by Rafik Schami
Gabriel’s idea was Farid’s salvation. After the end of August, he found life in the monastery rather more tolerable. Father Makarios the calligrapher, who also ran the printing shop, was both as down to earth as the printing presses and as fanciful as Arabic script. He had such a sure hand that he never hesitated for the fraction of a second in his calligraphy, as if he already saw the words he was going to write on the blank sheet of paper before him. Farid soon became his star pupil.
The mists of disappointment and opposition dispersed, and he began to pay more attention to his surroundings. To his own surprise, it was only now that he got to know Butros, who sat opposite him in the refectory, always ate in silence, and hardly ever laughed. He was shy and suspicious. But at the beginning of September he began telling Farid about himself.
The brothers Markus and Luka sat one on each side of Farid. They were twins, a boring couple who had been in the monastery for three years, always accepting everything and approving of it like good boys. Marcel knew why. “They have to be ultra-obedient, they’re here only through the bishop’s good graces. Their father ran off to America and their mother can’t feed them. It’s because she’s the bishop’s distant cousin that those two are here at all. Outside, all they can expect is work in the fish factory and beatings from their mother’s lovers, and they know it.”
In spite of their sad story, Farid thought they were a dismal pair, and once it occurred to him that if Jesus had been obliged to sit between those two in the refectory, he’d have died not on the cross but of boredom.
121. Joan of Arc
Everything was to be bright and shining on the feast day of St. Ignatius. The floor, the columns, the walls of the inner courtyard were scrubbed, the car park outside the monastery was whitewashed, and all the windows were cleaned.
Then the big stage was erected. A play was traditionally performed on 31 July in honour of the order’s founder, and here in this desolate part of the country it was a great event. Over five hundred chairs already filled the inner courtyard, although only the seats in the front row were upholstered.
In the afternoon all the employees, peasants, and labourers who worked for the monastery came streaming in. Everyone was still talking about last year’s play, Pietas victrix. The translated title hung above the stage in Arabic had proclaimed, “The Victory of Piety”.
Father Samuel the language teacher had written the play, and Father Constantine had composed the music, but the best part came from the workshop of ingenious Father Antonios. He taught physics, and his brilliant ideas had made the play into a positive firework display to delight the senses. He used steel wires, lights and stage effects to bring thunder and lightning down from the sky to the stage. Swords, angels, and spectres hovered weightlessly in the air and took the audience’s breath away. He had also stationed two monastery pupils behind the stage to howl like wolves or hoot like owls. It was truly gruesome, and gave even the most sceptical of the audience goosebumps.
This year the play was to be Joan of Arc. A magnificent show was anticipated, but it all went wrong. Marcel had already whispered to Farid at midday, “Theodore wants his revenge on his teacher – he hates Samuel.” At the end of July it was still vacation, so Farid knew neither the teacher nor his pupil.
“Why?” he asked.
“Why? Because Samuel’s horrible. But Theodore is wily. He’ll play his trick so cleverly that he won’t get punished.”
“How?”
“I don’t know exactly, I just know Father Samuel has been tormenting poor Theodore for four years. He made him repeat a school year twice, in grades nine and ten. You don’t get far here without good marks for language, and Samuel is in charge of teaching both French and Arabic. Theodore is twenty and still only in grade eleven.”
That evening St. Ignatius himself seemed to want to celebrate, and tempered the fierce July heat with a pleasantly cool temperature. Soon medieval torches were flickering on stage. Two violins played a soft melody, and then the play began.
The audience fell silent. The curtain went up. Soldiers and peasants stormed forward, crying, “Long live the good Catholic country of France!” But then English soldiers entered left and attacked them, and there was a battle scene involving over forty pupils and monks.
The English won. The French troops took their dead and wounded into a corner. Now the music was slow and heavy, and a guitar imitated bells tolling for a funeral. Wounded men said their last prayers. A priest, played by a twelfth-grade student, gave them absolution and his blessing.
Then Joan of Arc came on stage, and the audience loved everything she did and said. Josephine was acting very well. When she said that she must die a martyr’s death for Christ, the Virgin Mary and France, many a tough Father wiped a tear from his eye and blew his nose loudly, while women in the audience wept with emotion.
Farid admired the cook, who spoke her complicated part in French so well that he could understand everything. He felt attracted by her. And when, at the coronation of Charles VII in Reims Cathedral, she knelt before the King with the banner of victory in her hand, and cried, “Noble lord, now is God’s will fulfilled!” the audience clapped so loud and so long that no one could hear what the King said in reply.
Farid was beginning to doubt what Marcel had said, for the play was three-quarters over, and nothing untoward had happened. He glanced at his friend, sitting a few chairs away from him. Marcel caught his eye, and made a gesture which said: just wait, any minute now.
Soon after that Joan of Arc was taken prisoner, and the judge ordered her to be tortured until she confessed to being a witch. She was to tell her followers to surrender to the English, he said. Joan of Arc bravely refused.
The torturer came on stage, and Farid knew who was under the mask he wore. Theodore seized the cook by her long blonde hair and laid her down on a table that was doing duty for a rack. Then he tied Josephine’s hands to a large metal ring.
