The Calligrapher's Secret

by Rafik Schami

  A week later Tawfiq surprised him early in the morning by giving him the calligraphy, which he had personally collected and paid for. It was even more beautiful than Nasri had pictured it. A magnificent frame of ornamentation surrounded the script giving it an almost sacred look.

  “I think there’s nothing in our way now,” said Tawfiq, and Nasri saw the devilish gleam in his eye.

  A week later Nasri received a personal invitation to dinner with the president. A chauffeur collected him and took him to the presidential palace. The president enjoyed the evening so much that from then on he dined once a week with Nasri and a few carefully selected businessmen of the city.

  Friendships in such circles were as good as impossible, but through his wit and fearlessness Nasri was soon particularly close to the president. Behind the stiff uniform he discovered a lonely man who hadn’t had a happy day in his life since he was young, but had spent his time miserably occupied with conspiracies and counter-conspiracies.

  Nasri regarded the other businessmen as hypocrites. They watched the same film with the dictator every week, only to laugh at him in private afterward. President Shishakli worshipped Hitler and wanted to imitate him. He was impressed by Leni Riefenstahl’s film Triumph of the Will, and watched it once a week in the private cinema of the presidential palace.

  Nasri disliked both the Germans and the war, and he always made an excuse to leave the palace. Shishakli, son of a peasant, respected him for that, recognizing Nasri as a cultivated man and a free spirit who listened carefully and gave his own opinion with perfect civility.

  Three weeks later, the consignment of machinery, three full truckloads, had already arrived duty-free. It included machines for kneading dough and dividing portions destined for bakeries, as well as drills and lathes for metal-working and car repair shops, the first imports from Hungary. To give the firm a second secure footing, Tawfiq explained, he had acquired the sole agency for engineering works in Syria.

  “Second, did you say? I get the impression you’ve made our company into a millipede,” Nasri replied, and both men laughed.

  That day Nasri took some expensive perfume with him when he visited the whore Asmahan. When he entered her apartment he saw that she was busy cutting a beautifully written maxim out of a magazine at her living-room table. Asmahan thanked him for the perfume, and while she went on cutting out the maxim and framing it very carefully, she told him that she had always had a liking for calligraphy. Calligraphy was the photography of words, she said, and she loved words more than any man in the world.

  Only now did Nasri notice that all the walls in her bedroom and living room, kitchen and bathroom were covered with framed sayings. He felt ashamed of his blindness, but now he knew how he could please Asmahan.

  When she went away to make herself beautiful for him, he wrote down the maxim she had just been cutting out. It said, “The Wisdom of Love is its Madness.”

  That day he thought, yet again, that he should have married the whore, and to hell with his clan and his reputation. She was as clever as his wife Lamia, she was witty and could laugh enchantingly like his wife Nasimeh, and in addition she had the bewitching body of his wife Saideh. And, unlike any of his wives, she was grateful. Of course she wanted money for her prowess in bed, but his wives charged him double what he paid her, only in other ways – he had worked it out. None of them, however, was as grateful when he took her a present. Asmahan was sometimes happy for days on end over a bottle of perfume or an expensive French fashion magazine from the Librairie Universelle bookshop.

  But as he was about to immerse himself wistfully in these thoughts, an inner voice woke him from them, as always. It sounded like his father’s. “Do you really think you’ll be enough for her, you fool? A woman like that is sexy enough for seven men, and what’s she going to do with the rest of her sexiness when you’re lying beside her exhausted and snoring? She’ll soon find another man, and then a third and a fourth. You’ll be wearing seven pairs of horns, and you won’t fit through doorways.”

  Nasri was shaking his head, downcast, when Asmahan came back into the room wearing a thin silk wrap. She had piled her blonde hair up in a pyramid and adorned it with paste gems and feathers. She was the most beautiful whore in Damascus, and only her high price kept men from queuing up outside her door. She charged a hundred lira every time she slept with someone – it was as much as Tawfiq’s weekly salary.

