The Calligrapher's Secret

by Rafik Schami

  Even as a young girl Sultaneh had dreamed of going to the Café Brazil disguised as a man, sitting there with the men and then taking off her shirt. She also had the crazy idea of chaining up her husband so that for six months he could move only from the bedroom to the bathroom to the lavatory, to the kitchen, and back again, and then she would ask him, “Well, how do you like my world?”

  Noura noticed how bold Sultaneh’s tongue was when she was talking about her family. She tore her father’s character to shreds, and her husband’s too. His well-padded, snow-white body gave off strange smells, she said. “A different stench from every bit of it.” Noura didn’t have the courage to describe the torments she herself was suffering.

  The hours, days, and months followed one another, nipping every surprise in the bud. Noura felt like the donkey working the olive press in the Midan quarter where she had lived as a girl. His eyes were blindfolded as he pulled the millstone round, turning it endlessly from sunrise to sunset. “His eyes are bound so that he’ll think he’s trotting to some destination, and every day the donkey feels terrible when they take the dirty blindfold off and he finds that he’s still in the same place,” Dalia had told her then. Noura knew the olive press and the millstone.

  “But I’m not a donkey,” she said defiantly. “God didn’t make me a beautiful woman just so that I could walk on the spot all day long with my eyes bound.” Dalia raised her eyebrows. “Oh, my dear, my dear,” she whispered, and her anxious glance followed Noura when she left the house.

  Noura’s school friend Nuriman recommended a consultation with a famous clairvoyant; she wasn’t expensive, said Nuriman, and she gave good value. She promised to go with her the first time, because Noura was afraid of walking through the streets in a part of the city that she didn’t know.

  “She’s the only clairvoyant in Damascus,” Nuriman whispered on their way to the Muhayirin quarter. They had to catch two different buses and then go some way on foot. In her own case, said Nuriman, the clairvoyant had seen at once that her husband was still bound to another woman by black magic. She had given her the antidote and taught her the right magic spells, and lo and behold, her husband, who had looked at her with as much indifference as if she were a block of wood, came home from work with nothing in his head but to give himself lovingly to her, added Nuriman in a rather louder voice. A significant pause followed. “Soon it turned out that other woman had been sucking him dry and keeping him away from me. She was a distant cousin of his, widowed early, who was hoping he would leave me and go to her. The clairvoyant described just what she looked like and predicted that the jinnee who possessed my husband and had tied a knot in his prick would leave him, take the woman by the ear and bring her to me. And sure enough, she turned up at my door with a red ear and had the nerve to ask after her cousin, saying he hadn’t been to see her in quite a while. I wouldn’t let her into the house. Let her wait for him in the street and put on her performance there,” she said, with a brief laugh.

  “And did she wait?”

  “Yes, until he came back from work. Then she barred his way and wanted to know why he’d stayed away from her. But my husband pushed her aside and said she could go to the devil, he was better now and wanted to see his wife. She shouted right down the street until she got tired of it and went away.”

  In gratitude for his cure, Nuriman had taken the clairvoyant the lamb she had promised her.

  “Do you think she can get my husband to sleep with me less and talk to me more?” asked Noura, thinking that she sounded ridiculous. Nuriman looked at her in astonishment.

  “What? You want less of it? Are you sick?”

  Noura did not reply. They had reached the place where the clairvoyant lived. Noura felt very frightened as they entered the room. It was all swathed in black, and it smelled of chicken shit and rancid fat.

  The clairvoyant was small and ugly. She wore a stained black dress, and a lot of silver jewellery round her neck. It clinked whenever she moved.

  After Nuriman had left, the soothsayer laid out the cards, looking at Noura again and again with her sharp little eyes. “Your heart has seven seals. Your husband loves you, but he has not found the right key. You must help him. He must take seven powders on seven consecutive days, and for each powder you must burn one of seven spells on paper. And here are seven pieces of lead, which you must put under his pillow.”

