by Rafik Schami
Of course Farid paid when he rode on the tram. Claire had made sure of that. “You mustn’t cost other people money.”
One day he wanted to ride the tram nowhere in particular, just looking at people. He sat down by the window with a big bag of peanuts and watched the passers by in the streets. The great advantage of the tram was that it went along at a very gentle pace, and unlike bus drivers the men who drove the tramcars never stopped on some whim of their own to talk to friends. Somehow tram drivers didn’t just wear uniforms but seemed more serious in every way than bus drivers.
On the outward journey Farid could pick jasmine and oleander flowers through the open window, from bushes growing wild very close to the rails. At one point he suddenly spotted the lunatic who had been looking for his horse for years. Apparently the man, a Bedouin, had once owned the finest horse in the world. One day President Shaklan saw it and wanted to buy it no matter what it cost, but the proud Bedouin despised money and threats left him cold. However, the secret service had the Bedouin arrested and took his horse. The man went crazy with grief in prison. After a while he was released, and he had been roaming the streets ever since, knocking gates and calling out, “Here I am, Sabah.” Then he listened for an answering whinny from a horse. Sometimes he would begin to weep pitifully. People felt sorry for him, and gave him food, old clothes, water, even money. He went barefoot in summer and winter alike.
On the way back Farid couldn’t help laughing. A crook who had already tricked several women in Farid’s quarter was standing at a stop where a crowd of people were waiting for the tram. He sold sweetened, coloured water as a miracle cure for worms. And almost the entire population of the city had worms.
“Look at this, look at this, will you?” he cried, showing a jar containing small snakes and an assortment of worms pickled in alcohol. “Only the other day these worms were living it up in the belly of one of my customers, oh yes, they were holding wedding parties, until he took three of my miracle drops on an empty stomach, and out they rushed like kids going down a slide.”
The people looked anxiously at the big jar. Its contents could have filled the stomach of a cow. The tram driver himself was so impressed that he rose to his feet and followed the words of the alleged miracle-worker from the door with his mouth open.
“So how do we know if we have worms?” called one of the passers by.
“Does your breath smell? That’s the worms farting. And if you want to be quite sure, run your fingernail or a smooth piece of wood over your teeth first thing in the morning when you get up. If you find a yellowish, smelly smear on the wood, you have worms. It’s their shit,” replied the fraudster.
The tram driver scratched something off his teeth with one fingernail, smelled it, shook his head in horror, and hurried back to his seat in alarm as the next tram approached, ringing its bell loudly.
108. Children’s Games
Azar soon thought up a good way for Suleiman to get his own back on the policeman who had called him names and slapped his face. Suleiman had won ten packets of chewing gum from the policeman’s son during a game. The game was a very simple one: everyone threw his little packet of gum towards a wall, and the one that landed closest had won. There were no tricks involved; only practice counted. But Suleiman had been a little unfair because he was a world class chewing-gum thrower, and had persuaded the unsuspecting boy that with a little luck he too could win. The policeman’s son had spent all his money on ten packets of gum, and every one of them ended up in Suleiman’s pocket. Then the boy began crying inconsolably. Before long his father, a large and portly police officer, came hurrying down the street, seized Suleiman by the collar, shook him, slapped his face hard and took away all his packets of gum, including those that other players had lost to him that day. Josef always said that Lady Luck herself avoided playing games with Suleiman because she knew she didn’t stand a chance.
“He’s taken away all my chewing gum! That’s worse than him hitting me, because now I don’t have any capital left. How am I going to carry on playing?” wailed Suleiman. His face was red and swollen where the policeman had hit him, but he could take a punch. All the same, he was furious with the policeman’s children, who were all standing at the window up on the second floor, chewing gum and laughing. And their father, with his hairy chest bared, looked triumphantly down over the children’s heads at Suleiman and the other boys.
That night the gang met in the attic and decided to get their own back on the policeman. But it was a week before Azar could put his wily plan into practice. It was a mild summer night. The policeman was sleeping next to an open window with his pillow almost on the sill when something suddenly exploded right beside him. When he sat up with a roaring in his ears, there was a second explosion. This time he saw a bluish globe of fire floating towards him out of nowhere.
“War, it’s war,” he cried. He pushed his wife from the bed to the floor and flung himself on top of her. The woman, frightened to death, cried angrily that he had crushed her ribs; he’d better get off her at once, she said, and go and see to the children. However, they were sleeping peacefully in the back room, which looked out on the inner courtyard, and like all the neighbours had heard nothing.
Azar’s idea had been to put zinc and hydrochloric acid in a bottle to make hydrogen. He blew two balloons up with the hydrogen, fitting them over the neck of the bottle. The balloons rose into the night air without a sound, while Azar and Suleiman, down in the street, held their long, thin strings and manipulated them. Large firecrackers hung just under the balloons. When the right moment came Azar put a match to one of the strings, which had been soaked in kerosene. The flame shot up it and ignited the firecracker. The force freed the balloon, and it rose towards the sky. The second firecracker was just a little too close to its hydrogen balloon, which went off with a huge bang immediately after the firecracker had ignited. But by that time Azar and Suleiman were well away.
