by Rafik Schami
It was like addiction to a drug. He was always sitting there as if expecting her arrival, yet every time he was visibly relieved when she did appear.
As soon as they were sitting on the big old sofa that must once have been very luxurious, with its red velvet upholstery, he would touch her lips with his delicate fingers and begin reciting poems about the beauty of women. It was some time before she realized that they were his own poems composed to celebrate her beauty. She forgot the stack of flower pots, the rusting tools left there by former gardeners, the watering cans, and the hose. Touched by his words, she moved as if in another world that belonged only to the two of them.
Once he brought with him a large book whose pages were full of ornamentation that she could not understand, in the shape of intertwining script. Here and there she could make out a word, a letter, but the whole thing remained a mystery. The characters formed an elegant jungle of black ink with white spaces in between.
He kissed her for a long time that day, and she felt dizzy. He took her forefinger and ran it along the letters on the page, and she felt this script flowing into her. The book lay on a low old table in front of her. Malik bent closer to the paper, and sought his way through the labyrinth of the lines, curves, and dots. He looked divinely beautiful in the light falling through the coloured glass window. When she kissed his earlobe, he smiled and ran his finger along a word that she now saw set free from the jungle of characters, and she could read it: Love.
Another day she saw him sitting in the garden shed with a big book in front of him. He stood up at once, smiled at her, took her hand and led her to the sofa, where he kissed her so hard that she was in turmoil. He frightened her, for he seemed to be in a frenzy. She lay under him, and he kissed her not only on her lips, throat, and cheeks, as if he were groping like a blind man his kisses sometimes went down to her belt, and he found her watch and kissed that, he kissed her dress, her knees, her underclothes, all the time making sounds like the soft wailing of a baby hungrily searching for its mother’s breast.
Then he smiled, sat up, waited until she was sitting up too, took her right forefinger in his hand and wandered over the words of the first large ornament in the book.
They were lines in a passionate erotic poem, and she quickly realized that this was a forbidden book of love. The man who wrote them had lived in the fourteenth century; he collected daring, openly erotic poems from all over the world, and concealed them by the art of calligraphy. Only experts could read the secrets hidden in the lettering. For those not initiated, the script looked merely like beautiful ornamentation.
Page after page described forbidden love, amorous practices, and the growing longing for the touch of the beloved. And again and again, the poems celebrated the physical beauty of men and women in every detail. Often there was an easily legible religious saying on the page above the erotic poetry to camouflage it. Malik guided Asmahan’s finger on until she felt a violent longing for him. She put her arms round him and listened to the fast beating of his heart as she lay over him.
She loved him with eroticism and innocence at the same time. Days, months, and years went by as if in a second, so that later she could not tell those years apart. She woke up only when he suddenly fell severely ill.
Hadn’t she known, all these years, that he was incurably sick? Had she never feared for him? Why had she made so many plans in her daydreams, knowing that his heart disease was past curing? Had she perhaps idolized him so much to keep him alive for longer?
It was a complete surprise when his sister came to the front door of her house one day and muttered, with her eyes cast down, that Malik was dying and wanted to see her. Asmahan immediately ran without stopping from the street where she lived to the Italian hospital, far away in the city. His room was full of people. Malik saw her and smiled. In the silence that suddenly fell he whispered, “There she is. There she is.”
The disapproving glances of those present drew her attention to the fact that she was wearing her slippers. “Come here, I want to show you something,” said Malik, barely audibly, but even from the doorway she could understand it as clearly as if the words had been whispered into her ear. Her feet were rooted to the spot as if the glances of the others had weighted them with lead.
“I want to be alone,” she heard Malik ask his mother, who was holding his hand. Her eyes were red and swollen. Asmahan sat on the side of the bed, and when he put his hand out to her she looked around, embarrassed. But the room was suddenly empty, as if swept clear by some magic hand.
“I wrote this for you,” he said, and took out of the little bedside locker a small rectangular package clumsily wrapped in paper and tied up with thick string. Asmahan undid the many tight knots with trembling fingers, and tore the paper in her impatience. A small, framed work of calligraphy came into view. It looked very complex, and it resembled a rose.
“When you can read that you will think of me,” said Malik, fighting for breath.
“Love is the only disease of which I do not wish to be cured,” she read six months later, when she was able to decipher it. The small framed saying accompanied her all her life, like an icon.
Two days after her visit to the hospital, she woke from a nightmare as day was about to dawn. She heard someone calling to her, ran out of her room on to the small terrace, but her parents and her three younger brothers were still asleep in their own rooms on the other side of it.
Only later did Asmahan learn from Malik’s sister, who had slept on the floor beside his bed during all his nights in hospital, that at that hour of the morning, when he was dying, Malik had called her name aloud.
Malik was not twenty when he died, Asmahan was just fifteen years old. A week later she had a fever and lost consciousness. When she came back to her senses, her mother knew all about her relationship with Malik. How she had found out remained her secret. She consoled Asmahan and asked whether everything was all right with her “down there,” and was visibly relieved to discover that Asmahan was still a virgin.
