Читать книгу The Cruel Fire - Edward Atiyah - Страница 3

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Life was beginning to stir in the little, remote Lebanese village of Barkita as the summer morning came over the hills in bright sunny strides, leaping from roof-top to roof-top, stretching longer and longer past the pinewood, across the terraced vineyards, plunging here and there into the shadows of the valley. The day labourers were already on their way, whether by the main road or by mountain paths, to the various orchards or building sites on which they worked, each carrying his midday meal under his arm—olives and onions rolled up in a round, flat, thin loaf of bread. But the more well-to-do of the villagers—the small peasant proprietors and shopkeepers—had only just got up and were drinking their early cups of Turkish coffee and smoking their first cigarette or hubble-bubble of the day. Many of them sat in the open, in a small garden or on a terrace just outside their front door, over which a vine spread its branches, now thick with leaves and heavy with pendant bunches of grapes.

One of these comparatively prosperous and leisured villagers was Faris Deeb, who sat on his terrace sipping his coffee with a loud, hissing noise. He was a heavily built man of about forty-five, and his face was hard and unamiable, with a few days’ growth of hair on it, for he shaved only twice a week. He was the local corn dealer and owned a vineyard on the hillside behind his house and an apple orchard in the valley, by the river. The vineyard he had acquired from his father, who now sat a few paces away from him, sipping his own coffee; but the orchard he had bought with the profits of his hard dealings in corn and the savings of his avarice over the years. He had a shop in the village where he transacted his corn business and sold a few other things besides; but he did not have to hurry to it in the morning because his elder son and assistant, Mitry, was now sent ahead to open it, while Faris Deeb drank his coffee and smoked his argileh.... Where was that damned argileh? He would finish his coffee if it did not come soon, and he liked to draw the first few puffs while the aroma of the coffee was still in his mouth.

“Rosa!” he called to his wife, who was preparing him the argileh in the kitchen. “Rosa! What the hell are you doing, taking such a long time to prepare me my smoke?”

“It’s coming, it’s coming,” answered the unseen Rosa with an impatience as cold as her husband’s was heated. “I’m not a machine.”

“I’ll say that,” growled Faris Deeb. “A lazy cow, that’s what you are. A cow that doesn’t even give milk, now that your children are grown up!”

“A cow, am I?” said Rosa with aloof, unpassioned venom, issuing from the kitchen, carrying the argileh between her two hands. Then she addressed herself to her father-in-law. “Listen to your son’s sweet morning speech, Abu Faris. This is my reward for making him his coffee and bringing him his argileh; for looking after his house and bringing up his children to be better than anybody else’s children in the village, though the Lord knows he never gave me enough money to dress them decently, so loath was he always to open his purse wide enough for a copper to slip through!” She was a few years younger than her husband, and not an uncomely woman, with red cheeks, full lips and full but not over-abundant bosom.

“Put down the argileh here, and enough tongue-wagging in the early morning,” said her husband. “You always had enough money for food and clothes and everything necessary. I don’t deny my family that, but by God, I’m not giving money away to be spent on your trashy fineries. Anyhow, what do you think I am, a gold mine?”

Abu Faris sipped his coffee in silence, not wishing to be drawn into this acrimonious exchange between his son and his daughter-in-law. Such exchanges were a common occurrence in the household, not only between Faris and Rosa, who often finished by getting a beating from her husband, but also between Faris and the children. Mitry was too big and strong to be beaten now—too big and strong for Faris even to beat Rosa in his presence; but when Antoine and Genevieve answered their father back, he beat them too as he beat their mother. There had been that terrible scene when Faris discovered that Genevieve was walking out with the young man Ramiz—a nice young man too, who would make a suitable husband for her—and given her such a thrashing that her cheeks were too red and swollen for her to go to her work the next day. The old man’s sympathies were with his daughter-in-law and the children, who were good to him and who were the victims of his son’s vicious temper and tyranny; but he himself was cowed by the tyrant, though he did try to protest when Faris beat Rosa or the children. Until the row reached the stage of physical violence, however, Abu Faris preferred to keep out of it. He bitterly regretted his folly in making over the vineyard to Faris. If he had kept that in his name he would have retained some hold over his son, but now he had none. Yes, he had been a fool....

Faris Deeb uncoiled the red argileh tube and, putting the black mouthpiece between his lips, drew at it as though taking deep breaths under a medical examination. The embers poised on the mound of wet tobacco glowed, and the glass stem of the argileh began to cloud with smoke.