The lighting effects made a fire seem to blaze up in one corner of the stage. A pupil was working a pair of bellows to fan the flames higher. The torturer picked a black triangular item out of this mock fire: a piece of wood the size of Josephine’s upper body. There were curious red protuberances at its three angles. The torturer took the triangle to the front of the stage and told the audience, “These red-hot metal balls will burn their way so deep into the witch’s body that she’ll wish she had never been born.”
Then he went back to the cook, stood between her legs, and placed the triangular wooden board on her body. The corners of the triangle were now lying on her breasts and her mount of Venus, and he began rocking it back and forth.
All was so quiet in the auditorium that you could almost hear the spectators’ hearts beating. The torturer rocked the wooden triangle again, pressing it firmly down on Josephine’s body, and cried, “Confess that you’re in league with the Devil, witch! Confess it!” The cook began to moan. It was only because Farid was in the know, and watching closely, that he saw Theodore not just pressing the board down over her genital area but vibrating it slightly every time.
Josephine tried to struggle, which made the scene even more credible. She opened her eyes and whispered a plea. “No, please don’t!”
But that just spurred Theodore on.
“Confess, you witch!”
The cook responded with moans that grew ever louder and wilder. She twisted and turned to escape the hand making the triangle vibrate, but Theodore just stepped up the pace. Now her cries were ardent. They echoed around the courtyard, they made their way right into the bodies of the audience. The Fathers in the two front rows looked around in embarrassment.
Apparently on the point of orgasm, the cook was no longer calling for help but just moaning, “Yes, yes, yes!” Her voice made the stones of the building tremble. Some of the Fathers and monks rose in anger and left the courtyard.
Suddenly everyone heard a loud cry, this time not from the stage but from an attic window. The spellbound audience looked up. There
stood a thin figure clad in white, illuminated by demonic radiance. For a split second Farid thought that it was part of the show.
“Get all that damned fornication off the stage! It’s the Devil’s work!” cried the elderly protester.
Abbot Maximus rose abruptly from his seat and shouted in the direction of the platform, “Bring the curtain down! The play’s over!”
The curtain fell, and Father Samuel, the principal loser in the whole affair, sat hunched on his own in the front row, while the audience left the inner courtyard. He never wrote another play again. Abbot Maximus decided to end the tradition of a dramatic performance on St. Ignatius’s Day. There was in fact another attempt to produce one two years later, by popular request, but when that too was a failure, plays performed in honour of the founder of the order on his saint’s day were finally over.
On 1 August 1953, a day after the performance of Joan of Arc, the monastery pupils took the stage down again. Farid and Marcel lent the electrician a hand.
“You knew more than you were letting on,” said Farid quietly, but with a reproachful note in his voice.
“Yes,” said Marcel, “I knew Theodore had found out how quickly Josephine comes if you just put a bit of pressure on her mount of Venus.”
“Mount of what?” asked Farid. It was the first time he had heard the term.
“Mount of Venus,” explained Marcel, showing off. “That hairy triangle above a woman’s cunt, get it?” Farid nodded. “If you just rub that place a bit, and touch her breasts, she goes right out of her mind in no time at all,” Marcel added.
“And who was that weird old man shouting from the attic window?” asked Farid.
“I’ll tell you later,” Marcel murmured.
122. Nights in Autumn
September was the harvest month. The great heat of summer was over, but there was even more work. Not only were the grapes ripe, but figs and other fruit were ready to be dried too. Farid felt increasingly that he wanted to be out in the open air and hated staying indoors in a workshop.
Early in September he was given the job of drying figs. He worked for a week on a gigantic threshing floor paved with white stone. The figs were laid out side by side and close together in rectangles, with narrow paths left between them, so that the fruits could be turned once a day without any danger of being trodden on.
The grapes ripened at the same time and attracted more insects, although butterflies liked the figs. Farid, who did not find the work here hard, followed the course of their flight with interest. He felt something like happiness, watching the butterflies in flight as he sat in the shade of a simple shelter made of poplar branches.
But then something happened that was to haunt him in his dreams for years. It was a Tuesday afternoon. Farid was sitting in the shade of his shelter, looking down into the valley. There was much coming and going in the fields and on the threshing floors. A column of three mules had been going between the threshing floors and barns for days, bringing in huge sacks of hay. On the outward journey an experienced monk went on foot, leading the mules downhill, on the way back he always rode one of the animals and led the others after him on a rope.
But now the mules were suddenly racing round the bend in the path of their own accord, and at great speed. The hay on their backs had caught fire.
Terrible screams filled the air. The mules disappeared into the valley leading to the sea, apparently in search of water to save themselves, and so they did not turn to the monastery but galloped through the village. Two peasants’ huts caught fire, and an old woman trying to halt the animals was trampled to death. The mules never stopped until they reached the sea below. One of the animals escaped with a singed mane because it had thrown off its blazing load in time, the other two died horribly of their burns. Rumour in the monastery that evening said it was arson, and the hay had been soaked with petrol. Farid slept badly that night, and was distressed for several days. No one ever found out who was behind the incident.
