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Sarmada Page 17
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In addition to Buthayna’s hasty marriage to Saloum al-Rayyash, her departure for the Gulf, and the abrupt cancellation of the molasses lessons, Bulkhayr also came down with measles. He was laid up sick in bed, his body consumed by fever with his skin attacked by a red rash; it broke Farida’s heart to see him like that. She stayed up three nights in a row, preparing solutions and herbs, changing his cool compresses, listening as he deliriously recounted memories of the grape molasses and his auntie Buthayna, inconsolable and confused, his heart broken. Despite all her talents, Farida failed to find a combination of herbs that could drive the fever out of his young body and her old fears began to slip back in through the pores of her mind and demolish her fragile sense of security. The only thing that helped to hold her fears slightly at bay was Bulkhayr's recovery, although profound sadness still caused his eyes to glaze over, and he was morose and silent. His beautiful smile disappeared, as did his former vigor and love of life. Most of the time he sat there withdrawn with his thoughts elsewhere.
His days passed by calmly in the midst of all the amazing and frightening changes taking place in Sarmada: the arrival of electricity, the asphalted roads, and the transformed look of the place. All it took was one government initiative and the roads of a new life broke through the desolate tracts of basalt and boulders, and electricity began to stretch its way to the towns and villages. Something was changing in that village as it stood on the brink of new expectations that broke in on it forcibly, as all its ancient features faded and finally disappeared. It was as if one final round of governmental punishment had managed to infiltrate its innocence and begun to tame the place and strip it of its long-standing and deep-rooted character.
The villagers were waiting for new things to take place in their new lives, but they could never have anticipated how great the transformation would be; when the new patterns of life arrived, it was like another world. They received a surprise visit from the regional police, who gathered up all the weapons in Sarmada, and who would later take anyone carrying an unlicensed weapon to the infamous Tadmor prison, which would become permanently branded in the Syrian memory as the place where people were subjected to terror and their lives destroyed. The government, which remained on the outside, planted eyes and spies and people with nice handwriting who tried to outdo one another with the reports they wrote about the odd vagabond or transient vagrant, who they then rounded up and sent off to the various branches of the secret police. There the delinquents and their write-ups would be processed at dawn and escorted down into the chambers of torture and intimidation.
Even one of the police chiefs, who'd finished his service in the mountain region and was being transferred to a different district, said jokingly, during a farewell party that the people of the mountain were compelled to throw for him, “The mountains don't even need the secret police or any security force, really.” When they asked him what he meant, he explained gloatingly, “Because people with good handwriting” (a euphemism for informants) “are everywhere—God be praised. The government doesn't even have to bother hiring spies, you people do all the work yourselves!” All the mountain elites laughed disingenuously, flattering the most corrupt one of all.
The village shaykhs could see the transformations were killing off their authority, which was already in freefall, so they began to warn the people about the signs of the end times and the apocalypse, and Shaykh Shaheen, who had become head shaykh after Shaykh Mumps—Shaykh Farouq—labored tirelessly to decipher the symbols in the Epistles of Wisdom. After a long period of seclusion, he made an announcement to the villagers: “We are in the middle of the phase of exposure. This is the last phase of life. The resurrection draws near. There can be no doubting it, for it is said that a millennium shall pass, and not two, and that means that the resurrection will take place before we reach the year 2000.”
A smart aleck retorted: “That's all fine, Shaykh, but do the Epistles of Wisdom work on AD time or AH time?' Shaykh Shaheen stormed off, muttering strange words past a mocking crowd of open-minded youths.
The people of Sarmada felt that they could no longer remain the masters of their own lives, that the future would change everything, and that they simply had to go along with it, and abandon 300 years of independence, chivalry, and an innocent way of life. They were undefeatable when it came to repelling clearly identified, hostile outsiders who intruded on their lives, but a government as secretive as this one didn't even stir up the slightest dust.
