by Rafik Schami
Farsi admitted that the remark could be taken as meaning that Nasri couldn’t sleep for longing. He had no idea, however, that those lines had been dictated not by the poetic imagination but by a premonition. By this time Nasri’s longing for Asmahan was almost tearing him apart. If he so much as heard her name, his heart was warm, and although he swore daily to forget her, he couldn’t help noticing that his heart did not obey him. He had yet to learn that you can’t decide not to fall in love, just as you can’t decide not to die. It was Nasri’s bad luck that he couldn’t tell anyone, not even Elias the pharmacist, about his ardent passion for Asmahan and his jealousy of her other clients without making himself ridiculous. Who was going to understand that a grown man with three wives could still lose his head like a young man in heat over a whore?
No one knew that since childhood Nasri had been convinced that he must not love anyone, and if he did venture to love then the beloved person would be taken away from him. As a child he paid attention to his father but not his mother. To him, she was only one of several women in the harem building. He did not begin loving her until at the age of nearly twenty he saw how good she was. From then on he honoured her more than anyone. He had married his third wife only because his mother had taken her to her own heart. And indeed Nasimeh had a good character and a wonderful voice, but to his regret she was not beautiful. And what must his mother do, instead of being glad of his marriage? She died a day after the wedding.
He often lay awake wondering what curse he was under, or whether love was a lake that you had to fill with marriage and work if you were not to drown in it. He so often loved women whom he couldn’t have. And hadn’t he always married under compulsion? His father made him marry his first wife Lamia, with his second wife her brother’s gun was the clinching argument, and with his third marriage he wanted to give his mother her heart’s desire. You couldn’t call it love for any of them.
He kept making up his mind not to love Asmahan so as not to lose her, but as soon as he was lying in her soft arms, immersing himself in the depths of her blue eyes, he lost control of his heart. Once he even broke into song while he was making love to her, although he knew that he had a terrible singing voice.
“I don’t mind if you roar like Tarzan, it’s funny, but don’t look at me in such a soppy way while you do it,” said Asmahan. “It makes me feel afraid of you, and then I’d rather be with one of those old gentlemen whose only problem is getting it up.”
“Can you write me a letter with hidden words of love that go straight to the heart but don’t seem ridiculous to the mind?” he asked Hamid Farsi. He had allowed himself plenty of time this hot May afternoon. He wanted to give Asmahan a piece of calligraphy based on her full name, and have a particularly subtle letter written to go with it.
“How can words reach the heart without passing through the gateway of the mind?” replied Farsi, shadowing in a book title. Nasri was fascinated to see how the master could place the shadow of every letter consistently just where it would fall if a light had been shining on it from the top left-hand corner. That gave the characters a third dimension, so that they seemed to stand out from the paper.
“In the same way that calligraphy rejoices the heart even if you can’t decipher the words,” said Nasri. Farsi stopped for a moment and looked up. He was surprised to find that this nearly illiterate man was capable of such an answer.
“That’s different,” said Farsi, breaking the tense silence. It hadn’t lasted as long as two minutes, but it had seemed to Nasri an eternity. “The internal music of calligraphy works on the brain and then opens up the way to the heart – like music when you don’t know its origin or what it is about, but you enjoy it all the same.”
Nasri didn’t understand, but he nodded.
“All the same, it is not a mistake to send a woman you love well-known love poems, the older the better. Then you can say you are sending them because you liked them yourself and wanted the woman to share the same pleasure… it could be something like that, but it won’t get past the brain. Language refuses to be smuggled in.”
“It’s not bad to speak plainly in the middle of the ambiguities of poetry,” said Nasri. He had read that in the newspaper that morning, and liked it. The column about addressing the new head of state, who always seemed to speak in double meanings.
“Are you in a hurry?” asked Farsi. The Ministry had given him the honourable commission of redesigning all school textbooks, because in this new democracy they were to be cleansed of any traces of the dictator Shishakli.
When Hamid Farsi began complaining of all his commissions, however, Nasri spoke brusquely to him for the first time. “There’s no deadline that should take precedence over an order from an Abbani,” he said, “not even a commission for parliament. Just so that we understand each other,” he concluded imperiously.
Hamid Farsi obeyed, for Nasri paid ten times the price that any other connoisseur would have been willing to give.
On the fifth day the letter was ready in a red envelope, together with the small framed calligraphic version of a well-known love poem by Ibn Saidun. As usual, Asmahan thought the calligraphy was enchanting, but the accompanying letter moved her to tears. Nasri stood there in her salon, at a loss. He saw the young whore overwhelmed by the beauty of the words. And he saw her emerge from the cage built of the steel of her coldness and fall straight into his arms. “Do what you like to me today. You are lord of my heart,” she said, and gave herself to him as she had never given herself before.
Nasri stayed with her until morning. Next day Asmahan refused to take any money for that night. “With that letter you’ve given me back things that the world stole from me,” she said, kissing him fervently on the mouth.
Outside her house, Nasri stopped for a moment, thinking of her beautiful breasts and lips, and breathing in the jasmine fragrance that she had sprayed on her hair after bathing. Hamid Farsi brought him luck, he felt convinced of that.
