by Rafik Schami
A week later Satlan made a passionate speech denouncing the British and the French who, he said, were trying to blackmail him, and suddenly, to the surprise of millions of listeners, he addressed the demonstrators in Damascus directly. “My brothers in Damascus,” he said, proudly repeating their slogans, which he claimed encouraged him in Cairo to promote union between Egypt and Syria.
Josef couldn’t sleep that night. He regarded Satlan as a new Saladin who would unite the Arabs into a rich and powerful nation.
That day in the summer of 1956 people streamed out of all the surrounding streets, houses, schools, and shops. Motor traffic came to a standstill until the procession of demonstrators reached the Square of Seven Fountains.
Farid was amazed by the atmosphere. He had never known anything like it: thousands of people all shouting the name of Satlan, praising him to the skies. When the procession passed Rana’s house, he felt his heart beat faster. What would she say if she saw him? He didn’t know.
None of her family appeared at the windows.
Later, when Josef, Suleiman and Farid were on the bus going home, Josef was hoarse and exhausted. Suleiman was disappointed because it had all passed off so peacefully.
Wanting to cheer him up, Farid asked how Lamia was. He knew the two of them had been in love since they were seven, but he wasn’t aware that he was probing a deep wound. Only two weeks earlier Lamia had been married against her will, and had moved to the north with her husband.
155. Suleiman and Lamia
Lamia had lived in the house next door, separated just by a wall from Suleiman’s family. His sister Aida always mocked the couple. “My brother is a chocolate addict,” she once said. “If Jesus Christ asked him for a piece, he’d convert to Islam straight away. But he’ll give Lamia a whole chocolate bar and watch lovingly as she lets piece after piece melt in her mouth.”
When they were small, of course, Suleiman and Lamia had played together, but all that changed when she was twelve. Suddenly she wasn’t allowed to visit him, and he couldn’t touch her or give her presents any more.
He was in despair, but Azar had a bright idea: they could bore a hole in the wall between the two buildings, and then talk to each other or exchange letters through the small opening. The mud-brick wall was thin, so it wasn’t difficult to bore the hole. A trickier business was finding a place on both sides of it where they wouldn’t be disturbed. In the end they decided on the lavatory on Lamia’s side, while Suleiman had to disappear into a small broom cupboard under the stairs. He let his sister into the secret so that she could cover up for him if necessary. In spite of her sharp tongue, Aida could always be relied on.
All went well for months. But one day Lamia’s elder brother Ihsan discovered the hole, waited until his sister went to the lavatory, stood outside the door and eavesdropped on her love-talk. She was given a beating, and the hole was bricked up.
For a while Lamia’s best friend Nadia carried messages between the lovers when they arranged secret meetings in the New Town. But Nadia’s father saw his daughter three times speaking privately to Suleiman, and suspected that she herself had a relationship with the son of the consul’s chauffeur, now that Lamia’s parents had ended his affair with their own daughter.
Nadia was brave and didn’t give the lovers away, even when she was beaten. In his room, Suleiman could hear her screams after every blow, and wept with rage.
In her desperation, Lamia now turned to her favourite brother Usama as a messenger. He was only five, and she gave him a piece of chocolate for every letter he delivered. She thought he was a guileless child, but he began blackmailing his sister and had soon drained her of all her pocket money. When she couldn’t pay any more he gave her away. This time her parents didn’t beat her or lock her up, but in secret they frantically looked around for a man who would marry her even though she was so young. Soon they succeeded, and found a teacher urgently searching for a wife. He was twenty years older than Lamia, and came from the north.
At the sight of the young girl he felt suspicious. But when a woman doctor confirmed that Lamia really was still a virgin he married her.
156. Indian Movies
Claire’s mother had just celebrated her eightieth birthday when she had a fever that left her mentally confused. She needed care all around the clock now, and even though Claire didn’t do it herself she had to be constantly within reach of the nuns who were looking after Lucia. There was no way she could go to Mala for the summer vacation as usual.
