by Rafik Schami
Her horror knew no bounds when she heard him snoring barely half an hour later.
What was Noura to do? Surely all she wanted was peace. Hadn’t her mother said often enough that however bad a marriage was, it was a safe haven? None of that was true. She had never slept so badly, never thought so often of running away.
What exactly troubled her? She didn’t know for a long time, not until she met Salman. Only he showed her that her mind was troubled by the certainty that she was wasting her life for no good reason.
Her secret diary was filling up, and Noura felt like a spy who had to observe some alien being. Even when her husband was standing or sleeping beside her, she was aware of the distance between them that allowed her to go on observing him in detail.
He was fanatical in all he thought and did, but hid the sharp edges of his opinions under a thick layer of courtesy. He wanted to be the best at everything, but apart from his calligraphy, he was as inexperienced as a little boy. She often noticed how her father would give way to him so as not to expose him. When she once mentioned that to her father, he replied, “Oh, child, you’re right. In many matters he has only his assumptions, which he thinks are knowledge, but if I show him up every week he soon won’t want to come and see us anymore, and that would be worse. To see your face means more to me than any opinions in the world, however accurate.”
However, it wasn’t only in theological, philosophical, and literary questions that Hamid always wanted to be the best, it was the same in many other matters, although he read nothing but the daily paper. After years of fighting to be the most highly regarded of all calligraphers, he had emerged victorious, and like all victors he was intoxicated by his own success.
When he had married Noura, he was so famous that, in spite of his high prices, he could hardly cope with all his commissions. There was no alternative but to delegate much of the work to his assistants. Of course, he did the designs and added the final touches himself. And he still executed the most important commissions, letters and eulogies in the finest of scripts, with his own hands and with enormous pleasure. He asked a high price, but his works were unique. And it flattered him when academics, politicians, and rich businessmen, delighted by the prestige that his work brought them, visited him on purpose to express their gratitude.
“What I provided in the commission,” one customer said to him, “was an ugly skeleton of what I wanted, and you have brought it to life with a soul and flesh and blood.”
Rich farmers in particular, men who did not know their way around the urban jungle of the capital, asked Hamid Farsi to write letters for them. They never asked the price, because they knew that his letters would open gates – letters each of whose pages was a unique work of art. Hamid never once repeated a pattern. That was also why he did not like letting the completed calligraphy leave his hands.
He would put his mind to the meaning and purpose of a letter for days, and gave it exactly the form that would turn the script into music, riding a wave that took the reader exactly where the man who commissioned the letter wanted.
In his work, he felt very much like a composer. Even his master had praised his feeling for the music of script. While others never developed a true sense of how long an extension should be, how many curves a word could take, and where to place the dots, he had mastered the art perfectly out of his own feeling for the art. His profound insight meant that he never allowed dissonance into the composition of his works.
Arabic script could have been made to be music for the eye. As it is always cursive, the length of the link between the characters plays a large part in the composition. The lengthening or shortening of this link is to the eye like the extension or reduction of the time for which a musical note is held to the ear. The letter A(lif ), which is a vertical line in Arabic, becomes a bar line for the rhythm of the music. But as the size of the letter A(lif) itself determines the size of all other letters, according to the doctrine of proportion, it also takes part in the height and depth of the music formed horizontally by the letters on every line. And the different breadth of both the letters and the transitions at the foot, body, and head of those letters, from fine as a hair to sweeping, also influences the eye. Extension in the horizontal and the interplay between round and angular characters, between vertical and horizontal lines work on the melody of the script and produce a mood that is either light, playful, and merry, or calmly melancholic, or even heavy and dark.
And if you want to go carefully about making music with the letters, the empty space between letters and words calls for even greater skill. The blank spaces in a work of calligraphy are moments of rest. And as in Arabic music, calligraphy too depends on the repetition of certain elements that encourage not only the dance of body and soul but also our ability to move away from the earthly domain and rise to other spheres.
17
Everything around Noura sank into deadly silence. Evenings became a torment to her. On some of them Hamid spoke not a single word, and if he slept with her he did it with gritted teeth.
Sometimes Noura forced herself to make no sound herself for a whole evening, just to see if he noticed. No reaction. He washed, drank his coffee, slept with her or didn’t sleep with her, and snored all night.
And if he did say anything, it was only an echo of the hymns of praise that others sang about him. How long, she wondered, would she be able to endure this life?
Once, by way of protest, she put the dirty dishcloth on a plate, decorated it with a piece of the steel wool she used for scouring pans, and garnished the whole thing with matches, candle ends, and olive pits. She put the plate next to the jug from which he would have to pour himself water. He didn’t notice. He sat there without a word, eating his meat pie in silence.
In addition to all this he was miserly. At eleven-thirty every day she had to send an errand boy to take him his lunch in a matbakiyya , a dish in three sections: salad, main dish, and accompaniments. He never ate dessert, and he drank coffee at his studio. Almost half her neighbours sent their husbands lunch in a matbakiyya, but unlike Noura all these women were given money by their husbands and could go shopping. They haggled, drank tea and coffee, listened to rumours and passed them on, and laughed a lot with the shopkeepers. Noura loved to go shopping. Even as a little girl she had liked going to the well-known spice dealer Sami, to listen to the fantastic stories he told about every spice.
