Mushtak wouldn’t bless the novice when he left either. He turned his head away and looked at the wall. Elias’s back was burning from the lashes of his brother’s whip.
He had never hated his father so much as he did at that moment, when he waited at the window of the old bus until the passengers had hauled aboard all the stuff they were taking to Damascus with them. The village square was full of the travellers’ relations, saying goodbye and repeating their last good wishes again.
Some thirty passengers and as many chickens, two large rams, and a young goat filled the bus. Elias sat on his own, feeling chilly. Not a soul came to see him off. His sister Malake had made her escape. Here and there one of the many women whose favours he had enjoyed during the wedding celebrations waved to him surreptitiously or smiled, but none of them dared exchange a word with him.
Then a madman suddenly appeared in the square, pushing his way through the crowd with difficulty. It took Elias some time to realize that the man was making straight for him, and then he turned away.
“Here, it’s for you,” said the deranged man, smiling and handing him a little bundle. Elias could see fresh grapes and bread. The bundle smelled of pungent sheep’s cheese. He was startled, and left at a loss.
“Thank you,” he said awkwardly, taking the bundle. The young man’s face turned red, and he stayed there under the bus window. At some point in the wedding festivities he had appeared from nowhere. He was dazzlingly beautiful. He spent the night in the village elder’s guesthouse, and hadn’t attracted any particular attention among hundreds of strangers. But soon people realized that he was crazy. He kept having fits that lasted for about ten minutes, when he fell to the ground and seemed to be possessed by the devil. However, he was gentle and calm when he came to himself again, and in general he was peaceful, although his behaviour was strange. He listened to discussions with such interest that you might have thought him a sensible man, but then he would suddenly begin interrupting the disputants and start to sing, or throw melon peel and dirt picked up in the street. Only when he caught sight of George Mushtak did he instantly become almost rigid with fear. Secrets never lasted long in Mala. Within a short time the whole village knew the identity of the young man who went by the name of Shams. But old Mushtak mustn’t know he was here, and so Elias hadn’t heard anything about him either.
Yet again he thanked the unknown man, but he stayed there under the window of the bus, and people looked at him and laughed. When the bus finally moved slowly off on its way out of the village, the madman ran after it. Elias was embarrassed. He had a feeling that the bus driver was going extra slowly because he disliked the Mushtaks, and wanted to spin out what Elias felt was his own humiliation. The people in the village square fell about laughing when the madman tried to stop the bus.
“God protect you, brother!” he cried, weeping aloud, and at last he stood still. Only then did the driver step on the gas.
29. Loneliness
Early that evening, Bab Tuma Street, leading to the Jesuit monastery, smelled of jasmine. The bus journey had taken forever; the driver had to stop again and again because the overheated engine was boiling the water in the radiator.
Who, Elias wondered, was the madman? He felt embarrassed that he of all people had called him “brother”, while Salman wouldn’t give him a brotherly kiss and hadn’t even come to see him off. Why was Salman so cold towards him, so harsh?
He knocked at the monastery gate, and was pleased to see Brother Andreas’s face. Andreas smiled at him. “You’re back early. I thought you were staying two months,” he said in surprise. Elias did not reply. He just said good evening to the monk, went to the dormitory, left his case there and then hurried to evening prayers. The bell was just ringing.
As time went on he could find no peace in the monastery. At first he thought it was because he felt guilty about his father. He wrote letter after letter, saying that he prayed daily for his return to health. He was sorry to have caused him such pain, he said. His father did not reply. Two months later a letter came from Salman. It was disappointingly short, cool, and matter-of-fact: Don’t write so many letters, pay attention to your books. Father is well and happy. Your brother, Salman.
At least this brief missive freed Elias from his fears for his father’s condition. Yet still he was not at peace. There was a great deal to do in the monastery, and he flung himself into his work. But he never again felt the old happiness he had known before he went away. He tried not to let anyone see that his thoughts were elsewhere. The women of Mala had taught him another kind of happiness, a wild desire that plagued him, especially at night, when he lay alone in his room. He prayed to withstand the temptation, but as if he had been praying for more temptation instead his longing for women now attacked him by day, as well as following him into his dreams at night.
The monastic life seemed to him more and more like the quiet onset of senility. There were a hundred men there, and not a single woman worth a glance. Three ancient ladies from the neighbourhood came in to clean, cook and wash the dishes, and then went home again. The windows of the building led nowhere; it was as if no female creature lived anywhere near the monastery. He thought of the seething life somewhere beyond its walls. Damascus wasn’t a city to him any more but a woman, and the monastery was trying to keep him away from her.
When Elias imagined a woman it was almost always Nasibe, the butcher Tuma’s widow, whom he saw in his mind’s eye. Merely thinking of her passionate nature aroused him. She wasn’t a native of Mala; Tuma had seen her at the cattle markets he visited, and she was twenty years his junior. At the time Tuma had quickly come to an agreement with her father, who was glad to have one of his eleven daughters off his hands. The butcher was rich. He had inherited money and he worked hard. All seemed well, until the day when a bullet struck him in the forehead during the siege of Mala. He was just forty at the time.
After his death Nasibe dressed modestly in black and lived a very quiet life. There had been plenty of would-be suitors for a while, but she didn’t want to know about any of them. So after some time the men stayed away, since the grieving widow seemed inconsolable. She was left alone, and women praised her, no longer seeing her as a threat. Nasibe prayed a great deal. She made a living by fattening up kids and lambs which she sold cleverly and at a high price not to the village butchers, but to private customers who had something to celebrate and wanted to serve good meat at a festive meal. She soon had such a high reputation for her wares that she had more than enough work to keep her busy.
Elias had been told to go to the widow Nasibe early in the morning of the eighth day of the wedding feast, to ask if she could let the Mushtaks have another five well fattened lambs and three kids. His father had noticed that the cooks were economizing on meat to make it last through the extended festivities.
So Elias had knocked at the widow’s door and delivered his father’s request, she quietly asked him in, and when he passed her into her pretty little living room he suddenly smelled her ardent desire. It was only later that she told him how, not long before he arrived, she had overheard two women talking quietly about him under her window, and that had suddenly aroused lust in her again.
Elias sat down on the couch. She knelt on the floor between his feet, caressed him, and looked amorously at him. Slowly, she took off her black dress. It was the greatest surprise of his life. Nasibe seemed to grow out of the fabric. Her body, a moment ago nondescript, stiff and flat, rounded out as she cast off her fetters, liberated into a femininity that Elias had never before seen in such perfection. Nasibe told him that she wore tight clothes to hide her curves from men’s eyes. She was almost twenty-five, but her body looked no older than seventeen.