by Rafik Schami
171. The Debts of Venice
The year 1959 began badly. A wave of arrests rolled over the country. Farid’s Party training was interrupted because the man who ran the courses was in prison. He called himself Comrade Bassam, but his real name was Josef Kassis, and he was the son of one of the richest importers in Damascus. Comrade Bassam was a tall, smooth-skinned man with a droning, monotonous voice. He talked nineteen to the dozen, as if he had diarrhoea of the mouth. When he started on about some Marxist concept, Farid always felt an enormous urge to drop off to sleep, and sometimes, with unfortunate consequences, he couldn’t resist it.
“Comrade,” Bassam the Marxist expert had reproved him, “a fighter with no knowledge of economics is just a romantic adventurer. He will betray the working class the moment he gets a chance.”
Farid had no intention of doing that, but all the same he was obliged to agree that Bassam who ran the training courses was right, for if you contradicted him his sermon was immediately dragged out to three times its original length, and the other comrades would hold a grudge against you. So Farid merely complained to Amin privately about the boring Bassam. Amin couldn’t stand him, and called him a rich upstart. “His father imports washing machines, and son Bassam has one in his head, with a drum going around all the time,” he said, grinning.
Under pressure from the government of President Satlan, the Party feverishly extended its activities. Farid had to risk his life distributing pamphlets inveighing against the oppression of communists, and finally even found himself leading the youth organization.
At the end of March, Grandmother Lucia’s health deteriorated. She lived in her own deranged world, as if in a constant fever. The situation upset Claire. One day when she entered the house the whole place smelled of incense, jasmine blossom, and thyme. Claire called for the nursing nun and her mother, but there was no reply. When she finally found her, Lucia was dancing naked around a small fire that she had lit in the middle of the room. She was throwing spices on it and uttering cries of glee. The nun was nowhere to be seen.
After that Lucia slept for three days, and when she woke up she summoned Claire, who was now caring for her round the clock, and asked for notepaper and envelopes. From now until her death she wrote letters, asking the Venetian authorities to return her grandfather’s collection of glass eyes. When that nobleman lost his right eye, he had apparently had three thousand glass eyes made by a famous glassmaker on Murano until he found one that fitted him perfectly.
Farid was afraid of his grandmother’s delusions, and would visit her only in Claire’s company. Whenever he saw Lucia she was surrounded by ancient journals and papers. She wrote the mayor of Venice letter after letter, and to everyone’s surprise received interested replies. In fact they were written by Claire. As Lucia lay in a fever shortly before her death, the postman brought her a letter with the sender’s name given as “Mayor of Venice”. Claire read it aloud. It was written in French, and the mayor was inviting Lucia to spend a week in the city. She would stay in the finest house there as a guest of honour, and could visit the Murano Museum and see the magnificent collection of glass eyes that her grandfather had left to Venice in his will.
Lucia was very weak, but all the same she slowly raised her head and propped herself up on her elbows. “So there are still some decent people left in the world,” she said triumphantly, and her eyes shone with fevered delusion and endless longing for Venice. “But what glass eyes does he mean?” she asked, suddenly at a loss. Then a mischievous smile flitted over her face.
Claire said nothing, and helped her mother to lie down again. That night Lucia slept peacefully, embracing her pillow as if it were a lover, and never woke up again.
172. Paths Crossing
Farid passed the exam for his high school diploma at the end of June 1959, achieving good marks that allowed him to register at the university. He wanted to study mathematics, physics and chemistry, and be a teacher. Josef, whose average marks were not so good, registered to study geography and history. He wanted to go into politics, and was perfectly happy with those subjects. “A politician who doesn’t know anything about history and geography is no use, and will lead his country to ruin,” he said succinctly. He and Farid were the only members of their set with marks good enough for them to study at university.
It had been late summer when the new candidates for further education streamed towards the university. The authorities had put up a low-roofed building outside the entrance to help them deal with the crush. It had over ten windows side by side, like the ticket office at a rail station. The officials received application forms through a slit in the window, and seemed to have the calm of Buddha and the time of all eternity at their disposal, while the young candidates for university places roasted in the full sun outside.
Farid and Josef talked to the other applicants. Many of them came from the country and had never been in Damascus before. They had to go back to their distant villages that evening or spend the night on a park bench, since none of them had the money for a hotel. Some had even brought bread, olives, sheep’s milk cheese, and hardboiled eggs from home so that they wouldn’t have to spend anything on food. All the dialects of the country could be heard. There were two separate windows to one side for women candidates, and all was calm and orderly there. Few women managed to take their high school diploma and then go on to further studies.
A young man called Amran with an expressionless face was just ahead of Josef and Farid in line. He was almost sure, he said, that he wouldn’t be accepted by the university, he thought his marks weren’t good enough. But no one knew if such pessimism was well-founded. The man with him complained of the lazy officials, and enumerated the buses that had already left for his village in the north and those that would still be running from now until evening.
When Amran’s turn came to go up to the window, everyone around heard the humiliating remarks made by a fat Damascene clerk to the peasant’s son, after the poor man had been waiting for four hours.
