by Rafik Schami
On that day, when his grandmother was celebrating a round-number birthday, his mother was in a particularly bad temper. While the photographer was making preparations in the courtyard for the big family picture, she took him into one of the small, windowless rooms of the big house and slapped him because he didn’t want to stand between her and his father, but insisted on sitting on his grandfather’s lap.
The cook heard him screaming, opened the door, and told his mother to stop hitting him at once, or she would tell Hamid Bey, the master of the house, that she was tormenting his darling grandson.
As his mother stormed out in a huff, the cook washed his face, carefully combed his hair, and whispered encouragingly to him that Grandfather was specially fond of him. Then she gave him a caramel.
He was four or five at the time, old enough to understand what was going on.
3
As the firstborn, Hamid bore his grandfather’s name, a custom that had existed since the Middle Ages. He never guessed that his name was to govern his fate.
A year after the family photograph was taken, his brother Fihmi was born. He looked very like their mother, blond and blue-eyed and well-rounded, while Hamid had inherited the darkness of his grandfather’s complexion, eyes, and hair.
Fihmi was their mother’s darling, and there was no room left in her heart for anyone else. When he was two, still not talking yet and hardly able to walk properly, she took him from doctor to doctor – and as you could count the real doctors in Damascus on the fingers of one hand at the time, that meant from quack to quack.
But none of them did him any good. It was to turn out later that Fihmi suffered from an incurable brain disease. He was beautiful as a doll, and their mother let his curly hair grow long, so that he looked like a pretty girl. Almost every week she paid good money to have him photographed, she adorned the pictures with olive branches, and sometimes even lit a candle in front of them and burned incense in a dish.
Nor did Siham, who was born a year after Fihmi, have any love from their mother. The girl would have been neglected if a widow from the house next door had not stepped in. She treated Siham like her own daughter. Sometimes her mother forgot to fetch her home, and she would spend the night with the widow, who had always wanted a child but never had one.
And then came the day that was to turn the life of the whole family upside down. While Hamid’s mother was enjoying a cosy chat with the widow next door, he stole into his parents’ bedroom, where his brother was asleep in the big bed. He wanted to play with him and maybe tease him a little. Hamid shook the little boy, but he didn’t want to wake up. When he pinched him rather hard, Fihmi began screaming in such a loud voice that Hamid was frightened and held his brother’s mouth closed. The child wriggled and hit out. Exactly what happened then could never be explained, and Hamid did not tell anyone about it, but in any event his brother fell head first on the tiled floor, and suddenly lay perfectly still. Hamid, in the grip of terrible fear, ran to his own room and pretended to be playing marbles. Soon after that he heard his mother utter a scream that went to the marrow of his bones. She screamed so loud and long that soon the whole neighbourhood was in the house. No one bothered about Hamid.
Fihmi’s death hit his parents hard. His father blamed his mother, saying it wasn’t the fall that had killed the boy but all the pills prescribed by the quack doctors. “He had to suffer more than if you had entrusted him to the will of God,” he shouted. The fall, he claimed, had been the work of an angel’s hand to spare the child further torments.
When Hamid heard that, he thought for a moment that he had indeed felt the strong, invisible hand of an angel that day. But he kept it to himself, because he was afraid of his father’s despair, and his mother was absorbed in her own grief. She had eyes for no one and nothing else, wept and wailed and blamed herself. Because she had been drinking coffee with the widow next door when Fihmi died, she cursed coffee and never touched it again until her own tragic death.
And now poor ill-starred Fihmi finally became a saint to whom his mother prayed day and night. Her grief-stricken veneration of him went so far that she had his likeness imprinted on a gold medallion that she wore on a chain around her neck, which to Hamid’s father was like a ridiculous imitation of a Christian custom.
At the age of six, Siham was already so mature and tough-minded that she took no more notice of her parents or her brother. She was repelled by her mother’s religious mania, which was gradually beginning to infect her father, although he had resisted it at first. After a while they were both praying, burning candles and incense, and talking of nothing but angels and demons.
