Later, at the worst moments of his life, Farid was to think of those days again and again, and the extraordinary peace that he knew only near Rana. He felt both safe and light as air, so that at some moments he almost thought he could fly. Rana was only a few months older than he was, but she was always a little way ahead of him. He loved talking to her, and was never for a moment bored. And then there was her hair, and her eyes! He loved to kiss her on the lips. They were always sweet, and had her own special fragrance.
He liked it when she read aloud to him. He himself loved to tell stories, but she preferred reading. During those seven days they read L’Étranger and La Peste together. Even years later, he always thought of Rana’s voice in connection with the works of Camus. And in those days Rana told him for the first time how, whenever she had been with him, she waited as long as she could before showering, so that she could take the smell of him to bed with her.
She also confessed that it was he who had taught her the joys of kissing. No one in her family ever kissed.
“What, never?” exclaimed the surprised Farid, who couldn’t go a day without kissing his mother.
“No, as I said. My mother doesn’t kiss anyone, not even Jack, and he’s her favourite. She certainly doesn’t kiss me.”
“What about your father?”
“He once patted my head when I wasn’t well, but he’s incapable of hugging anyone. And if you hug him he doesn’t know what to make of it. It was you who taught me that kissing is nourishment just like bread, water, and olives,” she said.
When Farid took her in his arms and kissed her for a long time, she laughed. “Kind sir, you’ll eat me up!” And then she tickled him. “I said kissing was nourishment, understand? Not Rana Shahin.”
“Very well, madame, very well, but somehow your kiss is a strange kind of nourishment, because the more I have of it the hungrier I am.”
164. The End of a Dream
During that week Farid came to know the thousand reasons why he loved Rana. Her way of laughing at anything fascinated him. On their last afternoon in Aunt Mariam’s apartment, she told him how badly disappointed her father had been by the Greeks, and she couldn’t stop chuckling. “He expected every taverna proprietor to be a grandson of Socrates, every bureaucrat a descendant of Plato, every poor baggage carrier to be Diogenes in person.” And she described the way her brother had given himself alcohol poisoning with the sweet wine of Samos. He had to stay in bed for three days, and his Mama had stayed in bed too, to be on the safe side. Her father never wanted to hear the word retsina again.
Then they sat in the kitchen drinking tea, while Rana read aloud the last few pages of Camus’s La Peste. Suddenly Farid gave a start. He felt icy cold.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
“How late is it?” he asked in return, because he had left his watch at home. He was white as a sheet.
“Just after six. Aunt Mariam won’t be back until tomorrow,” she reassured him.
“All the same, we ought to go.”
But Rana wanted to finish the book. She felt very peaceful; she had already cleaned the apartment and removed all traces of their presence.
Next moment, however, they both started in surprise. Through the open kitchen doorway, they saw Aunt Mariam carefully pushing her large suitcase into the apartment. Mariam froze when she saw Rana with a boy. Then she recognized Farid, and forgot all about her case.
“I don’t believe it,” she said, slowly coming towards them. She left the front door of the apartment open. “How dare you meet a Mushtak in my apartment?” she cried, hoarse with anger.
Question after question whirled around Farid’s mind. Had someone given Rana away? Was that why her aunt had come home early? What was he to do? He couldn’t leave Rana alone now. How could they calm this Fury down?
The two young people stood there as if turned to stone.
“But Aunt Mariam,” said Rana, to break the silence, “we were only drinking tea and reading a book.”
“You have brought a Mushtak into my most private place! Is he brave enough to take me into his parents’ bedroom? Well, is he? I trusted you, I asked you to do me this small service, and you bring a Mushtak into my apartment!”
“But Aunt, I thought you’d understand us. We’re young, we were born here in Damascus, what can we do about the feud between our parents and grandparents? Farid and I have both sworn never to go to Mala again,” she went on, almost pleadingly.
“Tell him to get out of my apartment. I will never in my life exchange words with a Mushtak.”
Farid left the kitchen, walking past Rana’s heavily perfumed aunt.
“And now for you, madame!” screeched Aunt Mariam. “Isn’t it enough that Jasmin had to die? Isn’t that enough for you? Do you want another murder in the family? Don’t interrupt me,” she snapped when Rana merely raised a hand. “Your brother Jack was right. You’re playing with fire. He told me someone had told him you were friendly with one of those Mushtaks. He’s going to keep a close watch on you. And if he catches you with that Mushtak, it’s him and not you that he’ll shoot. Is that what you want? If you’re after another bloodbath, then go on meeting this boy, but never come into my apartment again.”
Farid waited in the stairwell outside the open front door. It was already dark.
“Aunt Mariam,” cried Rana in one last attempt, stretching out her arms as if to embrace her aunt.
“Go away, go away!” the woman shouted, retreating from her. When Rana left the apartment, her infuriated aunt slammed the door behind her.
Farid didn’t want to put the light on. They slowly went downstairs.
On the last landing, Rana placed herself in front of him and flung her arms around him. He kissed her lips. They tasted salty.
165. Training
Farid was proud to be a part of the secret life that pulsated beneath the calm surface of the city. Since the autumn of 1956 he had been in the Communist Party youth organization. Meetings of the Young Communists were held at different places every time, and members went separately so as not to arouse suspicion. He liked that in itself. He felt like a secret agent, although owing no allegiance either to Moscow or its Communist Party, only to a future society in which he could live freely with Rana, their heads held high.
The whole idea had the magnetic attraction of forbidden fruit. Like the others, he had a cover name for security reasons, and he regularly attended training courses. The young people he met there came, like himself, from rich families. Communist writings spoke of the workers and proletarians, but he never met one of them in all those years, and he didn’t much like that. How could the workers in Russia, England, and Germany come out on the streets with such militant self-confidence, going on strike, even forming something called the Labour Movement, while here they trudged submissively from home to work and back again, in fear?
When, at a meeting of his own Party cell, he suggested explaining communism to the workers, he was warned not even to try it. It would just scare people. He discussed the matter with the members of his old gang, Rasuk, Azar, Suleiman, and Josef, and encountered outright opposition. Josef was the only one who bought the illegal Communist Party journal Youth from him. The others wouldn’t touch it. But in his own mind, Farid felt this was the right way. He was full of impatience in his early years in the Party, and genuinely believed that the revolution was imminent. In his daydreams, he imagined himself at Rana’s side, storming palaces of some kind in which dictators, feudal lords, and also (rather comically) Catholic priests who had been overthrown begged for mercy. Tears came to his eyes at the idea of himself standing before these defeated enemies, showing magnanimity and sending them all off to an agricultural commune to live by the labour of their own hands at last. But if he so much as hinted anything of the kind to Josef, his friend laughed at him. “A bad Russian movie,” was Josef’s succinct comment.