by Rafik Schami
When Nagib left, Farid unobtrusively followed him back to their seats. “I was looking for you,” he said when they were sitting comfortably next to each other again. Grandfather avoided his inquiring gaze. Some time later, when Farid had almost forgotten this incident, he inadvertently overheard a fierce quarrel between his mother and his grandmother. Claire was defending her father, while Grandmother was talking angrily about Grandfather’s liking for young men. It was downright scandalous, she cried. Claire didn’t want to tell her son what it was all about. Grandmother was always imagining things, she said briefly, and wouldn’t allow her poor father the smallest pleasure.
“She ought to have married my Papa and you ought to have married yours, and then we’d all have been happy,” the boy speculated out loud.
Claire looked at him, her eyes wide. “You may well be right, but time decided otherwise. Mama and I have to love our own husbands.”
It was Josef who explained to him. “If what your grandmother says is true, it means your grandfather fucks boys.”
Farid didn’t understand. “How?” he asked, baffled.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake, don’t you know anything? Or has God sent me an innocent angel? How? How? How many orifices does a man have? Ears and nostrils wouldn’t be much use, right? So what’s left? Your mouth and your bum, idiot.”
75. At the Barber’s
The best barber in the Christian quarter was Michel, a distant cousin of Claire’s. Like all men of good standing, Farid’s and Josef’s fathers went to him. His customers even included the Catholic Patriarch and the bishop. Grandfather Nagib went to Michel too, and praised his elegance in the highest terms. He had a very handsome salon, said Nagib, and was one of the few barbers to wrap warm, moist towels around his customers’ faces after shaving them, to give the skin that special smooth, supple look.
Michel’s salon had large mirrors and a marble floor. Frescos and Arabic ornamentation adorned the ceiling and walls, and the basins were white marble with brass taps that shone like gold. The barber liked to show people his razors and scissors made in Solingen, which cost a fortune in Damascus. He was also an excellent perfumier, and had a secret book with a thousand and one formulas for fragrances. Men swore by his creations, but Claire laughed at them. “It’s all humbug! Michel just adds a few drops of cinnamon, rose, or carnation extract to ordinary distillates of jasmine and lemon blossom, and the men go wild about them.”
Farid didn’t much like visiting Michel the barber. Twice running he had left the boy to an apprentice, who was a nice lad but inexperienced, and kept pulling his hair. “I’m not letting that stupid little chicken loose on me a third time,” muttered Farid on his way home.
Josef too had rebelled against his father and went to a Muslim barber far away near the Ummayad Mosque, where the customers told so many stories that the barber’s attention was constantly distracted, and he gave Josef some very odd haircuts. The man also drew teeth. Quite often he would draw a painful tooth for a customer who had arrived in haste, wailing, while he left a man with his face already lathered waiting to be shaved. He also dealt in houses, songbirds and smuggled goods. He was just the barber for Josef.
“It’s like being in a movie there,” Farid’s friend enthused. “You get a really crazy haircut, you hear two or three exciting stories, you see a tooth being drawn or a deal done under the counter, you get to hear canaries singing, then you have a glass of tea, and all that for half a lira.” A haircut at Michel’s cost at least twice as much.
Farid went looking for a new barber in the Christian quarter, and found a dimly lit salon very close to his own street. He had never noticed it before, although he had passed the dirty wooden door with the smudged little pane of glass in it countless times. This particular day the barber was busy clearing out the salon, so Farid could see into the dark tunnel-shaped room inside. A naked light bulb hung over an ancient mirror. It was left on all day so that the barber could see what he was doing.
“Can I … can I get my hair cut here?” asked Farid hesitantly.
The old man looked up from his broom. “You of course can. Why not? When I finished.” The man spoke broken Arabic like all first-generation Armenians who had escaped the 1915 massacre and found asylum in Syria.
Farid went in. There were a couple of rickety chairs by the wall, and the place looked poor but very clean. Piles of old magazines lay between the chairs. The first page of all of them was missing. Posters of a green landscape with snow-covered hills in the background hung on one wall. There was a picture of the Virgin Mary in the middle of the wall between the posters.
Two large glass jars of water stood close to the barber’s chair. The bottoms of the jars seemed to have a black deposit in them. When Farid’s eyes had become used to the darkness of the room he saw that they were leeches, which his grandmother thought were very good for treating her inflamed leg. “They suck the blood and take the pressure off places where it hurts,” she claimed. Grandfather Nagib spoke of leeches with revulsion, and called anyone he disliked a leech. Here they were, then, swimming about in the two jars, clinging to the inner walls with their front or back suckers. A shudder ran down Farid’s spine.
The Armenian was having a long conversation with his neighbour and seemed to be in no hurry. To give himself something else to think about, Farid picked up one of the magazines and leafed through it. It showed pictures of King Farouk of Egypt, looking solemn, fat, and short-sighted, and surrounded by beautiful women. All the pictures were in unnaturally garish colours. Another magazine was devoted to all that was strange and wonderful, and seemed to find nothing but curious facts on this earth. A third was full of jokes and cartoons, a fourth was a fashion magazine.
