by Rafik Schami
Finally Farid went off with his bag full of metal parts to his cousin George, who was apprenticed to a joiner, a tight-fisted man. Farid waited until the joiner had gone home at midday, and then slipped into the workshop. He didn’t mention the scooter at first, just stood around asking after George’s health and how his family was. As he talked he kept putting the bag down in different places, until his cousin asked what was jingling about inside it. Farid told him it was parts for a scooter, and all he needed now was the wood.
“Why didn’t you say so at once, you idiot?” laughed George, and asked Farid to tell him what the scooter was supposed to look like. That didn’t take long. George abandoned the jobs he had been doing, and within half an hour he had prepared all the wooden parts, tied them up in a bundle, and put them over Farid’s shoulder.
“Now get out before that old skinflint shows up. I guess you can screw it all together yourself, but you’ll have to glue the parts first,” he said, and he gave the boy some adhesive too. Farid ran home. Ran? No, he was so happy that he positively flew. He worked for two hours, and then, feeling pleased with himself, stood back to look at the wonderful scooter he had made.
Finally he helped himself to a small rear mirror from his father’s worn-out old bicycle and fixed it to the left of the steering handle. And his grandfather gave him several small stars and moons made of coloured tin for decoration.
Last of all Farid found a piece of card and wrote out a charm against envious eyes that he had seen on a mirror in his mother’s cousin Michel’s salon, showing the palm of a hand with a blue eye in the middle of it, and an arrow piercing the eye. Under it, in beautiful Arabic script, were the words: May the eye of the envious be blinded. As a barber, Michel had a great fondness for handsome polished glass mirrors. A particularly fine example had once broken soon after a customer said, with envy in his voice and salivating greedily, “What a lovely mirror!” The man was famous for casting envious looks, and people said that if he envied a pigeon he could kill it in flight with his glance.
Farid used shiny brass tacks to fix the oval piece of card with the lucky charm on it to the front of his rather broad handlebars. He painted a sunflower and a canary on the scooter too, and next Sunday, his hair combed and perfumed, in white shirt, blue trousers, and tennis shoes, he took his scooter out into Abbara Alley.
“Terrific!” called Azar, and after taking Farid’s scooter for a ride himself he braked it, balanced on the spot for a minute, and folded the stand down. The pedal scooter stood upright in the street in all its glory. If Azar described something as “terrific”, the other boys all took notice, for it wasn’t easy to satisfy such a gifted handyman.
Less than three weeks later, ten wooden pedal scooters with ball bearing wheels were racing down the street, and the boys’ mothers were cursing the car repair workshops which were to blame for all this racket. And each new scooter was better than the last, so that Farid’s “terrific” construction was soon quite ordinary and occupied only a modest place among them. Now there were scooters with ostrich feathers, with bells and horns, and several with padded seats for little brothers and sisters, or the neighbourhood girls. Farid made a basket for Tutu, a spaniel who enjoyed a ride too.
Khalil was the first to master the art of drinking lemonade while riding a scooter. The bottle was securely fixed in a holder in the middle of the handlebars, and a straw enabled the clever inventor to drink without taking his hands off the steering handle or his eyes off the road.
Soon Abbara Alley wasn’t large enough for so many scooters, so all the boys adopted Josef’s suggestion of moving to parallel Saitun Alley, where Farid lived. The women of Abbara Alley blessed St. Joseph that day.
From then on a wonderful spectacle was to be seen in Farid’s street every Sunday afternoon. Ten boys, all spruced up, rode their scooters in a line two abreast to the forecourt of the Catholic church, and slowly paraded there before the eyes of the girls who, equally smartly dressed, were waiting for the scooters to arrive. The riders dismounted with solemn, almost majestic mien, folded down their prop stands in slow motion, and sat on the stone benches opposite. They crossed their legs and began talking about their scooters.
“Can I have a go on yours? Just to the tobacconist’s and back,” Toni begged humbly one day. He had never let Farid touch a single one of his many toys.
“Yes, okay, but be careful,” said Farid.