Siham laughed disrespectfully when her parents’ mania spiralled out of control, and although she earned many slaps, she did not keep quiet. With the years, her heart grew colder than the block of ice that was delivered every day to keep the vegetables and meat in the larder fresh.
The thin little girl grew into a tall, very feminine woman who turned all men’s heads. Her parents lived in fear that their daughter would bring shame on the family, and agreed at once when a photographer of modest means asked for Siham’s hand in marriage. Siham was just sixteen at the time. Years later she told Hamid that she had fixed the whole thing, and had got the photographer wrapped around her little finger at their very first meeting. “I wanted to get away from that damned tomb,” she had said. Her husband, who was not particularly bright, genuinely believed that this beauty, who let him photograph her in the poses assumed by American movie divas, had fallen in love with him although she treated him like a dog. Hamid took great pains to avoid her house; he could not stand either his sister’s coldness or her husband’s subservience to her.
His own disaster left her cold as well. She was interested only in getting her hands on everything she could. She had been full of respect and slimy servility to him when he was at the height of his fame, and kept coming to his studio to ask for money for some tasteless object or other. And he always cursed his soft heart when she giggled boldly, triumphantly put the money in her purse, and sashayed out of his studio chewing gum.
Now that he was in prison she was too embarrassed to come and visit him, but had no scruples about laying hands on his money and his goods.
To dispel these gloomy thoughts of his sister, Hamid scrutinized his father’s face in the photograph closely with a small magnifying glass.
Could anyone tell from the picture that he was in great financial straits at the time? He had broken off his training with the famous calligrapher al-Sharif a year earlier, out of sheer laziness, and set up on his own. He had no idea yet of the great difficulty of getting commissions as an independent calligrapher in Damascus without a certificate from a master of the art. Simply to show off, he rented a studio in the al-Bahssa district, the calligraphers’ quarter of the city at that time, but he had to give it up again, and in addition the area suffered a flood. From then on he worked at home. The room that he grandly called his studio had one window looking out on the courtyard and another between it and the children’s room, so Hamid could watch his father at work for hours on end without being noticed.
His mother might not have been there at all. She was obsessed by Fihmi. She spoke of nothing but her dead darling, and tried to get in touch with him at expensive séances with mediums who were charlatans. The house was going to rack and ruin. And since Hamid’s father was a man of weak character he did not get divorced, but clung all the more to his wife as she slid toward derangement. He could hardly support the family on the few small commissions that he still received.
About a year after Fihmi’s death, Hamid’s mother had fallen victim to full-blown madness, and his father followed her example a little later. Hamid had to keep quiet, because if he expressed the slightest doubt his mother would be beside herself with fury, striking out and screaming. Once she hit his right ear, which bled profusely, and was deaf for weeks. Even years later his hearing in that ear was poor.
If he wondered now why he had not
wept at his parents’ funeral, it was not because of the ridiculous nature of the few blackened remains that he had been handed after their death in a bus accident, or because of the hypocritical words about his father spoken by the sheikh, who had been well paid to officiate. The real reason, it struck him here in prison, was that they had made him weep so often that in the end he had no tears left for them.
4
Thunder was rumbling in the distance. Hamid’s temples were throbbing, as they always did when a storm was coming. The thunder and lightning moved closer, and when the storm was right above Damascus his headache died away. There was a power outage, the whole city was left in darkness, and in his cell he heard the curses of the people of Damascus in the nearby streets, shops, and cafés surrounding the Citadel.
He lit a candle to look closely at the faces in the photograph again, wondering whether what he knew about his family sprang from his imagination or from memory. He wasn’t sure.
Soon the lights came back on, but only in the office building and the three privileged cells. The lower floors remained plunged in deep darkness, from which screams rose to him like the cries of the damned being tortured in Hell. One voice made his blood run cold; a man was begging for mercy. His voice was as terrified and hopeless as the lowing of a young calf just before it goes to slaughter. His cries were drowned out again and again by the laughter of the other prison inmates down there. The man begged the guards to protect him, but he called for them in vain.
