The Calligrapher's Secret

by Rafik Schami

  But it was not only because of the poison that Hamid didn’t like working with colour. As he said to one customer, “Black and white make music, the eye moves between two poles. That creates a rhythm, the music of the eyes, made up of emotion and precision. Colour is fanciful, it easily tempts you to enjoy chaos.” Salman wrote that remark down on the margin of an old newspaper, tore the narrow strip of paper off and put it in his trouser pocket before he made the tea.

  The only colour that the master really liked was gold on a green or blue background. My golden ecstasy, he called it.

  For some time Salman wondered why the master kept sending him to the spice market to buy honey, although he never ate it. He discovered the reason at the end of August: it was for gold ink. That was the boss’s business, and only Samad, Hamid’s right-hand man, could make or touch it. And no one else was allowed to watch the two of them at work. But Salman stole a look in secret when Hamid was at work in the tiny kitchen behind the studio. The rectangular sheets of gold foil, gossamer-thin, created by rolling and beating out gold, lay between sheets of parchment in a big book with a leather cover.

  Hamid would take a porcelain bowl, put gelatin, honey, and dissolved and sieved resin into it. Then he laid the gold leaf in the solution and rubbed it with his forefinger until it too dissolved. After that he rubbed a second, third, and fourth sheet of gold leaf. Next he warmed the whole mixture and let it stand before decanting the fluid. He left the few remains of gold that had not dissolved in the bowl for several days until they were dry again. He added water to the golden fluid and stirred until it was all well mingled, then he scraped the remaining gold out of the bowl, put it in a bottle and poured the gold ink over it.

  Hamid always applied the gold thickly, let it dry, and then rubbed the surface with a smooth gemstone until the golden lettering shone.

  Salman also made notes about the knives used by the calligrapher. Master Hamid’s sharp knife came from Solingen. Samad’s knife, of which he was extremely proud, had been made at a famous steelworks in the Iranian city of Singan. He had bought it from an Iranian who was passing through Damascus.

  Salman got a sharp knife from a taciturn Armenian cobbler near the street where he lived. He wrote out a beautiful price list in calligraphic script for the cobbler, so that the Armenian would not have to struggle to speak Arabic, which he barely understood, and in return the man gave him the sharp knife.

  Salman learned the complex art of making a reed or a bamboo cane into a sharp-edged pen. For many apprentices, the most difficult part was the final cut that determined the length of the pen’s edge and the angle at which it inclined to the paper. “Don’t saw away like that, cut it,” cried Samad one day in horror when the assistant Said was cutting a pen. Samad laid the cane on a wooden board, brought Said’s knife down on it once, and the cane was cut. He trimmed the edge and split it so that it would absorb the ink. The tip of the pen slanted at an angle of thirty-five degrees.

  The assistant’s jaw dropped in amazement.

  “Now you can write Thuluth script. If you’re hesitant your pen won’t speak with a clear tongue that flatters the paper, it will have teeth instead, and you can’t even write to your mother-in-law with a pen like that,” said Samad, returning to his own desk.

  Next Friday Salman practised cutting in his room at Karam’s house. He realized that he lacked not just the experience but also the courage to cut the pen with a single stroke.

  You had to be careful not to torment the paper with a reed pen, but move it over the surface like a frail and sensitive fairy. Samad had once also shown him the function of every finger of the right hand. “The pen,” he said, “lies so that the forefinger moves it from up to down, the middle finger pushes it from right to left, and the thumb takes it in the opposite direction.” And Samad had smiled with satisfaction when he watched Salman practising industriously on every spare scrap of paper.

  Later Salman was to say that the turning point in his life, the moment that made him a calligrapher, had been on a certain evening in January of the year 1956. He was working overtime to help his master, and all the others in the workshop were doing a night shift as well. It was a commission for the Saudi embassy. The Saudis paid ten times the usual price, but in return they demanded the very best quality. They wanted a large painting made up of proverbs to be given to their king as a present when he visited Damascus.

