The Calligrapher's Secret

by Rafik Schami

  The country was experiencing an upturn, and all ways were open, even those that you could only dream of a few years ago.

  In the middle of February Hamid boarded a bus going from Damascus to Aleppo. At nine o’clock the bus, which was really scheduled to leave at eight, finally set off. It made its way through the city until it joined the national highway going to Aleppo at the northern exit from the city.

  In Port Said Street he saw Nasri Abbani deep in conversation with the well-known pharmacist Elias Ashkar outside the latter’s shop. They seemed to be on very good terms. Hamid wondered why he himself could not build up such a close relationship with the remarkable and generous Nasri Abbani, who whether intentionally or unintentionally had given great support to the Society of the Wise.

  Several members of the Society distrusted the rich and worldly Abbani, others wanted to take his money but not put his name on the tablet of honour.

  At the meeting where this was discussed Hamid was beside himself. Were the Council of the Wise, he asked, going to act like women gossiping about some piece of news over coffee until they had made it a scurrilous rumour, or were they concerned with realizing their ideas? “We don’t want to marry Nasri Abbani, we want to get his support for our side, so whether or not he visits whores is nothing to do with us. Or do any of you know how often this minister or that general, scholar or businessman cheats on his wife, his customers, or God?”

  His audience clapped. For a moment he found them so repellent that a shudder ran down his back. A wall as cold as ice separated him from all the members there, just as it separated him from Abbani, whom he had defended.

  Hamid intended to stay in Aleppo for three days and go on from there to Istanbul, where he was to take part in a congress of Islamic calligraphers, and negotiate over an important commission. A new mosque was to be built in Ankara, with money from Saudi Arabia, and famous calligraphers were to be involved in the design. Three Arab masters had been invited, and Hamid thought he stood a good chance.

  The day after he left, the employees in Hamid Farsi’s studio began working shorter hours and taking ever longer breaks.

  Samad was a good technician who knew all the tricks of calligraphy, but never went outside the prescribed regulations. “Without crossing boundaries you’ll never be a master,” Hamid told him. But Samad lacked both ambition and imagination. Nor did he want, like Hamid Farsi, to live only for calligraphy. He loved his wife and his three sons dearly, cooked and sang for them, and these four people gave him all that he felt it was worth living for. Calligraphy was a wonderful way of earning money, no more. Of course he did not say so out loud, for that would have lost him his job on the spot. And he would never earn as much anywhere else as he did with Hamid, whose right-hand man he had become over decades of work.

  Samad let his colleagues know that he valued their work, and so they liked him. On the other hand, they feared Hamid. They were always glad when their master had business outside the studio. This time Samad sent them home early in the afternoon. Only one man had to remain on duty by the telephone until six, to take any orders that came in.

  Hamid returned in a bad temper. The meeting in Aleppo had not gone as he had expected, and in Istanbul an Egyptian had been given the commission to work on the mosque. “The Turks wanted me, but the Saudi representative didn’t because he thought I was a Shiite. He just couldn’t get his head around the fact that a man’s name could be Farsi, meaning Persian, and he could still be a Sunni,” he said indignantly. He did not say a word about the meeting in Aleppo. The calligraphers there had protested in no uncertain terms against the idea of a School of Calligraphy in Damascus. Why not base it in the north, away from the centre of power? And who held power in the Society? The country, they said angrily, was democratic, but the Society was still stuck in the caliphate system, where a Grand Master could leave his legacy to a successor of his own choice. It wouldn’t do. Hamid stood his ground, however. And finally the masters of calligraphy had calmed down and unanimously agreed to support his project for the School of Calligraphy in Damascus.

  “In Aleppo they quarrel heatedly, but they don’t leave their friends high and dry, which is more than can be said of Damascus,” the head of the section there had said arrogantly. That barbed remark hurt.

