by Rafik Schami
92. Going to Church
Farid’s had strange feelings when he went to church. He took little notice of the Mass itself; in spite of the incense and gorgeously coloured vestments, it left him cold. But his gaze strayed, and when it fixed on one of the pictures on the walls, he wandered back in time to the dramatic events recorded there in oils.
It was obligatory for the pupils at the elite Catholic school to show up in the school yard washed and neatly dressed on Sundays, and then proceed two abreast to the church. He was happy enough to go, but he didn’t like having his presence checked on the way into church every Sunday. Anyone who didn’t come was punished first thing in the morning on Monday in front of the whole school. Only Muslims and Jews were excused attendance at Mass.
For years he made the church service into a memory game. He divided the Mass up to fit the fifty kilometres of road between Damascus and Mala. Both Mass and the journey to Mala lasted about an hour. The idea of the game was to suit every sentence spoken or act performed in the service to one of the various places that the bus passed on the way to Mala. Farid assigned a village, a factory, a ruin, or a tree to every kyrie eleison and every hymn.
He also liked to imagine the bus constantly losing parts of itself along the way, cutting curves so that women and children screamed and the chickens who always travelled under the seats with their feet tied flapped their wings. And when his bus finally reached Mala, clattering, hooting its horn and raising dust, he was glad because the church service was over.
But after a while his imaginary bus ride bored him, and he found wandering among the pictures and statues in the church more exciting. For almost three years he always sat in the same place, a pew with a good view of almost all the paintings hanging near the altar.
He liked the angels best. They were not gentle but often looked positively violent, armed with swords, spears, and fire. They were strange beings, their faces radiating feminine charm, while their bodies and posture were warlike and virile. For Farid, however, their greatest fascination lay not in this contradiction but in imagining how it would feel to be such a creature himself, both airy and of the earth, able to walk on foot or rise in the air with powerful wings, free of all earthly bonds.
He had favourite pictures, but the light decided which painting or which figure attracted his attention on any given Sunday. However, the great cross behind the altar where Jesus had died with an infinitely sorrowful expression on his face was always at the centre. The letters I.N.R.I. stood above the Saviour’s head, and Farid always tried to understand this word INRI as a secret message.
Every time he saw the crucified Jesus he couldn’t help thinking of his friend Kamal Sabuni, who like a few other sons of prosperous Muslim families went to the elite Christian school. Kamal thought Christianity interesting, but he could make nothing of the crucifixion of a God who could have turned the entire Roman Empire into a swamp and the Caesars and their soldiers into ants, just by lifting his little finger. And the young Muslim thought the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost a very strange idea.
“Muslims are too primitive to understand it,” said Farid’s father, but even he couldn’t explain the Holy Ghost, although he knew a lot about religion.
INRI. What message lay behind it? The religious instruction teacher at school explained the meaning of the letters in Arabic: Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. But that wasn’t mysterious enough for Farid. Why did INRI have such an effect on him?
“It was all part of the big theatrical show,” said Josef portentously. “He had to be killed in the Roman way. They were the rulers, so the notice had to be written in their language.”
In his mind’s eye, as Josef talked, Farid saw Pilate the Roman governor standing pale, slender-boned, and full of revulsion before the rabble of what, to him, was a strange and dusty province.
“Pilate found himself on a kind of stage,” Josef went on, “facing a trembling young man, and he, the Roman, quite liked him: a young Easterner condemned to death and abandoned by his whole clan. So there stood sensitive Pilate, a man who didn’t like the death penalty, and opposite him was a young revolutionary who simply wanted to get dying over and done with and didn’t even notice when he was offered a way out. Anyway, but for the Romans his death wouldn’t have had any INRI or the huge symbolical weight of the cross. Jesus would have died a miserable death by stoning, that was the usual kind of execution in the Middle East at the time. A heap of stones as a symbol wouldn’t have lasted for even a century. But,” said Josef, lowering his voice as he always did when he was about to broach the subject of conspiracies, “I.N.R.I. didn’t just mean Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudae-orum, it was a coded message to the Romans saying: Iustum necare reges Italiae: It is just to kill the kings of Italy. That’s what it says in this book,” concluded Josef, showing Farid a work about Italian secret societies.
