by Rafik Schami
At about this time Sarah’s mother Faizeh came back from Homs, where her daughter had had her first child, a little girl. Faizeh told Mahmoud the butcher and her neighbour Samira in confidence that Salman was working as a chef in Kuwait for a good salary. “But that’s strictly between ourselves,” said Faizeh in conspiratorial tones. In Damascus, that was as good as a request to spread the news with great speed, and Mahmoud the butcher and Samira did valiantly.
Within twenty-seven hours and thirty-three minutes, the news reached Karam in his café. He did not believe what he heard, but rang Al Andalus, the grand restaurant in the Christian quarter, and asked the owner about his friend Salman.
“I’m afraid he’s not here now. I’d happily have made that witty young man my deputy. None of my staff ever learned as quickly as he did – he sang as he worked, and he was so enthusiastic about everything. He had a very good nose too, and a good nose is worth gold in our profession. A pity, but I can’t grudge it to him. I’ve heard he’s earning more in Kuwait than I do in my restaurant.”
Karam hung up, weeping with rage at the oil sheikhs, the Pure Ones, his own stupidity, Badri, and Salman’s hard heart that had given him no chance to put his mistake right again.
The story of Salman’s new career as a chef in Kuwait had undergone several metamorphoses after the twentieth or thirtieth time of telling. Sometimes Salman was cooking for the Emir of Kuwait, sometimes he was owner of a chain of restaurants in the Gulf region. Some people said he had converted to Islam and married a cousin of the ruler, others were sure that he had been made into fish-food.
In the autumn, anyway, when the story found its way back to Sarah’s mother, it had been through so many changes that not even Faizeh herself would have known it again.
37
Years later, Hamid was to tell anyone who had ears and the patience to listen, that his wife’s flight had opened his eyes. On the day of her disappearance, he admitted, the decline of the Arabs had become clear to him. He no longer wanted to be part of it. He had wanted to shake people awake, but now he would leave them deep in their slumbers and regret nothing. A race that punishes its reformers and persecutes, banishes, and kills its prophets, he now saw, was fated to fall.
Hamid found his wife gone when he came home in the evening. There had been a great deal to do at the School of Calligraphy, and he had spent a long time that afternoon bringing tough negotiations to a successful conclusion. He was commissioned to carry out all the calligraphy and ornamentation for the Saladin Mosque financed by Saudi Arabia. The negotiations had not been easy, particularly as calligraphers from the other Arab countries were prepared to do the work for a fifth of what he was asking. Three of the most famous Syrian calligraphers also went away empty-handed. Hamid offered to employ them himself in return for a good fee, and they gratefully accepted. It had been an excellent day.
So he went home happy and content that warm April night. The School of Calligraphy had begun teaching at the beginning of April, a month earlier than planned, and he had carried his point in the Society of the Wise in the face of all who envied him and would have disputed the position of Grand Master with him. An overwhelming majority of members showed their absolute confidence in him. His adversaries had not chosen their moment well. Hamid was not just the best calligrapher but the hero who had brought the Society further than anyone else before him.
On the way home he whispered to himself, several times, “Hamid, you did it!” And then he took a deep breath and cried, in slightly too loud a voice, “Yes, I did!”
Now he was going to enjoy his wife and the night. He had bought her a thin nightdress of translucent red silk, and he wanted her to put it on and indulge all his whims.
In an expensive delicatessen he had two hundred grams of pasturma, air-dried beef ham with a piquant coating of sharp spices, sliced paper-thin for him. He also bought expensive cheese and olives, and for his wife an Italian jar of mini-artichokes preserved in olive oil. At the fruit-seller’s on Straight Street at the corner of his own street he bought an expensive pineapple for the first time in his life.
“Never mind the price,” he told the fruit and vegetable vendor, “today is a special day.”
Whistling his favourite tune, he opened the door.