Farid consoled his mother, saying he’d rather stay in Damascus anyway, he never wanted to set foot in Mala again. She raised her eyebrows. “Your father won’t like that,” she said.
“He ignores me anyway, so it can’t make any difference to him where I am. I hate Mala.” Claire stroked his head.
Elias didn’t know how to behave with his sick mother-in-law, and visited her once a month just out of politeness. He complained daily of the heat in Damascus, bewailing the fact that their lovely cool house in Mala was standing empty. However, Claire was not to be moved.
So Farid spent that summer in the city. Josef, Suleiman, and the other boys stayed in Damascus as well, but Rana had to go to Greece for two months with her parents. She phoned Farid a week before they left.
“Why Greece?” he asked on the telephone.
“A friend of my father’s has a house there.”
“Can we see each other before you go?”
“Tomorrow, if you like. We could go to the cinema. Dunia and I have tickets. I could persuade her to let you have hers, and my parents wouldn’t know.”
“Wonderful,” cried Farid. “When does the film begin?”
“At three in the afternoon. I’ll wait for you outside the entrance.”
“Aren’t you afraid of Jack? Suppose he …”
“Never mind Jack,” she interrupted. “We’ll meet outside the cinema.”
He was there half an hour early, and Rana herself turned up quarter of an hour before the appointed time. “My mother’s such a viper!” she said angrily as they sat down in a small café in the cinema building. “Ten minutes before I was about to leave, she said Jack had better go along to look after me and my girlfriend. Think of that! What was I to do? I told myself to keep calm, and I told him, ‘All right, come with us, then. We’re going to this marvellous Indian movie.’ Because I know Jack hates Indian movies. He thinks they’re badly made, the actors are too fat, the stories are too thin, and the songs are dead boring. But I still held another trump card.”
Farid looked at her inquiringly.
“It’s a love story. Jack hates love stories worse even than maths,” she explained. “So my mother was still trying to lumber me with Jack, and tempted him with a lot of money, saying he could take me and Dunia out for an ice after the film. Then I played my trump card and told him it was a particularly good love story. That did the trick!”
Rana and Farid sat side by side in the dark cinema, holding hands. It was one of those mammoth Indian films that spend three hours telling a story in which the lovers do their utmost to be unhappy and keep singing at each other without warning. One-third of it was singing that no one could understand.
Farid managed to kiss Rana surreptitiously twice, and was surprised by the tears that ran down her cheeks when she looked at him.
When the film was over she handed him a letter, dropped a quick goodbye kiss on his cheek and whispered, “Think of me.” Then she pushed her way through the audience to the main exit. Farid left more slowly, choosing the side exit.
He read Rana’s letter in the bus, and had difficulty in keeping back his own tears.
157. Gibran the Sailor
He sat on the edge of his old camp bed with a bottle of arrack in one hand and a cigarette in the other. About ten young men sat on the floor of his poorly furnished room, all of them smoking. A dense cloud of smoke floated out of the open window, as if Gibran’s room were a kebab restaurant.
It was the first time Farid had
joined them. Josef had been pressing him to go almost every day since his return from the monastery. He was really missing something, Josef said, for when Gibran was drunk he could tell a story better than the best of the hakawati storytellers in the city. And today Gibran was so drunk that he never even noticed when they came in. Farid found a place near the window where he could get some fresh air.
“My story today is about a tragic love affair. The tale of Laila and Madjnun is sweet lemonade by comparison. The heroine and hero are Juliana and Arnus, and you must remember those names.”
“Why?” some of the young men asked.
Gibran took a large gulp from his bottle and drew on his cigarette. “Arnus. Arnus and Juliana,” he repeated.
“Isn’t that the name of an avenue in Damascus?” asked Toni. Gibran took another large gulp and grunted.