93. Saying Goodbye
“Parents are weird,” said Josef. “They never ask if you want to be born, they just go ahead and produce you. And they don’t often ask any children they already have if they want a new baby in the family. They have it off with each other and expect the rest of the family to be glad. But in terms of the actual results, the cost of those five minutes of pleasure would give even a math teacher goose bumps.
I mean, what harm did I ever do Rimon and Madeleine for them to dump me in this house full of females? Did I ask them to do it? I’d have liked to be an only child with two ordinary parents, mother and father, and then I’d have some peace now. ‘Mind what you’re doing, Josef! That’s not a thing to say to a girl! Josef, dear, we don’t say that kind of thing when there are women in the room! Josef, that’s no way to speak to your sister! Josef! Josef! Josef! The hell with their Josef! He’s not me. I’m not him. I’ve been secretly calling myself Jacob for some time, so when they call for Josef I don’t feel as if it’s me they want.
And what about your own respected father? Did he ask the rest of us if he could put you in a monastery? He’d have had a shock if he did. Elias Mushtak, sir, we’d have said, we don’t give a damn for your monks. Leave Farid here with us. He hates the monastery idea. We don’t mind praying for the elm tree that burned down, but leave your son here. I’m just beginning to like him. But what does your good father go and do?
I overheard Madeleine and Claire talking yesterday, and they’re dead against it too, but they don’t get a chance to open their mouths.”
Josef looked up, and for the first time ever Farid saw tears in his tough friend’s eyes. This was at the beginning of June 1953, a week before he left for the monastery.
BOOK OF LAUGHTER I
The world of the imagination welcomes children more kindly than their parental home.
DAMASCUS, 1940 – 1953
94. Damascus
Damascus isn’t so much a city, a place marked in an atlas, as a fairy tale clothed in houses and streets, stories, scents and rumours.
The Old Town has fallen victim to epidemics, wars and fire countless times in its eight thousand years of history, and for want of anywhere better was always rebuilt on the same site. The hand that has moulded Damascus to this day was that of a Greek town planner, Hippodamos of Miletus. He divided the city into strictly geometrical quarters with fine streets, all laid out at right angles. The Greeks loved straight lines, whereas the Arabs preferred curves and bends. Some say it has something to do with their exhausting journeys straight across the desert. A bend shortens the distance, at least for the eye. Others claim that life is expressed in curves: the olive tree bows under the weight of its fruits, a pregnant woman’s belly is curved, the branches of a palm tree form a rounded shape. The old Damascenes had a more prosaic explanation: the more bends in your streets, the easier they are to defend.
Once you start talking about Damascus you must be careful not to founder, for Damascus is a sea of stories. The city knows that, so for all the Arab love of winding streets and alleys it retains a single Straight Street, which is called just that. It is the g
uideline and point of reference for every walk and every story. If the countless bends in the winding alleys confuse you, then you can always turn back to Straight Street. It’s an outsize compass that for over three thousand years has shown people the way from east to west.
