The Calligrapher's Secret

by Rafik Schami

  Nasri went from Asmahan’s house to the nearby Al Amir hotel, summoned Tawfiq, and told him what had happened. They discussed what he should do now.

  Tawfiq urged him to move to Beirut, but Nasri hated Beirut. He couldn’t stand the sea or the Lebanese way of life.

  “Then all we have is my late sister’s apartment,” said Tawfiq, who had heard from some of the porters of the buildings belonging to Nasri that strangers were giving them money and asking whether the owner was hiding out in one of his empty apartments. “It’s a modest place, but comfortably furnished. It’s going to be sold,” Tawfiq went on, “but that can wait a few months until we’re over this crisis. It’s also an anonymous kind of place, in a modern four-storey building with sixteen apartments, all just the same, and their tenants or owners are changing all the time. A real no man’s land,” said Tawfiq, getting to his feet. “What’s more, the building has two ways out to two different streets. I’ll fetch the car,” he said, and went to the door. He turned. “Take care,” he said in a paternal, almost affectionate tone, and he set off. Quarter of an hour later Nasri, looking out of the window, saw Tawfiq parking his Citroën outside the hotel entrance. Nasri paid for the room, and camouflaged by a pair of sunglasses, he slipped into the car.

  The apartment was on the third floor of a modern building close to Mount Qasioun. Looking out from the balcony, Nasri saw a small, dusty square and the main road of the quarter running downhill to the city centre. He had a good view of Damascus.

  “I could hold out here forever,” he told Tawfiq before his manager left the apartment. Nasri felt deeply grateful to him. That very day Tawfiq had apparently had the apartment cleaned and the fridge filled with delicious things to eat. He also found sugar, coffee, cardamom, tea, and various other comestibles in the kitchen, and a note: “Call me if you need anything.”

  Nasri did in fact call him two hours later, thanked him and asked if he could bring Elias Ashkar the pharmacist to the apartment, because he missed him. He was a reliable friend, he added, and a very civilized man.

  Tawfiq was not enthusiastic. “He’s a Christian,” he pointed out.

  “So what?” said Nasri, suddenly angry with the man to whom he had every reason to be grateful. “He can be a Jew or a fire-worshipper for all I care. He’s as decent a man as you or I,” he added, thinking that the pious Tawfiq would not much like that comparison.

  “As you like. I’ll bring him to see you tomorrow evening,” said Tawfiq. His words were forced into a corset of civility and regret.

  “And tell him to bring a bottle of lion’s milk,” added Nasri, knowing that obedient as he might be, Tawfiq, being a good Muslim, would decline even to buy arak, known jokingly as lion’s milk.

  The two visitors came that evening. But Tawfiq, visibly nervous, was quick to leave and drove home again. Elias Ashkar felt honoured to visit his friend of so many years in hiding, and hugged Nasri with tears in his eyes. “I miss our morning coffee together,” he said, much moved.

  Elias could only confirm what Nasri had long known, that the calligrapher was sparing himself no effort or expense to get hold of him.

  “Why don’t you have him killed? There are so many unemployed criminals ready to murder anyone you like for a hundred lira. Then you’d be left in peace,” said Elias, when they were both drunk. The bottle of arak was almost empty.

  “No, one doesn’t do that kind of thing. His wife has run away from him, the School of Calligraphy is in ruins, he’s closed his studio – and is he to die as well?” Nasri shook his head. “He’s a poor devil, and he’ll soon find out that I have nothing to do with any of it. Tawfiq is going to see him tomorrow and try to make him see sense. The goldsmith Najib Rihan is arranging the meeting.”

  Nasri still felt a trace of gratitude to the calligrapher, and when the arak had banished his remaining fear he told the pharmacist what an effect Hamid’s letters had on whores and presidents alike.

  When the pharmacist went to the bathroom, Nasri glanced at the newspaper that his friend had brought him. He saw an advertisement: “Fashion Show. Paris models display the ’56/’57 winter collection of the Paris fashion house of Carven in the Hotel Semiramis.” He smiled, remembering last year’s fashion show in the same hotel, organized by the very same fashion house of Carven. It looked as if the paper were a year out of date.