109. Festival of Sacrifice
Farid was just twelve when he ventured into the Muslim quarter on his own for the fist time. He knew from school that this was the day when the Muslims held their great festival of sacrifice. Josef didn’t want to go with him; he thought it would be too noisy and dirty for him there.
Although they lived so close to each other, the Muslim way of life and celebrations were very different from Christian customs. To Farid, Muslims seemed like an exotic race of people who were somehow more physical, colourful, noisier, more forthright than Christians. Later he found another way of putting it: they were more natural.
The cries of the street sellers at their fairground stalls sounded more cheerful than usual. All the houses were decorated, with coloured cloths and rugs hanging from their balconies like banners. Groups of people kept gathering around two or more men performing mock fights. Farid saw a couple of young men in traditional robes, carrying curved swords and small, round, steel shields. They hopped and danced and struck the paving stones with their swords, making sparks fly. Then they attacked one another. It was all well rehearsed, and blows fell only on their swords and shields in a prearranged rhythm.
A few metres away a man was making his horse dance. The horse was decorated too. The man assured onlookers that it was an Arab, although many of them volubly expressed their doubts of his claim, for Arabs are proud horses and run like the wind, but would never dance. Anyway, the animal had much too plump a body for an assil, a genuine Arab horse.
Elsewhere, a fight with bamboo canes looked much more dangerous than the swordfight. The two combatants carried long, thin canes and hard, round leather shields padded with cotton. They met in the middle of a circle formed by the spectators, kissed one another’s fingertips, and took three steps back to show that they were cautious and respected their opponents. Finally they began, each dancing around on his own and striking his shield or the ground with his cane. The canes whirled through the air with a whistling sound that gave you goose bumps. Finally the men went for each other, and the blows t
hey gave were real and not just for show like those in the swordfight. A referee was in charge of the fight and gave the sign when it came to an end.
When the two men acknowledged the applause, gasping for breath, Farid saw the red weals left by the canes coming down on their arms, necks, and faces.
Farid moved on, and for the first time he saw a shadow theatre. Damascus was famous for them at the time. There were none in the Christian quarter, but the Muslim boys at school were always going into raptures about the shadow theatre. A small stage with a screen behind it had been set up in a café, and the place was full. Adults and children alike sat there, enjoying a play about the shadow figure Karagös, a character who was always playing tricks but lost out every time. Farid was surprised to find that the narrator behind the screen on which the shadows moved didn’t care about his language or the sensitivities of the audience. His story was full of terms like “son of a whore”, and “pimp”. The main characters in the story had arses rather than backsides or buttocks, and they didn’t break wind but farted, very loudly. One of them could even work a mill with his farting and keep his whole family on the proceeds. The spectators laughed and slapped their thighs. Suddenly they were all like children. Farid didn’t quite understand what the play was about, but he couldn’t help chuckling too, because Karagös kept doing everything wrong and coming off worst.
The whole quarter was out in the streets celebrating. The houses seemed empty. Christian festivals were the other way round: the streets were empty then, and the houses full of visitors who moved at least once from one building to another, to go on celebrating somewhere new.
Farid happily roamed the streets, eating something now and then, drinking juice and airan, a chilled yoghurt drink, buying himself bags of pumpkin seeds, and several sweetmeats dripping with fat and syrup. He didn’t realize that he was slowly but surely giving himself indigestion. However, although he had terrible diarrhoea that evening he thought he’d never had a better time than at the Muslim festival of sacrifice.
110. Riding a Bicycle
Bicycles were expensive in Damascus at the beginning of the fifties. They were imported, usually from England or the Netherlands, and they cost a fortune. Two or three men at the most in any street owned such a luxurious means of transport. However, there was a bicycle hire place in every quarter. The man who hired out bikes in the Bab Sharki district had his shop on Straight Street, right between Saitun Alley and Abbara Alley. He was a Muslim, and bad-tempered, he looked a mess, and he was always working away on his bicycles. Farid couldn’t remember ever seeing the man drinking tea, smoking cigarettes, or simply sitting about. He was always bent over one of his bikes, or pumping up one of countless tyres. He wasn’t uncivil, but he was taciturn, and in Damascus that was regarded as unfriendly. However, people bought and hired bicycles from him because he asked less than his rival in Bab Tuma. And his bikes were sturdy.
