As evidence for this macabre theory the neighbours adduced the fact that, only a week after the major’s death, Colonel Badran was brazenly spending nights with the widow. His bodyguard stood outside the building, searching everyone who went in or out of the place, which had a number of tenants.
However, when the sole witness, that same goldsmith Butros Asmi, died in a strange accident, the building where the murdered major had lived in Marcel Karameh Street, in the middle of the Christian quarter, suddenly became a desert island cut off from the rest of the world by an ocean of fear.
The case of Mahdi Said’s murder was officially closed on 19 March 1970, and the three fat files containing the records of the investigation, the evidence, and the witness statements, as well as the indictment of the high-ranking officers and the court’s verdict on them, found their way into the secret service archives. The little note with the handwritten scrawl lay neglected inside transparent film in the first file.
Commissioner Barudi learned about the murdered major’s Christian past from his contacts. Now he was sure that the name Bulos and the note were the compass he must use to give him his bearings as he followed the trail leading to the murderer. Before handing over his own thin file on the case to the colonel, he had photocopied all the results of his investigations, and cut a strip about twenty centimetres long and a finger’s breadth wide from the note found with the body. He stored all these things carefully away in a secret compartment that he built into his desk one night.
Barudi believed that the murder victim’s childhood would lead him to the murderer. He felt certain of solving the case if he set about it carefully.
And he did set about it carefully. The trail he was following would finally prove to be the right one, but he had no idea where his curiosity would lead him just six months later.
BOOK OF LOVE II
Love is poverty that makes you rich.
DAMASCUS, MALA, SPRING 1953
7. The Fire
Claire woke him. There was alarm in her voice. When Farid sat up in bed he heard screams in the village. He ran out on the balcony, with his mother following him barefoot in her nightdress.
He guessed at once that his father was already among the crowd by the village well, and he knew inside him why. Astonished, he looked at the burning elm tree on the distant hill.
The icy wind made him shiver, and only slowly did he realize that he himself was responsible for the fire. Its distant flames shone like a mighty torch, bathing the village in an infernal light.
Some of the peasants hurried across the village square and past the Mushtak house. One young man stopped opposite the balcony and stood there for a moment staring up at him, then shook his head angrily, spat on the ground, and hurried on. The inhabitants of Mala were well known for their gloomy reticence. Farid knew the spitting was meant for him.
His mother’s cold hand made him jump. All her life Claire was a chilly mortal, just like his girlfriend Rana. He led his mother back to bed and lay down beside her. She fell asleep at once, and soon he heard her rhythmic breathing. Her features were finely drawn: she had smooth black hair, a delicate little nose, almond-shaped eyes under those closed lids, and skin as white as snow. Farid stroked his mother’s face.
He lay awake, looking up at the ceiling.
8. Strangers
The Mushtaks were a powerful clan, but they were still strangers in Mala. George, the founder of the family, had taken refuge in this Christian mountain village forty-five years ago. Farid and his many cousins were only the third generation. You didn’t really belong in the village until the seventh generation. That was the time it was supposed to take before you could speak the village dialect without any accent, and feel the characteristic pride deeply embedded in the hearts of even the poorest of the poor in Mala.
Farid had grown up in Damascus, and since his mother was a Damascene he had always spoken Arabic rather than the harsh dialect of Mala, which he understood without any difficulty but could never speak faultlessly. Nor was he for a moment proud of the village. Why would he be proud? Just because the ancestors of its modern inhabitants were said to have known Jesus in person, having fled from Galilee after his crucifixion? After that, as if obsessed by a secret mission, the peasants of Mala had defended their religion with their lives. You might have thought the fate of world Christianity depended on this one little village’s readiness to fight for it.
Farid felt something of a stranger in the village church. And the gruff, silent villagers were strange to him too; they seemed to be in perpetual mourning in their black peasant garments, they smiled only rarely, but could always find an excuse for drinking and brawling. Even less did he understand the fanatical mutual hatred of the Mushtaks and Shahins, the two most powerful families in the village. And least of all could he see why deep-rooted hostility existed between the Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church in Mala. It was not uncommon for Muslims to mediate between quarrelling Christians.
One incident in particular had shaken Farid badly. A retired teacher and ten or twelve young people had renovated a dilapidated but attractive stable, put in new windows, doors and bookshelves, and wired it for electric light. The stable belonged to the Orthodox convent of St. Thecla, and the abbess had let the man have it free. The teacher, who had no children of his own, was a great booklover. He installed a village library in the renovated stable, donated all of his own seven thousand volumes as its basic stock, and then, over a period of months, went begging more from publishers and booksellers in Damascus. He finally came back with a truckload of books. By the time the library opened in the summer of 1950, he had accumulated twenty thousand volumes.
But the library was closed down again a month later, for the teacher had forgotten two things. He was related by marriage to the Shahin family, and in addition he was Orthodox. The Mushtaks and their Catholic supporters moved quickly. The teacher had been a communist in his youth, they claimed, he used to give the children candy and whisper that it came from Uncle Stalin. It was also said that he would take pretty children on his lap and indecently assault them.
None of this was true except that the teacher really had been a member of the Communist Party for three years. The rest of the claims were all malicious lies, but they spread like wildfire, because they had half the village behind them. After a short talk with Lieutenant Marwan, the new police chief, the abbess dropped her support for the teacher. The Mushtaks, and many other Catholics with them, celebrated the closing of the library with dancing, music, and wine.
The last remnants of any sympathy for the dusty village died in Farid that day.
Embittered, the old teacher withdrew to his little house, to come out of it again for the first and last time six years later — in a coffin. No one but his wife followed it, by her husband’s express wish. He did not want either friends or relations at his funeral.
Farid’s family didn’t visit Mala only in summer, to escape the sultry air of the capital city of Damascus so that they could sleep at night in the mountains; year after year they also came for a whole week at Easter to commemorate the founder of the family. Friends and relations prayed with them for the soul of that first Mushtak, not just in church on Easter Sunday but for all the seven days of Easter, hoping that in God’s bosom he would find the peace he had never known in life. Most important of all, however, the guests, friends and strangers alike, were royally entertained for an entire week. Life in the village seemed to be one long orgy of guzzling. Columns of peasants converged on Mala from the countryside all around. Beggars and tricksters, gypsies and craftsmen, everyone came to join in the week of celebrations.