  Only later was Hamid to understand that the meeting in Aleppo had not gone as badly as he thought directly after it. He had met the calligrapher Ali Barakeh, a small young man who supported the Grand Master without reservations, and listened unmoved to the attacks from other quarters. Ali Barakeh idolized Hamid Farsi and hung on his every word. So Hamid made up his mind to name him his successor, also hoping to win sympathy in Aleppo that way. But then it was already too late.

  When he entered his studio after returning to Damascus, and found everything neat and tidy and well organized, he was reassured. He felt a desire to write down his thoughts and impressions of Aleppo and Istanbul. He told Salman to make him a coffee, opened the locked cupboard, and took out the thick book in which he recorded his ideas and his secrets. Even as he opened the cupboard he sensed that something about the lock was wrong.

  Nothing inside was missing, but when he opened the black, linen-bound book, he saw that a stranger’s rough hand had damaged it. There was a tear in the binding. Someone had forcibly opened the book. A tear of that kind couldn’t be repaired. If a book was badly bound, pages dropped out; if it was well bound, like his thick blank book here, it always opened at just this place. His book had been given to him by his master Serani, and had been made by the legendary bookbinder Salim Baklan.

  Hamid exploded. He shouted furiously in such a loud voice that the whole studio shook. He summoned Samad, blaming him and calling him to account. His assistant stood before him, head bent, wondering which of the men in the workshop had been unnaturally edgy over the last few days. It didn’t take him long to work that out: Salman.

  When Hamid finally stopped shouting because he was breathless, and the locals were beginning to gather outside the shop window, Samad looked at him with scorn. “You’re making me look ridiculous in front of our neighbours, God forgive you. But it wasn’t me. Anyone can break into anywhere these days, but now that I look at the cupboard, it was a pro. And I can’t help it if a professional criminal breaks in by night and steals your book, or the gold leaf, your knife, or anything else. You could always buy a steel safe, but I’ve heard that the king of the Damascene burglars can open any safe in the city with his eyes blindfolded.” Samad paused. “But if you listen to me, I’d say fire the errand boy. I get a feeling that there’s something not quite right about him.”

  Hamid looked up. His eyes were burning.

  “Fire him, then,” he said in a cracked voice.

  33

  Over the next few days, Hamid Farsi was happy to find what swift progress preparations for the School of Calligraphy were making. Decorators, electricians, locksmiths, and joiners were working round the clock to have the building finished and gleaming with fresh paint a week before the opening.

  The opening ceremony itself was to be on the first of March. Of the hundred and twenty prominent guests invited, only four had declined. And the editorial teams of all the newspapers and magazines published in Damascus were going to report the occasion. Even the most important Lebanese newspaper, Al Nahar, planned to write about it.

  Two days before the opening of the School of Calligraphy, Nasri, in a state of desperation, received his third letter from the hand of Hamid Farsi the master calligrapher. Had he failed, wondered the calligrapher, to make any headway with his beloved yet? The text written by Hamid was full of sad reproaches to her for playing a game of hide and seek, and asked her reason for declining to meet him. In addition Hamid had copied out two seventh-century poems from an old collection of lyrics. They spoke of the lover’s longing for a single meeting. Perhaps Nasri would touch her heart with this third letter. Hamid genuinely hoped so.

  Nasri had to go to his office first and discuss something wit
h Tawfiq, and then he went to see his wife Almaz, who had a heavy cold. She wouldn’t be trailing around after him today.

  That night he was going to see whether the beautiful woman was even at home. He climbed to the attic and looked down into her inner courtyard. There were lights on in it, he could see everything clearly – and what he saw took his breath away.

  The beautiful woman had a companion – none other than Hamid Farsi.

  Blind with fury, Nasri climbed down the spiral staircase again. What a despicable trick! He had told Hamid that the woman had not agreed to see him, he had paid good money and given her gold, and now that hypocrite was making use of his chance and might be blackmailing the young woman.