He set off for the office with a spring in his step, never guessing, surrounded by happiness and the scent of jasmine, how very wrong he was to be proved.
16
Hamid Farsi remained strange to Noura not only on her wedding night, but for all the nights that followed until she ran away. None of the well-meaning women who assured her that you got used to your husband turned out to be right. She did get used to the rooms and the furniture and to being alone. But how was she to get used to a strange man? She didn’t know the answer.
In bed, Hamid was kind and considerate, but Noura still felt lonely. She almost suffocated when he was inside her and lay on top of her. She couldn’t breathe. And this loneliness and strangeness hurt her all the time.
When all the dishes for the wedding feast had been eaten, all the songs sung, and the last guests had left the house, the frenzied exoticism of the wedding paled to ordinary loneliness. She saw him with new eyes, as if the bridegroom had left the house and a strange husband had taken his place.
She discovered his first weak point very soon: he failed to listen not only to strange women, he didn’t listen to her either. Whatever she told him, when she had finished he spoke only of his own projects, large or small. They all obviously occupied his mind more than life with her. When she asked about his plans, he was dismissive. “That’s not a suitable subject for women,” he said. Any little dwarf of a man interested him more than a clever woman.
Soon all the words dried up on her lips.
He also plagued her with his iron everyday routine. She couldn’t get accustomed to that. Although her father was the sheikh of a mosque, he had never taken time-keeping quite so seriously. But Hamid scorned such conduct. It was a sign of the decadence of Arab culture not to take time seriously, he said. He despised nothing in the world so much as the word “tomorrow,” so readily used by many Arabs in making promises, doing repairs, carrying out orders, and meeting a deadline. “Don’t beat about the bush,” he shouted at the joiner one day, “give me a day with a date, becau
se all real days have a beginning and an end. Tomorrow does not.”
The joiner had promised three times to make a set of shelves for the kitchen, and in the end Hamid bought one in a furniture shop.
Hamid led his life by the clock, to a strict timetable. He woke up, washed and shaved, drank coffee and left the house on the dot of eight. At ten he phoned and asked Noura if there was anything she needed so that the errand boy could bring it when he came to fetch lunch at midday. The boy was harassed by his master too. At eleven-thirty on the dot he was outside the door, breathless and sweating. Poor errand boy.
At six on the dot Hamid came home to shower. At six-thirty he picked up the newspaper he had brought home from the studio to read it to the end. At seven on the dot he wanted to have his evening meal. He kept looking at the time. On Mondays and Wednesdays he went to bed at nine precisely. On Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays he slept with Noura and postponed his bedtime by half an hour. On those days he was positively cheerful, to put himself in the right mood and drive the calligraphy that obsessed him out of his head for a couple of hours. Noura learned to smile brightly when her husband came home on those days.
On Thursdays he played cards with three other calligraphers in a coffeehouse in the new part of town until after midnight. On Saturdays he went to the weekly meeting of a calligraphers’ society, but Noura never heard about what they discussed. “That’s not a subject for women,” he said sharply, dismissing the question.
For a while she wondered whether he didn’t go to whores on Saturdays. But then she found a document in the inside pocket of the jacket he had worn to one of the meetings. It was two sheets of paper, with the minutes of a meeting of the calligraphers. She read the headings and thought it boring, and wondered why the meeting had been put on record. It was all about Arabic script. She put the folded sheets back into the inside pocket of the jacket so that he wouldn’t notice anything.
Before three months were up her intense loneliness had become entrenched in the house. As soon as all was peace and quiet Noura showed her less attractive side. The beloved books she had brought with her changed into insipid writings that had lost all their attraction. And she couldn’t buy new books without Hamid’s permission. Three times she told him the titles of books that she would like to read, but he just dismissed the idea. Those were modern authors whose works would perturb family life and morality, he said. She lost her temper, because he hadn’t read any of them before saying so.
To overcome her loneliness Noura began singing out loud, but soon after that she heard a venomous comment from the house next door that silenced her. “If that woman looks the way she sings, then her husband sleeps with a rusty watering can,” someone called across the yard, laughing. It was a little man with a friendly face, and she refused to pass the time of day with him after that.
To take her mind off her troubles, Noura took to cleaning the house again and again. Only when she realized that she was buffing up the windows with a soft cloth for the third time in a week did she throw the cloth into a corner, sit down beside the fountain and weep.
The women who lived in the neighbouring houses in the street were very friendly and open, and when she was invited to coffee with them she found real attention and liking. The women, for their part, liked Noura’s elegant way of speaking and her dressmaking skills, and they wished she would go to the bathhouse with them.
They visited each other early in the morning to exchange the rumours of the night, and again after the siesta for the second obligatory coffee of the day. In between they helped each other with cooking or the elaborate process of making candied fruit and preserving fruit and vegetables.
Noura laughed a great deal with her women neighbours. Unlike her mother, they enjoyed life and laughed at everything and anything, even themselves. Above all, they knew cunning ways of making their lives easier. Noura learned a lot from them.
