It was nearly evening when the men took their first prisoner, a little man with a southern accent who had apparently been scouting around to spy out the village’s defences. The furious guards hit and kicked him, and one of them actually wanted to shoot him out of hand.
“Leave the man alone,” ordered Mushtak. He turned to the trembling spy, and said, “Have no fear, we’ll send you back. Who’s your leader?”
“Hassan Kashat, sir,” replied the man anxiously.
“Are you sure of that, or do you know it only by hearsay?” Mushtak asked, and before the man had even nodded he was going on, “What mark does Hassan Kashat have on his left hand?”
“Mark?” said the man in surprise. ‘”He has no mark on his left hand. That hand’s crippled. I swear by God I’ve seen it. He hides it well by resting it on his dagger, but it’s crippled.”
Mushtak beamed. “You weren’t lying. Bring the man a piece of bread and a dish of fresh yoghurt,” he told his followers, and then turned back to the prisoner. “Well, my lad, you will eat under my protection now, and after that I’ll show you what your friends can expect here. And then you can go back to your leader Hassan Pasha Kashat and tell him: the man who crippled your left hand is waiting for you. Do you understand?”
“The man who crippled your left hand is waiting for you,” repeated the man, to show Mushtak that he had learned the message by heart. His voice sounded fearful and uncertain.
While he greedily ate the yoghurt they had brought him, Mushtak hurried away and gave orders for all the men whom the spy was about to pass to keep their faces muffled up, and as soon as he had gone by they were to go and station themselves elsewhere, so that after a while he wouldn’t be able to estimate the number of fighting men any more. The spy was released after nightfall, and he hurried away in the darkness down to the plain.
“Will Hassan Kashat withdraw when he learns that you’re here?” asked Salman next morning.
“No, he’ll stay,” replied Mushtak, and he hadn’t even finished what he was saying before the besiegers opened fire. The men entrenched in Mala replied, and Hassan Kashat’s troops, although they suffered great losses, moved closer and closer. The first villager fell at about ten in the morning. It was Tuma, one of the three village butchers of Mala. A bullet hit him in the forehead just as he was rising to his feet to fetch a crate of ammunition.
Around midday the first cannonball sailed over the men’s heads and smashed the window of the church of St. Giorgios. A second cannonball hit the back yard of George Mushtak’s house and left a small crater. Two window panes in the grain store were broken. The explosion of the cannonballs and the impact as they struck frightened the beleaguered villagers. Some of the men in the front line began firing at random. Hassan Kashat’s troops answered them with more cannon fire, and moved to within five hundred metres of the old mill at the entrance to the village.
Both sides fought fiercely for ten days, but they couldn’t get anywhere. The bandits could advance no further towards the village, the defensive ring stood firm as rock. And the climb up from the valley, which wasn’t so steep near the village itself, no longer offered the enemy good cover.
But the defenders of Mala could not break through the rampart their enemies had built from rocks and felled trees. The bandit Kashat’s troops had entrenched themselves in their positions. Mushtak’s face grew darker every day. Finally he told Habib Mobate to summon all the leading men of the village.
“Jusuf Shahin too?” asked the village elder.
“Him too,’ replied Mushtak dryly. The village elder turned pale.
Mushtak spoke bitterly to the assembled men. He never for a second looked at his rival; it was enough to have had to greet him with a handshake. That was the condition made by the two priests, Catholic and Orthodox. He sensed Shahin’s reluctance to be reconciled. The man’s hand was cold, as if he had drained the blood out of it.
Mushtak told the assembly that the French were not about to send the village any help, and he expected the besiegers to stay until the people of Mala starved to death.
Shahin waited until everyone else had spoken. Then he said, “No one will starve,” and turned his gaze on the priest of his Orthodox community, as if paying attention to no one else. “I’ve stuffed three of the caves in the rock full of wheat, dried meat, raisins, and nuts from the Lebanon, and two more with maize and lentils, salt and olive oil. That will last us for a while.”
Secretly, Mushtak admired his quiet enemy. Shahin had sent all that food to the caves, and not a soul in the village had noticed. Everyone knew, however, that he was an experienced smuggler, and it was said that he had often muffled the hooves of his mules by wrapping them in cloth so that they could pass border guards in silence.
“Tomorrow,” Shahin went on, “everyone can take what he needs. The nuns of the convent of St. Thecla will supervise the distribution.”
Mushtak quickly pulled himself together again. “And I will make sure this siege doesn’t last much longer,” he told the assembled men before they dispersed. It sounded more like a loser’s defiance.
Jusuf Shahin rose and went away without any leave-taking, but with the dignified bearing of a victor. Followed by his son Salman, who stuck to his side like a shadow throughout the siege, George Mushtak himself set off for home.
Salman kept turning, looking distrustfully to all sides, and surveying the situation. There had been an attack on the sixth day of the siege, allegedly by three men of the enemy troops. The shots had been fired from very close to Mushtak, and though they missed him the men had escaped unrecognized. No one discovered any more about the incident, or knew that their tracks led to the Orthodox quarter. But Salman feared that one of Shahin’s killers would take any second opportunity to shoot his father in the general confusion. Salman always carried a loaded revolver under his shirt now, and after that incident he became harder and less approachable. And Mushtak went along with what his stern son wanted.
The cannonballs were falling in the village less frequently now, and had a less devastating effect on the peasants’ minds.
Three days after the meeting at the village elder’s house, Mushtak and his son rode out to the farthest-flung of the sentry positions at dawn, and observed the enemy camp down in the plain as if waiting for a signal. A tent, a particularly large tent at the far end of the camp near the wild oleander bushes, increasingly attracted his gaze. It was out of reach of the rifle bullets, and very well defended by two trenches, as well as soldiers and a couple of cannon.
On the twenty-third day of the siege, another man fell into the hands of the village guards. They caught him in the olive grove below the mill. He was unarmed and disguised as a peasant from Mala — black trousers, striped shirt, waistcoat, and a black kuffiyeh headcloth. The man claimed to have had a vision a week ago in which he heard the voice of his brother, who had been living in America for the last ten years, and this brother, he said, was calling for him, so he didn’t want to fight any more. He had bought the clothes from one of the besiegers, who had taken them from a Mala peasant.
In tears, the man told his captors how Kashat was torturing men who tried to run away. A troop had been stationed to shoot the deserters, or bring them back to camp and torture them to death in front of the others.
“And what about the man whose clothes you’re wearing?” one of the villagers asked him.
“He was shot… Kashat takes no prisoners. They cost food and water,” the man replied, diffidently.
The men from Mala lost their tempers. One young fellow drew a knife, but Mushtak raised his hand. The prisoner’s words dried up in his mouth with fright. He turned pale.