  That night Salman was spellbound by the elegance with which his master Hamid divided up the large surface and conjured the characters up out of nowhere. And by the time day dawned the painting stood there before him like a divine creation. On the way home, Salman kept whispering to himself, “I want to be a calligrapher. I will be a calligrapher.”

  In addition to his calligraphic exercises, Salman taught himself out of a little book that was available to all the staff of the workshop. It said that in their harmony Arabic letters must be based on the geometry that the brilliant calligrapher Ibn Muqla had worked out over a thousand years ago. It concerned the duality of curving and straight lines, of contraction and relaxation, of the visible and the concealed. Soon Salman could distinguish the seven different styles of Arabic script. He found several of them easy. He fell in love with the popular Naskhi style used in most books, but he was afraid to try Thuluth. However, he worked hard to learn, and Hamid even sometimes gave him a word of praise.

  He came upon the name of Ibn Muqla on almost every page of this little book. His companions in the workshop did not know much about the great genius, but every week Salman heard his master launch into hymns of praise to that brilliant calligrapher, who had lived in Baghdad and whose doctrine of proportions still held good today.

  Hamid Farsi said, of Ibn Muqla, “We are learning the art. He taught it, because God gave it to him. That is how, in his short life, he could do more for calligraphy than hundreds of calligraphers have been able to do since.”

  On the same evening Salman wrote that down in his notebook, and he added a large question mark to the name of Ibn Muqla.

  In the course of the year 1956 Salman learned almost everything about the foundations of Arabic calligraphy, its elements, the equilibrium between the lines and the surface, the rhythm of a work of calligraphy following its rules as music follows its own: the dominance of one part of the words or characters over the others on a page, their harmony and symmetry, about contrast, overlapping and reflection, and above all about the secret of the empty spaces between the letters.

  But the most important thing of all that year was that, for the first time in his life, he learned to love a woman.

  20

  Noura’s Uncle Farid was unhappy yet again – it was his ninth or tenth marriage. She was tired of hearing him talk about women. He met the lonely ones when they commissioned him to write letters for them, and then fell in love with his script and his poetic language. Disappointment was not long in coming. Nor did he stop courting other women. “You need maturity in marriage, and your uncle is still a stupid boy,” her father said one day when he heard that his brother-in-law had another divorce pending. Noura felt that there was one thing her uncle never stopped to consider, and that was time. He was much older now, and his considerable girth made him look rather ridiculous in his white suit and red shoes. His charming way with women had become the tiresome posturing of a toothless Casanova. When he next visited Noura she sent him away, asking him not to call unless her husband was at home, because she was not allowed to see men when he was out. She knew that Uncle Farid did not like her husband; they were as incompatible as water and fire.

  “But Noura, I’m your uncle,” purred Farid smoothly. “You can let me in, surely!”

  “The same rule applies to all men,” she said sternly, closing the door. He never came to see her again, and even after his death Noura did not miss him.

  “In prison and in marriage time is the worst of all enemies,” the onion seller told her. The old man pushed his handcart down the streets praising the cheap onions he sold i
n melancholy tones. He had spent three years in prison, and he was unhappily married for the second time. Noura paid for her onions, smiled at their unfortunate vendor, and closed the front door behind her. She was near tears. Her attempts to make time dance past on swift feet had failed again, as they had failed on so many days before. Her long phone calls to her women friends left a stale taste in her mouth.

  Time was increasingly turning into a sticky, viscid mass, particularly on the three days of the week when he slept with her: Tuesdays, Fridays, and Sundays. On those days she would have liked to hide away after supper.

  She had been fascinated by her husband at first, but that was a thing of the past, and now she saw him with open eyes. He was boring and conceited, but all that still left a corner in her heart that was free of resentment and contempt empty for him – until the night when he first hit her. They had been married just six months. And after that terrible night the empty corner was full of memories of her humiliation, and of a certain smell that his body gave off, like burnt rubber. His former body odour paled to a mere memory.

