“No, he parks the car at the front of the house. Anyway, using a back entrance is beneath Dr. Shahin’s dignity.”
The cellar contained a workshop, a storeroom for wine, another for olive oil and other provisions, two guest rooms, a large bathroom, and Rana’s father’s study.
The study was the best room. It had a large couch completely filling one wall, a small table in front of it, and the room was surrounded by bookshelves of walnut wood. A large picture by Miró hung on the wall behind the desk. A ventilator hummed in the ceiling.
“Is that an original?” asked Farid, pointing to the Spanish painter’s blue picture.
“Oh no, a fake, like everything else in this house,” said Rana, and put one hand quickly in front of her mouth as if the remark had slipped out by mistake, but she was laughing through her delicate fingers. Farid loved the sound of her laughter, which reminded him of distant bells. He put both arms out to her.
It was Rana’s idea to open a bottle of the best Lebanese red wine. As they drank it, they pictured the life they would lead together some day. Rana kept breaking into her clear laughter, and Farid heard in that recurrent note the twittering of cheerful sparrows, which amused him. After about an hour, however, he noticed that she was tipsy. A little later she could hardly speak, and after another glass of wine she fell asleep, smiling blissfully. Alarm abruptly drove the alcohol out of Farid’s own veins. Rana was lying on the couch like a corpse. When he touched her she uttered a whistling sound, like a rubber duck.
What was he to do? It was already after ten in the evening. He sat her up, but she kept falling back again. Finally he bent down and put her over his shoulder. Her weight was no problem, but the alcohol suddenly rose to his head again, making him sway. His view of the stairs was blurred. None the less, he made it up to the first floor and then the second floor. Once there, he found her room and laid her carefully on the bed.
He began laughing himself, and fell on his knees beside the bed, with his upper body over Rana’s stomach.
A little later a sound roused him from his drowsy state. He felt as if he had just heard someone closing the front door of the house. For a second he thought of hiding in the wardrobe, but then he realized that no one had come in after all. It was probably the wind blowing the cellar door shut. He undressed Rana, got her into her nightdress, laid her in her bed again and kissed her forehead. In her dreams she moaned.
The bottle, he suddenly thought, and he ran down to the cellar, picked the wine bottle up, cast a glance around the room to check for any other traces, switched off all the lights, and left the house.
He kept his head bent until he reached the next side street. Finally he stopped, disposed of the bottle under the dense branches of a bush, and went to the bus stop. On the way back he imagined the expression on Rana’s mother’s face if she had entered the house just as he was coming up from the cellar with her daughter over his shoulder. He couldn’t stop chuckling, until two women sitting in front of him moved to sit elsewhere.
“Not quite right in the head, if you ask me,” said one of them.
186. The Oath
They were sitting in an apartment on the outskirts of the city. Judging by the stuffy atmosphere and the overflowing ashtrays, it must be a bachelor pad. This was Farid’s first meeting as a full Communist Party member.
The comrade who led this cell of the Party, which had four members, called himself Said. Apparently he was a bank clerk. Apart from him, only Farid had an important function in the youth organization; the others were ordinary members. Comrade Kamil, a Kurd, had abandoned his studies and now worked as an olive oil salesman. He had a slightly rancid smell about him. The Shi’ite Comrade Samad, on the other hand, always turned up freshly shaven. He was a ladies’ hairdresser, and there was something slightly feminine in the way he himself spoke. Comrade Edward, an Assyrian from the Euphrates region, was a maths teacher and an eternal sceptic who doubted everything, especially himself.
“I am happy to open the first meeting of our Party cell. Between you, you represent the living image of our country,” said Comrade Said happily, overlooking the fact that the majority of the country’s population, Sunni Arabs, was not represented among them at all. “Before we begin our meeting we will swear to be loyal, to die for one another, and to live for the working class. We despise anyone who betrays us. Your word will be enough for this oath now. When I was still young, members of the Muslim Brotherhood placed their hands on the Koran and a pistol. We communists had the hammer and sickle lying beside Marx’s Das Kapital and a picture of Lenin. But those days are gone now. We had neither cars nor telephones, but we were clever and had nerves made of steel. I still remember a raid on my apartment. I don’t mean to boast, but I was famous for my strong nerves and my quick repartee. When the police stormed my place, they saw the big picture of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, and one of the policemen asked me who the three men were. I told him in friendly tones, ‘The man with the beard is St. Anthony, the man with the bald patch next to him is the Apostle Butros, and the man with the big moustache is the Apostle Bulos. The policeman nodded and told his colleagues that I couldn’t be a communist. It was a fact, he said, that Christians prayed to pictures of their saints. But time changes everything, even us. So your word alone will do for me. Who’s volunteering to go first?” he asked.
Of course no one wanted to be first. The four of them all looked around.
“The youngest of us should have the courage to be first,” said Kamil.
“No,” replied Farid. “I’ll let you go first out of respect for your age.”
“Oh, very well, very well, I’ll start,” said Edward. “I swear by Lenin and my eyesight that I will always be true to communism, and even under torture I will not betray my Party.”
“I swear by …” Samad said next, in his soft voice, “I swear by …” he repeated, not quite sure who or what to cite, “I swear by my love for the Party that I will never betray my comrades, whether male or female,” was the solution he finally hit upon.
Samad was the only one to mention female comrades at all. Farid saw, from Said’s slight smile, that this had not escaped the notice of the old Party fox.
“And I swear by my mother and my eyesight that I will never betray the Party or give a comrade away,” said Farid hastily, and felt relieved.
“I swear by my people,” said the Kurd, and was going to go on to protest his loyalty, but Comrade Said, leader of the cell, raised one hand.
“Wait a moment, what do you mean, your people? Are you going to claim that all Kurdish pimps, speculators, Ba’athists and nationalists are saints?”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake! I swear by our General Secretary Comrade Khalid Malis, a Kurd like myself, that I will keep faith in life and in death,” Kamil proudly concluded.
187. Of Cats and Clever Women
Azar’s neighbour Zachariah was a cook at a pumping station in the desert that sent oil from Iraq on through a pipeline to the Mediterranean. His wife Bahia, at home in Bab Tuma, suffered less from her husband’s absence than from his stingy ways. He earned well, but gave her and the children nothing. All four of them were pale, undernourished, and dressed like beggars.
Bahia swore to her neighbours that if her husband died she was going to give a big party, and just to make him turn in his grave she would say out loud that it had been his express wish for her to spend a lot of money on her guests. The neighbours laughed with her, though out of pity rather than anything else.
When Zachariah came home for two days once a month he insisted on eating fish, because they never had fish at the pumping station. It was like a ritual. After the long drive through the desert, the bus arrived punctually in Bab Tuma at nine in the morning. The bus stop was only ten metres from the fish stall. He went to it before going on home and bought a kilo of whatever was the cheapest on offer, paying in advance for another kilo that the owner of the stall was to store overnight in his refrigerator for him.