The Calligrapher's Secret

by Rafik Schami

  The first six weeks of his life in hiding were extremely difficult. He had to relearn everything. How to be awake while others were asleep, how to spend long hours and days in closed rooms because no one was to know he was sitting just next door, how to say nothing for hours or even days on end. It was Nasri’s first experience of such things. His isolation filled his time with little barbs, making it an instrument of torture. All his life he had merely skimmed the newspapers; now he even read the advertisements and death announcements, and there was still time left over.

  He thought about things that had never crossed his mind before, and achieved insights he could never previously have guessed at.

  From hour to hour his torments increased. His eyes hurt whenever he looked at anything, his ears hurt whenever he heard anything, his heart threatened to stand still and then, next moment, to explode, and he had droning headaches as if his brain were too small for all his thoughts. Suddenly words grew inside him just as an embryo grows hands and feet. And his tongue flung the words at the wall, at the window, or if he was lying down at the ceiling. His heart calmed down and the headaches went away. It must have been like this at the dawn of humanity, he thought, the isolation of men and women made language grow in them so that their hearts would not explode or their brains die of sorrow.

  Every chance meeting in the street could cost him his life. He could not allow himself any careless act, however small. He always had to be faster than anyone who might give him away, and cleverer than that damned intelligent calligrapher.

  The few people he still saw acted differently to him now. A childhood friend declined to meet him, and a high-ranking officer who had crawled to him when President Shishakli was still in power wouldn’t even come to the phone. A young officer in the room outside his sent Nasri away, saying that his commandant didn’t know anyone called Nasri Abbani.

  He lay awake for hours, thinking. He wasn’t even embittered by the attitude of these friends who had cultivated not him but his aura; basking in it, they had hoped to brighten the darkness of their own lives a little.

  In hiding, and pursued, he kept remembering his great-uncle Ahmad Abu Khalil Abbani, his grandfather’s brother, who had also gone on the run from his pursuers. Even as a child he had been fascinated by the theatre, and he had made that low form of art, performed at the time in coffee houses and dance halls to entertain the customers, into a great dramatic art. He had founded his own theatrical ensemble, staging his own plays and many others translated from the French. As the first modern man of the theatre in Syria, he had suffered arson attacks, humiliations, murder threats, and persecution. He had invested all his money in his beloved theatre, and the mob, egged on by fanatics, had burnt it down. The drama was still taboo thirty years later, and until 1930 the Mufti of Damascus banned men and above all women from performing on stage, which explained why the few singers and actors who ever appeared at all were Christians and Jews.

  Ahmad Abu Khalil Abbani had to hide until at last he and his ensemble took refuge in Cairo, where he founded another theatre and trained a generation of Egyptian, Syrian, and Lebanese actors. But here too arsonists set fire to his theatre in the year 1900. He returned to Damascus, an embittered man, and died of a broken heart in 1903.

  Nasri, now in hiding himself, wept when he remembered his great-uncle’s portrait. It used to hang in his father’s salon along with many other pictures. The endless sadness in his eyes went to Nasri’s heart.

  For the first two weeks in hiding Nasri lived with his first wife Lamia. But when the first rumours of his whereabouts circulated in that part of town, Lamia’s women neighbours advised her to send him away for fear that his dissolute conduct might put the children in danger too.

  Lamia was pale, often cried in the night, and jumped at the slightest sound. It was hell. But he did not go until his children, in tearful chorus, recited the request they had learnt by heart, asking him to spare them and go away. He cursed Lamia and his father who had forced the marriage on him, and went by night to the house of his third wife Nasimeh, because he knew that his second wife Saideh’s house was full of guests. Her whole family had come from the south to visit, and when they came they were so glad to see Saideh that for love of her they wouldn’t let any member of the family go home.