  Nasri thought of nothing but revenge all night. And when he finally thought of a way to injure Hamid the grin on his face in the darkness was so broad that it almost illuminated the room. “Hamid, Hamid, you’ve made the biggest mistake of your life.”

  But the mistake was Nasri’s.

  34

  Tears ran down Salman’s cheeks as he and his father followed his mother’s coffin. Only when four men lowered the modest wooden casket into the grave did his tears dry up. He felt a strange fear. The thought that his mother would never stand up again weighed heavily on his heart.

  Only their neighbours from Grace and Favour Yard accompanied his mother on her last journey, and old Father Basilius added to the general misery. He was in an extremely bad temper, reproving two mass servers who kept fooling about, he mumbled his way through the funeral service as if it were a tiresome duty, and then hurried straight home. It was too cold and the whole occasion seemed too shabby for him.

  Karam parted from Salman at the graveyard, and hugged him. “God be with her. I feel for your grief, but believe me, it’s a release from all her torments,” he said, looking into the distance. Salman did not reply. “Oh, and I’ve found you a good job with Elias Barakat the jeweller. You know him, and he likes you a lot.” He kissed Salman’s forehead and was gone.

  All the others present expressed their sympathy, but to the end of his days only what his neighbour Maroun said remained in Salman’s memory like a solitary peak rising from a flat plain. “I won’t try to console you. I mourn my own mother to this day. Mothers are divine creatures, and when they die so does the divine spark in us. All consolation is hypocrisy.” When Salman looked up at him, tears were running down the man’s cheeks. He had never before seen Maroun’s face as wise and beautiful as at that moment.

  When Salman went home alone that cold afternoon, the apartment felt terribly empty. His father was spending the rest of the day with Maroun, Kamil, and Barakat in the wine bar on the corner of Abbara Alley.

  Wandering around the place, Salman found his mother’s old slippers still under the table where she had left them last time she stepped out of them before finally taking to her bed. He picked them up and began weeping again.

  It was not until nearly midnight that his father staggered home to bed.

  Two days later Salman phoned Noura from the post office. When he heard her voice he felt relieved. And Noura herself felt, yet again, that Salman was as fragile as a vase made of thin glass with a crack in it, so that it threatened to break apart any moment. When she hung up, she wondered if she would be as sad if her own mother were to die. No, certainly not, she told herself, and felt ashamed.

  Salman had invited Noura to his home. She had always wanted to know where it was and what it was like, but she had been too shy to ask him. Now she was going to see him there one afternoon. In the Christian quarter no one was particularly interested in who visited whom. Christians’ houses were open to all, and men and women visited each other. She had often noticed that when she was a little girl, since many Christians lived in the Midan quarter where she had grown up. When visitors came, the women sat with the men there.

  Salman didn’t mind what the neighbours said. The only one among them whose opinion had ever meant anything to him was Sarah, and she had left long ago. His father was out all day and quite often all night as well. What he did interested no one, least of all Salman. His mother had been the bridge between them, and now they were the two banks of a river and never met.

  On the day when Noura was going to visit him at two in the afternoon, he got on his bike just after eleven and rode off to see Karam.

  Karam was charming and captivating; it was just like the old days. But when the conversation came round to the burglary in which Salman had helped him, he proved slippery as an eel.

  Salman could have kicked himself for his naiveté. He had really thought that Karam wanted to know all those things out of sheer curiosity. Salman had made an imprint of the old-fashioned lock of the cupboard for him. After a few days, Karam handed him a duplicate key that Salman could use to unlock the cupboard – with some difficulty – when the master was away, and take out the beautiful big book containing the calligrapher’s secrets.

  It had been impossible to copy everything out in a short time. So the only way to get a copy made in 1950s Damascus was by a photographer. It was when he thought of that, at the latest, that Salman was really furious with himself, because he had still suspected nothing and just thought it was all rather amusing and exciting. Four hundred and twenty pages. The photographer had a very good camera and took two hundred and ten photographs, each showing a double spread from the book. Salman stood watching, and his heart fell when he heard the spine of the book crack audibly in the middle because the photographer needed a flat surface.