“Read more or hair cut?” asked the Armenian shyly. Farid looked up and put the magazine back on the pile. Time passed quickly, for the barber was an excellent storyteller who was short on grammar, but not on wit and adventurous experiences.
This first visit was the start of a friendship that lasted three years, until one day Farid found the salon closed, and heard from the cobbler next door that Karabet the barber had been knocked down by a truck in the night after a party, and died in hospital soon after the accident.
Until then, however, Farid had been to him every other week, and the Armenian never charged him more than quarter of a lira. Farid paid him half a lira, and added the other half to his pocket money. Claire laughed at his haircut, but she let him do as he liked, and his father never noticed.
Karabet was often sad or angry when he told his own story. He had lost his mother and father and fled from Armenia on foot, almost starving. Only when he described his childhood did his eyes shine. Then he stopped cutting hair for a moment, and talked about the sunny afternoons when he used to visit his grandmother. She always gave him a roll with a filling of pasturma, that delicate air-dried beef with its piquant crust of sharp spices. He would stand with his back to the mirror, miming the enjoyable consumption of an enormous pasturma roll.
Karabet earned more from his leeches, which he raised in a pond near the city, than from cutting hair. He was very clean and took good care of his “little beasties”, as he called them. Doctors, neighbours, even university professors bought them from him in large quantities, paying a lira for ten leeches.
It was in Karabet’s salon that Farid learned of the deposition of the king of Egypt, and in the tattered magazines he read about his comfortable life in exile in Rome and St. Moritz. He often went to the salon just to read the magazines. Sometimes Karabet asked him curiously what was in them. He couldn’t read them himself, but was given them free by a newsagent once they were several weeks out of date. And when a new supply came he didn’t throw the old ones away with the garbage, but passed them on to a neighbouring grocer who carefully folded them to make paper bags.
Farid felt safe in the dark salon, as if he were in a deep cavern. There were seldom any other customers, and those who did come were old Armenians who engaged in heated debate with
Karabet. Here, in this secluded shop, the boy learned to know the world through pictures. Until now life outside his own experience had been only sound and words to him. Elias read nothing but his newspaper, and seldom picked up a book. Claire was a passionate reader of novels. Only years later did she too discover the world of illustrated magazines.
In Karabet’s salon Farid saw photographs from distant lands: wonderful beaches, mountains, deserts, lavishly laid tables, exotic fruits, and all in colour. Actors and politicians, scientists and daring adventurers suddenly had faces too, and he looked at them so often that he felt almost familiar with them.
76. Cats and Bandits
The banisters on the staircase were a metre away from the roof of the aniseed warehouse, and the drop between them was four metres. Once Farid had landed safely on the warehouse roof he could make his way to the gang’s meeting place unobserved. The other four members walked over the flat rooftops of Damascus too, light of foot and soundless as cats, and met in the attic, which had been disused for years. A large wooden table and a few old chairs had been stored up there for ever. The owners of the building never came up to the attic, and several steps were missing from the stairway leading up from the courtyard of the whole large property.
At Farid’s second meeting, Josef brought out a fat book with a black cover. It contained descriptions of all the secret societies in the world. He never said how he came by such books. Some nights he read chapter after chapter aloud, while the others sat on the large chairs with their legs tucked under them, listening. Farid never met anyone who read aloud better than Josef, either before that time or after it. His husky voice increased the sense of mystery and made his hearers shiver. When he stopped for breath, the air was crackling with the boys’ desire to hear what came next.
At such moments Farid felt how easily he could take off from the earth and fly, light as a feather, to the times and places that Josef brought to life. He felt a particularly close link with the boy on those nights, one that he never felt later with other friends, even those who shared his hiding places when he went underground.
Their tasks were carefully allotted. Azar was responsible for inventions. Josef called him “Gaber”, after the inventor of algebra. Suleiman was to keep on the alert for any rumours. He was nicknamed “Bat”, because he listened to everything in silence. Josef himself was responsible for research into conspiracies and secret societies, and Suleiman dubbed him “Massoni”, freemason. Farid was given what he himself thought far too grand a title, but Josef, who thought he was very brave, gave him the job of defending the gang and called him “Kamikaze”. Rasuk was to report news, and was called just “Journalist”. Their names stuck even when the gang broke up.
Meetings always went on until dawn. Then the boys slipped off over the rooftops, like cats returning from their nocturnal rendezvous, and back to their beds.
77. A Series of Coups
When day dawned over Damascus on 31 March 1949, two armoured cars followed by two jeeps and four army trucks coming from the south reached the Old Town, where they divided into two groups. An armoured car, a jeep, and two trucks drove to the Prime Minister’s house, the other vehicles went to the radio station.
When the armoured car braked sharply outside the Prime Minister’s house, the soldier on sentry duty woke abruptly from an uneasy doze. A sturdily built colonel climbed out of the car. The sentry saluted.
“This is a coup,” said the colonel. The soldier didn’t know what that meant. It was the first time in Arab history that anyone had mentioned such a thing.
“Shall I wake His Excellency?” asked the soldier uncertainly.
“No need,” replied the colonel, turning to his own soldiers, who were now standing to attention. “Fetch him out,” he shouted excitedly.