  Nasimeh, his third wife, whose tongue had once spoken so sweetly that he could forget how ugly she was for minutes at a time, now used this good opportunity to call him to account. She reproached him daily for spoiling her life, failing to complete his studies of architecture, and neglecting to build any of the houses she had wanted. After seven days he could stand it no longer and beat her. She screamed so loudly that the neighbours came, thinking Nasimeh had been attacked. She sent them packing again without giving Nasri away, but she told him to get out of her house at once. Nasri would have liked to apologize to his wife and thank her for her courage, because from his hiding place he had heard everything, but Nasimeh left him no choice. “Either you leave my house within three hours or I won’t acknowledge you anymore,” she cried, weeping. In her family, as she had always proudly told him in the old days, no man had ever raised his hand against a woman.

  After her family had left he called Saideh, his second wife, who was glad that he wanted to come to her and said she had been longing to see him.

  She welcomed him with a lavishly laden table and a long night of love. She had always known, she said venomously, that Nasimeh was not a woman but a man. Only men would be interested in such fantasies as building houses. As for Lamia, she had always been rather hysterical. On the other hand, she said, he could stay with her forever, so that she could enjoy his company every night. She wasn’t afraid. For the first time in his life Nasri admired her, and found her more attractive every day.

  And as the house was in the Salihiyyeh quarter, he could go to the nightclubs when Saideh was asleep.

  This arrangement worked well for some weeks. But Saideh was not brave, as he had assumed, it was just that she didn’t take Nasri’s danger seriously, and apparently she told everyone that he was hiding with her. So her friends and relations came to see him, and Nasri soon felt they were gaping at him as if he were a monkey in a cage.

  It was all rather annoying.

  But what led him to leave the house hastily and without saying goodbye was a phone call from Tawfiq, who had heard in a café where Nasri was hiding. “You must leave the house at once. And don’t go to any of your other wives, because Hamid has his sights set on all four houses now. Take a taxi to my place. I’ll come straight home and we can discuss the situation.”

  Nasri’s swift action saved his life, for exactly an hour after his hasty departure Hamid Farsi stormed into the grand house with a knife drawn, pushed the screaming Saideh out of his way and searched the rooms. Hamid was trembling all over when, disappointed, he had to leave. “So he got away from me this time. But I’ll find him yet and murder him,” he said breathlessly, slamming the door behind him.

  Tawfiq’s wife had prepared a lavish meal, but she herself withdrew to be with her children. And as if nothing had happened, while he poured tea at the end of the meal Tawfiq launched into a brief account of the business he had successfully done for Nasri. All of it excellent news! Nasri swallowed the cutting remarks that were on the tip of his tongue along with a large gulp of tea.

  Only one comment escaped him. “There’ll be no point in any of those deals if he gets his hands on me.”

  It was Tawfiq’s opinion that Nasri should leave the city at once, but on that point Nasri was not open to persuasion. So Tawfiq tried to think of the safest place for him in Damascus and its immediate surroundings, and that was with Nasri’s Uncle Badruddin, who owned a villa that was like a castle in Dummar, a village nearby.

  Nasri agreed; he had no choice. When, just once, he went to the Café Havana in broad daylight out of desire for the noise of the city, the whole thing nearly went wrong. He drank a coffee and was letting his eyes and ears feast on the busy life of Damas
cus when he suddenly saw Hamid Farsi on the other side of the street. Hamid seemed to be watching the café, and if a tram had not come down the road and blocked his view of the café just then Nasri would have fallen into his hands. Instead, he slipped out the back door, jumped into a taxi, and fled to Dummar. The calligrapher was becoming some kind of giant kraken with tentacles reaching out to him everywhere.

  Uncle Badruddin was a rich gentleman farmer of the old school who thought city folk were much to be pitied. Even as a child Nasri had thought him rather limited in his outlook. When his uncle visited them in Damascus, bringing his apples, and began philosophizing on modern times and why they were so bad – “people have forgotten their Mother Earth,” he used to say – and when the conversation turned to the way young folk behaved, the inconstancy of married couples, the stink of the newfangled factories, or the wars flaring up all over the world, everyone had soon felt bored. Nasri could stand it for ten minutes at the most. His uncle couldn’t even tell a story, only preach sermon after sermon about the decline of morality.

