by Rafik Schami
But since Adnan’s death there hadn’t been many stories Salman could tell her. Adnan the taxi driver, Samira’s son, always used to tell the most adventurous of tales to good effect during his breaks in Karam’s café. Up to his death, he dropped in two or three times a day to drink tea with a lot of sugar in it. Then one night, as he was driving along a country road, his taxi crashed into a truck parked by the roadside. Adnan and his passenger died at once.
So the last big story he knew was about the lovers Karam and Badri. Sarah never tired of hearing about them. She was positively addicted to their story.
Badri could not be described as a philanthropist. He belonged to an obscure society calling itself “The Pure Ones.” It was against Christians and Jews, but above all against a secret organization that went by the name of “The Society of the Wise.” Apparently the calligrapher Hamid Farsi had something to do with this society, and its members, said Badri, were serpents. Outwardly they were Muslims, but in their hearts they were enemies of Islam. They used to pray to Greek gods, he said, and they went to bed with their sisters. Sarah laughed herself silly at the idea of sleeping with her own brother, because she had three brothers and couldn’t stand any of them.
“That man Badri may have muscles, but there’s nothing in his head but bird shit,” she said. “All the same, what he and Karam do sounds exciting.”
Salman could make no sense of it. On the one hand, Karam couldn’t stand fanatics, on the other he wouldn’t say a bad word about the Pure Ones so as not to annoy Badri. He was devoted to him, and Badri exploited the fact. Sometimes, after a quarrel, when Karam was weeping with longing for his boyfriend, he had to beg him for forgiveness over the phone until Badri was gracious enough to stop sulking.
When Karam got together with his lover Badri, he was like an affectionate little boy dissolving in gratitude at every touch, and doing whatever Badri wanted without a thought for himself.
In Sarah’s opinion, love was a two-faced goddess who liberated you and at the same time enslaved you. She had taken a long walk to the Amara quarter, she said, on purpose to see where Badri had his shabby, gloomy barber’s salon. Karam’s love, she added, must have blinded him, because that muscle-bound hunk couldn’t stimulate anyone in possession of his senses even to pick his nose. “I wouldn’t be surprised if your boss were even to die for Badri one day, although the man’s as stupid as nails are rusty,” she said, and Salman laughed heartily at that expression.
But why, he asked himself that morning, should he go to the calligrapher’s?
And as if Karam had heard his unspoken question, he said, “His is a distinguished art. Look at the people who patronize him. There are government ministers and doctors among his customers. And they all want to speak to Hamid Farsi personally.”
Salman nodded, but he thought that was too good to be true. The arrogant and moody Hamid Farsi had fired an errand boy almost every year, if the boy, like squinting Mustafa so recently, had not made off already.
“You can crank your lower jaw up again,” Karam encouraged him. “This is good news! It’s not as if I’m sending you to work in a brothel. Calligraphy is a noble art. The rich love these things, can’t get enough of them. And the best of it is, they don’t ask about the price. Do you know what Hamid Farsi asks for writing out a maxim like Bismillah ar-ruhman ar-rahim? A hundred lira! Admittedly he’s a master, but even the masters cook with water. And what do the ink and paper cost him? One lira! As for us here, I don’t make as much as that in a week, and I have to put up with my customers’ farting and spitting, their bad breath and their sweat. His customers bow down with gratitude. Ours never say anything unless it’s to complain.”
“But you know I hate school and books,” said Salman, trying to build himself a safety raft with a little lie.
“You rascal, are you trying to fool Karam? Sarah has taught you far more than most boys know when they’ve taken their higher school certificate. And – ” said Karam, leaning over to Salman and speaking in a soft conspiratorial tone – “you mustn’t let the master calligrapher know how much you can do. You can always say you only went to school until Year Two. And then you can learn his art on the sly. Calligraphers guard their secrets jealously. So you must learn this golden trade in secret yourself. And if he turfs you out you can always come back to me.”
Salman breathed a sigh of relief. “And may I visit you?” he asked.
