by Rafik Schami
The trouble was he couldn’t decide what to do, and that put him in a bad temper.
“Come on, let’s go to the cinema. They’re showing West Side Story. You asked me to tell you when they were screening it again …”
“Exactly, that’s what I need now,” Josef interrupted his friend. “A film to make me forget this ghastly society of ours for a couple of hours.”
The film was moving. It wasn’t just that it was yet another version of the Romeo and Juliet story, this time set in the slums of New York. They were both fascinated by the dancing of the young cast and Leonard Bernstein’s music. When they came out of the cinema Josef was in a much better temper, and invited his friend to the Havana for a coffee, hoping to pick up some unofficial news there.
But before they had finished their coffee, a man of dwarfish stature climbed on a table in the middle of the room and tapped his empty glass with a knife. The place fell silent. “I have to announce, gentlemen,” he cried in emotional tones, “that the Damascus brothel is closing its doors for ever at eight sharp tomorrow morning.”
Expressions of outrage were heard.
“You omen of bad luck!” said the café owner angrily, for within a few minutes the men were rushing out.
“How much money do you have with you?” asked Josef.
“Twenty lira.”
“That ought to be enough.” He paid for their coffee and left the café with Farid. They were the last to go. The proprietor just shook his head.
225. Goodbye
There was chaos in the brothel that last evening. Farid had never been there before. Josef had gone three or four times, he couldn’t remember the exact number. Farid’s own ideas of a brothel were abruptly terminated that evening. He had always imagined such a place as something like a palace out of the Thousand and One Nights. You went in, you were bathed in scented water and massaged with aromatic oils. You were dressed in magnificently coloured flowing robes, led to a room where semi-veiled women awaited their suitors, you inspected them and chose one, then you plunged into an erotic orgy, surfacing only occasionally to bathe and recover your strength. In Farid’s imagination, there were also naked dancing girls whirling about.
None of this bore the slightest resemblance to what he saw in the Damascus brothel. The plain yellow building, not far from the university campus, was surrounded by a high wall, impossible to scale, against which all and sundry had pissed. There was a small shelter for a doorman at the entrance. Two police officers usually stood at the gate to check that no men under twenty came in.
That last night, however, both officers were drunk, staggering about the small inner courtyard, so there was no one on the gate. Young men and ragged children were running about the corridors open-mouthed, trying to catch a last glimpse of the women’s naked bodies. The place did brisk business that night. Men stood in line outside the doors of the whores on offer for five, ten, or twenty lira. Only on the top floor did peace and calm prevail. A few customers waited here in comfortable armchairs, and the women cost between fifty and a hundred lira.
Josef borrowed ten lira from his friend and waited in line for his favourite whore, a dark-skinned Egyptian girl. Farid saw her as she glanced briefly out of the door and shouted for a matron called Badria.
Next moment he heard the woman Badria’s deep, masculine voice reply. She exceeded all notions of obesity as she came rolling along, hung about with massive, tasteless gold jewellery.
Farid didn’t feel attracted to any of the whores. Some of them were really pretty, but the idea of man after man emptying himself into a woman at ten minute intervals made him feel nauseated rather than sexually aroused. However, he was glad to have satisfied his curiosity. He had never thought he would ever walk about a brothel so freely.
Josef thought he would have to wait at least two hours, so they agreed to meet in the café on the top floor.
Farid sat down at a small bistro table. A man in his fifties was amusing himself with a young whore at the next table, drinking a bottle of red wine with her. He seemed to have known her for a long time, spoke to her in friendly tones, and didn’t keep touching her like all the other men, who missed no opportunity to paw a passing prostitute.
Suddenly another girl stormed into the café, brought a bouquet of red roses down on a young man’s head, and pursued him to the bar, where she flung the now battered bouquet in his face, shouting, “I never want to see you again, never, understand?”
The man protested pitifully, but the whore, a small, wiry girl, turned and marched out.