Asmahan swore to herself that she would never love anyone again. She declared her heart dead, never guessing that hearts have no way of understanding a declaration.
Men’s glances, bent on her with desire the older and more feminine she grew, left her cold.
“What does ‘only fifteen’ mean? She has more experience of love than I do. She’s in urgent need of a husband,” said her mother that same evening to her father.
A year later Asmahan married her cousin, ten years her senior, a heavily built forensic surgeon with uncouth manners, who knew more about corpses than living bodies and minds.
Early in 1950, Asmahan’s father had a remarkable letter from Florida. The letter came at just the right time, for her father had lost all his money in speculations. He was living on his salary as director of the tobacco factory, but he would soon have to run up debts to finance his expensive lifestyle. After six months the house was heavily mortgaged. And now this letter came like divine intervention at the last minute. Her father’s uncle was a rich hotelier, and had no children. After several divorces, and legal proceedings in which he had lost a lot of money, he hated the Americans. Now, fearing that at the end of a long working life the United States would inherit his still large fortune, he sent for the only nephew he knew from the days before he emigrated. He wanted him to go to the States, acquire a green card, and inherit his property. An airline ticket convinced Asmahan’s father that this was not just a joke.
Three weeks later he had the papers he needed, wound up his affairs in Damascus, and emigrated with his entire remaining family.
There was a moving farewell in Beirut harbour. Everyone was in tears, except for Asmahan’s husband, who laughed and joked the whole time. Asmahan felt revulsion for the man. She waited until the ship went out of harbour and then said what she thought of him. All the way back to Damascus they quarrelled, and shortly before they arrived she said she wanted a divorce.
“Not until I find a more beautiful m
istress,” he said, laughing coarsely. “But if you’re in a hurry you can find me one.” And he shook with laughter so much that he almost lost control of the car.
A week later Asmahan had her first lover. At a reception given by the then minister of culture, Fouad Shayeb, she was envied by the women there, and courted by all the powerful men. She had only to choose between them.
She enjoyed her champagne and observed the men strutting like roosters. They seemed to her just little boys, vain, mindless, unreliable. And she saw how small and stooped her arrogant husband suddenly was in front of the minister of health, and he in turn before the prime minister, and the prime minister himself before the head of the armed forces, a dwarf with a huge, scarred red nose and a figure decorated and hung about with brightly coloured orders and other trumpery that clinked with a metallic sound when the dwarf moved. He looked like the ape Asmahan had seen at a fair when she was a little girl. The ape had worn an over-decorated Napoleonic uniform, and could stand upright when the command was given, salute, and grin horribly all the time.
“One of these apes will wipe that smile off your face,” whispered Asmahan to herself as her husband laughed out loud again. She smiled at their host, a charming little man from the Christian village of Malula. He was very knowledgeable, and a good speaker. She liked him, but he was far too cultivated and at the same time not powerful enough for the task Asmahan had ready for her future lover. The one man for that was one whose laughter that evening was even louder and more primitive than her husband’s: the interior minister Said Badrakhan. He was a bold adventurer from one of the richest families in the north, and his conduct matched his origin.
He was the instrument to sweep her husband away like a chessman swept off the board. And so he did. Six months later the whole world knew about their affair. Her husband agreed to a divorce to avoid even greater scandal. The interior minister let him know that if he touched a hair of Asmahan’s head, he would be unable to dissect any more corpses in future because he would be one of them himself.
She moved out, and her lover gave her the little house near the parliament building. Two months later Said Badrakham died in a mysterious road accident. It was certain that the brakes of his car had been tampered with. The files covering the incident disappeared, and the government did not react to rumours that he had been killed on the orders of the President because he had drawn up a file at the Interior Ministry on the venality, dissolution, and other flaws of the head of state. His widow, however, spread the story, through a journalist, that his affair with a young whore had cost him his life, because the young woman’s ex-husband had hired killers to avenge his honour.
The entire business left Asmahan cold, and whether by chance or not, on the very day after the funeral she slept with a man for money for the first time. He was a member of parliament, and very generous. It was also he who advised her never to ask a fixed sum. “Look around you, and you’ll see that the really superior goods in shop windows never have price tickets on them. Be choosy and clever at picking your clients, and they will come and reward you more than well if you make them happy.”
The words of the member of parliament were to prove prophetic. Asmahan could soon hardly move for clients of the very best class. It was said of her later that she made more money in a week than the prime minister made a month, or a high school teacher’s earnings for a year, and Asmahan invested the money well.
Three months after the divorce, Nasri entered her salon, and from the first he was special. He was up to every trick, he knew half the city above and below ground, as he once said to her, joking. Nasri was extravagant, generous, and had excellent taste. Asmahan had resisted showing him her feelings for a long time, but Nasri’s letters, with the works of calligraphy, were waves beating high against the dam she had erected and bringing it down.
