by Rafik Schami
Even Amin, when Farid asked him why the Party didn’t take up the cause of women, said there were more important things to do. First communism must be strengthened, the workers and Palestine must be liberated, and the Arab countries united under communist leadership. After that they could talk about the emancipation of women, if their problems hadn’t been solved anyway when the revolution was ushered in.
Somehow work on the magazine had opened Farid’s eyes to a number of contradictions. He kept seeing a certain image in his mind’s eye: the Communist Party sitting in smoke-filled rooms with the curtains drawn, talking about Hegel, while life outside kept on changing. He couldn’t help thinking of the sad cardinals of Constantinople debating how many angels could dance on the head of a pin as the Ottomans captured the city.
Just before Christmas there was a party at the club. Farid invited not just Isa but the comrades from his Party cell and the co-ordinating centre. All six men came, but three of them sat on their chairs all night as stiff as plaster statues. They were horrified by the behaviour of the club members and the people who lived in the street, always hugging each other and talking at their ease and without inhibition. Isa laughed at the three of them. “They look as if they were in Siberia. These are the people you want to liberate, gentlemen,” he said quietly.
Isa liked Josef from the first. They sat together all evening. At a late hour, when old Gibran was in the table tennis room telling an erotic story of an experience that he said he once had in Havana, the seated comrades rose and warned Farid, as they left, to beware of this anti-communist, anti-Cuban propaganda. He was horrified by their narrow minds.
“Those aren’t Communist Party members, anyone would think they had no members,” snapped Josef, laughing. Isa thought this an excellent joke, and laughed too. Before Farid said goodbye to Josef that evening, his friend told him that Isa had persuaded him to write an article on the problems of the streets of Damascus for the fourth issue of the magazine.
Farid was speechless with delight. But Number 4 was never published.
218. An Icy Spring
Society was becoming militarized. Within nine months, General Mutamiran forced school students to wear uniforms, and no one who had passed his final examination could claim his high school diploma without doing a month’s course in a military camp first. Isa told Farid it was all humbug, and a nauseating spectacle. The magazine Youth undertook not just to write about love and sexuality, but to ask questions about the purpose of this imposition of military discipline on schools.
Issue 3 came out at the end of March 1964. The front page showed a child holding a white dove. The dove seemed to be asleep with an olive branch in its beak, as if it had reached its journey’s end and felt safe in those small hands. The subject of the article was less peaceful than the picture suggested: it was a study of children and war, a plea against the arming of young people. But that wasn’t all; there was also a long translation from Wilhelm Reich about power and the suppression of sexuality. In addition, there were caricatures from all over the world opposing military dictatorship and exploitation.
Two days after the journal came out, Farid and Isa were invited to a special meeting, which soon turned out not to be a meeting at all, but a lawcourt with eleven prosecutors led by a furious judge. Comrade Jakub came from the Euphrates region, and was responsible for culture in the Party. He was also Osmani’s right-hand man.
Farid was alarmed. He had never dreamed that his efforts to change society would bring him before such a ruthless committee of his own Party, obliged to listen to accusations against himself. He and Isa were naïve, they were unwittingly serving imperialism by weakening the revolutionary Communist Party. Because of their journal, Comrade Secretary General Khalid Malis had been summoned before President Mutamiran, and had to apologize for a communist magazine that was putting out propaganda on behalf of a Jew by the name of Wilhelm Reich, was questioning the army, and calling for disobedience – and all this at a time when General Mutamiran was trying to come closer to the Communist Party and the Soviet Union, and had offered the communists two ministerial posts in his Popular Front coalition.
Jakub spoke for half an hour without pausing for breath. Isa was slumped in his seat, looking miserably at the floor. It took Farid some time to turn from fury to contempt, but then he looked closely at the men’s faces. The three comrades who had sat through the club’s cheerful party with gloomy expressions on their faces looked perfectly relaxed here and were smiling all the time, nodding agreement, and reinforcing the accusations against the magazine by interpolating comments.
Farid, who had now been a Party member for nearly eight years, knew almost all those present. They were the most pitiful figures ever to have been set up by a political party for such a purpose. Who else would agree to act as an Inquisition without any sense of shame? One of them said, during a tea break, “Better stay in the Party and go wrong with it than be outside the Party and be right.”
Farid said not a word of apology during this hearing. Instead, he accused Jakub of grovelling, for as a young man he himself had published poems on Stalin, praising the occupation by the French as an act of civilization. Farid defended the magazine, line by line, and declined to discuss what the dictator had said, offered, or whispered to the Secretary General. The point that mattered was whether the magazine enlightened young people in this country. “And listen to this, Comrade Jakub,” he cried, raising his voice now, “I’ll still be in favour of enlightenment in ten years’ time, unlike you – or are you going to reissue your hymns of praise to General Weygand and the heroic Stalin?”
A grey, veiled look came over Jakub’s face. Farid was sweating in his excitement.
“Why would we want to go into delicate matters back in the past when you were still in nappies?” An older comrade came to Jakub’s aid. Such a reply was not the kind of thing you found in any of the Russian, Chinese, or Cuban novels about social intercourse among comrades.