Bulkhayr and his only friend Fayyad watched what was happening around them with disbelief. Suddenly they heard a thundering sound: “Explosion! Run!” Now that the basalt boulders had been laid with dynamite, the children shouted that sentence over and over again that autumn and the windows rattled.
Then electricity poles were erected at regular intervals alongside the first asphalt road to cut between the houses of the village and connect it to the main road that traveled between the mountains and the outside world. The roar and racket of the huge machine that crushed the rocks and smoothed the asphalted road startled the donkeys and grazing animals as it approached and all of Sarmada, every last soul, went out to watch the huge iron beast level the earth. When Fayyad asked, “What's that machine called?”, one of the workers answered haughtily:
“It's a steamroller.”
Something peculiar happened to the steamroller just two weeks later: all its screws and anything else that could be removed were stripped off and it was just abandoned there. It remained as a massive metal shell squatting in the middle of Sarmada for twenty years, until the government finally decided to remove the wreck and repair it.
Bulkhayr just barely passed first grade and ran aground in the second, causing a great deal of bewilderment and frustration. His teacher, Ibtisam, had predicted a bright future for him at first, and gone so far as to record it in her grade book, but the outlook soon deteriorated and he became the laziest student of all. The great void—no, better, the crushing abyss—that the molasses-tutor had left behind her caused him to lose any interest he'd once had in school. The boy who'd once dazzled his teachers and classmates with his enviable reading and writing skills and his precocious vocabulary suddenly lost his passion and reduced his teacher to a temporary period of soul-searching: how could this boy, who'd been near geniusspeed at learning, memorizing, and arithmetic, forget everything so quickly and without any forewarning? She blamed herself for pronouncing him gifted too hastily—for being taken in—and then cured his scholastic deterioration with that old Syrian standby: she sent him to the back of the class. There he shared a desk with the most hopeless student ever to enter Sarmada elementary, Fayyad al-Hadi, and the two of them would sit there, paying no attention to the reading and its boring characters like Basem, Rabab, and Hamid the industrious farmer, or to the Baath-scout cheers, or the solemn celebrations of Our Father the Leader and the Mighty Baath, or the curses hurled at Camp David and the Arab collaborators, and the rest of the rubbish they stuffed into the malleable minds of children. Later they would learn to revile the government of Iraq and its bloodthirsty leader, though the naive children couldn’t under-stand why people would say such things about a sister nation like Iraq that was ruled by the same Baath party, or how it could be worse than Israel as their teacher insisted.
Of course, Bulkhayr and Fayyad couldn’t give a damn about all that crap, and they didn’t even bother to move their lips or pens as they were meant to. They had better things to do—things that were more important to them than songs, revolutionary cheers, reading lessons, and the revolting things they had to memorize. Bulkhayr was still suffering from a painful loss and Fayyad from runaway fantasies of leaving Sarmada and going to Beirut, the city of his dreams and desires.
Workers shouting in warning “Explosion! Run!” shook Fayyad al-Hadi from his overpowering daydreams. His friend Bulkhayr was his only consolation. Bulkhayr, who was still tormented by the bitter terror of love that Sarmada drowned him in. All the men and most of the women in the villa
ge were tender and forgiving. They showered him with gifts and attention, but their exaggerated love felt almost stifling. Fayyad's situation was the complete opposite: for him, it was unanimous rejection, denial, and rebuke. But the two boys discovered together that cloying love and blind hate had united them in a unique friendship.
They felt that some mysterious common denominator linked their two destinies, so they spent every day of their dull childhood together and refused to let anyone else tag along, except on adventures. They impatiently waited for Farida to deliver what she'd promised Bulkhayr: a black and white Syronix television. The appointed day finally came and a big truck pulled up and dropped off three bewildering contraptions. Bulkhayr spent three whole days asking his mother questions like:
“Is that the refrigerator?”
“No, my love. That's the washing machine.”
