Next day, so the story continued, he felt unwell and went to Damascus to be examined and cured. In vain. A week later his prick was dried up, wrinkled, and dark brown. It looked like an old fig. Ten days later it simply fell off. Habib didn’t even feel any pain. He saw his prick lying in bed beside him early in the morning. At first he thought it was a black olive, but then he wondered how an olive could have come into his bed. All he had left was a hole above his testicles. And after that, so the tale went, his wife went flitting about like a fairy every night — in search of a man.
Later, a distant aunt told Claire the true story of the goatherd. Farid pretended to be asleep on the sofa, and heard that the wily man had served up this tall story about pissing on the fire to his simple-minded wife so that she wouldn’t discover the truth.
“And what was that?” asked Claire, amused.
“The fact was that the goatherd was insatiable and visited the whores in Damascus every month. There he met the famous Nariman. All the citizens of Damascus are in awe of her, and it’s not for nothing they call her She Who Sucks You Dry. And it was Nariman, of all people, whom the miserly goatherd refused to pay one day, saying she hadn’t given him a good time. So she sucked his penis away to punish him, and sent him off with nothing but the husk of it,” said the aunt, laughing. “Now he has only a limp rag between his legs — you could dry your hands on it, but there’s no pleasure to be had from it any more.”
Up on the hill under the elm, however, superstition was not Farid’s reason for holding back. He was violently lovesick for the first time in his life. His lovesickness not only took away his appetite and left him sleepless at night, it even made him unable to pass water that day. But he couldn’t and wouldn’t tell the village boys about his love. They were between fourteen and sixteen, they’d have laughed at him and insulted Rana with their coarse remarks. Love doesn’t tolerate coarse tongues, and the tongues of the village boys were coarser than a rasp.
However, there was another reason for him not to breathe a word about his love. Rana had sworn him to silence, for if the secret of their love came to light she feared for her life. And Farid knew from the evidence of his own eyes that her fears were not exaggerated. The previous summer young Ayesha had indeed paid with her life for love. She was a butcher’s daughter, and the whole village was talking about her relationship with the bus driver Bassam, whose family were at daggers drawn with Ayesha’s parents. Both families were Muslims, part of a small minority in the otherwise Christian village of Mala. Their dispute, which began over a large consignment of smuggled cigarettes, had led to three dead and over ten injured on both sides within the space of five years. The original cause of it, the cigarettes, retreated entirely into the background. The blood that had been shed now lay between the two families.
Ayesha’s parents, relations, and friends urged her to leave Bassam, but he was the only man she wanted. In the end they wrote a letter to her brother, who was earning his living as a labourer in Saudi Arabia, and he came back in a hurry. He offered her immediate marriage to his school friend Hassan, who was in the police, but Ayesha wouldn’t hear of it, and met Bassam secretly to tell him about her brother’s threats. She hoped they would induce her lover to flee abroad with her until tempers had calmed down again, but she didn’t guess that her brother was in the barber’s on the village square at that very moment, keeping watch on her. Bassam drove out of the village with his lover. It was afternoon, and he had an hour’s break before the next journey to Damascus. Where he took Ayesha no one knew, but an hour later they came back in the bus.
Farid was standing on the balcony drinking tea when Ayesha climbed out of the bus in the village square. Her brother marched out of the barber’s shop opposite the bus stop, crying, “Treacherous woman, you have let an enemy of our family defile you!”
He fired three shots. Farid’s glass fell from his hand. The bus driver, realizing his danger, stepped on the gas and saved his own life. Ayesha uttered a loud and terrified scream. “Mother, help me!” Then she died, there in the middle of the square.
14. Atonement
The fire wasn’t extinguished until midday. Then the crowd came home exhausted and dirty. Many of them, without naming names, were cursing “the boys”, meaning Farid and his friends.
Farid’s father wouldn’t say a word to him for two hours. Elias showered, dressed, and then went to the café in the village square, where the men discussed the matter until early evening. It was more the shock than any material loss that upset most of the farmers. Some of them were merely amused to think that one of the Mushtaks’ own offspring had spoiled their Easter for them, others thought none of it worth mentioning. But the Shahins were triumphant.
Elias Mushtak didn’t come back from the café until it was time for the evening meal. His face was grey and set. He muttered something to Claire, and she guessed that he had already come to a decision.
“After the summer vacation you’re going into the monastery of St. Sebastian,” he shouted at his son. “And you can be glad I don’t murder you on the spot. You’re the first Mushtak ever to burn down a sacred tree. You’ve dragged the name of the Mushtaks through the mud, and you must atone for it. And when you’re a priest later, saying your prayers, I hope you’ll remember that you owe the village something.”
“But I don’t want to go into a monastery,” said Farid, looking his father straight in the eye. Elias slapped his face. He fell over on his back, hitting his head on the floor.
“Stop it!” cried the horrified Claire. She began crying, ran to her son and helped him up.
“I didn’t do anything!” he told his father, with tears in his eyes. The second slap hit him. Farid stumbled.
“If I say you’re going into a monastery then you’re going into a monastery, and you don’t say another word, not even ‘yes’. Understand?”
“It’s all right,” wailed Claire, “he’ll do it, but don’t kill him.”
Farid wanted to shout that he wasn’t going to leave Damascus and Rana for a single second, but fear of his father paralysed his tongue.
His mother gently pushed Elias into the bedroom, where she talked to him for a long time. But Farid just heard his father repeating, over and over, that the monastery would do him good. Claire wept again. For a moment he was furious, and it occurred to him for the first time that he’d have to murder his father some day.
15. Suspicion
Next day, from the balcony, he saw his friends outside the house. They were playing marbles in the village square. He quickly dressed, but when he went to join them, they froze and avoided his eyes. Finally they quietly went away without a word. Only Matta stayed, smiling at him.
“What’s the matter with them?”
“They’re afraid.”