by Rafik Schami
He hoped the governor would understand, he wrote, that he could not begin until April, for the mosque in Aleppo on which he was working was to be consecrated at the end of March in the presence of the President of Syria. At present he was working twelve to fourteen hours a day so that the calligraphy would be ready in time. However, he would devote the month of April to this wonderful commission from the Damascus prison.
The governor was delighted. He sent for Hamid to come to his office, and showed him the letter. In the ornamentation that surrounded it like a decorative border, and could be deciphered by no ordinary mortal, the master from Aleppo wrote that he would feel it an honour to receive the greatest prize of his life, although by comparison with him, Grand Master Hamid, he was a mere dilettante.
When Hamid was sure that his successor would come to Damascus, he sent the guard to his sister Siham telling her to come and visit him at once. Siham was more than a little surprised to find a Hamid who seemed to be powerful even behind prison bars.
Hamid made his demand at once. “If I have calculated correctly, you have laid hands on a million lira of my property. Bring me fifty thousand here, and I will forgive you everything. And don’t sell my house, because I am going to live in it when I get out of here. You can let it, I’m happy with that, but bring me the money. I need it for a noble purpose. If I do not have it within a week, I shall instruct my lawyers to recover everything you have taken from me. And remember, I shall be out quite soon. The governor says I shall be pardoned after serving seven years. Do you hear that? And what are seven years? Bring me fifty thousand lira and I will consider that we are quits.”
“I’ll do my best,” Siham said evasively at last, and she left.
Ten days later the governor summoned Hamid to his office again. He gave him a large bag made of bamboo and reeds.
Hamid rewarded the guard, and when he was alone again slit open the bottom of the bag and smiled. “That daughter of the devil,” he said, laughing. Siham had sent him the money, but only forty thousand lira. However, even that was a fortune at the time.
He planned for his successor Ali Barakeh to set up a secret punishment squad to oppose the Pure Ones, the worst enemies of the Society, fighting back against them even to the death. “It is not right for us to go on waiting like obedient sheep for them to mow us down. They must learn that for every death in our ranks, there will be one in theirs,” he whispered.
Early in April 1958, Ali Barakeh was to arrive in Damascus. Hamid had already entered his name and year of birth, 1929, on the list hidden in the picture frame in February. Now he was sure that he would at least save his secret and be able to realize some of his dreams through that capable calligrapher.
But it was not to turn out as he intended.
10
Governor al-Azm sent a guard to bring Hamid to him. He was forthcoming as always, just like all those upper middle-class men whom Hamid could never puzzle out. They smiled all the time like Chinese, even when they were sticking a knife in your belly or when they had to swallow a bitter disappointment. Hamid had never been able to do that. Master Serani often used to warn him that his thoughts could be read on his face as if it were a book written in distinct characters.
He had met members of those elevated social circles only as customers. He knew that such men, with our without the title of Pasha or Bey, were not interested in him, only in his art. They admired the art, not the artist.
Hamid did not behave with quiet deference when he met them, but was proud to the point of arrogance to show these silk-clad personages that he had gained all he had for himself, instead of inheriting wealth as they had done, and that if they were not going to accept him as one of their own, they must at least show him a minimum of respect. He knew that the al-Azm clan, whose leaders were all customers of his, had been in league with the rulers of Syria against the ordinary people, and the other clans were no better. So he sometimes reacted aggressively when one of these fine upstarts remarked, of his work, that he had a great gift; it was as if such condescension belittled his work. To be called gifted was praise to the ears of children and amateurs, but not to the best calligrapher in Damascus.
Today, as usual, Governor al-Azm came round his desk to welcome him.
“A small but fine piece of calligraphy,” he said when a guard had brought tea. “If possible in green and gold. Those are my cousin’s favourite colours. Ali Bey is a great admirer of your art. He is parliamentary president, and in a week’s time he is coming out of the hospital. A stomach ulcer, or you could say it was politics. I hate politics, but he always wanted to be a politician. When we were little boys playing together, guess what part he always wanted to take?”