“That’s right, you watch out,” called Khalil. “His scooter bites children …”
“… who eat Dutch cheese,” Azar added, laughing. Josef grinned too, and his laughter infected the others too. For the first time Toni’s scooter was left lying on the ground, and no one condescended even to look at it.
97. Hashish
Arabs have all kinds of celebrations, but they never celebrate birthdays. They believe that just makes you grow old faster.
But early in the fifties, upper-class Christians began to adopt the European custom of marking birthdays. Elias, Farid’s father, who was on all the committees of the Catholic Church, had a good business idea: why not encourage rich Christians to make larger donations by celebrating their birthdays publicly? So he found out the dates of birth of the richest Catholics, and took the bishop and six priests into his confidence. The millionaire Bardoni’s secretary, wife and housekeeper knew that he was to be woken early in the morning by the Catholic Pathfinders’ brass band, and the day-long festivities would open with a folk dance performed outside his house. Two newspapers and Radio Damascus had also been told about the forthcoming event.
Then the plan was for the birthday boy to be led in solemn procession, amidst singing and dancing, to the church forecourt, where a festive table would be waiting for him and the guests.
After the meal, a singer was to keep the celebrations going from afternoon until well into the evening, his performance interspersed by occasional songs from the orphanage choir, while the St. Nicholas School for poor Christian children put on an amusing little play, and a sturdy pensioner delivered a rhymed greeting from the Old Folks’ Home.
What with all the organization, Elias was in a state of agitation for days before the birthday. He complained to Claire of the difficulty of teaching Arabs good manners. “They can’t even sing a little song in an orderly way,” he groaned on the Tuesday. “Everyone’s singing by himself, bawling out the tune regardless, no idea of harmony, just as if they were on their own in the desert and had never realized that we live in cities now.”
On Wednesday he was complaining of Bardoni’s powerful housekeeper. “His wife has no objection, oh no, but that old crone doesn’t want him woken by the sound of drums, cymbals, and trombones. Just try telling the bandleader that he must do without one-third of his musicians! But there’s nothing we can do against that woman’s will. Monsieur Antoine Bardoni is her slave. He may shout at his wife, he never shouts at his housekeeper.”
On Friday Elias couldn’t sleep. “There’s an insoluble problem,” he told Claire. “We managed to hire Monsieur Antoine’s favourite singer. His secretary told us that in private the eminent Monsieur Bardoni listens to records by the Egyptian singer Abdulmuttaleb. Amazing! The son of one of our richest Christian families, a fan of this hashish-smoker from Egypt! Well, we were in luck: the singer happens to be in Damascus, appearing in the evenings at the Scheherazade nightclub, where they don’t pay much. So he was glad of the idea of earning something extra, and he agreed. Then comes disaster: he can’t sing, he tells us this afternoon, because he’s clean out of hashish. His head’s empty, would you believe it? He can’t find the melodies, they’ve gone into hiding, or so he claimed – what a childish excuse! – he needs hashish to entice them out of the closets and drawers of his memory. I thought I must be going crazy. A singer who can’t remember his tunes! Would you believe it, he wants to go back to Egypt because he doesn’t know his way around Damascus, and the nightclub owner won’t get him any hashish? Which is understandable, because they come down on you hard for possession
: as little as five grams will get you a life sentence. But if he flies back to Egypt tomorrow the heart goes out of our birthday surprise.”
“Why don’t you just lay in a day’s supply for him?” replied Claire equably. “He can fly anywhere he likes after the event. The main thing for you and your friends is to have him there performing.”
“Where would we get the hashish? Here I am trying to organize a birthday party, that’s all! Do you see me landing in jail for the rest of my life?” Elias laughed bitterly.
“You could always ask my cousin,” said Claire after a moment. “Butros is legal adviser to the CID. He told me they have tons of confiscated hashish there waiting to be destroyed. Why don’t we simply abstract a little of it from the CID offices and give it to the singer? Butros is friendly with the head of the anti-drugs department. He’s won a case for him twice already.”
