by Rafik Schami
“No one in this street locks the door, and nothing has ever gone missing yet.”
When they were both dressed again and sitting at the kitchen table, drinking tea, she gave him a long, thoughtful look. “I want to leave Damascus with you,” she said at last. “Since I fell in love with you I’ve felt less and less able to put up with him. We have no chance here, he’ll kill us. But we are sure to find a place where we can live and love each other, undisturbed, by day and night.” She smiled at her own naiveté. “I mean after we’ve earned a living, of course. Me with dressmaking, you with calligraphy.”
Salman said nothing, almost alarmed by the beauty of the dream that Noura had conjured up in so few words.
“And even if they were to catch me,” she went on in the silence, “I wouldn’t be sorry if I could only have spent a week in Paradise with you first.”
“No, they won’t catch us,” said Salman. “We’ll live as unobtrusively as possible. And the larger the city where we go, the more invisible we’ll be.”
“Aleppo,” said Noura at once. “It’s the second largest city in Syria.” He tried suggesting Beirut, for he had heard that the capital of Lebanon looked kindly on all runaways and exiles, but she convinced him that their papers would not be checked as often in Syria as outside the country, and consoled him by describing the wonderful cuisine of Aleppo, which cast the cookery of both Damascus and Beirut into the shade.
“I need two passport photographs of you, with both your ears showing.”
“Both my ears?” He sounded surprised. “A normal photo won’t be big enough, I’d need a panoramic photograph to have room for both of them,” he replied, and despite the fear still sitting at the table with them she laughed. She could hardly hold her tea glass, but put it down on the table and coughed because she had swallowed the wrong way. Salman’s laughter cleansed her heart. His was not a gurgling, trilling or musical laugh, it was all his own. He laughed almost breathlessly, like an asthmatic, took a breath and laughed again like a wave breaking. He infected everyone with his laughter, even the chairs, she thought, as she knocked against one while she laughed and it made a bumping sound rather like a chuckle.
“And speaking of photos, I’d urgently recommend you to collect all the negatives of the photographs of the book from the photographer before Karam thinks of it. That occurred to me last night. My husband mentioned the burglary at the studio a couple of days ago, and he said in passing that there were treasures from ten centuries in his book, treasures of knowledge, philosophy, technique, and the history of calligraphy. You risked everything, so why not take them too? Who knows, they may come in useful some day.”
“But how are we to convince the photographer? The negatives belong to Karam, and he left them at the photographer’s only for the sake of security, in case anyone came searching his house or the café for them.”
“Does the photographer know Karam well?”
“No, he doesn’t know him at all. He’s one of many photographers in the new part of town. Karam didn’t want the pictures taken by anyone who might recognize him later.”
“Wonderful, then you just call him saying you’re Karam, tell him you need the negatives and you’ll send your wife to collect them. Tell him her name – Aisha – and say she will give him the number of photographs, two hundred and ten, as a password. If he wants to know more you can describe my hair and say I wear glasses,” Noura went on.
“Glasses? Why glasses?” asked Salman.
Noura laughed. “That,” she said, “is the secret of the calligrapher’s wife. And you will be waiting in a side street to take the package of photos,” she concluded, giving him a long goodbye kiss. At the door, she turned back once more. “I like your neat, tidy place here. You’re going to be a good husband for a very busy dressmaker.”
As she stepped out of Abbara Alley into Straight Street, she was wondering whether she had done right not to tell Salman anything yet about the three letters from the tiresome old goat who was pestering her. She had been about to do so several times, but her tongue had stopped the words and sent them back down her throat. They were hard to swallow.
She consoled herself again by thinking that there would be plenty of time in the future to tell this tedious story. Just now more dangerous prospects stood ahead, and at the thought she clenched her right hand to a fist in her coat pocket. She was determined to go the way she had chosen to the end.
Two days later, Salman rode his bicycle home. A package in the basket danced about at every uneven place in the road. When he left the bicycle outside the apartment door Barakat, the baker, who was standing in the yard, greeted him.
“Anything edible in there?” asked Barakat cheerfully.
“No, something legible, that’s all,” replied Salman, laughing.
“I’ll leave it to you, then! Have fun,” said his neighbour.
Salman opened the large case he had bought for the journey. It was still empty. He weighed up the heavy packet in his hands for a moment, and then put it in his case unopened.
Not until about three months later was Salman to open the package, and marvel at the amount of secret and dangerous knowledge that lay before his eyes.
When he told Noura, at their next meeting, of his suspicion that Karam had put him in her way on purpose, she listened attentively. Salman looked as if the idea troubled him very much.
“And what if he did?” said Noura, smiling at him. “If I hadn’t fallen in love with you Karam would have had no chance, however subtle the man he sent to visit me. Never mind Karam, Badri, Hamid, the Societies of the Wise and the Unwise, the Pure and the Filthy, let’s leave them to get on with their conspiracies while we go away together,” she said firmly. Salman breathed a sigh of relief.
35
The opening ceremony on the first of March was grander and finer than Hamid could ever have expected. Only one small thing clouded his delight; Nasri Abbani had not turned up. But Hamid soon forgot him.