“You want to know how I am?” Farid whispered one September night, full of longing for Rana. “Not too bad. I have three props to support me here. What? Yes, to support me, like legs. Gabriel, Marcel, and Butros. And if I get a fourth leg then I’ll be a donkey. No, not a table, a donkey, I like donkeys,” he whispered into his imaginary telephone. Then he smiled at his idea, never guessing that he had just made a prophesy.
The fourth leg was Bulos.
123. The Inquisitor
The vacation lasted until early October. A week after the Feast of the Holy Cross on September the 14th, Farid was back working with the builders, who were now repairing a large crack in the monastery wall. He hated the master builder so much that he could already feel cramps in his stomach on the way to join the site. Four pupils from grades eight and nine were in the same working party, but before an hour was up the four had ganged up with the builder and his men against Farid. Soon they were all leaning against the scaffolding, laughing at him.
Farid knew that refusing to work would bring a harsh punishment, and an entry in his monastery records that would never be deleted. Was it worth it, just for that lousy, ugly man on the scaffolding? He gritted his teeth and said to his fellow pupils, low-voiced, “You cowardly traitors!” They just laughed even louder. When the master builder heard what Farid had said he knocked the basket of stones off his shoulder and shouted at him. “I don’t like cheek from my boys. Fetch larger stones!”
As Farid hauled the empty basket after him he began shedding tears. Suddenly he saw a pupil four or five years older than him, standing behind a pomegranate tree.
“Come here!” he called.
“Do you mean me?” asked Farid uncertainly.
“Of course,” replied the pupil, grinning. “Give me that basket and watch me.”
For a moment Farid thought that the older boy who had so unexpectedly come to his aid was a guardian angel in a habit.
“My name’s Bulos,” said the pupil, taking the basket from him. He filled it with dusty soil and shouldered it so that the basket hid his face. The monastery pupils leaning against the scaffolding were still laughing and didn’t notice him. Bulos walked rapidly towards them and emptied the basket over their heads. Taken completely by surprise, the boys coughed and spat as they tried to knock the dirt out of their habits. One began shouting that he would complain of Bulos. That seemed to be just what Bulos had been waiting for; he jumped at the boy and twisted his arm behind his back.
“Come on then, let’s go straight to Abbot Maximus, and you can tell him how you were ganging up on your comrade Barnaba with those lousy builders, and you watched and laughed when they tormented him. What do you think Abbot Maximus will say about that?” he inquired, hitting the boy on the neck. By now the pupil was begging not to be taken to the Abbot.
“Then you and the other idiots here can apologize to Barnaba,” ordered Bulos, letting him go. “And all I have to tell you,” he added, turning to the master builder, “is that if you treat one of the boys so badly ever again I’ll make very sure the Abbot fires you. I promise you I will.”
The man went pale, as grey in the face as his own cement, and just nodded.
“Right, you can have a few peaceful days with these rats now,” Bulos whispered to Farid, and he went away.
That evening Farid looked for his guardian angel in the refectory, and saw him sitting at the eleventh grade table, deep in a discussion with one of his companions. Farid went up to him, tapped his shoulder from behind and said, “Thank you very much.” Bulos turned and beamed at him.
“Oh, it’s you! Everything okay?”
“Yes, thanks to your help,” replied Farid.
“It was nothing. I just couldn’t stand by and watch the way they were treating you.”
The bell rang, and Farid hurried back to his own place. Then the bell rang a second time, and all the pupils rose to say grace.
From that day on he met his rescuer daily in every free moment he had. Bulos was intelligent and wily, but extre
mely distrustful. He was proud of his Syrian origins, and despised the Arabs. They were just Bedouin, he said, who had destroyed the great civilization of his forebears the Assyrians with their swords. Farid didn’t understand any of this.
Bulos didn’t talk much, and you never knew exactly what he was getting at, but he always seemed to know what other people were thinking. And when you saw his blazing eyes you guessed that he would shrink from nothing.
“So why are you here?” he asked Farid on one of their first walks together in the monastery gardens.
Farid didn’t want to talk about the burning of the elm tree in Mala. “My father wanted me to come,” he said. “He never got to be a theologian himself, so I was supposed to make his dreams come true for him. I’m afraid he’ll be disappointed. I’m not cut out for the life here.” He shrugged, and shook his head.
“Nor am I,” said Bulos, “but I’ll have to put up with it. My stepfather won’t let me back in his house. He made me go into this monastery so that he could be alone with my mother. I was in the way. Now I’ll have to stay here until I take my high school diploma, but after that I’m going to study law.”
“Why law?”
“With a law degree you can get to be a high-ranking police officer or a judge. I’d be happy with either,” he replied, narrow-lipped, and looked into the distance. Farid could well imagine that at this moment, in his mind, Bulos was torturing his stepfather.
At the end of September Farid wrote his mother his first letter home of any length. So far his letters to his parents had consisted only of five lines of polite clichés and an assurance that he was all right. Now he wanted to give a fuller account.