Once upon a time, they say, it was over twenty metres wide, a magnificent avenue with columns and arcades. But the traders moved their stalls further and further out into the street from both sides, and today parts of it are not even ten metres wide. The traders of Damascus are masters of the technique of land-grabbing. They unobtrusively extend the area occupied by their stalls with a crate of vegetables, a little pyramid of inlaid boxes, or a tray of pistachios put out on the sidewalk for a few hours to dry in the sun. Then they put up a light-weight wooden stand and cover it with an even lighter cloth, to protect their wares when the sun is too hot. Once passers by and the police are used to the look of it, the wooden stand sometimes falls over, and the trader finds himself obliged to replace the wobbly structure with something more solid. Then the whole thing gets a door, so that he can enjoy his siesta without fearing thieves, and soon there’s a small window with a curtain over it. A week later the thin wood of the construction has been reinforced as if magically with mud brick, and after a covert nocturnal operation the little building is suddenly bright with whitewash, and its doors and window frames are freshly painted blue. Soon there’s yet another vegetable crate standing outside it, just to attract the customers’ attention. The police officer on duty grumbles, but he is placated with much volubility and a cup of coffee – until the time comes when he is transferred somewhere else. And the new policeman could swear that there’d always been a bend in the road here.
Damascus has seen and endured Arabs, Romans, Greeks, Aramaics, and another thirty-six peoples of different cultures. They ruled the city in succession, or sometimes at the same time, and no race has ever moved on without leaving its own mark on Damascus, so it has become a historical patchwork, a lost luggage office of cultures. Many compare it to a mosaic with pieces that have been fitted together by travellers over a period of eight thousand years.
Its builders have given the Damascenes all kinds of presents. Here you see a Greek column; a Roman bridge; a modest wall built with stones from the palaces of past millennia. There you find plants brought from Africa by slaves. To this day you seem to hear words in the street that were spoken by foreigners hundreds of years ago. And you meet people, whether vegetable sellers or doctors, whose forebears came from Spain, the Yemen, or Italy, but who still think of themselves as genuine Damascenes. The odd thing is that they’re right.
Damascus has been a fruitful oasis in the desert of Arabia. At the end of the 1940s several large textiles companies were founded near the city, many schools were opened, the university was enlarged, and newspapers and magazines filled the kiosks, bearing witness to the cultural wealth of Damascus. Cinemas became fashionable. They all had special days when women could go, and sometimes a man in love would wait in the street for three hours just to set eyes on his beloved when she came out. He would have to take the greatest care that no one noticed him smiling at her, but if she returned his smile it was like a foretaste of Paradise.
95. The Cat-Lover
Grandfather held his grandson’s hand tight, for he was afraid of losing little Farid in the crowded souks. He stopped at the entrance to a caravanserai and spoke to a spice merchant. Meanwhile Farid stared curiously at the interior of the great building. Horses and mules were tied up in the yard, and he saw many porters hurrying into large storerooms full of sacks. They carried the sacks out on their shoulders as if they hardly weighed anything, and loaded them up on the carts waiting in the yard. A pale man in a dark suit wrote down what the porters had stacked on the carts. A driver cracked his whip and the horses, who had been dozing with their heads bent, woke up and trotted out. The driver shouted to people to clear the road, so that they wouldn’t get their clothes dirty. It worked: a passage was opened up for his vehicle, and then the crowd closed up again to continue their conversations.
Suddenly Farid saw a camel butcher in a distant corner of the caravanserai. Camel meat is not eaten in the Christian quarter, so Farid had never before seen anything like this, and he was never to forget the horror of the scene.
The tall, distinguished-looking animal stood at the door of the butcher shop. It was looking at Farid, its eyes wide with fear. A dwarfish butcher was whetting his big knife while he talked to another man stitching jute sacks nearby.
With difficulty, two men finally got the camel to kneel down. The animal was still looking at Farid as if pleading for his help. Then the butcher passed his big knife over the camel’s throat, as if he were drawing a bow over violin strings. Blood spurted, and fell into a huge bowl. The camel’s empty eyes now gazed into eternity. The man stitching the sacks didn’t even give the scene a glance. He turned the jute sack he had just finished inside out again, and then added it to a large pile of other sacks.
Farid and his grandfather strolled on from the caravanserai through the Qaimariye quarter that had once been the commercial centre of Damascus, and was now a residential area with a few workshops. On the way he saw a strange sight. A man was sitting on the floor in the middle of his store, reading aloud from the Koran. About thirty cats surrounded him. They were sitting on his lap, on the shelves, on the floor, and in the display window of the otherwise empty room.