But Hamid said he could get better food at half the price, and anyway it was not right for the famous calligrapher’s beautiful wife to haggle in the market with those “primitives,” as he put it.
“He doesn’t know anything about it!” she wrote in her diary. Haggling was right at the top of any Damascene woman’s list of delightful activities. Hamid had not the least understanding of that. He sent the cheapest scraps of meat and vegetables home to her by his errand boy, all the stuff that the shopkeepers could palm off only on men. And he bought in quantity, as if she had to prepare lunch for an orphanage, and although it was all of poor quality, Hamid expected her to make the most wonderful dishes out of it. It was her neighbours who came to her aid. They knew secret recipes for making tasty things to eat out of the cheapest ingredients. In return, Noura sewed for them for free, which meant that the women could keep the money they got from their husbands for jobs involving sewing, and spend it on coffee, cardamom, sweets, and cinema tickets.
Hamid Farsi never noticed this arrangement for mutual aid.
He didn’t make Noura wear a headscarf. At the time Damascus was in a mood of elation, and only old ladies wore headscarves, while young women hardly ever did, and they wore the veil even less frequently. He was not jealous, but he did not want her to have visitors while he was out.
In fact no one visited except the neighbouring women, whose husbands didn’t like them to have visitors while they were not at home either, but no woman in the area obeyed that prohibition.
Hamid didn’t notice that either.
The world of family, friends, an
d neighbours did not seem to touch him at all. He was superficially friendly to everyone and interested in no one. If he found out by chance that one of Noura’s girlfriends or neighbours had been visiting her, he rolled his eyes. “They ought to visit you when I’m at home.” But apart from her mother, no woman felt at ease in his presence.
“It’s sexual conditioning,” said her neighbour Sultaneh, a little woman with only one eye. “Men are hunters, always seeking their fortune far away. We women are gatherers and search every inch of the ground for seeds and herbs. Sometimes we find a story that’s like a seed, so small you overlook it although it has life in it and is tough enough to survive even if an elephant treads on it. Stories and seeds. That’s why women love stories more than men do. That’s why they make a better audience.”
Noura tried to arouse Hamid’s curiosity, and over supper she told him about what happened in the lives of the families living around them, about strange events, and adventurous incidents. But she soon realized that he wasn’t listening.
“Keep well away from the disadvantaged and people who have suffered disappointment,” was his only comment. “Misfortune is infectious, like a cold.” She didn’t know where he found all these proverbs that he kept shaking out of his sleeve, and she couldn’t take remarks like this seriously. Or not until the day when he so heartlessly and ungraciously threw her friend Bushra out of the house.
Bushra was Badia’s daughter, and had grown up – like Noura herself – in Ayyubi Alley. It was Badia who had helped to arrange Noura’s marriage to Hamid. She had five sons and Bushra. Her one daughter was the darling of the quarter because of her wonderfully clear, loud laughter. Elias the confectioner would sometimes give her a coloured lollipop when her lovely laugh brought a smile to his face, driving the melancholy away. Noura too loved her, and when Bushra, who was seven years her senior, stroked her face, sometimes even kissed her and called her “my beauty,” little Noura was in heaven.
Her parents, her neighbours, and her school friends expected the richest man in the city to choose Bushra for his wife. And at first it looked as if their expectations would be satisfied. Kadri the lawyer, after seeing Bushra pass his window on her way home from school, sent his mother to arrange it all with Badia in the hammam. After that the two women prompted their husbands, who then imagined that with their infallible sense of what was due and right to their tribes they saw how well Bushra, aged fifteen, and Kadri, aged twenty-five, suited each other.
After Bushra’s wedding, Noura lost sight of her for seven years. And then, suddenly, the people in the quarter were whispering that Bushra’s husband had made a cousin of his pregnant, so he wanted to marry her. The cousin, however, insisted that he must divorce Bushra first. Soon after that, Bushra moved back to her parents’ house with her three daughters. She was twenty-two now, and looked pale, but not as if she had borne three children. She was tall and slender like her father, and had her mother’s beautiful face.
The little girls amazed the neighbourhood. They all looked like copies of their mother at different ages. The eldest of them was six, the youngest three.
At this time Noura was learning dressmaking from Dalia, and she began seeing more of Bushra again. Together with the forthright Dalia, Bushra was a woman who could tell her something about marriage.
“What would you expect of a husband,” she once said, “who slaps you about on the wedding night until you go on your knees and repeat, ‘Yes, sir, you are my lord and owner of my soul and I am nothing?’ After six years of marriage and three children, he discovered that he loves his cousin, so he is getting divorced from me,” she told Noura over coffee one day.
The two of them got on as well as if they had been close friends all those years. About six months later, Noura heard that Bushra was getting married again, this time to Yousef, a friend of her brother, whom she had always liked and who had no objection to her three daughters.
Noura rejoiced at Bushra’s happiness, but Dalia did not like the man. He was too jealous, she thought, for a woman of such stature, and had too small a soul. Was Dalia drunk when she said that, Noura wondered, or did she mean it seriously?