But to be honest, the women bored her. They were simple folk who had nothing to say as soon as the conversation moved away from men, cooking, and babies, on all of which they were true experts. They couldn’t read or write. After several attempts, which failed pitifully, to interest the women in something about the world outside their routine as married women, Noura fell silent.
The telephone was her salvation. On the phone she could at least keep in touch with the friends of her schooldays. That cheered her life a little, although the time still seemed to pass terribly slowly. Sana, an amusing school friend, advised her, “Write a diary about the secrets of your marriage. Especially about all the forbidden things you long for. But first find a safe hiding place for it!”
Noura found her safe hiding place in the storeroom, where there was an old cupboard with boards at the bottom that could easily be removed.
She began writing, and at the same time observing her husband more closely. She wrote down what she saw and what she felt in a big exercise book. In writing she learned how to ask the most difficult questions, and even if she couldn’t always find an answer to them, she felt a strange relief at having put them into words.
With every page she wrote, her distance from her husband increased. Oddly enough, she now saw many features in him that she had not noticed at all before. She found out that Hamid was a brilliant technician, but unlike her father he was not interested in what the words he wrote said, only in their form. “Proportion and music must both be in tune,” he told her one day. “I can’t believe,” she wrote in her diary, “that a calligrapher is interested only in the beautiful appearance of the words, not what they say.” And she underlined it with a red pen.
One day he brought an enchantingly written and framed proverb home with him, and found a place for it in the salon. Noura never tired of praising the beauty of the script, but she could not manage to decipher the words of the proverb. They wound their elaborate way around each other, turning and reflecting. None of the few visitors who came to the house could read it, but they all, including her father, thought the picture that the characters formed wonderfully beautiful, saying it satisfied the soul and the mind. When Noura urged her husband to tell her what it said, Hamid only grinned. “Dung makes vegetables grow faster.” He took Noura’s shock as a sign that she had no sense of humour.
Hamid was surrounded by the walls of his proud silence, as if he were in a citadel where women had no business. His old master, Serani, was allowed in, and so was Prime Minister al-Azm, whose house was very near the studio, and who was a great admirer and a good customer of the calligrapher.
But despite his respect for them, he kept even those men at a distance. In his heart, Hamid Farsi was lonely. Noura was deeply wounded to find that when she tried to get close to him she was repelled as if by thick walls. Her friends tried to comfort her by saying it was just the same with them. Sana had a husband who was consumed by pathological jealousy. “He makes a terrible scene if a man looks at me for too long in the street. Then he stands on his dignity as an air force officer, and I wish the earth would open and swallow me up. He’s always afraid that someone else will take me away from him. As if I were a donkey he owned, or a car, or a toy. And he attacks the man at once, the way he’s learnt from his father, his neighbours, and those unspeakable Egyptian films where men punch each other in fits of jealousy. And the woman stands to one side waiting, the way a nanny goat, a ewe, or a hen waits to see which billy goat, ram, or rooster wins.”
Sana’s husband never told her a word about his work in the air force. That wasn’t women’s business. “But we can be widowed,” said Sana bitterly – and prophetically, for a few years later he crashed on the maiden flight of a new fighter plane.
Other friends thought of their husbands as insecure little boys who always needed their sand castles. Noura should be glad her husband was faithful to her, they said. And yet another of them accused her of ingratitude; there was her husband giving her a more comfortable life than she had ever dreamt of, and now she said she was bored.
“What a simple soul!” growled D
alia. “You just tell her that husbands spend more at the brothel and restaurant than on their wives – don’t let anyone tell me about ingratitude!”
Even without the dressmaker’s support, Noura felt no gratitude to a man who never touched her except when he slept with her, and for months on end didn’t ask her how she was. He avoided any kind of touch as if she had an infectious skin disease. Even in the street he always walked just in front of her. She asked him to stay at her side, because she felt it was humiliating to be always scurrying along behind him. He said he would, but in the next street he was several paces ahead of her again. And he would never hold her hand. “A proud man does not do these things,” he said briefly.
For years after that she wondered why a man should feel his pride was injured if he held a woman’s hand, but she never worked it out. Sometimes she stood in his path so that he would have to touch her, but he always found a way to swerve aside. And if she touched him, he flinched away. He was intent on never showing himself to her naked, and if she herself walked naked from the bedroom to the bathroom he looked away.
Once he scolded her all night because at supper she had touched him under the table. They had been invited to her parents, and her mother was more cheerful than Noura had ever seen her. For the first time she actually stroked her father’s cheek in front of guests. Noura was glad of it, and wanted to share her pleasure with her husband. She nudged his leg with her foot under the table. He was startled and alarmed. She had difficulty in keeping the smile on her face. At home he shouted at her, saying such frivolous conduct was like a whore, no decent wife did such a thing in public.
And that evening she shouted back for the first time. She was beside herself. If things went on like this, she said, she would freeze to death at his side. Hamid just laughed unpleasantly. “Then heat the stove. We have plenty of wood.” With that cutting remark he left her sitting in the salon.