by Rafik Schami
She turned out to be opinionated to the nth degree. She could not refrain from commenting on anything he said, and never dreamt of agreeing with it. There had always been some Greek, Chinese, or Arab idiot who lived centuries ago and had proved the opposite of what he said. And if Lamia couldn’t cite anyone else she presented her father as evidence for the truth of her own opinions.
He had never felt at home with Lamia as he did with his other wives, because the big house with the magnificent garden near the Italian hospital was a wedding present from her father. She always, without a second thought, called it “my house” and not “our house.”
She was a killjoy who began yawning the moment he even touched her. “Your body’s not covered with skin, it’s all over light switches,” he once told her angrily in bed. “As soon as I touch you the light goes out.”
“That’s a contrived metaphor without any wit or esprit in it,” she said, yawning with tedium. She was terribly thin, she was flat-chested, and she was mad about reading. Nasri himself could make nothing of books. The newspaper was enough to show him that the world sickened him.
“A son with your good looks and her clever brain would be a godsend to the clan. He could be called after me,” said Nasri’s father as he left on the wedding night.
It didn’t turn out that way. They had six children – but all girls, and all six girls took after their mother. That marriage had been his father’s worst mistake. Nasri went to sleep with that thought in his mind every third evening at Lamia’s house, after doing his duty. He was only ever happy there in the last months of her pregnancies, because then he wasn’t allowed to touch her. He found it easy to go along with that ban.
It was Nasri Abbani’s custom, after eating a light breakfast, to go first to a café, where he drank a cup of sweet coffee and read the newspaper, and then stroll through the souk. In passing, he left his orders with shopkeepers, giving the address of one his three wives, depending on which house he would be spending the coming night in. The vegetable sellers, fishmongers, spice dealers and confectioners, bakers and butchers conscientiously supplied what he wanted, and always delivered the best of everything, for Mr Abbani was well known for his generosity. He didn’t haggle, he didn’t sample the goods. He paid. And he never forgot to tip the errand boys generously.
Nasri Abbani always wore fine European suits, and as the weather was often hot in Damascus he owned more pale suits tailored from fine linen and Damascene silk than suits in dark English wool. He wore silk shirts and Italian shoes, and put a fresh carnation or rose in his buttonhole every day. Only the arabesque patterns on his ties gave an Oriental touch to his appearance. He also owned a large collection of walking sticks with silver or gold knobs.
He was always addressed as Nasri Bey. Bey and Pasha were Ottoman honorifics that had no real value in Damascus, being a relic of the past, but they gave the bearer an aura of noble descent, for the Ottoman Sultan had honoured only the noblemen close to him with that invisible but audible distinction.
Nasri Abbani was very proud, and despite the friendship all and sundry felt for him he hardly talked to anyone except the pharmacist Elias Ashkar, whose medical knowledge was far greater than any doctor’s. Ashkar’s modern pharmacy lay in the new Salihiyyeh quarter of Damascus, close to Nasri’s office and not far from the house of his second wife Saideh, right next to the fashion house of the famous Albert Abirashed in busy King Fouad Street, a name which had been changed to Port Said Street after the Suez war of 1956. The change of name was intended to honour the resistance of the people of the Egyptian harbour town of Port Said to the English, French, and Israeli invasion. Nasri Abbani thought this reasoning ridiculous, and spoke of King Fouad Street to the end of his life.
Nasri Abbani visited the pharmacist almost every morning, and soon rumours spread that he was buying secret potions there to keep his boundless lust for women physically unimpaired.
Around ten in the morning – sometimes later but never earlier – Nasri Abbani arrived at his large office on the first floor of the magnificent modern building that was his own property. The ground floor was let to a large electrical items store and Air France. The second floor was the central office of the Persian carpet trade in Syria. These firms and businesses paid high rents, for King Fouad Street was the main artery of the modern city, with the best hotels and restaurants, bookshops, press agencies, import-export firms, cinemas, and expensive fashion stores that boasted of getting in haute couture from Paris for their shows. Nasri’s first-floor office had two rooms, as well as a kitchen, a modern washroom, and a storeroom for the archives and stock. One of the rooms was large and light, with a window looking out on the street, and it was furnished like a sitting room. Two dark wood sofas upholstered in red velvet, a low coffee table, and several grand armchairs dominated the room, leaving only a small corner for a delicate table on which lay a desk pad and a telephone.