He could never forget that moment of menacing silence. Curiously enough, he guessed at once that Noura was neither visiting neighbours nor at her parents’ house. Something terrible must have happened. He went into the kitchen, put the paper bags down on the table, and called, “Noura!” His heart was thudding.
No answer, no note, nothing. He went into the courtyard and dropped into a chair by the fountain, feeling weak. At that moment he grasped the catastrophe.
“There are moments when you know what you have done wrong. I was close to death when, in a single second, I understood all that was wrong in my life. I was born into the wrong society at the wrong time,” he repeated later. His audience felt sorry for him, but no one could understand.
Many of his own decisions now seemed to him mistaken. Yet he wanted only one thing, to honour Arabic script, that divine invention that made a few written characters into oceans, deserts, and mountains, that moved the heart and inspired the mind. And did it not endow everything recorded in ink on paper with a long life? Only gods can do that. He should have realized. Script was a goddess, and only a man who gave up everything for it would be let into Paradise. What place was there for a wife and children? And hadn’t he been born into the wrong family, for a start? Who but a madman would cuff his son around the head for having a divine gift? Was his father sick? And his mother, who had never loved or defended him, was she not sick as well?
What idiocy it was to want to lead a married life. Of course he needed a woman. Not that he was an addict like Nasri Abbani. No, somehow love play did not satisfy him half as much as working on calligraphy.
He sat for half an hour in his deserted house, wishing some neighbour would tell him that Noura had had an accident, or had fallen down in a faint and had been taken to hospital.
But no one knocked at the door for hours on end, although he put on all the lights and turned up the radio, letting the neighbours know that he was there.
Hours later, the idea of an accident struck him as absurd, and that hurt, because he realized how helpless he was. He was also sure that his parents-in-law knew nothing about any accident, or they would have phoned him.
How long had he slept? He didn’t know. From that day on he abandoned the discipline that had woken him at six every morning and sent him to bed at ten in the evening at the latest. Day and night became indistinguishable.
A vigorous knocking woke him. He looked around him, startled, and shook his hand, because he had had a nightmare in which a large wasp stung him right between his forefinger and middle finger. He was lying on the bed, fully dressed. For the first time in his life he had gone to sleep unwashed, still in his street clothes.
It was still early, but day was already dawning outside.
Noura’s father stood at the door, pale-faced, his eyes red with weeping. He was uglier than ever.
“Assalam alaikoum,” he greeted Hamid dryly. Sheikh Rami Arabi had never been a dissembler, as Hamid knew. He came straight to the point. Without a word, he flung the letters down on the little table in the inner courtyard and stood there. Of course Hamid recognized his own hand. How in the world had Noura’s father come by those letters? And suddenly it was all clear to him. Hamid understood what the scholar, without any words, was telling him. His knees gave way under him, he dropped on the nearest chair. How was he going to explain himself to his wife’s father? He hoped the whole thing was only a nightmare.
“Please sit down. It’s a terrible misunderstanding, and I can explain to Noura,” he said in a broken voice. For a moment he was secretly relieved that Noura had gone for refuge to her parents, and sent her father here ahead of her. However, he maintained the façade of the shocked husband. “She ought to have discussed it with me be
fore alarming you unnecessarily. Those are letters for a customer that I…” he began trying to explain.
But Sheikh Arabi shook his head, dismissing the idea. “Noura is not with us. She’s run away… I gave you a flower to be your wife, and what did you do to her, you man without honour?” said the sheikh, his voice choked with his unspoken grief. He cast his son-in-law a contemptuous glance and left.
Hamid Farsi was stunned.
That fornicating goat Nasri Abbani had tricked him. He had seduced his wife Noura with those letters, and who knew how many people he had told about it, all to destroy his, Hamid’s, reputation and humiliate him. Had Nasri Abbani planned it all from the first?
But the calligrapher and his neighbours, whose ears were pricked, still did not believe that Noura had run away for good. He phoned the studio and said he wouldn’t be in that day. Such a thing had never happened before. From now on until the closing of the studio, however, it became almost the general rule.
