Sarmada Page 8

  The book was full of supernatural wisdom that contained the key to life and the meaning of death. Incredible truths, such as that although the Earth actually rotates clockwise, some obstacle in our minds makes us think that time progresses from east to west. No amount of explaining or pleading can change the minds of the hoi polloi. Al-Azif explains that we are actually looking toward the past and not the future. The so-called future has happened already and it's the past that is yet to come. This is where religions get their dogged assurance about what is to come, and it is the root of a great error because the future has already happened and we are retrogressing in time. Only a few people have discovered this fact, but they don't share the great secret because the average person wouldn't be able to bear the shocking truth.

  To the rational observer, the secrets of the book seem like no more than mere legends and tricks based on fundamental misunderstandings of the nature of time, but to anyone who possesses the gift of the sixth sense, and whose brain cells are not so easily duped by the other senses, the book is all truth. It is the knowledge, similar to the cosmic unity, about all that has taken place, or to put it more accurately, all that has yet to take place. Whoever possessed it possessed the key to understanding all supernatural occurrences, prophecies, and events throughout history. Yet those who owned incomplete or faulty copies were certain to suffer the most excruciating deaths imaginable. There was one copy in the Vatican, but it was incomplete and the priests were forbidden from reading it anyway. The original Arabic copy had been lost for centuries. It had once belonged to a Jewish family in Damascus, but they had it translated into Hebrew, and when they left for Palestine, they left the Arabic original with a silversmith called George Sahtout.

  George Sahtout, the silversmith, had a clandestine affair with a Christian woman from the Hauran region for a long time and in 1954, after his wife died—from choking on an oversized piece of quince—they got married. Before he died, he gave his daughter a chest that contained countless antique bracelets and a necklace of emeralds and other precious gems, which were said to have once belonged to Bilqis, the famed Queen of Sheba. The chest also contained a mysterious book, filled with symbols for deciphering the secrets of the dead and bringing them back to life, and ways of commanding occult forces and invisible creatures to do one's bidding. The silversmith had taught his daughter, Sara, who later became known as the soothsayer of Kanakir, the secrets of the symbols, and he left her the book so that she could study it closely over the years to come.

  Relying on all her training, the soothsayer wrote out a revenge curse on talismans with soot she made from the following ingredients: she burned a piece of lizard tail, which carried on twitching for hours, and when it finally fell still, she added some black pepper and a hyena's molar and ground it all up into a powder with some murderous ink she'd made from the skull of a stranger who'd burned to death—she'd dug up his grave and used his bones to make ashes that incited the dead's contempt for the living. With this soot, she traced symbols and letters and conjured up strange names and illnesses to torment Farida so that she'd leave Sarmada and never come back.

  She slipped the amulets into Buthayna's trembling hand and also gave her back the ring and the ram. “Kill the ram,” the soothsayer said, “but don't let any humans eat the meat. Give it to the wild animals who live in the wasteland. All I want is for that she-devil to leave the village.” She gave the girl a vial of arsenic tincture and told Buthayna to wait for a week and if the spell didn't work to pour a few drops of the liquid onto Farida's food. Once it reached her stomach, she would lose all her evil powers.

  Buthayna took the amulets and the vial, unaware that she was actually carrying a deadly poison, enough to kill a large camel.

  Farida wanted to convince the Mansour brothers to come to her party, so she decided she'd just go over there and invite them herself. She put on a lovely embroidered dress that showed off her lightly bouncing cleavage, and even wore a little lipstick. She covered her hair with a gauzy scarf and brushed her long locks down across her shoulders. She made up a platter of croquettes and a pot of bulgur boiled with chunks of meat, and set off toward the old mill.

  They were surprised to see her, to put it mildly. All five brothers were out in the field beside the house, hoeing the soil, so she set the things she'd brought down on the stone window sill and called to them. They stopped their work and eyed the strange woman curiously. Shafee, the youngest brother who was all of eighteen, had a twinkle in his eye as he walked toward her and smiled.