“Is that the television?”
“No, dearest. That's the refrigerator.” Until Saeed the blacksmith, who'd become an electrician in the meanwhile, came over to Farida's house and connected them to the grid. And on that same Thursday evening in the spring of 1980, an antenna went up on the roof of the shed, and after his mother had gone to the majlis for Thursday prayers, Bulkhayr and his friend watched the Egyptian film Not Twenty and Already in Love on Israeli Television's Arabic hour. As the film ended, a one-sided love story began, starring Fayyad and the leading lady Yusra, and from that day forth, she swept through his life like a hurricane. He was instantly infatuated and even the direction of his dreams changed from Beirut to Cairo! He went on to cut out all her photos and stories about her from magazines and newspapers, to see her films, and to hang on her every word, her every whisper. He even used to close his eyes during certain scenes because he couldn't stand to see her smothered by an actor's kisses.
They entered sixth grade. Fayyad was considerably older than the rest of the students because he'd started school a year late and failed the first grade as well as the second, where he'd met Bulkhayr. Mr. Zaydoun, the school principal, cursed the idiotic idea of compulsory education and decided he'd simply pass the boy until they were finally rid of the jackass—his preferred name for Fayyad. Of course, for Fayyad, school was nothing more than a place to sleep and hang out with Bulkhayr. He lived with his partially blind grandmother and worked from time to time with Saeed the blacksmith, and later electrician, in his shop. The bright light of the welder had damaged Fayyad's eyes, so he now had trouble making things out at night. He spent his precious free time with Bulkhayr, constantly coming up with new ways to annoy Sarmada, although it always ended with the villagers overlooking Bulkhayr's involvement and taking all their anger out on Fayyad.
They went on walks every day through the rocky tracts, fantasizing about running away together to somewhere some day: Bulkhayr to Damascus and his longed-for dream and Fayyad to his sweetheart Yusra in Cairo. In that hopeless place, their friendship deepened, as did their thirst for revenge against the tyrannical school principal and his punishments. They were just on the brink of puberty at that time. Zaydoun, the principal, was one of those who ate up everything the Baath put out and then got indigestion for it. His first child had Down's Syndrome and his second was mentally retarded and this caused him to turn the school into a merciless military regime. All the elementary school students were frightened of him and he had spies who infiltrated them and reported back to him—even during the summer holidays!
He forbade the children from swimming at either the western or the eastern ponds and he invented punishments for every student who got less than seven out of ten in their exams. The lazy students who failed to do their homework or did poorly in their exams had to line up in front of his office so he could brand their supple cheeks with a marker: Lazybones. Instead of playing during recess, the lazy students were made to clean the toilets or to line up in a ridiculously long singlefile chain and march around the athletic fields throughout the entire sports lesson or recess, led by none other than Fayyad al-Hadi, while the entire school laughed at them. “Train of lazies!” Fayyad would bellow, pulling the others along as they held on to one another's waists behind him and repeated: “Choo choo!”
Zaydoun ran the local party and the “yellow” school, so called for the school's dingy color, with a martial, “take no prisoners” spirit, cursing the power that had sent him apes to teach instead of children. He even started railing against UNICEF of all things because it was an organization specifically devoted to caring for children and he cursed it every morning along with everything else that had to do with kids. He used to beat the children sadistically: he'd rap their hands until they burned and he never hesitated to have them hoisted up and whip them on the soles of their feet, or to slap them, or squash them underfoot, especially during the Baath-scout classes where they were supposed to learn marching drills and the meaning of discipline. He planted the germ of loyalty to the pioneering party and Our Father the Leader in their little minds and woe to those children who couldn't get their heads around the proto-military maneuvers or the right replies to the scout cheers that glorified the mighty Baath.
