by Rafik Schami
While her parents tried to calm her down, Karam was firmly on her side. He was implacable. Karam indicated that the scandal over the calligrapher’s wife was something to do with pimping, and her husband was involved in it. But he advised her not to show that she suspected anything, for Nasri could throw her out, and then she and Nariman would have to live in poverty. The Abbanis had all the judges in the city behind them.
Nasri would soon die, said Karam, and it would be better for her to seem loyal to him and offer him a hiding place now that his other wives had proved so cowardly. Then she would be sure of a good inheritance for herself and her daughter.
“I’ll tell you straight out, Hamid will catch up with him. It’s only a matter of days or weeks. He got away from Hamid only at the last moment three times. But before he dies you must have made sure you’ve secured everything for yourself.”
So Almaz immediately rang Tawfiq and told him briefly that she was going to visit him at the office within the next half hour. He was to send the other staff away, she said, because she wanted to speak to him in a private. She had an idea that she didn’t want to discuss on the phone.
Karam smiled, gave Almaz a hug, and left.
Taking his victim by surprise, Hamid had stabbed him twelve times in the region of the heart. Every single thrust of his knife, which was sharp as a razor blade, would have been fatal, as the forensic expert said at the autopsy. Nasri Abbani didn’t even manage to take his pistol out of his pocket, and even if he had done so, he had never in his life fired a pistol.
For many years, Hamid was to think of the last minutes in the life of Nasri Abbani. “Hamid, you’re crazy,” gasped the dying man. “Killing me when I’ve never done you any harm.”
“What about my wife, you bastard?” Hamid had shouted. Abbani, lying in a pool of blood, raised his hand like a drowning man. His lips trembled in the wan light of the street lamps.
Rashid Sabuni, one of the best-known lawyers in Damascus, had no difficulty in convincing the judge and jury that life imprisonment for this brutal murder, committed with intent, would be the minimum sentence demanded by justice.
Not just the number of stab wounds, all the other evidence was against Hamid Farsi. The café proprietor Karam Midani also incriminated the accused. He had met the calligrapher again and again, he said, and since the disappearance of Hamid Farsi’s wife he had had only one thought in his head, to kill Abbani.
Hamid shook his head, horrified. He thought he must be losing his mind. He accused the witness Karam of being a member of the secret society of the Pure Ones, and a homosexual notorious all over the city. Karam had egged him on to follow Nasri, and had even offered him a pistol. Hamid was so beside himself that he tried to attack the witness physically. Two police officers forcibly escorted him out of the courtroom.
His lack of respect throughout the trial for the judge, and his total failure to show any remorse, earned him a life sentence.
However, he spent less than two years of it in the Citadel prison in Damascus, where right at the start, to the fury of the Abbani family, he was given one of the finest three cells, known by the inmates as “the villa.” He was spoilt, and well treated, and was allowed to do calligraphic work for the prison governor. Protests did no good, because the al-Azm clan, of which the governor was a member, was even more powerful than the Abbani clan.
Nasri’s younger brother Muhammad, confused by grief and rage, used underworld connections to hire a murderer held in the same prison as Hamid Farsi to kill him. However, the man was overpowered by the guard in charge of those three cells. After three hard blows in the face the criminal, a man getting on in years, was shaking with fear and disclosed the name of the man who had hired him.
A charge of incitement to murder was brought against the Abbanis. They were glad to get off just by signing a document. Next day their lawyer explained exactly what it was to which, in their fear of retribution and scandal, they had put their names. Their horror was boundless. They, the undersigned, took the entire responsibility on themselves if anything unfortunate were to happen to Hamid Farsi, their brother’s murderer.
The Second Kernel of the Truth
Others read in order to study,
while we must study so that
we can read.
Taha Hussein (1862 – 1973)
Egyptian writer
Truth is a jewel, and makes the life
of its owner rich but dangerous.
Yousef S. Fadeli (1803 – 1830)
Syrian alchemist
1
Only in prison did Hamid Farsi really come to think about his life, which now seemed strange and far away. He felt relieved to be in this cell, but that very feeling disturbed him. “Sentenced to prison for life,” he repeated, to present his disaster to himself as dramatically as possible, but he could not find anything dramatic about it.
Lying on his bed, he was amazed to realize how quickly all that he had built up had fallen into ruin. His reputation as a man, his fame as a calligrapher, his certainties and his pleasure in life were all gone as if they had not until very recently been impregnable defences.
In the afternoon, drinking tea with Governor al-Azm, he said casually, as if speaking to himself, “Life is nothing but a struggle against decline and decay, and we always lose in the end.”
Noura’s flight had been the beginning of his downfall. It was a mystery to him why she had not run away with Nasri, but had left that fornicating goat behind for him to deal with. As if she wanted him to kill Nasri, as if Nasri had to pay for something. Maybe Nasri had never told her that he had four wives until he had slept with her, and the information came as an unpleasant surprise.
