Easter week was very much the Mushtak family’s affair. Christmas, however, was firmly in the hands of the Shahin clan, which was involved in a blood feud with the Mushtaks. The village was split: half its inhabitants followed the Greek Orthodox rite and with it the rich Shahin family, while the other half belonged to the Roman Catholic Church. In Mala, the Roman Catholic Church was almost entirely financed by the Mushtaks.
Since the two churches celebrated their festivals according to different calendars, Easter often presented an extremely macabre spectacle. No soon had Jesus risen from the tomb and ascended into heaven by the Western, Gregorian calendar of the Catholics than the Orthodox Christians were having him arrested, tried, and crucified on Good Friday by the Eastern, Julian calendar. The Muslims had cause for mirth every year.
At Christmas, however, the windows and the church in the Orthodox quarter were brightly illuminated, and the Shahins celebrated all week until the second of January. Family members even came all the way from America just to be at the party. The Mushtaks’ houses, on the other hand, remained dark at Christmas, and the Catholic church celebrated the day as modestly as if Jesus were only some third-rate saint.
Farid’s mother, a typical city dweller, regarded the whole thing, her husband’s behaviour included, with some amusement as earthy peasant folklore. In all these years, she had never found her way to anywhere near the true soul of Mala. Nor did she want to. Instead, she made the villagers respect her for her generosity, and she also distanced herself from the Mushtaks. She was the only woman in the clan known everywhere by her first name, as “Madame Claire”.
The local dishes of Mala, which always smelled of sheep or goat urine, were not to her taste, nor were the cakes baked there, and certainly not the dried fruits that the village people offered visitors. She amused herself by watching the comings and goings in the streets and the village square from her balcony as if she were in a theatre. Claire loved vaudeville drama.
Together with autumn, Easter was the best season in Mala. There was summer sunshine, but without the disadvantage of summer heat. A fresh breeze blew from the mountains of Lebanon, still snow-covered at this time of year. Nature was already in full bloom, and the picturesque rocks on the outskirts of the village were surrounded by young green shoots.
But Farid felt ashamed of his father, who underwent a metamorphosis every Easter. The man who played the part of distinguished and elegant city gentleman in town, larding his Arabic with French words, changed on arrival in Mala and became a grunting, bawling, quarrelsome peasant who staggered home night after night on the verge of alcohol poisoning. At home he seldom laughed; in the village street he was a clown and a tiresome, sentimental groper of women.
Farid was embarrassed when he was with the villagers because, particularly when drunk, they were free with their comments and gibes, always on the same subject: his father’s affairs with women and the outsize thing that Elias had between his legs. The assembled men of the village often laughed at Elias’s shy son. Only Sadik the village miller, who was hard of hearing, never bothered him with sly digs — but talking to Sadik was hard work. You had to shout the whole time. Sadik was funny when he was telling secrets. He acted like a man whispering, but in fact he broadcast his allegedly confidential news at such loud volume that even the dead in the distant cemetery must have heard it.
“The ones who laugh loudest are the men whose wives your father’s already screwed,” Sadik had shouted in his ear at the barber’s last year. Farid had gone red in the face, and hated the village, where life seemed to consist solely of working in the fields, guzzling, drinking, and crapping everywhere. The villagers were also puffed up with pride because Jesus Christ had, allegedly, saved them from ruin.
“If I were Jesus,” Farid had said to his mother when he was only ten, “I’d appear above the altar on Sunday — even if it was only for a minute — and shout in their hypocritical faces: ‘You can all kiss my arse, you and your horrible Christianity.’”
9. Rapprochement
Farid could always find interesting children to play with in Mala in summer. They came to spend the vacation here with their parents, prosperous city dwellers. In the company of those children, he could feel that the village was a place for adventure after all. They turned the rocky landscape into the film set of a Western, and played cowboys and Indians or cops and robbers all day, quite often riding real horses and donkeys.
But at Easter he thought Mala a dreary place. He was just nine when his mother saw him hanging around the apartment one day, counting the hours until they went back to Damascus. She suggested taking a nice picnic and going for a long walk with some of the village children, saying they could show him the local countryside and the trail of his forebears.
At first he didn’t want to, but then he joined the other children after all, and soon they were out and about in the mountains every day. The village boys hadn’t the faintest notion of his forebears or the history of the place, but Farid, whose physical speed and stamina were considered outstanding back in Damascus, had to admit that hard as he might try, he couldn’t compete out here in the wilderness. In the village square these boys looked slow and ponderous, but out in the open country they suddenly became lithe and fast. They ran like young gazelles, scrambled up smooth, erect tree trunks like lizards, chased hares and rock partridges like hounds. Thirteen-year-old Abdullah could kill any living creature, however swift, with a pebble from his sling. His first catch when Farid went out with them was a rock partridge. Soon after that he brought down a hare. The boys fell on his prey, and within a very short time the partridge and the hare had been plucked, skinned, neatly gutted, and washed. They broiled the meat over a fire near the old elm tree, throwing thyme and other herbs into the flames, and a pleasant aroma rose into the air. Farid had never tasted such deliciously seasoned meat before.
Matta, a notably taciturn and simple soul, was as strong as an ox. He could tackle all the other four boys on his own, throwing them over on their backs and pinning them down on the ground. He also picked up rocks weighing over fifty kilos and held them above his head without visible effort. But the really amazing thing was the ease with which he could climb trees just like a bear. As if his hands and feet had made all the trunks, branches and twigs their own, they fitted every tree. He seemed to glide upward, and then he swung from branch to branch and tree to tree like a monkey.
Matta idolized Farid and was glad to call the pale-skinned city boy his friend. He never guessed that Farid admired him too, as if he were some strange and wonderful creature.
Claire gave her son’s friends lavish presents. Year after year, each of them received an Easter gift: expensive penknives, ingenious little tools, picnic sets for their expeditions, and large quantities of chocolate. Soon they were looking forward eagerly to Farid’s arrival at Easter and in the summer. They felt strangely attracted to the pale city boy, who might not be able to aim a stone accurately enough even to hit a mountain, but was never at a loss for words. His gift of the gab seemed to them positively miraculous. Not only did amusing remarks just bubble out of him, he could harness his tongue and ride it away in a style that left the others breathless. Farid told a story so well that you could see it all before your eyes. That was the miraculous part, for the boys weren’t used to such stories. They were told hardly any stories at home, and those they did get to hear were steeped in morality and soon bored them. Farid’s words, however, were colourful, fast-moving and intriguing.