Over time, the two best friends got used to being lazy and the slur stained onto their cheeks didn't bother them anymore. They took the ridicule in their stride and delivered it right back, twice as bad and totally shameless, and if anything, all it did was exacerbate their natural devilry. They dug skulls up out of the cemetery once they figured out they could sell them to Jawdat, the hopeless medical student. He paid them twenty lire per skull and then he sold them in Damascus for fifty. So the two of them became a pair of regular old grave robbers. They stole electrical wires and made fully functioning toy cars out of them, which they then sold to the other kids, or they worked as lookouts for the guys hunting lost treasure among the valleys, stones, and wasteland. They learned how to set bird traps, how to make catapults and slingshots, and how to steal chickens out of coops. They were pros at marbles, at training the donkey foals to thresh, at collecting mushrooms and making paper planes.
One day they got punished by Zaydoun and his colleague Mr. Four-Eyes—their special name for the teacher otherwise known as Khalil the freak, a hard-line and humorless communist who wore thick glasses. He was constantly disgusted by everything around him and never stopped ridiculing the two boys for being totally worthless and unserious. Khalil was the big intellectual whom the security forces had forbidden from teaching anything but elementary classes because they wanted to limit the influence of teachers with deviant political views. On the day the boys were punished, the two men were unanimous in their rage, though they each had their own reasons. They reprimanded Bulkhayr and Fayyad because the boys had gone and terrorized the entire village: they'd smeared themselves with black soot and dressed in sheepskins—they were still half-naked—and walked around knocking on people's doors and shrieking at whoever answered. They didn't even think twice about scaring the two teachers after midnight, and they capped off their insane night by scrawling mocking slogans onto the victory arch that hung over the entrance to the village. Next to where it said “One Arab Nation, One Eternal Mission,” Fayyad climbed up and wrote: “Principal Zaydoun and Mr. Four-Eyes will suck you off for a kilo of limes.” They ended up writing that sentence all over the place: on the walls of the school, beside the main bus stop, on the walls of the party office and on either side of Poppy Bridge.
When the village woke up to that effrontery, the slogan began to circulate in whispered mocking as they secretly saluted whoever had written it. The whole of Sarmada was fed up with Zaydoun, who stuck his nose into every last thing. Sure, he'd planted trees around the village and done some good things, and he'd arranged for a bus link between Sarmada and the city, but he'd also forced the Baath onto the docile village. He was the one who collected the memberships and made sure everyone attended the Monday meetings. He was always saying, “The Baath comes first. Don't anyone think they're more important than the Baath. The Baath's more important than God Himself!” Because he had a close relati
onship with the secret police, and because he wrote precise reports for them about what was going on in the village, and because he paid bribes to those higher-up in the party and put on regular banquets for the mountain region's party leaders and political police, he'd been able to foil any attempts to push him out.
Khalil the communist, on the other hand, had cut himself off from the rest of the village after he'd discovered he was infertile and incapable of impregnating his wife, who decided that what she wanted was a divorce, but not because he couldn't make her pregnant, no, rather because he was always so miserable and so contemptuous of everyone and everything. After the divorce he withdrew. He no longer took part in any of the holidays or festivities; it even got to the point where he began to resent his younger communist comrades. He looked down his nose at them to compensate for his inferiority complex and emasculation, and eventually, he became intractable, rancorous, and intolerant; he was unable to forget, let alone forgive the tiniest slight, and even bore a grudge against a comrade who'd failed to return a greeting when he'd been lost in thought.
Khalil's sole accomplishment was a polemic he'd published on the class conflict between landowners and peasants, in addition to some poetry, which was boring but wholly engaged with the “big issues” and copied the style of socialist realism from the writers of Moscow and the Soviet camp. The communists who were part of the government and the National Progressive Front had a lot to say about him, as they usually did. After all, these were the people who'd agreed to become regime lackeys in exchange for access to the Ministry of Culture, one of the country's few cultural pulpits, and they accepted those jobs as a sort of bribe that sapped them of their revolutionary enthusiasm for change.