The Calligrapher's Secret

by Rafik Schami

  Salman was glad, because he had worn his shoes all winter, their soles were giving way and had holes in them, and the uppers were hard as bone. Poor people’s shoes, said Mahmoud, the errand boy from the nearby bakery, were designed to be instruments of torture so that the poor would do penance for their sins and go straight to heaven when they died. And he tapped his own shoes, which left bleeding blisters on his feet. The leather sounded like wood.

  Year after year, Salman’s longing for a better pair of shoes made him hopeful. He walked through the souk with his mother, who would stop in front of the colourful display windows, seemed to forget herself entirely at the sight of a dress, made little noises of delight, and when she saw a boy’s suit or a pair of shoes she would look Salman up and down as if taking his measurements, or wondering whether the colour would be right for him, only to move on again. After an hour Salman was tired of this.

  “Mother, when are we going in?”

  “Going in? What for?”

  “To buy shoes for me and a dress for you.”

  “Oh, child, where would I get the money?”

  He looked at her, horrified. “Don’t look so silly,” she said with an innocent expression, “just look at the clothes and shoes and imagine how you’d feel walking around in those wonderful things.” And then she would walk quickly on through the market.

  A week before Easter this year, Salman invited his mother to go to the Souk al-Hamidiyyeh, and she laughed a lot on the way here. Then she saw a beautiful dress in a shop window, and Salman asked her casually whether she liked it. She looked at him, her gaze transfigured, and said, “Do I like it? I’d be a princess in that dress,” she said.

  “Then it’s yours. You must try it on and haggle with the shopkeeper first. I have the money,” said Salman boldly, although his voice almost failed him.

  “Aren’t you joking?” asked his mother, uncertainly.

  Salman took his hand out of his trouser pocket. His mother was amazed when she saw two blue hundred lira banknotes and several ten lira notes. “I’ve been saving up so that you can be a princess at last,” he said. “And you must buy yourself shoes today, and I want a new pair of trousers, a shirt and a pair of patent leather shoes. I’ve worked it all out. If we drive a good bargain it will come to between a hundred and ninety and two hundred lira,” he added.

  In spite of her frailty, his mother was an excellent haggler. That evening they went home heavily laden, and Salman still had thirty lira in his pocket. He had brought back a pair of white socks for Sarah as well. Sarah laughed herself silly, because the socks were three sizes too big. She gave them to her mother.

  Salman took time off at Easter and went to early Mass with his mother. She walked proudly up the nave of the church, and sat down in the front pew, just like a princess. She really did look enchanting. When she went up to take communion and the priest recognized her, his mouth dropped open. He forgot to say “This is the body of Christ” to Salman, who was following his mother, and stared in astonishment at the elegant apparition as she walked on.

  At this hour Salman’s father was sleeping off his hangover from the day before.

  His mother’s happiness lasted exactly three weeks, and then she caught a cold. As she did not take things easy, the cold turned into pneumonia. And when no herbal teas did any good, nor did compresses on her legs or to cool her forehead, Faizeh fetched the doctor. He was nice, but he wanted five lira in advance. Salman paid, but the medicine that the doctor prescribed was very expensive.

  The neighbours, including Faizeh, recommended Salman not to listen to the doctor, saying that a few herbs would be enough. Salman was sure that only that medicine would save his mother. But now his savings with Sarah didn’t cover the expense.

  It was Monday, the quietest day at the coffeehouse, so his boss Karam didn’t come to work that day. Samih, the older of his two colleagues, was at the cash desk, and when Salman asked him for an advance of twenty lira, Samih roared with laughter. “You can think yourself lucky if I give you twenty piastres. Do you know how much twenty lira come to? Two hundred cups of tea, or a hundred cups of coffee, or seventy-five hookah pipe smokes – you think I’ll just hand you that much money? The boss would hang me and stick a notice on my chest saying ‘Strung Up For Stupidity.’”

  Darwish and Samih laughed so much that Salman left the café in annoyance. He knew where his boss lived, so he set off straight away.

