by Rafik Schami
It was also Marcel who told him, briefly and graphically, about the hierarchy of the monastery that first evening. “The monastery pupils are squires, the novices are knights, the monks are princes, the Fathers are kings, and the Abbot – well, he’s God in person.”
“Why are some of them still just Brothers although they look old enough to be ordained priests by now?”
“Only God knows. They probably have a screw loose somewhere,” said Marcel.
“What about Brother Gabriel?” asked Farid.
“Gabriel’s the only ordinary monk allowed to sit at the top table with the Fathers and the Abbot,” Marcel told him. “He’s cleverer than all the rest put together. But he can’t be a priest, all the same.”
“Why not?” whispered Farid, leaning over the table.
“He’s sick in the head,” replied a small pupil next to Marcel. The others called him Timotheus. Marcel dug him in the ribs with his elbow. Obviously he didn’t approve of this explanation.
“Doolally,” said another.
“Oh, shut up,” snapped Marcel. “The Pope himself is afraid of Gabriel because he knows so many secrets,” he whispered in conspiratorial tones. The others fell silent, exchanged meaning glances, and looked surreptitiously at Gabriel.
“All those secrets probably sent him crazy,” said Timotheus.
A bell rang, and the pupils began folding up their napkins, putting them into small drawers under the table top.
“What happens now?” Farid asked in Arabic.
Marcel smiled slightly. “Well, in the summer vacation we have free time. We play cards or chess, or we go for walks in the yard and talk about people behind their backs. It’s prayers at ten, and then we go to bed.”
When the bell rang for the second time they stood up. A short prayer followed. Farid kept his mouth shut and looked helplessly at Gabriel, but he was one of the few who were entirely absorbed in praying. When they all crossed themselves at the end of the prayer, Gabriel became aware of his surroundings again, including Farid, and signed to him to stay in the room.
“Let’s start here,” said Gabriel, when all the others had gone. “You know the refectory now. We all eat the same food that you get, even Abbot Maximus. No one has any privileges in our order. The food is prepared here in the kitchen.” As they approached it, two elderly women in white overalls were pushing a trolley through the kitchen door and began to clear the dirty plates off the tables.
The kitchen was enormous. Several men and women were cleaning and scrubbing in it, some of them polishing up the stoves and the big white marble work surface. The floor of the kitchen, like the refectory floor, was made of polished slabs of red-tinged stone. About twenty people worked here. Farid noticed one of the cooks in particular. Her name was Josephine, and she looked out of place among the others. It didn’t seem right for her to be wearing an overall and working in the kitchen. She had blue-green eyes and fair hair, and she looked like a marble goddess. She smiled at Farid, but he soon discovered that she spoke an unattractive dialect, coughing words out with no melody to them, as if she were having a fit,.
“So this is our new boy – handsome, isn’t he?” she smiled, putting her hands on her hips.
“Good evening,” said Gabriel.
“And good evening to you too, Brother Gabriel. Are we getting this handsome lad to help out here?”
Gabriel dismissed the idea with a smile. “Well, so how is Joan of Arc getting along?”
“Oh, my word, if I’d known how much work there was in it I’d have said no. Working away all day here and then rehearsing in the evening!”
“I’m sure you’re right. It’s too much even for a bundle of energy like you,” agreed Brother Gabriel sympathetically, and he went on his way with Farid. When they reached the corridor he whispered, “A very gifted woman. She was once one of the star pupils in St. Mary’s Convent, she knows French and Latin perfectly. But the porter there seduced her, and she was pregnant at the age of sixteen. So they had to get married in haste, and of course he was fired from the convent. He found another job only with difficulty, thanks to the kindness of Abbot Maximus, who got him work in a horse-breeder’s stables. But the man was useless and lazy, and a week later he was out on his ear.”
Farid was surprised not just by the frank way Gabriel spoke, but by the decided tone of his judgement.