“Are you out of your mind, or what? You’ll come here to eat at noon every day, and once a week you can come home to my house to practise calligraphy. No one can get anywhere living where you do now. I’ll fit out a little room for you. But not a word to the others about it, because they won’t like the idea. Do we understand each other?”
He nodded in silence.
When he thought back to this conversation, Salman had to admit that Karam was right. Apart from Sarah’s lessons, and the tips he spent on giving his mother a treat now and then, his time at the café had not been what he had expected at first, but rather dismal. His thoughts wandered around the dark hiding places of his memory. Three times a customer, a rich estate agent who lived by himself, had tried to get him into bed. He ordered small things every day, and touched Salman when he delivered them, his eyes shining with longing. He begged Salman to stay, saying he only wanted to stroke his behind a little. Salman was frightened, and asked Karam for help. Karam smiled meaningly, and from then on sent Darwish, who earned a couple of lira for keeping quiet about it, to the gay estate agent.
Nadia surfaced in his memories as well. Nadia, the pretty twenty-year-old daughter of the carpet dealer Mahmoud Bustani. Her parents had a fine house in Rose Alley, in the middle of the Souk Saruya quarter. Her father came in every day at three to smoke a water-pipe before going to his business. Nadia had been divorced after one year of marriage to a Jordanian prince. She made eyes at Salman until he really did fall in love with her, and she was always there to see him when he delivered orders for her parents or their neighbours. She wanted to know where he lived; he lied, and said Bab Tuma, the centre of the Christian quarter, and when she asked him whether he would convert to Islam for the sake of love he replied boldly that he would become a Jew or even a Buddhist for love if Islam wasn’t enough for her. And whenever she asked prying questions about his home, he answered very briefly so that he could conceal his poverty. The beauty of the buildings in the trendy Souk Saruya quarter impaired his honesty. How was he to tell Nadia, or any of the other rich customers in this part of town, about the miserable hovel where he slept at night? There were houses with inner courtyards here, designed by sophisticated architects on the model of pictures of Paradise. Karam had not been exaggerating when he said the rich people of Damascus would be disappointed in Paradise itself and protest, offended, “We were better off in Damascus, so all that piety and fasting was for nothing.” Salman thought so too. Paradise was probably made for the poor, and if there was solid housing and enough to eat there, they’d all be happy.
Nadia often complained that he just stood there in silence looking adoringly at her, she would like to hear him say something nice. As he couldn’t think of anything, he asked Sarah to help him out, and she dictated the translation of an ardent French love poem to him.
But he was out of luck. Nadia wouldn’t even touch the sheet of paper. She had heard from a girlfriend that he lived in a rat-hole, and she had been there and convinced herself of it. “A yard full of beggars! And then you have the impudence to lie to me. You don’t love me!” Nadia laughed hysterically, but Salman sensed the suppressed tears of her disappointment. He wanted to tell her he had lied to her because he loved her, but Nadia wouldn’t let him get a word in. When she told him he was a conceited little liar and it was only her magnanimity that kept her from complaining of him to his boss, he went slowly back to the café.
Karam called Samih to the till and went to the Souk al-Hamidiyyeh with Salman. He bought him two shirts, two pairs of trousers, socks, and new shoes. When they had all those th
ings, they went to the famous Bakdash ice-cream parlour.
“Master Hamid would rather employ simple-minded illiterates than clever people,” he said as they spooned up their ices. “He’s so jealous that he’s ruined the prospects of all three calligraphers who tried to open a shop in this quarter over the last ten years by spreading slander about them. He doesn’t want to share the loot he enjoys here, where he has no rivals. But there are crowds of them in the calligraphers’ quarter of al-Bahssa.