Going down a narrow corridor, you reached the second room, which was also large but had no windows, and seemed to consist only of desks and shelves full of files. This was where Nasri’s colleague of many years’ standing, Tawfiq, sat with two older clerks and three young assistants.
Tawfiq was no older than Nasri, but his thin form, stooped shoulders, and prematurely grey hair made him look as if he belonged to a different generation. Dark rings under his eyes showed exhaustion.
Nasri had inherited Tawfiq from his father, who was said to have told him, on his deathbed, “Your two brothers have good brains and you have Tawfiq. Pay attention to him, because if he leaves you’ll go under.”
Old Abbani, whose wealth was proverbial, retained his sharp eye for a man’s qualities to the end. He was a manufacturer, real estate broker, and large landowner. It was said that every other apricot eaten by a Damascene came from his fields, and that all the products in the capital derived from apricots were made in his factories. He was also the largest dealer in apricot kernels, which were in great demand for making peach marzipan, oils, and aromatic substances.
At the age of fifteen, Tawfiq had gone to Abbani as an errand boy. He was small and half-starved at the time, so he was teased by the warehouse workers who filled jute sacks with apricot kernels and sewed them up. But the experienced Abbani recognized Tawfiq as not just a mathematical genius but a young man with a razor-sharp mind and courage. Tawfiq had given evidence of that when he once contradicted Abbani, which no one else dared to do.
At the time old Abbani had been furious, in fact furious with himself, because without the objection raised by the pale young man he would have ruined himself over a stupid calculation. When he felt calmer, he went down to the warehouse to give the boy a lira as a reward. But Tawfiq was nowhere to be seen. When he asked about him, he found out that Mustafa, head of the warehouse, had beaten the boy to a jelly with a stick for being impertinent enough to correct the boss. All the rest of them, although of course they too had spotted the mistake, had kept their mouths shut out of respect. When Tawfiq was finally found and taken to the boss, Abbani said, “From now on we work together, my boy. And everyone here must show you respect, because you are now my first secretary.” He added, to the rest of them, “Anyone who so much as gives him a nasty look is fired.”
A few months later, Tawfiq had mastered all kinds of arithmetical calculations, including working out percentages and drawing up tables. He knew all the clever tricks to use in applying for exemption from duty, an art that old Abbani hadn’t even tried to teach his two accountants in ten years.
From now on Tawfiq was treated like a son of the Abbani family. When he was eighteen, his patron arranged a good marriage for him with a well-to-do young widow from the village of Garamana south of Damascus. She was a good wife, and from that day on Tawfiq lived happily. Old Abbani had been a dispensation of Providence for him.
With time he became prosperous, and his wife bore him three children. He was as unassuming as ever, and spoke quietly and respectfully to everyone, even the errand boys. Out of gratitude to
his patron, he stayed loyal to Abbani’s spoilt son, who was more interested in women’s underclothes than interest rates and property prices. Soon he became sole ruler of a small financial empire. As the years went by he also became fond of Nasri, who had absolute confidence in him and never accused him of making a mistake. Unlike his two close-fisted brothers, Nasri was generous. True, he knew little about business, but he did know a great deal about life, and like his father felt not the slightest respect for the powerful men whom he enjoyed wrapping around his little finger.
“God made everyone what he is,” he said to himself and to others. You can’t expect a champion boxer to be good at ballet.
Tawfiq stuck to his method of getting Abbani’s agreement before doing any business deal. And Abbani always did agree, for he understood nothing about all the business done with apricots and the countless products derived from them. Nor did he take any interest in selling plots of land in order to buy others because, it was said, the most expensive quarter in Damascus was soon to be built where pomegranates, oleander bushes, and sugar cane now grew, the reason being that an embassy was giving up its magnificent residence in the Old Town and planned to move here.