The man who had spoken was a textiles worker and had spent many years in prison for the Party, but even prison, Farid thought whenever he met him, is no cure for stupidity.
“We’re here to discuss your abuse of the Central Committee’s confidence in you, and we must tackle the subject of the consequences.”
At that moment Farid realized that the verdict on him had already been learned by heart, for these last words were not those of a textiles worker, but of a bureaucrat of Osmani’s kind.
Isa too understood what the remark disguised. He rose, trembling, and apologized volubly and submissively. As he did so, he died to Farid. The litany of self-accusation was demeaning.
Three years passed before Farid saw Isa again, by chance, in a cinema. Isa smiled at him, but the smile aroused only revulsion in Farid, who turned away.
The leadership was in a hurry in that spring of 1964. A week later, Farid was removed from all his posts in the Party. Even his membership was frozen for six months, the next harshest penalty to expulsion. And this penalty in itself showed that Osmani was behind the whole thing. He didn’t want to make a martyr of Farid, which was what would have happened if he had been expelled immediately. Osmani was relying on his tried and trusted methods: humiliation first, then keeping his victim on tenterhooks until, driven by his own injured ambition, he left the Party of his own accord. That was Osmani’s aim.
If there was ever a figure of authority who knew the way mean tricks would work, he was the man. Just under a year later, Farid left the Party when it was next shaken by disputes. This was early in January 1965, when the armed Palestinian resistance movement erupted under Arafat’s leadership. The Communist Party had instructions from Moscow to be suspicious of armed conflict, and it ignored these events. Arafat was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and a Saudi agent, whispered the communists, like old washerwomen gossiping. Officially, they said nothing. At the end of January hundreds of young members left the Party. Farid justified the termination of his membership in a furious letter that no on
e ever read.
However, it was a step into the void. Low as the Communist Party had sunk, it was a community offering mutual protection, a club of like-minded people. Now he had to endure the feeling that he belonged nowhere. He roamed the city alone, with a record playing in his head and stuck in a groove: nine years for nothing, and all you get is failure.
He felt deeply ashamed. He dared not phone Amin, but he immediately told Rana what had happened. She was glad that now he would have more time for her and their love, and he could finish his studies as soon as possible.
But the sense of being thrown off track accompanied him like a shadow. Curiously, he was ashamed to tell Josef about it. For six months, he never mentioned that he had left the Party. When he finally did pluck up the courage to do it, he was grateful for his friend’s understanding. Josef never even hinted that he could have told him so.
219. The Fair
Rana called early, and Claire joked with her for a long time. Farid came into the inner courtyard barefoot, guessing who his mother was talking to. “And here comes a beggar,” said Claire, “unwashed, unshaven, barefoot. You can see how much he loves you. He wouldn’t have jumped out of bed so quickly for anyone else, even me.” Then she handed him the receiver. She was happy; his girlfriend had just told her that Farid had left the Communist Party, and from now on she would be able to sleep easily again.
Rana was in cheerful mood. The International Autumn Fair in Damascus opened its gates in a few days’ time. Farid didn’t understand why she was so pleased by the prospect of the exhibition, which bored him with all its stands of industrial exhibits. When he said so, she laughed. “Industrial exhibits? Stands? My love, who do you think I am, the Minister of Trade? No, they give the best concerts in the world at the Fair. Last year I saw Feiruz. I’d like to go to something like that with you this year. You can hear great international figures, people such as Duke Ellington, Miriam Makeba, famous Cuban and Hungarian groups.”
“Who’s Duke Ellington?” he cautiously asked.
“Don’t say you’ve never heard of him! He’s one of the greatest jazz musicians in the world. But perhaps he was taboo for you – after all, he’s an American imperialist. Last September people were dancing in the auditorium, and they wouldn’t let him leave the stage until he’d given them a tenth encore. That’s why he likes coming to Damascus so much.”
Farid suddenly felt how much there was in the world for him yet to discover. And once again it was Rana who opened the door to life for him. She had already bought tickets for Feiruz. Her husband Rami often had to be abroad with delegations of some kind, why she wasn’t allowed to know. She supposed he was buying weapons for the army.
Josef knew Duke Ellington’s music. He had been at that legendary first appearance of the musician in the city in 1963, and Laila wanted to go as well. Through her husband, she bought seats in one of the front rows, at a discount too. The three of them went. Laila got on well with Josef at once, and soon they were joking together with as much easy familiarity as if they had been friends for ever. On the way back she even linked arms with him. Finally she invited him and Farid in for a glass of tea, and they stayed until midnight and then took a taxi home.
“How about doing a deal?” said Josef as they parted, and before Farid could ask what he meant he went on, “Your cousin for my entire tribe. What a wonderful woman!” And he laughed at his surprised friend.
Duke Ellington played wonderfully well. And Feiruz, the best of all Lebanese women singers, who had fallen in love with Damascus and appeared in the city every autumn, was fantastic. The Damascenes were at her feet. She sang softly, stood still, almost motionless, without any mime or gestures. He songs had great lyrics and catchy tunes. Unlike Um Kulthum, who sang of the tragedy of abandonment, of loneliness, and of unrequited love, Feiruz sang songs full of confidence, even cheerfulness, usually to a dance rhythm that had her audience tapping their feet. They roared with enthusiasm, perhaps partly because Feiruz was a strong woman, and in the middle of Arabia at that! Rana adored the singer. She held Farid’s hand and kissed it fleetingly now and then. He could smell her intoxicating fragrance.
