The Haj - Leon Uris [54]
There were sixteen boys and no girls in the school, from age eight to twelve. I was the youngest but determined to be a great scholar because my alternative was the lowest job in the family, that of the goatherd. No one else wanted to learn as badly as I did, and often the other boys would fling me to the ground and beat me to try to make me stop studying so hard.
The teacher was Mr. Salmi, a skinny, nervous man with a shiny bald head and a thread of moustache. He seemed to get more pleasure in using the blackboard pointer for beating us than he did in pointing out problems. Being the son of Haj Ibrahim, I did not get nearly the number of backside strokings as the other boys, but that only made them take out more vengeance on me in the yard. Within a few months I realized I had to be able to hold my own or be beaten out of the school.
I was never without a pocketful of stones and I could throw them as straight and as hard as the meanest Shi’ite Moslem rioting in the streets. I was very good. One day, when things had gotten particularly nasty for me, I filched one of my father’s fine daggers from his armoire and hid it under my dress. That day when I was cornered in the yard, I flashed the dagger in desperation and swung it and barely scratched the face of the leader. They didn’t bother me much after that.
We had only a few textbooks. Sometimes four of us had to use one book at the same time. Our courses were limited. Mr. Salmi was amazed at how quickly I learned. Often, when Hagar came to fetch me, Mr. Salmi would pat my head and tell her I was gifted by Allah. Mr. Salmi was the second adult man to ever pat my head, because we were mostly ignored by adults. Once my father did pat my head when I proved he was being cheated by Kamal and Uncle Farouk. I can never forget the touch of Mr. Salmi’s hand. It felt very good. However, when we were alone and he patted my head, it made me very nervous because Mr. Salmi always gave me a strange look at the same time.
By the time I was nine I had memorized many surahs, or chapters, of the Koran. I practiced in all my free moments, so I could multiply and even do long division in my head without use of a pen and paper.
Aside from the Koran, there seemed to be two main topics of discussion. Out in the yard all the boys spoke about was fucking. The older boys bragged endlessly about their escapades while the younger boys listened to them in awe. I saw through them. They were making it all up. Even though I knew they were lying, I realized that it was important for them to make a manly impression. In fact, making a manly impression seemed to be the most important part of adult men as well. In Tabah, whenever I came into a group of older boys and unmarried men, all they talked about was fucking. Until I went to school all I ever heard about it was that it was dirty, dangerous, and against Allah’s will. I knew there had been feuds between our own clans for years over boys and girls who merely looked at each other with passion. Touching a girl could be the cause of a fist fight or even a murder. In the yard one day one of the boys told us how his brothers had murdered their sister because the family had suspected her of fornicating without being married and she had dishonored them. I heard that it had happened in Tabah also, before I was born.
While the glories of sex were extolled all the time in the school yard, just the opposite was told in Tabah. ‘Stay away from the girls; don’t touch a girl, don’t smile at a girl, don’t play with a girl, don’t speak to a girl except on actual village matters. The honor of the family depends on keeping your sister a virgin. The honor of your own manhood depends entirely on your wife having her virginity on the wedding night.’
It was so powerfully ingrained in us that boys and girls were absolutely frightened of one another. Yet