“What Badi was saying is exactly the kind of honour I can live without,” said Rasuk, taking up the thread of the argument again. “We’ve been beaten, humiliated, and robbed for five hundred years, and we confine our idea of honour entirely to a scrap of skin in a woman’s most private place. That’s not normal, is it?”
Protests broke out.
“He’s been going out for a few months with an Englishwoman,” cried Michel the joiner, “and now he won’t hear of masculine honour any more.”
“You listen to me, young man,” added Sadik the vegetable dealer, “you can take everything from an Arab except his honour. Europeans may be in advance of us in many ways, but not on that point. Where honour is concerned we’re way ahead of them.”
Rasuk cast Farid a glance that spoke volumes. Sadik, of all people, who was always cheating his customers! And that skinflint spoke of Arab honour!
“In your place,” Farid told him sharply, “I wouldn’t talk about Arab values so much. Do you know what quality our ancestors most abhorred?”
“Well, what was it?” asked Sadik with his naïve expression.
“Avarice,” replied Farid, and a chorus of laughter and chuckling, catcalls and whistles broke out against the vegetable dealer.
“But Sadik is right all the same,” cried Badi the teacher and Basil the construction worker above the din. “We’ve had everything taken from us, but our honour remains. I’d rather die than marry a woman if other men had slept with her first,” added Basil. Several of the company nodded. They included Amin, who was friendly with Basil and Badi.
“And you don’t think that’s odd?” asked Azar quietly.
“Louder,” Taufik demanded. “I can’t hear a word.”
“Don’t you think it’s odd for virginity to be so sacred to us?”
“What’s odd about it?” growled a small man whom Farid didn’t know, but whose name was Edward.
“The odd thing is for men, who pay hardly any attention to women in the usual way, to situate all their honour in the place where they pee! What miserable, dishonoured men those Europeans are, conquering the air and the seas, venturing into the world of atoms, while our proud men twirl their moustaches and live with antiquated ideas — but they can feel superior because they’ve married women who were still virgins.”
Angry murmurs of protest against Azar were heard from several quarters.
“And I’m sure you all know,” said Rasuk, coming to his aid, “that a few gynaecologists here do nothing but sew up the hymen again. They study in America, they sacrifice years of their lives, just to come home and spend all their time cobbling up the damage for the sake of masculine honour.”
At the end of October Rasuk was drafted into the army, expecting to have finished his military service in January 1961. Then he would marry Elizabeth a month later, and they would move to England. She would have finished her studies in Damascus by then.
But it all turned out quite differently.
179. Listening to Films
Claire loved films. She could never have enough of them.
“Films are magic,” she said. “There was a man sitting beside me in the cinema, weeping buckets of tears over the sad story of a woman prevented by her parents from marrying the man she loved. He went on crying until the end, when she was on her deathbed, and her last words were for her lover who was far away. But at home this man who wept floods of tears in the cinema would forbid his daughter to meet her lover. He’d even assure her that he knows who the right man for her is better than she does. I bet you anything he would.”
When Claire hadn’t been to the cinema for some time she would get Farid to tell her the plots of movies he had seen with the other young men. Claire called this “listening to films”. The only ones she didn’t want to hear about were Westerns, science fiction, and movies about the days of chivalry.
Once there had been some very good movies on for three weeks, but nothing suitable for Claire, although she was desperate to listen to another film. When Farid woke up from his siesta one hot afternoon, he found her in the inner courtyard. She had freshened it up by spraying water around, and in the shade there was a place to sit with a table, two comfortable bamboo chairs, and a large plate of pistachio nuts. Now he knew why his mother had asked three times at lunch whether he was doing anything that afternoon. She couldn’t go on any longer without listening to the story of a film.
For want of a suitable film, he told her the tale of a tragic murder case that he had just heard from Josef. It was the story of a woman who — like Josef’s own aunts — was prevented from loving because she had inherited a fortune, but lived under her brother’s thumb. He chased away any men who came too close to his sister. Cheated as she had been, the woman kept quiet for a long time, until she fell in love with a spice merchant and begged her brother to agree to the marriage. She was already thirty, but as usual her brother found about three hundred things wrong with the man, insulted him, and sent him packing. The woman took her revenge: she poisoned her brother and his family, and then hanged herself. It took the CID a long time to fit all the pieces of the puzzle together and solve the case.
Some time later, when Farid had left the courtyard and Claire was still wondering which of her own women friends might be capable of such an act of murder and suicide, the doorbell rang. Matta was standing outside the front door, with a woman who smiled at Claire.
“This … is Faride … my fiancée,” said Matta quietly. “Is my brother … Farid … at home?”
180. Fatima and Josef
Josef was in love too. Fatima had fascinated him from the moment when he first saw her. They had met at the big demonstration in October, when half a million people gathered in the streets to show their support for President Satlan.
As time went on, Josef came to love Fatima as he had never loved anyone before. She had what he lacked: courage, cheerfulness, and spontaneity, and she showed him what she was thinking and feeling. Fatima also read countless books, and Josef had to work hard to keep up with her. When women fall in love with an idea, he sometimes thought, they can be more fanatical than any man.
He met her some ten times in the six months after that first meeting, in the Café Vienna. They always sat at the same table, talked, dreamed of a strong, united Arabia led by Satlan, drank coffee, and kissed.
Fatima loved voices. She didn’t mind what people looked like at all, so long as they had good voices. She told Josef that even in her mother’s womb she had graded her relations by the sound of their voices, and she hadn’t changed her mind to this day. She couldn’t resist Satlan’s voice, or Josef’s either.
From a distance, Josef looked spectrally thin and ugly, but when he spoke Fatima felt elated, light at heart. And there was another reason for her to like Josef’s company: his clever mind left no room for boredom. He was amusing and laughed at himself. “The fire in his heart,” Fatima told Farid once, “has melted any fat he ever had on him.”
Fatima was passionately pro-Satlan. He promised the rise of a great nation moving on to pastures new, and to her he was not so much a politician as a saint. He spoke directly to her and millions of other women in every speech he made, urging them to rise and fight. That was why she had been one of the first Syrian women to stand side by side with men, united in a sea of sympathy for Satlan. And suddenly some men at that October demonstration in 1959 had placed the thin boy whose voice made her go weak at the knees on their shoulders and carried him with them. She had loved him ever since.