  The garden gate was ajar. Salman went through the garden, and as he reached the front door of the house he heard indistinct laughter in the distance. The door wasn’t locked either, so he quietly went in. The sounds came from the bedroom.

  Years later, Salman still remembered how he had felt his pulse thudding beneath his skull. He had often been to Karam’s house, and he could come and go whenever he liked. So the place was not strange to him. He had also met Badri the barber there many times.

  Now, as he stood in the corridor, he looked through the open bedroom door and saw the barber lying underneath his boss. In everyday life, Badri spoke broad Damascene dialect in a deep voice. But now he was pleading ecstatically, in the high tones of a film diva, for more of whatever Karam was doing to him. At that time Salman was nearly fourteen, but he didn’t understand what was going on. His parched throat felt rough and dry as sandpaper. He slowly walked backwards to the door and left the house. Not until he was outside did he take a deep breath. It was beginning to dawn on him that the barber was playing the part of a woman in this game of love. Of course Salman had heard the word “gay” used in the street, but only as a term of abuse. He would never have thought there were men who made love to each other so tenderly.

  Although he couldn’t see himself, he knew he looked paler than usual. His cheeks were cold as ice. He crouched there outside the door until he heard the two men laughing and playing around in the bathroom. Only then did he stand up, bringing the knocker down on the door three times.

  It was quite a while before Karam looked out through the spy hole in the door at Salman, inspecting him in alarm. “Is something wrong?” he asked, worried.

  “No, no, but my mother is very sick. I need twenty lira urgently. She… she has dangerous pneumonia. I’ll pay you back in instalments,” said Salman, near tears.

  “Wait here,” replied Karam, and he disappeared into the house. Soon he came back, now wearing his new blue pyjamas, and gave Salman a twenty-lira banknote as well as five lira in coins. “Buy your mother some fruit with the five lira. That’s a present from me, you only have to pay me back the twenty.”

  Salman could have kissed his hand, but Karam patted him briefly on the head. “Close the garden gate behind you,” he said, disappearing into the house. Salman heard him double-locking the door on the inside.

  After his mother had taken the medicine, she slept peacefully that night for the first time in a long while. But Salman tossed and turned in bed, unable to sleep. Why did his boss, who had money and a house, love a man instead of a woman? And a man who seemed to consist entirely of muscles at that, and thought of nothing but his oiled hair and his figure? Badri couldn’t even move gracefully. When he picked up his coffee cup he did it as stiffly as if the cup weighed ten kilos.

  When Salman described the love scene in the bedroom to his friend Sarah, she said, “Life’s nothing but a carnival. In his heart the muscleman is a woman, but God was in such a hurry that he gave him a man’s body.” And when Salman stared at her, bewildered, she tried to explain it more precisely. “It’s like in the hammam when the bath attendant hands you someone else’s clothes.” Sarah stopped for a minute. “Said is a woman in his heart as well,” she added. “That’s why all the men love him.” She pointed to the handsome orphan Said, who had just come home from his work in the hammam.

  “God got a few details mixed up,” Sarah continued. “That’s not surprising, when you think of all the billions of things he has to organize.”

  Sarah listed a dozen divine mistakes. Beside her, Salman felt very smal
l, and he admired her. She was amazing. She went to the school run by nuns of the order based in Besançon, and she was top of her class. Salman often imagined her as a doctor in Africa in the future, or helping the American Indians. When he told her so, she laughed. “You’re an idiot. The Africans and the American Indians can get on fine without me. I want to be a teacher, and get married and have twelve children, and I’ll make sure that they grow up to be a butcher, a baker, a joiner, a locksmith, a barber, a cobbler, a tailor, a teacher, a policeman, a flower-seller, a doctor, and a pharmacist, and then I know I’ll be looked after to the end of my days.”

  Sure enough, Sarah did become a teacher, one of the best in the country, and after a stormy love affair she married a bus driver who loved her to the last day of his life. As well as going on with her own career she brought up twelve children to be excellent craftsmen, teachers, and tradesmen. One of the girls among them became a doctor, another girl a lawyer, but none of the twelve wanted to be a butcher.

