by Rafik Schami
After supper Farid fled to the library, where he found Bulos, who seemed to be buried in a book. Bulos looked up, a smile tried to form on his lips, but he suppressed it and went on reading. The Rise of Nations, said the title on the cover of his book.
That evening Farid discovered Jules Verne’s first novel, Five Weeks In A Balloon. And suddenly a week’s silence was no longer a threat. He spent twelve hours a day reading now. Sometimes he even missed a meal to follow an exciting incident to its conclusion. During that week, he realized that books could be a life-raft in an ocean of silence and grief. And when he lay in bed at night with his back aching from sitting and reading so long, he felt Rana’s hand in the darkness and travelled with her through the world of the stories he had read.
Jules Verne had been merely the one who opened the door, the magician who revealed the world of books to him. Soon after that, Farid was wandering through nineteenth-century France with Balzac, India with Kipling, Russia with Tolstoy, America with Jack London.
But in the middle of that week of silence, Laila’s letter arrived. Brother John handed out the mail without a word. Farid was startled when the monk – in his usual rough style – just threw the letter down on his book and went on.
Rana understood him and would love him for ever. Clever Laila had skilfully smuggled him the message that he longed to hear between the lines of her letter. The camouflage was brilliant. Her seven-year old daughter Rana, wrote Laila, idolized him and spoke of nothing but her dear Uncle Farid who was in a monastery. She wanted to join a convent herself later, and be a nun in Africa. Farid grinned when he imagined the satisfaction on the censor’s face.
He had been writing Rana a letter every month since September, and sending it via Bulos under cover of another letter to Laila. The bus driver was extremely happy to have the lira that Farid paid him for every delivery.
And Laila answered once a month. So as not to attract attention, she sometimes signed her letters with the name of her mother Malake.
A great peal of bells announced the end of the week of silence. Farid took more pleasure in regaining the use of language than in the festive meal served that day.
The day was set aside for recreation. All the gates were open, the inmates could go out and take walks around the monastery. For a moment, the world was a whole dimension larger.
126. Rebels
Farid spent a long time standing in front of the glass cases in the library where the valuable scrolls with the poems of seventh-century St. John Damascene were kept.
The saint was also known as St. John of the Golden Mouth for his lyrical style. A short account of his life lay beside one of the scrolls. His right hand had been severed by a blow from a sword during a pogrom, but the story went that he picked it up, put it back on his arm, and finished writing his poem.
Brother Gabriel made fun of this heroic legend. However, when Farid asked about the large greasy marks on the scrolls, his face darkened. They had been left by the sardine cans of the peasant rebels who captured the monastery in the 1930s, drove the monks out, and misused the building as their barracks.
“They couldn’t make anything of the scrolls, so they used them as tablecloths,” said Gabriel. “They wreaked havoc here in the monastery for two years, until the French army of occupation drove them out. When the monks returned they found a sad scene of destruction. It took three million dollars and four years of work to restore the monastery. That’s why our Abbot pays protection money rather than face such devastation again.”
“What kind of protection money?”
“We’re in the region dominated by the rebel Salman. He’s fought off all attacks by the government to date. His headquarters in the Eagle Mountains is impregnable, and he’s absolute ruler here. He demands fifty thousand lira every year, and we pay up. In return, his bandits can’t so much as pick a blade of wheat from our fields.”
“Fifty thousand – why, that’s a vast sum!” said Farid in amazement.
“Yes, indeed, but every painting in the church, the marble altar, the library, they’re all priceless treasures. And what does the money matter? We can live in safety,” replied Gabriel.
“Do the bandits stick to your agreement?”
“Salman’s a decent man at heart. A pity he’s a Muslim. He is a great Sufi and admires Christ more than many a Christian.” Gabriel hesitated, as if he felt awkward about going on. ‘But unfortunately he admires him with a weapon in his hand.”
