The bare, felled trees were covered by hoarfrost. The scene froze Salman’s blood in his veins. All his trees and rosebushes lay on the ground as far as the eye could see. Twenty hectares of ravaged orchards, most of the trees grubbed up roots and all, a few old, well-established specimens simply sawn down. The entire irrigation system had been destroyed by bulldozers; pipes and hoses stuck up from the churned soil like skeletons. Several bulldozers, specially equipped trucks, excavators, and tractors must have been used in the operation.
Not a wall, not a water tank had been spared. The watchman’s house had collapsed, and they found the poor man under its ruins. His corpse had two large, gaping holes in the chest. His murderers had torn it apart with dumdum bullets.
Salman’s face turned grey, and he wept for the first time since his father’s death. He just stood there, unable to utter a word. The sympathy of the people around him was no comfort.
In February 1954, two months later, he died of a heart attack, the first villager in Mala ever to suffer one. Heart attacks are almost unknown among the Arabs.
At the time, in the winter of 1953, all the clues pointed to Ismail Rifai, but the case was never cleared up. Ismail was powerful, and Salman’s sons were not strong enough to act yet. Their mother Hanan knew that. She wore black for fifteen years, and kept reminding her children of the perpetrator’s name. Her sons adopted her own quiet approach, and started planning too.
Hanan, who didn’t once smile in all those fifteen years, was a pale woman of iron energy. After the attack she and her children wanted no more to do with farming. She leased the fallow land to several Mala farmers, and divided the rent equally between her husband’s siblings. Hasib had disappeared without trace in America, so she donated his share to the religious houses of Mala in his memory. In return, they let her keep old Mushtak’s house, which her sons later converted into one of the finest buildings in the village, with an artificial stream that wound its way through the extensive grounds and cascaded from a high rock into a swimming pool. Latif, Nassif, Shadi and Fadi were inseparable. They always liked going out together to Mala, where they partied all night long, and then drove back to Damascus in their big deluxe American limousines.
But to conclude the story of Ismaiclass="underline" in the autumn of 1968, Salman’s youngest sons Nasser and Saba, through go-betweens, tricked Ismail Rifai out of his entire fortune. At this time he was also under suspicion of having smuggled weapons and money into the country from Iraq to organize uprisings against the government. Collaboration with neighbouring Iraq was hated in Damascus even more than collaboration with Israel, and always had been.
Ismail denied all accusations, but the evidence was overwhelming. Guns, ammunition, and crates of money were found in his barn. The find had been faultlessly arranged by a secret service man to whom Nassif, Salman’s eldest son, gave a 1967 Opel. Ismail was sentenced to life imprisonment.
That day Salman’s widow Hanan laughed again for the first time and wore coloured clothing. She hailed her sons as heroes, and gave a lavish party for them in the expensive Ali Baba restaurant that had just been opened in Damascus. Elias and Claire were invited too. Farid wasn’t there; he was already in prison at that time.
“It took fifteen years,” said Nasser, raising a glass of arrack to his mother, “but we’ve avenged our father.”
“Fifteen years?” asked Elias in surprise. He was sitting between Claire and Ibtihal.
“Yes, uncle,” replied Saba, the second youngest son, “it takes a long time to ensnare someone like that. He was a suspicious man.”
“A Bedouin,” joked Nasser, “would say: well done, lads, but why in such a hurry?”
BOOK OF THE CLAN III
Love is a wildcat with nine lives
VENICE, DAMASCUS, MALA 1850 — 1935
51. Lucia and Nagib
Claire’s memory was not particularly good, but one event in the summer of 1935 was ever-present in her mind. She was seventeen, and had loved Musa Salibi with every fibre of her heart for the last two years. But then she suddenly met a pale young man with the most beautiful hands in the world in the God-forsaken village of Mala, and he spoke to her in French.
She was a city-dweller born and bred, and as a young girl she thought village life boring. She shared her aversion to all things provincial with her father. He made no secret of the fact that he preferred a newspaper and a morning cup of coffee in Damascus to the fresh mountain air. Unlike Claire, however, he could always get out of visiting Mala by claiming that, sad to say, he couldn’t take the time off work.
Her mother seemed indifferent to her father’s presence or absence. She liked the rugged country life and the primitive villagers who obeyed her slavishly, did everything she asked, and kept calling her “Signora”, because she liked to hear the word so much.
Claire’s brother Marcel, two years her senior, could imagine no better way of spending the summer than in Mala either. For that very reason Claire took a dislike to the village. But one thing was true: you slept better in the mountains than in the sticky heat of Damascus.
Her mother Lucia was half Venetian. Her father, Antonio Sciamico, had come to Damascus in 1850 with a trade delegation, fell in love with the city, and stayed. He was said to be a nobleman. Large parts of the Italian city of Venice, Lucia liked to say, belonged to his family. However, the only certain fact was that he was a flâneur and a playboy.
Antonio Sciamico learned Arabic fast, and renamed himself Anton Shami, which sounded rather like his Italian name, but helped him to blend in more easily. In Arabic, Shami just means Damascene, and is a very common surname. Many Jews, Christians, and Muslims bear the name.
After a while he married Josephine, the daughter of Zacharias Asfar, one of the largest silk manufacturers in Syria. Shami himself became a famous trader in the Suk al Buzuriye, the spice market near the Ummayad Mosque. He made a large fortune from spices, silk, and fine woods. But his greatest source of pride was that in 1871 he had eaten supper with his favourite composer Giuseppe Verdi in Cairo, where the Italian genius was giving the première of his opera Aida for the opening of the Suez Canal. Anton Shami had the photograph showing him sitting at table with a laughing Verdi greatly enlarged and hung it in the drawing room of his magnificent house, which united Italian and Syrian stylistic features to very beautiful effect. To this day the building bears his name, and is the finest in the whole quarter. When the last German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, visited the East in 1898 he stayed there while he was in Damascus. At the time Lucia was already engaged to Nagib Surur, son of a prosperous family of cloth merchants, but Anton Shami had the betrothal ceremony repeated and photographed in the Kaiser’s presence. These pictures hung in Lucia’s bedroom, along with those of her Venetian forebears.
She could tell wonderful stories about her grandfather Doge Paolo Sciamico’s glass eye and the last German Kaiser’s withered hand. And the older she grew the more stories she told. Her fund of stories grew even greater after her husband’s death. She began indulging in flights of fancy about a great collection of glass eyes owned by her family in Venice. The glassmakers had had to produce countless eyes, she claimed, until they made one that suited the Doge. She wrote letters to the Italian authorities in Rome and Venice, demanding the return of this valuable collection. But that was not until just before her death in 1959.