“The coward,” said the young whore at the table next to Farid. “He only wants Fatima here in the brothel. First he says he loves her, and when she finally believes him, he won’t even take her to the cinema in case someone sees them together. I’ve seen enough of his sort.”
A little later, the young whore suddenly laughed out loud and pointed to a thin man just coming into the café, who went to the bar and ordered a coffee. This gentleman, who was extremely elegant but had a rather dusty look about him, seemed deeply offended by the idea that the President was going to close the brothel down.
“Do I interfere with his politics? Do I tell him not to take money from Saudi Arabia? Of course not. So why does he want to deprive me of my only pleasure?”
“That’s Hassan Sabbat, notary, multi-millionaire, and lover of our matron Badria,” said the young whore, giggling.
“You can’t be serious! Badria? Surely he couldn’t even offer himself as a wick to light her fire!” said the man with her. The whore giggled. “Very true, but love is blind.”
Here in the café, Farid learned how mistaken were all the myths in Arab novels and films about honest girls turning whore in desperation. My father raped me, they said, and forced me into prostitution. Or my wonderful husband, my mother, my sister fell ill, so I just had to sell myself to get money for medicine and doctors. These ridiculous moral tales ended with some old actor regretfully telling the fallen woman, “My child, a woman’s honour is a match that will burn once only.” And at almost all screenings of such films young men would call out, in the dark auditorium, “But a lighter will burn thousands of times.”
The young whore at the next table had already packed her bag, she said. She was moving to Beirut, to work in an establishment in Mutanabi Street. Sad as her fate might be, she sounded more self-assured than most of the married women in Damascus.
When Josef came up to the café it was after midnight, and they were just in time to catch the last bus to Bab Sharki.
“I’m going to marry Nadia, but I won’t celebrate the wedding with any of those bastards in her family. And I want you to be my witness,” he said. Farid must have been looking at him with such a baffled expression that Josef asked, quite concerned, “Did something upset you here among the whores?”
A day after the brothel was closed down, Matta came to see Farid, his chest swelling proudly. “My brother,” he said, “you must come for a ride with me.”
“A ride? On your bike?” asked Farid, whose imagination stretched no further.
“Oh no,” laughed Matta. “I’ve bought myself a Suzuki. Brand new! A superbike.”
Sure enough, outside the door stood one of the motorized three-wheeled scooters that were buzzing about the Old Town like wasps, making a terrible noise and stink, but very useful. They could get down any narrow alley, delivering goods to the most remote back door. Italians and Japanese were competing for this lucrative market, but independently of the manufacturer these little vehicles were all called Suzukis.
The Syrians welded a kind of mini-seat on the Suzukis, next to the rider’s saddle. Farid sat on this, and Matta rode up and down Saitun Alley, grinning proudly.
“My wife sold her jewellery so that I’d never have to push a handcart again,” he said, and there was a happy gleam in his eyes.
226. Beginnings
Through Nadia’s eldest brother, Josef had soon found a job as a teacher in Rauda Street, a high-class part of Dam
ascus. The brother had been a member of the Ba’ath Party since his youth, and was now high up in the Foreign Trade department. He had a good friend in the Ministry of Culture. He also liked Josef and Nadia and wanted to see them properly provided for.
Farid, on the other hand, got a post allotted at random in the pool of hundreds of available candidates that late summer of 1965, people who had no government contacts who didn’t want to bribe anyone. His contract was for two years as a probationary teacher in a school south of Damascus, not forty kilometres away. He could go home in the evenings either in a shared taxi or by bus.
Katana was an ugly garrison town; take away the barracks and you were left with a large, dusty village with dirty streets and rusty snack bars. But the school building was new. Farid began teaching there in October with enthusiasm. He taught the seventh, eighth, and ninth grades. The pupils were strictly brought up, and thought it a heaven-sent miracle that the new teacher didn’t hit them.