  It was late when the pharmacist left the building. He looked around the shadows of the entrance for a long time before weaving his way out into the lamplit street.

  Three days later Tawfiq came with news that the calligrapher was now entirely unhinged. Persecution mania, he said. Although he had declined the goldsmith’s offer to act as a go-between, he, Tawfiq, had gone to see Hamid Farsi, who had told him in all seriousness that Nasri had been the man pulling the strings of a conspiracy aiming to disgrace him publicly because he, Hamid Farsi, wanted to carry through revolutionary reforms of Arabic script. It wasn’t about Noura, it was only about his humiliation, and for that he was going to kill Nasri.

  Nasri was furious. The pharmacist had been right, he said, the calligrapher was a disaster that ought to be prevented. He would have to be killed to keep him from killing Nasri.

  Tawfiq did not reply to that. When Nasri stopped to get his breath back, he stood up. “I must get back to the office. We have a big deal to do with the Japanese today,” he said, leaving. Nasri was angry with his manager, and cursed him and all Japanese.

  When he went to the window, his blood froze with fear. There on the other side of the street, not ten metres away, stood Hamid Farsi leaning against a poplar, keeping watch on the building. Tawfiq left and went to his Citroën. Hamid waited a little longer, until a bus cut off the sight of the place where he was lurking, and then scurried across the road to the building as nimbly as a weasel.

  Nasri froze. He knew that neither his door nor most of the others had nameplates on them. But perhaps the calligrapher had found out exactly where he was hiding. He went to the kitchen and looked for a large knife, but all the knives were small and old, with wooden handles beginning to crumble. But then he saw a long, sharp kebab skewer. “You just come here. I’ll spit you on this,” he whispered, grinning nastily at the idea of holding the calligrapher over a flame with onions and peppers, like shashlik. With the skewer in his right hand he tiptoed to the door of the apartment, and listened for noises in the stairwell. In the apartment to the right of him a girl was crying loudly, in the apartment to the left of him the lid of a pan fell to the floor with a crash. Below him a woman swore. He thought he heard footsteps. Then it occurred to him that too much silence in one of the apartments might seem suspicious. He walked casually into the living room, turned the radio on, and when he came to a song of lamentation he thought: that’s the kind of thing housewives like. He went back to the kitchen, ran water, tapped a board with a cooking spoon, and knocked a water glass against a metal bowl.

  He felt ridiculous, and could have wept if fear had not driven his self-pity out of him. He stole over to the window and watched the street. Then he saw Hamid Farsi coming out of the building again and returning to his observation post behind the poplar.

  Nasri called Tawfiq, who said nothing, as though he had guessed as much. “I have news for you,” he said then. “It’s curious, and only you can decide if it is good news for you or not.” Even before Nasri could ask what this was all about, he heard Tawfiq say, “Your wife Almaz came here. She wants you. You’re to go to her, she says, and keep watch on Hamid Farsi from her house.”

  Nasri thought about it.

  “Not a bad idea,” he said then. “Tell her I’ll be with her tomorrow about midnight.”

  He thought of the many stories about clever women that he used to hear even as a child. He smiled and shook his head as he imagined the absurdity of keeping watch by night on his own pursuer Hamid Farsi.

  Only a woman could think of such a trick, he thought.

  Next evening Nasri kept watch on the man who was after him where he stayed by
the old poplar until late into the night.

  Just before midnight he left the building through the back exit, took a taxi, and drove through the city in the late summer night. He reflected on his life, as the lights of his beloved city soothed his soul. He wondered whether it wasn’t time for him to start an entirely new life. The first step in this new life would be to divorce all his wives. It would not be simple, and it would also be very expensive, but he never wanted to be stuck with wives he didn’t love again.

  Nasri was determined as never before to put this plan into practice. He had no idea how little time he had left.

  41

  Hamid Farsi was desperately searching for Nasri Abbani. At the end of July he had been sure that his enemy was in the city, because three detectives independently of each other had seen him in the Café Havana on Port Said Street, close to the Abbani building.