“What do you expect to do with these results?” asked the sweating colossus behind the glass pane scornfully.
“Study something, anything,” replied Amran, not exactly quietly but in a tone that all could hear. He would be happy with any subject, he continued; the main thing was that a university degree would open gates for him.
“You wouldn’t even get a job as a porter with marks like these,” scoffed the clerk.
“Why not? I’ve passed my high school diploma, and there’s no law saying you have to have certain marks before you can study,” said Amran, in as level a tone as if the point at issue were not his place at university but something of no importance at all.
“Hmm. No, there is not in fact any such law. The university itself decides on its new students, depending on their numbers and average marks. But if we’re talking about laws,” said the clerk in a loud voice, grinning, “you can’t quote me one obliging me to accept you either.”
“What am I going to do now?” asked Amran, rather more quietly.
“Oh, join the army. They’ll take anyone,” replied the clerk. His derision was palpable, pouring out of the window. Some of the bystanders laughed. Farid was seething with fury, but he was afraid to say anything.
“I don’t like armies,” said Amran. His voice suddenly faltered.
“Nor do I, but someone has to defend the Fatherland,” barked the clerk, pushing the thin folder with Amran’s application form back through the window. “Next,” he said, without any emotion. But the next was Amran’s companion. He went up to the window. “My marks are even worse than my friend’s, so I guess I’ll go straight off to join the army, and do you know why?” he asked with assumed civility.
The clerk, for his own part, pretended to be curious. “No, why?”
“Not to defend this filthy Fatherland but so I can fuck your mother without being prosecuted for it. You wait and see, you bastard of a Timur-Leng,” he said. He turned, and walked away at a deliberately s
low pace.
The clerk froze. Leaving his window to punish the boy who had insulted him would have been too risky. The other angry peasants’ sons who weren’t admitted would have lynched him.
That was the first time Farid heard the term of abuse frequently used by peasants from the country to insult the Damascenes. Timur-Leng came from Mongolia and had captured the city with his wild horde in 1400, after a long siege. His revenge for the resistance that he encountered was terrible. He had a third of the population driven into the great Ummayad Mosque and set the place on fire. None of the thirty thousand people inside survived. He allowed his soldiers a week in which to rape the women who had not been driven into the mosque, and from those who had survived his revenge he sent scholars, craftsmen, and artists to his capital of Samarkand, leaving only a handful of wretches behind on a smoking pile of rubble. It was said that the Damascenes were so crafty because they were Timur-Leng’s bastards.
Eight years after the incident outside the university, in the autumn of 1967, a young army captain by the name of Amran led a coup. Two days later he appointed himself general, and soon after that President of Syria. He issued a decree giving peasants’ sons bonus points for university entrance. Two years later, President Amran received five honorary doctorates at the University of Damascus, in the faculties of philosophy, literature, mathematics, political science, and medicine. Moscow followed suit. In recognition of a large order from Amran to the Soviet arms industry, it appointed him Honorary Doctor of Philosophy of Moscow University.
173. The State of God
Madeleine opened the door to Farid. “Thank goodness you’re here. He’s beside himself,” she said, concerned, and took him to Josef. Josef was a changed man. He looked at Farid red-eyed.
“Those bastards, they’ve made a second attempt on President Satlan’s life, would you believe it? Suppose the hand grenade had gone off? The criminals, I could murder them all!” Farid didn’t know what to say. Josef sounded as if he were under the influence of drugs. He was snorting rather than breathing, his words came out as if he were retching instead of speaking. It took Farid some time to grasp the fact that one of the Muslim Brotherhood had thrown a hand grenade at the President. Satlan had escaped unscathed while the young fanatic fell, riddled by bullets from the President’s bodyguard.
Farid kept quiet and let Josef rant on. He could understand his friend’s grief and rage, but the assassination attempt meant nothing to him personally. He had been rejoicing all day over news from Rana. She would be alone for an hour in a small church next Sunday, she said, when her brother Jack had to go to the tennis club with his father. Farid was to wait for her under the picture of St. Barbara.
If he had opened his mouth, the only word to emerge would have been “Rana”. So he kept quiet and listened to Josef. Later, Rasuk joined them. He had heard about the attempt on the President’s life on the BBC World Service. The Arab radio stations were saying nothing about it.
“Elizabeth asked me if these were the new Assassins,” he said. “I don’t know much about them – they sound odd. I thought I’d ask you,” he added, turning to Josef.
“Myths and legends proliferate around the Assassins. They are described as murderers, religious fanatics, paid killers, and most often of all as ‘hashish eaters’. At the time no one knew about smoking hashish, people chewed it,” explained Josef, sounding like a walking encyclopaedia. Then he went on. “Well, yes, the Muslim Brotherhood are just like the Assassins of the old days. They murder when the leader of their sect tells them to, they don’t fear death because they already have one foot in Paradise. So you can’t even frighten them.”
“And do they pump themselves full of hashish first?” asked Rasuk.
“No, that bit’s nonsense,” said Josef. “Hashish just makes it easier to get through to other realities. It makes meditation deeper, guides the eye to the essentials, and it’s a help in attaining wisdom.”