“He won’t give away any of his secrets, so you’ll have to spy them out for yourself. You mustn’t take off the mask of an indifferent, uninterested simpleton. Perhaps he will forget to be on his guard then, and you must exploit that and crack his secrets. Find out the recipes for his famous inks, and what secret tricks he uses in his writing of script. What exactly makes him such a master? I don’t know much about it myself, but I’ve heard that his calligraphy can be recognized even from a distance. You must find all that out if you’re to be successful. But keep the secrets to yourself, write them down and hide your notebooks with me – and not with the Devil, he’s in league with him! You must tell no one, not even Sarah. If he catches you, he won’t just throw you out before you’ve learnt all his arts, he will punish you severely. He’s done that twice already with incautious apprentices. One of them is now sitting outside the Umayyad Mosque with his crippled hand, begging, and the other sells onions. And neither of them knows why their master crippled them. He’s the Devil’s twin brother.” But the sight of the dismay on his young friend’s face told Karam he had gone too far. “However, he won’t do anything like that to you. If he touches a hair of your head, there’ll be nothing left of his studio and not an intact bone in his body. So you must learn everything, and don’t be afraid.”
“Suppose I can’t learn calligraphy?”
“You’re clever, you have a steady hand. And it’s not difficult when you know the trick of it. A friend told me that if you have the right pens and the right ink, you’ve already half mastered the art. So you must take care to notice how your master trims the reeds for his pens until you can do it in your sleep.”
“And why are you doing all this for me?” asked Salman, as his eye fell on the two big bags with his new clothes.
“It’s nothing, my boy. I have no children, and after all, I owe you my life,” he said, affectionately patting Salman’s head. “You’ll go to the barber today, and then to the hammam, and tomorrow morning you’ll come to my place dressed like a prince at nine, and we’ll walk round to him. But I’ll call him today, because he doesn’t like people to drop in unannounced. As I was saying, the French ambassador is more modest than he is,” said Karam,
As they said goodbye in the Souk al-Hamidiyyeh, Karam held Salman’s hand firmly for a long time. “I’ll give you two years, and in that time you must have found out all his tricks. Understand?” he said in an emotional voice.
“Yes, sir, I’ll try my hardest,” replied Salman shyly. He laughed and saluted Karam to shake of the oppressive sense of gratitude that had moved him to tears. He did not know that he would keep his word.
Salman’s mother was more than a little surprised when she saw him early next morning in his new clothes. “You look like a bridegroom. Has Sarah decided to marry you after all?” she asked. The preparations for Sarah’s wedding were in full swing.
“No, no, but today I’m going to try to get a new job. With a calligrapher,” replied Salman.
His mother took his head between her hands and kissed his forehead. “You smell of good luck,” she said.
Hamid Farsi was not as bad as Salman had feared. Karam had known him for years, but Hamid had never been particularly close to him, or indeed any of the other neighbours.
What struck Salman at once, besides the clean and tidy studio, was the calligrapher’s clever little eyes. They seemed to be observing him all the time, and going against Karam’s advice Salman didn’t try to lie and make his family out better than it was. He replied honestly to the master’s questions, concealing neither his mother’s sickness nor his father’s drinking. Hamid Farsi raised his eyebrows, surprised by the frankness of this thin youth, who couldn’t be more than seventeen or eighteen, but had already seen the heights and depths of life. He not only saw himself as a child, the boy’s jug ears also reminded him of his beloved master Serani, who also had huge ears like sails.
When he asked what Salman hoped to get out of the job, according to his rehearsals with Karam he ought to have said, “To serve you, sir, and earn money,” But suddenly Sarah seemed to be prompting him. “Sir, I hardly went to school at all, but I love our Arabic script. I’ll never be a calligrapher or a scholar, but I’d like to be a good assistant. I’ll try hard and follow your advice, and I’ll be your loyal servant any time.”
Karam was sure that Salman had messed everything up. But to his great surprise, he heard the most famous calligrapher in Damascus say, “Then let’s try it. You are hired at once, and I’ll show you what you’ll have to do in this studio and who you’ll be dealing with. So say goodbye to your old master, without whose word in your favour you couldn’t even have set foot in my studio.”
Salman went up to Karam and gave him his hand as he had been told. “Thank you very much, master,” he said quietly.