Two men ran past the sentry into the palace and up the stairs. After a short time the Prime Minister could be heard swearing. Accompanied by the two soldiers, he came out of the house and stared at the colonel without a word. He knew the man: Husni Hablan was an unprincipled servant of the French who had also been in touch with the German Nazis in secret. A worthless character.
The Prime Minister was the scion of an ancient and aristocratic Damascene family, and had insisted on getting correctly dressed before going outside with the soldiers.
“You’ll go on trial for this insult. And you won’t get out of jail again this time,” he finally said, in angry tones. Like the sentry on duty, he failed to understand the situation.
Husni Hablan laughed. “You and your trials – you can lick my arse! I’m the law now, and you’ll be going to jail yourself because I say so.”
The Prime Minister was deeply offended by the colonel’s language. “Take him away,” ordered the leader of the coup, and the soldiers, though still rather hesitantly, led away the man who had just been their prime minister. As if dazed, he walked to the jeep and sat down in his black suit between two unwashed soldiers.
“And now for that other idiot,” cried the officer, telling his column to drive to the hospital where the seriously ill President was waiting for a stomach operation.
Soon the ten men who until now had been the most important people in the state found themselves in prison. That same morning the radio station broadcast some Austrian marching music and then the first communiqué from Husni Hablan, leader of the coup. The Damascenes, who had always hated their governments, rejoiced and danced for days.
Colonel Hablan moved into the palace with his wife and promoted himself to Field Marshal two weeks later. When he discovered from an illustrated magazine that field marshals always carried a baton, he ordered one made of pure gold from a jeweller. The baton, Hablan decreed, was to be large and its shape unique. But the jeweller, though he was pleased to have the order, had never seen a field marshal’s baton in his life, so he modelled it on a rolling pin that he happened to have bought the previous day because he liked its shape.
The Syrians, with their talent for ridiculing all their rulers, said the dictator was under his wife’s thumb. She was always waiting for him with a rolling pin when he came home drunk after visiting whores, and now he’d show her a thing or two!
Husni Hablan acclaimed his own rise to power enthusiastically and often, especially at the American and French embassies. But he soon sensed that the French and Americans wanted to keep him down. He turned away from these allies, feeling suspicious of them. Then he met Anton Saade, an ambitious young adventurer who admired and tried to emulate Hitler. His supporters called themselves Syrian Nationalists, wore black shirts, and copied the swastika as their symbol, but giving it rounded corners that made it look like a toy windmill. The ambitious Saade wanted to unite Lebanon, Syria, parts of Palestine, Iraq, and Jordan under Syria’s leadership. As dictator of Damascus, Hablan applauded the young nationalist’s brilliant idea, and hoped for more respectful treatment from the French and Americans once it was a fait accompli.
Saade was a fanatic, capable of anything, an intellectual with ambitious political plans but no experience of armed conflict. His first attempt to occupy a police station in the mountains of Lebanon failed miserably. His men were shot down, he himself escaped to Damascus, and fled to the protection of his patron Hablan.
Soon after that, however, the American ambassador called on Hablan and told him brusquely that, as the new ruler of Syria, he had embarked upon an extremely dangerous venture. Lebanon was part of the French protectorate, and if he did not hand the terrorist Saade over to the Lebanese at once the United States couldn’t protect him any longer.
Hablan was frightened, and he did indeed deliver his ally up to the Lebanese, who executed Saade within twenty-four hours, even before the man who was such a threat to them could give away his contacts, naming any persons and governments behind his movement. Anton Saade’s death for his ideal made him a martyr to his followers. The Syrian Nationalists, who were politically insignificant but well organized and shrank from nothing, now had a new enemy: the cowardly Husni Hablan.
On 14 August 1949, a hundred and thirty-seven days after his coup, the dictator was overthrown. It was just like a movie. A troop of soldiers marched into the capital. To avoid bloodshed the head of the secret service, one of those involved in the new coup, got in touch with the lieutenant commanding the guard of the presidential palace. The lieutenant received a large sum of money for unobtrusively disappearing that morning and telling his men to keep the peace until he was back.
The Field Marshal was still asleep when the troop arrived at the palace. Colonel Dartan, leader of the coup, sent a young first lieutenant to Hablan. The name of this athletic officer was Mansur, he was a loyal supporter of the executed Anton Saade, and he thirsted for revenge. Mansur drew his pistol and stormed up the broad marble stairway. Colonel Hablan was just coming out of his bedroom in a rage when the young, powerful officer in his camouflage gear reached the landing. Before the colonel found out what all this noise meant, the lieutenant’s large hand, the hand of a farmer’s son, landed on his cheek. The small, stocky dictator lost his balance and fell to the floor. “That’s what you get for betraying the martyred Anton, you son of a whore!”
The dictator shouted for help, imbuing his words with all the weighty importance of the state, only to discover that the state wasn’t at all important now. Only his wife went to stand by him, but she was sent back. Pale as death, she obeyed.
First Lieutenant Mansur kicked Hablan to start him going down the stairs. The dictator, stumbling, cursed, and begged, and when he reached the bottom his face was bleeding.