The Calligrapher's Secret
Page 8
7
At Easter of the year 1948, Salman took first communion. However, now that he had enjoyed the liberty of days off, St Nicholas’s School seemed to him even more intolerable in his second year. He avoided the place. Only in winter, when it was icy cold outside, did he go to school, convincing himself yet again that this damp building, where everyone knocked the weaker children about, was no place for him.
When inviting spring weather came, Salman went out and about with Benjamin in the fields beyond the city walls. He smelled life there, the air was fragrant with apricot blossoms, and they ate young, bitter almonds still green and straight from the trees.
They laughed a lot and played with the dog. Pilot soon made friends with big, strong Benjamin, and would let him drape him over his shoulders like a fur collar. Within six months Pilot grew into a handsome, powerful animal. After a while Benjamin couldn’t lift him off the ground anymore. “This is a donkey in disguise,” he said, groaning under the dog’s weight and falling on his behind. He let Pilot go and laughed.
“You’re the donkey,” said Salman. “My Pilot is a tiger in camouflage.”
Early in the summer, Father Yacoub had made himself so unpopular in Damascus with his fanaticism that the bishop moved him to a mountain village on the coast. Soon after that, and before the end of his second year, Benjamin finally left school. He went to work with his father, a nice little man with a face with scars and wrinkles all over it. He marvelled at the strength of his young son, who towered a head above him, and sometimes, when there were no customers around, would pick him up with one hand.
Two days after Benjamin had left, Salman too said goodbye to St Nicholas’s forever. He never set foot in the school again.
None of the neighbours asked why he wasn’t at school like other children. School didn’t count for much in Grace and Favour Yard, where they struggled merely to survive. To Salman, it seemed natural to stay at home and look after his sick mother, who stopped shedding tears and whimpering as soon as he was near her.
“Why aren’t you going to school anymore?” asked Sarah one day.
“My mother…” he began, about to invent something, but when Sarah looked at him the lie died away on his tongue. “I hate school. It’s horrible… I don’t want to learn anymore,” he stammered angrily.
“Would you like me to read aloud to you the way I used to? Read you good stories?” asked Sarah, trying to find out the real reason for his dislike of school.
“I don’t like books now. Tell me something else,” he said.
“Don’t be stupid, books are wonderful. No one can tell stories as well as the books I’ve read,” she said.
And so she read aloud to him, and with every new book what she read grew more interesting and exciting. One day Sarah brought along a book with peculiar arithmetical problems and ingenious number puzzles. From then on Salman took special pleasure in solving complicated calculations. Sarah was amazed at the speed with which he could do mental arithmetic, and as a reward she gave him three kisses on his forehead and one on his lips that day.
Salman was especially fascinated by a book about the earth, and he patiently practised tracing the course of the great rivers of the world, and could soon place many countries precisely where they should be on the map. It was only reading aloud that gave him trouble. He went too fast, overlooking letters and sometimes whole words. Sarah stroked his head and whispered, “Slowly, take it slowly. We’re not on the run.”
It was a whole year before he could read aloud without making mistakes, putting the right emphasis on the words. Sarah was delighted with her own success as a teacher, and sat with him almost every day.
They made a remarkable couple, an image of calm and beauty.
Sometimes the neighbours made fun of them, and Samira in particular said she could just see them as a bridal couple. That annoyed Sarah’s mother, who told her off in no uncertain terms. “And don’t forget, my husband’s in the police!” Faizeh finally warned her, marching off to her apartment in front of all the neighbours who were sitting outside that day, her head held high. After that they were left alone.
Sarah went on leading Salman into distant lands and introducing him to foreign people. She taught him for years on end without any breaks for a holiday, sometimes mercilessly. She gave him the last lesson just before her wedding. They laughed a lot that day. When she had discussed the closing pages of Guy de Maupassant’s novel Strong as Death with Salman, she said, “I’ve been expecting to bore you rigid all these years.” Salman said nothing. He had no words to express his gratitude.