  A strange feeling took over her when he came home. Icy cold filled the rooms; she was freezing and felt paralysed. She remembered a film that had left her feeling like that in the cinema, when a train was frozen in the ice in Siberia. All the passengers had frozen rigid, with ice covering their eyes. For a few brief moments she felt a fire in her burning as if it wanted to make her heart steam and save her limbs from the ice, but then the fire went out, and the chill emanating from her husband entered into her.

  Hamid looked after himself carefully, showered every day, and rubbed a mixture of olive oil and lavender oil into his hands to keep them always smooth and supple – for his calligraphy, of course.

  That day began with a disaster. A large jar, full to the brim of expensively preserved tiny aubergines stuffed with walnuts, had slipped out of her hand and broken into a thousand pieces on the tiled kitchen floor. The floor and the cupboards were splashed all over with olive oil. She had to throw all the aubergines away in case any little splinters of glass were left, and it took her two hours to clean the kitchen.

  Then, feeling exhausted, she cooked Hamid his favourite dish, lentil soup with noodles, sent it off to him in the matbakiyya, and rested for half an hour.

  When her neighbour Wardeh asked her to a little party Noura was delighted, and thought the day was saved. She was not to know that the real disaster was only just beginning. The sweet rice pudding she ate at Wardeh’s house upset her stomach, and she vomited three times that evening. She felt weak and wretched.

  But Hamid showed no sympathy. “I want to sleep with you tonight,” he said, reaching for her bottom as she served him salad.

  When she told him how bad the pain in her stomach was making her feel, he waved the excuse away. “You can be sick all day, but not on Tuesday, Friday, or Saturday night,” he said, with a broad smile. “Those are my rights. Didn’t your learned father tell you that God gives them to me?”

  She wanted to tell him that her father never forced her mother to sleep with him, but her tongue would not obey her. Tears rose to her eyes.

  She was afraid of him in bed, afraid with a mortal fear that left her lying rigid, and he was angry. “Am I sleeping with a dead corpse?” She felt angrier with him than ever before, and when she tried pushing him away he hit her. He was in a frenzy, and beat her mercilessly. She was so terrified that she couldn’t even shed tears.

  In this desperate situation, Noura remembered her mother’s advice, which was always to say out loud the things men like to hear, so she began writhing and moaning and asking for more. And that was just what he seemed to like. When he had finally finished, he fell asleep without another word.

  His sweat was sticking to her, and smelled of burnt rubber. She got out of bed and crept into the kitchen, where she scrubbed her skin with water and hard soap until it hurt.

  From then on Hamid’s special body odour made its way through any perfume he used, and it always reminded Noura of that terrible night.

  Noura’s mother always arrived whenever she was least wanted, whispering advice that no one had asked for. A snake. Noura no longer felt any real hatred for her mother, of the kind she used to feel, only profound contempt. Sometimes she suspected that her mother had fallen in love with Hamid Farsi herself. Whenever she saw him she gazed at him adoringly, touched him tenderly, and agreed to any nonsense he said.

  “Your husband is the crown of your head, and you ought to serve him, wash his feet, and then drink the water as a gift from heaven. Proud women end in the gutter, my girl.”

  Noura turned up the volume of the radio so loud that her mother left the house without saying goodbye. She would have preferred to stay away from her parents for a long time, but Hamid accepted her father’s invitation for them to come to lunch one Friday. It was a week before the New Year. The meal was excellent, and Hamid’s paeans of praise went on and on. Her mother looked at him lovingly. “Teach your father-in-law to say charming things like that. He never says a word!” When Hamid thanked her for the coffee at the end of the meal she placed a hand firmly on his leg, which not even Noura was allowed to do, but he just smiled at her mother. Noura could have screamed with fury.

  “You traitress!” she hissed at her mother in the kitchen, and hated the silly smile that spread over her mother’s face. She seemed to be living in another world.