  “Don’t worry, it will be all right,” Karam reassured him.

  It was not all right.

  For Karam to get two hundred and ten expensive photographs taken to satisfy his curiosity and to risk his, Salman’s, job was something he couldn’t get his head around, as he told Karam now in a steady voice. Karam was full of flattery again, and encouraged him to go and see the jeweller straight away. He said a lot of fine-sounding things about the sacrifices great and small to be made for friendship. For the first time Salman felt that there was often no real joy in Karam’s laughter; it was only an act on the part of his facial muscles as they drew back his lips and bared his teeth.

  A little boy came into the café and ordered something at the counter. “Hassan, the new errand boy. He’s a distant relation of Samad’s,” said Karam. Salman glanced at the little fellow biting cheerfully into a falafel sandwich.

  Salman decided to retrieve his implements and above all his important notebooks from the room in Karam’s house. Their ways must part. Above all, he must not go along with any proposition made by that enigmatic man again. He would rather starve than visit the Café Karam. For nights on end Salman lay awake in bed. It was not just his disappointment that robbed him of sleep, one idea tormented him more than any other: could it be that Karam was malicious enough to have made use of him from the start, as a spy on Hamid Farsi and as the lover of Hamid’s wife? Was that his gratitude for being saved from drowning? Karam had often shown that he thought nothing of gratitude. He would flatter you and then go behind your back. And what if he had deliberately used him to seduce Noura? Would that cloud his love for her? He could find no answer to that question, but he decided to tell Noura everything, all muddled up together the way it was as it seethed inside his head. Sarah had once told him that keeping silent in love was the first rift, and would grow unnoticed into other silences, until love broke to pieces.

  But now he must pretend to Karam to suspect nothing until he had his notebooks safe. In the first two books, Salman had written down all that he had learnt in Hamid’s studio: technique, the master’s advice, the making of inks, the composition and secret of colours, and how to make corrections. But the third notebook was particularly dear to his heart. In that one Noura had written the answers to the questions that – intrigued by the information about Ibn Muqla – he had so often asked her. Noura was glad to be asked to perform these tasks, not only because her husband’s library made the search easier for her, most of all because they
made time pass quickly. And Salman was someone who listened avidly and gratefully to everything she had to say about the famous calligraphers of history, both men and women, and the secrets of the old masters. He would kiss every one of her fingertips afterwards, and caress her earlobes so tenderly that sometimes she couldn’t stand it any longer, but threw herself on him and made love to him passionately.

  It was just before one-thirty when Salman reached his apartment. He opened the windows and doors, swept the rooms, wiped the floor with a damp cloth, placed a plate of fresh biscuits on the table and prepared the water for particularly good tea, a variety he had bought from the best tea merchant in Straight Street, opposite the entrance to the spice market, the Souk al-Busuriyyeh.

  Noura’s heart was beating fast when she came through the gate of Grace and Favour Yard and saw Salman. He was standing at the door of his apartment on the left-hand side of the large rectangle that was the poor quarter of the yard.

  He smiled and came to meet her, greeted her formally and with reserve, and accompanied her to the front door, where he stood aside to let her go in first.

  She was amazed to see how fresh and clean the apartment was, and how meticulously tidy. He read her expression correctly.

  “Two hours in the morning, quarter of an hour in the afternoon,” he said with a grin. She took off her coat, and he was fascinated by her new cotton dress. “You’re as beautiful as the women in the fashion magazines,” he said, embracing her lovingly. She was going to thank him for the compliment, since she had made the new dress herself, but her lips found better occupation. They clung to him and did not let go until she came back to her senses naked and sweating in bed beside him. “Aren’t you going to lock the door?” she asked, rather late in the day.