Hamid washed and shaved, put on his summer suit, and went purposefully off to see his parents-in-law in the Midan quarter. Sheikh Arabi was not at home. Only his wife Sahar, her face tearstained, looked round the door.
“What have you done? I loved you like a son,” she said, concealing her other feelings, for once she had thought herself eternally in love with this wiry and strong-willed man. If he said a word to her, or just lightly touched her, she felt moved to the depths of her heart. But she had sacrificed that heart to save the honour and reputation of the family. And now everything in her died, and she felt that she had acted correctly, for all this man’s aura had done was dazzle her. She would have been lost with him anyway.
She did not seem about to let him in. It was not usual in this traditional quarter for a woman to receive another man in her husband’s absence. Even male cousins and sons-in-law had to wait until the master of the house came home.
“Let me explain,” he said, taking her hand. But she withdrew it quickly and closed the door. Hamid called again, through the door, “But when did she leave?”
“We don’t know,” said Noura’s mother, weeping. He knocked quietly, but in vain. The Arabis’ neighbour Badia appeared in the doorway of her house.
“What’s happened? Can I help you?” she asked the calligrapher, whom she knew well. She guessed it was something bad, for Noura’s mother wouldn’t say a word to her, for the first time; she had just kept muttering, “A disaster, a disaster,” and disappeared from view.
“No, thank you,” said the calligrapher briefly, and he dragged himself away to the main road, where he hired a cab to take him home.
It was worse than he had thought.
“I’m an ass,” he cried when he was sitting alone by the fountain that evening, thinking of Nasri. He wailed so loud that the neighbours heard him. Up to now none of them had known about Noura’s flight. Only in the course of that evening did certain news reach the house next door, but then by dawn it was setting out its rounds, a fully matured rumour, through the bakeries and snack bars of the quarter.
Nasri Abbani might have been swallowed up by the earth. Weeks after Noura’s flight, Hamid still couldn’t find him. And in his wounded imagination he staged whole films in which the rich Abbani seduced women and then sold them to oil sheikhs.
Hamid went to the studio only once or twice a month. Even then, when large commissions came in and he was urgently needed, he dismissed them from his mind.
At the end of May, Salim, a barber whose shop was not far from Hamid’s studio, told him he had heard that Nasri Abbani had not fixed on Hamid by chance; he had been planning to drive him to ruin from the first. Nasri Abbani, he said, had received instructions from high places not only to approach Hamid with commissions for extravagant works of calligraphy, seducing him gradually with his generosity, until the point came when he could produce written evidence of his lack of character. Salim added, in conspiratorial tones, that the roles were well allotted. While Nasri Abbani was ruining Hamid’s reputation with those letters, a gang of experienced criminals had abducted Noura. It was a ruse that had been employed three or four times in Beirut, Cairo, and Baghdad to get rid of unpopular colleagues or political opponents.
“And what can be more humiliating for any Arab man than to have the story spread that he was pimping for his own wife?” asked Salim, but he did not wait for an answer. He rose and said goodbye to Hamid with a soft pressure of his hand. “The Abbani clan ruined my own father too because he trusted its members unsuspectingly. They’re in league with the Devil! Or do you think it’s just chance that Nasri, that fornicating goat, owns half the building sites in Abu Roummaneh without ever having lifted a finger?”
Hamid could have wept with fury. The man was saying exactly what he had worked out for himself. Nasri Abbani was a snake. And now he understood why he had stayed away from the public opening ceremony of the School of Calligraphy.
To get the better of Nasri, that wily criminal, and call a halt to his own running costs, Hamid decided in July to close the studio for the time being. Samad reminded him in vain of several major commissions that must be delivered in the autumn. But Hamid was not changing his mind.
That was on the day when the rumours in Damascus struck up another song about Noura, like a chorale directed by an invisible hand. This one said she had been seen on a British passenger ship leaving Beirut for the Gulf.