Before three years were up Bushra came, unannounced, to see Noura, who was now married to Hamid. Bushra drank her coffee fast, nervously, as if she had to unburden herself of what was on her mind. “He was crazy with jealousy when I had a girl again,” she said. “He was sure he would sire only boys and they would look like him. But Dunia is a girl, and she looks like me. He accused me of still harbouring sperm from my first husband in my body, saying it would fertilize me all my life. The doctor assured him that sperm dies after a couple of days at the latest, but it was no good. He accused the doctor of sleeping with me himself, and went for him with a kitchen knife.”
Just as she was saying this Hamid entered the house, and fell into a rage as soon as he set eyes on the weeping Bushra. He didn’t so much as say good day, but ordered her in an icy voice to leave his house at once and take her bad luck with her.
Noura felt humiliated, and was sure she had lost Bushra forever. She cried all night. Hamid took his blanket, slept on the sofa in the salon, and refused to talk about it next day. As far as he was concerned the matter was over and done with, as if Bushra were a piece of calligraphy that he had delivered.
Many years later, Noura heard that Bushra lived only for her children. She had moved into the first floor of her parents’ house, and got a job in the offices of an airline. Soon her laughter was as loud and clear again as it had been in her youth.
On the day when Hamid threw Bushra out of his house, she embraced Noura in the dark corridor by the front door, shedding tears. “He’s sick with jealousy too. My poor sister in misfortune,” she said as she left.
18
“Working in the café isn’t the right job for you in the long term. You’re not going to tell me you’ve learnt something here over the years that will help you to provide for a family later, are you?” asked Karam one warm autumn morning, and he did not wait for an answer. “Hamid Farsi the calligrapher is looking for an errand boy. That squinting lad Mustafa has made off,” he added, and took a large gulp of tea. “You ought to apply for the job. Calligraphy, I assure you, is a goldmine.” And he raised the glass of tea to his lips again.
Salman froze with horror. He thought the older waiter, Samih, had told tales because of their quarrel the day before.
It had been his first serious quarrel for years. That Monday, as usual, Karam was not in the café. And as always that made the waiter Darwish aggressive. He mentioned his suspicions of what Karam got up to, but only Salman knew the truth. Karam was spending all day in bed with his lover Badri, who like all barbers took a day off on Mondays. However, the café had no day of rest.
The quarrel flared up when the last customer had left. Samih, the eldest of the three waiters, had cashed up at the till, and transferred unpaid bills from his notes of them to the book where they kept the customers’ records. As well as those who paid cash, there were regular customers and businesses in the area that paid weekly or even monthly. Salman and Darwish cleared the tables, washed the dishes, mopped the floor, arranged the chairs neatly and put clean ashtrays on the tables. There was nothing their boss hated more than arriving first thing in the morning to find the place in a mess.
Darwish was needling Salman the whole time, trying to find some way of making him lose his temper. The jeweller Elias Barakat had complained of Darwish’s arrogant manner that afternoon, and insisted on having Salman to wait at his table. Samih, the older waiter, warned Salman not to stab Darwish in the back, but Salman didn’t want to annoy the customer. The jeweller always tipped generously, and he was also a Christian, which was an important reason for Salman to behave well. Samih and Darwish were Muslims, and Salman suspected that they treated Christian customers brusquely on purpose.
Salman waited on the jeweller, who gave him a whole lira as a tip. He’d be back, said Barakat as he left, since this café still had one ci
vilized and well brought-up waiter.
When they were alone, Salman could sense the pent-up dislike of the two Muslims for the “pig-eater,” as Darwish had called him. Samih said little, but nodded to his colleague in approval of whatever he said, which spurred Darwish on. It was just before midnight when Darwish hinted that he knew Salman was always getting into bed with the boss to make sure he kept his place, or his clumsiness would have got him fired long ago.
At that Salman’s patience wore thin. “You’re just jealous,” he shouted at Darwish, “because the boss doesn’t fancy your bottom anymore, he’s found a much more attractive one! You idiot, not even a raven would like the look of my bony behind! Karam fucks a wonderfully handsome man every day, but I’m not about to tell you his name, not even if you’re dying of jealousy.”
Darwish collapsed like a house of cards and began crying. Samih hissed, nastily, “You devil’s spawn, praying to a cross! Did you have to hurt him like that? Don’t you know how sensitive he is?”
In fact Samih was not a tale-bearer, but now that the boss was trying to make him like the sound of a new job Salman thought the old waiter had given him away after all.
Why would he go and work for the calligrapher, of all people?
If Karam had said he should go and work for a joiner or a locksmith, he wouldn’t have had this sinking feeling in his stomach. But he knew that Karam, and even more his lover Badri, called the calligrapher a serpent and often said bad things about him when they were talking confidentially together. And now Karam wanted him to go and work for the man? Salman couldn’t even ask his boss why, because he had often heard those conversations about the calligrapher only by chance. He had eavesdropped on them on the sly and with satisfaction, learning some of the secrets of the city, and with those he had been able to impress even Sarah, who knew everything.