The Dark Side of Love by Rafik Schami Read Free Book Online Page B

Muslims did at Ali’s party, Claire would have fainted away with shame.
    An odd feeling came over Farid. It was a mingled sensation of fear, curiosity, closeness and distance. He felt attracted to it, as if part of his soul were at home in these surroundings. He had never known such closeness in any Christian house. After that his fascination led him to accept any invitation from a Muslim fellow pupil, in the hope of discovering the secret of that mysterious attraction.
    Kamal Sabuni didn’t really stand out at school, where he was considered rich but dim. For that very reason, his mother and siblings were glad to meet the pale boy Farid who, so Kamal had told them, was top of the class. They wanted him to come back often, and visit by visit he learned to know more about the differences between the lives of Christians and Muslims. The Sabunis had been textile merchants since the Middle Ages, so they were seriously rich. They dressed like Europeans, but still seemed a hundred times more Arab than his own parents. Strange how near and yet how far they often appeared to him. It wasn’t like visiting his friend Josef, whose home lost all interest for him as time went by; when Farid stood at Kamal’s door it was always like visiting for the first time. The maid knew him well, but every time she impersonally asked what he wanted.
    Here, as in no other Muslim house, all rooms were open to him, even the most private, and in no other family was he so confused by the switch from Islamic to European ways and back again. The same family that strictly segregated the sexes in public enjoyed sensuous physical contact within their own four walls. Once Kamal’s eldest sister Dalal even became so aroused by flirting with her husband
during a meal that she had to leave the room with him. When they had been away for some time Farid guessed what was going on. To make sure, he asked to go to the bathroom, and on the way heard Kamal’s sister moaning in orgasm. The bed creaked, and his heart raced. He felt guilty, like a child who has stolen something entrusted to him. In the bathroom he calmed down, and finally went back, hoping to hear more, but this time all was quiet. The couple took their time, and no one else at table paid any attention to their absence. They didn’t return until the dessert course, and although their hair was combed and they were freshly perfumed, they looked a little drowsy.
    Baker Sahed, a well-known painter who was President of the Damascus Academy of Art, had spend months portraying members of the family. He sat at his easel in the drawing room and painted and painted; his work never came to an end. Farid had a feeling that the artist was going slow on purpose to keep up his intimate association with the family and their rich friends, and in fact many commissions were said to have come his way through the Sabunis.
    Kamal couldn’t stand the painter. The man was a closet gay, he told Farid, and kept pawing him “down there” as if by accident. There was something feminine about the artist’s movements, his voice was high as a eunuch’s, and the look in his eyes betrayed his desire for young men. As for his elaborately phrased request – how would the young gentleman like to pose naked in his studio, as model for the statue of Youth that he was planning? – Kamal could only laugh nastily. Strangely, his mother had no objection to the idea at all. Somehow, thought Farid, Muslims have a healthier attitude to their bodies than we Christians do, they enjoy them more. They wash themselves before cleansing their souls, evidence in itself of their high regard for the body.
    After that first visit when Kamal proudly played his latest records, Farid went to see him almost every week, and his family made it very obvious that they approved of his friendship with their son. For one thing was clear to them: Kamal didn’t take school seriously, or his teachers either, men whose