Had she perhaps wanted to teach Nasri a lesson? Had she underestimated him, Hamid? Did she maybe think that he would just slap Nasri around a bit to make him look ridiculous? Or had she wanted Nasri to kill him? Hamid had never understood women. His grandfather had once looked at the clear, starry sky above Damascus and told him that only when he had counted every star there would he be able to fathom the mind of a woman.
The Citadel prison occupied a large site in the extreme north of the Old Town. The citadel itself had been destroyed and rebuilt several times since the days of Saladin, and during the four hundred years of Ottoman rule it had not been under the direct authority of the governor of Damascus, but along with its garrison was directly answerable to the Sultan in Istanbul. The Ottoman sultans knew that the restless city of Damascus was more easily governed without the powerful Citadel. Sure enough, the Sultan’s loyal elite troops came out of the Citadel whenever there was a revolt in the city to subdue the rioters.
The French then posted their own garrison in the Citadel and for twenty-five years used it as a prison for Syrian insurgents. Since independence it had served for several decades as the central prison, but out of indolence the Damascenes went on calling the prison just “the Citadel.” That was to come in useful, for fifty years after independence the building was renovated and once again was officially known as the Citadel. The prison was moved elsewhere.
The Citadel was one of the few in the east that had not been built on a hill but level with the rest of the city. In its days as a prison a tangle of rusty barbed wire and shapeless rails secured the walls and obscured the view of the building.
Hamid’s cell was on the second storey of the north wing. That was an advantage, because this side was spared the blazing heat of the summer sun. From the grating over his door he could look out at the inner courtyard of the Citadel, as well as the roofs and streets of the Old Town. Somewhere among them lay his beautiful house. The small barred window opposite the door showed him a section of the rooftops of the Souk Saruya quarter where he had once had his studio.
Out of eight hundred prisoners, Hamid was one of three with special privileges. The cell next to his was occupied by a rich Damascene merchant’s son who had committed seven murders. He was a quiet man with a pitifully pale complexion who had slaughtered his wife�
�s family in a quarrel. The third and rather larger cell contained the son of an emir unknown to Hamid, serving life imprisonment for the vicious murder of a cousin. If the murdered man had not been the president’s son-in-law, he assured people, he would not have spent a single day in prison. He was unpleasantly talkative, loud-mouthed, boastful, and crude. Hamid avoided him.
Hamid’s cell was a spacious room. But for the barred door and window you would have thought it was the attic room of a fine house. He was allowed his calligraphy instruments, because the prison governor, a distant relative of Prime Minister Khalid al-Azm, revered his art. He had told him over tea on his very first day that he was extremely sorry to see him in prison over a woman. He himself had four official and five unofficial wives, and he wouldn’t dream of quarrelling with another man over any of them.
He regretted, he said, that he could not set Hamid free, but as long as he, Governor al-Azm, was in charge of this prison he would be treated like a nobleman, for calligraphers were the true princes of Arab culture. “What am I, with my degree in law from the Sorbonne, by comparison with you?” he added with a show of modesty.
Hamid was not in the mood for bombastic speeches, and the man talked on and on without stopping like a garrulous drunk. However, he was soon to find out that Governor al-Azm was as good as his word. Both the guards and the older inmates, the men who really ran the prison, treated him respectfully. He did not have to do menial work or stand in line for anything. A guard knocked on the door twice a day and asked in subservient tones, if with a touch of irony, whether there was anything he wanted apart from his freedom.
Pots of jasmine and roses, his favourite flowers, were quickly brought in to adorn the walkway in the open air that separated his cell from the handrail around the inner courtyard. He could also send out for ink and paper of the best quality.
Not a week went by before his first commission came from the governor. He wanted a saying from the Quran written out in Kufic script, which Hamid did not particularly like. “And it’s wanted in a hurry,” added the guard bringing the message, as he did later with all the other commissions for works of calligraphy intended by the governor for his distinguished friends at home and abroad.
On his first and only exploration of the lower floors of the prison, where he was allowed to go accompanied by a guard, Hamid realized what luxury he and the two scions of powerful clans enjoyed in the Citadel. All the others lived in dank, dark misery and the stench of decay.
What kind of men were they? The prisoners included professors, writers, lawyers, and doctors who could not only speak for a full hour on Arabic poetry and philosophy, but also loved French, English, and Greek literature. In here they were prepared to murder a man brutally for a cigarette, a bowl of soup, or for no reason at all. They seemed to have stripped off the veneer of civilization like a thin raincoat as soon as they entered the prison.
He never wanted to go down to those lower levels again.
Besides his most important calligraphic instruments and the certificate that testified to his mastery of calligraphy, he had with him a unique thirteenth-century document the size of a hand, several books of theoretical and secret writings about the art of calligraphy, and three rare eighteenth-century calligraphic works that his master had given him. He also had a photograph dating from the old days brought from his studio, where it had always hung above his desk. Time and damp had left stains on the picture, turning its black to light sepia. He hung it on the wall beside the window of his cell.
The photograph had been taken after a party at his grandparents’ house, when he himself was still a small child. Neither his sister Siham nor his younger brother Fihmi had yet been born. Never before had he looked at the photograph as often as he did now.
