Father François Saleri was a brave man. He had stayed on in Damascus after the fire in the monastery, and was now teaching mathematics in the schools of the elite Christian classes. He loved Elias like a brother, and was horrified when he heard the story.
He left at once in the luxurious cab provided by his friend, and he did in fact come back to Damascus next day with an apology from Elias’s brother and his father’s word, sworn with his hand on the Bible.
“I couldn’t get any expression of remorse out of old Mushtak, but your brother shed tears. He was ashamed, and that induced your father to give his word. I knew about his fear of God, and I didn’t demand a signature, just for him to swear with his hand on the Bible. A powerful man like George Mushtak cares for no signatures, but he does care for the word of God. You can rely on what your friend François says and live in peace,” said the priest, taking his leave.
It was midnight when Elias, pale-faced, came back to Claire. She was still in bed. He dropped on the sofa beside her and began to sob pitifully.
“I’ll get the better of them all,” he said at last. Claire didn’t understand, but later she always said that Elias had lost his laughter and all his cheerful bearing that night.
“Why,” she wondered aloud, “why do our enemies shape us more than our friends?”
But Elias had fallen asleep, and she couldn’t answer her own question.
58. The Lightness of Love
Whenever Claire thought about love she saw in her mind’s eye not just that moment in Mala when she first met Elias, but also the radiant face of her former teacher Barbara.
Her love for Elias had been a blazing fire in which her heart flared up, an affection that nothing could hold back. On the night when Elias determined to get the better of his father, all that seemed to be over. But love is a wild cat with nine lives. So that night her desire for Elias turned to endless concern for his health and constant fear for his life. This new kind of love bound Claire to him more closely than ever. She knew he was his father’s victim, but ultimately his battle against his father was a battle for their love.
It was all so different with her teacher Barbara and Fadlo, Barbara’s husband. They showed her the essence of a wonderfully light-hearted kind of love, yet one that seemed perfectly natural, a Paradise on earth. Claire had liked her teacher from the day she met her. That was in the eighth grade, when the girls were wondering about the replacement for Sister Helena, who had had an unlucky fall and must now spend months in plaster. No one missed her. Even the headmistress of the Besançon School was secretly grateful to the divine or human hand that had allowed the accident to happen. Although Sister Helena was sixty-eight she wouldn’t retire. She was a good mathematician, but unable to communicate what she knew. All the girls she taught had bad marks in her subject. That changed when Barbara came.
Josephine the jeweller’s daughter had been joking the day before that she couldn’t imagine a maths mistress without a moustache. The others felt sure their new teacher would walk into the classroom in a man’s suit, with thick glasses and a book of logarithms in her hand. Madeleine, Claire’s best friend, laughed. “And her name is Math al Gebra, and she has three children, Cone, Cube, and Pyramid. Pyramid’s the daughter.” The girls giggled.
Then she arrived. Barbara was willowy as a schoolgirl herself, but that was just outward show, for she could fight like a lioness for her convictions. She came into the classroom with a spring in her step, and when the girls stood to attention and called out “Good morning” in chorus, the way they used to with Sister Helena, she laughed. “I don’t want you standing up when I come into the room. You’ll just frighten me,” she said, smiling. “It’s more important for your brains to wake up, and I don’t want you making any statements you can’t prove.”
After that she told them about herself, and why she loved mathematics, and within half an hour the young woman with short black hair, wearing a pale pullover and a skirt the colour of autumn leaves, had won the girls’ hearts. Barbara told them something odd and interesting about the history of mathematics in every lesson: not just what the inconspicuous, apparently worthless zero had brought to it, and what that zero had changed, but also — and this remained imprinted on Claire’s mind for ever — stories of how mathematics could put even kings to shame. As in the tale of the inventor of the game of chess, whose king asked what he wanted as a reward, offering the man his own weight in gold. “No, your Majesty,” he said. “I will be happy with one grain of wheat in the first square on the chessboard, two on the second, four on the third, sixteen on the fourth square, and so on.”
The king and his court laughed at the simple-minded inventor of the game, who asked for nothing but a few grains of wheat. The court mathematician was the first to stop laughing, for after only a few squares the number of grains ran to twenty decimal points, and he knew that the whole kingdom could never provide as much wheat as the inventor had asked.
Barbara mingled the curious and the practical in a magical way that drew the girls into the world of mathematics. The school administration was amazed by their progress after six months with her, and even more by the atmosphere in the class. Barbara was the only teacher who sometimes asked girls home to her house for a cup of tea.
Claire would never forget the first time she went there. Her heart was beating fast as she entered the little house in Bab Tuma, which had a narrow façade, but was on several floors.
On this first visit, Claire was fascinated by Barbara and her husband. They had been married for twenty years, yet they were always kissing as they passed each other in a happy, heartfelt way, as if they had only just fallen in love. She had never before seen such affection between a man and a woman. Lucia and Nagib never kissed, they never held hands, and if for once Nagib caressed his wife Lucia would immediately and suspiciously ask, “I suppose you want me to do something. Why not say it straight out?” Sometimes Claire felt very angry with her mother for her coldness, but Lucia was quite often right, and Nagib came out with the true reason for his show of affection. The tender moments between Barbara and Fadlo, on the other hand, had no ulterior motives.
Claire tried to visit her favourite teacher as often as she could, but Lucia would allow it only once a month. Barbara herself liked to see the attentive, friendly girl. As she and her husband had never had children, she longed for a young creature to whom she could give something special, and she had found just the right girl in her delicately built pupil with the beautiful face. With her, Claire found the warmth she missed at home. Her father Nagib was born to be a bachelor. He did keep trying to be kind and affectionate to her, but most of the time he lived in his own world. Only later, in old age, did he develop a strong and truly loving relationship with his daughter.
Claire’s friendship with Barbara had been an ardent one, up to the day before the end of the school year of 1935, the beginning of the vacation when Claire met Elias and fell hopelessly in love with him. After a quarrel between the new headmistress of the school and the maths teacher, Barbara lost her job. She moved north and found another post in an American private school. When she said goodbye to the weeping girls, she told them a great many things that, hearing her through the mists of their grief, they failed to understand and had soon forgotten entirely.