Nadia was brave and didn’t give the lovers away, even when she was beaten. In his room, Suleiman could hear her screams after every blow, and wept with rage.
In her desperation, Lamia now turned to her favourite brother Usama as a messenger. He was only five, and she gave him a piece of chocolate for every letter he delivered. She thought he was a guileless child, but he began blackmailing his sister and had soon drained her of all her pocket money. When she couldn’t pay any more he gave her away. This time her parents didn’t beat her or lock her up, but in secret they frantically looked around for a man who would marry her even though she was so young. Soon they succeeded, and found a teacher urgently searching for a wife. He was twenty years older than Lamia, and came from the north.
At the sight of the young girl he felt suspicious. But when a woman doctor confirmed that Lamia really was still a virgin he married her.
156. Indian Movies
Claire’s mother had just celebrated her eightieth birthday when she had a fever that left her mentally confused. She needed care all around the clock now, and even though Claire didn’t do it herself she had to be constantly within reach of the nuns who were looking after Lucia. There was no way she could go to Mala for the summer vacation as usual.
Farid consoled his mother, saying he’d rather stay in Damascus anyway, he never wanted to set foot in Mala again. She raised her eyebrows. “Your father won’t like that,” she said.
“He ignores me anyway, so it can’t make any difference to him where I am. I hate Mala.” Claire stroked his head.
Elias didn’t know how to behave with his sick mother-in-law, and visited her once a month just out of politeness. He complained daily of the heat in Damascus, bewailing the fact that their lovely cool house in Mala was standing empty. However, Claire was not to be moved.
So Farid spent that summer in the city. Josef, Suleiman, and the other boys stayed in Damascus as well, but Rana had to go to Greece for two months with her parents. She phoned Farid a week before they left.
“Why Greece?” he asked on the telephone.
“A friend of my father’s has a house there.”
“Can we see each other before you go?”
“Tomorrow, if you like. We could go to the cinema. Dunia and I have tickets. I could persuade her to let you have hers, and my parents wouldn’t know.”
“Wonderful,” cried Farid. “When does the film begin?”
“At three in the afternoon. I’ll wait for you outside the entrance.”
“Aren’t you afraid of Jack? Suppose he …”
“Never mind Jack,” she interrupted. “We’ll meet outside the cinema.”
He was there half an hour early, and Rana herself turned up quarter of an hour before the appointed time. “My mother’s such a viper!” she said angrily as they sat down in a small café in the cinema building. “Ten minutes before I was about to leave, she said Jack had better go along to look after me and my girlfriend. Think of that! What was I to do? I told myself to keep calm, and I told him, ‘All right, come with us, then. We’re going to this marvellous Indian movie.’ Because I know Jack hates Indian movies. He thinks they’re badly made, the actors are too fat, the stories are too thin, and the songs are dead boring. But I still held another trump card.”
Farid looked at her inquiringly.
“It’s a love story. Jack hates love stories worse even than maths,” she explained. “So my mother was still trying to lumber me with Jack, and tempted him with a lot of money, saying he could take me and Dunia out for an ice after the film. Then I played my trump card and told him it was a particularly good love story. That did the trick!”
Rana and Farid sat side by side in the dark cinema, holding hands. It was one of those mammoth Indian films that spend three hours telling a story in which the lovers do their utmost to be unhappy and keep singing at each other without warning. One-third of it was singing that no one could understand.
Farid managed to kiss Rana surreptitiously twice, and was surprised by the tears that ran down her cheeks when she looked at him.
When the film was over she handed him a letter, dropped a quick goodbye kiss on his cheek and whispered, “Think of me.” Then she pushed her way through the audience to the main exit. Farid left more slowly, choosing the side exit.
He read Rana’s letter in the bus, and had difficulty in keeping back his own tears.
157. Gibran the Sailor
He sat on the edge of his old camp bed with a bottle of arrack in one hand and a cigarette in the other. About ten young men sat on the floor of his poorly furnished room, all of them smoking. A dense cloud of smoke floated out of the open window, as if Gibran’s room were a kebab restaurant.
It was the first time Farid had joined them. Josef had been pressing him to go almost every day since his return from the monastery. He was really missing something, Josef said, for when Gibran was drunk he could tell a story better than the best of the hakawati storytellers in the city. And today Gibran was so drunk that he never even noticed when they came in. Farid found a place near the window where he could get some fresh air.
“My story today is about a tragic love affair. The tale of Laila and Madjnun is sweet lemonade by comparison. The heroine and hero are Juliana and Arnus, and you must remember those names.”
“Why?” some of the young men asked.
Gibran took a large gulp from his bottle and drew on his cigarette. “Arnus. Arnus and Juliana,” he repeated.
“Isn’t that the name of an avenue in Damascus?” asked Toni. Gibran took another large gulp and grunted.
“And wasn’t Arnus the son who went to war against his father?”
“What war?” asked Suleiman. “I thought Arnus meant a corn cob.”
“No, my boy. Arnus may sound like the Arabic for a corn cob, but it’s a Roman name. Sultan Aziz of Damascus was a young and very clever ruler in the days when the crusaders had occupied the entire coastline.”
That was the beginning of the long love story that Gibran told. He talked and talked, and never stopped drinking all the time, holding the normally restless young men so spellbound that they all listened in silence. One of them even shed tears when the Sultan’s son Arnus was put in prison, and Sultan Aziz saw around his neck the medallion that he had given his beloved wife Juliana many years ago.
Gibran ended his story, put the empty liquor bottle down on a crate where a full ashtray and several crumpled books already lay, and fell backward on the bed. He began snoring at once, and the young men stole out of his room.
158. The Club
The new club in Abbara Alley, founded during Farid’s absence in the monastery, had been there for some time now. It had its premises in a large backyard belonging to the Catholic Church.
Its founders, a handful of young men, were proud of having made a pleasant place out of a dilapidated yard full of mountains of rubbish and old junk. Determined to make their idea succeed, the members had collected donations from the Christian community, reminding the rich that it was time to do something for the young if they were to hold their own with the Muslim majority in Damascus. When they approached atheists, nationalists, and communists, on the other hand, they pointed out the advantages of having healthy young people around, brought in from the street by the club to keep them from drugs, gambling games, and knife fights. Instead they could play basketball and volleyball, table tennis and chess on the club’s new premises.
Such lavish donations had come in that, besides a well-equipped playing field, the club also had an office, a large table tennis room, and ten modern showering and changing cubicles in the single-storey building next to the yard. There was even a café.