Farid was fascinated by bicycles, but he couldn’t ride one, and didn’t feel brave enough to hire a bike and learn. Azar and Suleiman had learned very quickly. How they did it no one knew, but it was as if they had been riding bikes all their lives. Suleiman could even ride with his hands free, or stand on the saddle and spread his arms. Azar could fling the front wheel up in the air and ride on the back wheel alone. It all looked so easy, but the moment Farid so much as touched the handlebars of a bike it seemed to want to fall over, or at least go in a different direction. It wouldn’t even let him push it.
Josef was no better, but that very fact was a challenge to him. He paid a lira to hire a bike for two hours.
“And if I can’t ride the wretched thing after that, you can throw me into the sewers,” he growled with determination.
Farid laughed. “Or call an ambulance.”
“No way! You wait and see, I’ll come riding it back shouting, ‘Look, no hands!’”
But their plans fell through. The man at the hire shop took the lira and didn’t ask if Josef could ride a bicycle, just pointed to a red one and mumbled morosely, “You better be back by five, or I’ll charge for another hour.” And he added, as he did with all children, “I know your father.”
It was quarter to three now, so he’d given them an extra fifteen minutes. Josef beamed and pushed the bicycle towards Saitun Alley, rigid with excitement.
“It’ll be easier in your street, it’s better paved,” he claimed. He wanted to avoid the mockery of the boys and girls in Abbara Alley.
Saitun Alley was quieter than a graveyard at this time of day. There wasn’t a human soul in sight as Josef and Farid turned into it. But suddenly a man appeared.
“Hello,” he said, “what a nice bike! You two look like beginners – has anyone tested the brakes for you? I have a friend who put his brakes on too hard. He flew over the handlebars and landed on his head. He’s spoken nothing but English since. A medical phenomenon. Let’s see how those brakes are working.” And before Josef had fully grasped the situation, the man had gently removed his hands from the handlebars, jumped on the saddle, and rode off towards the Catholic church. There he turned and raced back towards them. Josef stood in the middle of the street waving to the man to stop, but the man called, “The brakes don’t work!” shot past him like an arrow and turned right into Straight Street. Josef and Farid ran after him, but the man had almost reached the eastern gate already. And then he was out of sight.
“I’m an idiot. I ought to have kicked him in the balls. He was a thief, and now the bike’s gone,” said Josef gloomily.
They stood there, silent and lost in thought, watching the street sweepers who sprinkled the road surface with water in the afternoons in summer, and swept up the worst of the refuse.
“Come on, let’s go to my place,” said Farid at last, but Josef just stood there. He was wondering how to break the news of the loss gently to the man in the hire shop without having him seize him by the throat or demand large sums of money from his mother.
“I’ll help you,” Farid went on. “I’ve saved over fifteen lira, and I bet Grandfather Nagib will come up with fifty. I’m sure I can get another ten out of Claire, so that comes to seventy-five. That’s almost the price of a bicycle.”
Josef’s face brightened, and a smile showed, although a smile clad in grief and gratitude. He put a hand on Farid’s shoulder, saying in a shaky voice, “Thanks. You really are my friend.”
“Of course I’m your friend. And when we’ve paid for the bicycle we’ll go and find that bastard and smash his balls to scrambled egg,” proclaimed Farid grandly, to make it even more impressive.
They couldn’t say later how long they had been standing there like that, but suddenly Josef froze with surprise, for the man appeared again. Shouting cheerfully, he rode past them to the Catholic church.
“He’s not getting away from me this time. I’m going after him,” growled Josef. Farid planned to grab the bicycle from behind as soon as the man rode past him. But it never came to that. The man rode around in an elegant curve in front of the church porch, dismounted, leaned the bike against the wall, and adjusted his shirt and trousers. Then he went into the church. For some reason its doors were standing wide open.
“What’s he planning to do?” asked Farid.
“He’s trying to lure us in.”
“You run and fetch the bike and I’ll wait here. If he gets in your way, shout for help,” said Josef, picking up a large stone lying by the wall.
Farid’s heart was thudding, but he ran. The sun, suddenly hotter than ever, was blazing down on his head. He was sweating, and so scared that the air flickered before his eyes, but he could feel Josef’s eyes on his back, so there was no way he could change his mind now. When he reached the bike he swiftly seized the handlebars, started pushing it, and for once, oddly enough, it obeyed him and went along beside him like a faithful dog. Josef put the stone down and came over to his friend. Relieved, he took the bike.
“It’s five,” he said.
The man in the hire shop just looked up brie
fly from his work, pointed to the wall where he wanted Josef to lean the bike, and took no more notice of the boys.
Josef and Farid quickly went back to the church to find the man, but the church was empty, and the old sexton Abdullah hadn’t seen anyone come in or go out.
On the way home, Josef swore that he would never touch a bicycle again in his life. And sure enough, he never did.
111. Maaruf Directing Traffic
Maaruf lived with his wife Samira and their four children in two rooms of the big apartment building next to Farid’s house. Samira was a tall woman with white skin and black hair. She wasn’t beautiful, but her white skin had men turning to look at her.