Rimon climbed into the ring with a grim look, raised his hand reluctantly in a brief salutation, and went to his corner. He seemed to consist entirely of bulges. His neck, his arms, his legs — there were no straight lines about the man. He looked darkly at his opponent as his trainer urgently whispered last-minute advice to him.
None of the speeches, greetings, and expressions of gratitude preceding the fight penetrated Claire’s mind. Only the bell aroused her attention again.
From the first, Musa didn’t stand a chance.
Rimon made for him like an enraged bumble-bee. The referee kept trying to separate the boxers, but during each clinch Rimon punched Musa mercilessly. Musa did his best to keep his opponent at arm’s length, and when he succeeded he too excelled with his elegance and the stylish series of hooks he threw to the other man’s head. At those moments the crowd rejoiced in relief. But Rimon took the punishment and then went straight as an arrow past his opponent’s fists to get him in a clinch again, neutralizing the advantage of Musa’s long arms. When Rimon kept so close to him, Musa was helpless. His adversary’s movements had none of that dancing beauty that he himself saw as essential to the sport of boxing. Rimon was rough and square-set, and the ring judge had to warn him three times in the first round for head-butting his opponent.
Musa sat in his corner in the short break between the first two rounds, looking dazed. The trainer was urging him to keep his opponent at a distance, while his second cooled his face with water. But as soon as the bell went Rimon got going like a clockwork tin toy. He shoved, he punched, he pushed and bellowed at his adversary, moving forward like a road roller all the time. Musa stopped dancing. He sought safety in distance, trying to gain a few seconds to pull himself together and remember his technique, but soon a hammer blow from that gorilla Rimon destroyed any kind of technique at all. Rimon battered his head with uppercuts, while digging his elbows into Musa’s stomach.
These first rounds lasted forever, and at the end of the third round Rimon landed a punch on Musa Salibi’s left temple. It wasn’t a hook but a jab, and it was like a chunk of granite flinging Musa away from his challenger. He staggered sideways and fell to the floor. The referee held back Rimon, who in defiance of all the rules was trying to rush his opponent like a beast of prey. Musa struggled up again, and the referee allowed the fight to go on, but the two boxers hadn’t had time to make another move before the bell rang.
“You just wait,” an elderly gentleman sitting near Claire told his wife, “Musa’s worn that appalling amateur out. Now he’ll really show what he can do.”
Musa dragged himself to his corner, and Claire called out to him to stop fighting. He heard, and looked at her with empty eyes. A man caught her arm roughly. “Hureime, little lady, this isn’t for women and children. You just sit down or go out in the fresh air.” And he pushed her unceremoniously down in her seat. The man hadn’t even looked at her. His gaze was fixed on his idol, sitting up there in the right-hand corner of the ring with his eyes swollen.
The fourth round lasted seven seconds. That was the time it took Rimon to get from his corner to the middle of the ring and slip below his adversary’s outstretched fists. Then, in the fraction of a second, he planted the full force of his left hook against Musa’s chin. A second later his right glove landed a thunderous blow on his tottering opponent’s left temple. Musa not only lost his balance but sailed through the air to his right, dropped like a stone, slid half a metre across the ring, unconscious, and came to rest on his back at an awkward angle. Rimon knew there was nothing the handsome man on the floor could do now. Arms outspread, he leaped up in the air, uttering a yell that shattered two light bulbs and did permanent damage to the referee’s right eardrum. The audience changed sides, and was now acclaiming Musa’s savage conqueror.
Claire didn’t know what to do. A number of men jumped up to go and help the ex-champion lying on the floor. She tried climbing into the ring too, to be with Musa, but her uncongenial neighbour held her back. “No women go up there except whores,” he said. She could smell his nauseating sweat, and was only just able to keep the contents of her stomach down. Then she shook her arm free. “Don’t you touch me,” she said, trying to keep calm, “not unless you want trouble.” The man showed his bad teeth in a grin, and moved away.
She stood there by herself; no one offered to help her, not even the committee chairman. The men carried Musa past her, one of them calling for a doctor. But when Claire tried following them to the changing rooms, the little caretaker who had always been so deferential to her father planted himself four-square in front of the entrance. “No women in here,” he said, staring into the distance. She couldn’t take it in; she had always called the man “Uncle”, she’d known him since her childhood. How often had he patted her head, how often had her father pressed five lira into his hand, telling him to go and have a good meal out with his wife? At that time a labourer didn’t earn as much as five lira for two days’ work. And now the caretaker didn’t even call her by her name, just spoke of “women”.
“But Uncle Sharif, don’t you recognise me? I’m Musa’s fiancée,” she said softly and sadly, for she knew deep down that he had recognized her perfectly well.
“No women allowed in. You’ll have to wait here for Musa. We have decent morals here, not like you Christians.”
She was confused. Of course she knew the boxing club was in the conservative Muslim quarter, but that was still in the heart of her native Damascus. Where had Musa brought her? Obviously her mother had not been wrong to say, as Claire left, that she didn’t like letting her go to that rough part of town, but she supposed her daughter would be under Musa’s personal protection the whole time. And now he was lying helpless on the floor himself.
The place emptied, the stream of spectators crowded out through the distant main entrance. Claire found herself at the other side of the hall, near the little back exit next to the changing rooms, showers, and toilets. The hollow silence alarmed her.
The minutes crept by, heavy as lead. She seemed to wait for hours. Even later, she couldn’t believe it had really been less than thirty minutes. She heard laughter and other sounds beyond the heavy door. They reached her as if they came from a deep cavern with its entrance blocked.
Two men were coming out of the auditorium, approaching her. A small sturdy man and a tall strong one, with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth.
“Hey, how about us having a nice time together?” asked the tall man, waggling his eyebrows up and down in what he took for a seductive manner.
“Go to hell,” said Claire with difficulty. Her voice was failing. Her heart froze to a sharp splinter of ice.
“No need to act like that, we’ll pay,” replied the small man, thrusting his right forefinger back and fourth through the circle he made with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand.
“Please go away,” she begged, but that just encouraged the men. The tall man reached for her breasts. She kicked his shin and swung her bag at the smaller man, who was grasping her buttocks. She screamed, because hitting them wasn’t going to get her anywhere. The pair of them quickly seized her arms, one each, and pushed her towards the toilets.
But then something she was never to forget happened, and she often told the story. A man came hurrying out of the door to the changing rooms.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he shouted, and without waiting for an answer he picked up a short length of hosepipe lying under the washbasins and began lashing the two men with it.