Rosa contemplated her husband with ill-concealed, arrogant distaste, her arms akimbo, the fists resting on her hips in a challenging posture. Her secret guilt made her hate him all the more. In her hate of him she found her absolution—her hate and her provocation of him into words and actions of increasing viciousness. When she succeeded in making him behave with the utmost brutality of which he was capable, the adulteress felt purged of her sin, exulted in it as her final revenge and triumph. She had also another triumph. She had learned how to deny him the enjoyment of her body even when he took her. Gone were the days when she resisted him or showed reluctance. That had only whetted his desire and given him greater pleasure. Now, she let him take her when he wanted as though she were a lump of dough that neither responded nor resisted, and she knew that her indifference filled him with a mad frustration.

“Thank God,” she said, “the children don’t depend on you any more for their food and clothes. They’re all grown up and earning, and you need them more than they need you.”

“I have never needed anybody, nor ever will,” he said, smarting with his unsatisfied need of her as a woman.

“Then why don’t you let Genevieve get married? Why don’t you let Mitry go to join his cousin in Brazil?”

He took the mouthpiece out of his mouth and glared at his wife. “Has that girl been asking you to intercede with me again? I’ve told her ‘no,’ and ‘no’ it is. Get that into your head. And if I ever catch her walking with that namby-pamby boy again, I’ll give her a bigger thrashing than the last one. I’m not going to let her marry a penniless fellow and produce a family that will become a burden on me. She’ll have to marry a man of property.”

“Ramiz is not a penniless fellow. He’s earning.”

“Earning from what? A job by the week which he might lose any time. Has he got a house? Has he got a shop, a vineyard, a prosperous father?”

“No one with property will marry her unless she has property of her own. Would you give her a dowry? Why, you don’t even allow her to save from her wages so that she could amass a little dowery of her own. You make her work and pay you half her earnings. You’d lose that if she married. That’s why you won’t let her marry.”

“It’s a lie! What she gives me of her wages doesn’t pay for her keep.”

Abu Faris intervened here with a quiet aside to Rosa. “Enough, enough, my daughter,” he said, trying to prevent the altercation from reaching those excesses which so distressed him. He could not understand it, but it did seem to him that Rosa often went on deliberately provoking Faris until he used violence on her. He had known children behave like that, as though nothing would satisfy them until they were beaten, who knew the beating would come if they went on provoking their elders long enough, and yet would not desist. Rosa was like that. She was being like that now. Paying no regard to her father-in-law’s warning, she went on:

“You make a handsome little profit out of it, together with what you get from Mitry and Antoine. Antoine gets only ten pounds a month, and you make him give you five.”

“Ten is only his salary, you fool; but a waiter at a smart hotel gets twice as much as that in tips. I know nothing about his tips.”

“How that must hurt you!” said Rosa.

“You know how much he gets,” said her husband, narrowing his eyes, beneath the bushy eyebrows, into hard slits, “don’t you? He tells you.”

“All right, he tells me; but I’m not going to tell you,” she said, letting her arms fall and walking back into the kitchen nonchalantly.

Faris Deeb dropped his argileh tube, got up and followed her.

His father said: “Come back, Faris; leave her alone. How does she know how much the boy gets in tips?”

“She knows,” snarled Faris Deeb, “and I’m not going to have anything kept from me in this house. I’ll beat her secret out of her.”

In the kitchen, Rosa had picked up the coffee pot and turned the tap on to wash it.

“How much?” said her husband, coming up to her. “I’m asking you for the last time. How much?”

“I don’t know,” said Rosa coldly.

“You’re lying. You said you knew.”

“I wanted to annoy you. I hate you.”

“Your hatred doesn’t hurt me.”

“Nor your children’s? They all hate you. You’re a blight on their lives. They wish you dead, every one of them.”

“I don’t care if they hate me or love me as long as they fear me.”

“But they don’t all fear you now. Mitry doesn’t. You daren’t beat him any more.” She gave him a little derisive sneer, knowing that he was about to strike her, and experiencing that queer thrill that came before the first blow. She enjoyed goading him because it made her feel superior to him intellectually. The rage that he felt when he beat her hurt him much more than his blows hurt her, for she was no weakling and could stand up to a good deal of punishment.

“Why should I beat him,” he said, “when he obeys me? He’s a sensible young man now.”

“A strong young man, you mean, who is capable of paying back a bully like you who beats only women or children. Or are you afraid to beat even a woman now?”

He raised his hand and struck her in the face; and her conscience, as well as her intellect, was satisfied, for she was expecting a visit from her lover that morning.