“And how does he get the money? Do his robbers come to the monastery?” asked Farid curiously. That interested him more than the elevated ideas of the rebel Sufi.
“No, no,” said Gabriel. “I take it to him in his citadel. He insists on that, to show that he and not the monastery is the ruler here.”
“What? You mix with the robbers?”
“It’s not as exciting as you may think. The monastery sends word that I’ll be coming, then I go, I hand over the money, I get a sealed receipt and come back.”
Farid felt very restless. That night he waited until the monk on supervision duty was asleep, and then got up and sat on the broad window sill. It was a warm April night, and the windows were open. The full moon turned the sea into a silver platter with a fishing boat slowly gliding over it. The sea was as still as if the moon had calmed the soul of the waves.
Out there, somewhere in the Eagle Mountains, was an invincible rebel who was popular with the poor, and was said to be so small of stature that if an egg fell out of his trouser pocket it wouldn’t break when it hit the ground.
How can such a small man lead robbers, Farid wondered? Perhaps he enchants them with the power of his tongue and they never notice his size.
Farid had clearly sensed that Gabriel secretly liked Salman, even if the rebel did blackmail the monastery for large sums.
The sea was glittering strangely, as if stars had fallen into it. Suddenly Rana was there. “Can you hear me?” he whispered drowsily.
Very little news made its way to the monastery in the summer of 1954. They heard that Shaklan had been toppled, but it was another year before the monastery felt the first results of his fall. The rebel Tanios, he of the patent leather shoes, was happy with General Batlan’s new government, for the President had appointed one of his sons as agriculture minister. Tanios laid down his arms and allowed governmental troops to pass through his own region and surround the second and far more dangerous rebel, Salman. The fighting went on for weeks, and it was said that the rebels fought fiercely, but when their leader Salman was captured and shot in an olive grove, they surrendered. Only the women would not capitulate, and defended their last bastion, a small and ruinous fortress. For a long time the soldiers dared not attack; horror stories were told about the rebels’ women. But when they stormed the fortress, greatly outnumbering its defenders, they found out that all the women had committed suicide.
The defeat of the rebels was a relief to the monastery. No more protection money had to be paid from now on.
127. An Excursion
October was almost as hot as August that year. For once, the pupils in the monastery were allowed to go on an excursion to the sea, escorted by Father Constantine the music teacher. They had to walk in line, two by two, but they could choose who to walk with. Farid joined Bulos, who had just received a letter from his mother by courtesy of the bus driver. All the way down he was swearing at the stepfather who beat her.
“I could murder him. A fragile woman like that, he sits on her chest and breaks three ribs. And what does she do? She tells the doctor she fell off a ladder while she was doing housework.”
Bulos was trembling all over, and went on to describe, at length, an occasion when his stepfather had tied his mother to a chair and then tortured him, Bulos, before her eyes. He told this tale with as much detachment as if he had merely seen it all in a movie. Farid could hardly believe the story, but Bulos was straightforward in everything he did. Farid shuddered to think of the terrible revenge that Bulos would take on his ste
pfather some day.
It was a relief when they arrived down on the beach and the line could break up and scatter. There wasn’t another soul in the little bay. The pupils undressed. They had no bathing trunks; they were to bathe in their shorts and keep a second, dry pair to change into later.
Marcel was the first to run into the waves, but at that moment Father Constantine ordered them, in tones of alarm, to leave again. Just as the boys were laughing at Marcel’s leap into the water, a pair of lovers had come on the scene. A muscular man and a blonde woman tourist had chosen the bay below the monastery for their own outing. They ignored Father Constantine’s request to them to find another bay, and undressed. Reluctantly, the monastery pupils left, feeling furious, and all of them without exception thought nothing could be more ridiculous than Father Constantine’s suggestion that on the way back they should all pray for the lovers’ souls, and hope they would remain chaste.
“How such an idiot can make such brilliant music is a mystery to me,” whispered Bulos.