  For now, she wanted three lira. That was a lot, but not too much if it would do any good.

  After a few days her husband had terrible diarrhoea, and complained of the strange taste of the dishes she served. That was all he said.

  Noura visited the enchantress once more, this time on her own, to tell her about a strange dream. On the fourth or fifth day of her husband’s “treatment” with powder and the spells, she had dreamt of Omar the vegetable seller. He was a strong man with a bald patch that was always shining, and his vegetable shop was in Straight Street. He was not handsome, but his charm was irresistible. In her dream, she saw him polishing up an aubergine. When he smiled at her, she saw that he was naked. He laid her down on a jute sack, covered her body with rose petals, cut a watermelon open with a large knife, took out a gigantic section of the fruit and put it between his mouth and hers. And as she ate she felt him penetrating her. She went on eating until the last of the fruit fell on her naked belly, and Omar leaned over her and ate the piece of melon, thrusting at her so hard that she fainted away with pleasure.

  She had woken up in a very cheerful mood.

  When she told the clairvoyant this dream the woman said, “Then my magic has shown you the right man, the one who has the key to your locks.”

  Noura thought that was very silly, and she decided to avoid the clairvoyant in future. As she was leaving she met a woman who was accompanying a friend to the enchantress’s door, but did not want to go in herself.

  “She’s a charlatan. She lives on other people’s misfortune like a maggot in fat,” said the stranger. Noura was fascinated by what she said. She wanted to hear more, to comfort herself, and she invited the woman to eat an ice with her. On the way to the ice- cream parlour Safiyyeh – that was the woman’s name – told Noura about her own happy life with her husband. She loved him more and more every day, and every day she found new qualities in him. She was a teacher, he was a master locksmith. They had known each other only slightly before their marriage, yet from the first day he had been loving to her, and his tender affection had grown even greater in the ten years since their wedding.

  Safiyyeh talked a lot that morning, and Noura listened attentively. To hear that there really were happy couples in Damascus was more exciting than any fairy tale. On parting, she and Safiyyeh exchanged addresses, and promised to visit each other.

  “If you ask me,” said Safiyyeh, when they said goodbye, “part of your trouble is not being allowed to use your abilities. You’re an intelligent woman, you should be doing something that fulfils you, not waiting all day for your husband to come home.”

  But Hamid reacted with a fit of rage when she cautiously hinted that she would like to work as a dressmaker. There was no one in their street who followed that very necessary profession. He shouted at her, and wanted to know who had put the idea into her head.

  She did not reply.

  Over the next few weeks she visited Safiyyeh several times and saw that the woman had not been exaggerating. Once her husband was at home when Noura arrived, having injured his hand at work the day before. He was friendly and left the two women alone, but he made coffee for them and laughed when his wife inquired, after her first sip, whether there was a coffee shortage in Damascus these days. It was the first time Noura had ever known a man to make coffee for his wife.

  Other people’s happiness hurt Noura, so she decided not to visit Safiyyeh anymore. It was all so simple. Why did Hamid refuse to take a single step along the path to meet her? He wouldn’t even fetch the salt if it wasn’t already on the table. “Salt,” he said to her, and when Noura did not r
eact, on purpose, hoping he would get to his feet, he grabbed her arm and growled, “Are you hard of hearing? I said salt.”

  Noura knew that she was at the end of a blind alley. She was in a desperate situation, but she regarded knowing it for what it was as progress.

  It was at this time, when she was looking in despair for a way out of her blind alley, that Salman turned up. Salman, a penniless man with a child’s beardless face and jug ears! She had thought him about fifteen at first, and was very surprised when he replied, blushing up to both his ears, that he was already twenty. She had to make a great effort not to laugh at the sight of him.

  So why did she fall in love with him, of all people? She consoled herself by reflecting that love, like death, has a will of its own. It comes unexpectedly, and cannot be explained. And it sometimes seeks out people you would never have thought of, again like death, which can carry off perfectly healthy people to the next world while the severely ill beg daily for it to come quickly.