His distinguished guests uttered fulsome praise. Even President al-Quwwatli, the head of state, was present, but preserving a discreet distance. In view of all the scholars there, he didn’t want to make a speech.
It was rumoured that the Saudis, with whom his family had been closely connected for centuries, had asked him not to speak at the opening so as not to give a political dimension to a private School of Calligraphy. When Hamid heard that, his chest swelled with pride.
The minister of culture praised the industry, vision, and persistence of the first director of the school, Hamid Farsi, who, he said, had visited him almost every week until he finally had written permission to open it from the ministry of culture.
“I asked Mr Farsi,” joked the minister, “how long there had been plans for this school, and he replied: since the year 940. I thought I had failed to hear him properly, and he must have said 1940. What, for a whole seven years? I asked appreciatively. Hamid Farsi smiled, and out of courtesy he did not correct me. But my well-read colleague, an admirer of Mr Farsi, told me later that he had meant the year of the death of the greatest calligrapher of all time, Ibn Muqla, who died in 940. It is therefore a particular honour to open this school, which will revive his name.”
Long and loud applause thundered through the hall.
When Hamid went to the speaker’s rostrum, the photographers’ cameras flashed in competition. He thanked the minister, and promised to do everything possible in the cause of calligraphy. His speech was short but powerful. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he concluded, “here in Damascus, I promise you, here in the heart of Arabia, calligraphy will flourish and make Damascus the capital of a strong nation once again.”
The applause moved Hamid to tears.
When he slowly and with relish read out the list of patrons, it struck him again that Nasri Abbani was not present. Why had he failed to turn up?
The guests ate and drank, talked and laughed loudly until midnight. Again and again a camera flashed, because many of the guests wanted to take sou
venir photographs of such legendary personalities as the brilliant Fares al-Khuri, the only Christian prime minister in the history of Syria.
After the ceremony, when all the guests had left the School, Hamid was surrounded by deep silence. He walked through the empty building, letting the images of the last few hours run past his mind’s eye. His great dream had come true, but was he a happy man now?
Why had Nasri Abbani stayed away from the ceremony? Everyone was wondering. Nasri Abbani’s former teacher, Sheikh Dumani, a senile old man whom Hamid had invited, was surprised to see that his worst pupil in fifty years of teaching headed the list of patrons of culture and calligraphy. “His handwriting was as illegible as if he’d bribed the chickens to do his homework for him,” slobbered the old man toothlessly. “As usual, he’ll have been held up somewhere by his prick,” he announced to the assembled company, suggestively cradling his balls in his left hand.
“Well, that danger doesn’t threaten you and me,” remarked old Fares al-Khuri cynically, and the men around them laughed.
But why hadn’t Nasri come? Were those idiotic Pure Ones behind the fact that Tawfiq, Nasri Abbani’s right-hand man, had suddenly called a day before the ceremony, saying that he was getting many threats, so his boss would like to cancel the contract to rent, “for reasons of the security of his property, you understand.” Hamid did not understand, and his lawyer reassured him: the contract was valid, and no power on earth could cancel it now.
Nasri Abbani not only failed to come to the ceremony, he would not see Hamid in the next few days and did not return his phone calls.
What had happened?
Hamid had no idea.
36
On the tenth of April 1957, Noura and Salman boarded the bus from Damascus to Aleppo.
They took three large cases and a bag containing food and drink for the journey.
“Hold out your hands,” said Noura when they were finally seated, and she put a heavy velvet bag into them.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Seventy gold coins that Hamid gave me on our wedding day. My wages in advance for four years of cleaning, cooking, and ironing. And putting up with his moods. The other thing,” she said in a soft, sad voice, “is something that no money can pay for.”
She looked out of the window at the labourers tearing tramlines up from the ground. The third tram route was being built. “You don’t see donkeys for hire about anymore these days,” she said, shaking her head. What problems she’s had, thought Salman. Here she was running away from her native city and her marriage, and she thought about donkeys. He put his arm round her. “I’ll always be your donkey,” he said, but his joke could not cheer Noura up.
Only two hours before leaving she had gone to see Dalia. The dressmaker had looked up from her sewing machine and understood at once. “I’m going away,” whispered Noura.
“I suspected as much when I saw you. Have you thought it all over?” asked Dalia. Noura nodded.
They both cried when they said goodbye. Dalia knew she would never see her young friend again. Later, she was to say that she understood for the first time that day how you can go into deadly danger not because you hate life, but because you love it.
Finally Noura went to her parents’ house. She knew that her father had been in bed with a cold for some days. She gave him an envelope with letters in it, told him briefly what kind of letters they were, and asked him to look after them well. Then she was on her way again. He ran after her in his bedroom slippers. “Child,” he asked in alarm, “has something happened?”
She shed tears.
“Can I help you, my dearest child?” he asked, feeling so weak at the knees that he had to lean on something for support.
“Read my letter and see what you must do. I can help myself,” she said, and saw that he too was weeping. His tears drew her down into the depths like leaden weights. In her mind she freed herself from him, and hurried out.