In a fit of rage, Hamid fired all the employees in his studio, from Samad to the young errand boy Hassan, every one of them. And as they left he told them what he had thought of them all these years: they were incompetent craftsmen, and therefore hopeless as candidates to learn the art of calligraphy. He told Samad contemptuously that he and the errand boy Hassan had better go looking for the nearest car repair workshop, where they could finally make themselves useful to their fellow men.
Not only Samad but all his assistants were deeply insulted. They thought their master had gone completely crazy, not even preserving a minimum of courtesy and gratitude. Only the thin little boy Hassan followed his master’s advice and looked for a car repair workshop where, small and half-starved as he was, he faced up to the heavily built owner and said boldly that a master of calligraphy had prophesied that he would be a good motor mechanic. The oil-smeared man laughed, showing his yellow teeth. “Oh, calligraphers talk a lot of nonsense, but who cares? We could do with an errand boy. Can you make tea?”
“The best tea you ever drank, sir,” said the boy proudly.
“Then come on in. One lira a week, and after that we’ll see,” said the owner of the car repair shop.
38
On 13 April 1957, nine days after Noura’s flight, ten bearded men stormed the School of Calligraphy late in the morning. They locked the door from the inside, tore the telephone wire out of the wall, and broke all the furniture. It was a Friday, and only the secretary had come to the School to deal with all the paperwork that had accumulated during the week. She had the shock of her life. The men looked as if they had come straight out of a bad film about Arabs. One of them shouted at her, “How dare you work on a Friday, you unbeliever!” He struck her a blow that knocked her to the ground. Another snatched her jacket off the coat stand and flung it over her head. “Cover your head, whore!” he cried. She couldn’t even scream. They gagged her and tied her to her office chair. After that the men rampaged through the building, and she heard furniture, mirrors, glass tables, and bookcases being smashed to smithereens. When they came back to her office, they took a broad brush and painted their hideous sayings and threats on the walls in dripping red. Then the horror was over.
At the beginning of May the School closed down for the protection of its students. Hamid was sure now that Nasri Abbani had been one of those pulling the strings that led to the closing of his School of Calligraphy.
39
Some people said he was in Beirut, others claimed to have seen him in Istanbul, still others said that he had gone to Brazil to join his friend, Colonel Shishakli, the former pres
ident.
No one would have bet a single lira on the chances that Nasri Abbani was still in Damascus.
He loved his native city in the same way as he loved women: addictively and beyond all measure. He was a true Damascene who thought the city was Paradise. Every time he had to leave Damascus it felt like a kind of torture, and he was sure his journey would end in darkness and cold – and a life of toil and tribulation. Nasri was not capable of that sort of thing.
It was his manager Tawfiq who advised him to take the calligrapher’s humiliation seriously. He believed him, said Tawfiq, when he said he hadn’t touched the woman, but his belief didn’t count. In the city everyone claimed, as if they had seen it for themselves, that the calligrapher had written love letters for that famous philanderer Nasri in return for money. And as if it wasn’t enough that Hamid Farsi’s wife had run away, his great dream of the School of Calligraphy had finally come to nothing as well. As a result the cuckolded husband was blind and unpredictable in his fury. “I’m not interested to know whether you stuck your prick into the woman or a wasps’ next, but I do feel a burning desire to make sure that lunatic doesn’t stick something sharp into you,” added Tawfiq.
What a tone his accountant was taking! For the first time, Nasri felt that he had underestimated Tawfiq all along. He was more than a mere financial brain blindly making his way through life calculating profits, he was an experienced man with strong nerves. Ever since Nasri had felt it wise to hide from Hamid, he had noticed a change in his manager’s attitude. He was as civil as before, but less patient, and his voice was not louder but more commanding. It bore a distant resemblance to the voice of Nasri’s father.
“This is a matter of life or death,” Tawfiq had said, emphasizing the fact that he expected his orders to be followed, although with the courtesy of all Damascenes he called them suggestions. And against his inclination, Nasri had to obey.