by Rafik Schami
Farid knew Shafika only from hearsay; Josef had once said what a beautiful body she had. After she had offered him a seat she sat down too and asked him to write. He wrote in a kind of daze, for the young woman spoke sadly, in very brief and concentrated language, without any of the usual hackneyed phrases and without repeating herself. She dictated him a wonderful love letter, and he had only to put her words down on paper. The letter was about her loneliness and her longing for her husband, who was working on a building site in Saudi Arabia to pay off the debts he had incurred in Damascus when his little bus company failed.
After an hour the woman fell silent. Her letter covered six pages. Farid stood up when he had addressed the envelope.
“Would you like something to eat?” she asked, without looking at him.
“No, thank you,” he replied. “I’m not hungry. I’ll be happy to write letters for you any time you like.” And with these words he quickly left. He was sorry he hadn’t had a chance to discover whether what Josef said was true and she really did have an enchanting body, and whether, as many said, she smelled of thyme.
When he told his friends later about this commission they laughed at him. “No wonder women invite him in to write letters for them. Our Farid is just a big, innocent baby,” said Josef.
Suleiman looked thoughtfully at Farid. “I think that’s the trick of it,” he murmured.
The beautiful Shafika never asked him to write another letter. Her husband had been angry, she told Farid. He said he was dying a hundred deaths daily there in the hot sand with the Saudis, while she sat in lush, shady Damascus, filling her head with all that nonsense about love as if life were some trashy Egyptian movie.
85. Death
The building next door to Farid’s house had once been very beautiful. You couldn’t tell from outside, for the façade was unpretentious, made of mud brick and wood, like most of the houses in the Old Town. People preferred to keep their riches away from envious eyes. The religious minorities were twice as cautious as the Muslims, for they always had to remember that any display of wealth might injure the vanity of the city governor. Then he would exercise his powers and confiscate a house for the flimsiest of reasons. That had happened to the Jew Josef Anbar, a rich merchant who had a wonderful house built in Damascus. He guilelessly showed his neighbours what he was creating within his four walls. Envious souls among them went straight to the governor claiming that the Jew had said his house would be finer than the governor’s when it was finished. Next day Josef Anbar was arrested and the house confiscated.
So a wise man let only friends and family see his domain. The handsome architecture of the house next to Farid’s was a wonderful interplay of form and colour. The arches around the inner courtyard on the first floor and the mingled pink and white stones of the columns and walls made it look larger, while their recurring patterns and lines delighted the eye. An octagonal fountain of coloured marble stood in the centre of the courtyard.
The man who built this house, Djamil Khuri, had inherited a large fortune. His father, a ship-owner, came from Egypt, and when riots broke out there in the nineteenth century and Christians were at risk he sold his shipping company and went to Damascus, where he grew even richer as a money changer. He married the daughter of an old but poverty-stricken Damascene family. His wife gave him a son, this Djamil Khuri, but before the baby was a month old his mother took her own life. No one could explain why, since she had always seemed happy. Only after her death was it discovered that she had been forced to marry the rich Egyptian. Her family owed him a lot of money.
The suicide and the rumours about it hurt her husband, who had thought he was giving his wife a Paradise on earth. Soon after her death he began drinking, and he was dead within a year.
His son Djamil was brought up by his grandmother. He was cared for well enough, but no one could take his burden from him. As a young man he swore that he would never marry, for he never wanted to do to any child of his own what his parents had done to him. He left the house and all his money to the Catholic Church on condition that the rooms would be let only to poor, needy Christians.
More than ten families had lived there since Djamil’s death, and the building was now in very poor repair. Firewood and drums of heating oil were stored where the fountain once used to play. The walls were filthy, and many window panes had been replaced by cardboard or plywood.
“They’re not poor, they’re just mean,” said Josef, when Farid said he supposed the state of the house was due to its tenants’ poverty. “They won’t pay a piastre for repairs. Those are cunning folk – they live there for almost nothing, pretending to the Church to be poor.”