It was time to leave his parents’ house, and with Josef’s help, he found a tiny apartment. It was dark, consisting only of one room, a kitchen alcove, and a lavatory, but it wasn’t far from where Rana lived. Claire was sad, but she knew her son must lead his own life now. Within a week he had furnished the new apartment, and he enjoyed a long afternoon there with Rana. They cooked together, made love, and were as happy as two children keeping a secret.
“Let’s run away,” she said quietly, before she said goodbye.
In mid-March, three weeks after a coup by the leftist General Taisan had overthrown his conservative colleague Baidan, Farid unexpectedly suffered a harsh setback. It came after his quarrel in February with the school principal, a sadist and bootlicker who had come into the classroom during physics and hit out, sputtering with fury, at one of the pupils. Apparently the boy, whose name was Ismail, had insulted the Syrian flag at break.
Farid swallowed hard, and after school he brushed up his knowledge of the new legislation on schools. It gave the teacher and no one else authority to discipline his own pupils. An older colleague told him that the principal always tried to intimidate new teachers, laying claim to the grades they taught as his own preserve. “Of course a principal has the right to summon any pupil to his office, but turning up unannounced during lessons to humiliate a child is just malice,” he said.
Less than a week later, the principal appeared again. This time he wanted to punish a boy called Jusuf. During the patriotic slogan that the Ba’ath Party required all schoolchildren to recite in the morning, he was said to have insulted the Arab nation. Instead of calling out, “Nation with an eternal mission!” Jusuf had apparently called, “Nation with a flatulent mission!” The principal flourished his bamboo cane. Jusuf turned pale. Farid knew that the boy had a heart defect, and he knew that the principal knew it too.
“I’m sorry, but you can’t do that in my classroom. First, beating pupils has been forbidden for two years, and second, you’re disturbing lessons over an unproven accusation. Jusuf,” he asked, turning to the boy, “did you say what the principal says you called out?”
Jusuf leaped to his feet. “No, sir. I never insulted our Fatherland. But Yunus from Grade Eight said if I didn’t give him ten marbles as protection money he’d tell the principal I did.”
“That will do, Jusuf, you can sit down,” said Farid, turning to his boss, who was rooted to the spot. “As you see, my pupil is not guilty of anything. It’s the tale-bearer who ought to be asked why such notions of the Fatherland enter his head. And if you don’t mind, I have very little time for teaching even without interruptions, so please let me go on.”
The principal left the room without a word, and never came back again. Jusuf’s statement turned out to be correct, but the principal never said another word about that either. In the middle of March, however, Farid was transferred for disciplinary reasons to a village on the southern border with Israel. Among themselves, the teachers called it Syrian Siberia.
Farid was furious. The reprimands were down in writing, and thus official, but no one had given him a hearing, and it made no difference to the young head of the education department in the Ministry of Culture whether the rest of the teachers and the pupils contested them or not. He, Farid, was accused of having incited and encouraged school students to make fun of the Ba’ath Party and the principal. Probationary teachers had almost no rights at all.
His request to be allowed to stay until the end of the school year met with a curt refusal. He was to report to the middle school in the village of Shaga within a week, or he would be summarily dismissed.
The Grade Seven pupils wept when he said goodbye, and Jusuf, the boy with the heart defect, came up and offered him his hand, with two hardboiled eggs in it. “Something for the journey, from my grandmother,” he said. Farid could no longer hold back his tears.
Shaga was 200 kilometres from Damascus, and almost half the way to the village was through impassable country. Going there and back every day would be impossible. He had to change buses twice and then go in a shared taxi for some distance to get back to Damascus from the village, and the journey took four hours.
Rana was very sad. “I want you to know,” she said, “that even if I have to wait all my life to live free with you for a single day, I won’t regret it.”
With a heavy heart, Farid gave up his rented apartment and packed his things. Josef and Nadia came to see him off in the bus, and Matta insisted on taking him and his case to the bus stop himself. He wept as he said goodbye, and then rattled away fast on his Suzuki.