  Only parliamentarians, ministers, large landowners, generals, and rich businessmen could afford the pleasure she gave them.

  Today, after a little love play, Nasri asked out of frustration and a little shame how many men she had had today.

  “You’re the third,” she said, putting on her underclothes.

  “And now you’ve had enough?” he asked, hoping that after sleeping with him she would say, “Oh yes!” Asmahan just laughed her clear laugh and did not reply.

  “Hurry up, the parliamentary speaker will soon be here! He wants me to play the innocent student and he’ll seduce me. He’s a professor, you know.”

  “And after that?”

  “Oh, do hurry up. After that another three or four, maybe five, it all depends how jealous their wives are,” she said, and laughing but forcefully she propelled him toward the door.

  She was a strange woman, with no sense of shame – as if she weren’t an Arab woman at all – but a sober and accurate idea of what she did. “Whoring is a profession as old as the hills,” she told him one day. “Some sell their strength and the work of their hands, their eyes and their backs, and I sell the work of my cunt.” You could look at it like that, of course. Nasri didn’t like to. She added, “Suppose a beautiful and clever woman is ripe for marriage, what husband will her parents choose out of a hundred suitors? They won’t pick the most sensitive or the cleverest or the one who has the best way with words, let alone the most honourable, they’ll pick the richest and most powerful. It’s just a case of buying and selling. Beautiful, healthy women are sold in exchange for power and security for the woman and her family. But I see you don’t understand what I’m saying.”

  Nasri was bewildered. She was speaking Arabic, yes, but this was not the kind of language he was used to.

  This time Nasri waited until afternoon before going to the calligrapher, hoping that by then the man’s bad breath might have worn off, and sure enough, today his breath smelled of orange and coriander.

  “Did the president like the last calligraphic work?” he asked, after returning Nasri’s greeting.

  “Yes, very much. How could he fail to when it came from your pen?” said Nasri, looking at the keen blade of the knife the calligrapher was using to sharpen the point of the reed.

  “I’ll be through with this in a minute, do sit down,” he said, pointing to an elegant chair. One of his assistants came in and asked quietly for some gold leaf. The calligrapher stood up and took a thick book out of a cupboard. “There are still seventy leaves – when you’ve finished, enter the number you took out and the date in the list you’ll find at the end, and take care of the tiniest pieces left over. It’s gold, understand?” he said in a soft but stern voice to the assistant, quite an old man who found this admonition in front of a customer embarrassing.

  “Yes, I always do take care,” he said.

  “Send me Yousef,” added Hamid Farsi. “I want him to fetch us two coffees.”

  A small boy came out of the workshop and asked Nasri politely how he liked his coffee.

  “With plenty of sugar and a little cardamom.”

  The boy, who had a bad squint, set off for Karam’s café at the end of the street.

  Nasri, watching him go, wondered about his clean clothes. Everyone in this place seemed a little more elegant than the people working in the other nearby shops, as if by order.

  “Slovenliness and calligraphy don’t go together,” Hamid Farsi replied briefly to his customer’s compliment.

  “I have an unusual request today.” After drinking his coffee, Nasri
moved his chair closer to the master calligrapher’s desk. “It’s very intimate. For a woman, you understand,” he whispered. “Of course, not one of my wives. Who writes love letters to his own wife?”

  The calligrapher gave a wintry smile.

  “No, it’s a saying about love. Here,” said Nasri, taking the small piece of paper out of his wallet and unfolding it on the table. Hamid Farsi read the saying and liked it.

  “How large is it to be?”

  “The size of the palm of my hand, but very fine, please. Perhaps in gold,” Nasri added.

  “Is it wanted in a hurry?”

  “Yes, as usual. And this time, please, another suitable accompanying letter in your wonderful script, but no letterhead and address. The lady might show it to other people, you see. It’s enough to end the letter with my first name, Nasri.”