“And wasn’t Arnus the son who went to war against his father?”
“What war?” asked Suleiman. “I thought Arnus meant a corn cob.”
“No, my boy. Arnus may sound like the Arabic for a corn cob, but it’s a Roman name. Sultan Aziz of Damascus was a young and very clever ruler in the days when the crusaders had occupied the entire coastline.”
That was the beginning of the long love story that Gibran told. He talked and talked, and never stopped drinking all the time, holding the normally restless young men so spellbound that they all listened in silence. One of them even shed tears when the Sultan’s son Arnus was put in prison, and Sultan Aziz saw around his neck the medallion that he had given his beloved wife Juliana many years ago.
Gibran ended his story, put the empty liquor bottle down on a crate where a full ashtray and several crumpled books already lay, and fell backward on the bed. He began snoring at once, and the young men stole out of his room.
158. The Club
The new club in Abbara Alley, founded during Farid’s absence in the monastery, had been there for some time now. It had its premises in a large backyard belonging to the Catholic Church.
Its founders, a handful of young men, were proud of having made a pleasant place out of a dilapidated yard full of mountains of rubbish and old junk. Determined to make their idea succeed, the members had collected donations from the Christian community, reminding the rich that it was time to do something for the young if they were to hold their own with the Muslim majority in Damascus. When they approached atheists, nationalists, and communists, on the other hand, they pointed out the advantages of having healthy young people around, brought in from the street by the club to keep them from drugs, gambling games, and knife fights. Instead they could play basketball and volleyball, table tennis and chess on the club’s new premises.
Such lavish donations had come in that, besides a well-equipped playing field, the club also had an office, a large table tennis room, and ten modern showering and changing cubicles in the single-storey building next to the yard. There was even a café.
From the first everything had been open to boys and girls alike, and as prices in the café were affordable it became a favourite meeting place for young people. In less than three years the club had acquired two hundred active members and a hundred honorary members, including the minister of culture, who was a Christian and could always call on the club members as voluntary assistants in election campaigns.
All Farid’s friends were already in the club, and his father was an honorary member and generous with his donations. Two weeks after he came home from the monastery, Farid joined. He played chess well, he was reasonably good at basketball, and very good at table tennis.
All the inhabitants of the buildings around the square took down the boards that had been nailed over their windows. Vermin, the penetrating stink, and the unappetizing garbage lying around the yard had made it impossible for them to have them open before. Now they sat at their windows, cracking roasted nuts and drinking tea, while they watched a strange, foreign game in which young men struggled for possession of a large red ball, aiming to throw it up and through a dangling, basket-like construction. Before two years were up, all the neighbours knew so much about the game that they sometimes even whistled derisively at the referee.
Now that this new meeting place was available Farid’s friends seldom met in the attic or at Rasuk’s place. They preferred going to the club. And someone else started coming to it every day: the old seaman Gibran. He became best friends with Taufik, who leased the café. It turned out that they had known each other in their youth, but then lost track of one another for decades.
Gibran helped Taufik to clean the café, water the flowers, and buy supplies. In return he could eat and drink as much as he wanted there. He stopped wandering around town and cast anchor at the club. There was only one thing he couldn’t do there, and that was to drink alcohol. Taufik was inflexible on that point. He himself never drank, and one day when Gibran turned up tipsy Taufik wouldn’t let him in, hard as the young people begged him. They had hoped to hear one of the old seaman’s spicy stories.
159. Amin
Farid met Amin in September over a game of chess. He said of him later that no one else apart from Claire and Rana had such an enduring influence on his life as the small tiler. Even years later, Farid remembered their first meeting. He had of course seen Amin at the club before, but only that day, during their game of chess, did he first talk to him. At the time there were no very good chess players in the club, so Farid, with the sketchy knowledge of the game that he had picked up in the monastery, was like a one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind and beat everyone. One September afternoon, Amin came over and asked him to teach him how to play chess.
