“Leave the girl alone, you bastards!” The hosepipe whistled through the air and came slapping down on the heads and shoulders of her repulsive assailants. They let Claire go and stumbled away. The smaller man turned just before he reached the exit and shouted back, “Whore!”
Her rescuer stood there looking almost shy, breathing heavily. The man’s name was Barkush; he was a police captain and an enthusiastic if unlucky boxer. He kept his distance from her so that she could recover her self-control.
“Thank you,” said Claire, and she began to cry.
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m … I’m waiting for my fiancé. He’s unconscious.”
“Who? Musa? You’re Musa’s fiancée? He came round some time back, he’s drowning his sorrows in chilled arrack with his friends. You can go home, don’t worry.”
She wanted to ask him to find Musa for her, but suddenly her tongue wouldn’t obey her. A rift the size of the rocky ravine in Mala opened up inside her, splitting her heart. She had to make an effort to preserve her composure in front of the man, and dragged herself out.
At the time her mother was living in a villa in Arnus Avenue, an exclusive area. It was about two kilometres away, but she decided to take a cab. Several horse-drawn vehicles were standing ready near the Hidjaz train station. She picked the best and didn’t haggle over its price. When the cabby wondered aloud what a woman was doing out and about on her own by night, however, she snapped at him to mind his own business and take her to Arnus Avenue, near the French gendarmerie.
As soon as the old cab driver heard that address he cheered up, for only the rich and powerful lived there. Fares to that quarter always gave generous tips.
“Just as you say, miss, I won’t meddle, but I’m a father myself, I’d be worried about such a beautiful young lady. I have three children, you see, my daughter Hayat, she’s about your age, and if you’ll permit me I’d say she’s as pretty as you, not that I mean to give any offence.”
Cabbies are always talkative, but this one could compete with my mother’s new radio set, thought Claire. His name was Salim, he said, and in the normal way he drove between Beirut and Damascus, but there wasn’t much money in it these days, for hardly anyone travelled that road now, so he’d switched to the city, which wasn’t so easy, because the regular town cabbies didn’t like to see the bread taken out of their mouths. They attacked cabbies from the country and robbed them of their day’s takings. But he had no choice, he said, he had those two horses ahead of them to feed, not to mention a wife and three children. That made him braver than a lion, he told her, and the town cabbies sensed it, riffraff that they were, so they left him, Salim, alone if they had any sense.
He talked and talked, and suddenly she didn’t mind any more. The cab was driving through the mild summer night. A cool westerly breeze was blowing into the back of the vehicle, and the horses’ hooves beat out a soothing rhythm on the cobblestones of the streets.
Claire heaved a sigh of relief when she saw the lighted windows of her home, and paid the cabby generously. Even before she reached the door she could hear the Italian songs that her mother listened to on the radio night after night.
Two weeks later she was sitting beside her mother in the bus to Mala, feeling utterly miserable.
She loved Musa, but something had broken for ever that night at the boxing club. He had come to see her, he’d been very nice to her, and he tried to explain that he’d been ashamed to look her in the face that night. But for the first time she felt a void in her heart not when he left, but while he was sitting there with her.
The village felt bleaker than ever to Claire that summer. Only the French novels and books of poetry that she had brought with her proved to be life-rafts. For days on end she followed Julien Sorel’s fate in Le Rouge et le Noir, she sought comfort in Verlaine’s love poems. She also took refuge in André Gide’s Les Faux Monnayeurs, George Bernanos’s Sous le Soleil de Satan, Guy de Maupassant’s Bel Ami, Colette’s Chéri and La Vagabonde.
Her mother left her alone, was out and about all the time, saw visitors, or stayed close to her radio. For the first time, in her loneliness, Claire felt some kind of kinship with Lucia. And for the first time she briefly sensed a certain closeness when they ate or went for short walks together.
One sunny day in early July, she met Elias. She always laughed about it later, for their meeting place was anything but romantic. It was in the vegetable dealer Tanius’s store on the village square. Claire liked Tanius, who was always kindly disposed to her. Whenever she went to the shop he had a joke ready, bringing it out in his broken standard Arabic. As a rule Tanius, like all the villagers, spoke the local dialect.
That day she had just finished reading Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir, and oddly enough was more moved by Mathilde’s fate than by the tragic, dramatic death of her lover Julien Sorel.
In the store, she put a few tiny cucumbers on the scales handed to her over the counter by Tanius. One little cucumber fell to the floor, and suddenly a slender hand was giving it back to her. Claire hadn’t noticed the young man before, and now he was looking at her with the eyes of a child who had all the sorrows of the world within him.
“Merci bien, monsieur.”
“Avec plaisir, mademoiselle,” said the man. He wasn’t much taller than Claire herself. He had left the shop again by the time she was through with her mother’s order. Tanius smiled when she turned around, expecting to find the stranger still standing behind her. “That’s Elias, a fine young man. Amazing that a prickly thistle like George Mushtak could bring such a flower into the world.”
When she left the store, with a small errand boy carrying the heavy basket of vegetables for her, she saw Elias walking down the street by himself. He had just reached her house, and she wished he would stop so that she could catch up with him.
And sure enough, he did turn to look at her. Her heart fluttered with joy as if she had just won a prize. Claire was never to forget that moment and the sense of delight that she had never known before. She was rejoicing in a magical power that, at that moment, she had at her command.
“You called to me?” he asked in fluent French. She felt she had to tell him the truth.
“Yes, monsieur, I wanted to ask what an educated man like you is doing in this dusty village?” She sent Butros the errand boy on ahead with the basket of vegetables, telling him to leave it at the door, and gave the boy ten piastres. Butros beamed all over his face, for that was as much as he earned in a week working for the vegetable dealer.
Claire and Elias talked to each other for a long time outside the Sururs’ vacation house. Elias knew many of the books she loved, and he could recite Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal by heart. When she told him she went to the Besançon school, he smiled. “Besançon is a small town, but it gave mankind a great gift: Victor Hugo.”
Claire felt hypnotized. She would have liked to put out her hand and touch Elias, because she could hardly believe all this was real. Here in the middle of a village at the end of the world, a young man had said lovelier things to her in the short time since they met than anyone else in her whole seventeen years of life. She felt a need to sit down and listen to this fascinating man, tell him all the things she kept locked in her heart. She had to make up her mind quickly.