But Josef was being spiteful. The young widow Salma, who lived on the first floor near the way into the building, really was as poor as a church mouse. Claire and Antoinette’s mother Hanan used to give her clothes and sometimes food or money. Even when Salma’s husband was alive they had been so poor that they could hardly feed their six children.
And then her husband died one day without any warning. Salma’s mother and sister happened to be visiting at the time, and when news of the death reached one of her husband’s brothers he and his wife arrived in haste. After the scanty supper she gave them they stayed, even though there was so little space. Salma put her guests to sleep with the children in the main room, and she herself slept with her sister in the next room, where her dead husband was lying. It was a hot summer, and in the night the corpse began to smell of decomposition. Only slightly, but Salma picked it up. If you live in cramped conditions you’re quick to notice any unpleasant smell. She cursed death, who had robbed her of her husband and left her alone with the children. Towards morning her eyes closed with exhaustion.
86. On the Rooftops
From Josef’s room, you could reach the flat roof down a stairway, and from there you had a clear view of the big building next door and into most of its rooms.
“All the doors and windows are left open, and the walls are so thin that neighbours hear you coughing, farting, and snoring. They know what you eat, what you say, and what you want to keep secret,” said Josef, laughing. His rooftop had a balustrade around it, so he was allowed to sleep up there on hot nights. “You never saw such things. A movie without a screen. A new story in every window,” he assured his friend.
Farid’s father despised the Damascene habit of sleeping out of doors in summer. Those who did, he said, were all uncivilized Bedouin who wanted to feel they were still in the desert, as if no one had ever invented houses. Claire didn’t share his views, but she dared not contradict her husband. However, she told Farid that, to her mother’s annoyance, she had sometimes spent summer nights with her father on their own roof as a girl. She thought it delightful, and had felt very close to the moon up there.
Elias Mushtak greatly respected the Rasmalo family, so he had no objection to his son’s spending the night with Josef now and then. Unlike Claire, however, he never discovered that the two boys slept out on the roof together.
Farid felt as if he were in a theatre with several different stages when he first spent a night in the open air with Josef. Somewhere in the building opposite a play would begin, build to its climax, break off abruptly or continue after a short interval, while a second and then a third drama began in parallel on one of the stages above or below the first. Farid’s marvelling gaze wandered back and forth. The characters in the dramas were quarrelling, playing, weeping, loving, laughing. Josef knew the programme by heart; he could say when and where men and women made love, how they did it, and how long for. To Farid it was all entirely new.
“He screws her seven times a week,” commented Josef as they saw the traffic cop Maaruf through one of the semi-circular windows above the doors. He was thrusting vigorously into his wife as she knelt in front of him. She was pleading, her face twisted in pain, begging him to stop, but the man pushed himself in harder than ever, slapping her buttocks with the flat of his hand. The woman began to weep.
“Same thing e
very night. Her screams make him even randier. She doesn’t fancy him at all, she loves Said who lives on the second floor next to Fahime,” said Josef, pointing to the big corner room, whose tenant was walking up and down in it, wearing a pair of shorts. “She’ll be there with him in exactly half an hour,” he prophesied.
The attractive man in shorts was a bachelor from the north. He was blessed with an athletic body, almost blond hair, and sky-blue eyes, but he was not particularly bright, and he was also regarded as rather suspect. It was thought that he worked for the secret service on its lowest level, so people avoided him. All the same, women cast him amorous glances.
“You’re joking!” Farid protested. “She must be half dead of pain down there, she won’t want to do anything but rest.”
Josef looked at him with a supercilious expression. “You don’t know anything about women. They have eight souls and the Devil has only seven, so he can never get hold of a woman. She takes refuge in her eighth soul where the Devil can’t reach her any more,” he said, just as Fahime put on the light and began watering her flowers. “Look, she always waits until it’s cool. It’s better for the plants then,” whispered Josef.