“God be with you on your way,” he whispered, hoping she would turn at the end of the street and wave, as she always used to do, but Noura had already disappeared round the corner and into the main road.
Slowly, Rami Arabi went back to his bedroom. He opened the large envelope with trembling fingers. It contained Noura’s farewell letter, and over thirty notes he had written her with his witty sayings and turns of phrase. His heart guessed that the return of his own words meant a deep separation. But Nasri’s letters were the real shock.
He was horrified, he reached out for support, picked Noura’s letter up again and read it carefully. She wrote about her disappointment, the torment of an unhappy married life to which he had delivered her up. She assured him that she would not hate either him or her mother for that, but she was taking her life into her own hands, since as parents they had failed in their prime duty to protect her.
Rami Arabi knew his daughter too well to misunderstand. She had written all this down for him before she went away because she felt like a sponge soaked with bitter words. She had to squeeze the sponge out before she could take up whatever her new life had to offer.
When he had read it all for the third time, he looked at those seductive letters in her husband’s calligraphic handwriting. His hands were shaking. He felt paralysed.
“The bloody pimp!” he heard himself cry out loud.
Her mother did not hear about Noura’s visit and the letters until that evening, when she came back from the weekly meeting of a women’s religious society. She asked her husband to read the farewell letter aloud to her, and the frankness of its wording told her that Noura had gone already. She let out a scream, and wailed so loudly that three women from the house next door came round, thinking that their neighbour Sahar’s husband had breathed his last.
Salman had been back to the café owner Karam’s house that day, had picked up his notebooks and writing implements, and left a circular calligraphic work behind for Karam. After work that evening, Karam was surprised to find the key in the front door of the house. He thought Salman had come back, and looked forward to seeing him.
When Karam had been to Grace and Favour Yard to see him in the middle of March, but did not find him there, a woman neighbour said Salman was learning the art of fine Damascene cuisine from a master chef. The Al Andalus restaurant, she added, was very elegant and very expensive, and was near Bab Tuma.
Salman seemed glad to see Karam there. Now that he had discovered cookery, he said, he got along with a spoon better than a reed pen. He had a lot to do just now, he added, because there were two weddings ahead to be catered for, but as soon as he had a moment he would be back to see Karam and perhaps practise a little calligraphy. His boss Carlos, who was quarter Spanish, quarter Jewish, quarter Arab and at least a quarter Christian, loved calligraphy and thought that, with cookery, riding, and fencing, it was an art that you must master before you could call yourself a man.
This was an emotional meeting for Karam. For the first time he discovered that Salman could also speak very eloquently. When he said so, joking, Salman laughed and said yes, he might be right. All these years he had had a kind of knot tied in his tongue, and now love and spices had freed him of it.
He’s not a boy anymore, he is a man now, said Karam to himself on the way back to his café. He felt deep affection, far from any pity or pangs of conscience, for this brave young man, an affection that blossomed in his heart like a lily, and was far more than his love for Badri’s divine body. For the first time Salman seemed to him irresistibly attractive. Next time they met, he was going to say so. Again and again he hoped for a telephone call or a spontaneous visit to the café, but March came to an end without granting the enamoured Karam’s wish. Badri’s feelings were hurt because Karam talked of nothing but Salman, and he was not mistaken in his assumptions, for the heart of a lover betrayed has an invisible compass.
So that April day Karam opened his front door and called out to Salman, but silence swallowed up his voice. Walking slowly, he went to the room wher
e Salman always worked. The door was not closed. The drawer in the desk yawned open, cleared out, in the empty room. Only a piece of calligraphy the size of a hand lay on the desk. Karam could not decipher it.
Two days later he showed it to Hamid’s journeyman Samad, who was having a bite to eat in the café at midday. “Can you read what this tangled stuff says?” he asked, putting the stiff sheet of paper in front of the expert.
“It’s not tangled stuff, it’s Kufic script with reflection. It’s neatly written, the proportions, angles, and curves all correct, but the script lacks elegance. Who wrote it?”
“A friend,” replied Karam proudly.
“No, that can’t be so,” said Samad.
“Why not, may I ask?”
“Because no friend can have written that. It says: The heart of Karam is a graveyard.”
All the colour drained from Karam’s face. Even his dark eyes seemed to have turned pale grey. He dragged himself into his office behind the bar. His staff swore that when he came out again his hair was no longer blue-black but ashen grey.
Salman disappeared quietly, as was always his way. He did not say goodbye to anyone. He merely wrote a long letter to Sarah, and asked her to tell a white lie to cover up his and Noura’s tracks.
He sold his bicycle for good money to a vegetable seller in the distant Amara quarter of the city.
Apart from Sarah’s mother hardly anyone in Grace and Favour Yard noticed that Salman had gone away. Only when his father fell seriously ill with liver disease two months later did several neighbours realize that it was a long time since they had last seen Salman. Many of those who lived in the Yard were already looking forward to the chance of getting a good two-roomed apartment soon. But Salman’s father recovered and lived for many more years, although he never drank a drop of alcohol again.