She forgot her vow never to love anyone, and fell hopelessly in love with him after the third or fourth letter. And it was those letters, bringing her to life, conveying a sense of great lightness, that made life hard for her. She could no longer lie indifferent in the arms of the other men. She assumed a smile like a mask, but some of her experienced clients saw through it. They were not pleased, and no longer said when they left that they felt they had been in Paradise, they talked to her almost like doctors, telling her she was tense, stiff, her heart wasn’t in the job.
She could not imagine a day without seeing Nasri, smelling him, giving herself to him. And he came regularly in the middle of every day.
However, he reacted almost with shock when she said she could imagine living with him and for him alone. He wrote her no more letters, he visited her less frequently, and the more she telephoned him the more elusive he was. Those were four of the worst weeks of her life. Nasri seemed to have disappeared. She was very worried, and went to his office one morning. There he sat, laughing with a grey-haired assistant. When he saw her his expression changed. The assistant went out of the office without a sound, and fast, like a man getting to safety from the threat of a thunderstorm.
“What are you doing here?” asked Nasri brusquely.
“Looking for you. I was worried. Aren’t you glad to see me?” She gave him a pleading glance. He did not reply, but smiled uncertainly and blustered about business that kept him occupied, but he promised to come and see her soon. However, he did not.
When she went to his office once more – again after a long time – Tawfiq, the grey-haired assistant, took her firmly by the arm and would not let her in. “This is a decent business firm, not a brothel,” he said, pushing her in the direction of the stairs and closing the door.
The words she had once heard a drunken old whore say echoed menacingly in her ears: “When someone first rejects you you’re past your peak, and the road downhill goes faster than you think.”
“No,” she cried as she came to herself. She ran downstairs and out of the building. She swore revenge, and went back to her work, hoping that her clients’ requests and paeans of praise would help her to forget the wounds she had suffered. She did not have to wait long. The first client to visit, a famous confectioner, praised her effusively when he left, saying he felt more satisfied than with anyone else.
Soon the flattery of her clients drove the old whore’s words out of her mind. But she decided that the next time someone rejected her she would stop at once, and move north to the Mediterranean, where she would make herself out a young widow and open a beach café. She would amuse herself and never work as a whore again, but wait with curiosity for whatever surprises life brought. I have money enough to be secure, she thought proudly.
32
Nasri was not to be intimidated either by his broken leg or the jealousy of his fourth wife Almaz. At the beginning of February he was able to walk without crutches again. An iron spiral staircase now led from the first floor up to the attic.
He did not tell Hamid a word about his accident, but spoke enthusiastically of the wonderful effect of the first letter, and commissioned a second. He dictated a few details to the calligrapher, about the woman’s laughter and her delicate hands, and was about to go when the calligrapher said, “Thank you for not backing out.”
“Backing out? Why in the world would I back out?”
“Because of the shameless blackmail the so-called Pure Ones are exerting. They sent one of their bearded fanatics to see your business manager. He phoned me at the time, sounding concerned, and I assured him that we now have President al-Quwwatli aboard the project, as well as all the Christian patriarchs. I have no idea how the news even reached their stupid minds.”
Nasri had been hearing about the Pure Ones for years; his youngest brother secretly sympathized with them. He himself couldn’t stand them. They looked like caricature ugly Arabs, and he thought their propaganda ridiculous. They were a danger to the public. They wanted to do away with the republic, democracy, and political parties, and return to sharia and the caliphate. As a party they stood no chance in the open-minded and ethnically mingled
society of Syria, so they maintained an underground army that acted with uncompromising hostility, blackmailing, agitating and mounting assassination attempts, while the distinguished Pure Ones delivered lectures on the glorious past of the Arabs to which they wanted to return.
“But listen to me. They don’t know Nasri Abbani. I now consider your school a positive necessity.” He stopped, because he didn’t care for his own emotional tone. He in fact regarded calligraphy as a harmless art.
“Well, in your skirmishing with the bearded fellows don’t forget my letter. Another bearded man urgently needs it,” he said, laughing smugly, and he gave Hamid his hand and left before the calligrapher had really worked out what he meant.
Three days later, Nasri sent the next letter sailing through the air. The beautiful woman was sitting in the inner courtyard, copying something out of a large volume into a notebook. She smiled when she saw him up at his little window. Nasri had sent her down another gold coin and suggested meeting her at a place of her own choice.
The woman laughed, picked up the letter and disappeared.
From mid-December Hamid Farsi had been travelling all over the country again. He was collecting money and convincing influential patrons that they should support his School of Calligraphy. Lavish donations flowed in, and he was beginning to consider opening a second school in Aleppo, the northern metropolis, directly after the opening of the first in Damascus. After that five more branches were to be founded in the main cities of Syria. But central control was to be from Damascus.
Far more important to him than the donations was the confirmation of his vision that the time was ripe for a radical reform of Arabic script. When he had explained his ideas a year earlier to the Council of the Wise, the highest organ of the Society of the Wise, they had laughed at him. Some cowards saw his plan as endangering the Society, and would rather have snored in peace for another hundred years. But when he stood by his plans, and announced that he himself would take the responsibility – even if it cost him his life – those hands that had pointed suspiciously to him at first now applauded.