  So Hamid lay in wait for the fornicator near the Librairie Universelle bookshop, opposite the café. One afternoon he suddenly saw him sitting in the window. But Hamid wasn’t skilful enough; Abbani saw him and made his getaway through the back door.

  Hamid hired a detective agency to watch the houses of Nasri’s wives. It was expensive, and again and again there was a false alarm. Once a detective called him to say he was sure Nasri was now living in hiding with his second wife in the Salihiyyeh district. Hamid hurried off, knocked, and forced his way in. The woman fell to the floor. He felt sorry for her, but Nasri was nowhere to be found.

  He had no luck with the third wife in the Midan quarter either. As for the fourth wife, she wouldn’t even listen to him and she was certainly not letting him into the house. She stood there, a broad figure, cursing him and her own husband, and slammed the door. He heard her calling “Pimp!” in a loud voice from behind the closed door.

  That cut him to the heart.

  Nasri had not turned up at his office either. His deputy warned Hamid that if he found him prowling around outside the office again, he would set the police on him.

  Hamid was not in the least afraid of the police. He feared only that they might frustrate his plan of revenge. From that day on he avoided going down Port Said Street too often.

  He stuck close to Tawfiq. That was the advice of an old Secret Service man, and one day Tawfiq drove his old Citroën to a building at the foot of Mount Qassioun. Hamid was sure the man would lead him, unintentionally, to his master, but he couldn’t find a trace of Nasri anywhere. He spent two days and a long night watching the building. No luck.

  And then, a week later, Karam called him. The café proprietor said he had important news for him.

  Hamid set out at once for the café, where Karam told him that for the last few days Nasri Abbani had been hiding with his fourth wife Almaz.

  “And how do you know that?” asked Hamid suspiciously. He was afraid that the café owner was trying to trick him. Over the last few weeks his exposed nerves had been vulnerable to both useless detectives and men with malice in mind. The latter called at night and gave him an address where, they said, Nasri was staying. The addresses were once the brothel and twice well-known nightclubs, and in all three cases Hamid looked ridiculous.

  “Listen: my niece Almaz is Nasri’s fourth wife. She’s horrified by the way that fornicating goat would leave no whore in the city alone, and now he’s getting the Saudis to send him women at great expense.” Nasri, he said, had come back and was acting as if nothing had happened.

  “You know her house in Dakak Street,” said Karam. “You went to see her there once, she told me. The buildings in her street run almost parallel to those in yours.”

  Hamid was astonished. Yes, he had once briefly encountered that fat woman with her loose tongue, but he would never have thought that the wall of the house in Dakar Street lay right next to his own.

  “Nasri lived with my niece in Baghdad Street first,” Karam went on, “in the very same house that was going to be the School of Calligraphy later, but my niece soon discovered that her husband was sleeping with two of her women neighbours. That was too much of a humiliation for Almaz, and she didn’t want to spend a day longer in the house. That’s why they moved to the Old Town in such a hurry. Almaz had her mind set at rest for a while, until Nasri discovered your wife.”

  “But how could he have seen my wife?” asked Hamid, his throat dry.

  “His house has an attic with a view down into your inner courtyard.”

  “Attic? What attic? Our house is the tallest on three sides, with nothing but the sky above. And on the fourth side there’s only a high mud-brick wall without any windows in it. I’ve never seen anyone there,” said Hamid. He was beginning to feel that this was an absurd conversation, and he couldn’t imagine Nasri, who after all knew that he, Hamid, was after him, hiding so close to him.

  “You don’t understand because you’re a decent man. Unlike Nasri. You keep your eyes lowered because other men’s wives are taboo. You don’t even know how many women there are in the houses you look down to from your terrace. But he uses a tiny window as a peephole. Take a good look when you go home today,” said Karam, and he stood up, because one of his staff was indicating that he was wanted on the telephone.

  Hamid too rose, thanked Karam, and went straight home. Once there, he did indeed see the inconspicuous little window in the wall. The attic must be up there, above his house. The wall was so weather-beaten that you could see hardly any difference between the plaster and the two halves of the wooden window frame when they were closed. At the moment they were open. Hamid imagined that a woman had waved to him. He did not react.

