She gave him a more direct answer than he had ever read in any book about love. Claire spoke softly, but she looked him straight in the eye. She loved him very much, she said, and wanted nothing more fervently than to hold his hand, kiss him, and hold him close. But she didn’t know what she was to do without causing a scandal and putting him, Elias, in mortal danger, because she was engaged to a dangerous boxer who worked as a bodyguard.
He wasn’t so much alarmed by Claire’s frankness as by realizing that he could scent no desire in her. Furthermore, Nasibe warned him against Claire and described her in forthright terms as “that Damascus whore.” She was ready to kill the woman, she said, if Claire tried taking Elias away from her.
But when his father had a private conversation with him one morning, saying he would like him to seduce Samira with his charms and make her submissive, because after that she’d be bound to want him, Mala seemed too hot to hold Elias. His father and the powerful Mobate on one hand, Claire’s injured fiancé on the other, and then there was the infatuated Nasibe, who was claiming to be pregnant. He knew he mustn’t waste another second.
Only flight was left, but to be sure of the girl he wanted to take with him he went to Claire, and made his love and strong feelings for her very clear. He enjoyed the touch of her smooth skin, and although this first sexual experience of hers hurt, she held him close and wouldn’t let him go until she had entered Paradise with him several times.
They eloped next morning. Elias never guessed that his flight had saved his life, for Jusuf Shahin had just heard of the plan for him and Samira to set up a stud farm in competition with himself. So old Shahin had sent two men to lie in wait for Elias by night. They were to leave him alive, but mutilate his face. Then the vain Samira wouldn’t like the look of him any more, and George Mushtak’s son would be nothing but a burden to him.
The two men had waited opposite Tamam’s house, where the Surur family was spending the summer. They knew that Elias visited every evening. But they waited there in vain until after midnight. George Mushtak too had been waiting up for his youngest son until dawn. He thought Elias was with Samira, and smiled as he imagined her surprise and pain when that small, slight man thrust into her. He almost felt something like love for his difficult son. He was going to use him to ruin old Shahin.
If he had had the faintest idea of what had already happened by then, he would have wept bitterly at his worst defeat.
34. Defeat of the Master of the House
George Mushtak shut himself up in his bedroom for days on end. He cursed everyone, and he reviled Elias with particular ferocity. Mushtak knew that Shahin would strike now, and he told Salman to tell his men to be very careful and never leave the house unarmed. Many of them smiled at the fears of the master of the house, but soon after that they witnessed an attempted murder, and realized that George Mushtak had not been exaggerating. Shots were fired at Salman.
Mushtak’s eldest son was the only one allowed to see his father, and they spent many hours together every day. Salman kept urging his father to show himself to his people, because the wind was turning, blowing against the Mushtaks from a very dangerous quarter.
Shortly after the Feast of the Holy Cross on 14 September, Salman entered his father’s room again. That day, he had had a distressing quarrel with three young fellows lounging idly about, who made no move to go back to their work when they saw him coming.
“Father, you must go out to the men,” he said. There was sorrow and determination in his voice. “Elias doesn’t matter so much. It’s a pity that we’ve lost a supporter now that he’s gone, but you have a new son in Basil, which is more than we could have hoped for. The men are waiting for you outside. Of course I’ve had everything you ordered done, but I can tell that they need your word, your hand.”
Salman waited. He did not tell his father that the Shahins had fired on him, or that they were spreading word around the village that Mushtak had suffered a stroke. He passed one hand over the basil plant growing in a pot by the window, and thought how powerful his father was, when his mere absence seduced their enemies into rash confidence. He had recognized the marksman, despite the distance he kept. It was Butros, Jusuf Shahin’s eldest son. And Salman thought he would pay him back for that cowardly attack.
“Then let’s go out,” said George Mushtak, interrupting his son’s dark thoughts. He sensed that Salman urgently needed him.
At the end of September he rode out into the mountains, breathing deeply. He stopped on a hill, and let his eyes wander from his property to the Damascus road.
35. Samira and Shams
Mobate was by no means as unhappy as Mushtak when he heard of Elias’s flight. He had been very anxious about his daughter, who wouldn’t hear of marrying Mushtak’s son. She had actually threatened to die rather than become the wife of a dwarf who couldn’t even speak the village dialect properly, and instead tried to babble French in a pretentious way, as if his mother came from Paris.
When George left his room again Mobate immediately came to visit, assured him of his friendship, and said that marriage was a matter of fate, not planning. Mushtak did not agree, but he was relieved that the village elder bore him no grudge for his son’s flight.
Mobate knew he would have gained power if Samira had become Mushtak’s daughter-in-law, but at the same time he would also have lost it through being so clearly related to Mushtak. Clarity in that respect would make him less acceptable in others. The more open to him all houses were, the stronger he was as village elder. And then there was that eternal bloodshed between the Mushtaks and the Shahins. The marriage would have left him constantly involved in it himself.
As for Samira, he wasn’t worried about her future. And he was right. After a short, stormy infatuation with the handsome lunatic Shams, she had decided in favour of a marriage that would take her into calmer waters. Shams disappeared from the village and was never seen there again. Some said they had seen him begging in Damascus, others claimed to have come across him preaching in a mosque.
Samira met a man from Damascus who loved horses, and took herself and her fortune off to join him. The couple founded a stud for noble Arab horses that was to become one of the most successful in the country. But that was later, and much was to happen in the village before then.
As already mentioned, two weeks after Elias’s flight a marksman shot at Salman for the first time, although he missed. But then, in October and just after the Feast of St. Sergius, the attacker fired another bullet at Salman, and it hit him in the upper arm. It was only a glancing shot, but this time old Mushtak heard about the attack and massively over-retaliated. The Shahins’ stable was set on fire. Six horses perished miserably, and the watchman’s charred body was found with a hole the width of a finger in his right temple. Everyone knew that the Mushtaks were behind it, but the operation had been so efficiently carried out that no trail led to them. For months Jusuf Shahin mourned his horses, which he loved more than his own children. Old Mushtak knew just where his enemies were most vulnerable.
A counter-attack in the early summer of 1937 failed, thanks to Basil’s watchfulness. He set a trap for the three men who climbed into the yard by night after tricking the guard dogs with poisoned meat. The men were caught. After being cruelly tortured at the police station, they finally confessed everything. Jusuf Shahin had to pay a fortune in bribes to avoid going to jail, as the man behind the three of them, and was obliged to sign a humiliating document stating that he would be liable to prosecution for incitement to murder if anything happened to George Mushtak, one of his sons, or even just one of his employees. The verdict would inevitably have been a death sentence.