“What’s going on in the city?” he asked without preamble. “My daughter’s just come home terrified. The police stopped her bus, all the passengers had to get out, and they were searched for weapons. People are saying there’s been an attempted coup. Is that possible?”
“Attempted coup?” repeated Farid incredulously. Damascus had been on constant alert since January. It was said that Damian the Iraqi dictator was likely to attack the country, and there was increasing hostility between him and President Satlan. Not a day went by without bitter accusations. President Satlan, obviously with his reputation in mind, had spent a month travelling around the cities of Syria, making fiery speeches against Iraq and the Syrian communists who were flirting with Baghdad. Rumours were rife, and said that Damian was preparing to fight for Damascus with the aid of communist guerrilla troops.
Gurios wouldn’t come in for a coffee, so Farid went back to his lunch, but he had no appetite now. Something made him feel infinitely sad. He phoned Rana. “I’m sorry, you have a wrong number,” she said calmly, so he knew that she wasn’t alone.
The sense of happiness that just hearing her voice gave him was soon gone. A coffee later, he called his cousin Laila. She was taciturn. When he asked what was going on she burst into tears and could say no more. Farid dropped everything and went to see her.
There was no one at the bus stop just outside her street. The bus itself hadn’t been as crowded as usual, and the driver had turned up the volume on his radio. It was broadcasting a report on the catastrophe in Morocco, where an earthquake and an extraordinary spring tide had destroyed the harbour town of Agadir at the beginning of March, and ten thousand lives had been lost.
Farid saw several army trucks in Abbasid Square. Armed paratroopers in camouflage uniform were standing around everywhere. Even in the New Town, soldiers were posted at every street intersection.
Laila wasn’t well. She had given her employees the day off so that she could rest; she was running a temperature and looked very pale. Her husband was on tour in the north with the Radio Orchestra. The apartment looked like a dump. Farid kissed Laila and made her get back into bed. Then he spent two hours busily tidying and cleaning the place, opening all the windows and letting in fresh air.
“My goodness, if Claire could see this!” said Laila faintly when she went to the lavatory, and saw the results of Farid’s labours. She was smiling.
“She mustn’t hear a word about it. I wouldn’t do it for anyone but you. Usually I act like a pasha,” called Farid from the kitchen, where he was making tea after all those chores.
Funny, he thought, how love alters people. After taking her high school diploma Laila had begun to study history, and wanted to write about the historical development of Arabia from the women’s viewpoint. Although she was a Christian, she knew a great deal about the Sufi philosophy, and men had swarmed around her at the university, not least because of her erotic aura. However, she turned down both Djamil the professor of philosophy and Samuel the architect.
The Mushtak clan derided her for failing to take her university finals because she had fallen in love with her musician, and for thinking that she was a good dressmaker after only a short training course. Laila was trying to make a name for herself, and she did indeed have many customers, but unfortunately her abilities were limited. Farid was convinced that his mother ordered a dress from her every year only to bolster her morale, for Claire never wore the dresses. Elias laughed at Laila too.
Aunt Malake had thought long and hard in wondering whether to agree to her daughter’s marriage. Musicians, apart from a few celebrities, were not highly regarded in Damascus. Many Christians were pioneers of the theater, film, and music. Famous women singers like Marie Gibran, Karawan, and Nadira Shami, the first Syrian woman to act in a film, were Christians too. They were all regarded as immoral. All the same, Malake had finally said she was happy for the marriage to take place, for she felt how much Laila loved Simon.
Simon made Farid nervous, he didn’t know why. Sometimes he thought perhaps it was to do with his own guilty conscience, because his body was always forgetting that he must love Laila only platonically. Yet ever since he could remember, he had felt an enormous physical attraction to her.
He was just bringing the tea from the kitchen when he saw Laila sitting up in bed, rolling herself a cigarette and crumbling hashish over the tobacco. He was shocked, but quickly regained his composure. “Smoking in bed?” he laughingly reproved her.
“I smoke everywhere,” she said, without looking at him.
“And what are you smoking now?” he asked, uncertainly.
“Hash, Lebanese quality, the best from Baalbek. It’s food for my soul, and I won’t hide that from you anymore. I don’t let my husband know, or my family, or the rest of the world, but after all you’re the other half of my soul.”
“But hashish is a dangerous drug,” he said in concern, handing her the tea.
“Nonsense. The Arabs, Persians, and Indians have used it for thousands of years, and at the same time they philosophized, invented mathematics, observed the stars, and wrote the most beautiful poetry.” She licked the edge of her cigarette paper.
“How long have you been taking it?” Farid asked hesitantly. He had never been able to pretend in front of Laila.
‘Calm down, Comrade,” she replied, “you’re starting to interrogate me. Commissar, I started at nineteen, I’m twenty-six now, that makes seven years. A lucky number, don’t you think? Yes, I know it carries a life sentence in the Syrian civil code, so you don’t have to preach morality to me.” She lit the cigarette.
“Very funny,” snapped Farid. “But why do you want to dull your mind?”
“Dull my mind?” she repeated defiantly. “My head is clear as glass when I’ve been smoking a joint. Only communists get befuddled, by order of the Central Committee. All mystics have eaten or smoked hashish, and do you know why? Because you can never get into other people’s souls if you don’t leave your own cocoon. Hashish makes a hole in the wall, opens up a way for you. It’s just your bad luck that Lenin didn’t smoke it.”
“Leave Lenin out of this. Seriously, do you think it’s a good idea?”
“Yes, a very good idea,” she insisted, her voice soft but firm. She drew on the cigarette. “Whenever I feel that sadness is stifling me, but I have some important problem to solve, I smoke a joint, and suddenly I find new hope and sometimes even a solution. Try it, go on,” she said, offering the cigarette in her hand. Farid waved it away.
“No, never,” he said curtly. He drank his tea in silence. “Anyway, what problem did you have to solve today?”
“A very important one, it’s been on my mind for days, and I think that’s why I’m feverish. Ever since I was a child I’ve always run a temperature in such situations.”
She said nothing for a while, and Farid poured her more tea. The room smelled of hashish, and for the first time it struck him that the drug smelled rather like incense. He realized that his cousin was serious, and he let her take her time.
“I wasn’t eight yet,” said Laila, “and as you know we were living in Beirut at the time. One day my mother took me by the hand and whispered, ‘Today is a great day for you.’
We crossed several streets and soon reached the old quarter of the city of Beirut, where she went to the hammam. It was the first time in my life I’d been in a hammam — after all, we had two European bathrooms in my parents’ villa. But here was another world — and funnily enough I felt at ease in it from the first moment. Just before we went into the baths my mother had bought a great many salted pumpkin seeds, pistachios, and baklava and other sweetmeats.