by Rafik Schami
When Hamid had finished writing, the master picked up the sheet of paper, examined it carefully, and gave it back to the boy. He was wondering how a thistle like Ahmad could have brought such a flower into the world, and was convinced yet again that God’s will was unfathomable.
“Write your name in the bottom left-hand corner, and the date by Islamic reckoning, and in a year’s time we’ll see what progress you’ve made.”
He was accepted into the studio. His father shed tears of joy. Hamid saw it as a mercy in every sense, for from now on his father was kinder to him. From the first day with the master, he had to learn not only calligraphic techniques and recipes for ink, but also how to cut reed pens, as well as studying geometry, symmetry and perspective, light and shade, the doctrine of harmony, and other important prerequisites of the art. Most important of all was a thorough study of the history of calligraphy, and all the styles of Arabic script. And if he had a brief break from work, the master handed him the Quran or a collected volume of Arabic poetry and said, “Here you can discover the secret fruits of the language.”
7
Serani was famous among calligraphers for never praising anyone, but he was the most courteous man on earth. His studio was like a beehive. As well as the journeymen, assistants, errand boys, and customers, two or three of the sons of rich families came to him to be introduced to the art of calligraphy. It was regarded as part of a good education at the time for boys to learn not only to ride well, but also to master Arabic script perfectly.
Hamid learned eagerly, and his master was lenient over obvious mistakes, but implacable if he saw something concealed and botched up. He particularly despised scratching letters out. “If something can’t be licked off it must be done again,” he taught. Serani never scratched a mistake away with a sharp knife, but licked the fresh ink off the paper like lightning if he noticed a mistake. At first Hamid was shocked and disgusted to see not only his master but all the journeymen licking up ink, but practising in secret he soon learnt that it was the best and quickest way to correct mistakes. Later he found out that all calligraphers did it, and they would say, joking, that a master calligrapher could be considered really experienced only when, in the course of the years, he had licked up a whole bottle of ink.
But a calligrapher who scratched out a great deal was considered unsure of himself. Hamid’s father scratched away on every calligraphic work he produced.
Master Serani never worked out the length of time that he or one of his assistants would need for a piece of calligraphy, but repeated again and again, “Let time make itself at home in your work.” With an attitude like that he was never going to get rich, but his calligraphy adorned the major mosques, ministries, and palaces of the city.
Hamid never visited his master at home, and even after years did not know where he lived, although from the first Serani had treated him as his personal pupil. He was his best student, and far too good for the menial tasks performed by Ismail the errand boy.
Ismail went to their master’s house several times a day, to do the shopping for Serani’s wife and take a hot lunch in a matbakiyya to Serani at work. He told Hamid how simply their master lived.
Serani’s standards were so strict that it was ten years before he would let any of his journeymen have the much-desired document certifying that he had completed his training, which calligraphers regarded as a master’s diploma. Many journeymen left his studio embittered and abandoned the career; others, feeling that they would never gain their master’s seal of approval, founded their own calligraphy workshops, with varying degrees of success.
Hamid received no special treatment. He had to learn everything thoroughly, and besides his own calligraphic exercises he had to help every day with the commissions being carried out by the workshop, for Serani regarded Arabic calligraphy as a communal art. He used to say that a European practised his art on his own because he thought he was a universe in himself, but that was the conceited notion of unbelievers. A man of faith knew that he was only a part of the universe, and so each of the master’s assistants was to join in the work of calligraphy at present being created.
These tasks were not difficult, but they called for patience and stamina, and Hamid possessed both those virtues. Although he fell into bed exhausted in the evening, he knew that working in Master Serani’s studio was Paradise compared to school. Everyone here spoke softly, and an apprentice was seldom beaten or scolded. Hamid only once earned a slap from Hassan, the oldest of the journeymen, when he upset the big jar containing freshly prepared ink. But Hassan was a decent man; his hand had gone out to strike Hamid, but he did not complain of him to their master. Once again, following the old recipe of an alchemist, he boiled a mixture of gum arabic, soot, and charred rose petals with water for hours, sieved it, thickened it until the solution was a soft dough, dissolved the whole thing, boiled it again, sieved and thickened it again, until the ink was smooth and black as night. The experienced journeyman carried out this whole performance in secret, so that their master would not hear about Hamid’s accident. When Serani asked for it three days later, the ink was ready and even perfumed with lemon blossom.
Nor did the others bear Hamid a grudge when he once ruined a reed, cutting it up too small. He had not known that the reed, which looked cheap, had been processed for three years in Persia before it came on the market. Master Serani always bought the most expensive implements for his workshop. “A calligrapher who stints on his purchases will be sorry for it later.”
It was another world. And Hamid was intensely grateful when he heard about the dirt and the harsh treatment that other boys had to endure in learning a trade. He felt like a prince.
Every morning the schoolboys in his street watched him leave home, and he smiled happily because he no longer had to go the same way as they did to the inferno that was school. The teachers in elementary school, which he had hated, made their canes whistle through the air all day above the children’s heads. They were giants and the pupils delivered up to their mercies were tiny.
