That evening the Mushtaks celebrated victory with their friends at a meal in the courtyard of the big house, and Mobate, who was sitting beside George, was not exaggerating when, in drinking his health, he said that after this no one, not even Salman or Basil, would take such good care of his safety as his arch-enemy Jusuf Shahin. Everyone laughed.
His old enemy did indeed forbid his sons to make any more attempts on Mushtak’s life. And they respected that prohibition until their father’s death in the summer of 1938.
BOOK OF THE CLAN II
The clan saved the Arabs from the desert, and at the same time enslaved them.
DAMASCUS, MALA 1907 — 1953
36. Jasmin and Mariam
When Jusuf Shahin died in the summer of 1938, his testicles crushed by an accurately placed kick from his mare Sabah, his arch-enemy George Mushtak told the old village barber who brought him the news that while the snake’s tail might be dead, the snake itself was still alive. The barber understood those words as an insult to a dead man. The hostility between the two families didn’t even respect the dignity of death. He silently nodded and moved away.
But George Mushtak had told the truth. He feared Samia, the real ruler of the house of Shahin, far more than his old rival Jusuf, who might be unprincipled and malicious but had never been able to see further than the end of his own nose. Samia, on the other hand, was the daughter of a family of considerable importance. She came from Aleppo, and had seen a good deal of the world before finally marrying the rich horse-breeder from Mala who was twenty years her senior.
For decades her father Butros Khuri had been the biggest textiles manufacturer in Aleppo, supplier to the court of the Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid. He bore the honorary title of Bey, which the Sultan seldom bestowed on Christians. Butros Bey had stipulated that the bridegroom, Jusuf Shahin, must be a strict adherent of the Greek Orthodox Church. He hated Jews, Catholics and the French, and blamed himself all his life for having backed the overthrow of the Sultan, toppled from his throne thirty years before.
Jusuf Shahin was Greek Orthodox but very far from devout, so he was hypocritical in presenting himself to his future father-in-law as a man who would campaign against the Catholics day and night. He got what he wanted: his wife and a great deal of gold in return for his courage.
“The Catholics are even worse than the Muslims. You have to knock their heads in, that’s the only language they understand,” said Butros.
“And so I will,” replied Jusuf unctuously, unaware that in his struggle with his rival Mushtak he was indeed going to become the greatest enemy of the Catholics.
After this conversation with Butros Bey, Jusuf used part of the money to renovate his large property. And he did it exactly as Samia wished, so that she would lack for nothing and could hold her head high in the company of her rich parents and the rest of her family. His was the only house in the village at the time to have a proper bathtub, and coloured marble tiles on the floors of the rooms. A year later Samia moved in.
Loyalty was alien to Jusuf Shahin in both his business dealings and his private life. He was faithful to Samia only because he hated all women. It was said in the village that he allowed her near him only four times in his entire life, on the occasions when he made her pregnant. None the less, she brought eight children into the world. The other four, rumour said, were the result of her love affairs with the young grooms. This, however, was the wildest of gossip. Only her youngest daughter Jasmin was the fruit of a passionate affair, but no one in the village knew anything about that in detail.
Samia went to Aleppo to spend a week with her family and relations there every year. Jusuf never accompanied her, and so she was able to meet the love of her youth secretly in Aleppo. Her cousin Samer was a highly regarded lawyer, although he had made his large fortune by importing exotic woods. Samia and Samer had grown up in the same big house and played together like brother and sister. They had loved each other since childhood, but they couldn’t marry because, as a baby, Samer had been breast-fed by Samia’s mother for several weeks while his own mother recovered from an inflammation of her nipples. According to the custom of the time, that made Samia and Samer siblings at the breast, and marriage between them would have been incest.
Samer himself was now unhappily married. His father had chosen the daughter of the richest merchant family in Aleppo as his wife.
Samia knew exactly when and where she had conceived Jasmin. In the winter of 1919 Samer was able to welcome her to his own house for the first time. His wife had gone away with their three children, so Samia visited him daily, and they spent a week together in Paradise.
On the first day of their reunion they were hungry for each other, and had already made love in the dining room, on the stairs, in the bathroom, and in the passage under the arcades. When they reached the bedroom on the first floor, they were so exhausted that they fell asleep. Samia woke in alarm two hours later, and had to run back to her parents’ house nearby. As a woman, she couldn’t on any account spend the night out.
Next morning she went to Samer as early as she could. Her cousin was already waiting for her. He led her to the bedroom, where she stopped in surprise. He had covered the bed with a thick layer of snow-white jasmine flowers, picked early that morning and now filling the room with their intoxicating fragrance. He undressed Samia and carried her carefully to the bed, where he made love to her at length in the sea of jasmine. They perspired freely during their love play, and their bodies were saturated with the scent of the jasmine blossom.
Weeks later, however hard she scrubbed herself in the bath, Samia still smelled of their fragrance. Even her husband, who always stank of his horses and whose nose was anything but sensitive, wondered why she had given off such a flowery scent ever since her return from Aleppo.
So Samia gave the daughter she had conceived that day the name of Jasmin, and she was her favourite child. The girl looked like her mother, but she moved, spoke, and laughed like her real father, although she never met him, for Samia’s cousin Samer died in an accident in 1923, when the child was only three years old.
When her other daughter Mariam married Samer’s eldest son in the summer of 1938, Samia stayed away from the wedding. She went to bed and claimed to be unwell.
Her husband Jusuf hated wedding festivities, but he was sure that his daughter had won a great prize in Jakub, the son of his father Samer’s rich and highly regarded family. However, he was morose and bad-tempered when he went to the wedding with the bride and her older brothers Butros, Bulos, Faris, Basil, and Musa. All his sons were married now, and they brought not only their wives but also their parents-in-law with them. His daughter Amira and her husband Louis came from Damascus. A bus had to be hired just for the family, and another was reserved for Shahin’s followers, neighbours, and the leading villagers of Mala.
Jasmin was eighteen at the time. She wanted to go to the wedding too, but she had to stay with her allegedly sick mother and help the housekeeper Salime to look after her. She wept for nights, but it did her no good.
