At this meeting, Farid and another twenty comrades did their best to follow the boring utterances of an elderly man who spoke in a nasal voice. He called himself Comrade Gaber, and talked about Hegel. It was spring, and Farid felt terribly weary as the man droned on in his monotonous voice about thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. He had hard work keeping his eyes open, particularly as one comrade sitting near him was already snoring. He sat up straight and glanced through a crack in the curtains over the window. The large apartment where the meeting took place was in a modern building in the New Town. There was vibrant life down in the street under the beautiful blue sky. People were going about in short-sleeved shirts, happily enjoying the fresh breeze that blew through Damascus at this time of year, scented with apricot and almond blossom, while the mists of Hegelian concepts grew ever more opaque around him.
Suddenly Farid knew that Laila was right. He couldn’t change anything here, because the Party consisted of old, rotten wood. The Communist Party, she had said, would at the most share an administration but wouldn’t overthrow one, for in any such political upheaval it would go down itself. Somehow, he thought, Hegel just doesn’t suit Damascus.
When the comrade finally reached the eagerly awaited end of his speech, they all enjoyed the coffee break.
Next another and rather livelier comrade from the Central Committee spoke on plans for the leadership to listen more to the grassroots in future, thus improving the work of the Party.
Encouraged by these remarks, a comrade stood up and asked, in a southern accent, whether the leadership was thinking of holding a Party Congress at long last, after more than twenty years, and before the General Secretary died of old age and power passed to his wife or his son. Perhaps Comrade Secretary General had forgotten how a Communist Party works.
This sounded almost like a contribution to the satirical magazine al-Mudhik al-Mubki, “What Makes Us Laugh and Cry”, which had recently begun publishing again. It was popular and it was feared, with the result that dictators regularly banned it.
No one dared to laugh. The face of the envoy from the Central Committee twitched in a peculiar way, and he noted something down.
“Any other questions?” he asked at last, icily. Farid would have liked to know a few things about the unpleasant Comrade Osmani, who was back in the leadership again, but he dared not speak. He felt unwell. Ever since the first question, the atmosphere had been curiously ominous, as if before a thunderstorm. At such moments he felt more fear than during police interrogations.
Another comrade rose, reeled off thanks to the Party leadership, and asked in a subservient tone whether the Party had any rules or guidelines for the protection of those working underground. “Everyone improvises,” the man went on bitterly, “and we none of us know how to guard against informers. I’ve fallen into a secret service trap three times already.”
The Central Committee envoy nodded, impressed. He wrote all that down. “I will put your important idea to the politburo of the Committee. Very good, very good,” he praised the man. The comrade proudly sat down again.
Then a thin student rose to his feet. Farid had been joking with him at the coffee break. His name was Nagib, and he was studying Arabic literature at Damascus University. “And I’d like to ask,” he began, “why the comrades don’t write about love in our magazines, instead of printing long hymns of praise to the agriculture of the Soviet Union? No one reads them, least of all the Russians. Our journals are illegal, so how am I supposed to persuade a student to read them and risk being thrown out of the university if all they print is eulogies of Soviet achievements, and never a word about love? You can discuss love with anyone. And then everyone would read the magazine.”
Laughter rippled round the room.
“Write about what? Write about what?” the envoy was heard to ask.
“Love,” explained one of the older comrades, spluttering with laughter.
“I mean,” continued Nagib, undaunted, “I’m working with over ten students who sympathize with our Party, and all their heads are full of any number of questions about love. It seems to me we’d be much better motivated to throw off the fetters of society if we tackled that subject.”
“The subject of screwing!” cried one man with assumed indignation. The comrades laughed heartily, and Nagib went red in the face.
“If the Party would address that question it would have a much firmer footing among the young,” he said, fighting for his idea one last time, but then his words were drowned out by loud and confused voices. There were cries for everyone to keep an eye on the time and not fritter away the meeting with useless chatter.
The comrade from the Central Committee who wanted to listen to the grassroots didn’t write anything in his notebook this time. “The comrade is still young, we must be patient with him,” he said sarcastically.
Nagib stood up and left the room. Malicious laughter rang out when one of the comrades cried, “He’s off to the brothel to take a course on love.”
What peasants they are, thought Farid, but he dared not protest. As time went by he realized more and more clearly that discussions in the Party didn’t revolve around the best way for the country to go. They talked, asked questions, and provoked comment just to please those present. Anyone who gave his frank opinion was in danger, because his words showed what he thought, whereas those who said nothing were flexible and could adapt to the majority. So most people said nothing, or at least didn’t say what they really thought.
The representative of the leadership turned to the platform. “I would like to request that at the next meeting for training purposes we should make sure the participants are more mature.”
Many people laughed and clapped, and Farid hated his own cowardice. On the way home that night, he decided to overcome his fears, and as a first step he set himself the task of editing the journal Youth. He didn’t guess what a risk he was talking. Later, he would even claim that he had fallen into a trap set by Osmani that night, but that was exaggerating.
When he reached the door of his house he saw Claire sitting by the fountain. She looked careworn, and he knew at once that something had happened. “However late you came home, Josef wanted you go to straight to him. Rasuk has had an accident,” she said, shaking her head. “Poor boy — he’d only done a week of his army service.”
Rasuk had died when a military transport vehicle collided with a bulldozer. Ten soldiers were killed, ten more badly injured.
Josef said that Rasuk’s coffin had been brought home in the afternoon. He had been to see the family just after that. Azar, who was now running a little vegetable store near Bab Tuma, went with him. And Suleiman had offered to run errands for the family, but Rasuk’s parents sent him away. Apparently they had found out that under Satlan, Suleiman had informed not only against Gibran and Farid but against Rasuk’s girlfriend Elizabeth too. The police had expelled the Englishwoman from Syria. “His father is crying like an abandoned child, and he’s been trying to wake his son up as if he were only asleep,” Josef said.
214. Coincidence
It really was coincidence, although Josef wouldn’t believe him either then or ten years later. Farid had fixed to walk from the university with him through the Suk al Hamidye and so to the Ummayad Mosque. Josef wanted to enjoy the atmosphere there. “Unlike a Christian church,” he said, “a mosque has a lot of life and not too much sanctity about it. You feel at ease there.” And he joked that it would do a Young Communist like Farid good to experience the sensuality behind the façade, and see more in life than materialism and the economy. So around midday, after lectures, they set off. They stopped on the way at a snack bar, drank juice, ate a falafel each, and then sat for a while with a boy who was selling cactus figs chilled on a block of ice. They tasted best in the autumn.