Sarah had everything ready. She gave Salman a certificate that she had designed for him. “Salman is my star pupil,” it said in Arabic and French. It was dated and signed, and the three red, green, and blue marks stamped on it made the document look official. But Salman recognized the police station stamp that Sarah’s father had brought home. “They make it look like something to do with prison,” he said, laughing.
However, that was not until nine years later. Let us go back to the summer of the year 1948, when Salman had just left school.
When the weather grew warmer, Salman often took the dog for long walks in the fields in the afternoons by himself, because Benjamin usually worked at the falafel stall at that time of day. The dog loved jumping in the little river and running after sticks.
Pilot ate everything that Salman put in front of him, and understood every word he said. He would stay in the yard even without a chain when his master said goodbye to him. He whined quietly, a heartrending sound, but he did not move from the spot if Salman told him to stay.
One August day the dog chased two big farmer’s boys away when they attacked Salman on his walk. They were strong lads, and thought they would have a bit of fun with this weedy city boy. They didn’t see the dog until he jumped out of the water, anxious about his screaming master. Salman’s cheeks glowed with pride. That day he gave his protector a big bowl full of bits of meat, let him eat it at his leisure, and then went home to Grace and Favour Yard.
“We can sleep peacefully in our hiding place tonight,” he said.
“But there’s no point in it. He’ll come to fetch me in the night,” replied his mother.
“No one will fetch you. Pilot can deal with two men like Father at once,” said Salman, and he would not give up until his mother agreed to go back to their hiding place with him. She was amazed to see how handsome and powerful the black dog had grown. And when Salman told her about the two farmer’s boys, running away with the seats of their trousers torn and shouting out magic charms which they hoped might protect them from the dog, she even laughed.
“The dog doesn’t understand Arabic,” said his mother.
They ate bread and olives and drank tea, and then they lay down to sleep. Years later, Salman still used to say that no olives had ever again tasted as good as those.
He woke up when he heard his father’s first desperate cries from down below. Salman went downstairs with a candle. His father was lying face down in the corridor, whimpering with fear, and the dog was standing over him in the attitude of a victor.
“Don’t you ever come here again,” shouted Salman, calling the dog off. He had never before seen his father stagger away at such speed. Only his curses still hung in the air behind him.
But before a year was up the weaver’s heirs had come to an agreement, and they sold the house to the Church for a good sum of money. A modern Catholic old people’s home was soon to be built on the site, very close to the chapel of St Boulos.
However, the dog couldn’t go to live in Grace and Favour Yard. Not only was his father against it, so were most of the neighbours, saying that they’d be scared for their children. It was no good for Sarah and Salman to show them all how fond of children Pilot was. Samira, who never stopped talking, led the campaign against the dog. “Samira’s afraid he’ll tear all the men who visit her by night to pieces,” said Sarah.
“What men?” asked Salman.
Sarah found a place to hide Pilot in the ruins of a former paper factory near the East Gate. It was a deserted watchman’s hut overgrown with ivy, and had stayed in good condition. The dog lived there until his mysterious disappearance seven years later. But many important things happened in Salman’s life before that, and the story should turn to them first.
When Sarah wasn’t reading to him, his mother didn’t need him, he wasn’t out with his dog and there were no odd jobs for him to do, Salman played in the alley. Over ten boys used to meet there every day. He joined them, but never pushed his way into the middle of the group, and never really became one of them.
Five of them also lived in Grace and Favour Yard, and were just as poor as he was, but as soon as they were playing in the alley with their friends, who always looked cleaner and better-fed, they acted as if he, Salman, was the only one from Grace and Favour Yard. His jug ears were the particular target of their witticisms. Adnan, Samira’s son, told a nasty story of how he came to have them. “The midwife was in a hurry, but Salman refused to come into the world. He was shit-scared of life. So the midwife just grabbed his ears and pulled until he popped out.” He laughed unpleasantly, infecting the others.