Hamid had enjoyed hearing the history of past times and reciting the Quran, and he had been top of the class in arithmetic, but not a day went by when he wasn’t hit by one of the teachers or an older boy. He had always been small and thin. One bigger boy in particular persecuted him during every break. This boy was nicknamed Hassun, goldfinch, although he was not in the least like that delicate little bird. He was a colossus who looked down on Hamid and three other small boys and took away their sandwiches every morning. If they resisted he dragged them off one by one to a dark corner, where no school supervisor could see him, and crushed their balls until they were almost fainting with pain. Every night Hamid thought of the way he was going to punch his tormentor’s ugly face next day, but as soon as the bell rang for break he could already feel how his balls would hurt, and gave up his sandwich of his own accord.
For all its drawbacks, the school had a good reputation, which meant that he had never been able to convince his parents that it was hell on earth. His father was sure that it was a factory turning out the men of tomorrow.
Hamid looked at his father in the family photograph. “A factory making men,” he whispered bitterly, shaking his head. He walked up and down his cell, looking briefly at the dark sky through the barred window. Why had he been shut up here behind bars? It had been a fair fight. He had only defended himself against the powerful Abbani, who always got what he wanted without caring whether he was wrecking other people’s lives or not. He had not acted with malice, as the Abbani family’s wretched lawyer had made out.
Karam the café proprietor had told him that the philandering Nasri Abbani was living in hiding with his wife Almaz, but that he went to the Hammam Nureddin every Tuesday evening.
When Hamid and Karam met in the Café Havana Karam warned him that Nasri was armed, and advised him to take a pistol with him. He even offered to get hold of one for him. But Hamid did not want a pistol. Pistols were not for men. Any child could shoo
t down a hero from a distance with a pistol. Only a knife could redeem his honour.
And then that same Karam gave evidence against him in front of the judge. He was a man of bad character. No one knew just what part he had played in the story.
He, Hamid, had faced Nasri and told him he was going to kill him for the injury to his honour, and instead of apologizing, Nasri had asked since when rats like Hamid Farsi had any honour? He wasn’t even an Arab but a Persian mongrel, a refugee. As he spoke he put his hand in his jacket pocket, but the unwieldy revolver was stuck there. Should he have waited for the bastard to riddle him with bullets? No – he had gone for him with the knife.
What was so cold-blooded about that?
Hamid smiled bitterly. It had been a matter of life or death. Why was he not allowed his victory? In answer to that question, not only did the judges and lawyers shake their heads, so did Master Serani when he visited him in prison. “You fell into a trap,” he said quietly. He saw a conspiracy behind the whole thing. He had heard that the café proprietor had provided Abbani with his revolver, although Abbani himself didn’t want the gun and had never in his life held one. He had also been dead drunk that evening, as the autopsy showed.
Hamid’s master really believed that Abbani had been innocent, and Karam and the Pure Ones were behind it all. That wouldn’t have mattered if his teacher and master had merely been wrong about Abbani. But he also asked Hamid to return the certificate making him Grand Master of the Society of the Wise so that it could choose a successor, in order to avoid a split. Half the calligraphers admired Hamid and would have left it to him to choose his successor, the other half wanted to expel him from the Society, but they were prepared to refrain from doing so if he would return the certificate of his own accord.
“Tell them I have already found a successor, and I will give the certificate to him,” said Hamid.
Serani left, bowed down by grief. He turned one last time to wave, hoping that Hamid would change his mind and call to him, but he stood there like a statue, frozen and motionless.
Agitated, Hamid paced up and down his cell. He remembered that Nasri had been stinking of liquor, and was babbling rather than speaking. Karam’s part in it all was an enigma. Had he lured him into a trap, or had Karam himself been blackmailed and forced to give evidence against him? Perhaps he had been paid for it? Karam had egged him on to attack Abbani because the latter had, allegedly, raped Karam’s niece Almaz. Her family had been relieved when the man made up for it by marrying their pregnant daughter. And it was from this niece, Abbani’s fourth wife, that Karam had heard when and where he could find the philanderer. Karam denied it all in court, and the widow made herself out a loving wife on the witness stand and praised her dead husband’s fidelity until the judge sent her home. The judge himself, as Hamid’s lawyer whispered to him, had often been to the brothel in Nasri’s company.
“How else could I have found out where to find that strutting rooster Abbani if Karam hadn’t told me?” shouted Hamid, but the judge never seemed to have heard of logic. He said he was sticking to the facts, and the facts were that Hamid, it was well known, had been looking for Nasri for months, and had asked several men and women about him. That was the most important argument for finding him guilty, and it supported a verdict of premeditated murder.
Nothing was any good.
Hamid struck the wall with his fist. “Bloody justice! She’s a whore too, led around with her eyes blindfolded.”
He sat on the edge of his bed, bent down, and drew out a longish, large wooden box. He opened it and took out the sheet of paper on which he had written when he first visited his master’s studio.