  By now he was around seventy, and as well as the limitations of his mind, his fear of the Last Judgment (which he expected any day now) had intensified. Anything in the nature of a storm, a war, or an epidemic was reliable evidence, as he saw it, that the end of the world was imminent.

  It had become no easier to be close to him, and as he had not a single tooth left in his mouth you not only got an earful from him, you also got a face full of spray.

  “The end is coming, and the world will fall into the sun and burn up like a piece of paper over the fire,” he announced one evening. After such apocalyptic predictions Nasri found it harder than ever to get to sleep. All kinds of ideas raced through his head until at some point in the night he would wake up bathed in sweat.

  He himself soon didn’t know how long he had been staying with his uncle, who wore him out with his rustic hospitality. “Why are you picking at your food like a schoolboy? Help yourself! We have plenty here, we don’t want a guest to go hungry to bed, not like other hosts today. Eat all you like, we’re not watching,” he cried, and Nasri was sure his uncle was counting every mouthful he took.

  Nasri seldom ate dessert, and as he saw it fruit was for children and invalids. What he needed was a good strong coffee with cardamom. His uncle, on the other hand, expressed it as his opinion that coffee was poisonous, and since he would eat and drink only what came from Syrian fields, coffee was out of the question for him anyway.

  Nor could Nasri smoke, and he had to drink his arak in secret straight from the bottle, without water and without ice cubes. It was misery.

  The days and weeks lost any distinguishing features. A time came when Nasri woke from a nightmare and hurried out into the still cool night. He ran as if his uncle were after him. He did not slow down until he was on the main road and saw the lights of a bus on the way to Damascus. Nasri waved, the bus stopped, he climbed in and sat down. The bus was almost empty. A few farmers on their way to market in Damascus had loaded their vegetables and chickens on board.

  Soon he fell into a deep sleep. He didn’t wake up until the bus braked suddenly on the outskirts of the city to let a small flock of sheep cross the road. The shepherd shouted angrily at the lead ram, which had stopped in the middle of the road and was bleating at the city as it woke from sleep.

  “Even a castrated ram will fall in love in Damascus,” said Nasri to his neighbour.

  After three days in the city, he suggested, those sheep would be playing backgammon and drinking arak. “That’s why they go to slaughter quickly. Any sheep that gets away becomes a citizen of Damascus,” replied the man when the shepherd’s stick came down on the skull of the ram.

  The sky above Damascus was already growing lighter.

  Nasri stole into his office and phoned Tawfiq. “Where will you go now?” asked his confidant. His voice sounded weary.

  “To see my whore. No one will think of looking for me there,” said Nasri.

  On the way to Asmahan he wondered why he thought all his wives so ugly. He was sure that each of them was beautiful in her own way, but not to him, or not now. Why do people get ugly when we stop loving them? To him, Asmahan was pretty as a picture and very attractive, but his manager thought she was terrible. So, Nasri concluded, just before reaching her street, he loved Asmahan. Probably because she didn’t belong to him. Like the desert, she belonged to everyone and no one. From the pavement opposite the little house he saw an elegant elderly client leaving. He quickly crossed the road and pushed the doorbell.

  40

  Asmahan had heard of the flight of the calligrapher’s beautiful wife. Nasri’s part in it became harder to work out from week to week. He himself, however, had disappeared. And suddenly there he was in front of her. He must have been watching the house for some time, because the doorbell rang only a moment after Habib the old jeweller had closed the door behind him. She thought the elderly man had left some tablets, his glasses or his walking stick behind, because he was always forgetting something, and she suspected he did it on purpose so as to take her in his arms once more, for free. Habib was miserly. She opened the door, laughing. There stood the pale-faced Nasri.

