by Rafik Schami
Dear Claire, dearest Mother,
I’m all right. There’s a lot to learn here, particularly French, but I’ve already made friends. One is called Marcel, he’s a born joker, another is Butros, a good friend. The third is called Gabriel and is a clever man. And the fourth is my guardian angel Bulos. I’m sorry, I can’t tell you their surnames; surnames aren’t used here in the monastery. It seems they’re secular, so to everyone except myself I’m Barnaba. The monastery never gives the same name twice, which means there’s no danger of any mix-ups.
Marcel is the funniest of my friends, and Bulos is the most interesting of them all. Bulos gets on well with his mother, but very badly with his stepfather. His own father was killed when he was little. Isn’t that dreadful?
His stepfather doesn’t let Bulos’s mother visit her son very often. He misses her, but he’s a guardian angel to me.
I wanted to write so that you’d know I’m not choking to death in this dreary monastery, and I love you and miss you very much. I miss your cooking too, what with the inedible food they give us here. Apparently enjoying good food is a sin. I pray for you every day, Mama, asking God to forgive you for enjoying the pleasures of life. Greetings to Papa.
Your son in exile.
Farid
Next day he was summoned to one of the Fathers whom he didn’t know, Father Istfan. When he told Bulos this, Bulos frowned. “Did you write anyone a letter?” he asked. Farid was alarmed.
“They call Istfan ‘the Inquisitor’,” Bulos explained. “He censors all letters. There’s nothing for you to worry about, but your letter will be handed back to you. Every pupil goes through this – it’s a baptism of fire. But only idiots fall into the Inquisitor’s hands a second time. His halitosis is enough to cure idiocy on its own.”
Father Istfan more than lived up to his reputation. His expression was alarmingly gloomy, and he had very bad breath which made Farid think of something decomposing.
“Your letters,” he began, taking the folded sheet out of an envelope that had been slit open, and on which Farid recognized his own handwriting, “will be handed in to us in unsealed envelopes in future. We will be happy to advise you how to write them, so as to make sure there’s nothing in them to give your parents cause for concern, and we can point out any spelling mistakes. There are a number of untruths here,” he said slowly, breathing out air from the graveyard inside him. “First: Gabriel is a Brother, not some playmate of yours. Second: your name is Barnaba and not Farid. Third: exaggerations will only confuse your parents. Bulos is a pupil here, not anyone’s guardian angel. Fourth: you write that life here is dreary. That is not true. If you are bored, there are plenty of things you can do for the common good. My son, I wouldn’t like you to make your parents anxious with such exaggerations. And fifth, I see that you are in the best of health, so what you say about the food is clearly nonsense. You should describe life here honestly and in positive terms.”
Farid’s fury stifled the words in his throat. He took his letter from the Inquisitor’s hand and stormed out, with tears in his eyes.
“They check up on everything, but you have to write home at least six times a year,” said Bulos, who was waiting outside for him. “It’s compulsory. Anyone who doesn’t write attracts their attention, and they suspect him of smuggling letters.”
“Well, I’m not going to write if that ghoul is going to read what I say privately to my mother. That’s not …”
“You have to write,” replied Bulos. “Beat them with their own weapons: write letters that don’t say anything much, and if you want a real letter taken out in secret then give it to me, and it will be in Damascus next day.” Bulos smiled.
“Really?” asked Farid incredulously.
His guardian angel nodded.
Two days later Father Istfan summoned him again. Once again, his room stank of decay. “My son, a letter for you from a person by the name of Rana Shahin arrived today,” he informed Farid. “In your own interests and hers we have destroyed that letter. You are allowed to receive letters only from close family members.”
Farid could have hit Father Istfan, but he swallowed and said nothing. Bulos’s support was a help to him. He wrote Rana a passionate letter, telling her that he loved her and thought of her every second of the day, adding that her letter sent to the monastery had been intercepted, so it would be better if she didn’t write until he had found a way to get around that problem. But she was to talk to him at night, and despite the distance between them he would hear her voice.