  “Your mother has a good heart. She’s worried about you,” Hamid told her out in the street. Noura felt she was stifling.

  “Hello, Noura,” called Elias the confectioner. “Aren’t you speaking to me anymore?”

  Noura felt ashamed of herself for failing to see the old man – toothless now, but still amusing. “Hello, Uncle Elias,” she replied, smiling.

  “Ah, the master calligrapher has stolen the most beautiful lettering in our quarter and left holes in our alphabet. Would he like to buy his princess a kilo of assorted chocolates? Or maybe ‘ish al bulbul, nightingale nests, or perhaps the best barazik, delicious butter cookies with sesame and pistachios? All of it fit to melt a lovely woman’s heart.”

  Elias, like most of the Damascene tradesmen, spoke in a seductive singsong, making his eyebrows dance.

  “We don’t need any sweets,” replied Hamid, narrow-lipped, as he walked on. Noura could only cast an apologetic glance at Elias, and then hurried after her husband.

  That night, long before he began going to the mosque every Friday at noon – that was early in 1956 – Hamid forbade her ever to leave the house without wearing a headscarf. And he also threatened to divorce her if she spoke to Christian men in the street. Hamid was like a man drunk. He was shaking all over, and he could hardly get the words out of his mouth.

  “So what happened?” asked her neighbour Widad when Noura told her how bored she was. “What do you expect? Even a miracle will lose its lustre if it happens 365 days a year. After five years you’ll feel no more for him than if he were your brother. Our husbands can’t help it. Time scrapes the gloss off every bridegroom, and there’s nothing left but a brittle mixture called ‘husband’ and ‘my children’s father.’”

  Widad drank in secret to summon up some feeling for her own husband, and when she was drunk she turned him into a wild seventeen-year-old hungry for her body.

  Samia, a young neighbour from the north, told Noura that as soon as her husband, a boorish teacher, touched her she sent her mind out of her body to travel far away. She was a mistress of that art by now, and didn’t even feel if her husband was still in her or had already gone to sleep.

  Noura thought she would try it herself. While her husband lay behind her, pushing himself into her, she wandered around the bedroom, watching herself in bed. Then she went into the kitchen in her mind, drank coffee, and thought of a story from her childhood. When she saw the rolling pin she had used that day to make stuffed pouches of dough lying on the table, the thought suddenly came to her that she could pick it up and stick it in her husband’s ass. She
felt she could already see the astonishment in his eyes, and burst out laughing.

  After a year Hamid wasn’t even speaking to her anymore. Everything was going smoothly so far as he was concerned, and he seemed to be happy. She sometimes heard him talking to other people on the phone, and envied them their ability to arouse his interest. Whenever she herself tried to broach a subject he stifled the conversation at birth. “Obviously,” he would say, or, “women’s nonsense.” She had fewer and fewer ways of getting through to him.

  Dalia, to whom she poured out her troubles, just shrugged her shoulders. “Sounds as if you’re talking about all my customers’ husbands. Somehow the system of marriage hasn’t matured yet, even though we’ve been trying it ever since Adam and Eve,” she said, and took a large gulp of arak. “People ought not to be allowed to marry for longer than seven months, and when that time’s up they should all change partners. That way boredom wouldn’t stand a chance.” Was she joking? Noura didn’t feel like jokes.

  She got used to the headscarf. At least with her head tied up like an egg – as her father said, amused – she could leave the house, but only to visit the neighbouring women or do the shopping that her husband didn’t get around to.

  But she was much better off than other women, said her neighbour Widad. Noura knew that not only Widad but Sultaneh and some of her other women friends were never allowed to leave the house without male company. The front door was as far as they could go. Sultaneh couldn’t even look out of the window except on the sly, in case someone saw her. Nor could Widad and Sultaneh phone anyone – they had to wait to pick up the phone, so Noura called them at least once a day.