  “Let me in, please, there’s a madman trying to kill me,” he said breathlessly. She let him in, and for a moment she even felt a little sorry for him. Nasri told her his problem at once. He wanted to hide out for a while on the first floor of her house, where none of her clients were allowed to go. The calligrapher, said Nasri, would have hired killers by now.

  “And when they find you,” said Asmahan, “they’ll kill me too. At least I’d like to know what for! Did the calligrapher write the love letters you gave me as well? Couldn’t you find a single word of your own for me? Did you pay him to express your love?”

  In her agitation she fetched a piece of paper and put it down in front of him with a dramatic gesture. “Write me a short letter here,” she said. Nasri was upset, he raged and roared, but it was no use. She knew now that he had been lying to her. Her pity turned to deep contempt.

  Then the doorbell rang. Asmahan smiled, for she knew exactly how she could get rid of him forever. An old story, told to her once by a school friend, had shown her how to humiliate vain men.

  “You must hide, quick.” She pushed him into a small cupboard where he could sit on a stool among buckets and brooms. What kind of life was this? Only recently he had been one of the most highly regarded citizens of Damascus, and now he had to hide from the world among all this junk!

  And as he was thinking of his sad fate he heard Asmahan laugh. The broom cupboard was separated from her bedroom only by a thin wooden partition. He had to listen to Asmahan and the unknown man making love and obviously enjoying it. When the sounds of lovemaking had died away at last, he heard the two of them talking about him. The man was telling Asmahan, in detail, what rumours about Nasri and Noura were going the rounds. Nasri almost exploded, and his heart was so full of shame that it felt like jumping out of his chest.

  “That bastard pays for letters,” said the man, “so that he can seduce women, and his own wives are seduced daily by one or another of their neighbours with no need for letters at all.”

  “Is that true?” asked Asmahan. “And have you been making up to them yourself?”

  “No,” said the man in her bed, “but a friend of mine has been through all four of Nasri’s wives.”

  Nasri was on the point of exploding. He could have wrung Asmahan’s neck, but what he was hearing took his breath away.

  For he was beginning to realize that Asmahan’s client was someone high up in the Secret Service. Like all men of his stamp, he was inclined to show off, but he was astonishingly well informed.

  “By now,” he added, “even my own men are looking for Nasri.”

  “Why? Has he been making love to their wives as well?”

  The man laughed. “No, not that, but the calligrapher is after him. And as the Secret Service doesn’t have much to do in a democr
acy, they like to get private work on the side. I always earn a little out of it myself without having to get my hands dirty. Well, what’s one to do? I long for the old days of strong government, although that’s slandered as dictatorship now. My men were overworked back then.”

  “And these days they’re hired to look for Nasri Abbani and murder him?” asked Asmahan.

  “No, they’re only looking for him. The calligrapher wants to keep the pleasure of murdering him for himself. It’s his honour that’s been dragged in the dust. My men can investigate all they like, but they have orders not to lay hands on him. If one of them does more than I’ve allowed, he’ll be fired on the spot. I have reasons enough to fire the entire army in my desk drawers.” The man laughed so much at his own joke that Nasri’s ears hurt.

  “And what does anyone who gives away Nasri’s hiding place get?”

  “It’d be twenty thousand to twenty-five thousand lira. The calligrapher’s in a hurry, and he’s a very rich man.”

  Nasri was in a trap. The longer he listened the more frightened he felt. How could this jumped-up calligraphic painter whose school he had supported be after his life? And how had it happened that Asmahan suddenly had the upper hand and could make herself so much richer with a single remark? What had become of his life?

  After a while all was quiet in the room next door to the broom cupboard, and what seemed another eternity later Asmahan opened the cupboard door. She was tearstained and drunk. “Get out of here this minute, before I weaken and call the calligrapher,” she said.

  Nasri was close to tears himself. “Let me explain,” he begged her.

  “Go to hell,” she shouted, and pointed at the front door of the house.