Elias was weeping with emotion now, probably imagining his father’s defeat.
He slowly rose and went back to the sofa, where he sat down and drank his arrack in silence.
“There, it’s all right now. You can go to sleep again,” Claire whispered to her son, and Farid, barefoot, tiptoed his way back to bed.
But she herself lay awake for a long time.
BOOK OF LOVE IV
At the moment of love there’s no place for a strange woman
DAMASCUS, JULY 1940
63. Disturbances
The copper-coloured turtledoves were beginning to sing their melancholy songs again, and the people of Damascus rose from their siesta. While the heat is unbearable the birds keep silent. Claire sprinkled water on the marble floor of the little inner courtyard, which was burning hot, and opened all the drawing room windows. Heavy heat weighed down on the city.
Farid was sleeping peacefully. His mother drew the curtain that protected his little cot from flies. The baby smiled in his sleep.
The midwife’s words and clear laughter were still ringing in her ears. “What a masterpiece! But no wonder, after so much practice. Well, my dear, it was worth it. You wait and see, Nadshla is never wrong. He has the most beautiful eyes I ever saw. He’ll soon be winning the hearts of all the ladies.” Claire knew that Nadshla was an excellent midwife and also an accomplished liar. Babies change, and Farid was only five weeks old.
She smiled, for she was suddenly wondering why Nadshla would specify the conquest of women’s hearts in the child’s future. Had it been a reference to her husband’s many adventures? Some of the men in the Mushtak clan were obsessed by women: George Mushtak, his son Salman — and indeed, hadn’t the rift between her husband and her father-in-law been over a woman too — herself?
Thinking such thoughts, she had come over to the pot of basil in the window. She loved its refreshing fragrance, gently stroked the leaves, and then smelled the palms of her hands. After that she turned, drew the curtain over the baby’s cot aside again, and looked at her son. “You will not be a Mushtak, and you’ll never conquer anyone. You will be a Surur who loves women.” There was bitter determination in her voice.
Her sister-in-law Malake, her cousin, and a few women friends were coming at three. Claire heard shots fired, but far away, possibly in the New Town. The disturbances had been going on for weeks. Famine drove the poor to Damascus, where they looted and held demonstrations. The French soldiers shot at random into the crowd, and over a hundred people had been killed in the streets during the last three weeks. Elias had had iron roller shutters fitted to the confectioner’s shop.
Once again several shots rang out in the silence. Claire whispered, “Holy Virgin, I commit Farid to your hands. You know how I’ve suffered to bring a healthy child into the world. Holy Virgin, hear me. These are difficult times.”
The international situation was extremely uncertain. The French were still occupying Syria, but the Germans had invaded France in June. There were rumours that more and more German agents were being infiltrated into Damascus to prepare for the expulsion of the French. “More than a hundred Syrian nationalists, including that bastard Fausi Qawuqji, are already in Berlin with Hitler and will march with him. If he comes,” said Elias, “I shall pick up a gun. Better die with honour than live like a dog under Qawuqji.”
“Is he so bad?” asked Claire.
“He served here as an officer with both the French and the British. Such unscrupulous lickspittles are the worst. And he attacked Mala.”
“Holy Virgin, let’s hope the Germans don’t come,” she whispered.
Her gaze wandered from the drawing room window above the inner courtyard to the rather smaller room opposite. With the big dining room, it formed the north wing of the house. When she looked through the open window, her eye fell on the large brown leather suitcase that had stood there, packed and ready for the last year, in case fighting spread to the whole of Damascus. It contained a few clothes for Elias and her, and a hundred pounds sterling in gold. “The sovereigns would last us a few months,” her husband had always said.
“Now we’ll need another suitcase for Farid,” Claire whispered to herself.
The French occupying power had kept the country more or less peaceful for a long time after the great Syrian uprising of 1925. Elias admired the French high commissioner, whose firm hand had imposed order since the mid-1930s. The smallest misdemeanour was instantly punished with death, and the Arabs knuckled under. Now, however, the cards were being reshuffled.
General Louis Weygand, who had ruled Syria with a rod of iron until May, had been recalled to Paris to lead the French army against Hitler’s forces. In Damascus the French had boasted that the Maginot Line was impregnable, and Hitler would perish miserably if he attacked it, but two weeks later the Germans were in the French capital.
The opinion of the colonial troops was split. Many wanted to collaborate with the Germans, and proclaimed their allegiance to Marshal Pétain’s government, set up in Vichy by agreement with the Nazis. Others allied themselves with the Free French national committee led from exile in London by a young officer called Charles de Gaulle, to organize resistance to the Germans. There were violent confrontations between the two parties everywhere. The leadership of the French troops in Damascus came down on the side of the Germans, and declared war on Great Britain and the French exiles. There was chaos in the city, and trained German agents contributed to it.
It was said that large British forces were gathering in Palestine, on the southern border of Syria, to occupy the country again and free it of Nazi adherents. The Syrian administration governing under the French occupation didn’t last two weeks. It fell, was formed again, fell once more. The chaos of war and the bad harvest brought the first famine since 1918.
The embittered masses carrying their dead to the cemeteries cried out in pain, and saw the French and all other Christians as godless folk whom it was the first duty of Muslims to kill. Many Damascene Christians fortified their houses and kept large supplies of buckets full of water ready, for fire was the rabble’s favourite weapon.
64. Sheikh Napoleon
Every time she met her neighbours Claire could feel that they backed Hitler because they hated the French. Madeleine herself thought the French were barbarians, and told horror stories of humiliations inflicted by the soldiers. When Hitler’s troops marched into Paris the Syrians hailed it as a victory. They were glad to see the hated French General Weygand, who had shed so much Syrian blood, overthrown by the Germans.
There were two foreign radio stations transmitting Arab news. One was located on Cyprus, and had close links with the British. It reported even the most appalling incidents factually, calmly, and in monotonous Arabic, as if it were reporting the yield of the wheat harvest in Argentina. Elias liked it because it gave detailed information. The other station broadcast from Berlin, and Claire listened to it when Elias wasn’t around. The announcer was called Yunus al Bahri. Madeleine had told her about him. People tuned in only in secret in the Christian quarter, for fear of French informers, but in the Muslim quarter Claire saw a large group of men, over forty of them, sitting around a radio set and listening to the tinny voice of Yunus as he breathed out fire and brimstone against the British. The worst he called the French was bastards; the principal targets of his tirades of hatred were always and exclusively the British. They were a race of liars, he cried, hoarse with excitement. He was a master of passionate oratory, he recited poems and suras from the Koran, he reported news and gave vent to insults more freely than Claire ever heard anyone let fly before or indeed later. Yunus did not shrink from crying, after the music of an Austrian march rang out, “You English, here’s some good news for you, Hitler’s going to fuck your mothers. That’s right, fuck your mothers,” he repeated, in case any of his hearers thought they couldn’t believe their ears.