hear of any exceptions or compromises. The entire family must go to the village and publicly commemorate his father. They would also celebrate the latest ignominious defeat inflicted on his enemies of the Shahin clan.
“You can wear the city around your neck like a jewel the rest of the year, but we all belong in Mala for this one week,” he said calmly but implacably. Any further argument, as usual, was futile. What Elias said was law. Even Claire seldom protested.
So Farid obeyed, and went up into the mountains with the others in a very bad temper. That year he noticed for the first time how dangerously his father drove along the winding road. Three times, he almost crashed into vehicles coming the other way. Farid pictured himself falling into the abyss. It was always his father’s fault, but Elias Mushtak cursed the other drivers at the top of his voice.
The higher up the mountain road the car made its way, the bleaker and more unattractive the boy found the landscape. And it seemed to be reflected in his face. A moment came when his mother noticed the grief in it as he stared at their surroundings. It was very unusual for him to look like that. He’s in love, she thought, unhappily in love. And Claire was not wrong.
13. Scruples
All the Mushtaks arrived in Mala on Good Friday, in relays, and light and music filled their long-deserted houses again.
As if they had been waiting all winter for this solemn moment, the five village boys came to the Mushtak villa in their best clothes next morning, making a rather shy and restrained noise under the big balcony until Farid heard them and asked them in for a lemonade, as he did every year. They liked it very much, particularly with ice cubes from the only electric refrigerator in the village at that time, which of course belonged to the Mushtaks. Sticking to their usual custom of the last few years, as they drank their lemonade on the balcony they decided to go for a picnic under the huge old elm tree on the hill after church on Easter Sunday. From that vantage point, you could think of the village as charmingly small and insignificant, the way the boys liked it. Furthermore, no one could catch them smoking up on the hill. They kept watch through the binoculars on anyone and anything moving further down. They didn’t really have anything to fear during Easter week, for no one else felt like going up to the distant elm tree when festivities were in full swing in the middle of the village.
So next day, soon after church, Farid and his five friends set off uphill to the elm tree. His mother had packed as much food as if he and all the others were emigrating to America. The contents were pure delight for the Mala boys, who these days brought nothing with them but their appetite for any number of strange delicacies.
When they reached the elm they lit a small fire on the spot where shepherds, stopping to rest on the hill, had lit their fires for decades. Farid wasn’t hungry, and gave the other his sandwiches. But he drank the strong, smoky tea and enthusiastically described the beautiful women of the capital city to his friends. The farmers’ sons relished his exciting descriptions, and couldn’t get enough of them.
They sat there for hours, feeding the fire with stout branches and thistles, and warming themselves even more on the women’s bodies delivered up by Farid to their wild imaginations.
But suddenly the usually silent Matta said this was the last time he’d be with them. Hesitating slightly, he poked the embers of the fire with a twig. “My father’s a distant cousin of the new abbot of some monastery in the north. I have to go into it. They need novices, and there are hardly enough priests these days for all the Christian villages. But I don’t want to go.” And then he fell silent again.
“Oh, come on, what’s the matter with that? It’s better than this dump. All you can do here when you finish school is feed goats, grow wheat, and have children. It’s worth leaving Mala for the good life in the monastery. I’ve heard everyone has a bed to himself there,” said Simeon the beekeeper Isaak’s son, trying to encourage his friend.
“That’s true, it’s something to look forward to.” Butros, son of the shepherd Fadlu, joined in the conversation. “It’ll be worth going into the monastery just to get away from your brothers and sisters farting at night.”
But Matta shook his head.
“No, really,” Butros persisted, “you ought to be glad. You’ll get clean clothes and enough to eat. And you’ll learn a lot more than in our lousy school here. What else do you want?”
Simeon went on cheering him up. “Yes, and these days priests live like millionaires.”
“But what’s he going to do with the prick between his legs? Those monks in black aren’t allowed to marry,” pointed out Ghassan, the vegetable dealer Tanius’s son. Matta smiled grimly.
“Oh, he can put it in olive oil to keep it fresh and crisp,” joked Butros, “until one of those randy women comes along confessing that she needs three men a day plus her own husband or she can’t sleep at night.” He turned to Matta himself. “And then she asks you, ‘What am I to do?’ And you say, like the man of God you are, ‘My daughter, consider your husband and the other three your main course, and have me for dessert.’”
Butros laughed a lot at what he considered his own excellent joke. The other boys laughed too, and even Matta smiled faintly. Only Farid was quiet.
“What’s the place called?” he asked.
“The monastery of St. Sebastian.”
Farid knew that it was on the Mediterranean coast. “It’s a good one,” he said, pretending enthusiasm out of sympathy. But Matta’s face remained unmoved. He looked as if he were desperately trying to find a way out of an invisible maze.
When the sun set they rose to go home. Instead of fetching water from the nearby spring to put out the embers, the five others lazily pissed on the ashes. Only Farid refrained.
The boys laughed at him. He didn’t dare piss just because he was superstitious, they said. For in the village it was thought that if you pissed on a hearth your pee would hit the Devil, who likes to swelter in any fire, and he’d be so angry that he’d strike men impotent and light an inextinguishable fire in their wives’ cunts, forcing the women to cuckold their husbands. The goatherd Habib, who used to screw not only his wife and his maidservant every week but his forty goats too, had been impotent, so rumour had it, ever since he drank too much tea one night and was too lazy to move a few steps away from the fire on the hearth. Then the Devil hissed with anger, and his hairy hand shot out of the embers and scratched Habib’s glans. The poor man jumped and felt a strange chill in his limbs, like a snowstorm sweeping through his bones.