After the concert she asked him home with her. They went up to her little studio on the roof and made love until they were exhausted. The night filled them with peace and confidence. But when Farid dressed again, Rana suddenly began shedding tears. He looked at her in concern.
“Don’t worry, I’m only crying because this is such a beautiful moment. I’m crying because I can never manage to hold such moments and keep them.”
Threads of light were beginning to weave the day. He held her close once more. “I want to live with you and no one else,” he said.
220. Treasure Hunting
A new craze had broken out in Damascus in the early sixties: searching for hidden or buried precious metals. Treasure hunting was strictly forbidden, since the government regarded any finds as state property, and private appropriation of them counted as theft.
But people still went out at night searching, some of them with beeping devices, many with magic spells and mysterious cards. They tapped walls and floors everywhere, trying to find any hollow spaces. When they did turn up, however, they were seldom evidence of a lucky find, and generally just showed that repairs were urgently needed.
Josef laughed at his aunts, tapping their way around the house. His father threatened, in desperation, that if they broke so much as one of his expensive tiles he’d make them sell their own gold bangles to pay for the damage. After that his aunts did their tapping with a rubber hammer.
“People want to get their hands on money quickly, and do you know why?” asked Josef, as so often not waiting for an answer. “The emigrants have turned their heads. My cousin Nicolas goes about in midsummer looking like a really big shot, all dandified in a suit. He drives the fifty metres from his house to the vegetable store in his Mercedes, parks it in the middle of the street, and no police officer dares take his number down. Then he stands there, shouting his order for vegetables over the heads of the people waiting in line, and the vegetable seller doesn’t even object to such discourtesy, he leaves all his other loyal customers to serve Nicolas. And do you know why? Because Nicolas will tip him a whole lira. The neighbours have never done any such thing. I mean, imagine tipping a vegetable seller. And would you like to know what Nicolas did before he emigrated?” asked Josef bitterly.
Farid nodded.
“He was breaking stones for my father at three lira an hour. Two days ago he invited my parents around to his place and showed them his gold bath taps. Madeleine hated it, but you should have seen the wonder and amazement in the eyes of my father and my aunts – they were bowled right over.”
At the end of November Kamal came to drink tea with Farid. He was devastated; he had lost his entire fortune overnight. The government had nationalized his factory again, leaving him with nothing but his debts. The whole thing was like some English comedy, but Kamal didn’t feel like laughing.
Soon after that he went to join his father in Saudi Arabia, and came back ten years later a multi-millionaire. But he wanted no more to do with textiles, and instead opened new casinos everywhere in partnership with the new President of Syria’s cousin.
BOOK OF LAUGHTER III
Both chemical factories and dictators contaminate their surroundings.
DAMASCUS, 1961 – 1965
221. Fasting in Space
Josef said that a good friend had given him two tickets to an interesting event being held by the Muslim Brotherhood, and asked Farid if he would like to go along. “Space From the Viewpoint of the Muslim Brotherhood” was the title of the event.
“And here you see again how backward our church is,” he said, with a trace of envy in his voice.
“Aren’t you afraid?” asked Farid, who couldn’t stand the extremely conservative Muslim Brotherhood. They were financed by Saudi Arabia, and were the most brutal of anti-communists and misogynists.
“Afraid? Wha
t would I be afraid of? That they’ll persuade me to convert? I don’t even believe in my own religion, why would I believe in theirs? Or do you think I ought to fear they’ll beat me up for being a Christian? First, I’m not a communist; second, I’m not a woman; and third, even the government courts their favour these days. They’ve turned moderate and socially acceptable. They probably want to prove that we were in space long before the Russians and Americans.” Josef laughed. “You know how Orientals have been in space for thousands of years. Way back we had that old Syrian liar Lucian, who said he flew through space. Remember Sindbad’s flying carpet, and how the Prophet Elijah went up to heaven in his fiery chariot, remember the ascension of Christ and the Virgin Mary, and Mi’raj, Muhammad’s ride to heaven. A Muslim Brother told me the other day, in all seriousness, the French were calling their most powerful warplanes the Mirage after it.”
But no one talked about any of that in the lecture hall of the chemistry faculty. Farid was annoyed. The Muslim Brothers always got the best hall in the university for their events so that they could make propaganda out of it. It was said that over half the university authorities sympathized with them.
When the bearded speaker entered the hall the audience rose and said a short prayer. Then they sat down again. After a brief introduction about modern times the scholar, who held two doctorates, came quickly to his subject. He put the central points of his lecture in the form of questions and answers. “Where does a Muslim direct his prayers when he is in space? How can he locate Mecca when he is in space? How will he fast in space? How often should he pray when his rocket orbits the earth ten times, how often if he flies twice as fast? And may a Muslim astronaut marry a being from another planet?”