This was an interrogation, and for a moment Farid thought the principal was a genuine informer. The secret service often blackmailed members of the opposition and made compliant informants of them. But at least this man was talking about it openly.
“Well, write that I’m a converted communist. I mean someone who wants socialism, but neither the Russian nor the Chinese kind.”
“What kind, then? An Arab kind?”
“A Farid Mushtak kind,” he said, forcing himself to laugh. “But don’t ever say that I try unloading my views on the children, because I’d consider that educationally wrong. You can say that you’re the only one who knows my political opinions, and that was only in private conversation.”
They went on talking for half an hour, and Farid had a queasy feeling when he left the principal, who had taken it all down in shorthand on a sheet of paper. When he told the other teachers about it, they reassured him. Husni was okay, they said, and a victim of informers himself.
Only two years later he was to discover that his colleagues had been wrong. Husni’s hatred of communists outweighed his personal misfortunes. He had accused his new teacher of subversion and sophisticated manipulation of the children, encouraging them to be materialists who no longer saw anything divine in natural phenomena. His was a Cuban kind of communism, Husni claimed.
Next morning Farid woke with a start. Salvoes of gunfire followed the sound of bombs going off, and again and again the noise of a jet fighter rent the sky. The widow in whose house he was lodging was already in the inner courtyard. She was pale, and pointed south. “They’ve been fighting for an hour. Do you think they’ll come to our village?”
“No idea,” he replied. He quickly dressed and ran out into the road. Screams and the hollow sound of bombs dropping came from the southern part of the village. Black smoke was rising. An ambulance raced past him.
It was a hot June day. The seasonal workers, mainly Bedouin or poor peasants from neighbouring villages, came to meet him. “It’s hell there, hell!” shouted one of the reapers. “They’re dropping incendiary bombs and surrounding the camp down by the spring, but the Palestinians are fighting like the devil.” Then he ran on.
Farid went in the direction from which he heard screaming. A farm had been hit. The farmer, a man in his fifties, was sitting on the ground weeping. The house was in flames. Farid joined the other people handing on a chain of buckets full of water. It took them two hours to put the fire out.
“What am I to do now? Where do I start?” asked the farmer, and he and his wife and four sons looked in horror at the smoking remains of their house. The neighbours tried to console him by pointing out that neither the family nor his barn with the harvest in it had been hit. The house itself was mud brick.
Gradually the southern end of the village quietened down. No one ever found out what the Israeli and Palestinian losses were, and once again grisly rumours were told and passed on everywhere.
When the fire was out, and Farid realized that he felt like a stranger among all these people who knew each other, he went out into the fields. Leaden silence weighed down, and the whole world seemed hollow. Suddenly he heard the song of a cicada. For a while it fiddled away alone, then an answer came from the shady place under the pomegranate tree, and a little later it was a concert performance with many orchestral parts, as if the first cicada had given the signal that the danger was over and life had returned to normal.
Moved by the song of the cicadas, Farid set off for home. Not far from the burned-out house several peasants accosted him and, in ornate Arabic, requested him to do them the honour of drinking tea with them. He accepted the invitation, particularly as he didn’t know what else to do that day. The peasants took him to a large farm where ten of them, young and old, were sitting around a small fire. They all rose and welcomed him warmly. “You’re not a city dweller,” said one toothless old farmer, clapping him on the shoulder.
“Yes, I am, I’m a genuine Damascene,” he replied, smiling awkwardly.
“Oh no, they’re all bastards. Different blood flows in your veins. You’re from the mountains,” said the farmer. Farid preferred to stay loyal to his city of Damascus, and wasn’t going to claim Mala as his native place.
“I really am from Damascus, but we’re not all bastards. And I can hardly run away from here, because I was never a good sportsman,” he joked.
A young farmer told the toothless man to mind his manners. His son was one of Farid’s pupils and spoke warmly of him. When he mentioned the boy’s name, Farid was astonished. He was one of the most troublesome boys, and he often had to speak sternly to him.
The men told him jokes about the teacher from Damascus who had preceded him, but disappeared after three weeks. He was particularly amused when the young farmer told him about a theatrical group from Damascus which toured the front line to encourage the people there. They called themselves the Standing Firm Company. But before any of the actors had delivered so much as a single line on stage they took to their heels and ran for it, involuntarily providing the audience with a perfect comedy. They left half their props behind. There had been fighting between the Israelis and Palestinians south of Shaga that evening.
When Farid went on his way again it was already noon. He was hungry. In the village he saw hundreds of seasonal workers lining the streets. Suffering from the intolerable heat, they were leaning against the walls of buildings and trying to retreat into what little shade there was.
The house where he himself lived was providing shade for three people in the street, two men and a woman. Farid greeted them and asked if they would like a drink of water. All three gratefully said yes. The door of the house was locked, for the widow had gone away, but luckily he had the key on him. He unlocked the door, went in, and filled a large jug with cool water. When he was taking it out again he found the woman waiting in the doorway to spare him the trouble. Farid stopped dead at the sight of her. He had never in his life seen such a beauty.
“Thank you very much,” she said, smiling. As if dazed, he gave her the jug. She poured water from its spout into her mouth in a curving jet, stood there squarely before him, left hand on her hip, and drank and drank.
“Hey, daughter of the devil, leave a drop for us!” joked one of the men. The woman laughed, and spilled some of the water over her shirt, but it was welcome refreshment to her. She handed the jug on and looked with amusement at Farid, who was still standing motionless in the doorway.
“Perhaps Mr. Teacher doesn’t like our manners,” she said flirtatiously. She was about twenty, but with her mischievous smile she seemed as playful and carefree as a girl of ten.
Farid smiled too. The peasants here called any idiot in European clothes “Mr. Teacher”.
Very soon the jug was empty. He filled it again, and was going to take the water out, but when he turned away from the tap the young woman was standing in the middle of the courtyard, with both hands on her hips now, smiling radiantly at him. She was shabbily dressed, in a yellow man’s shirt with a red shawl over a mended skirt, and with her feet in clumping men’s sandals, but she could have worn anything and still looked good.
“I thought I’d save Mr. Teacher the trouble,” she said.
“What’s your name?” he asked almost inaudibly.
“Sharifa bint Abdulrahman bin Salih bin Gawash bin Saqir, of the Gasalah tribe,” she replied.
“And is it okay for people to call you just Sharifa if they’re in a hurry?”
She looked amused. “What is Mr. Teacher’s name?”