Later, Adnan took to calling him “the madwoman’s son.” Salman was deeply horrified. His mother wasn’t mad, she was sick. Very sick. But how could he explain that to this rough boy?
The word “bastard” was on the tip of his tongue, but his fear sent it back into his mouth, and he swallowed hard. Adnan was big and strong.
Later, he couldn’t remember how old he was when he first began cooking, but it must have been in the year when he and his mother finally moved out of the weaver’s house. Faizeh realized that Mariam was too confused to be allowed into the kitchen on her own safely. So now Faizeh cooked both for her own family and her friend’s. Sarah helped, and one day Salman joined in.
“Teach me to cook,” he asked Faizeh, but she laughed and sent him out to the others in the alley. “You should be playing with the boys. The kitchen is no place for men,” she said. There was nothing to be done about that, so he began surreptitiously watching her, noticing how she washed rice, cooked noodles, peeled onions, crushed garlic, and broke up mutton bones to extract the delicious marrow. Before a year was up he could prepare several simple dishes. Faizeh and Sarah enjoyed them. As for his father, after five years he still didn’t notice that his wife wasn’t cooking for him. But when her health went from bad to worse he stopped shouting at her and beating her. Once, when Salman was pretending to be asleep, he saw his father caress his mother’s head and sing something to her quietly.
“Your family is all topsy-turvy, the woman lies in bed and the man does the cleaning,” said their neighbour Maroun, who lived with his wife and ten children in two tiny rooms opposite, when he saw Salman cleaning the windows of the apartment.
“Maroun’s eyes are asleep,” Sarah whispered to Salman as their neighbour walked on, “but his ass makes music all night long. I can hear it all the way to my own mattress,” she added in a low and conspiratorial tone. Maroun was a pathetic failure who took the tickets in the Aida Cinema, a place that had once seen better days, but was now dilapidated and showed nothing but old movies. It cost only twenty piastres to get in, and you could have guessed it from the auditorium and the screen. Salman had heard quite enough about this insalubrious place to know that he never wanted to set foot in it. The cinema was full of men trying to grab boys’ behinds, and a bunch of hungry, quarrelsome characters who were often drunk. Maroun sometimes came home with a black eye or a torn jacket. His wife Madiha was an intelligent and beautiful little woman. She used to tell him, every day, about the men she could have married if she hadn’t made the mistake of her life by listening to him in the first place.
“Not that she seems to have learnt anything from her mistake,” said Sarah dryly. Madiha had a baby every year around Easter. But none of the children had so much as a glimmer of their mother’s beauty and brains. They all looked at you with copies of their father’s stupid face when he stood abstractedly taking tickets at the entrance to the cinema, tearing off one part and handing the rest of the ticket back to the cinema-goer without even looking at him. The children were famished. “They aren’t just starving, they’re starvation itself,” said Faizeh, Sarah’s mother.
Salman was desperately looking for work. He had a long day, because Sarah didn’t come home from her own full-time school until the afternoon. And his ever-empty pockets troubled him more than boredom. His father gave their neighbour Faizeh only exactly as much money as she needed to buy the food.
And Salman was also looking for a job because he wanted to get away from his father, who was treating his mother rather better now but treated him worse. He never wanted to set eyes again on that large, dirty man with his dark and usually unshaven face. Or hear him shouting, “Get up, you lazy omen of bad luck!” Or feel the kicks he got if he was so sleepy that he didn’t understand how serious the situation was at once.
Salman envied the neighbours’ children who were seen off to school every morning by their parents and other relations with a singsong in all musical registers, and in his heart he responded to every greeting that he heard in the Yard. But he was also sorry for them, because they still had to go to St Nicholas’s. Only one of them didn’t, and Salman admired him because he already had a job, and everyone treated him respectfully, like an adult. That was Said.
