Malake was lamenting the fact that next spring Adel had been going to give her the promised honeymoon they’d never had. He was planning to take her to Rome, Venice, Paris, Vienna, and London. Barbara had encouraged them to go, saying she and Laila could easily look after little Isabelle.
A year later Elias was helping his sister to find a house in the exclusive Salihiye quarter of Damascus. Malake had sold the factory and their villa in Beirut for a good price, and in the summer of 1953 she and her daughters returned to the Syrian capital. But she refused ever to set foot in Mala again.
They lived in style in a large, handsome house built in the eighteenth century by a relation of the Ottoman Sultan, and Farid, who knew the mysteries of calligraphy, was able to decipher all the sayings on the ceilings and walls for his aunt and her daughters. Poetic and religious Sufi quotations adorned the walls, columns, and ceilings of rooms in line with their functions. Barbara carefully wrote everything down, and Laila, her gaze transfigured, watched the boy. Everything he did touched her heart. He looked handsome and noble as a prince’s son, she thought, as he stood there deciphering the Arabic texts word by word, and once he had disentangled the calligraphic labyrinth of a saying it was clear to her for ever. The bathroom alone had thirty of them, all to do with water and Paradise.
Malake was a capable woman. With her brother’s help, she bought some large and dusty fields lying fallow to the north-east of the Old Town at a very reasonable price. Later on, this area became a large, elegant middle-class housing estate. After ten years plots of land here cost almost a hundred times what she had paid.
Normally Farid would have been glad of his favourite cousin’s return to Damascus, but instead he bewailed his bad luck, for he had to leave the city himself.
“When the angels visit a house,” joked Laila, “the devils run for it.” She looked at him and laughed to hide her own regret, but she couldn’t deceive Farid.
91. Grandfather’s Death
It was a sunny February day, and as Grandmother Lucia told the story, Nagib had found one of his rabbits sick that morning. Grandfather loved rabbits, and had built his pets a beautiful hutch. He never had many of them, at most six or seven. Farid didn’t like the rabbits, so he never went to the east-facing terrace of his grandparents’ house where the hutch stood, although hutch was hardly the word for it. Grandfather had lovingly built a natural enclosure with a stream of water, caves, and sunny terraces, all surrounded by wire netting. There was a bench opposite the hutch where he often sat for hours on end, happy as a child as he watched his rabbits running about. Grandmother Lucia hated them.
So that morning Grandfather had been sitting on his bench, as he so often did. There was a big black rabbit on the old man’s lap. He was worried; it wasn’t well. Grandmother had looked out of the kitchen and saw Nagib sitting there without a scarf. She opened the kitchen window and called to him to put something warmer on, but he told her he’d come in soon. Lucia made coffee. When she turned to look again, he was sitting there all hunched up while the black rabbit hopped merrily about the terrace.
“Nagib,” cried Grandmother, full of foreboding. But Grandfather couldn’t hear her any more.
Farid had just come home from school when the phone rang. “Oh, no, for God’s sake! I’ll come at once!” Claire called down the receiver, and she rushed out of the room.
“What’s happened?” he asked.
“My father’s dead.”
Grandfather was lying on the bed. Neighbours and relations were there already, and Claire was crying like a little girl. Farid had never seen her shed tears before. She reacted to neither friends nor family members, and he had a feeling that she didn’t even recognise him. She just wept and kept kissing her father’s hands and forehead, and she was talking to him. “Why did you leave me so quickly, why didn’t you say goodbye?” Nothing could comfort her.
Claire heard nothing and no one. Even when Elias arrived and embraced her lovingly she didn’t notice him, but sat lost in her thoughts beside Grandfather’s body.
“I’ll have to go now, there’s a lot to organize,” Elias whispered to his son. “You stay with Mama and help her.”
Even when Lucia went to bed, Claire and Farid stayed with the dead man. Farid didn’t feel at all tired. “Do you see his smile?” Claire asked in a low voice at about midnight. And indeed Grandfather was smiling with as much amusement as if his death were a joke. Farid noticed Grandfather’s new shoes, and he remembered other corpses who had worn brand-new shoes in their coffins. Presumably God set great store by cleanliness.
“Do you know why he’s smiling?” asked Claire, with the ghost of a grin around her mouth. “He’s laughing at Grandmother’s superstitions and our own horror.”
“What superstitions?” asked Farid.
“She believes the rabbit was mortally sick, it palmed its own death off on Grandfather, and that cured it. She told everyone so, and late this afternoon she gave the butcher all the rabbits for free.”
“But that’s stupid,” he said. “The poor creatures can’t help it.”
“Come out with me a minute, but put something warm on,” Claire said suddenly.
Farid put on his jacket and followed her. She left the second-floor drawing room, went along the arcades around the inner courtyard to the terrace on the east of the house, wrapped herself in a rug, and sat on the bench. Shivering, Farid sat down beside her. It was full moon.
“This is where he was sitting with the rabbit on his lap, and then his head tipped a little way forward as if he’d gone to sleep. Grandmother knew at once that he was dead, because he never fell asleep when he was with his rabbits. He was always far too curious and interested in everything for that.”
The enclosure was empty. Even the little stream of water had stopped flowing. Farid felt a strange loneliness. He pressed close to his mother, and Claire wrapped her rug around him.
92. Going to Church
Farid’s had strange feelings when he went to church. He took little notice of the Mass itself; in spite of the incense and gorgeously coloured vestments, it left him cold. But his gaze strayed, and when it fixed on one of the pictures on the walls, he wandered back in time to the dramatic events recorded there in oils.
It was obligatory for the pupils at the elite Catholic school to show up in the school yard washed and neatly dressed on Sundays, and then proceed two abreast to the church. He was happy enough to go, but he didn’t like having his presence checked on the way into church every Sunday. Anyone who didn’t come was punished first thing in the morning on Monday in front of the whole school. Only Muslims and Jews were excused attendance at Mass.
For years he made the church service into a memory game. He divided the Mass up to fit the fifty kilometres of road between Damascus and Mala. Both Mass and the journey to Mala lasted about an hour. The idea of the game was to suit every sentence spoken or act performed in the service to one of the various places that the bus passed on the way to Mala. Farid assigned a village, a factory, a ruin, or a tree to every kyrie eleison and every hymn.
He also liked to imagine the bus constantly losing parts of itself along the way, cutting curves so that women and children screamed and the chickens who always travelled under the seats with their feet tied flapped their wings. And when his bus finally reached Mala, clattering, hooting its horn and raising dust, he was glad because the church service was over.