“It won’t be long before they transfer you back to Damascus for disciplinary reasons instead,” said Josef, watching Matta go. “Hell’s here, not down south where they regard teachers as demigods. Here they think they’re crap. They know a teacher doesn’t even earn as much as their family chauffeur, so how would they respect him? Knowledge doesn’t count for as much as the make of car you drive. And I don’t even ride a bike. Sometimes my pupils see me get out of a crowded bus and shake their heads as they sit in their Mercedes. And you always have some of the sons of the top brass to teach here, so too bad if you provoke one of those uneducated apes. Punish him and you’re attacking the Foreign Minister, or even worse the head of the secret police. The kids are always showing you they know it, too.”
“You know how Josef is!” Nadia intervened. “Never happy. I keep telling him he ought to be giving private tuition to one boy at a time instead of educating these hordes, and he’d earn twice as much, but he won’t listen to me.”
Josef laughed. “Nadia doesn’t want me to die of a heart attack, she’d rather I died of a stroke. Those kids and private tuition! They just don’t want to learn anything. They’ve already been to Venice and New York, London and Paris, they’re burned out at the age of fourteen. And you think they’d want to learn geography?”
“Calm down,” said Farid. “I don’t know if they need teachers or tractors more down in the south, but I’d have liked to stay here,” he added, and boarded the bus, because the driver was already starting the engine.
He looked gloomily out of the window, envying everyone who could stay in Damascus. He had no idea that one of the most exciting periods of his life was just beginning.
227. First Signs
Dunia was the first to notice that Rana wasn’t well. Four weeks after Farid had left, she visited her friend without phoning first, and was alarmed. Rana seemed desperate, and was letting herself go. She said she hurt all over, but the doctors hadn’t found anything, and her husband was always cross with her. He said she was plain lazy and addicted to reading books. Rami had locked the books away, and he locked her studio on the flat roof too. She wasn’t even allowed to read newspapers and magazines. Instead, she had to learn crochet and knitting from his cousin Majda, and his sister was supposed to teach her to bake cookies and iron properly.
Rana showed Dunia her efforts. They were very clumsy. “An elephant could knit better than me.” She laughed and cried by turns. Dunia was bewi
ldered, but she knew Rana couldn’t stand that stolid housewife Majda.
Finally she encouraged her friend to get up, wash, and smarten herself up, and by the time Rana was ready Dunia had brought some kind of order into the apartment and cleared up the garbage lying around everywhere. Rana seemed to have lost all her joie de vivre, as if she had given up entirely.
They went to Sibki Park. “You ought to go on vacation with Rami,” said Dunia. “You need a little fresh air, that’s all, you want to get out of your own four walls.”
“Rami can’t take a vacation. He has to stay here and make sure he keeps his job.”
“But you’re not yourself at all,” Dunia told her forcefully. “Why don’t I talk to him?”
Dunia knew that discussing his wife’s psychological condition with a Syrian was like trying to square the circle. Psychological sickness was regarded as a disgrace to the whole family, in particular a woman’s husband. So all psychological problems were denied, only total derangement was recognized – and for that there was the al-Asfuriye mental hospital. All the same, she was prepared to speak to Rami. Rana shook her head. She felt guilty because she couldn’t love him but was just a burden.
“Are you sure?” Dunia pressed her.
“Yes, thank you, I must deal with this by myself. First I have to get his cousin off my back. I have to or I’ll kill myself with one of those knitting needles.”
Dunia began phoning her friend every day. After some time she thought Rana seemed better, and invited her to come around to her place when several other young women were visiting.
When she arrived five or six of Dunia’s neighbours were sitting around her new record player, drinking coffee and talking. Rana didn’t know any of them. Dunia put a new Beatles record on and invited her friends to dance. She’d been to London with her husband, she told them, and she learned the new dances there. The women were delighted, and once their hostess had cleared away all the vases and little tables she showed them the latest steps. Rana smiled wearily, but didn’t feel like joining in. Even when the women, led by Dunia, tied scarves around their hips and began swaying in an oriental dance, she stayed where she was. “I have to think,” she said.