“And this is our treasure, the library,” Gabriel interrupted his thoughts. “One of the best in the Middle East.” He pushed the heavy wooden door open. Farid’s eyes were bright with amazement. He had never seen such a library before. It was at least as large as the refectory, with endlessly long, tall shelves on which all the books were neatly arranged. Most of them had leather bindings.
Between the shelves and the tall stone columns there were little tables, each with a chair and a reading lamp. A large table with over twenty seats stood in the middle of the room. Several monastery pupils and Fathers sat there, immersed in reading.
On the wall opposite the door stood glass-fronted cupboards where scrolls and old manuscripts were kept.
“Those are the words of St. John of Damascus, or St. John of the Golden Mouth,” said Gabriel. Farid knew a lot about St. John, the writer and orator who was the pride of all the Damascene Christians.
He would have liked to spend longer in the library, but Gabriel gently impelled him out again. There was still a lot to see, and Gabriel needed to go to the lavatory.
Farid waited for him in the corridor. The cellar was enormous, apparently extending under the entire monastery building and the inner courtyard. Two thirds of it were occupied by the refectory and the library, which lay side by side, and that area was surrounded by storerooms as well as the lavatories and the little printing press and book-binding shop. All the rooms had thick, heavy doors.
A fresh breeze swept briefly over the inner courtyard, which was lit only faintly by a lantern at the entrance gate, but light fell from the rooms on to the arcades surrounding the courtyard on the west and the south.
The north side was occupied by the great church, the entrance gate, Brother John’s workshop and the visitors’ room. Brother Gabriel explained that the monastery pupils and novices could be visited, under supervision, by close family members. The visitors’ room had a narrow door of its own opening on to the car park.
“Over there,” Gabriel said, pointing north, “is the church of St. Sebastian, our patron saint. I’m sure you’ve read his story and the history of the monastery in the little book given to every future pupil here.”
Farid nodded, hoping that the monk wouldn’t ask him for details, for all that stuck in his memory was the image of Sebastian with a transfigured expression on his face, tied to a tree trunk and pierced by three arrows. As he read, Farid had imagined Sebastian dying among native American Indians, and that idea had taken firmer root in his mind that the legend of the martyr.
Luckily one of the monastery pupils was coming their way, and called out to Gabriel, in French, ‘Good! At last! I can pass the signal on to you!”
“Not now,” protested Gabriel, laughing. “I’m busy showing Barnaba the ropes as quickly as possible, so that he’ll know his way around.”
“Excuses, excuses!” replied the boy, laughing too.
“Speaking Arabic is forbidden,” explained Gabriel, as he turned back to Farid, “and that applies to everyone. Anyone caught at it is given a round, thin, wooden disk with the letter S for ‘Signal’ on it. He has to carry the signal about with him until he finds someone else speaking Arabic, and then he gets rid of the little disk by passing it on to him.”
“But suppose whoever it is denies speaking Arabic? Or suppose he’s older and stronger than the person carrying the signal?”
“Large or small, old or young, it makes no difference. The carrier of the signal will have witnesses, because no one talks out loud to himself alone. And it’s best for the guilty party to take the disk, or everyone will know he’s looking out for someone speaking Arabic,
and they’ll avoid him like the plague.”
“But suppose he doesn’t catch anyone else?”
“Then he eats his dinner kneeling, and the signal is taken away from him and given secretly to a scout known as the Starter, who goes around listening for Arabic.”
“But that’s espionage. Do you approve?”
Gabriel froze. The question seemed to have gone home. “Personally, no, but the monastery administration uses the system to make sure pupils are well disciplined and learn to speak French quickly. Oh, look, it’s time for night prayers! We must hurry,” he added, glancing at his watch.
The church of St. Sebastian had been built in the seventeenth century to plans designed in Rome. It wasn’t large, but it was magnificently furnished. The nave had no columns, so there was a clear view of the high altar wherever you were. Stylistically, the interior was a mixture of the Baroque, Jesuit magnificence, and Oriental opulence. Large paintings hung on the walls, showing Biblical texts, angels, and Jesus and Mary in royal splendour. Farid thought the church was cluttered by comparison with the Catholic church in his street at home.