Bewildered, Elias looked into his wife’s unfathomable eyes. “Then … then call him and ask if he’ll help us out,” he stammered.
Next day Claire came back from the CID headquarters with a lump of best Lebanese hashish the size of a tennis ball. She gave Elias the handkerchief containing her valuable loot. “That would make even an elephant sing,” she said.
Elias turned pale. In Damascus, you could get three life sentences for possession of such a large quantity of hashish. But that evening, when the singer said he’d never smoked such fine hash before, he was happy.
Sunday came at long last, and the party began. Later Elias said the unfortunate outcome was because the first person he met that day happened to be the hunchbacked, one-eyed widow Mathilde, and she had grinned at him and shouted, “It’ll all go wrong!” Elias hated the widow.
“So then the band didn’t play cheerful tunes, it churned out Austrian marching music instead, the stuff they usually broadcast over the radio when there’s a coup. The millionaire was frightened to death and ran down to the cellar in his pyjamas. It was difficult to convince him that it had all been arranged specially for his birthday,” said Elias, taking a sip of water to moisten his dry throat. “Well, so he reluctantly followed the procession to the Catholic church, and he didn’t cheer up until the Patriarch of the Middle East and the Bishop of Damascus welcomed him at the church door. He was pleased as punch then, and the lavish meal was the very best quality. I supplied the cakes and cookies myself, made with the finest butter as usual. But it all still went wrong. The Egyptian singer made for the wide blue yonder before he was due to perform.”
“Why on earth did he do that?” asked the incredulous Claire.
“Because when he’d just smoked his third hashish cigarette, some joker backstage asked if he knew where the stuff came from. When the singer shook his head – he had no idea – that son of a whore whispered, ‘It’s from the CID.’ Then the singer cracked up. Maybe he’d smoked too much hash, or maybe fright turned his brain. Anyway, he started screaming that he’d been lured into a trap and they’d put him in prison. And then he was gone, said he wouldn’t stay in Damascus a moment longer.”
98. The Photographer
Few things fascinated Farid as a child more than photographs. In the first few years after his birth they were rarer than pictures of saints. Seven pictures of the Virgin Mary hung on the walls at home, along with two crosses made from the wood of the olive tree in Jerusalem, which was in great demand. A small statue of St. Anthony of Padua with the child Jesus stood in a niche in the dining room. It was a copy of the famous work by Juan de Juni, and such things were distributed by the Franciscans all over the world. The abbot of the Franciscan monastery had given it to Elias shortly before Farid’s birth, not only in thanks for his generous donation, but because St. Anthony was the patron saint of bakers, and also stood by women in childbirth and helped people to find things they had lost. The abbot enumerated over ten instances in which the saint’s protection had apparently been beneficial, and Elias fervently hoped that Anthony of Padua would both find his keys for him and help Claire in childbirth after all her miscarriages.
However, only three photographs hung in the drawing room: one of Farid’s mother when she was sixteen, another of both his parents, his father in a dark suit and his mother in a white wedding dress. The suit and the wedding dress had been borrowed. The third photo was of Farid himself aged two, in a sailor suit. He was asleep on his mother’s lap, and she was smiling at the photographer. His father stood stiffly beside her, looking gravely past the camera. Behind Farid’s parents stood Grandfather Nagib and Grandmother Lucia. Lucia posed looking as stiff as her son-in-law, but Grandfather was laughing and glancing up with his head on one side.
At the end of the forties, Basil opened the first modern photographic studio in the Old Town. He called it the Studio of Stars, and tried to give his customers a touch of Hollywood gloss when they posed for his camera.
Farid felt there was something mysterious about a photo. The people in it were alive, yet frozen on a piece of paper. But he understood the deep dimension of the magic only when he saw a photographer at work in the street. Farid was just seven that summer, and for some reason his grandfather urgently needed a picture of himself.
“Come on, we’re going to the photographer’s,” he told Farid.
Close to Bab Tuma, three photographers stood in front of their remarkable apparatus, large wooden boxes on adjustable tripods also made of wood. Their customers sat on folding stools in the open air, in front of a wall with a black cloth over it.