  “Where do you think you're going?” His eldest brother Nawwaf called after him gruffly.

  “To see who she is, and what she wants,” he answered and continued in her direction. He greeted her and had the feeling that he was seeing a creature from another planet. Something flew up out of the cage of his soul, which burst open and seemed as if it would never be closed again. The bitter veil that had covered his almond, endlessly questioning eyes disintegrated.

  “What's your name?” she asked, velvet-voiced.

  “Shafee. Shafee Mansour.”

  “Wonderful. I actually came over to introduce myself and to invite you all to come for rice pudding at my place. You and your brothers, the night after tomorrow, on the Feast of the Cross.”

  “Oh, but we can't!” said Shafee. She stared into his eyes. He felt that some strange bliss was sliding along that gaze and down into his soul, shaking him to the core. He didn't want it to end, but it did:

  “No, but you can come,” she said.

  “I'd love to. I'll try.”

  “Shafeeeeee!” Nawwaf's hoarse, angry voice brought him back to his senses, and back out to stone-hoeing in the fields.

  “I'll be waiting for you,” said Farida seductively, and then she turned and walked away.

  Naturally, there wasn't a force in the world—not Nawwaf, or Nayef, or Talal, or Shahir, or all four brothers shouting at once—that could unglue Shafee's eyes from her rear as he watched it dance beneath her floral dress.

  She needed help from the neighbors if she was going to pull off a real feast of rice pudding, grape molasses sweets, and pancakes dipped in the blue-tinged grief-milk, to feed all of Sarmada and advertise her skills as an expert herbalist. She bought three sacks of rice and borrowed ten cans of milk, and then made the crumbly cakes out of grape molasses, ghee, and flour. Some of the women took it upon themselves to tidy up the garden. Farida had borrowed chairs from the primary school so that the party could be extended out into the clearing in front of her house. It took the women two whole days to prepare for the party, during which time Buthayna came over, accompanied by Umm Khalid, to make up with Farida—sinisterly masking her true intentions. Farida could hardly believe it and she welcomed Buthayna like a sister. As Farida and the other women prepared for the big celebration, Buthayna monitored her anxiously. She saw her drink occasionally from a bottle of milk, wrapped in hessian to keep it cool, which she'd set down next to the water butt. Buthayna made sure no one was looking and then she poured a few drops of the soothsayer's tincture into the bottle. She made an excuse about having something urgent to take care of, and off she went.

  As the rice boiled away in several large cauldrons, Farida took the hessian-wrapped bottle and poured it into the cans of milk. She stirred them up well, ever certain that the substance she'd drawn from Umm Salman's breasts would soon cure all of Sarmada of its pain. She poured out the whole bottle and then she boiled the milk, before adding it to the fluffy and bubbling rice. This she flavored with orange-blossom water and spices that spurred an appetite for life as well as for food.

  The evening of September 27th was a turning point in the history of Sarmada. The village desperately needed someone who could restore a little life to the sad, scared place. Even laughter had come to be seen as a sin and the villagers prayed to God to keep them safe whenever someone let slip a foolhardy chuckle. After they'd seen how death could change a happy wedding into an unstoppable wave of funerals, they began to believe tha
t they simply hadn't been made to enjoy life, or even to live it. There was evil behind anything that made you smile, so they decided that they preferred the stoic face of caution to the mirth of cruel punishment.

  Farida, though, buzzed with joy, hurrying about as if floating on a smiling cloud. She gathered all the children around and passed out sweets and jingling coins. She took advantage of their excited anticipation for the Feast of the Cross and got them to build a big bonfire in the open space in front of her house, where she'd marked out a safe space for it, and she got them to go around to all the families who weren't coming to the party, promising them plenty more paraffin, firewood, and sweets.

