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“Will you come in for a coffee in an hour’s time?” she asked. And Elias simply said, “Avec plaisir.

In the brief hour before she came back she knew in her heart that she had fallen under this man’s spell. She took off her engagement ring and put it away in a little box.

54. Purgatory and Paradise

It was something that Claire had never in her life expected: from visit to visit, she realized that she was counting the hours until Elias came to see her again. Her heart betrayed her, wrecking her intention of waiting for their meetings with calm composure. When he touched her with his gentle hands, she felt violent excitement in every vein. But his mere presence excited her too. He was witty, he could laugh on the slightest provocation, but he could also be very jealous, although that was just an expression of his feelings for her.

They read a great deal together, and talked of love and grief, fulfilment and abstinence, loyalty and longing. Claire felt as if she had only half existed until the day she met Elias, and now had found her missing other half. It did not escape her mother’s notice.

“That young man is your own kind — forget about your father’s primitive friend and send him back his engagement ring,” Lucia advised her at breakfast two weeks later. Claire’s jaw dropped with surprise, and her mother remarked dryly, “You’ll have to chew, you know, food doesn’t go down of its own accord. Elias is from a distinguished family,” she continued. “The Mushtaks are real men, rich, generous, made of granite, not like that feeble chauffeur who’ll let a dwarf knock him about in the ring.” Lucia shook her head. “But Nagib always did keep such dreadful company.”

For the first time in years, Claire felt a deep need to hold her mother close. She stood up, hugged her and kissed her. Lucia stroked her head. “You must be very generous in what you offer Elias. The Mushtaks are magnanimous in all they do, and I feel sure this latest sprig of theirs doesn’t like people to be faint-hearted either.”

She had known and respected George Mushtak for years, and the old man respected the Signora too, although he avoided any close friendship with her. Rumours of her attitude to men kept him away. She insisted that her lovers must wash thoroughly and shave their pubic hair, and was said to treat them like horses, riding and even whipping them.

Once, when Elias didn’t visit for several days, Claire felt quite sick with longing. She summoned Butros the vegetable dealer’s errand boy, gave him fifty piastres, and told him to look for Elias and ask him to come and see her at once.

“He goes up to the mountains at dawn and doesn’t come back until after dark,” the observant boy immediately told her.

“What’s he doing in the mountains?”

“I don’t know, lady. My master says there was such a quarrel between father and son that everyone in the street could hear them.”

“Well, I want you to wait for him first thing tomorrow and ask him to come and see me before sunrise. And don’t say a word about it to anyone else. Swear!”

“I swear, lady. I hate tell-tales,” said the lad, who wasn’t even twelve yet, gratefully pocketing the money.

She couldn’t sleep all night, and in those hours of darkness she realized that the purgatory they talked about in church consisted of waiting and longing.

When two roosters crowed by turns in the distance, she got up and went to the window. The night sky was growing pale in the east. Claire looked over at the village square and saw him hurrying along the street, a small and inconspicuous figure.

Her heart beat fast. She groped about for her dress in the dark, couldn’t find it, and cursed her own untidiness. Suddenly she felt his hands. She was not alarmed, just surprised by the speed and silence with which he had made his way to her.

“I love you,” he said, and he was weeping. He held her close, and she felt his head. It was like the head of a child seeking protection.

“I love you too, dear heart,” she whispered, her voice breaking with emotion. Then she kissed his forehead and pressed him to her breast. After a while he calmed down and began telling her his story.

He told her everything, and Claire felt a great need to care for this boy who had stumbled from one misfortune to another. He told her frankly about his desire for women, and his bad luck when his father had caught him with Nasibe. He described his wretched situation when the Muslim peasants, running wild in the hunger riots of 1933, set fire to the Jesuit monastery in Damascus. He had come back to Mala like a whipped dog. But his father wouldn’t speak to him, and derided him at every opportunity. As if not the mob but he, Elias, had attacked the Jesuits in Damascus, his father had accused him of failure. And whenever he asked to be sent to study with the Jesuits in Beirut, he had met with a refusal.

He told her about his bad luck working in the French provisions store. Early this summer, however, his father had suddenly turned friendly to him, had even forgiven him for all his faults in front of the assembled family and forbidden his brother Salman to hit him. He wanted him, Elias, to start breeding horses; it was a gold-mine, said old Mushtak. You could get fine Arab horses at a good price from the Bedouin, and then build up a large business.

He had been willing enough, he said, because he loved horses, but now he had found out that his father’s sudden change of heart was the result of a secret deal with the village elder Habib Mobate. He, Elias, was to marry Mobate’s daughter.

“A miserable bunch of tricksters, that family, but they know how to cheat peasants. And I’m supposed to waste my life among them,” groaned Elias, telling her that Habib Mobate had made his money by secretly registering his name with the French as owner of all the land in the neighbourhood that had been common property under the Ottoman Empire. It consisted of fields, mountains, and valleys of incalculable value. The farmers never noticed, for Mobate let them go on using the land for grazing, but when anyone tried cultivating a plot of land, the village elder got the gendarmes to drive him off it, so it was two decades before the village discovered that entire hills and huge expanses of grazing belonged to the Mobate clan.

That morning in July 1935, Elias was badly frightened. He had to make up his mind: if he married Samira, he would be doing his father a great favour, as old Mushtak had told him in friendly tones. He didn’t have to love Samira, added Mushtak. He just had to get her pregnant, thus making the Mushtak clan more powerful. With his great virility, he could make love to as many women as his heart desired. Elias knew he would be the richest of George Mushtak’s sons, for Samira would inherit as much money as the cash and property of all the Mushtaks put together were worth.

Time was short. Two days ago, the servant Basil had given him away. He had seen him coming out of Claire’s house by night, Elias told her. Mushtak had ranted and raged and struck him in the face. He had shouted that city girls were all whores of the French, and he’d have Elias shot if he went to see her again.

“So I’ve been roaming the mountains for days. I know my father. He might not kill me, but he’ll certainly disinherit and disown me if I decide for you and not Samira,” he said quietly.

Claire held him close. They were lying naked in her bed now, with Elias’s hands moving as light as butterfly wings over the landscape of her body. While he told her the whole story she sensed that he had long ago chosen her, and she felt a wild longing for him.

It was already light in the room, but the curtains dimmed the daylight. He thrust into her, expecting a scream of horror, but she welcomed him, twining her arms and legs around his back.