Fahime lived in a two-roomed apartment with her husband and three children. Like many Damascenes, she had the art of making ordinary cans, drums, tin containers, and old buckets into the most fascinating colourful pots for flowers, and she had adorned her windows, the stairs and the little terrace with them. Cacti, oleander, small-leaved basil, avocados, jasmine, hibiscus and carnations grew and flourished in these containers.
Even as Farid’s eyes were wandering over all the plants, a fight broke out between two girls in a bedroom to the left of the stairs up to the second floor. Miserly Masud lived there with his wife, who was twenty years his junior, and their two girls, who took after their mother and squinted just like her too. They were having a pillow fight and were in the middle of it when Masud ran into the room, slapped their faces hard and switched off the light. The girls whimpered at first, but then Farid saw them lying side by side in the faint light of a small electric bulb, laughing quietly but heartily at their father’s fury.
At the same time, on their left, the male nurse Butros was quarrelling with his wife over a broken vase. He was trying desperately to stick it together again. Josef giggled. “Maybe he put his prick in that vase.” It was said that the male nurse would stick his penis into any orifice he chanced to find. But his wife was a particularly devout woman, who dressed their three daughters in such old-fashioned clothes that the girls looked like old women before their time. The neighbours often told tales of fights raging in the marital bedroom. Butros wanted to sleep with his wife every night, but she wouldn’t let him.
A narrow corridor led past the male nurse’s apartment to the old sailor Gibran’s room. It was dark in there.
“What did I tell you?” whispered Josef, when something suddenly flitted past on the dark first floor of the house next door.
“What? I can’t see anything,” said Farid.
“She’s waiting down there for Fahime to draw her curtains and go to bed,” said Josef.
Fahime was the only tenant in the building who had thick curtains. The others had either none at all or very threadbare curtains that showed more than they concealed.
Ten minutes later Fahime put out her light, and next minute Samira the traffic cop’s wife, barefoot, was on her way upstairs to the second floor. Silent as a shadow, she floated into Said’s room.
“You’ve never in your life seen a dance of love like this,” whispered the excited Josef. His voice held a promise of much to come. The electric light in Said’s room went out, then there was the brief flicker of a match, and a candle was lit. Its light was so faint that Farid could only guess at the lovers’ bodies. They both kept completely quiet, for the window was open and the curtain thin.
At last the game of love began. The man carried his lover around the room, and she twined her arms and legs around him. He danced with her, pressed her against the wall, laid her tenderly on the bed, lay down on her only to pick her up again as if she weighed no more than a feather. He whirled around in a circle with her, and then sat down on a chair while the woman rode him, perched on his lap. Her upper body moved rhythmically up and down, as if she were sitting on a trotting horse. After a while the man carried her around the room and slowly let her down to stand on her feet again, then embracing her like a dancer from behind. Farid was sure that Samira was smiling; he knew her face. She was pale, with white skin and blue-black hair.
How long they danced and made love in their dancing he didn’t know later, for suddenly old Gibran’s window caught his eye. It was said that the old man had seen both sides of the world. He was wrecked and all adrift, but the Catholic Church had caught him and found him a room in the big building. He had certainly declined to spend a single night in the St. Anastasius Old Folks’ Home. Gibran had once been a sea captain, so the story went, and had made a great deal of money, especially by arms smuggling, but then he lost it all by night in the taverns and brothels of harbour towns and went back empty-handed to Damascus, no better off than when he left the city forty-five years ago as a young seaman.
Gibran told a great many stories, but most of them were lies and often macabre too. However, the young people of the Christian quarter loved him. He was ready to tell a story in return for a cigarette, and if there were women in the story he would want an extra five piastres to buy a shot of arrack. If he was drunk he would tell stories for free, but he needed half a litre of high-proof arrack to get drunk in the first place.
That August night Gibran was walking around in circles, looking at a picture on the wall, weeping, laughing, talking to the invisible hearers who seemed to populate his room.