“Do what you think right,” said Nasri Abbani half-heartedly. And within two years the value of the land had multiplied by five.
But when Abbani, delighted by such profits, wanted to sell, Tawfiq dismissed the idea. “This is our moment to buy really large tracts of land. In another five years’ time you’ll get five hundred times the money.”
“If you say so,” said Nasri, although he was not really convinced. Five years later the plots in the new Abu Roummaneh district were indeed the most expensive in the city. Tawfiq worked out that they had made a profit of six hundred and fifty percent.
When Nasri arrived at the office in the morning, he would ask Tawfiq in friendly tones, “Any news?” And every morning Tawfiq replied, “I’ll be coming in to see you right away, Nasri Bey.” Then he would send an errand boy to fetch two coffees from the nearby café, one very sweet for his boss, one without sugar but with plenty of cardamom for himself.
Over their coffee, Tawfiq gave a brief and precise account of all developments in the business, well knowing that his boss soon got bored. In just seven minutes he could outline all the financial dealings of the firm, including exports, rents and repairs to the many buildings it owned, and all the new plots of land they had bought.
“Then that’s all right,” Abbani would say abstractedly, even if there had been a negative figure in this account for once.
After that he would talk to his friends on the telephone for an hour, and hardly a week went by when he didn’t arrange to have lunch with one of the powerful men of Damascus in his favourite restaurant Al Malik, near the parliament building.
“I can smooth the way for us over lunch,” he told his business manager, and he was not exaggerating. Nasri had charm, he knew the world and his fellow men, and he knew all the latest gossip. His guests were impressed. Of course they were never allowed to pay, only to enjoy themselves. The chef came from Aleppo, and if any cuisine could boast of aromas and delicious concoctions that outdid even the cookery of Damascus, then it was the cuisine of the largest city in northern Syria.
If there was no one for him to invite, he went out to lunch on his own. And only on such days did the restaurant proprietor venture to exchange a few words with his distinguished customer. Nasri Abbani did not like to eat lunch with any of his wives and their children; he ate with them in the evening.
After lunch Nasri would set out to visit his favourite whore Asmahan. She lived in a little house less than a hundred paces from the restaurant. Asmahan was glad to see him because he always came in the middle of the day, when none of her distinguished clients had time for her. Nasri joked with her, and she genuinely enjoyed his sense of humour and laughed until she cried. Then he made love to her, had half an hour’s siesta, made love to her again, showered, paid, and left.
Sometimes, as he walked away, he thought that the young whore let him do as he liked too willingly, too mechanically, and he could have wished for a little more passion. Only years later was he to find out, by chance, what Asmahan’s heart was capable of. But apart from that, she had everything he loved: a beautiful face with blue eyes and blonde hair, a bewitching body that could have been carved from marble, and a tongue that spoke only honeyed words.
The same could not have been said of any of his three wives.
11
One rainy January day in the year 1952, Nasri Abbani entered Hamid Farsi the calligrapher’s studio. He was pleasantly surprised to find the place so neat and clean. He had never been to a calligrapher before, and had imagined he would meet an old man with a beard and dirty fingers. But here sat a slender young man, elegantly dressed, behind a small walnut desk. Nasri smiled, said good day, shook the water off his umbrella and put it in a corner beside the display window.
Suddenly it occurred to him that he should have come to the shop better prepared, for he had never ordered any calligraphy before. He looked around him. Beautiful examples of script hung everywhere, poems, maxims, verses from the Quran. But he did not see what he wanted.
“Do you take commissions to provide for special wishes?” asked Nasri.
“Of course, sir,” replied the calligrapher quietly.
“And discreetly? This is about a present for a distinguished person.”