His mind in turmoil, Hamid went back to the photograph on the wall and examined it once more. The bearing of his grandfather Hamid Farsi bore witness to his pride, his love of life, and his melancholy and pain. He seemed to be proud of his noble origins and his achievement. Hamid remembered that his grandfather, who was not religious, often talked about an old Sufi master called al-Hallaj, who considered that God and man were equal and their union made them an inseparable entity. The Sufi scholar had been crucified in Baghdad for his opinions in the year 922.
And he, Hamid? What guilt had he brought on himself? Had his downfall not begun when he decided to reform Arabic script? Reforming the script and its language would be a blessing to mankind. Why did he encounter so much opposition, so much obstinacy, as if he hated Islam? He who had always lived an upright and devout life, so devout that his grandfather had once advised him not to be so hard on himself? Mankind, said his grandfather, had invented Paradise and Hell and set them up on earth.
Hamid looked around him. Wasn’t he shut up in hell here, while his adulterous wife was amusing herself somewhere out in the wide world?
His grandfather had been something of a playboy, a man of many aspects. He was the most successful man in Damascus, yet at the same time bitterly disappointed in his sons, so that he had told Hamid he must grow up quickly and save his reputation or all that he had built up would be lost.
At the time Hamid wasn’t even seven years old, but he decided to eat twice as much as usual so as to grow faster.
Later, Hamid discovered that his grandmother disliked him because she couldn’t stand all the things that her husband enjoyed: parties, women, laughter. “If I don’t care for someone,” said his grandfather once, “she’ll be bosom friends with him next day.”
Hamid held the magnifying glass closer to his grandfather’s face. He saw pain in the corners of his eyes and mouth. And indeed, he had had to bear pain as heavy as mountains. He was Persian by origin, and as a child of four had fled with his father to Damascus from Iran, where he had seen fanatics murder his sister and mother because someone had informed on his father for sympathizing with a rebel Sufi sect.
As if by a miracle, Ahmad and his son Hamid escaped to Damascus from their pursuers. At the time the city hospitably took in many refugees, including him and his father. Ahmad Farsi, a carpet merchant, was already very rich at the time. With the gold dinars he had brought with him, he bought a fine house near the Umayyad Mosque, and a large shop in the Souk al-Hamidiyyeh, and grandfather Hamid Farsi went on running the business after his father’s death.
Ahmad and his son soon became Syrians. Ahmad hated religious fanatics of any and every sect worse than the Devil, “for the Devil is a prince of noble form,” he said, “and it was not he who took my daughter and my wife. A fanatical neighbour strangled them both with his own hands.”
He never prayed.
His son, Hamid’s grandfather, only ever went to the mosque to meet one of the more religious businessmen there. He kept open house for everyone, and entertained Jews and Christians at his table as if they were members of his own family.
In the picture Grandfather wore a waistcoat and tie, and he had a gold watch in his breast pocket. You could still see the watch-chain in the picture, although it was made of fine gold thread. At the time when the photograph was taken, Hamid Farsi had been the best-known carpet merchant in the city.
When his grandfather died, his grandson Hamid walked behind the coffin feeling numb. He was eleven or twelve, and already apprenticed to Serani the great master of calligraphy. He could not grasp the fact that death was final, or understand why it was in such a hurry to take those you loved best away. It could have removed a number of unpleasant neighbours from the street instead.
Not until much later did he realize that he had buried his happiness that day. Unseen, it lay in his grandfather’s coffin. Never again did he feel the tingling that refreshed his heart as soon as he set eyes on his grandfather. Of course he had achieved a great deal, and less gifted calligraphers envied him, but none of them knew that he, the famous Hamid Farsi, was an unhappy man.