To the right of the altar hung a large painting of St. Sebastian, a copy of the original Italian work of Guido Reni, as Farid later discovered. The altar itself was dominated by a magnificent statue of Jesus Christ. Tall arched windows surrounded the nave of the church.
Gabriel motioned to his charge to go further forward, while he himself found a place with the other monks near the door. Farid looked desperately around the sea of shaven heads and black habits for someone he knew. A slight nod of the head and a shy smile came to his rescue: Marcel. Farid made his way along the long pew, knelt down beside Marcel, and whispered, “Thanks!”
Night prayers didn’t last long. Then, silently and well disciplined, the monastery pupils, monks, and Fathers moved out in an orderly line. Farid followed Marcel. Out in the dark courtyard, the pupils dispersed into smaller groups and went on climbing the stairs to the dormitories in silence. Farid was strangely restless. His heart seemed painfully constricted, and he felt estranged from himself and abandoned.
There was absolute silence in the dormitory too. Farid unpacked his underwear and put it away in his small locker, washed, and got into bed.
Almost a hundred and twenty of the younger monastery pupils slept in the west wing. About a hundred older pupils and the novices slept in the east wing. The rooms for the monks and the Fathers lay in between.
It was a mild night, and the sea sounded closer in the silence and darkness. Farid couldn’t get to sleep for a long time. The dormitory was not entirely dark; several little lamps fastened to the wall gave a muted light.
Near the entrance of every dormitory a monk slept in a small room, furnished in extremely Spartan style with a bed, desk, and medicine cabinet. The only ornament was a picture of the Virgin Mary illuminated by flickering light. A different monk was on duty supervising the pupils every week; only Brother John was excused that duty.
The monk on duty on Farid’s first night stood at the big window in the dark for a long time, keeping an eye on the dormitory. Then he did his rounds, stopping briefly by every bed. Farid closed his eyes and did his best to breathe regularly.
“Try to sleep,” whispered the monk, and went on. He said something quietly to a boy at the end of the aisle near the washroom too. When Farid slowly opened his eyes again a little while later, he had disappeared.
How beautiful his time with Rana had been, thought Farid. “Love tastes and smells so wonderful,” she had said one night. He had laughed then. Was she thinking of him now? She had promised not to let a single hour of her life pass without thinking of him. And what Rana promised she always performed. He was ashamed to realize that he sometimes forgot her for hours at a time.
Now he was thinking of her breasts. He had never seen anything so lovely before. They didn’t look like the apples or pomegranates so often mentioned in Arabic poetry, no, Rana had breasts with nipples like the tips of a lemon, pointing slightly upward and outward. The mere sight of them aroused him.
He turned on his side and pressed the light blanket between his legs.
The sea slipped away on velvet soles.
120. Summer Days
Next morning Marcel showed Farid a piece of paper on the door, setting out the timetable for the day during the vacation:
“6.30, get up. Wash. Make beds. Leave lockers open. Brother to close them after checking. Short morning prayers. Breakfast. Work. Lunch eaten at work place. End of work 15.00 hours. Wash. Summer academy from 15.30 hours. Evening prayers. Supper. Games. Night prayers. Bedtime. Sunday is free.”
The days followed this pattern, and after a time they all merged into each other. If it hadn’t been for Sundays, Farid would soon have lost all sense of time.
During the first week he was sent to work with the builders who repaired any damage to the monastery walls during the summer months. He and two other school students took them the construction materials. It was hard work climbing ladders in a habit, carrying stones and mortar, and the builders laughed at the boys’ clumsiness.
A week later Farid changed to the metalworking shop. The master in charge here was an unassuming, silent man. This work was hard too, but interesting. Master Rimon liked the boy at first sight. He told him that he had once been a priest himself, but then he fell in love with a young widow. He had confessed it at once to the abbot of the time, so he was allowed to go on earning a living in the monastery metalworking shop. Two years after the wedding, his wife died when their son was born, and he had brought up the boy on his own. But at the age of twenty his son had emigrated to America, and Rimon now lived by himself down in the village at the foot of the mountain where the monastery stood.