  At noon, the children ran after Atallah, the sacristan, all the way to the door of the old church. Everyone loved the witty, rash sacristan: he couldn't go a day without losing control of his tongue and then the insults would just slide off it. His last hit had been a running joke in Sarmada for weeks. When his son Michel came down with a bad case of the measles, Atallah got very worried and swore to God that he'd sacrifice one of his cows if his son got better. Two days later, the boy was on the mend, so he ran down to the barn and found his donkey laid out, dead and rigid on the floor. “Are you getting old, now, God?” he shouted to the sky. “You can't tell the difference between a donkey and a cow anymore?”

  The children were so impatient to receive their holiday treat that the sacristan had to open the church door for them so they could wait for Father Elias. He stuck the heavy key in the lock, but it wouldn't budge. He tried turning it again, first calmly, and then again with unmistakable annoyance. He tried turning it to the left and to the right, but the lock refused to open. He was steaming; he looked right up into the sky toward He who sits on the Heavenly Throne and said, “So what's the point of all my praying, you son of a whore?” He kicked the door and suddenly the key turned. He looked back up at the sky with a smile. “It's obvious there's only one way to get you to do anything.”

  Father Elias arrived a few minutes later, dividing a box of peppermints among the children and recounting the story of the Feast of the Cross as he did every year. “The Feast of the Cross is an old rite taken from the life of Saint Helena. One day, she had a vision and the Lord told her to go to Jerusalem to find the True Cross. Her son, the emperor Constantine, sent a 3,000-man attachment along with her and she passed through here, through Sarmada, on her way 1,800 years ago. When she got to Jerusalem, she searched and searched for the cross until she finally found it—along with two others—buried beneath a rubbish dump!

  “But she had to find out which of the three crosses was the True Cross on which Christ had been crucified, so she took the three crosses over to a funeral procession that happened to be passing by. They passed the first cross over the bier, but nothing happened, and then they passed the second cross over it, but again nothing happened. When they passed the third cross over the dead man, he came back to life and went on to become a caretaker at the Church of the Resurrection. Having found the True Cross, Saint Helena built a great fire there in Jerusalem on September 14th—which we call the Little Feast—to signal that her quest was complete. Everyone who could see the fire lit their own fires, in all the villages, towns, and cities she'd come through on her journey. We lit a fire here in Sarmada, too, hundreds and hundreds of years ago and they saw it in Azra, so they lit a fire, and on and on until the signal got all the way to Constantinople on September 27th and the emperor Constantine learned that his mother had succeeded in finding the True Cross. That's the reason we celebrate every year with a big fire in honor of Saint Helena.” The children, inspired by the priest's entertaining story, took their sweets and coins and hurried off to prepare for the big celebration that evening.

  Everything that happens in Sarmada is testimony to the power of forgetting: the meetings of the local branch of the Party, the educated young people from Damascus and their revolutionary zeal, every single one of them: the communists, nationalists, Nasserists, and Baathists. The only idea anyone had was to take the defeat in the war and recast it as a “setback.” Syria was swept up in a spirit inspired by Nasser's popular reinstatement and the dream of pan-Arab unity. Peasants and the esoteric sects took advantage of the climate to break out of their former isolation and join in the calls for change, reform, and revolution. Stillborn independence had given rise to decrepit leaders who transformed the Arab countries into entrenched dictatorships, which made Israel seem like an oasis of democracy in a desert of depraved barbarians and tyrants. Israel wanted nothing more than to keep these dictators around because its very existence depended on the Middle East remaining a patchwork of corrupt dictatorships and populations divided along sectarian lines.

  Yet to Sarmadan passivity, politics seemed as if it were taking place on a different planet. The local intellect couldn't quite understand all the new terms or why people suddenly yearned to be free from economic feudalism and worn-out customs. Baathism had an easy time penetrating the mountains, including Sarmada, and the Syrian countryside more generally, because it appealed to the hopes and concerns of rural sensibilities. But still it failed to permeate the spirit of the place, the specific social character; no ideology—not Baathism, nor anything else—could ever truly master the human character.

