“A ride? On your bike?” asked Farid, whose imagination stretched no further.
“Oh no,” laughed Matta. “I’ve bought myself a Suzuki. Brand new! A superbike.”
Sure enough, outside the door stood one of the motorized three-wheeled scooters that were buzzing about the Old Town like wasps, making a terrible noise and stink, but very useful. They could get down any narrow alley, delivering goods to the most remote back door. Italians and Japanese were competing for this lucrative market, but independently of the manufacturer these little vehicles were all called Suzukis.
The Syrians welded a kind of mini-seat on the Suzukis, next to the rider’s saddle. Farid sat on this, and Matta rode up and down Saitun Alley, grinning proudly.
“My wife sold her jewellery so that I’d never have to push a handcart again,” he said, and there was a happy gleam in his eyes.
226. Beginnings
Through Nadia’s eldest brother, Josef had soon found a job as a teacher in Rauda Street, a high-class part of Damascus. The brother had been a member of the Ba’ath Party since his youth, and was now high up in the Foreign Trade department. He had a good friend in the Ministry of Culture. He also liked Josef and Nadia and wanted to see them properly provided for.
Farid, on the other hand, got a post allotted at random in the pool of hundreds of available candidates that late summer of 1965, people who had no government contacts who didn’t want to bribe anyone. His contract was for two years as a probationary teacher in a school south of Damascus, not forty kilometres away. He could go home in the evenings either in a shared taxi or by bus.
Katana was an ugly garrison town; take away the barracks and you were left with a large, dusty village with dirty streets and rusty snack bars. But the school building was new. Farid began teaching there in October with enthusiasm. He taught the seventh, eighth, and ninth grades. The pupils were strictly brought up, and thought it a heaven-sent miracle that the new teacher didn’t hit them.
It was time to leave his parents’ house, and with Josef’s help, he found a tiny apartment. It was dark, consisting only of one room, a kitchen alcove, and a lavatory, but it wasn’t far from where Rana lived. Claire was sad, but she knew her son must lead his own life now. Within a week he had furnished the new apartment, and he enjoyed a long afternoon there with Rana. They cooked together, made love, and were as happy as two children keeping a secret.
“Let’s run away,” she said quietly, before she said goodbye.
In mid-March, three weeks after a coup by the leftist General Taisan had overthrown his conservative colleague Baidan, Farid unexpectedly suffered a harsh setback. It came after his quarrel in February with the school principal, a sadist and bootlicker who had come into the classroom during physics and hit out, sputtering with fury, at one of the pupils. Apparently the boy, whose name was Ismail, had insulted the Syrian flag at break.
Farid swallowed hard, and after school he brushed up his knowledge of the new legislation on schools. It gave the teacher and no one else authority to discipline his own pupils. An older colleague told him that the principal always tried to intimidate new teachers, laying claim to the grades they taught as his own preserve. “Of course a principal has the right to summon any pupil to his office, but turning up unannounced during lessons to humiliate a child is just malice,” he said.
Less than a week later, the principal appeared again. This time he wanted to punish a boy called Jusuf. During the patriotic slogan that the Ba’ath Party required all schoolchildren to recite in the morning, he was said to have insulted the Arab nation. Instead of calling out, “Nation with an eternal mission!” Jusuf had apparently called, “Nation with a flatulent mission!” The principal flourished his bamboo cane. Jusuf turned pale. Farid knew that the boy had a heart defect, and he knew that the principal knew it too.
“I’m sorry, but you can’t do that in my classroom. First, beating pupils has been forbidden for two years, and second, you’re disturbing lessons over an unproven accusation. Jusuf,” he asked, turning to the boy, “did you say what the principal says you called out?”
Jusuf leaped to his feet. “No, sir. I never insulted our Fatherland. But Yunus from Grade Eight said if I didn’t give him ten marbles as protection money he’d tell the principal I did.”
“That will do, Jusuf, you can sit down,” said Farid, turning to his boss, who was rooted to the spot. “As you see, my pupil is not guilty of anything. It’s the tale-bearer who ought to be asked why such notions of the Fatherland enter his head. And if you don’t mind, I have very little time for teaching even without interruptions, so please let me go on.”
The principal left the room without a word, and never came back again. Jusuf’s statement turned out to be correct, but the principal never said another word about that either. In the middle of March, however, Farid was transferred for disciplinary reasons to a village on the southern border with Israel. Among themselves, the teachers called it Syrian Siberia.
Farid was furious. The reprimands were down in writing, and thus official, but no one had given him a hearing, and it made no difference to the young head of the education department in the Ministry of Culture whether the rest of the teachers and the pupils contested them or not. He, Farid, was accused of having incited and encouraged school students to make fun of the Ba’ath Party and the principal. Probationary teachers had almost no rights at all.
His request to be allowed to stay until the end of the school year met with a curt refusal. He was to report to the middle school in the village of Shaga within a week, or he would be summarily dismissed.
The Grade Seven pupils wept when he said goodbye, and Jusuf, the boy with the heart defect, came up and offered him his hand, with two hardboiled eggs in it. “Something for the journey, from my grandmother,” he said. Farid could no longer hold back his tears.
Shaga was 200 kilometres from Damascus, and almost half the way to the village was through impassable country. Going there and back every day would be impossible. He had to change buses twice and then go in a shared taxi for some distance to get back to Damascus from the village, and the journey took four hours.
Rana was very sad. “I want you to know,” she said, “that even if I have to wait all my life to live free with you for a single day, I won’t regret it.”
With a heavy heart, Farid gave up his rented apartment and packed his things. Josef and Nadia came to see him off in the bus, and Matta insisted on taking him and his case to the bus stop himself. He wept as he said goodbye, and then rattled away fast on his Suzuki.
“It won’t be long before they transfer you back to Damascus for disciplinary reasons instead,” said Josef, watching Matta go. “Hell’s here, not down south where they regard teachers as demigods. Here they think they’re crap. They know a teacher doesn’t even earn as much as their family chauffeur, so how would they respect him? Knowledge doesn’t count for as much as the make of car you drive. And I don’t even ride a bike. Sometimes my pupils see me get out of a crowded bus and shake their heads as they sit in their Mercedes. And you always have some of the sons of the top brass to teach here, so too bad if you provoke one of those uneducated apes. Punish him and you’re attacking the Foreign Minister, or even worse the head of the secret police. The kids are always showing you they know it, too.”
“You know how Josef is!” Nadia intervened. “Never happy. I keep telling him he ought to be giving private tuition to one boy at a time instead of educating these hordes, and he’d earn twice as much, but he won’t listen to me.”