In December 1952, when Colonel Shaklan erroneously imagined himself at the height of his power, he arranged for a military parade to show off the latest tanks that he had just bought in France with Saudi money. He returned the salute of the officers driving past him even more punctiliously than usual, and felt proud of their shiny new weapons.
Suddenly one tank driver lost control of his modern vehicle, and the mighty tank went straight into the rows of applauding spectators lining the streets. Heart-rending screams reached the colonel, shaking him badly, and rose to the sky of Damascus. Swallows flew away in fright and didn’t come back to the city for days. The tank tracks crushed more than fifty men, women, and children before the fearsome machine crashed into a concrete pillar and finally came to a halt. The tank driver climbed out of his turret, saw the catastrophe, and instantly shot himself.
People said it was a divine portent of imminent downfall. And Colonel Shaklan agreed as he sat alone in the presidential palace that evening, eating his dinner and washing it down with chilled whiskey.
48. Dethroned
Rana never felt at ease in her family. Her father was a lawyer, her mother taught French in an exclusive girls’ school. Since they both had careers, they didn’t want more than two children.
Rana was pretty, with a delicate look rather like an Indian girl’s. She learned fast, and was already quite independent at the age of three.
The first bad experience of her young life was her child-minder, a dissembling woman with hairs on her nose. The girl hated her, and never liked being left with her.
Then her brother Jack was born and laid claim to everything, their mother and father and all the available space. He was fair-skinned, almost blond, rather plump, and he had a powerful pair of lungs. He disliked Rana from the first. She felt the same about him. She pinched him whenever she could, and he yelled blue murder when he so much as set eyes on her. That made their parents take the little boy’s side. When Jack came along Rana’s mother, who had gone back to teaching six months after her own birth, handing her daughter over to the horrible child-minder, suddenly wanted to give up work and spend all day at home looking after him. But she still sent Rana to the child-minder, at least until her daughter rebelled. A year after Jack’s birth the delicate little girl developed a strange fever whenever she went to the hairy-nosed woman, but it vanished as soon as she was home again.
Rana had got what she wanted. From then on both children stayed at home. But their mother had time for no one but Jack. Jack did such and such, Jack ate this, Jack said that, it was Jack, Jack, always Jack. Rana had to get by as best she could. As far back as she could remember, her mother had never once asked, “Is there anything you’d like me to explain?” or “Do you need help?” Never.
But when it came to that great hippopotamus Jack, even his first day at school was a major family event. All it lacked was a telegram of congratulations from the President of the state. And from then on Rana’s mother spent time with her son every day, following his progress through school. Woe to anyone who trod on the plump little boy’s toe; his mother, equipped with every weapon her teacher’s training could provide, would sally forth to his school and deal with the teachers there. She was an expert herself.
Jack was not stupid, as his teachers later came to believe. Far from it, he was highly intelligent, but his abilities went the wrong way. At the age of ten he was showing Rana that he had his mother entirely under his thumb. He could succeed in getting his sister slapped when he felt like it, he could have her pocket money docked, make sure she was forbidden to go out or listen to music — all through his mother. He used his mother for his own ends, and she became his slave.
Rana had just begun at high school when she found out for certain that Jack would never be her brother, but always her enemy. She was sitting quietly in her room, playing, when he came in and attacked her for no reason at all. After he had beaten her up brutally, he tore her favourite doll to pieces and ran away. Rana wept, and tried to gather up the rags of her doll. Suddenly her mother appeared and laid into her like a woman deranged. She’d been saying filthy things about the Virgin Mary, said her mother, her brother was sitting in the kitchen crying his eyes out with shame. Rana was baffled. The world was upside down. She had never in her life said a word against the Virgin Mary. Far from it; even as a little girl she had venerated the mother of Jesus.
Her father came home late. He went to see her, sat down on a chair, and looked at her sadly. “Girl, girl, what makes you do these things?” he asked quietly. Rana didn’t reply.
That evening she knew that her brother was dead to her, and now living in the family home was easier. Even Jack was nice to her when he sensed her cold indifference, but she didn’t care about that.
With much moaning and groaning and the help of three private tutors, he managed to pass the exam for his middle school diploma, and then he left. Rana had taken her high school diploma the same year, with distinction, but her mother didn’t even notice. She was busy letting every visitor know how enthusiastically all his teachers spoke of her brilliant son. But she’d decided to take him out of school all the same, she said, because he was such a talented craftsman and his ambition was to be a goldsmith.
He didn’t make it, however. He skipped classes for a year and gave up the training course, and after that he became a male nurse. His mother described him as the surgeon’s right-hand man. At twenty, to his father’s great disappointment, Jack became a professional soldier, and as he had his middle school diploma and was almost two metres tall he became a sergeant in the President’s special unit, which was in fact just the thing for him. But that wasn’t until much later.
Rana’s parents still took no notice of her, but there were advantages to that. It meant that she could make her own decisions, didn’t have to ask permission, and wasn’t accountable to anyone. She swore to herself that she would take charge of her own life.
When she fell in love with Farid in the spring of 1953, the feud between the Shahins and the Mushtaks was at its height. All the same, Rana ventured to hint to her mother that she had met a nice boy whose surname was Mushtak. Her mother threw a fit. “Mushtaks can’t be nice,” she shouted, as if Rana were hard of hearing. “They ruined your uncle and cost your father a million lira, and you call one of the Mushtaks nice?”
Her mother wouldn’t hear another word about the boy. That was sad, but much worse was to come later that afternoon. Jack pushed the door of her room open. “You listen to me, you stupid cow,” he shouted, planting himself squarely in front of her. “If I catch you with anyone even distantly related to the Mushtaks, I’ll kill you. Do your hear me? I’ll kill you! I’m the Samuel in our family, understand?” He shouted so loud that his mother came running and begged him not to over-excite himself.
The word “traitress” escaped from Rana, but no one heard her, because her brother was still ranting in a deafening voice. Later, when she told Farid about it and said she would have to be careful, he suddenly threw a fit and began shouting. What kind of life did anyone have in this filthy country, he cried, you’d only just started loving someone and you were threatened with violence and murder! Only later did Rana discover that he had quarrelled with his father that day, and was still upset. He asked her if she had another boyfriend and was just looking for a way to get rid of him, Farid. That was too much. Rana rose to her feet and ran away. It was a week before Easter.