“Won’t you give me a little kiss? Uncle Hamid likes good boys,” he said, his wet lips smiling to show yellow teeth.
“No,” muttered Farid, pulling his hand away with a jerk. Then he went back to his father.
“Good evening, Papa,” he said. Elias turned his vacant gaze on him, took a fabric napkin in his left hand, grabbed his son’s collar with his right hand and pulled him close.
“My son is no American sissy.” His aniseed-laden breath was horrible. It made Farid retch. But his father pulled him even closer and began rubbing his head with the large napkin as if towelling it dry. The men laughed.
“Young people have to be brought up properly,” announced one of them.
“Yes, the saying goes: God’s blessing be on the man who beat me, not the man who indulged me.”
There followed a babbling of confused voices, and Elias’s grip tightened. Farid’s scalp was burning. His father’s hand was holding the collar of his shirt so tightly that he could hardly breathe. He felt he was choking. With a violent movement he freed himself, and fell over backward. Elias was alarmed when he heard his son hit the floor.
“You fool!” he stammered in alarm. “You could have broken something!”
Farid got to his feet and rushed out of the dining room to the sound of laughter from the men. He saw Claire coming out of the kitchen, ran past her to his room and locked himself in.
She followed and knocked softly on the door, but he didn’t want to see her. In this humiliating defeat, he would feel ashamed to meet her sympathetic eyes. And he was angry with her for sending him in to his father. Farid felt lonely and desperate. The world had turned its back on him.
After a while, however, he straightened up again and saw his hair in the mirror, looking as windblown as a wheatfield after a stormy night. Suddenly he couldn’t help laughing. That one crucial second stayed in his memory for ever. He decided to get the better of his father. “I’ll keep my hair like this even if you die of rage,” he whispered.
Claire was surprised to see him storm out of his room, and when she heard the door of the house bang a little later she knew that her husband had handled the situation badly yet again.
Farid didn’t have to look far. The photographic “Studio of the Stars” was just before the Kishle road junction. Basil the photographer was not a little surprised when the boy paid him the price he asked in advance, and without haggling either, bringing out a heap of piastres which, as the photographer rightly suspected, was all his savings. The boy carefully counted the money, put the remaining piastres back in his pocket, looked proudly at the photographer, and said, “And for that, I want the best photo you ever took. I’m going to keep it all my life.”
The photographer had no idea what the boy wanted the picture for, but somehow he felt tremendously keen to take a good photograph, so much so that it made him slightly dizzy. He suggested that the boy might like to comb his hair, because the camera would record everything. He himself took a sip of water and then watched closely, rather taken aback to see Farid carefully arranged his oiled hair in front of the mirror, putting every lock in order.
“You look like that famous young actor; his name escapes me for the moment,” he flattered the boy.
Three days later the photo was ready. Farid was more than satisfied, and from then on he took it with him wherever he went.
89. The Inventor
As they were sitting on the ground outside Josef’s house, listening with bated breath to the story Suleiman was telling, a woman neighbour called out to Azar: would he come and mend her broken iron? Azar wasn’t thirteen yet, but he was as efficient as if he were a mechanic, an electrician and a joiner all in one.
Suleiman had just seen the latest Errol Flynn movie, and was telling his friends about The Adventures of Don Juan. Since children weren’t allowed in to see the film, Suleiman had bribed the doorman with Spanish cigarettes.
Farid was sure that the movie was only half as exciting as his friend’s account of it, for once Suleiman got into his stride he used only the basic outline of any film and made up his own story on that foundation. The story changed track even more when his audience interrupted him.
Azar, who never tired of Suleiman’s stories, called back to the neighbour, “It’ll cost you twenty piastres.”
“My God, you’re getting pricier all the time. Look, come around here, I’m sure we can reach some agreement,” the woman said.
“No, twenty piastres or I’m not doing it,” replied Azar. “Last time,” he muttered quietly, “she fobbed me off with an orange and a slobbery kiss on my cheek. Talk about a nightmare! I can’t stand the way she stinks of fish and oranges.”
“All right,” called the woman, “but I’m only paying fifteen piastres, that’s all I have.”
Azar got to his feet and turned to Suleiman. “Don’t go on with the story until I’m back.” Don Juan was just holding his beloved in his arms.
“Tell her to pay you the twenty and I’ll screw her,” smirked Josef.
“Heavens above, she’d suck you in and spit out your bones, and then what do I tell your Mama?” sniped Azar.
Quarter of an hour later he was back, cursing the woman, who had paid him with just ten piastres and two oranges.
90. Laila’s New House
Farid had really met his Uncle Adel properly only on two or three visits to Beirut, and when he and his parents went to stay with Aunt Malake he had eyes and ears only for Laila. He knew he had once seen Uncle Adel sitting at the end of the table at lunch, but even then Laila’s father had failed to make any great impression. It was Elias and Malake who dominated the table. Back in Damascus, Farid could hardly even remember the man’s face.
Laila always looked after her little cousin so lovingly that Claire could have those days in Beirut to herself, left at leisure to go on long shopping expeditions with her sister-in-law. In the 1940s Beirut was a window on the west, a city of exotic goods and customs from all over the world. By way of contrast, Damascus was still something of a sleepy provincial town in the middle of farming country.
One day in the winter of 1951 a telephone call brought the bad news that Uncle Adel had unexpectedly died of a heart attack. He had woken in the night and felt thirsty, but he obviously never made it to the refrigerator. He fell down dead in the corridor.
Elias sent telex messages to his brothers Salman in Mala and Hasib in America. Salman still bore his sister a grudge, and refused to come to his brother-in-law’s funeral. Hasib wrote a few civil platitudes, and didn’t come either. Elias himself, however, set off that evening with Claire and Farid, and reached Beirut late at night. Malake was grateful to them, for her husband’s family was also hostile to her, so she and her daughters had no one else to stand by them.
Her daughter Barbara was nineteen. In temperament and strength of character, as Elias realized with amazement, she was the image of old George Mushtak. Laila was seventeen at the time, and Farid was surprised by the pallor of her face. He felt alarmed at the sight of her, and later, when she was resting on a sofa with her eyes closed, he actually thought she had died. Isabelle, the youngest girl, was just nine, and to Farid she was a silly little thing whom he ignored. He spent most of the time sitting with Laila and comforting her by stroking her hand.