  “But you must tell me what the letter is to say. Then I will work out the right form of words.”

  Nasri was in difficulty. He had thought out everything in advance, but not the answer to a question like this.

  “Oh, something or other… you know the kind of thing. About love and so forth,” stammered Nasri, and suddenly he seemed to himself ridiculous. The calligrapher was privately amused by this rich man, who wanted to show that he was a person of great stature, but couldn’t put together a couple of sentences about his own feelings.

  “Very well,” he said, in the superior tones of one reaching out his hand to a drowning man, “then tell me what the lady likes, what’s most beautiful about her, and I’ll see what can be made of it.”

  Nasri hadn’t been so embarrassed since his childhood, but then he began talking about Asmahan’s blue eyes, her body, and her beguiling charm. And finally he mentioned the remark that had shaken him so much, that she loved words in fine script better than she loved men.

  The calligrapher wrote it all down. He envied this rich man for loving a woman who herself loved calligraphy.

  When Nasri left the calligrapher’s workshop and stepped out into the street, he realized that he was sweating profusely.

  12

  Even years later, Noura thought nostalgically of her time with the dressmaker Dalia. She spent three years with her, and she had learned so much there! She always used to say that her father had taught her how to read, her mother had taught her how to cook, and Dalia had taught her how to live.

  Noura also enjoyed working with Dalia because it meant she could get away from her mother. She didn’t have to do any cooking or cleaning at home, because she had a profession, and her mother was very respectful of a profession.

  The dressmaker’s house stood where the ends of two alleys met, and was triangular, an unusual shape in the city. It looked like the bows of a mighty steamship and had two front doors, one on each alley. There was no inner courtyard, but a narrow garden behind the living quarters where tall plants screened the house from the neighbouring buildings in the two alleys. A gnarled old bitter orange tree, a tall palm, and two lemon trees were the columns framing a jungle. Among them oleander and rose bushes grew to a great height. Jasmine made a dense curtain of white flowers and dark green leaves in front of the neighbouring houses.

  A tiny fountain adorned the terrace, which was paved with red and white tiles like a chessboard. The dressmaker and her assistants relaxed here. They drank their tea and coffee on the terrace for ten months of the year, and they could also smoke here, which was strictly forbidden in the workshop.

  The dressmaking premises were on the ground floor, and consisted of a beautiful reception room, two well-lit workshops, a large kitchen, and a small storeroom for sewing materials. The washroom was a little shed hidden behind the bitter orange tree in the garden.

  Dalia lived upstairs. She did not like to be visited there, not even by Noura. A stairway behind the façade of the house led up to the attic on the next floor. Beside the attic room there was a wide space to hang out washing. But the flat roof was not surrounded by railings, like the roof of Noura’s house at home. She did not like going up there to hang out washing. She felt dizzy on the stairs, which always swayed slightly.

  Dalia loved her house. She had bought it and renovated it herself. Her four brothers had divided her father’s inheritance between them, cunningly tricking Dalia out of her share after their parents’ death, when she was already burdened more than enough by personal disasters. By the time she found out that she had been cheated, it was too late. She never said another word to her brothers all her life, or with their sons and daughters who kept trying to make peace with the famous dressmaker whose work was in such demand.

  “Give me back what your fathers stole from me first,” she would say, brusquely dismissing her relations. “Otherwise you and your slimy ways can go to the devil.”

  Dalia the dressmaker’s house was only a stone’s throw from Noura’s home. At first that was the one disadvantage, for over the first few weeks Noura’s mother would drop in several times a day for a word with her daughter. Noura was cross, because her mother spoke to her as if she were a little girl. Dalia was quick to notice that this got on her young assistant’s nerves, and one fine morning she put an end to Noura’s embarrassment. “You listen to me,” she snapped at Noura’s mother. “Bring your daughter up as you like at home. Here she has to learn from me, and I and no one else am in charge here. Do we understand each other?”