Amin was five years older than Farid, he worked laying tiles, and he laughed a great deal at the evening meetings. You could tell from his sharp comments that he knew a lot about politics. Josef had always kept a respectful distance from him. Now and then they did argue, but they always stayed friendly.
Amin got Farid to tell him all about chess, and learned with an eagerness and gratitude that were all his own, marvelling at the thought processes behind the moves. He was an emotional player who swore volubly when he lost.
On that first day the game lasted only ten minutes. Amin invited Farid to have a tea, and when Taufik served the slender glasses, the tiler sipped his and then asked, with interest, “I hear you were in the monastery, is that so?”
“Yes, but it doesn’t mean anything to me. I had a horrible time there, and the place was anti-Christian anyway.”
“How do you mean, anti-Christian?” asked Amin in some surprise.
“Because Christ preached love but they practise hate, pure hate. Jesus never tortured anyone, and shared his bread with all comers. But the monks torture people until they collapse or get to be as heartless as they are.”
Amin lit a cigarette. “It’s odd what the Church has made of Jesus, don’t you think?” he said. “He sided with the poor of this world, but the Church is always on the side of the rich and powerful.”
“You’re right. A friend of mine in the monastery said the Church makes the way to God not shorter but longer.”
“Building in curves, barriers, and detours along the route,” added Amin grimly. “And charging tolls and admission tickets whenever it likes.”
Josef came in and went up to them. “Hello, Amin, trying to palm a Stalin icon off on him?” he joked.
Amin shook his head, grinning. “No, they’re all sold out, and I’m not selling any of Satlan.”
Josef forced a smile, but there was discord in the air. Soon Rasuk, Toni, Suleiman and a number of others joined the two opponents. Farid had no idea what it was all about, but he sensed that each was trying to hold the other’s ideas and convictions up to ridicule.
Suddenly they were all talking at once, and Farid couldn’t keep up. He felt like a small child, inferior to the rest of them as they pronounced instant judgement, juggled names and events, and defended their claims with fanatical zeal. He could think of nothing and no one, apart from Rana and Claire,
whom he could defend knowing so certainly that he was in the right.
Unobtrusively, he withdrew from their circle and sat down in the café.
“It’s all just froth,” said Gibran, who was sitting there too, nodding in the direction of the fighting-cocks out on the terrace. “All just froth,” he repeated after a while. His voice faltered, and sounded as lonely as Farid’s soul.
Farid read a magazine lying on the counter. Taufik kept carrying tea and coffee out to his customers on the terrace, where over thirty men and women were now involved in a debate that was getting nowhere, but was frequently interrupted by roars of laughter.
“Do you feel like a walk?” he suddenly heard Amin say. “We can’t hear ourselves speak any more here.”
“Good idea,” said Farid. He paid, and waited for Amin, who had to go to the men’s room first.
“Off already?” asked Josef, suddenly materializing behind him.
“Yes,” replied Farid.
“Will you drop in at my place later?”
“What if it’s late?”
“Doesn’t matter. I’ll wait for you upstairs.” Farid realized that he meant in the attic.
Amin seemed to know Farid’s family. He lived close to Grandmother Lucia, near the Ananias Church. When Farid went home three hours later, he was feeling remarkably cheerful. He knew that he had made a friend who talked to him like a big brother that evening. Amin was knowledgeable and very witty, yet he could well have complained day and night of the hard times his family had suffered. They had been resettled time and time again over the generations, and every time they lost all they had. His father, descended from a highly regarded Christian nobleman, worked as a doorman in Damascus, and his wages only just paid for his cigarettes and arrack. Amin had had to leave school early and start work to feed the family, including three younger sisters who were still at school. But none of that could quench his love of life. He saw his poverty not as a private misfortune, but as part of even greater wretchedness all over the world that left millions of people starving and suffering. He said he would lend Farid books about world poverty, and they agreed to meet again.