Farid could happily have spent the whole summer with Rimon, but that wasn’t permitted. Every pupil at the monastery had to take his turn with all the different jobs. Next was farming. Working with the reapers was hell; following them through the fields day after day in the blazing sun drained all his strength. He had hallucinations. The reapers were usually strong, experienced older pupils and monks who cut the blades of wheat with sickles. A troop of younger pupils went behind them, fanning out over a broad front, gathering the blades into sheaves and piling them up on carts to be taken to the threshing floors, where hot dust filled your mouth and nose, and husks and chopped straw stuck in your collar, rubbing your skin sore. Those days seemed endless.
Again and again, Farid’s loneliness overwhelmed him. The older monastery pupils took no notice of him, the childishness of the younger boys bored him. He saw Marcel and a few other familiar faces only at supper, and was never in the same working group with any of them. That was intentional, so that everyone would get to know everyone else, according to the monastery administration. “So that we don’t gang up together and refuse to work,” was how Marcel put it.
Sometimes Farid thought he was going crazy. Not only did most of the monks remain strangers to him, he felt that this Barnaba going around in a habit, staring back at him from the mirror with his sunburned face and the ugly, peeling skin on his scalp, was a stranger too. His hands were covered with painful weals and blisters.
When Farid was moved from reaping to the joiner’s workshop he felt as if he had won a prize, for he loved working with wood. The master joiner was a gloomy man who said not a word all day, but his journeyman understood all his gestures, and passed the gist of them on to the newcomer.
Every evening Farid was jolted by the sight of monastery pupils who had been lumbered with the signal kneeling in the centre aisle of the refectory. Apparently there were three of the little disks in circulation, although no one was quite sure of that.
“What, even in the vacation?” cried Farid indignantly at the sight of one pupil who was almost falling asleep with weariness and couldn’t even eat. His sore, limp hands were dangling.
“The signal takes no vacations and never sleeps,” said Marcel, who was often handed it himself, but was clever en
ough to pass the little wooden disk on again in good time. Only once did Marcel fail, and then he had to eat his supper kneeling. Farid was horrified to find his neighbours at table suddenly turning spiteful. He snapped at them to shut up, but they went on taunting Marcel.
As a newcomer, Farid couldn’t yet be given the signal himself, so he didn’t have to kneel if he spoke Arabic, but whenever he did the others looked at him in alarm, as if he came from another star. So he said as little as possible, and was soon regarded as a silent boy. That showed him even more clearly what a stranger this shy boy Barnaba was, for Farid’s effervescent loquacity had been famous in Damascus.
Father Basilius was a good language teacher who made French lessons lively and amusing. The fact that he also looked like a vulture lent a touch of comedy to everything he told them. The language came easily to Farid, and when he began dreaming in French he realized that he was making good progress. Music was different. He didn’t care in the least for highly-strung Father Constantine, who had an aura of great unrest about him, and he couldn’t get on with the musical instruments. There was no doubt that the Father was a musical genius, said to have composed several hymns, as well as the music for all the plays performed annually on the feast day of St. Ignatius. But like many another genius he was incapable of explaining anything to other people. Marcel told Farid that the musician, who was still a young man, was in love with the cook Josephine, and had suggested her for the part of Joan of Arc.
One day Brother Gabriel, who was still keeping an eye on Farid, came up with a wonderful idea. In his despair at getting nowhere with music lessons, Farid had told him about the pleasures of learning calligraphy in Damascus, and Gabriel persuaded the monastery administration to let him give up music in the afternoons and instead take the advanced calligraphy course, since he had already mastered the basic rules. The art of calligraphy was very highly regarded in the monastery, for although French was spoken as the everyday language and in lessons, the liturgy and the Bible were in Arabic. The monks were anxious to use perfect script for the products of their own printing press, and were always looking for new young talent. The monastery press had received major commissions from outside because of its high reputation.