  At that time Salman also found out that on the day when Pilot saved him from the river, half-drowned, his boss had been beaten up over a young man and not a woman. He had been going to meet the young man, but the boy’s two brothers were there instead, lying in wait to murder him.

  Darwish had had a long affair with his boss, but then Karam had broken it off, although he let him go on working in the café. However, Darwish still loved Karam, and suffered from their parting. He was married, and didn’t like his wife, but all the same he had seven children with her.

  Around this time Salman began to feel a little sympathy for Badri the muscleman, and he sometimes felt sorry for the woman inside him who had to carry so much muscle around.

  Badri could not only pick Salman up with one hand, he could do it with his teeth. Salman had to lie on the floor and go rigid. Then Badri would get Salman’s belt between his teeth and lift him. His neck swelled in the process to a mighty pyramid of muscles, with finger-thick veins standing out.

  Badri often came into the café, but Karam acted as if he knew him only slightly. He had drinks served to him, and joked with him, but he always kept his distance. However, if you looked closely you could see that the two of them loved each other. Darwish saw that clearly, but it intrigued him that the man didn’t come every day, and he always paid. So he suspected that Karam had fallen for the confectioner’s assistant who came to the café daily to deliver the little delicacies offered by Karam along with other small dishes. Karam often cracked vulgar jokes with the plump assistant, who seemed to like the game, but it never went beyond cheerful teasing, tickling, hugging, and pinching.

  Badri was rather stupid and fanatically religious. His was a dangerous mixture of ignorance and certainty. It was only because Karam liked Salman that the muscleman would shake hands with him. “I’ve never given my hand to a Christian before,” he boasted. “If a Christian happens to stray into my salon, my assistant has to deal with him. And afterwards all the scissors and razors have to be boiled to get the smell of the unclean Christian off them.”

  “Take my word for it, that man lives in fear,” said Sarah. “If the fanatics catch him they’ll make mincemeat of him.”

  “Then they’ll have rather a lot of mincemeat that day,” said Salman. It just slipped out as he imagined the muscleman disappearing into a mincer, surrounded by a crowd of the bearded fanatics who went around Damascus denouncing immorality at this time.

  “And you’re getting sillier every day, working in that café,” said Sarah, revolted. All her life she never ate meat.

  Years later, Salman had to admit that Sarah was the first to realize, long before his boss, that although it brought him money, working in the café was getting him nowhere.

  Sarah told Salman so in the summer of 1952, but he didn’t leave the café until the autumn of 1953.

  Later, when he looked back, his memory of those years in the café was vague. Only events involving one person stuck in his mind, and that person was Sarah. She went on teaching him almost every day. He had to write summaries of the novels he had read, and she commented critically on them later. She taught him algebra, geometry, biology, geography, physics, and a little French, a language that she herself could speak without a trace of accent.

  Sarah had passed her higher school certificate with brilliant results, and she was now teaching small children while she studied for two years at teacher training college. After that she taught mathematics and French in an elite school. She was also in great demand as a private tutor for the children of rich Christians, but she accepted only the daughter of the Brazilian consul for a good sum of money per hour. She didn’t want more private pupils; she wanted time to read a great many books and go on teaching her favourite student Salman.

  Then she married the bus driver, a rather stout man with a bald patch who loved her more than anything in the world. And when her cousin Leila made snide remarks, saying she herself dreamed of an actor who lived nearby, and she wasn’t going to marry anyway until love took her heart by storm and set it ablaze, Sarah who knew so much was exactly the person to give her a lecture for free. “Then you’ll have to marry a fireman. Actors are knights and heartbreakers on screen, but in real life they fart and snore, they have pimples on their behinds and bad breath. I think stout men are very attractive, and best of all they have a good sense of humour. They laugh forty percent more than thin men. And if a stout man has a good heart he makes me feel like a queen.”