  Farida, who alone knew how to make a wasteland bloom, how to take her green thumb and cheer a place up, borrowed some chairs, and the women came to help sweep the open space in front of her house. They handed out servings of rice pudding, made with some of Umm Salman's grief-milk, which she'd also added to the dough for the pastries she'd prepared: olive and thyme, cheese and spinach, as well as a sweet variety. She even drafted the children to take pastries around to the houses of the people who weren't attending the party. As people gathered, half-curious and half-keen, the party took on a happy mood and something like a zest for life bubbled up to the surface, albeit tentatively at first. Then Nour al-Din picked up his flute and started playing and more than thirty young men got to their feet automatically and began to dance the Dabke. When Hasoun the drummer turned up with his famous darbuka, the party was transported to a whole other level. More dancers joined the Dabke lines and everybody ate up the rice pudding and the scrumptious pastries. Sarmada celebrated warily, trying desperately to forget the nightmare of Salman's nuptials. Girls were dressed up as if they were going to a wedding and all the different local dances were performed amidst a pandemonium that spread over the entire village.

  After they'd finished the tasks Farida had asked them to do, the children began going around the village collecting cow chips, which were lumps of cow dung mixed with straw left out over the summer to dry that the villagers used to light their woodstoves. The children's shouts could be heard throughout the village and whenever an elderly woman or a young housewife gave them several cow chips and a bottle of paraffin, they would chant:

  One can, two can, can this be?

  This lady here must be a queen!

  But for the cheapskates who were stingy with them, they had this to say:

  That's all you've got, just scraps and rags?

  I'm guessing, lady, you must be a slag!

  The children usually got insults against their own mothers in return, as well as several buckets of dirty water poured down from the roof.

  “Holy Spawn of Satan!” shouted Shaykh Farouq when he saw the strange sweets and pastries the children had brought over, and he forbade his wife and daughters from attending the “Whore's Ball,” as he liked to call it. Farida was definitely chipping away at his authority. She'd distinguished herself as a herbalist and all he had left was his special cure for the mumps: he'd scribble a few obscure phrases on swollen, lumpy faces with a ballpoint pen, recite a couple of Quranic verses, wrap a white bandage around the patients' cartoon-like faces and tie a knot at the top of their heads. Once the patient had recovered, he'd get a chicken or some eggs for his skillful cure of the painful swelling. This had earned him the nickname “Shaykh Mumps,” but the people of Sarmada never dared call
him that to his face. He stormed out of his house, brandishing his cane, determined to put end to her party. When he arrived, he was appalled by the sight of the village children leaping about like monkeys, as they fed cow chips and wood into the fire. The extravagance of Sarmada's celebration absolutely shocked him. Salama had donated two sheep, which only encouraged the better-offs in the village to chip in with their own fleshy contributions, and soon the square was filled with the biggest barbecue the village had ever seen. Everyone who came brought something, just because they wanted to contribute to the banquet, and Sarmada had the time of its life. No one could've stopped the spirited exuberance that swept through the village streets. So rather than take his anger out on evil, corrupting, debauched Farida, Shaykh Mumps turned around and headed back home. He sat down on the porch and called to his daughter Joumana, “Bring me one of those pastries Farida sent over.”

  “You came around just in the nick of time,” she said, handing him two pastries: one with sugar and grape molasses, the other with cheese and spinach. The shaykh took them and waved to his wife and daughters as they left for the party.

  “Just don't be home late!”

  A group of shaykhs came round to Shaykh Farouq’s house… “So, Shaykh. are you happy about what’s going on around here?”

  “Be patient, Shaykhs. The people are exhausted, let them blow off some steam.” Shaykh Farouq’s large nose began to turn a pale red and his guests started devouring what pastries remained.