Neighbours with buckets of water helped to put out the fire, or at least keep it from spreading to other buildings made of wood and mud. It was a miracle that only the Jesuit monastery went up in flames.
The monastery administration found the students rescued from the fire temporary accommodation in a nearby building belonging to the French Lazarist mission, but a few days later it was decided that the monastery was to be dissolved, the priests and teachers would go to Beirut, and the students must go home. Only Brother Andreas would stay to make the necessary arrangements for selling the site. The ruins could not be restored now.
Andreas waved goodbye with tears in his eyes.
31. Nasibe
Elias was bored in Mala. He had spent nine years studying natural sciences, philosophy, literature, and music, and suddenly he found himself back in a remote mountain village that hadn’t moved on at all in those nine years, and knew nothing of the outside world. Mala was intellectually stagnant. Its people seemed to be living on another star, where there were no table manners or mathematics, no civilized social intercourse or Molière. They knew as little of Aristotle as of the exotic plants of South America that Elias had read about in his lessons.
He couldn’t find a single book in the village apart from the Bible, which he knew by heart already. The folk music played at weddings and religious festivals could best be described as a shrill kind of snoring. The musicians were unacquainted with notation and the theory of harmony, and scorned purity of tone in playing. Elias couldn’t listen without feeling it was driving him crazy, and he thought of his music teacher Brother John, who played the piano and flute so divinely, yet was never satisfied with his performance. He would have had a heart attack if he’d met puffed-up Sarkis who stood with his legs planted wide apart, played out of tune, and was proud of it.
His only comfort at first was Nasibe. But although he could sleep with her — and she was magnificent in that respect — how was he to carry on a conversation about things she didn’t understand? She too was only a backwoods peasant woman. At least he could laugh with her, although even that hadn’t been so easy recently. For in the middle of their laughter she would suddenly turn serious, and suggest selling everything she had to go to Damascus with him and marry him there. He didn’t say no; he did not want to lose her. Her infatuation with him was all he had to cling to in the village.
But one day he heard of a job with the French administration in Damascus. He asked his brother to get him his father’s permission to go back to the capital. He still had to communicate through Salman, for even after six months George Mushtak wouldn’t say a word to Elias.
Salman told him curtly, “You can go. Here are five lira for the first few weeks, until you have a salary.” And he threw the coins in his lap.
Elias took up his post in Damascus early in July. The work wasn’t hard: he was running a provisions store for the French army. In three weeks he learned how to draw up lists and tables of everything that came into the store and went out of it, and a little later, like all his colleagues there, he found out how to earn something on the side as well as his official salary. It was simple: you set aside five kilos of rice and let the grocer have them, then you counted the five kilos in again with supplies for the soldiers’ canteen, and you shared the money thus earned fair and square with the cook. Everyone did it. And if an officer came along — an officer with the rank of at least first lieutenant — and said he needed three litres of red wine you didn’t stop to argue, you smiled, gave him what he wanted, and added the missing bottles to the accounts for the next party. Who was going to check whether three hundred or three hundred and fifteen bottles of red wine had been drunk at a reception for the French High Commissioner or the governor of Damascus?
“No one,” explained his predecessor, giving Elias a list of the maximum quantities to be unofficially allowed to every rank of officer. “There’s order even in chaos,” the old man went on. “Only generals can have as much as they want.”
Elias was living in the Bab Tuma district, lodging with a tight-fisted old widow whom he hated as much as his boss. Neither of them could be described as a genuine human being. If his boss First Lieutenant Mauriac had really been human Elias’s life would have taken quite a different turn. But Mauriac was a sadist who enjoyed tormenting his inferiors, a slimy hypocrite who spent all day cleaning his uniform, tidying his desk, or polishing his boots. He had been transferred to administration as a punishment for cowardice on the field of battle, and even that was only because his uncle had been a famous hero in the First World War, or he would have been dishonourably discharged from the army. Every single one of his thirty-five underlings knew it. He was a corrupt, unprincipled man who delighted in humiliating his new employee every morning. “Well, little Syrian?” he would say. “So how are you going to defend France, eh? The rebels will just fart in your face. You’d better be glad we’re taking the trouble to put this dunghill of yours in order.”
There was nothing to be done about it. Answering back just spurred Mauriac on to think up even worse humiliations. “You have to keep saying, ‘Yes, sir, very true, sir,’” Elias’s predecessor had told him quietly, “while you secretly wish him an elephant’s prick up his arse.” Elias laughed, and thought the old administrator had lost his backbone with the advancing years, but he soon found out what happened to those who stood up to Mauriac. The first lieutenant had them beaten and put to cleaning the latrines.
So the former Jesuit student repeated, “Yes, sir, very true, sir,” at least three times a day. It was a bitter daily pill that Mauriac made him swallow.
Otherwise, however, there was nothing wrong with the administrative work. Elias and another Syrian called Adnan, under Mauriac’s direct supervision, managed a huge store containing not just foodstuffs but luxury goods from all over the world, things that the average Syrian never set eyes on: expensive sweetmeats, textiles, wines, coffee, butter, cognac, champagne, spirits, rock candy, pistachios and peanuts.
Over thirty workmen did what the two managers told them, and before three months were up Elias thought up a good idea for getting around the problem of certain logistical bottlenecks that were delaying the supply of goods. Mauriac was pleased, because the military governor gave him a decoration for it, and “his” procedure was to be adopted in all the other stores too. But Adnan ascribed the fact that the newcomer and not he had won praise, although he had been in the job so much longer, to the general injustice of Christians. He was a Sunni and had never been praised for anything in his ten years working here.
Elias later suspected that Adnan gave him away out of resentment, and took pleasure in his cruel punishment. But something of crucial importance was to happen first.
Nasibe visited him. It was a surprise. He came back from work about five in the afternoon, and there she was standing under the chestnut tree near his lodgings, carrying a small basket. Elias was bewildered. On a short visit to Mala, he had probably told her where he was living in Damascus, but he had never expected her to come and see him.
But now here she was, delighted when he smiled at her and said she was in luck, because that dragon his landlady was away for a week, staying with her daughter in the distant seaport of Latakia. She wouldn’t let her lodgers have visitors, either men or women. “Their shoes wear out the stairs,” he said, quoting the old lady as he took Nasibe into the house.
However, after a few hours his pleasure in seeing her died down, and on that day he knew he didn’t want to live with Nasibe. She, on the other hand, was as happy as ever with his pretended ardour, and took the things she had brought from Mala out of her basket: dried fruits, wheat grits, cheese. He took her hand, led her to the larder and asked her to cook something with these magnificent provisions.