Then he folded the letter, put it in an envelope, and wrote on it the one word “Rana”. He put this letter inside a second addressed to Laila, in which he vented his anger at the censorship in the monastery. He asked her to pass his letter on to Rana and confirm, in an answer apparently coming from his Aunt Malake, that his girlfriend had really received it. She was to write the following sentence: “The Virgin Mary was gracious to me, and my operation went well.” He gave this letter to Bulos, promising him to pay back the lira that the bus driver asked as soon as possible.
He was able to do so when his mother visited him two weeks later. He whispered to her that although it was forbidden in the monastery, he needed money. The monk who had to supervise visits was an amiable man who stood at the far end of the room with his back to them the whole time, looking out of the window.
Quick as lightning, Claire handed him a hundred lira.
“All that?” Farid marvelled.
“Nothing’s too much if it helps you. Be generous, that will open doors to you.”
He also learned from Claire on this visit that his cousin Laila had married a violinist, but to her family’s chagrin insisted that she didn’t want a wedding party.
“What’s her husband like?” asked Farid.
“Well, it’s a strange world. A hundred men would have given anything to marry Laila, but she takes no notice of any of them and sets her heart on this fiddler.”
“Yes, but what’s he like?”
“I don’t care for him. He has a shifty look, and he flatters people too much. And he’s idle, but Laila has come into a good inheritance.”
Farid felt curiously disappointed. Why had Laila never said a word to him about any of this?
Claire smiled bravely when she said goodbye, although according to the monastery regulations it would be a year before she was allowed to see him again. Farid felt miserable for days after her visit.
124. A Shipwrecked Sailor
Life in the monastery seemed harder and more dangerous the better he came to understand it. He was increasingly surprised that he had noticed so little of the churning emotions around him during his first few months. Farid himself felt like a shipwrecked sailor adrift on a stormy sea.
Once he had thought that a monastery would be a place of silence and tranquillity. None of that was true of the monastery of St. Sebastian. It was as if, by withdrawing from the world, the Fathers and their pupils had opened the door to those very passions against which they meant to protect themselves within the monastery walls. The more closely he looked at it, the more blurred seemed the boundary between love and hate.
For himself, he was surprised to find how quickly and warmly he had taken Gabriel, Marcel, Butros and Bulos to his heart. He knew that his soul could rest on those four foundations. By way of contrast, the signs of affection that Markus, one of the twins, kept lavishing on him were alarming. The boy had spoken of his own loneliness with fiery, feverish eyes. Marcel told him that evening that Markus would rather have been born a girl.
But the extremes of hatred to be found in the monastery alarmed Farid even more than this excessive affection. He kept finding pupils in the lavatories who had been brutally beaten up. Only gradually, and with the help of Marcel and Bulos, did he discover that the lavatories were obviously regarded as the best place to settle old scores. Not all of them were equally suitable, although they were all unsupervised, but the more remote they were the greater the danger. Among the mo
st dangerous were those on the third floor, and by night those in the cellars, where really harsh punishment was inflicted. The first floor lavatories were the place to settle minor quarrels. The safest lavatories of all were on the second floor near the administration offices and the Abbot’s rooms, but people who only ever went to these lavatories were teased by the others as scaredy-cats. The scaredy-cats included Marcel, although he didn’t seem to mind.
“I like to shit in peace,” he said, laughing at himself.
It was a long time before Farid realized that he too was regarded as a coward. First Bulos told him not to be so anxious all the time; that would encourage even the most faint-hearted to attack him. He could perfectly well go to the first-floor lavatories, he assured Farid. But his heart thudded every time he saw three or four youths hitting another pupil. Bulos had warned him never to get involved himself, and above all never to tell on anyone to the supervisors.