“Good luck, my boy, and your hot meal will be waiting for you at my café at twelve every day. And be good, the way you’ve been good working for me all these years,” he said, much moved, as he left.
Outside, he felt that he had been sweating with agitation, and he heaved a sigh of relief. “The crafty devil,” he said, laughing, and then he set off for his café at the end of the street.
19
Karam had not been exaggerating. Calligraphy was an entirely different world. Never in his life had Salman thought you could make so much out of written words. He had regarded calligraphers as superior painters who provided signs for shops and buildings. But here a doorway was opening to secrets that felt like magic to him. There was nothing threatening about them in the same way as he had found school threatening, and not for a minute did he feel time hanging heavy and weighing down his heart as it had at school. The days ended faster than he could have wished. Work in the café had left him physically tired, but it had not asked much of his mind. He had wandered everywhere in his thoughts, but he had not thought much about what he was doing.
Here the work did not just call for physical effort, his head too was full to splitting with what he saw and absorbed. In the studio and behind it in the workshop, silence reigned, reminding him of the Catholic church outside the times when mass was celebrated. Not just Hamid Farsi, but all the calligraphers he met were quiet, taciturn men. All the same, Salman’s head was so full of ideas that he even forgot his mother and Sarah, Pilot and Karam, because he spent all day thinking of nothing but what was going on around him. He was exhausted in the evening, but happier than he had ever been before.
Salman had to tidy the studio and the workshop every day. His master was more scrupulously clean than a pharmacist, and couldn’t bear to see dust. After that Salman could study with the assistants. A saying hung over the workshop door: Haste is the work of the Devil. Nothing here was done hastily. On his very first day Salman watched the journeyman Samad, his master’s right-hand man, who was in charge of the workshop, ornamenting a triangle through many reflections for the benefit of his assistants, until it turned into a hexagon with the intertwining words building up around a centre. Salman could still recognize the characters as Samad sketched them, but soon they vanished into an arabesque as beautiful and mysterious as a rose.
Every line was sharp as a knife, but the characters positively leaped out of the paper when the assistant Basem added shadows to the title of the book written out in a sure hand by the journeyman Samad. Salman was allowed to watch. The other men liked him because he did anything they asked at lightning speed.
Hamid Farsi looked in briefly, inspected the book title, nodded, satisfied, and wrot
e his name under the calligraphic design. He noted something down in his book listing commissions and went out again to go on working on the calligraphy of a complicated poem.
Salman took a piece of scrap paper, wrote his name in pencil and tried to give it shadows. It didn’t look bad, either, but the letters did not rise off the page as they did when Basem shaded them.
When he made tea for the assistants in the afternoon, they praised his good taste. He had brewed the tea with the careful attention that Karam had taught him to give the job. “Coffee is a robust drink and can tolerate a few mistakes, but tea is the sensitive son of a mimosa. A moment’s carelessness, and it droops and loses its bloom,” Karam had told him. Hamid Farsi’s assistants watched curiously as Salman made the tea with obvious enjoyment. They were not used to this kind of thing from the previous errand boys. Even the great Master Farsi was impressed. “You’ll soon be setting up in competition with your former boss,” he said, taking a large gulp of fragrant Ceylon tea.
“You must never forget the angle of the sun,” Basem advised him now in friendly tones. “Look, if I paint a line that twists and turns, runs straight and then goes on in a zigzag, and the sun is up there on the left, where will the shadow fall?”
He slowly drew in the shadow as he drank his tea, and Salman saw how it accompanied the line, changing shape as the line itself turned. Master Hamid looked in at the workshop for a moment and nodded, pleased to see his assistant looking after the young lad. Salman jumped up from his stool and stood to attention. Hamid smiled. “Sit down, we’re not in a military barracks here, and pay attention to what Basem says.”
Over the next few days Salman went on busily absorbing everything he saw and heard. It was all new and mysterious to him. Even paper and ink suddenly became an interesting new world.