“It was Hassan Kashat, who else?” replied her father, looking into the distance and shaking his head. “The French, ah, well, the French,” he added.
“You know Hassan Kashat, am I right?” asked Salman. He knew that his father hated the man, but not why.
‘You’re right,’ replied Mushtak, and his eyes narrowed. “I know him very well, and I hope he will make the mistake of coming to Mala. But you children wouldn’t understand that,” he added, dismissing the subject.
Two days later, on the fourteenth of September, the village celebrated the Feast of the Holy Cross. The village elder came to the great bonfire, together with Imam Yunis from the nearby district town of Kulaifa, and Muhammad Abdulkarim, head of the Rifai family, one of the most powerful Muslim clans in the country. Their residence was in the village of Aingose, ten kilometres from Mala. The village elder hoped to show that the religions lived at peace with one another.
Mushtak stayed away from the festivities. Instead, he was oiling the hundred rifles behind closed doors with Salman, Malake, and his faithful manservant Basil. Then he had the guns carefully wrapped in linen cloths and packed in wooden crates, five to a crate. He had given his other ten men twenty piastres and let them have the day off to celebrate as they pleased. He spent all evening cursing the village elder’s yielding character, and not until late at night did he let Salman and Malake join the noisy crowd dancing happily in the village square.
Only his servant Basil stayed with him. Even though he had permission to go, he would not leave his master’s side. Mushtak was fond of his faithful servant, who was sometimes closer to him and understood him better than his own children. Basil was an orphan. He had grown up with the Mushtak family and venerated the patriarch of the clan.
Salman and Malake were glad to be among the other young people at last. Everyone was gathered around the bonfire in the village square now. The two Muslim dignitaries were joining the celebrations too, and enjoying the presence of the cheerful girls who stayed in the square, mingling with the men, until far into the night. Now and then one of them disappeared into the darkness with a young man, and came back after a while giggling. Even most of the children were still up.
George Mushtak was missed, since he usually donated plenty of wine and three lambs for the spit on this occasion every year. But even when the village elder knocked at his door and invited him to join them in the square, he merely replied dryly that he didn’t feel like celebrating anything, and would not open the gate.
Three days later, a Sunday, a cold north wind blew over the village square and the air smelled of snow. Suddenly, during divine service, a shepherd came running down the central aisle of the church of St. Giorgios.
“They’re coming, they’re coming!” he cried, waving his hands in the air. The priest interrupted his prayers, but not before concluding the last verse of the hymn of praise to the Lord with a kyrie eleison.
“Calm yourself, my son. Who are coming?”
“The bandits. The whole plain’s black with them. I set off at dawn for the hill beyond the mill with my sheep. When I saw them, I couldn’t believe my eyes.”
The man was breathing noisily. Apart from that, there was a deathly hush in the crowded church. Someone hushed a crying child. Then nothing could be heard but the congregation whimpering desperately behind their hands.
“How many are there?” asked the village elder.
“Thousands. They’re advancing through the whole valley along a wide front,” replied the man, tracing a horizontal line in the air with his hand.
Mushtak rose from his seat in the front pew, went up to the altar, crossed himself, and turned around. He looked over the village elder’s head.
“I need,” he said, in a calm, firm voice, “five brave men on five good horses to hold the bandits back down there while we get our women and children to safety in the caves in the rock.”
Twenty men rose briskly to their feet and followed him to his house. The village elder was left behind, ignored, and at that moment, although he was only sixty, he felt older and frailer than the ninety-year-old widow Nasrin in the pew at the back.
Even before Mushtak reached his house, the bells were ringing in all the church towers. It was an ancient signal of danger. People streamed out of their houses into the village square. Many of them were afraid, but there was no sense of panic anywhere.
He stood at his gate deciding which men were to have rifles and which were not. Salman wrote down the names of the men standing ready, rifle in hand. Then the armed men stormed out to the hills that had a good view of the village from the south.
Mala was a rich Christian village. High in the mountains, it had been well protected from most of the adventurers who roamed the country during four hundred years of Ottoman rule, looting and burning. Its inhabitants had also been spared the Bedouin who attacked the villages of the plain in successive waves, trying to escape starvation. Mala had thus become a pearl among villages. Even in the 1920s it had electric light, mains water, and four coffee-houses. Many rich emigrants from Mala had gone to America, Canada, and Australia, and sent money home. The monastery of St. Giorgios and the convent of St. Thecla were famous for their miracles. Prosperous Christians from all over Arabia came to ask the saints for children, a cure, or success, and had given generous donations, transforming those religious houses into rich citadels.
The bandits knew that, and they had descended like the locusts that come out of nowhere and devour everything, before disappearing into nowhere again. It had been like that in 1830, 1848, and 1860. The battle of 1860 was famous all over the country, for not only did the little village hold out for four weeks while it was besieged by over three thousand heavily armed bandits, it then put them to flight. It was such a devastating victory that after it the bandits had avoided Mala for sixty-six years, until now.
Soon the first shots fired at the bandits by the horsemen up in the hills were heard in the village. The line of men at Mushtak’s gate was a long one. Even the village elder had to wait his turn. He was given a rifle, not with solemn ceremony, as he had hoped, but not peremptorily either, as he had feared. Mushtak handed him the gun without a word, and was already looking at the next comer.
Mobate envied the man his household servants, who showed him dog-like devotion. Finally, Mushtak himself carefully folded up the list that Salman had handed him, and gave it back to his son. “They are all in your debt. You can always remind them of it later,” he said. “Man is a forgetful animal.”
Then, accompanied by his son and shouldering a Mauser, he walked out to the village square with his head held high. Many of the men kissed his hand emotionally, as if he were a saint, and thanked him for the rifle, but he just stood there listening to the distant sounds.
Suddenly his glance fell on the line of men forming in the Orthodox quarter. The Shahins were distributing rifles to their own supporters, who were soon perched on the rocks like black ravens, keeping watch on every part of the northern and eastern routes to the village, while the Catholics guarded the roads to the south and west.
Late in the afternoon all the children, old people, and most of the women were safely in the great rocky caves that surrounded the village. Only about fifty women stayed with the men, helping to construct the huge mounds of rubble with which they were trying to block the one weak point in the fortifications, the Damascus road.
Mushtak rode to the hills with a Mauser over his shoulder and his field glasses hanging in front of his chest, giving him the look of a military commander.