Then she undressed her visitor and led him into the bedroom. A large bed filled the little room. Nasibe quickly pulled the curtains, pushed Elias down on the bed, laughing, and lay on top of him. At that moment he doubted whether she had ever lived without men. She made play with her tongue, and he tasted her saliva, which was sweet as honey. Her lips wandered down his body, tickling him like butterflies. From time to time the tickling became too much to bear, and then he would push her up with both arms and kiss those lips passionately.
Her skin was dark and smooth as a child’s. He bent over her; she laughed and yielded to him. He kissed her feet, let his own lips wander over her soft knees and along the insides of her thighs to the source of her perfume. He licked the aroma of her insatiable desire. Nasibe spread her legs and raised them in the air, and then drew Elias to her.
“Slowly,” she begged in ecstasy, as if to hold the moment fast. She laughed flirtatiously. He sucked her right breast. Nasibe groaned in a strange way, her voice like the soft whinny of a mare, and he tenderly bit her lip. “More, more,” she repeated lustfully. He thrust in, licking her earlobe as he did so. “No, bite me, blow your breath into my ear. Do it, do it, please,” she begged.
He lost consciousness, he was flying with her like a feather. She clasped him in her arms to regulate the rhythm of his thrusts, and then they were united, almost bodiless, far from the earth and its force of attraction.
Later he didn’t know how often he had made love to her that day, but after that she clung to him. She was eight years his senior, but in her forthright peasant way she had told him he ought to leave the monastery. “I’d suit you better,” she had said, laughing. But Elias was aware of the grave intent that showed through her laughter lines.
She kept seeking him out during the wedding festivities and wanting to make love. Sometimes they were very careless about it. Finally he had chosen the safest place he knew, the drying chamber at the back of the yard, for their next rendezvous. And as chance would have it, that was the very place where they were discovered by his father.
When Elias thought of Nasibe now that he was back in the monastery, his loneliness grew high as a mountain, and he wept quietly into his pillows.
30. Arson
One cold February day in 1933, Elias returned to Mala with a suitcase in his hand. No one in the Mushtak household seemed interested in his arrival.
He got out of the bus and walked slowly home. The gate was closed. His sister-in-law Hanan, Salman’s wife, opened it and brusquely showed him his room on the first floor near the back entrance. It was the room where his mother had spent her last days, and after that servants had slept there. The room was only sparsely furnished, with a bedstead made of old wooden lathes and a mattress stuffed with dried maize leaves and straw. The mattress stank of urine and sweat, the bedclothes were grey with dirt. Only the pillows and two threadbare towels were at least clean.
“I’ll bring you your meal in this room at noon every day. You know the master of the house doesn’t want to see you, but you can stay here until you’ve found somewhere else.”
It was Hanan’s voice, but the words were his father’s, so he couldn’t blame her for those two incredible sentences. All the same, he felt humiliated. Here was a stranger showing him where to go in his own father’s house, explaining that he must stay in this dismal room and would get only one meal a day. He had to summon up all his strength to keep back the tears.
“What about Salman?” he said, not sure what to ask first: why his brother hadn’t come to greet him, or why he was allowing him, Elias, to be treated like a mangy dog.
“Salman’s very busy,” replied his wife, and left. She fits into the Mushtak household perfectly, he thought, watching Hanan go. She had a strange way of walking, like an old woman. He sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at his brown case.
The burning monastery rose before his mind’s eye again. He could clearly hear the screams. Three Jesuits had perished in the flames, the bravest of the Fathers. They had rescued all the students before they burned to death themselves.
The whole dreadful business had begun as early as the summer of 1932. When the unrest started, Elias was on the point of leaving the monastery to find some kind of job working for the French, so that he could live in Damascus and make love to women. There were demonstrations of some kind every day, and they were all against the French in one way or another. Even if they were just demonstrating against the decline of morals, the march ended in anti-French violence every time.
The French governor of the city responded by letting his most brutal forces loose on the demonstrators. The Senegalese were notorious for their ferocity, and struck without mercy. Demonstrators were killed and injured every day.
Brother Andreas was the first to realize that the riots would lead to the closing of the Jesuit mission in Damascus. Everyone laughed at him. As a great power, so Abbot Rafael Herz, an arrogant and greedy man, told him, France was putting all its weight behind them.
“France?” said Brother Andreas in surprise. “France is much too far away, and the rabble are too close.” But no one understood what he meant.
On the seventh of October, the Feast of St. Sergius, the first wave of the disaster reached the monastery gates. About a hundred men were shouting as they fled from the cudgels and bayonets of the Senegalese soldiers. “Down with France! Down with the Christians who pray to the cross, down with them, the swine!” They threw stones. One stone hit the cross above the monastery gateway, and it fell to the ground.
There hadn’t been a drop of rain throughout the autumn in the south of the country, and when the seed corn dried up in winter thousands of people set off to go north. With images of beautiful green cities before their eyes, they whispered their prayers and hoped to escape starvation.
From then on the rioting was worse and worse. Wherever it raged, it left sheer devastation behind, flattening everything like a desert storm. The French soldiers struck back without mercy. And when the demonstrators retreated, they took their wounded away with them, cursing and swearing revenge.
January was freezing cold, but the sky still grudged the country rain. Soldiers prevented a huge wave of peasants from the south from invading Damascus at the southern city gate of Bab al Sigir. The human torrent stormed on along the city wall, forced its way in through the two gates of Bab Sharki and Bab Tuma, and attacked the Christian quarter. Shops were wrecked, churches and houses set on fire. But only the Jesuit monastery actually went up in flames. Two trucks of soldiers cut off all escape routes and fired into the crowd. Three soldiers and seventy peasants died that day. The Jesuit monastery burned down to its foundations.
As already mentioned, Elias had been feeling for weeks that he must leave the monastery, but he realized that he shrank from explaining his decision to its administration and his father. The monks were too kind to him, regarding him as one of their best novices, while his father, the sphinx of Mala, was already embittered enough. Failure to make it in the monastery would have meant Elias’s death sentence.
He was waiting for a good opportunity to get away, and kept only the essentials, next day’s clean underclothes, in his small locker. Everything else was in his case under the bed. It was evening when Brother Andreas hurried into the church, crying, “The house is burning!”