2
His grandfather sat on a chair like a throne in the front row, with Hamid, his favourite grandchild, on his lap, and they were both looking at the camera with a triumphant expression. Grandmother Farida, with some flowers beside her, was sitting on a small bench at a certain distance from them as if she did not belong with her husband. Behind his grandmother, in the very middle of the picture, stood his youngest uncle, Abbas, and to the left of him was Uncle Bashir. Hamid’s father stood by himself on their left. He was the firstborn son. Instead of taking over his father’s business, as was usual for an eldest son, he had decided in favour of calligraphy, but all his life he was only an average craftsman. There was a dull look in his eyes. And some way from him, as if to demonstrate the distance she preserved from this family, stood Hamid’s mother, her expression gloomy as she gazed into the distance.
Centre right, behind his grandfather, stood Aunt Mayyada with her husband Subhi in his uniform. He was still a French Air Force officer at the time. Later, as an experienced airman, he was recruited by the new Saudi army for good money and with the prospect of Saudi citizenship. So he immigrated to Saudi Arabia, but Aunt Mayyada thought life there was tedious, and she couldn’t stand the heat and the isolation. She and her children came to Damascus every year. She soon had nine children, and they stayed in Damascus longer and longer as time went by. After a while there were rumours that her husband had married a Saudi princess. The royal house thought well of Subhi, who was high up in the Defence Ministry.
Later on, when Aunt Mayyada was growing old, she came to Damascus by herself. Her sons and daughters stayed with their father or with their own families, and Hamid gradually realized that his aunt lived alone. Her husband sent her a generous allowance, but he never visited her or his native city again.
Mayyada was fond of Hamid, but he did not keep in touch with her much because his parents disliked her. However, when he needed her help she was there for him, for instance in arranging his second marriage.
“Grandfather was right. Aunt Mayyada brought bad luck. Whatever she touched went wrong,” whispered Hamid. He turned his eyes to the picture again. Between his aunt and her husband stood their firstborn son Rushdi. He was three years older than Hamid and had a bad squint. At the time Hamid thought Rushdi was joking and squinted to make other people laugh, but when the boy pulled both his ears and still kept squinting horribly Hamid realized that it was no joke. Rushdi’s four sisters were not at the party, and so not in the photograph either. They were visiting their other grandparents, who unlike Grandfather Farsi liked girls.
To the right of brother-in-law Subhi, Aunt Sa’adiyyeh and her fiancé Halim were posing as if about to appear in the newspaper. Halim was a well-known folksinger of the time, and the pin-up of all the young women in Damascus. After three years of marriage he returned Hamid’s aunt to her parents, still virgo intacta, as the women said, blaming him. He divorced her and fled abroad with his gay lover, a Canadian diplomat. Aunt Sa’adiyyeh was pretty as a picture, and soon married a young film director. She immigrated to the United States with him, and the family never heard from them again.
To one side and in front of Halim the singer stood Aunt Basma, who was only twelve at the time. Hamid’s grandmother had had her when she was forty and did not like her at all. Basma was the black sheep of the family. Even in the picture Hamid could see that she was not enjoying the occasion. She did not look friendly or in party mood, but stared indignantly at the photographer as if she wanted him to explain why the family had gone to such expense that day.
Basma had fallen in love with a Jewish doctor in the middle of the 1930s and immigrated to Israel with him, not that the country was called Israel yet; it was still Palestine, and was under British occupation.
Grandfather took this as a personal insult and publicly disinherited her, in front of respected businessmen and sheikhs as witnesses, to retrieve what he could of his honour.
Because Grandmother was superstitious and feared the number thirteen, the family’s old cook Widad stood next to Aunt Basma. Hamid remembered her well; in the kitchen she always had an apron covered with greasy marks round her waist, but in the picture she wore an elegant black dress.
To Hamid now, the photogr
aph bore witness to another world, like old pictures of American Indian chiefs, harem ladies, or Hawaiian dancing girls. And soon after it was taken that world had disappeared forever. The photograph captured a moment of happiness. It was one of the few times in Hamid’s childhood and youth when he had tasted infinite joy. Grandfather loved him and told everyone that when Hamid was fifteen he was going to pass the carpet business on to him, for unlike his own sons, his grandson had inherited his sharp mind. He would let no one treat the boy harshly; he spoilt him and played with him like a friend. It was he who initiated Hamid into the mysteries of mathematics. Those hours full of strange calculations left him with a love of numbers for life. And if Hamid did not understand something, and asked, his grandfather would explain patiently as if he had all the time in the world.
Hamid wanted to stay with his grandfather forever, so there was a drama at the end of every visit because he didn’t want to go home to his parents’ house, which was chilly as the grave. There was a sour smell about it, while his grandparents’ house smelled of jasmine and roses.
His grandfather Hamid Farsi was his protector until the day he died, which particularly annoyed his mother, who hated her father-in-law. She stood as far from him as possible in the photograph, with her lips firmly compressed, as if she and not Hamid had been slapped shortly before. You couldn’t tell from looking at him in the picture, but one ear had been burning like fire. However, his triumph over his mother helped him to forget the pain.