“Yes, anything that is to be written in fine calligraphic script, as long as the wording does not offend God and his Prophet,” said the calligrapher, giving a routine reply. At this point he already knew that he could ask whatever price he liked of this prosperous man who smelled so fragrant.
“It’s a maxim for the president of our state,” said Nasri, fishing out of his pocket a note on which Tawfiq had written: “For His Excellency Adib Shishakli! Lead our nation on to victory.”
The calligrapher read these lines. He obviously did not like them. He moved his head back and forth. Nasri sensed the man’s discomfort. “That’s only an indication of the kind of thing it should say. You can make your own judgment and work out how and what you write for such a great man.”
Hamid Farsi breathed a sigh of relief. This is a man of quality, he thought, and his suggestions came promptly. “I’d put the names of God and his Prophet in gold at the top, and underneath, in red, the name of our President. Under that I would put, in bright green: You are chosen by God and his Prophet to lead our nation.” The calligrapher paused. “I have heard that he’s very devout, so putting it like that would be in line with his own ideas and wouldn’t read like an order. You are courteously expressing an assumption, a wish, that God has chosen him to reign over us. All rulers like that sort of thing.”
“And suppose it wasn’t God who chose him to lead that coup?” asked Nasri, making a joke of it to dispel the chill that he felt.
“Then the CIA or the KGB had a hand in it, but we can’t write that, can we?” said the calligrapher, never turning a hair. Nasri laughed out loud, but he felt lonely.
Hamid Farsi showed him the fine paper and the gilded picture frame he would choose for this saying. Nasri was enthusiastic.
The calligrapher agreed to drop everything else and complete his commission within the week. He named the price, which he had set very high, but Nasri smiled. “Let’s leave it like this. I won’t ask your price, and you will do your very best for me. Agreed?” he asked, offering his hand, because he never expected anyone to turn down his generous offers.
“Agreed,” said Hamid quietly. Nasri was surprised to see that the man didn’t even smile or thank him for the commission. A strange fellow. Tawfiq had advised him to make the president a present with a view to getting the large number of machines he was importing past customs. That would raise their profits by three hundred percent.
“Nothing can be done without the president, not since the coup,” Tawfiq had said, “and the president loves fine calligraphy, drinks himself silly every day,
watches Hitler films for hours on end and puts on a show of devout belief for the faithful.” Nasri marvelled at Tawfiq’s cunning. He knew as much as if he had his own secret service.
In Tawfiq’s opinion, Farsi was the best calligrapher in Damascus. He knew that Farsi was expensive, unapproachable, and arrogant, but what he wrote in his beautiful calligraphy was always a unique work of art. Above all, he was reliable. The present had to be given at exactly the right moment. In two weeks’ time the ship carrying the machines would put in at the northern port of Latakia, and by then he needed the consent of the president. “One phone call from him, and the minister of trade will hurry on ahead of me to keep those idiotic customs officers quiet until our trucks have driven the machinery out of town.”
Tawfiq was a devil, and the most diabolical thing about him was his weary but angelic face.
Nasri looked out of the window. It had stopped raining, and he suddenly remembered the additional request that was to accompany the present.
“And something else,” he said, already at the door. “Could you also write me a letter to go with it in your beautiful script? In my name? It would be bad taste for me to write it myself in my terrible scrawl…”
“Of course I can, but I shall need your full name and address so that I can provide the letter with an elegant letterhead that no secretary or receptionist will keep from him,” said Hamid, pushing a blank sheet of paper toward Nasri. When the latter had written down his name and address, Hamid Farsi knew that this elegant gentleman had been speaking no more than the truth.
The sun was shining outside and Nasri heaved a sigh of relief. The calligrapher was a capable and intelligent craftsman, but his mouth odour was intolerable. It reminded Nasri of the smell of the beasts of prey in a circus he had once gone to with his father. As the manager of the circus revered his father, Nasri had been allowed to get quite close to the animal cages, accompanied by one of the keepers. The cages stank of urine, which was bad enough, but when a tiger or lion roared or a hyena howled, the stench of their breath almost stifled Nasri.