Their happiness, however, lasted only two years, and during those years Gibran and Karime seemed to be growing younger and closer together all the time. The two of them would even sing duets for a whole evening, and you could hear that Karime still had a wonderful voice. But early in the summer of 1960, a terrible thing happened and ruined everything.
192. Breathless
Rana had expected anything but the stalker that late afternoon. She had been to the cinema with Farid. The chance came out of a clear sky, and Farid had responded at once. Half an hour after her phone call, he was holding her hand in the dark auditorium of the cinema. Friends had recommended Kazan’s film East of Eden, with James Dean in the lead. Rana thought the story harsh, and unlike her school friends she didn’t find James Dean virile, but rather effeminate. But she was deeply moved by the character of the rebel Cal whom he played, a man who both respected and fought his father, as Farid did.
Later, when they left separately, Rana watched as her lover was making his way to the bus stop. It was at that moment that she saw the man. He was the same age as Farid and herself, he was leaning against a lamp post, and he wolf-whistled at her. He wore expensive American clothes and had combed his oiled hair into an Elvis Presley style. Rana didn’t like either Elvis or Bill Haley, with their ridiculous greasy locks. Her favourite male singer was the Egyptian Abdulhalim, and most of the other girls in Damascus were his fans too. He had a warm, melancholy voice, and looked like any poor Arab boy in love, not like the smooth and slippery Elvis.
She had first seen the stalker at the beginning of the school year outside the parliament building, where she met her friend Silvia every morning. He had followed them, and Silvia made the mistake of turning around. She had even smiled at him, and then he was glued to them until they reached the school gates.
He was still there at midday. Silvia said boys were like hunters and beggars. “Each of them has his own preserves. This one’s obviously set his sights on us.”
When the friends separated again at the parliament building, he decided to follow Silvia, and the relieved Rana was able to continue on her way home. But that afternoon Silvia told her that when he began pestering her she had stopped and slapped his face. From then on he stalked Rana like a troublesome shadow. Early in the morning, at twelve noon, after the midday break at two o’clock, and when school closed at five. He was always waiting by the same street lamp, and the girls at school soon thought he was Rana’s boyfriend. He seemed to have an endless supply of chewing gum. However, he kept in the background, merely getting a friend of his to call out his name from the other side of the street, as boys often did, to make sure that she knew it: Dured, an unusual name, made famous only years later by a popular comedian.
She began to hate him. Rana liked school, and felt liberated from her family as soon as she stepped outside their front door. Going out, to her, meant plunging into the stream of passers by who populated the streets. She was surrounded by cheerful, attractive faces, school students, office workers, army officers. Best of all she liked the look of the old people who seemed to have all the time in the world.
Fashion boutiques, flower shops, cafés, and cinemas lined her way to school, along with well-tended trees and pretty street lamps. She took her time, was never in a hurry, met up with girlfriends who lived nearby, first Salma, then Silvia, then Fatima, Mona, and the others. Sometimes there were ten of them in the party by the time they reached the school gates.
Now all that was over. She felt hunted, and hurried to school and back every day looking cautiously around her. After Silvia had slapped the stalker’s face he stuck to Rana, probably guessing that she would never strike a man.
“Just don’t let him know where you live, or he’ll be standing beside your bed, and your parents will think you’re in a relationship with him,” Silvia warned her. A nightmare! Rana was rescued by chance. One day, not far from the street where she lived, she saw him coming closer and closer. Desperately, she fled into a large building with its front door open. He had never come so close and been such a nuisance before. She stood in the stairwell, breathless, and watched him through a dusty window pane. He took up his position right opposite the front door.
“What’s the matter, my dear?” she heard a kindly voice behind her, and jumped. A middle-aged woman was looking down at her from the door of her second-floor apartment.
“There’s a man who pesters me following me around,” explained Rana.
“That’s no problem,” the woman reassured her. “You’re in the right building. If you open that door,” and she pointed to her left, “you can go down another staircase and get out into the alley behind this house, and it will take you to the tram depot. Do you live a long way off?”
“Not far from the depot,” Rana replied, thanked the woman, ran upstairs, opened the door to the other, providential staircase, and breathed a sigh of relief when she was back home and in her room.
That had been six months ago. Since then he had believed that she really lived in the big building, and she disappeared into it every day to escape him. She meant to do the same when she came out of the cinema that afternoon, but Dured the stalker caught up with her just outside the building. “Don’t make a scene. You don’t live here. I found that out yesterday,” he said.
She felt a strange fear that she was never able to explain to anyone later, not even Farid. As if Damascus were suddenly empty of people. As if this character was the most powerful man on earth, and she was only a little beetle to be trodden underfoot any time he liked. She stopped, feeling as if she no longer had feet, just two lumps of lead in her shoes. Rana wanted to scream, but she couldn’t utter a sound.
“I won’t hurt you. I just want you to have a coffee with me and be friendly. Is that too much to ask?” he said, standing squarely opposite her, immovable as a mountain.
“Let me by, please,” she begged, trying to keep calm.
“I’m not going to touch you, but if you won’t have a coffee with me I’ll follow you to your front door and tell your parents you go out every morning with a whore who’s the daughter of a well-known belly dancer, and you were at the cinema with a man today, and I won’t be lying. I can describe him in detail.”
“Silvia isn’t a whore.” Those were the only words that Rana could utter in her indignation.
“Oh yes, she is. Who else would hit a man in the face? Only women of that kind, and she’s learned it from her mother,” he said in a quiet but venomous voice. Enormous anger suddenly freed Rana from the clutches of her fear. “And you carry tales,” she cried, striking him in the face so hard that he almost fell over, but regained his balance at the last moment. Before he knew what she was about, however, Rana kicked him in the balls. Silvia had shown her how to do it.
“Well done!” said an old man who happened to be passing. “That’s the only kind of language such pests understand.”
Dured limped away, groaning. Deep in her dreams, she could still hear him shouting, “Christian whore!”
193. Moon Woman
Something had happened. He sensed it very clearly.
Farid was just eating lunch when the bell rang. He was alone in the house. Their neighbour Gurios was standing at the door, out of breath.