  Noura’s mother did understand, and she never dropped in again. But oddly enough she bore the dressmaker no grudge for her reproof. “She’s a strong woman. She has buried three husbands, and she knows what she’s doing,” said Noura’s mother.

  Noura lay awake for a long time that night, wondering how her parents could bear to live together. Her father was an incorrigible philanthropist who saw even a criminal as a man in need of love. Her mother, on the other hand, distrusted everyone. She saw every passerby as a wolf in human form, waiting under cover of a friendly smile to devour Noura alive. “Mama, men don’t smile at me, and if one does I’ll soon send him on his way,” she said untruthfully, to soothe her mother’s fears. She didn’t mention her fears of the barber, whose looks burnt her skin, or her liking for Ismail who sold beans in his shop not far from her alley. He was always friendly, well dressed, and neatly shaven, but he was also uglier than any other of the men in this quarter. He had a face like a vulture and a body like a hippopotamus, but he was always good-tempered and full of praise for his baked beans, fried falafel, and the other little vegetarian dishes that he sold over the counter. His shop was so small that there was only room in it for Ismail himself, his pans and his deep-fat fryer. Noura’s father used to say that if Ismail put on any more weight there’d be nowhere left for the salt sprinkler. Yet like all the neighbours he appreciated Ismail’s dishes, the secret of which he had inherited from his forebears. For twenty-two generations, said a notice above the little door, the family had been cooking and frying vegetables in that shop. And it was said that the Ottoman Sultan Selim had stopped here on his way to Palestine and Egypt because the delicious aromas coming from the shop gave him an appetite. The sultan had written a letter of thanks to the shopkeeper of the time. It had hung in the shop for four hundred years, and to the end of the Ottoman Empire it forbade any official to harm the shopkeeper.

  When Ismail saw Noura, he would purse his lips into the shape of a kiss, and sometimes he even did give his mighty ladle a hearty kiss, making his eyebrows dance a suggestive jig at the same time.

  “Rose of Damascus, marry me,” he called to her one morning as she was walking past his shop, lost in thought. For a moment she took fright, but then she laughed at him. And from that day on she felt something like warmth when she set eyes on him, and walked past his shop slowly with her head held high, enjoying the flow of his poetic remarks.

  What danger could this corpulent man represent? She twice saw him in her dreams as a little falafel ball swimming in oil, blowing bubbles, and calling out “Eat me, eat me,” in a singsong chant. She woke up laughing.


  No. Noura hadn’t confided in her mother since she was ten or eleven. That spared both of them trouble. All the same, there were constant arguments when her mother found out something that stoked her fears for Noura.

  At that time all young women idolized the singer and actor Farid al-Atrash, who sang popular, melancholy love songs. He had the saddest voice in the Arab world, and it moved all women to tears. Week after week the newspapers were full of him. Farid al-Atrash was a bachelor all his life; it was said that he loved horses and boys more than women, but the women didn’t believe that.

  The singer left Noura’s father cold, and her mother hated him because he seduced women with his songs. “He’s a Druze, and what would you expect a man whose mother played the lute for money to be? Did you hear how his sister ended up? Drowned in the Nile. She was the most beautiful woman in the Arab world, but instead of marrying a king she sang in night clubs, and her lover, a jealous Englishmen, strangled her and threw her body into the river.”

  Dalia the dressmaker was one of those who idolized Farid al-Atrash. She didn’t just like singing his songs, she went to see all his films at the Roxy Cinema. In fact she had seen some of those films, like Ahlam al Shabab (Dreams of Youth) and Shahr al Asal (Honeymoon), over ten times. The wall above her workshop was adorned with a large poster for the film Makdarshi (I Can’t Do It). Farid al-Atrash seemed to be saying just that to whoever looked at the poster while his screen partner, the famous dancing girl Tahiya Karioka, watched him jealously. And whenever her customers urged Dalia to hurry with their dresses, she just pointed to the poster in silence and went on working.