This was the first time Farid had ever heard anyone speak in favour of hashish; his parents and his school, his Church and the Party all condemned drugs as harmful.
“But,” objected Rasuk, “Marco Polo said the leaders pumped all new members full of hashish and opium until they were out of their minds. Then servants took the new warrior into a beautiful garden full of naked youths and women dancing about and satisfying all his desires, and he thought he was in Paradise. Later, he was taken back to his lodgings in a dazed state. When he returned to his senses, he was told he would go straight back to that Paradise once he’d carried out the leader’s orders and died a martyr’s death. Don’t laugh,” Rasuk told Farid. “It says so in a book about the Assassins.”
“Yes, you can find an amazing amount of nonsense in books, said Josef dismissively. “Hashish is soothing, it makes you drowsy and sexy. Not exactly the qualities of a fanatical killer who carries out his mission without any thought of loss. A man like the legendary Hassan Sabah, the leader of the sect known as the Assassins, was an ascetic, philosopher, and mathematician and could never have inspired fear if his army was high on drugs. His men wouldn’t have occupied a single village. But they say that Sabah had fifty-three citadels between northern Persia and Damascus in his power by 1092. Marco Polo was certainly an honest man, but how could a traveller with hardly a word of Arabic grasp the principles of such a secretive organization?”
“Why did Marco Polo put all this nonsense together, then?” asked Farid.
“Well, if he’d written honestly after such a long journey that he still didn’t understand many cultures and their customs, people would have taken no notice of him. But if you don’t tell the truth, if you put your audience’s imagination into words instead, they believe you and you’re popular. Those orgies in the Assassins’ citadels really did take place in Marco Polo’s fantasies about the East.”
“What drove them to do it, though, if it wasn’t expecting to have all their desires satisfied in Paradise?” asked Rasuk, interested.
“Exactly what drives today’s fanatics: a sense of divine mission that makes them the elect. It’s the only drug that can enable young men who enjoy life to overcome the fear of death and despise life itself. The idea of going to Paradise is the most dangerous of all civilized inventions. That’s where communism and religion meet, and the only difference is in defining its location. In this world, say the communists. No, in the next world, says religion. The Muslim Brotherhood tried to synthesize the two. They want to set up the state of God here on earth, because they think that would solve all problems. Although it’s the biggest problem of all in itself.”
“Do they really want that, or are you just making fun of them?” asked Rasuk.
“It’s all in the stuff they write. You two ought to do a bit more reading,” Josef said, so worked up now that his voice was hoarse.
“And what does the Muslim Brotherhood plan to do about us Christians?”
“Oh, they’re clear about that too – either you emigrate or you become second-class citizens,” said Josef.
“I’d rather emigrate,” Rasuk decided.
174. The Trap
“I don’t know what I’d do without Matta,” said Claire, the day before her mother’s funeral. Farid could see for himself how hard his friend was working, collecting flowers and wreaths for the coffin, getting food and drink in for the wake after the funeral, and candles for the church. No errand was too far for him to go. He was also willing to be one of the six men carrying the coffin from the dead woman’s house to the Catholic cemetery outside the city walls.
Elias surreptitiously slipped a hundred lira into Matta’s aunt’s bag as she sat with the other mourners. The old lady wept with gratitude and embarrassed Elias by trying to kiss his hand. He dropped a kiss on her forehead. “We’re all fond of Matta,” he whispered, and patted her on the shoulder.
“God bless you and your Claire, and may the Merciful One protect Farid,” replied Matta’s aunt, much moved, and she slowly made her way home. The size of the funeral proces
sion surprised Farid. He had no idea that his family had so many well-wishers in Damascus. Josef and Azar walked beside him, just behind his parents and Claire’s brother.
This was the first time Farid had seen his Uncle Marcel, his mother’s only brother, at close quarters. He was tall and massive, and when he stood next to Claire you sensed that they had nothing in common. There was something shapeless about Marcel, whose face was scarred and pitted by chronic acne. When Farid expressed his condolences, the ugly colossus failed to recognise his nephew, and absently offered his limp, sweating hand.
Later, at the wake, Farid also saw his mother’s cousin Sana, whom he had met quite often at his grandmother’s house during the last two years. She was almost thirty and already had four or five children, but she looked like a girl of twenty. Her husband Habib worked for the tram company as an electrician. Sana laughed a lot. There was something wild about her that fascinated Farid.
Not long before Grandmother’s death she had invited Farid to visit her, but at the time Claire had asked him not to go. “She’s a slut,” she briefly explained.
But Farid had never noticed any sign of that about her. Sana was always elegantly dressed and smelled of expensive perfume. Of course she was very feminine, and her clothes emphasized her curves, but blaming her for that seemed to him excessively Catholic. So he decided to visit Sana a little while after the funeral. She lived quite close, in Kassabah Alley.
When Farid entered the inner courtyard of the two-storey house, she saw him from the kitchen window. “Oh, how nice! My cousin has come to visit,” she cried out loud, as if she wanted to let the whole street know. The stairs were crammed with toys, shoes, and cartons.