Only once did Farid get involved, one Saturday when three ninth-grade pupils dragged Marcel into the lavatories in the cellars and laid into him there. Farid had been reading until late in the library, which was permitted only on Saturdays. A moment came when he needed to go to the lavatory himself, and heard what was happening to Marcel. He immediately flung himself on the three boys and hit out at them, shouting. At first they tried to attack him too, but when he shouted even louder they ran off, just before several monks and pupils in the library noticed.
“Why were they beating you up?” asked Farid later, when he was alone with Marcel.
“I hit the little one, he’s a terrible tell-tale,” replied Marcel. “First I lay in wait until he was finally sitting on one of the first-floor lavatories. Then I tipped a whole can of piss over his head from above. And then he fetched his cousin and a friend to get his revenge,” said Marcel cheerfully.
Farid could make nothing of this. Suddenly Marcel seemed like a stranger. Marcel, who had been surrounded by servants at home in his parents’ house, had never needed to fight anyone, yet he had a particularly sharp tongue. He provoked others and then couldn’t defend himself. At mealtimes other boys, often listening fascinated to his stories, would steal the best bits of meat off his plate. Or they would smuggle the fat they had left on theirs into his helping, and he would absent-mindedly eat it. Farid watched this disgusting game for a few weeks before his patience snapped. He knocked the fork out of the hand of a pupil who was just spearing a good piece of meat on Marcel’s plate.
“What’s going on there?” It was the voice of Father Basilius, who was on supervision duty on the podium that day.
No one replied.
Farid had to accept that Gabriel had less and less time for him now. Not only was he busy teaching, every Saturday afternoon he also ran a study group in the great hall on the subject of early Christianity, in which only a select few could take part. Marcel and Bulos laughed at the participants, who apparently danced with each other and held hands, ate large quantities of bread, and drank wine. Bulos didn’t like Gabriel. “He’s a snake in the grass. Smooth outside, venomous inside,” he said. He suspected that Gabriel was the head of a secret society and, under cover of being a simple monk, controlled the entire monastery.
“I’ll wake you up and show you something tonight,” said Marcel quietly, when they were leaving the refectory three days after the scuffle in the lavatories.
“Why at night?” asked Farid.
Marcel looked cautiously around, to make sure no tale-bearers were lurking. “It wouldn’t be any good in the day. They’d catch us at it.”
“Do I keep my habit on?”
“No, you can wear your pyjamas, and I’ll fetch you as soon as the duty monk’s asleep.”
It was after midnight when Marcel soundlessly nudged him. Farid jumped up and quietly followed his friend. They crossed the washroom and then went through a door that Farid had never noticed before. It led to a stairway. Farid could smell damp air. His heart was hammering.
“We’re going up to the attics,” whispered Marcel, and before Farid could ask any more Marcel was hurrying up the small, steep staircase. It creaked beneath his feet. Beyond the door at the top was a heavy curtain insulating the attic yet further from the stairwell. When Marcel pushed it aside, Farid saw that the room on the other side was not entirely dark. Candlelight flickered in four small cells. Farid froze, for there were people behind the gratings over the cell doors: ancient, desiccated monks who could have climbed straight out of a medieval painting. One was kneeling in front of a picture. Farid recognized him as the figure who had hurled denunciations from the attic window during the performance of Joan of Arc. All that Farid could make out in the picture was Jesus on the cross. In the second cell a slightly younger monk lay stretched out, face down, with his arms and legs in a cross shape. An old man with hair down to his shoulders crouched in the third cell. He was chained to a pillar. And the fourth cell held a monk immersed in a book lying open on a stool in front of him. Two more cells were dark and empty. Their doors were open. The doors of the other cells were only closed, not padlocked.
“Who are they?”
“Nutcases. Let’s go, the others are waiting,” said Marcel. He led Farid on along a narrow corridor, past discarded furniture, implements, and large pots and pans.
“Harmless nutcases born a few centuries too late. The one stretching all his limbs out was a famous theologian once, until he started having conversations with God. He and the others are stashed away here like these pieces of furniture,” said Marcel, pointing to an old cupboard.
When they left the west wing and went down the central corridor, Marcel mentioned that they were right above the bedrooms where the monks and the Fathers slept.