  He had to admit that he had never noticed either that house or the other neighbouring buildings. So far as he was concerned, his own house ended on the ground floor anyway. He never went into the rooms on the first floor or up to the flat roof where his wife used to hang out the washing. He had never looked into the other inner courtyards. They were none of his business, as his grandfather and his father had drummed into him: other people’s houses were private.

  Hamid stood under the window and looked up. Any piece of paper weighted with a small pebble could land here, he thought.

  He went back to his chair beside the fountain and looked up once more. The window was closed again now, and he could hardly see it.

  Next morning he went out of the house early and did not come back until evening. Could it be that that bastard had always seduced Noura in the morning? He remembered how Abbani had once told him he didn’t wake up until nine, since he was out and about almost every night. He took his evening meal early with whichever of his wives it was his turn to visit.

  However that might be, if it had been only a case of the licentious ways of a fornicating goat, Nasri would have known at their first meeting, at the latest, that Noura was Hamid’s wife, and he would have stopped asking her husband to write letters for him at once. Or had the whole thing been planned far ahead? Had Nasri sought out Noura from the first, he wondered, to humiliate him? He felt boundless hatred for Nasri Abbani, to whom he had given nothing but beauty, and who had then struck a mortal blow to his reputation. And suddenly the generosity of Abbani’s donation to the School of Calligraphy seemed to be part of the diabolical plan to make his dream collapse like a house of cards. His enemy was no bearded idiot. No, his enemy was a smiling man who was only waiting to plunge a sharp knife into his body.

  Next morning Hamid rang Karam several times, to no avail. He walked through the Old Town and felt, for the first time, the glances of others burning into his skin.

  He turned back halfway, slammed the door behind him, and crept into the dark bedroom.

  Suddenly he heard the phone ring.

  He went into the salon where the telephone stood. It was Laila Bakri, a school friend of his wife’s, ringing to ask if Noura was back yet.

  He closed his eyes and saw sparks in front of a dark sky. “What’s that to do with you, you stupid whore?” he shouted into the mouthpiece, and hung up.

  42

  Fiv
e months after the disappearance of his wife, Hamid Farsi stabbed Nasri Abbani with a sharp knife as the latter was coming out of the Hammam Nureddin in the spice market, late at night, and walking along the dark street that led to the house of his fourth wife Almaz.

  Nasri died without knowing that his wife Almaz, with Karam’s help, had given him away. She was bitterly disappointed by the way he slept around. After coming into her life at a moment of weakness, he had left her with only one option after making her pregnant – unless she wanted to die – and that was to marry him. And then he betrayed her at every opportunity he had.

  After the wedding she began to love Nasri passionately. His generosity to her alone would have been reason enough. But the more she loved him, the colder he grew. And when she once told him after Nariman’s birth how much she loved him, he replied dismissively, “All right, all right, you’ll soon get over it. It’s like a fever, normally harmless. You should put your mind to losing weight instead.”

  From that day on her love evaporated.

  When Karam visited her one day, he told her about Asmahan the high-class whore whom Nasri had been visiting every day for years. Apparently, said Karam, she had fallen in love with him, and as he did not return her love she had stopped being willing to see him as a client.

  And then came the scandal over the calligrapher’s wife. She had had her suspicions for some time, because Nasri climbed up to the attic more and more often, and she felt even more deeply injured than by the whore Asmahan. Now it was from her own house that Nasri planned his new seduction.

  She had meant to teach him a little lesson with that fall, but Nasri had forgotten it even before the plaster came off his leg. And then he had installed an iron spiral staircase up to the attic, with ulterior motives in mind.

  She summoned her uncle Karam, and he came at once, as always when she needed him. He was not a real uncle, only a distant cousin of her father’s, but he was friendly, often helped her, and asked nothing in return. She liked his deep voice, and he gave her good advice, on the sole condition that she didn’t say a word about it to her husband, because he didn’t like him.