  That day Noura felt a great need to write down everything going through her mind like waves beating on the shore, all the things she couldn’t tell a living soul. “Love is a wild child, there’s no hope for it, it comes straight into your heart without knocking on the door.”

  One interesting aspect of her love for Salman was the fact that it had not been love at first sight, as the old saying goes in Damascus. Early in October, when he first came to her door, she scarcely said “Good day” to him. Every day she gave him the matbakiyya and took in the heavy basket of shopping that Hamid had bought. This scene was repeated more than two hundred times in the seven months between October 1955 and April 1956. Sometimes she exchanged a word with him out of civility, or because she felt sorry for him, sometimes she didn’t. Sometimes she gave him an apple, sometimes she didn’t. He was shy, and far from talkative. And whenever she closed the door he went straight out of her head.

  But one day she closed the door and couldn’t forget him, and she wished she had not been so cold and condescending to him before.

  It was a warm day in the middle of April. Noura thought of Salman all night. Years later, she was to say that her thoughts of him turned into a chisel knocking piece after piece out of the wall at the end of the dark blind alley, and near dawn, soon before she finally fell asleep, she saw a breathtakingly beautiful landscape spread out before her eyes, flooded with light.

  Noura asked herself several times next morning: have I really fallen in love with him? She looked at the clock three times, and when she heard the knocker she almost died of joy. She forced herself to keep calm, but when she set eyes on him she knew her fate was decided. He didn’t say a word, just cast her an anxious glance and waited for his orders. When she looked into Salman’s eyes she felt as if she were beside the sea; there were waves surging through her, and she was a part of those waves.

  She took his hand, quickly drew him into the house, and closed the door behind him. “Would you,” she asked breathlessly, “would you like a coffee? Or a sweetmeat or a chocolate?” Her intoxicated heart was dancing in her breast.

  He didn’t reply, but only smiled. He would have liked to say: I’m hungry, do you have a roll and a couple of hardboiled eggs, or a piece of cheese? But he stopped himself.

  “Or would you rather have something to eat?” she asked at that moment, as if she had seen his hunger in his eyes.

  He nodded, and felt ashamed that she had guessed. She breathed a sigh of relief, went into the kitchen, and filled a large plate with delicious things: cheese, pasturma, olives, preserved peppers, and gherkins.

  He was still standing awkwardly in the corridor, leaning against the wall opposite the kitchen. She handed him the plate, and two little flatbreads.

  Salman sat down on the floor and carefully put the plate in front of him. She watched him, feeling happier than she had ever been before, and smiling.

  That day she discovered, for the first time in her life, that her hand could move of its own accord. Even as she watched Salman from the kitchen doorway, her right hand was on its way toward him. Noura had to follow it, and the hand laid itself on Salman’s forehead as if to feel how hot he was. He stopped eating, and shed tears at the same time.

  “All of a sudden,” he said, and paused as if fighting back his tears, “I know how my dog felt when he came to me and could eat all he wanted for the first time.” He told her about his first, nocturnal meeting with the little abandoned puppy who grew into his dog Pilot.

  She kissed his lips; they tasted salty. He kissed her back, breathing in the lemon-blossom scent of her cheeks.

  And when he took her face between his hands and kissed her eyes, she felt a flame blaze up in her. She held Salman close. Suddenly it occurred to her that he must hurry. She kissed him one last time and stood up.

  “The seven locks have just broken open and fallen at my feet,” she said. He didn’t understand what she meant. Quickly, he took the matbakiyya and ran away.

  Only then did she see that he had eaten hardly anything.

  Noura felt exhausted, as if she had been crossing mountains and valleys. She was surprised that she had felt such extreme pleasure merely from Salman’s touches and kisses.

  That afternoon she felt guilty. Was she an ungrateful woman living in comfort and betraying the man who provided it for her? She decided to be cool to Salman next day, to give him the matbakiyya and close the door, as she had always done before. She would be thankful – just like the lovers in Egyptian films – for those few dreamlike moments, and then read him a lecture about loyalty and duty. But when, in the middle of preparing this speech, she looked at the clock, it was just after eleven, and she longed to see Salman as a drowning man longs for air. And even before he had knocked for the second time, she drew him into the house and to her heart.

  From that day on, time flew past as if it were made of pure ether.

  21

  Master Hamid was seldom agitated. By comparison, Samad said, the Buddha had been a man of regrettably choleric temperament. Only when his sister, a tall, pretty woman, came to the studio did he grow nervous. He didn’t like her; she was vulgar and rather provocatively dressed, which embarrassed him. When she was there, the master couldn’t sit still, and kept glancing anxiously at the door, as if afraid that one of his distinguished customers might come in and ask who that bold-looking woman was.

  His assistants were curiously nervous too. Although she was their employer’s sister, they greedily and without inhibition eyed her backside.

  Master Hamid gave his sister Siham the money she begged for just so that she would leave his studio as soon as possible. And for some time after that he would curse his useless brother-in-law, a photographer, but apparently a very bad one.

  The occasional visit from his mother-in-law, who had kept her youthful looks, also upset the course of his day. He was extremely embarrassed, although shyly friendly. As he always left when she did, Samad claimed that they were going off to a nearby hotel together. But that wasn’t true. Hamid used to invite his mother-in-law to a family café not far from the studio, and come back quite cheerful half an hour later.

  But in the course of the year, as his mother-in-law turned up more and more frequently, she got on the master’s nerves badly. His assistants, of course, sensed it, and Samad said, shaking his head, “That woman will ruin his life yet.”

  Then, suddenly, she stopped coming at all.

  In the spring, Master Hamid had many appointments at the Ministry of Culture, and whenever he was not in the workshop his assistants relaxed slightly. For months they had been dealing with more commissions than ever before, and Master Hamid demanded unconditional dedication to their work.

  One sunny day at the beginning of May Hamid was at the Ministry once again, and since there was not much to do in the studio just then, Samad said they could all have an hour off. Salman went to see Karam, who said in great good humour, “Well, my excellent calligrapher, does your boss want to order something to eat?”

&nb
sp; “No, no, he’s back at the Ministry, and Samad gave us all an hour off as a reward for finishing all the work that’s to be collected this afternoon.” Salman said nothing for a moment, wondering whether he ought not to tell his fatherly friend Karam about his love for Noura, which was now three weeks old. He felt great confidence in Karam, and an equally great need to tell him everything. “Do you have a little time to spare for me?”

  “For you, all the time in the world. What’s it about?”

  “There’s a woman, don’t ask me her name. I don’t know it myself, but she’s very beautiful and I… I’m not sure, but I think she likes me,” said Salman, hesitantly.

  “So where’s the problem?”

  “Perhaps I’m just imagining that she loves me. Maybe she only wants to drive her boredom away. And she’s a Muslim.”

  “Well, it’s not difficult to find out about the first problem. The second is a delicate matter, and you must approach it slowly, but there’s always a way.”

  Salman smiled bitterly. “The woman is married – to a powerful man,” he added quickly.

  “Good heavens! What a fellow you are! First you tell me a harmless story, then every sentence is another hammer-blow. Do you love the woman? That’s what really matters. Everything else will follow if you love her and she loves you. Married, Muslim, Christian, Jew, man, woman. None of that’s important except to inflexible minds.” Leaning over the table, he went on. “As you know, I love Badri, whatever he does or doesn’t do, says or doesn’t say. And he loves me, not the way I’d like, but as far as he can. That’s my bad luck, but I love him. Even if it cost me my life, I wouldn’t move a centimetre away from him. Love doesn’t judge positives against negatives, what’s safe against what isn’t, what’s harmless against what’s dangerous, or it wouldn’t be love, it would be a tradesman’s balance sheet. So what does your heart say?”