“No,” said Josef, and then there was a long silence that troubled Farid. “Amin’s a nice guy,” said Josef at last, without looking at his friend, “but he’s a dangerous communist. You want to go carefully with him.”
“Why?” asked Farid, who hadn’t thought the tiler seemed at all threatening, but was very sensitive and straightforward.
“Because communists never love their country. They get their orders from Moscow and carry them out, and if the comrades there tell them, ‘Kill your sister,’ they do just that.”
“Thank God I don’t have a sister, but I do have you. And comrade or no comrade, if the Pope himself tells me, ‘Kill Josef,’ I’ll convert to Islam right away. Satisfied?”
“Don’t act so stupid. First they train you, then they inject a love of Moscow into you, and after that you have no will of your own. They’re not naïve enough to order you to do something that repels you, they do it much more subtly, telling you to do things you don’t think bad at all. And suddenly you may be a decent, honest human being, but you’re a murderer and a traitor all the same.”
“But I’d never do anything to harm my country, my family, or my religion.”
“My God, how simple-minded can you get? The communists don’t even recognise God, religion, and the family. They’d sleep with their own sisters.”
“Nonsense,” growled Farid angrily, remembering that Amin was sacrificing his life for his parents and siblings, while the pampered Josef couldn’t stand any of his sisters.
“I only wanted to warn you because I’m your friend and I’m fond of you,” said Josef. He sounded sad and resigned.
“Then calm down, Papa, going for a single walk with Amin doesn’t make me a communist,” replied Farid cheerfully.
“Not yet, not yet,” whispered Josef despairingly. For he was firmly convinced that Farid had taken a fatal step.
And he was not mistaken.
160. Hakawati of the Night
One night just before school began again in early October, Gibran played the part of hakawati, the traditional Syrian storyteller.
Members were still at the club after midnight, but only sitting in the café and in the table tennis room. Out on the terrace, the noise they made would have disturbed the quiet of the night. However, they could stay in both rooms as long as Taufik let them, and he kept late hours himself. He was always glad to have company, for he felt lonely all by himself in his tiny room in the tenement block at the end of the street.
There was room for ten people in the café, but the big table tennis room would take a hundred chairs. Michel the joiner’s clever design for the large green table meant that it could be folded up in a couple of moves and wheeled away to be stored in a cupboard, leaving a spacious lecture hall. Chairs and benches were stacked in a nearby room.
One evening Farid came to the club and found a number of young people sitting around Rasuk in the table tennis room, drinking tea and laughing. Farid entered quietly, found a chair and joined them. Rasuk was in the middle of a story, but Farid soon realized who it was about: their neighbour Saide, who else? Most of those present knew Saide; in the alley they used to say she had a body like marble and a mouth like a radio station. Men spoke of her as a daring woman married to a simple-minded skinflint. Her husband Sadik was a vegetable dealer. His large store was near the mouth of Abbara Alley, and he was a man of few intellectual gifts, but great malice. His best trick was his well-feigned innocence; his baby face would deceive any customer. Claire couldn’t stand him, and very seldom bought from him. If she did, once she was home she found vegetables in her bag that weren’t as good as those she had chosen and often had even placed on the scales herself. Elias didn’t like Sadik either, and would never shake hands with him, saying he was afraid that if he did he’d lose at least one finger to that rogue. “Even his name, Sadik, the honourable man, is a disguise,” Elias had said.
Saide joked with men and liked it when they gave her presents. In return, she made anyone who gave her something feel that he had conquered her heart.
“She goes to hang out washing on her large rooftop terrace every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon,” Rasuk went on, and Farid noticed a fiendish smile on that sophisticated storyteller’s face, for he knew very well that his male hearers were thirsting for every sentence, so he slowed down. “Want me to go on?” he asked, looking around as he took a long drink from his glass of tea. Of course he knew what the answer would be.
“Right, so she’s stretched her washing line where she can be seen by people in the surrounding buildings, just as if she were presented to them on a platter. Then she begins to sing, and young men in all four buildings run for the lavatories with doors or windows looking out on Saide’s rooftop.
Soon she acts as if her skirt is getting in her way as she moves around, so she tucks the hem up into her belt, showing her bare legs, walks around the outside of the terrace, and she knows that behind those doors the young men’s eyes are popping out of their heads, practically lodging their pupils in the cracks in the walls. When she’s in the mood, she does a little dance in front of every door until she thinks she can feel the hot breath of the boy behind it, and then she goes on to the next, and while the first young man, quietly and hunched with exhaustion and shame, creeps out of the lavatory, she turns her charm on the second and then goes on to the third.”
“And are you in the audience yourself?” asked Suleiman boldly, but Rasuk wasn’t to be shaken.
“Of course. Who told you I was made of stone?” he replied, to the sound of murmured agreement. “But sometimes she’s in a bad temper, or she doesn’t feel like playing tricks on the boys. Then she lures them into the lavatories but she does her round very quickly, without stopping anywhere, and then …” Rasuk broke off his story and drank some more tea. The air was crackling.
“Yes, what then?” asked Toni the perfumier’s son impatiently. The others laughed.
“Then she leaves the poor milkmen in the lurch,” said Rasuk.
“What milkmen? What are they milking?” asked the naïve Toni. The company roared with laughter. “They’re milking their billygoats,” cried Suleiman.
“How do you mean? What billygoats?”
“Someone had better tell Toni the facts of life some time,” cried Masu’d, a strong builder’s assistant with unruly hair.
“Then what happens?” asked Samir, the mechanic’s son.
“Then she goes away leaving the laundry basket there,” replied Rasuk. “She stays in her apartment for hours, clearing up, cooking, or drinking coffee with a woman neighbour. She takes wicked pleasure in thinking of all those young men gradually emerging from the lavatories again.”
As if Rasuk’s story had been the newsreel before the main film show, Gibran now rose and came forward. He asked Rasuk for his place, and Rasuk moved to sit next to Farid in the back row. Meanwhile, Taufik came in with twenty glasses of tea on a large tray and offered them to the audience. Everyone who took a glass put ten piastres on the tray, leaned back, and enjoyed the fragrant aroma.
Gibran sat down, put his glass to one side, and for a while he just looked gravely at the men in the audience. “Rasuk’s story,” he began slowly, “reminds me of another clever woman.”
“Even the Prophet Muhammad feared women’s wiles,” agreed Taufik, taking a glass of tea himself, and sitting where he had a view through the window of the table tennis room and could see if anyone came into the café.
“However that maybe, we were living in the outskirts of Damascus at the time, near the south gate of the city, Bab al Sigir. My parents were poor peasants. A woman whose name was Balkis lived near us. Her husband was big and strong as a camel, but he was almost blind. He owned a flour mill behind their house, and vegetable gardens and vineyards, which ensured him a certain amount of prosperity. Balkis was very beautiful. Indeed, to be honest I’ve seen many women on my travels, but only one more beautiful than Balkis, and she was a Berber from the Atlas Mountains whom I met in a nightclub in Marseille harbour, but that’s another story, and I’ll tell it another time.