128. The Syrian Brothers
More and more often, Farid longed to hear the sound of Arabic. Sometimes he went off on his own to taste a few Arabic words, letting them melt one by one on his tongue. Twice he got so high on them that he forgot himself and recited some Arabic verses out loud. He was startled to feel someone slipping the little disk with the letter S into his pocket. As he refused to pass the disk on to anyone else, he had to eat his supper kneeling.
“I admire your noble attitude. I’ll be thinking of you,” whispered Bulos in passing, squeezing his shoulder. Marcel and Butros gave him an affectionate wave too, while the twins Luka and Markus acted as if they didn’t know him. Farid also refused to eat, but the monk on supervision duty took this gesture to be mortification of the flesh and not a protest.
A little later, as they were walking in the monastery grounds, Bulos told him about a secret society whose members were interesting boys, and would like to get to know him, Farid.
He was first admitted to a meeting of this secret society chaired by Bulos, the Syrian Brothers, in mid-November. The members were ten pupils from different grades. To Farid’s great surprise they included Marcel, who had had to leave the Nightclub in order to join. Bulos had insisted on it.
Farid didn’t understand what the aims of the society were, but it was an exciting change from routine, and when they swore loyalty in the twilight of the attic where they met, and Bulos spoke of the power of their association, Farid remembered that other attic back in Damascus and his friend Josef. Bulos appeared to be convinced that the Syrian Brothers would take over power in the monastery one day.
At first Farid thought Bulos was only joking, but when he insisted on the swearing of an oath against treachery and tale-bearing, he realized that his friend meant it seriously. Enemies of the Syrian Brothers were attacked in the lavatories after dark and beaten up without much discussion. The punishment squad consisted of Bulos and three strong tenth-grade boys. The victims could not identify their tormentors, who were well disguised, but afterwards they knew who they had to keep quiet about. And the threat of the signal was instantly reduced for the Syrian Brothers. If a member of the secret society was handed the hated wooden disk, all the others would go hunting until they caught someone else speaking Arabic.
One day Bulos explained that it was important for them to have a secret language that no one else would understand. Every week from then on, he taught his friends ten to twenty new words and phrases invented by himself. He hoped that within a year they would be able to talk to each other in this secret language. Farid was surprised to find how eagerly everyone set about learning it. And sure enough, they were very soon able to greet each other in it at their meetings or in the school yard, exchanging brief secret messages that no outsider could understand.
129. Discord
The January of 1955 was particularly cold. It snowed overnight, and the world seemed to be frozen under a sugar coating. Now the monastery building showed its structural faults. None of the big windows fitted properly; the wood of the frames had warped in the heat and drought of the long summer months. Farid froze in bed at night, even though the nearest window had been draught-proofed with old rags.
Outside, the ground was slippery as glass. No motor vehicle could venture up the narrow dirt road to the monastery. The inner courtyard had become an ice rink. The pupils, the cooks, and the Fathers slid about on it, and someone was always falling down.
Farid was standing near the stairway under the arcades, watching his breath emerging as vapour from his mouth, like cigarette smoke, when Marcel waved to him. “Bulos is looking for you.” And he added, in their secret language, “There’s a meeting this evening.”
Bulos was angry. Markos, a ninth-grade pupil and a member of the Syrian Brothers, had been turned, he said. The boy wouldn’t give the society away, but he wasn’t coming to any more meetings because he felt more comfortable with Gabriel’s Early Christians group.
These remarks reminded Farid how Butros had often warned him to avoid Bulos and attend the Saturday group instead. Bulos was waxing indignant about Gabriel, calling him a Jewish communist, and Farid was startled by the mounting hatred of his tone. The others just nodded. But when Bulos began contemplating a punitive operation against Gabriel out loud, Farid’s alarm changed to cold anger. The others were also paying more attention now, and didn’t go along with Bulos’s idea. Gabriel was frail and sick, said Marcel.