  Sarah’s wedding was a great event. She had luck even with the weather. That February was dry, and as warm as if it had changed places with May. Sarah’s bridegroom came from Homs. He was an orphan, so it made no difference to him where the wedding was held. Sarah’s father, who knew how to organize a good celebration, wanted his daughter to be married in Damascus. Ten of his colleagues from the police force formed a guard of honour for his daughter at the church door, and Sarah walked past the men in their best uniforms like a princess as she entered the church.

  Grace and Favour Yard celebrated the wedding for seven days as if all the people who lived there were Sarah’s family. Salman was particularly surprised by the part Samira and her son Adnan played on this occasion. Adnan was now married, lived in Jews’ Alley, and drove a taxi. They paid Sarah as much attention as if they had always loved her. Samira cooked for the guests, and Adnan acted as errand boy. Salman’s mother Mariam also helped as far as she could. And everyone decorated the yard and bought drinks for the others. Shimon too was generous, providing crates full of vegetables and fruit.

  The bridegroom was overjoyed. He had never before known anything like this wedding, and he marvelled at it for all seven days.

  And if Salman’s dog had not disappeared a week before the wedding, Salman too would have been happy. A nearby restaurant had given him some bones and meat for his dog, but when he went off to take them to Pilot all he found was some drops of blood and a tuft of his dog’s black hair. What had happened? He hadn’t said a word to Sarah about Pilot’s disappearance so as not to spoil her pleasure in anticipating the wedding.

  After the festivities, Sarah went with her husband to Homs, the beautiful city on the river Orontes. That was in March 1955. Sarah hugged Salman when they said goodbye, and whispered in his ear, “1955 is a lucky year for you and for me. I’ve married the man I love, and you will take your first step through the gateway of your own happiness this year too.”

  Grief for his sick mother and his lost dog stifled his voice. He just nodded, hugged Sarah tight, and thought of Pilot who, if he wasn’t dead, must be even lonelier than he was himself.

  It was to be years before Salman saw Pilot again, but that autumn he was to find out that Sarah really did know everything, even about the future.

  10

  “Aren’t you rather overdoing things,” the pharmacist asked his friend, “having your three wives living in streets so far away from each other?” Why, he wondered aloud, couldn’t he accommodate them in separate parts of a large harem, as his grandfath
er and father had done before him?

  “My wives can’t be far enough away from each other. Otherwise they’d scratch each other’s eyes out within an hour. Three oceans keeping them apart would be even better. Then I’d live on an island in the middle of the oceans. My compass,” said the elegant guest, “would lead me unerringly to one of them every night.”

  “I’d be happy with three deserts between me and my wife,” replied the pharmacist, “but we Christians can have only one wife until death parts us. Your Prophet was a playboy. Our Lord Jesus Christ was a revolutionary, and he had no idea about women.”

  “Are you sure? Maybe that’s why he never married, even with women throwing themselves at his feet,” replied the man in the white suit.

  They were drinking coffee served to them by the pharmacist’s plump assistant in her white coat. The pharmacist had a laboratory behind the shop, with a cooking niche and a refrigerator filled with ice cubes in it. He always kept a bottle of the best arak there. Now he stood up. “Drops for an inflammation of the eyes, was it? Who for?”

  “I don’t know,” said Nasri Abbani, surprised.

  “I have to know if they’re for a child or an adult,” said the pharmacist, dismissing his friend with a noncommittal handshake.

  “I’ll ask my wife. Do you have a telephone?”

  “How would a poor pharmacist afford a telephone? My name’s Elias Ashkar, not Nasri Bey Abbani.”

  “Very well, I’ll find out today and let you know tomorrow,” replied the elegant gentleman, leaving the pharmacy.

  That’s what comes of talk, he thought as he walked out. Lamia talks too much, and in the end no one knows what she really wants.

  If only his father had married her, instead of urging him to do it. He, Nasri, had still been young and inexperienced at the time. It would be a good idea to put the brakes on his desire for women, as his father had expressed it. Lamia seemed just right; she was the daughter of a famous judge and smelled of books and ink more than sensuality.