“What do you bet he’s talking about the crusades again, or his love affairs in Hawaii or Honolulu?” said Josef, who knew the picture on the wall. “All it shows is an ugly old freighter with a tiny little captain waving from somewhere on top of it. Gibran always says that’s him.”
Farid had never visited the old sailor, even though he lived so close. Claire wouldn’t let him. She didn’t like the grubby old man, she didn’t even believe he had ever been to sea. And she said Gibran put too much nonsense about the seafaring life into young people’s heads, more than was good for them.
87. Forbidden Reading
“It’s not suitable for you,” said Elias, when Farid saw him sitting over a fat book one day and asked what he was reading. His father’s repressive reply intrigued him, and he went looking for the book with the brown cover next day. It wasn’t in the modest library in the living room, or lying on any of the tables. Even days later it didn’t reappear. Josef said that when fathers hid books they must be about sex. He’d just have to go on looking for that book, Josef added, and bring it to the attic.
Farid kept wriggling out of the proposition, but Josef didn’t forget it. When he reminded his friend for the third time, Farid decided to search the wardrobe in his parents’ bedroom, although he had never done such a thing before. Somehow that bedroom was taboo. Elias didn’t like to see him there, and Claire herself always contrived to visit Farid in his own room before he thought of entering his parents’.
Heart thudding, he pulled the heavy door of the wooden wardrobe open. Farid suspected that he might find a secret compartment for forbidden books behind it. But the book lay in full view inside the wardrobe, wrapped in a red cloth. It was a book not about sex but about famous murders in history, and it said expressly, under the long title, that it was unsuitable for women and young people.
“That’s because authors usually don’t know the first thing about women,” said Josef. “They ought to live here with a house full of females, like me, then they’d find out what strong nerves women have. We men are weaklings by comparison.”
Then he read aloud. The book contained accounts of over fifty murders and the punishments, some of them very cruel, inflicted on the murderers. One such exe
cution imprinted itself on Farid’s mind for ever. It was for the murder of General Kléber, Napoleon’s representative in Egypt. The murderer was a destitute student aged twenty-three called Suleiman al Halabi, a Syrian fanatic from Aleppo, who had come to Cairo on purpose to kill the victorious unbeliever. He made his way into the well-guarded French headquarters and stabbed him.
The French staged his execution as a grisly theatrical show. Suleiman al Halabi stepped up on the huge stage, watched by thousands of spectators. After nights of torture, he was a pitiful sight. But appearances were deceptive.
French music played, and a cannon shot announced the opening of the show. The verdict was read aloud. Four sheikhs accused of being in the plot were beheaded. That was just the prelude. An officer stepped up and explained that the hand raised against France was to be burned, and the man’s screams were not to arouse any pity among the spectators, for the condemned man deserved none.
Two soldiers placed the man’s right hand in a brazier where a fierce fire was burning and kept it in place until it was charred and dropped off. But Suleiman al Halabi neither screamed nor wept. He stood there as if he were in another world, looking absently at his torturers.
The little man never uttered another sound until the moment of his death, even under further cruel tortures.
The French occupying power took a final revenge on the city that had sheltered a man like Suleiman al Halabi by bombarding the Old Quarter of Cairo with cannon fire. More than eight hundred dead were found among the ruins.
“Compared to the stories in this book,” said Josef as he reached the last page four nights later, “what our teachers call history lessons are pure distilled shit.”
88. The Photograph
If he tried to remember the first time in his life when he seriously rebelled against anyone, he always thought of a little photograph of himself that he had had taken when he was a boy. He had been twelve at the time. The photo looked harmless enough. Farid was gazing into the distance, seen at a slight angle in the manner then usual for photographic portraits. There was a touch of melancholy in his eyes, although his gaze was determined, almost defiant. His mouth had made only a faint attempt to sketch the friendly smile requested by the photographer.