Farid and his grandfather had to wait. There were two farmers and a young man in line ahead of them. One of the farmers was cross because he didn’t want to puff out his cheeks as the photographer asked. The photographer snapped at the farmer to do as he was told or his face would look like a crumpled pair of underpants in the photo. The other farmer was afraid that the photograph might steal his soul.
“Don’t worry, it’s like painting,” the photographer assured him.
“But the Prophet forbade it,” explained the man.
The photographer was losing his temper. “The Prophet didn’t need ID to claim a legacy. You do. Take a deep breath and hold it,” he ordered. The man fell silent and blew out his cheeks until they were smooth and round.
“But who’s doing the painting there inside your box?” he asked, when the photographer had finished with him.
“The light,” replied the photographer.
“Ah,” said the farmer, mulling it over. He stepped back, looking baffled and muttering to himself, “The light, the light.”
Next was a young man who wanted a photograph of his wife taken, so that she could get a passport for the pilgrimage to Mecca. But a furious quarrel broke out when the man refused to let her lift her veil in front of so many men. Farid’s grandfather tried to make the peace, but it was no good.
“I can’t take her picture with that black veil on, you might as well have a photo of an aubergine,” said the photographer venomously.
The man took his wife’s hand and marched angrily away. She could be heard abusing him, complaining that he and his mother were making trouble because they didn’t want her to go on the pilgrimage.
Farid was surprised when the photographer disappeared under a black cloth fixed behind his camera. It was some time before he came out again, and then he opened a drawer filled with some kind of liquid at the side of the apparatus and took out a small, dark picture with a few lighter patches on it, which Grandfather called a negative. Finally the man fastened the little picture to a board and briefly held it in front of the lens, only for his head to disappear inside his cloth tunnel again. After quite a while he emerged, sweating and looking as if he’d been fighting a demon. Once again he opened the curious little drawer at the side and took out the second photograph. It was a perfect likeness of the man who hadn’t wanted to puff out his cheeks at first, and sure enough he looked much healthier in the picture than in real life.
As for Grandfather, he went home that day with four photographs, none of them any good, because he
kept on smiling at the last minute. The photographer was cross with him, although Grandfather paid for all the pictures. They were amusing. Farid got them as a present and kept them in a box like a valuable treasure.
“I’ll go back again tomorrow,” said Grandfather.
“But why are the pictures no good?” asked Farid. “They’re lovely.”
“Officials don’t like photographs where you’re smiling. It makes them think you don’t take them and their check-ups seriously.”
99. Suleiman and the Chickens
Suleiman’s father Abdallah was chauffeur to the Spanish consul. He was a man of elegant appearance and limited intellect, but because he never said much he gave an impression of wisdom. He was happy in his job, and did his work conscientiously.
His wife Salma came from a peasant family in the south. She was wily and distrustful by nature. Salma always looked just a little too elegant for Abbara Alley, because she wore the consul’s wife’s cast-off clothes. The Spanish lady was sturdily built, like Salma herself, so the clothes fitted perfectly.
Abdallah and Salma had two children, Suleiman and Aida, who both took after their mother. They were short, sturdy, and born tricksters. One day the chauffeur was planning a visit to his parents-in-law. He was allowed to use the consul’s limousine, because the consul himself was in Spain. Suleiman’s mother was in the seventh heaven. She put on her best dress, and after an hour’s drive climbed out into the dusty village square as majestically as a queen. The peasants marvelled at the transformation, sang Salma’s praises, and suddenly remembered that they’d always known this enterprising woman would make something of herself.
But not all her relations admired and flattered her. Salma’s cousin, the biggest building contractor in the village, had never got over the fact that she had chosen to marry not him but a useless townsman, and always tried to present Abdallah as a weakling. He was married himself now and had three children, but his heart still belonged to Salma. So almost every visit ended in a quarrel between him and Abdallah. The quarrel broke out this time when he boasted that his own children were braver and healthier than Salma’s, and to prove it he wanted the children to behead the five chickens destined for the midday meal.