“But don’t worry, they wouldn’t hear a herd of elephants down there. This ceiling is very well insulated, and when they couldn’t get the third-floor bedrooms warm enough in winter they thought it was because of the height of the rooms. They built in false ceilings lower down, and those are well insulated too,” he assured his friend. “All you ever hear is the mice and rats who fall through cracks in the attic floor, and scurry about on top of the false ceilings until they die. There’s no way for them to get out of the trap. It can be horrible.”
Now Farid heard soft whispering behind a mountain of old furniture. He stopped, rooted to the spot, but Marcel tugged his sleeve. “Come on, those are my friends,” he said.
Five of the older boys were sitting in a niche behind the cupboards on old couches and armchairs. They were smoking and drinking wine from a large beaker that was passed around in a circle. A candle on a large tin plate burned on the table in the middle of the party. Beside it lay photos of naked women dating from the 1920s. Farid saw another shabby piece of card bearing the inscription “The Nightclub”.
“This is my friend Barnaba, he’s another lunatic, he ought to be a member of our nightclub,” said Marcel. Farid had to smile.
“Can he be trusted?” asked a thin boy, scrutinizing Farid suspiciously.
“He’s okay,” replied Marcel, sitting down on a large couch. He signed to Farid to join him there.
Marcel was appreciated in this circle; no one teased him or made snide remarks. Farid took a couple of puffs at the cigarette that was being handed around, but had to cough, for it was curiously sharp in flavour. The wine, on the other hand, was sweet and sticky.
They spent about an hour up there, cracking jokes about the Fathers and nuns. It was cold in the attic, but the boys didn’t seem to notice. Farid didn’t feel at ease. This was not the kind of company he liked, and he was glad when the meeting ended.
Next time Marcel invited him to join them at the Nightclub, he thanked him but said no, he’d rather sleep. After that night, however, he often lay awake for a long time, staring into the darkness and thinking of the gang at home in Damascus, of Josef, and the attic above the aniseed warehouse. What were his friends doing now?
125. Silence
On Ash Wednesday, 3 March 1954, the world of the mona
stery fell silent. The idea was that you spent seven days cleansing your soul. To Farid, it was a misfortune. He loved the sound of words, the music of language, and regarded silence as the province of death, not life.
But Abbot Maximus thought otherwise. His remarks announcing the advent of a period of silence sanctified it. “Only when your lips are closed do you hear the voice of the heart,” he said, smiling kindly and looking around. “We learn thoughtfulness and patience best in silence. And only in stillness, dear brothers in Christ, do we find our way to the light.”
Observance of the commandment of silence was strictly supervised. “One word and you’re made to kneel down on the spot,” said Marcel, “and you have to stay there until the bell goes for the next meal.” He himself had once had to kneel on the ice-cold stone floor for three hours.
Everything fell silent. Even the chattering sparrows avoided the inner courtyard, for the heavy silence scared them away. The monastery became a house of deaf mutes. School and work were in abeyance. It was a week of meditation for all right-thinking people. The church and the library were open to everyone.
Farid almost lost his mind in this silence, but the sight of someone kneeling cured him of any wish to speak. The outward calm left his mind in turmoil. He didn’t want to be a priest. Why was he here at all? He dreamed of exploring the world and its secrets, he could be a pilot or a sea captain. So what was he doing behind these dank walls?
The inner courtyard, where the monastery pupils and the Fathers walked without making a sound, seemed positively ghostly in the evening twilight. Farid sat on a bench for a long time watching their silent perambulations, with a yawning void inside his head. He went into the church and immersed himself in the details of the large paintings. Just as he reached St. Giorgios the bell rang for supper, bringing release. Farid cast a last glance at the dragon. The creature looked pitiful, and he felt sorry for it. The horse was muscular, yet wrongly proportioned in some way. Its hindquarters occupied almost a quarter of the picture, and St. Giorgios seemed to be driving his spear into the dragon rather lethargically.