“Does he sell cats?” asked Farid.
“No, no,” said Grandfather. “He’s a holy man who looks after all the local cats.”
The cats clambered over the man as he sat there, jumped from his shoulder to the shelves and then back again, but he went on reading undisturbed. Grandfather took a lira bill from his wallet and put it in a copper dish near the entrance.
“My thanks for your kind heart,” said the man, and turned back to his Koran. Three cats crossed the street. Making purposefully for the store, they put their catch of three mice down outside the door and went in. The man looked up.
“Ah, those are their love letters,” he said, and smiled when the mouse in the middle suddenly jumped up and disappeared, quick as a flash, through the window of a cellar on the other side of the road.
“A good actor, that mouse,” said Grandfather, turning home with Farid.
96. The Scooter
Farid was about ten when scooters became the latest craze. Toni, the perfumier Dimitri’s son, was the first to take his out on the street the day after Easter. It was a top-of-the-range model in red-painted metal tubing, and the children stared as if Toni were an astronaut.
Toni often got presents of foreign toys from his father, who travelled the world tracking down new fragrance ingredients, but the scooter was the best yet. The girls, particularly Jeannette and Antoinette, were fascinated. They all wanted a ride with him, and he raced past the envious boys with his girl passengers.
Before the week was up, Azar appeared with a clunking, clattering wooden scooter. Its footboard was joined to the vertical steering handle by simple angle irons, but all the same Azar’s scooter was a successful imitation. The wheels consisted of large, indestructible ball bearings. They made a racket calculated to bring tears of delight to the boys’ eyes. Like Azar himself, the scooter was robust, straightforward, and practical.
“My scooter’s not for girls,” he said, when his sister asked for a ride on it. And it was indeed much harder to steer and keep balanced than Toni’s scooter with its rubber tyres. But it was all his own work.
Farid could hardly sleep for the next few nights. In his dreams he saw himself racing around on a scooter. Once he even had the parrot Coco on his shoulder. Perhaps the parrot featured in his dream because it had stopped talking since the day when Azar went down the road on his scooter, and just made loud squawking sounds in imitation of the noisy ball bearings. A week later the bird’s owner stopped hanging its cage on the window looking out on the street and gave it a view of the interior courtyard as seen from her kitchen w
indow instead.
The local car repair workshops were suddenly swamped with requests for ball bearings. It was only after a long search that Farid found a pair. They were larger than Azar’s, but the larger your wheels the faster you could go.
“You can have them for three afternoons clearing out the workshop, making the men’s tea, and fetching their bread and falafel from the restaurant,” said the owner of the place. “Is it a deal?”
It was definitely a deal. Farid spent three afternoons sweeping, scouring, and polishing the workshop until it was clean and neat, and serving tea, sweetmeats, and fresh water. He made good tea for a ten-year-old. The men and their master were very happy, because Farid never gave them tea in dirty glasses, which was what they were used to. He washed the glasses well, and after the men had drunk their tea he rinsed them out again quickly with hot water, so that they steamed and then shone. He had learned that from his father.
In the end Farid got not just the ball bearings but the fixings he would need for them, as well as hinged steering joints with their pins and screws. But the useful tips the men gave him were better than all these presents. Finally, the workshop owner even handed him a simple prop stand, made out of a small metal rod bent into a U shape.
“Fit that on, and your scooter can stand upright anywhere, proud as a Vespa, and it won’t have to lean against the wall like a tired old bike,” he said. The workshop owner looked like a baddie in an American B-movie Western, but he was kindness itself.
His most junior employee, a young man of equally sinister appearance with tousled hair, surprisingly gave Farid the most valuable item of all: a brake. Neither Toni nor Azar had brakes on their scooters. It was a piece of rubber tyre, and Farid fixed it to the back wheel like a mudguard.