He could still hear the words his master had said to his father back then, when they were leaving. “Ahmad, God gives the gift of talent to his elect, we cannot and need not understand why, and that gift, you may believe me, is no cause for rejoicing. It is a heavy duty. What I am saying verges on blasphemy, and I say it all the same. It is both a gift and an imposition. Go home and be glad you don’t have it, and look after the boy. I don’t want to hear of you mistreating him. Do we understand each other?”
His father had nodded without a word.
Master Serani did not want anyone else to supervise Hamid. He made him his personal pupil, and was very well satisfied with his progress. It was about five years before the Damascenes began speaking of “that infant prodigy of calligraphy,” which Hamid thought was going too far. He couldn’t hold a candle to his master, yet people said that the calligraphy of master and pupil could no longer be told apart.
His master handed over more and more important commissions to him now. At sixteen he was already in charge of the studio when Serani was away, and that was about half the time. More than one of the journeymen was as old as Hamid’s father, but that made no difference to Serani. Nor did the fact that being singled out like that made Hamid unpopular. In addition, his own perfectionism made him disinclined to overlook any carelessness from journeymen working to routine, and that did not make them like him any better.
Serani knew that his assistants were unhappy about it, but it was as if he was spellbound by his pupil. “Hamid is my deputy. Anyone who doesn’t do as he says can leave,” he said curtly.
Hamid put the leaf with that first work of calligraphy back in the wooden box, and was about to slide it back under the bed when he saw the thick notebook with the black cover in which he had entered his thoughts and secrets. It was a journal of his work and a diary combined, and on the advice of his master he had not given it any title, to avoid arousing too much curiosity.
At the time, Serani had bought him the large, thick notebook from the famous bookbinder Salim Baklan, whose workshop provided artistic covers for the most expensive printed copies of the Quran. “A book bound by Baklan is indestructible,” said Serani.
The binding had been broken when the pages were wrenched apart by force. When it happened his assistant Samad had laid the blame on the errand boy Salman, who had come to him through Karam.
Hamid shook his head to dispel his thoughts about the dubious motives of the café proprietor, and returned to the notebook. He had noted down the subjects of his exercises and his feelings every evening. Later, he confided to his diary his ideas about script and his secret plans.
He could write frankly because he had a special drawer in a large cupboard in the studio, and kept the key to it on a chain around his neck. But even if he sometimes left the drawer unlocked, no one ever touched anything in there.
He couldn’t keep anything at home, because nothing escaped his sister Siham, and no lock could withstand her curiosity for more than three days.
When he set up independently and had his own studio, he kept the notebook in the cupboard behind his desk. It was his most precious possession. It not only contained all his ideas, thoughts, and plans for a reform of calligraphy, but also the names and opinions of his friends in the Secret Society of the Wise. He kept it secure and unobtrusive among many other notebooks and works on ornamentation and calligraphy, for this cupboard was always kept locked because it also contained gold leaf and expensive writing instruments.
None of his assistants had ever touched the cupboard. He was sure of that. For a while he left secret marks that would have shown him if anyone had opened its door. But apart from him, no one seemed interested in what it held.
Only that little Salman was noticeably curious. He absorbed every remark about calligraphy and busily made notes on scraps of paper, but otherwise his talents were only moderate. Later, after suspicion had fallen on him and he had lost his job in the studio, he was said to have gone to work in a restaurant. If he had been after the secrets of calligraphy, he would not have become a restaurant chef.
The others in the studio were good fellows, and three of them even good craftsmen, but none of them really deserved to be called a calligrapher.
“The pen is the tongue of the hand.” He quietly read aloud the saying that Master Serani, at his request,
had written on the first page of the notebook.
Calligraphy, he himself had enthusiastically written, is the art of using black to bring pure joy to the desert of white paper. It gives it form and value.
He leafed through a few pages of technical comments on the correct proportions of the characters, then came upon an episode that had impressed him at the time. He had recorded it word for word.
Master Serani had told him: “The Prophet set great store by script, and the Quran, the word of God, is written in it. The first words heard by the Prophet Muhammad were: Read in the name of the Lord who made thee,
who created mankind out of liquid blood,
read, the Lord is generous,
He taught us to use a pen for writing,
He instructed man
in what
he did not know before.
After the victory of the battle of Badir the Prophet offered every prisoner freedom if he could teach ten Muslims to read and write.”
Hamid leafed through a few pages about the making and care of writing instruments. He remembered this time of his life very well. He had been studying about a year when he showed his master a saying that he had written out the night before as ordered by a customer. Serani praised his work. An older colleague was envious, and made poisonous remarks all morning, until Serani took him aside and told him to stop. Hamid was on the other side of a screen and had heard it all.
Sitting on his bed in the cell with the notebook in his hands, he remembered Serani’s words as well as if he had only just spoken them. “You are hard-working, but he is gifted. Just as bees do not know who led them to create the perfect hexagons of their honeycombs, Hamid does not know who makes his pen follow those invisible lines and shapes. So do not be envious; there’s nothing he can do about it.”