After Grandfather’s death, his three sons quarrelled. Hamid’s father inherited nothing but five carpets. Grandfather had bequeathed the house to his middle son, and the youngest son inherited the business in the Souk al-Hamidiyyeh. Grandfather had either overlooked his firstborn son, Hamid’s father, or had never forgiven him for going his own way instead of working in the family business.
Hamid’s father had been a religious child. The script in the Quran and on the walls of the mosques fascinated him long before he could read it. He wanted to be a calligrapher from the first, and he finally got what he wanted, but in all he did he was never more than an assiduous imitator, and his talent was only moderate.
Hamid’s mother claimed that Grandfather had disinherited her husband because he despised her and would rather have married his son to a cousin, which confirmed his mother in her opinion that her husband’s family – apart from him – were all villains and malefactors.
Siham, Hamid’s sister, thought their father had been disinherited because just before Grandfather’s death he had forced Hamid the younger to apprentice himself to a calligrapher instead of going into the family business. He apparently said, “That useless Ahmad has broken my heart three times: he married against my will, he refuses to take over my business, and he won’t let my favourite grandson go into the carpet business either. This is enough.”
Whatever the true reason may have been, Hamid’s father went away as good as empty-handed. However, he did not want the Farsi family to lose face, so he did not protest. He watched with satisfaction as his two brothers came to no good and finally sank into ruin. He felt particular superiority in that it was not he himself but God who had avenged him.
Bashir, the elder of Hamid’s two uncles, fell sick of a muscular wasting disease soon after Grandfather’s death. Soon he could no longer walk, and he cursed his wife day and night for tormenting him. Hamid’s father refused to go and see his severely ill brother, although the house was less than a hundred metres away from his own street.
Uncle Bashir was a sad sight. He sat on a shabby mattress surrounded by rubbish, the house was in a bad state, and his wife was either out or on the point of going out when Hamid went to see his uncle. She was not beautiful, so she made herself up elaborately, but she had a beautiful body and always smelled of an exotic perfume called Soir de Paris. Once Hamid took one of the little blue bottles that stood under the
big mirror in the bathroom. Whenever he smelled it, it reminded him of his aunt.
Without his parents’ knowledge, he kept stealing away to see Uncle Bashir. Not out of pity, as he assured his sister, but because his uncle fascinated him. From where he sat he could follow his wife down the streets and into strange houses, where she gave herself to all sorts of different men so that she could buy pretty clothes, jewellery, and perfume.
The tales that Uncle Bashir told were gruesomely erotic. But he told them as if Hamid’s aunt were not his wife but the heroine of a story. He narrated her adventures with verve, and was full of concern when she was in danger of being abducted, or a jealous lover threatened her with a knife.
“As soon as she goes out of the doorway she’s the heroine of my story,” said his uncle, when Hamid asked one day why he was so pleased when, in his tales, his wife made love to other men and drank wine, while he had just been reproaching her in real life for not wanting to cook him a hot meal.
“Here she’s my wife, and she makes life hell for me.”
He never repeated a story, and if he noticed that his words were holding Hamid spellbound he would break off in the middle. “Well, that’s enough for one day. We don’t want you feeling randy about your own aunt. Off you go home, and don’t come back until you’ve forgotten her.”
Of course Hamid was back next day, all innocence, to hear more about her adventures.
Now he brought his face closer to the photograph. He looked hard at Uncle Bashir, who stood behind Hamid’s grandmother with his chest thrust out, beaming like a hero and laughing with bold confidence. How weak human beings were. A virus, some kind of short-circuit in the brain – and a hero becomes a picture of misery.
5
Hamid let his gaze move on to his grandmother. She was not sitting, as usual at the time, on a chair next to her husband, but by herself on a bench. A bouquet of flowers lay on the bench, as if to indicate that no one was to sit beside her. It was her birthday. She was a daughter of the grand Damascene al-Abed clan, and loved flowers and poetry. Her father Ahmad Izzat Pasha al-Abed was the best friend and adviser of the Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid.