by Rafik Schami
“I love her very much, but I don’t really know whether she loves me back. She certainly likes me, but I don’t think she’d like it if she knew I live in Grace and Favour Yard.”
“In that case you should leave her at once, because she wouldn’t be worth your love. Although I’d guess that the woman doesn’t care a bit where you come from. Who you are is what matters, and she’s struck lucky with you. But if I may give you some advice, don’t think too much, act – and you’ll soon find out whether she loves you or just wants to amuse herself. Didn’t your Jesus say: knock and the door shall be opened? Or was that the Buddha?”
Salman didn’t know. The hour was up, and he had to go back to the studio. But Karam held him back by his arm. “I have something for you,” he said, pointing to a bicycle standing by the pavement. It was a robust transporter bike, with rather wider tyres than average and a small, firmly mounted carrier above the front wheel, the kind that many grocers and bakers used for delivering goods to their customers. “Made in Holland,” said Karam. “I got it in payment for the debts a no-good man ran up with me for a year. He assured me he was writing sensational books, but he was really writing poetry that would make our lame sprinters break all Olympic records if you read it to them for an hour and then opened the door to freedom. That bike covers no more than a quarter of what he owes. He’ll have to have paid off half of it before I let him order a tea here again.”
Salman was overwhelmed by this present, and hugged his friend. “I thought you could save at least half an hour in the middle of the day with the bike, and enjoy the time with her,” he whispered into Salman’s ear. “You mustn’t tell anyone in the studio about your bike. Leave it with my friend the potter Yassin. You know his shop. You can pick it up whenever you like, and you can go from there back to the studio on foot. If one of Hamid’s assistants sees you, say the bicycle belongs to Karam but you have the use of it now and then.”
Salman thought of nothing but Noura all the time, and at quarter to eleven his patience gave out. He snatched up the bag with the roasted coffee that Master Hamid had bought his wife from the nearby coffee-roasting shop. “But it isn’t eleven yet,” Samad objected.
“Let him walk there at his leisure for once,” Radi defended him, and Samad finally said he could go. Salman walked the first five steps slowly, then he raced to the potter’s yard, got on his bike and rode away.
On the bike, it took him exactly ten minutes.
“You’ve robbed me of over twenty minutes of burning, tantalizing waiting,” said Noura, pressing close to him at once in the dark corridor just inside the front door. He kissed her for longer than he had ever kissed a living soul before. Soon she couldn’t keep on her feet, and she led him to the room opposite the kitchen. It was a kind of lumber-room with a broad old sofa in it. Noura had cleaned the room and cleared away a great many pots and pans, lamps, household utensils, and countless cartons of old junk.
For a long time Salman had seemed to her like a being from another world. Since that first kiss in the middle of April, he had made no attempt to sleep with her. She was burning for it, but he caressed her as tenderly and thoughtfully as if her skin were a delicate rose petal, and he was afraid of crushing it in his fingers. It made her crazy for him.
That day, when she couldn’t stand it anymore, she forgot his concern for her and her own fragility. She pulled his trousers down and made love to him without more ado. For the first time in her life she felt what many of her friends had told her about total ecstasy.
She felt her veins catch fire. It was as if hot steam were surging through her body. Her heart beat fast, and she saw the most beautiful face in the world held in her hands, the face of a man making little sounds of joy like a dolphin, and in her concern for him she held him very close. “You taste of roast pistachios,” he said, surprised, when he had licked her breasts.
Then he lay on the sofa beside her, and only now did she notice that he was not circumcized. “Did the circumcizer forget you?”
“No, we don’t get circumcized,” he said.
“Why not? It’s a sign that a boy has grown up. Why isn’t it a sign to you Christians?”
“Maybe Jesus wanted his followers to stay children forever.”
22
Nasri Abbani would never have believed that passionate love could end so abruptly. He had been in love with fifteen-year-old Almaz for over a year. Even when he was with other women, he closed his eyes and saw Almaz. She had a divine body, with such a smooth, soft skin that his fingers could hardly get a grip on it. And she smelled so feminine! She was a mistress of the art of flirtation. She could turn men’s heads as she swung between hinting at possibilities and refusing herself in a way that was all her own, something Nasri had never known in any other woman, a refusal that neither insulted a man nor entirely rejected him, but only said: you haven’t tried hard enough with me yet.
She was the daughter of one of his tenants. Still a child though she was, she was far in advance of all his three wives together. She had a wonderfully comical sense of humour and was never at a loss for an answer. Her sharp tongue – and this particularly impressed Nasri – left deep wounds in her enemies. She was three fingers taller than him, and she also had a lovely face more like a Swedish beauty than an Arab.
He had known her when she was still playing with dolls. Even then she had that sensual expression that conveys flattery and provocation at the same time. Her parents appeared to understand nothing at all of what was going on.
Whenever Nasri visited her father, who wasn’t much older than he was, she seemed to have been just waiting for him. She positively clung to him. He gave her generous presents, and never forgot to bring her favourite sweetmeat with him, pistachio rolls. Once, in the cold month of January 1955, he wanted to discuss a project with her father, but found only Almaz at home. Her parents had travelled north for a few days to go to a funeral, and an aunt came in the evening after work to spend the night with the girl. When Almaz bit into her pistachio roll that day, licked her lips and looked sideways at him with half-closed eyes, he lost control and his reason.
He got her pregnant.
His brothers and his assistant Tawfiq were beside themselves, and he would happily have settled the matter with money, but Almaz’s father was a hot-tempered man. Either Nasri must marry the girl, or he swore he would empty his double-barrelled shotgun twice, first in Nasri’s mouth and then in his own. He would sooner die than put up with such disgrace, he said, and he was not to be moved by either persuasion or blackmail.
Tawfiq, Nasri’s business manager, was the first to give way. Better to marry Almaz and reinforce the clan with her children than unleash a scandal with an uncertain outcome, he said. The worst wife is better than the finest whore, because with a whore you squander not only your money but, above all, your seed.
“Well, I’m doing better there than my brothers,” said Nasri, annoyed. “I’ll increase the Abbani clan four times over. I’m a real Damascene stud bull,” he cried, recollecting the International Damascene Fair last autumn, when he had come face to face in the Netherlands House of Industry and Agriculture with a formidable animal who, according to the information provided by the Dutch, had sired over three thousand calves.
So Nasri gave in and married Almaz in March. He felt a strength of love for her that rejuvenated him, while his other three wives made him feel older with their sorrows and complaints.
After the wedding Nasri and Almaz flew to Cairo, and then his heart was in trouble. Once made up and wearing pretty clothes this young woman, who had been no further afield than her parents’ rural home on the outskirts of Damascus, proved to be a woman of the world. She gave orders to the men in the hotels and on the boats during their trips on the Nile, and made them run to do her bidding. They all wanted to serve Almaz. It left Nasri speechless. In bed, however, soon after the best moment, when he was drowsing beside her, exhausted and drunk with pleasure, she put on a performance that, for quite a long time, he
could not understand. Only later did he recognize it as a mixture of pathological jealousy and a pronounced desire to dominate. She urged him to criticize his other three wives, and was always wanting him to promise that she came first in his affections, she was the mistress of his heart, and he would go to see the other wives only with her consent.
He could not and would not promise that, but he was ready to compromise. So he complied with her wish to make their two weeks of holiday into a month, but he was not putting up with her domineering nature. In the Abbani household, he said, a husband was always the master. She should be glad she was his favourite wife, but she couldn’t ask for more.
He phoned Tawfiq and said he had caught Egyptian fever and must recuperate in a sanatorium on the Red Sea. Tawfiq was to make sure his wives had all their hearts could desire.
But extending the holiday by no means solved the problem. Almaz’s jealousy continued to get on his nerves, and when he said a friendly word to a woman, maybe a waitress or a street seller, she made a terrible fuss. As she saw it, all women had only one aim in life, and that was to destroy her happiness with Nasri.
When they came back to Damascus they moved into a grandly furnished house in elegant Baghdad Street, but on the very first night Almaz started complaining that it was all so cold, so European. She wanted a fountain and a garden with orange and lemon trees, jasmine and grapevines, flowerbeds and beds of herbs. She could live in a place like that, but not in this unwelcoming building.
And then Almaz put on uncanny amounts of weight during her pregnancy, probably owing to the large quantities of cakes and other sweet things that she consumed, as well as the stuffed dough pouches that her mother sent her every week, as if her daughter were in danger of starving to death.
Nasri knew how pregnancy can alter women. Only his first wife Lamia had gone unaffected until the last few weeks. His second wife Saideh put on some weight, and her dislike for him grew steadily up to the time of the birth. She would not let him sleep with her for three months before it because his prick, as Saideh had read somewhere, would batter the head of the baby inside her.
His third wife Nasimeh did not usually think much of sex, but when she was pregnant she was lustful and wanted to sleep with him every day.
Almaz, on the other hand, went through a strange phase. She put on so much weight on her breasts, belly, and behind that her friends and relations hardly recognized her.
She didn’t breathe these days, she puffed and panted, she didn’t so much eat as devour her food, and she hardly moved at all and didn’t do a hand’s turn around the house. She enlisted the aid of her relations, and paid them generously out of his pocket. Only the smell of her was as feminine as ever, and still attracted him.
And with every kilo she put on, she was more jealous than ever because he seldom slept with her. She suspected all his wives and all the whores in the city of having conspired against her. Her digs at him burned in his wounds as if she had sharpened her tongue with pepperoni oil.
After the birth, his friends consoled him, all that would be over. The extra weight, her venomous tongue, and her bad temper would go away. But when Nariman was born in September, Almaz was more unpleasant than ever. Her daughter was now the centre of the world, and all and sundry should become her slaves on the spot. The worst of it was that her relations enthusiastically took her side. Almaz’s parents mutated into babbling idiots, and sometimes, when Nasri observed them, he was close to calling the mental hospital and getting his in-laws taken away.
And then he and Almaz had to move to the Old Town, because her parents had inherited a house there from an aunt, and didn’t want to sell it to a stranger. A number of houses in the city stood empty at that time. Damascus and its immediate surroundings had no more than three hundred thousand inhabitants, but covered as large an area as Cairo. As Nasri would not agree to rent it, or to live on his in-laws’ charity, he bought the house from them.
It was south of the Umayyad Mosque, in a side street close to Straight Street. It had a small but beautiful inner courtyard with a garden, a bitter orange tree, a sweet orange tree, and a fountain. Everything about the house was small and full of nooks and crannies, but not only did it have an upper floor, like all the Arab houses in this part of town, it also had an attic storey above that. You reached the attic from the first floor up a tall wooden ladder.
Their move in November cost Nasri the last of his strength, since Almaz hardly did anything, and nothing pleased her. When he poured out his sorrows to his friend Elias the pharmacist, Elias laughed cynically. “If you marry any more wives there’ll soon be a housing shortage in Damascus.”
Nasri couldn’t laugh at this joke.
Almaz’s parents seemed to have taken up residence in the house. Whenever he came home to it they were there. Several times he was on the point of getting divorced from Almaz, but his brothers and his business manager recommended him to keep his temper in the interests of the clan.
So after a long interval he went back to visiting Asmahan, his favourite whore. However, she had changed completely. Not only did she want him to love her passionately, she was also making him the crazy proposition of giving up her life as a whore to be available only to him.
Asmahan represented danger, because she had fallen in love with him. Over all the years when he had been unable to sleep at night for thinking about her, she had remained cold – and now that he wanted no more from her, she was pestering him.
There was nothing for it but flight.
Of course Almaz found out about his visits to Asmahan and asked him to explain himself. He knew perfectly well, she said, that she needed his loving care, and if he was still going off to see whores, she would get her revenge on him some day.
Her parents, who were present, froze rigid with shame. They would have liked to get up and go, but Almaz wagged her forefinger at them to make them stay where they were.
“Women talk a lot of nonsense. I don’t have anything to do with whores,” said Nasri patronizingly.
Elias the pharmacist warned him not to take her threat lightly. Nasri, however, felt sure of himself, since his relationship with Asmahan had been on ice for some time.
Almaz soon seemed to calm down, but she remained cool. If he visited her once every four days he found it tedious. He disliked her parents so much that he often lost his temper and sent them home, but sometimes he actually found the fuss they kicked up consoling. They clowned about with baby Nariman all day, and were slaves of their own daughter.
Usually, however, the spectacle repelled him. He moved his bedroom to the first floor and left the ground floor under his wife’s rule. Upstairs he was left undisturbed.
Almaz did not lose any weight at all after Nariman’s birth, and moved about like a sumo wrestler. Only her enchanting odour and her daughter reminded him, painfully, of her former beauty.
One October day he was sitting on the tiny terrace in front of the attic with his father-in-law, drinking a little bottle of arak with iced water. It was warm and summery. They looked out across the rooftops of the city as it slowly grew quieter while sunset came on. Pigeon breeders sent their birds up into the air, directing them from their roofs by whistling, and the pigeons circled and performed acrobatic dives and turns as they flew. At this evening hour the carpet of sound that filled the sky above Damascus grew calmer and more melancholy.
They ate roasted peanuts, drank the chilled, cloudy arak out of delicate glasses, and discussed happiness and women, this year’s harvest and the war on the Suez Canal.
When the bottle was empty, the nuts were eaten, and they had exchanged stories and rumours, Nasri’s father-in-law set off on his way back to the ground floor. He spoke the name of God as a charm to protect him, because he was afraid of the rickety old wooden ladder that led down to the first-floor terrace where washing was hung out. Nasri put the chairs and the little marble table away in the attic, which consisted of only one room with a window looking east, opposite the door.
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bsp; That little window gave him a glimpse of the house next door. It was not at a very good angle, but he could make out the kitchen window on the ground floor and part of the inner courtyard, with a fountain and trees, as well as a lumber-room on the first floor of the house.
He looked idly through the half-closed shutters of his window – and then he saw her. She was bathing at her leisure, singing softly to herself. What a sight! What beauty! Nasri gazed and gazed, and had to swallow because his throat was so dry that it hurt. At that moment his wife called him down to supper.
He took no notice of either the food or the conversation.
Next morning he woke very early, crept up to the attic and watched the house next door again. It lay there perfectly peaceful in the light of dawn.
The unknown woman had taken possession of him. She had a delicate face with big, beautiful eyes, and was a little shorter than Nasri and almost boyishly slender. He had never had a woman like that yet. Who was she? Why was there no man in the house? Was she a widow? Or one of the several wives of a man who visited her only once a week?
Whoever she was, Nasri wanted her.
But he had to be patient, because he was about to go to Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Morocco with Tawfiq on important business. His presence was essential.
Two weeks later he boarded a rather elderly Syrian Airlines plane for the flight back to Damascus. Tawfiq, who was with him, had some excellent contracts in the bag and was beaming with satisfaction, while Nasri Abbani was in a bad temper and looked as if he hadn’t had enough sleep.
When Nasri went up to the attic immediately after his return to look for his unknown beloved, it seemed as if the earth had swallowed her up. Where was she? He would have to spy on her cautiously without letting the jealous Almaz notice anything.