The Dark Side of Love by Rafik Schami

horses follow the path slowly. In many places it wasn’t even a metre wide, and the ever-hungry maw of the abyss gaped to their left. Nassif
was riding a little way in front of Laila, singing softly and gazing into the distance.
    The morning light had banished enough of the darkness of night for them to be able to see across the valley to the top of the next height. Suddenly Laila saw the hyenas on the other side of the abyss. They had attacked a woman walking to the nearby village with a bundle of firewood on her head. To the eye, the rising ground lay so close that not only could Laila count the hyenas, she could also see the woman’s face clearly.
    â€œNassif,” she screamed in horror. Startled out of his thoughts, he stopped his horse, but could not turn it. He carefully dismounted and turned to Laila, and at that moment he too saw the hyenas.
    The woman was trying to drive the beasts off with a stick. They retreated briefly, then attacked again, and through their greedy howls, which sounded like laughter, the two travellers heard cries for help.
    Nassif shouted and cursed, but only a single hyena looked back at him in surprise, while the others attacked the woman yet more fiercely, and no one came to her aid. Laila had no strength left. She slipped from her saddle. Nassif tied his horse to a bush, went to her and held her tight.
    â€œI love you, Laila,” he said, and kissed her. His kiss made her frozen blood flow again.
    â€œCan you go on?” he asked. She nodded. He helped her back into the saddle, then remounted his own horse, and sent it trotting slowly down the narrow, dangerous path. She followed him. It was the last time he ever called her Laila.
    Three hours later they reached Mala. Later she said that the hyenas had been the warning sign that her days in Mala would begin with misfortune and end in misfortune too, but she ignored the sign.

20. Sarka’s Fever
    After her early death in 1920, the villagers spoke ill of Sarka. Years before her death, they said, she had betrayed George Mushtak and
Mala by encouraging the reapers to revolt. But Sofia the midwife defended her, saying it was her husband’s fault. A week before the birth of her first child, Sarka had fallen sick with a strange fever. It lasted two days, and she had talked nonsense. Then, soon after the delivery of the baby, she fainted and lay unconscious for hours. That had been with Salman, and later it was the same with her second child Hasib. And at Hasib’s birth, said Sofia, when the young woman came back to her senses after several hours, she herself had heard her making sounds like a wounded animal for half a day. No one could understand her. With her third child, her daughter Malake, Sarka fell into a dreadful state of derangement for a while. She screamed that her husband would hate the girl and kill her because she had the mark of a crescent moon just below her left breast, like her mother. As an experienced midwife, Sofia told George Mushtak that he should either stop getting his wife pregnant or take her to doctors in the city, but he just said angrily, “Women’s foolishness!” Sarka, he said, had nine lives, like a cat, and could bear twenty children. At the birth of their fourth child Elias, however, she fainted away again, and when she regained consciousness she didn’t recognise anyone for a while. After that she was afraid of the baby, and cried out that he was an elephant. At this point Sofia guessed that the woman had lost her wits, but George Mushtak still wouldn’t hear of it.
    â€œThe fever’s eaten her brain away,” said the midwife, and she thought that was the only reason why Sarka’s husband was able to forgive her everything later. “When she came back she was out of her mind, just a miserable creature deserving not punishment but pity.”

21. The Elm Tree
    The great elm tree, with the rotten half that burned down at Easter in 1953, had a story that