His other sons Latif, Shadi and Fadi were also solely interested in engines. Together with their eldest brother they had made ambitious plans. The future was motorized, they said, and consequently a good garage and workshop in Damascus would be a goldmine, because the Arabs had no car manufacturing plants or factories to make spare parts, so they depended on repairs and ingenious minds to keep the cars they had bought on the road.
Saba and Nasser were still much too young to choose a profession. But Ibtihal, Salman’s only daughter, loved agriculture and always wanted to go out to the fields with the men. Funnily enough, she was the only one who looked like a Mushtak. Who knows, thought Salman, his anxieties allayed, perhaps she carries her grandfather’s soul in her, and will be the first woman to become a successful farmer some day.
But until they saw whether, in a few years’ time, that happened he had to defend the farm alone against his enemies, and most important of all he must get rid of that troublesome Ismail.
What, he asked himself, will Ismail do? Attack the estate? He’d never dare. Side with those damn Shahins against me? A neighbour had told Salman at the barber’s that Faris wanted to get a rich man’s help to build up a farm twice as large as the Mushtak lands, and growing just the same produce as Salman: apples, almonds, roses, and vegetables.
Salman smiled in the dark. A rich man would be a fool to invest his money in these bleak mountains. Soon he fell asleep. He saw his father smiling at him, and handing him a branch of the pomegranate tree. It was covered with red blossom.
50. Ismail
It was an established fact in Mala: buying land from a Mushtak, even just a handful of earth, was completely impossible. The other farmers were selling off their acres because of the drought and the lure of the oil boom. The preferred to hire themselves out as workers in the Gulf states, where they did in fact earn a great deal of money. Many became millionaires overnight in the Gulf, but most of them lost their money again once they were home. Clever con-men persuaded them to invest in expensive buildings in Damascus and then absconded with the cash. Their victims couldn’t return to Mala, because the price of land there had risen steeply in a very short time. Mala had become popular. The village lay high up in the mountains, and its good air and cool summer nights were famous. First the prosperous citizens of Damascus discovered it, then came other Arabs who had plenty of money in their pockets, and soon the price of building plots was as high as in the capital. Farmers who still had their land now grew rich from selling it. And the emigrants who hadn’t been conned out of all they had in Damascus, but came back to Mala in time to lay out their money there in the fifties, were the richest of the villagers ten years later.
Old Mushtak had never wanted his children to divide up his property. Division went against the principle of a strong clan, so after his father’s death Salman took over the farm uncontested. That was in 1947. Hasib was in America, and received nothing, Elias and Malake had been disinherited. Salman was a good businessman and lavished presents on his siblings, sending sackfuls of rosebuds, apples, raisins, dried figs, and almonds even to the disinherited brother and sister. He was earning extremely well, and even had plans for a perfume factory of his own in Mala. Then disaster suddenly struck.
Ismail Rifai was the son of that Muhammad Abdulkarim who had been at the harvest festival in Mala long ago and then, with his brother-in-law and son-in-law, went over to the side of the attacker Hassan Kashat when he surrounded the village. But after that George Mushtak had killed his arch-enemy Kashat. Muhammad Abdulkarim’s brother-in-law and son-in-law managed to escape; he himself had been hit by a ricocheting bullet and died.
Now Ismail, the dead man’s son, wanted to buy the Mushtak farm with all its wide lands, and make the place a vacation paradise with the financial support of a French tourist agency. He didn’t want just any plot of land, only the Mushtak property, not least because of its incomparable views and good supply of ground water. But there was another reason known to no one but Ismail himself and George Mushtak in his grave. Ismail wanted to settle accounts with the village whose bullets had killed his father.
By now he was a powerful man. Ismail had sold the idea of his father the martyr to the first Syrian government after the country gained independence, and the government, which couldn’t legitimately lay claim to any heroic battle for that independence, only to tough fighting for small, indeed tiny concessions, was in bad need of martyrs, as many of them as possible, so as to represent its rise to power as the natural reward for many sacrifices made in the struggle for the Fatherland.
Ismail, son of the alleged great martyr Muhammad Abdulkarim, seized his opportunity and rose to be a state secretary. His father, said the official records and his new tombstone, had fallen fighting French colonialism. In fact, as Ismail knew only too well, his father had been hit in the left temple by that ricochet and fell into a small, muddy pond surrounded by stinging nettles just below the Mala mill, a patch of ground on which no Frenchman had ever set foot.
Ismail’s plan to buy the Mushtak farm was like a bombshell dropped on Mala, especially in the Catholic quarter. The land lay on a high plateau reaching from the old elm tree to the mountains of Lebanon. Was it now to go to a stranger rather than someone from the village, to a Muslim whose father was a traitor?
Salman reassured his anxious friends in the barber’s shop. “A Mushtak never sells, and will bow to no one,” he said in a tone almost of indifference, trying to imitate his father.
“Your father would have cut the messenger’s balls off,” said a toothless old shepherd, adjusting his headcloth. Salman had always thought this shepherd an unpleasant know-all, and ignored him.
He gave a polite but cold reception to the messenger from the state secretary who wanted to encourage tourism. “Tell your master Ismail Rifai that this is a Christian village, and it’s grown neither larger nor smaller over thousands of years. We’re not selling. Not at any price. Syria is a large country, and there are plenty of other places for tourism.”
Two days later the go-between came back and, with dark hints and threats, offered twice the sum, but this time Salman didn’t even look up from the tractor he was repairing. He growled at the envoy, “Didn’t I tell you plainly in good Arabic, or is your boss as slow on the uptake as his father? We’re not selling.” And when the envoy got back into his black car Salman wondered briefly if the shepherd’s suggestion hadn’t been a good idea after all. The leaves on the trees had already turned brown that October day.
A week before Christmas, persons unknown destroyed all the trees on Mushtak land standing out of sight of the village. No one had heard anything, but later a pigeon-breeder said that his birds had been fluttered around restlessly for three nights on end. However, they calmed down again in the early hours of the morning, which they wouldn’t have done before an earthquake, and slept almost all day, only to batter themselves desperately against the walls of their wooden lofts again by night.
The police thought it had all been well organized, and then carried out according to plan during several days of icy December weather. All routes leading to the lands belonging to the Mushtak farm had been blocked by men claiming to be military police. If anyone asked why, they had said there were army manoeuvres on the high plateau.
Not until the third day did Salman and several other farmers in the village who wanted to ride out to their fields become suspicious. They asked at the Mala police station whether there was in fact any manoeuvre going on. The two local policemen, followed by several farmers, drove in Salman’s truck to the plantations some three kilometres away, where a terrible sight met their eyes.