It was indeed more comfortable in the mosque than in a church. The floor itself, covered with beautiful carpets, looked far more welcoming than the hard pews in church. A church had always been a place for prayer, while mosques were meeting places. The carpets invited you to linger. Several men were asleep, lying by the walls, others were reading or walking quietly around, deep in thought. A number of believers had gathered around the tomb of John the Baptist. They were quietly murmuring requests and prayers, touching the walls, columns, and grille of the tomb, and transferring the blessing of the touch to their faces. In one corner, a scholar was delivering a lecture to a small audience as he sat on the floor, leaning back against a column. There was a sense of deep peace. No one asked Josef and Farid what they wanted here, or whether they were Muslims. It was taken for granted that anyone could sit in the mosque.
“If all of Islam were like this mosque,” whispered Josef, “I’d convert today, but then I’d find myself in cahoots with oil sheikhs and members of the Muslim Brotherhood. So I’d rather stay a Christian.”
“Which means you find yourself in cahoots with all the dictatorships of Latin America, and those wonderful Christian colonialists, Fascists, and Falangists. No, I don’t really want to be their brother. You’d better join us or you’ll miss the new dawn,” said Farid. Josef choked with laughter.
“Nicely put, little Stalinist, but I don’t see any dawn coming with your bunch. More like dusk.” Suddenly someone dug him in the ribs. An old man was reproving the two of them with a look of displeasure.
As they left, Farid decided he would like an ice in the famous Bakdash ice cream parlour near the mosque. At first Josef didn’t want to join him, but then he let himself be persuaded. As they entered the ice cream parlour they saw Rana, sitting at a table with Dunia, and quite by chance there were two more seats free there.
“Very cleverly contrived,” muttered Josef, unable even to manage a weary grin. He greeted the girls dryly and sat down opposite Dunia, whom he knew only from a visit to her brother Kamal and from Farid’s many stories.
“So what do they call you and me?” he boldly asked. Dunia didn’t understand his question. “I mean, are we go-betweens or extras? Is it a marriage or a movie being made?”
Dunia laughed at the ugly young man’s irony. She didn’t remember anything at all about him.
When Farid took Rana’s hand, Josef called, “Lights, camera, take 376, Romeo and Juliet eating ices.”
Farid was furious, but when Rana smiled at him and whispered, “A Mushtak thundercloud,” he quickly suppressed the volcano inside him, although it went on seething deep down. Rana had often told him that he was getting more and more like his father, who sometimes lost his temper for moments on end. Claire called those moments “Mushtak thunderclouds”. Farid had the same fits of temper. But Rana, unlike his mother, didn’t know how to deal with them, and hated them. She herself, like Claire, had an equable nature.
Josef was unbearable that day, making snide and venomous remarks the whole time, so that Farid wondered why the two young women didn’t just get up and walk out.
Dunia told them that after the family’s former textiles factory had been denationalized again, her brother Kamal had tried to increase his own share in it by selling stock. Dunia didn’t think this was a good idea, because you could never rely on governments, but Kamal had been very sure of himself. He wanted to be an industrialist, of course in the family business. The country grew its own cotton, but instead of selling it as a raw material he was going to have it made into fine textiles and then export it. Dunia smiled at her brother’s dreams.
On the way home through the spice market and down Straight Street, Farid and Josef were silent. Then Josef suddenly said, “I’d never have thought that spoiled idiot Kamal could think on such a scale. Good for him.”
When they reached the Kishle intersection, they saw an ambulance standing at the turning into Abbara Alley. It was too wide to get right into the alley itself. The blue light was flashing all the time. A large and pale-faced crowd surrounded the vehicle.
“Rasuk’s father went crazy,” said Sadik the vegetable dealer, when Josef asked what had happened. And out came the paramedics already, pushing the stretcher to the ambulance. Rasuk’s father lay strapped to it under a blanket, unconscious. His black-clad wife was running after the men, wearing a single slipper — she had lost the other on the way — weeping and striking herself in the face.
“I thought she’d go crazy,” said Sadik, “but it was his father.”
“He’s been so fond of his son ever since he was born,” whispered Josef. Farid had already heard at the club that he’d been going to the cemetery at night, barefoot, taking his son his favourite food: sheep’s cheese with olive oil wrapped in a thin flatbread.
And Rasuk’s father had taken to going up to the flat roof of his house more and more often, waiting there for his son with a quilt and a pullover. He had been sure that Rasuk would come back to him by parachute.
When the ambulance raced away, his wife could no longer stand upright. She fell to her knees. Josef and Farid ran to her, took her under her arms, and helped her home. A pale girl followed them with the lost slipper.
215. One Of Us
Josef had an incredible story to tell. Suleiman’s father Abdallah, that quiet, unobtrusive man, he said, had almost stabbed a Muslim with a pair of scissors. The man was taken to hospital just in time for them to save his life. “It’s not the stabbing itself that surprised me, it’s how the tailor found out he was a Franco supporter,” he added.
It was well known in the quarter not only that Suleiman’s father was under his wife’s thumb, but also that he was a fervent supporter of the Spanish General Franco, whose picture hung in the family’s sitting room next to the Virgin Mary. It was years before the neighbours realised how deep Abdallah’s veneration of Franco went. They thought it was mere opportunism, and the Spanish consul’s chauffeur was making himself out to be more Spanish than the consul himself. But Farid also knew that the man hated Muslims and dreamed of Syria’s return to the pre-Islamic period. A mistake, but he and several thousand Syrians firmly believed it would be a good thing.
That day, so Josef learned a week later, Suleiman’s father had been on the way home when he saw a Muslim outside the tailor’s shop calling another man a “Christian swine” and an “idol-worshipper”. He didn’t know either of them. All the same, he went straight into the tailor’s workshop, picked up a pair of scissors, and stabbed the Muslim twice in the back with them. The wounded man fell to the ground and his Christian rival fled, for fear that he would be accused of the assault. Suleiman’s father put the scissors in a bag, left the man lying on the ground, and went calmly home.
A day later he brought the scissors back to Khuri the tailor, who had told the police that yes, the attack had taken place just outside his shop, but he hadn’t witnessed it himself because he was standing with his back to the door at the time, listening to songs by Um Kulthum on the radio while he pressed a suit. The radio was turned up very loud today too. Suleiman’s father could hardly hear what the young tailor was saying.