For brief moments I really was crazy now and then. The mask stuck to my face, and I said confused things even when I was on my own. And at such times a cold hand clutched my heart. Gibran, I told myself, you’re not just acting crazy, you are crazy. The Indonesians tormented me for six months, and only then did they believe I was deranged and threw me out. I had to leave the country on the next ship. Its captain was an old friend of mine. He was horrified at the sight of me, but once we’d put to sea I showered and shaved, and we ended up laughing a lot and drinking together.”
It had not been a difficult decision for him to opt for mental disturbance again in Damascus, for otherwise they would certainly have beaten him to death. He was maltreated by secret service men in jail for two weeks, and then they were convinced that he really wasn’t pretending. However, in the psychiatric hospital he discovered that the secret service had its eyes and ears there too, so he had to go on pretending to be crazy, and only when the coup brought Satlan’s regime down was Gibran cured overnight, along with twenty other inmates.
But Karime would have nothing more to do with him. Gibran went to see her. He wanted to tell her how he had longed for her, and ask why she never visited him, but she wouldn’t even open her door. That was two weeks after his discharge from hospital, and Gibran came to the club looking grey and stooped, as if he had aged ten years. Yet he remembered Karime to the last day of his life, and he was always returning to the house of memory, which never sent him away.
212. Matta’s Wedding
Farid would never have expected Matta to have such a big wedding. His aunt’s house was crammed to the roof with guests. Claire and Elias had generously provided all the drinks. Josef came with his whole family. Even Matta’s parents were invited, although they had no say in the arrangements; that was his aunt’s business alone. This was the first time Farid had seen Matta’s whole family: the nine brightly dressed peasant boys who were his brothers, and his father, whose name was Tamer and who seemed far too old. And then there was his mother Nasibe, whose beauty did not escape Farid. Nor did her bad temper. She seemed withdrawn all evening.
“As if she’d come to a funeral,” he said quietly to his mother.
“Nasibe is a bad loser, but that’s a long story. Celebrate your friend’s wedding and take no notice of her,” Claire whispered back.
The bride’s family was a noisy, colourful clan from the mountains. They sang and danced, to the disapproval of Matta’s devout parents, but they had to put up with it or their son would have turned them out.
Matta and Faride were very lucky. The first week of December was almost like summer, with temperatures up to 25 °C by day. Even the nights were mild and summery. Gibran enlivened the evening in his own way, standing by the balustrade on the second floor and turning to the inner courtyard to tell amusing stories. The guests were delighted, and Taufik and his helpers served the drinks.
Matta’s aunt was very happy. She had never had so many guests in her house before. They filled the rooms of the first floor and second floor, they were thronging the corridors too, they even went up to the flat roof to celebrate.
Faride’s relations entertained the wedding guests better than any theatrical company. They spent all evening leaping about with great verve. As soon as a moment’s silence came, a couple of women would begin trilling or dancing, and then others would join them and sing along too. When the men hopped and stamped the ground shook. Elias and Claire were enjoying themselves too, singing and dancing together for the first time since the days when they were so deeply in love.
“Matta’s found himself just the right family,” said Josef, and Farid looked at the bridal couple with satisfaction. Memories rose in him, taking him far back into the past. He had always liked Matta from the first day when he met him in the village square in Mala. Farid hadn’t even been ten at the time, and Matta was a couple of years older.
He would have been spared so much if he’d been allowed to live with his cousin Aida. As a shepherd, Matta would happily have roamed the steppes, mountains, and forests; it was the life he had been born for.
But even before his time at the monastery he had sometimes acted strangely. When the boys were sitting together he would often freeze as if he were a statue, only to explode suddenly like a firework display. He had always talked to himself, too, and when Farid asked what the matter was he would answer in an incoherent way, or laugh until the tears came for no reason at all.
Some of the Fathers in the monastery had thought he was possessed by evil spirits. Father Istfan, who censored the students’ letters, had in all seriousness tried to exorcize them, laying hands on Matta and adjuring the spirits to leave the boy. Matta had laughed at the priest, which only confirmed Istfan in his assumption that the devil in person was laughing at him from inside the novice. But with astonishing courage, the boy had told him to his face that it was he, Father Istfan, who had the Devil in his own heart, for Matta, like everyone else, could smell the odor of decaying bodies and sulphur emanating from his mouth. That went home. Father Istfan struck poor Matta in the face and sent him packing.
And then Matta had run away, and when he was taken to the doctor later he no longer knew who he was. He had told confused tales, saying they put something in his tea in the monastery, and that was why he couldn’t remember anything.
But today this same Matta was celebrating his wedding to the woman who, as Claire said, gave him all that he lacked.
213. Hegel in Damascus
Two municipal measures changed the face of the city in 1962. The last tram rails were torn up, and the river Barada was covered over.
General Amilan went back to his barracks, as he had promised, handing power over to a civilian government which was a coalition of conservative parties. There was an amnesty for all prisoners but Sarrag, formerly chief of the secret police. He managed to escape and join his old boss Satlan in Egypt, where he was welcomed as a hero, but that wasn’t until early May.
At the beginning of March, Farid was asked by the Central Committee of his Party whether he would take over as head of the new editorial team for the underground magazine Youth, and expand its scope. The offer was delivered by the comrade in charge of coordination for the city of Damascus. Farid was already running the youth and culture sections of the organization in Damascus, another comrade called Salih looked after finance and the archives, and a third, a gloomy and silent comrade called Taher, was responsible for running the network of cells. The idea was to work more effectively in the underground through these links. The head of the coordination office, a son-in-law of the General Secretary of the Party, congratulated Farid on the offer, which was an honour, but he asked for time to think whether he was up to the job. He always felt curiously shy about expressing his opinion openly in front of Party comrades whom he didn’t know, so he did not tell this man that his memories of editorial meetings were not particularly happy. He went home and thought and thought, but still he couldn’t make up his mind. Only the Party’s political training course in early April tipped the scales, and he accepted the editorship.