Said was an orphan. Since his parents’ death in a bus accident, he had been living with the old widow Lucia. She had a small apartment right opposite the gateway between the baker’s journeyman Barakat and the big communal kitchen. The widow took in Said because she was childless, and the Catholic church would pay for him. His father had been caretaker in the top Catholic school for decades. It was close to St Nicholas’s, and was reserved for the sons of rich Christians.
Said was the same age as Salman, as pretty as Barakat’s daughters, and slightly simple like Maroun’s children. After his parents’ death when he was in the fourth class, he didn’t want to spend another day at school. He worked as an attendant in a hammam near Bab Tuma. He had no pay, but he passed on to his foster mother the few piastres he got as tips because the men were pleased with him, and she too was pleased with him.
When Salman asked Said to ask his boss whether they could do with another boy in the hammam, Said seemed as surprised as if this was the first time he had heard that question. It was a year before Said told him that the boss would see him. That day Salman rubbed his pale cheeks with pumice until they were almost bleeding. Sarah watched him washing and combing his hair in the kitchen.
“Getting married today?” she asked.
“No, the manager of the baths wants to look at me. I don’t want him thinking I’m sick,” he laughed.
“Are you scared?” she asked. Salman nodded.
In fact the hammam manager, in his undershirt and with a towel around his waist, did look as fearsome as a samurai warrior. He examined Salman, and then shook his head. “You said you had a good strong friend,” he told Said. “This one’s a toothpick. If my customers see him they’ll think we’re a hospital for hopeless cases.”
8
“Arabi,” Noura’s grandmother told her, “is my husband’s surname, and therefore your father’s too, but my first name is Karima, so if you mean me just say Granny Karima, not Granny Arabi. And do you know what my name means, little one?” Noura shook her head.
“Karima means noble, valuable, generous. And a woman should be generous above all. Men like that, because they’re rather anxious and are always expecting famine. I learned to be generous very early, so you can ask me for anything you like and I’ll give it to you – even if you want sparrow’s milk,” she said, and she went on making a brightly coloured paper kite.
When Noura asked her father what sparrow’s milk
tasted like, he laughed and said that was one of his mother’s many inventions, and she should try it some time.
Noura’s mother, on the other hand, was furious. “What’s all this nonsense your mother talks? Sparrows lay eggs, they don’t give milk. Putting such notions in the girl’s head will ruin her,” she said, rolling her eyes.
So next time she visited, Noura asked for sparrow’s milk. Her grandmother disappeared into the kitchen and came back with a glass of milk the colour of lilac. “That sparrow ate a lot of berries today,” she said.
The alley where Granny Karima lived had an especially nice smell. The fragrance of newly baked bread kept streaming out of the bakery not far from her house. It was a small bakery, and it specialized in a particularly thin flatbread half a metre in diameter. The bread was cheap. Farmers and labourers bought it in large quantities. Noura’s parents didn’t like it. They said it tasted burnt and too salty.
But whenever Noura went to see her grandmother, Granny Karima went to fetch a large, fresh flatbread, and they ate it without putting anything on it as they sat together at the big table. Grandfather, watching, laughed at the two of them.
“As if we didn’t have anything to eat,” he protested, “you sit there like fakirs eating plain bread.”
“A girl,” said Noura’s grandmother, “must learn to enjoy small pleasures at an early age. Men don’t know how.”
Noura wanted to visit Granny Karima as often as possible, but while she was still little she had to wait for her father to take her. Her mother seldom went to see her parents-in-law. Whenever Noura wanted to go, her mother had a migraine and asked her father to take Noura on his own.
Years later, Noura still remembered her grandmother in her little house. The inner courtyard was a rampant jungle of plants. The chairs and corner benches were positively hidden behind curtains of climbing jasmine and dwarf orange trees, oleanders, roses, hibiscus, and other flowers growing in pots on green-painted wooden stands. As soon as Noura arrived at her grandmother’s, the old lady hurried to make her a wreath of flowering jasmine and put it on her head.