Farid felt something break inside him. “I won’t join in. I think we should leave Gabriel alone,” he said hoarsely, looking Bulos in the eye. Disappointed, Bulos shrugged.
“I tell you, he’s a snake in the grass, but if you don’t want to do anything about it, we’ll leave him alone for now.”
130. Epilepsy
He couldn’t wake up, although he heard the bell. Only when Marcel shook him did Farid slowly come to his senses and sit up in bed. He felt a painful throbbing in his right temple. He’d rather have stayed in bed, but he was afraid of his fellow pupils’ scorn, for laziness was regarded as disloyalty: the others would have to do his work as well as their own. It was a fiendish system, and meant that even the Fathers and the monks must turn up for work looking keen so as not to lose face. Farid was due to work in the orange grove with five other pupils after lessons.
So he tried to get up, and almost fainted. He clung to the bedstead until he felt a little better. Finally he staggered into the washroom and put his head under a jet of cold water.
He felt a little fresher in lessons. But then, soon after prayers for Nones at three in the afternoon, it happened. He was just marking out a circle around a young orange tree with a spade, as instructed by Brother Jakob, who himself worked hard enough for three, and then he was going to weed the earth inside it. Suddenly everything went black in front of his eyes, he lost consciousness, and collapsed. When he came to his senses the first thing he heard was Gabriel’s voice. He opened his eyes and saw Brother Jakob’s concerned face. At that moment Bulos walked past a little way off, taking no notice of him. “Where’s Claire?” asked Farid softly, but then he realized he had seen her only in a dream. The back of his head hurt where it had hit the ground. Brother Jakob told him he had fallen backward as stiff as a post. Farid wiped the saliva from the corners of his mouth. It’s the falling sickness, he thought, frightened, and remembered the street seller Hassan who sold ice in Saitun Alley in summer and sweetmeats in winter. Hassan fell down in a faint at least once a year, and people said that because the djinn loved him they sometimes stole him away to sing to them.
Gabriel accompanied the sick boy to the dormitory, and stayed for a while when Farid sat down on his bed, exhausted. “I see you’re my brother in misfortune,” he said, stroking Farid’s forehead, and then he left.
131. Spiritual Welfare
Anyone with problems was supposed to turn to his grade teacher, although if they were serious or of an intimate nature, every grade also had another experienced monk availabl
e. Then there was the confessional for downright sins.
However, Farid never made use of any of these opportunities. At the end of March, just after the week of silence, a monk called Christian told him he had to confess before he partook of the body of Christ. When Farid replied that he wasn’t committing any sins in the monastery, the bearded monk laughed. “And there’s your first sin: pride. Seek and ye shall find, oh yes,” he added, and went away. Next day Farid set about looking for some small sin that wouldn’t mean too many prayers to be said in penance. Marcel warned him, “Thinking of Josephine’s legs will cost you a prayer of repentance, two Our Fathers and three Hail Marys. Farting in divine service costs a prayer of repentance and one Our Father. The cheapest sins are small wishes and wanting better food.”
So Farid cobbled together his first lie for confession. It turned out exactly as Marcel had predicted. Farid was satisfied with the results. Once, however, sheer curiosity made him want to find out how the Fathers would react to the sin of sexual desire, and he confessed to the priest that whenever he saw Josephine he wanted to put his arms around her and kiss her lips. At that the priest lumbered him with a whole litany of prayers. Farid never said a single one of them. He didn’t feel sinful, for he had never wanted to kiss Josephine’s lips, and his confessor knew nothing at all about Rana and hers.
Farid solved his everyday problems with the help of Gabriel, Marcel, or Bulos, but the monastery administration didn’t approve of that kind of thing. In May the monk responsible for his grade sent for him, and Bulos advised him to act naïve and come up with small problems of some kind. “Then the Brother will be pleased to have helped someone,” he said, “and next time you can tell him it worked a treat and then dish up some even sillier story. After about the fifth time he won’t want to see you any more.”