Hamid shook his head. He had no idea what the governor was talking about.
“He always wanted to play the president. But never mind that now – he is a great connoisseur of calligraphy, and always regrets never having the time to draw and paint himself. However, he admires you enormously, and thinks, as I do, that the greatest crime is really to keep you in prison. As I told you recently, he plans to get you pardoned after seven years. After all, he is the president’s son-in-law. I wasn’t really supposed to tell you about the pardon… now, where was I? Oh, yes, if possible write something so that it looks like a falcon or an eagle. My cousin is very fond of falconry.”
Hamid rolled his eyes; he hated both the vegetation style and the animal style of calligraphy, in which the letters mutate into trees, landscapes, lions, and birds of prey. He thought it ridiculous to distort characters until they slavishly served to make a picture. The results could be improved on by any novice painter or photographer.
Governor al-Azm noticed Hamid’s reluctance. “It was only an idea. I don’t understand much about these things. Write just as you like.” The governor hesitated slightly, pouring Hamid tea. “And then there’s one other little thing,” he said quietly. “My aunt, the mother of my cousin Ali Bey and sister of Prime Minister al-Azm, has donated money for the restoration of the little Omar Mosque – did I tell you about that aunt of mine?”
Hamid did not know why the governor was telling all these stories, and shook his head.
“She’s a hundred and ten, and still goes shopping every day, has her siesta, and drinks a litre of red wine every evening, and six months ago she grew a second set of milk teeth. If I hadn’t seen them for myself I’d never have believed it. Little snow-white teeth growing in her gums. But however that may be – legend says that a Sufi master dreamed that Omar, the third caliph, wanted to build a mosque in that little square close to Silk Street. At that time, in the eighteenth century, the area was a sink of iniquity.” The governor laughed knowingly, and took a gulp of tea. “There’s to be a marble plaque at the entrance commemorating her generous donation, and it would be an honour for my family if you would design it on paper. I have three stone-masons here who could engrave your calligraphy in marble, two of them serving life sentences, the third five years.”
On the way back to his cell, the guard told him his brother had a son, now seven years old, who had been born covered with hair and sexually mature. Hamid felt he was in a madhouse. He shook his head as the guard locked the door of his cell and went away, coughing, and it took him some to cleanse his brain of all this rubbish.
Memories came back. He had been twenty-nine, at the height of his fame and fortune. Not far from his studio Minister Hashim Ufri, a rich industrialist and great lover of calligraphy, lived in one of the finest houses of the Souk Saruya quarter. He often ordered works of calligraphy both large and small from Hamid.
In 1949 Minister Ufri took King Farouk of Egypt a piece of Hamid Farsi’s calligraphy when he was on a state visit. A month later the Egyptian ambassador came to Hamid’s studio and told him, with great ceremony, that the king had never been so enthusiastic about a work of calligraphy as he was with that one – except, naturally, for some by the old Ottoman masters, but of course they were dead, and creating calligraphy for the Lord of all Lor
ds.
“It may surprise you to hear that our king is a passionate calligrapher himself, like his father and his grandfather before him. He would like to buy the pens with which you conjured up that divine script.”
All the colour drained from Hamid’s face. He was pale with fury, but pulled himself together.
“If His Majesty is a calligrapher, then he knows that pens and knives are small but sacred objects and not for sale.”
“There’s nothing that is not for sale, certainly not to His Majesty. Don’t make yourself and me unhappy,” said the ambassador.
It suddenly struck Hamid that the King of Egypt was very close friends with the dictator Housni Hablan, who had been in power in Syria since March, and who in the last resort was a primitive illiterate who would not scruple to take the whole studio apart and ship it off to the King of Egypt to do him a favour.
Amazingly enough, the threat concealed under the ambassador’s remarks did not look much better than the calligrapher’s worst fears.
“They are not for sale, but I will give them to His Majesty as a present,” said Hamid desperately, standing up and opening the cupboard behind him. There they lay. He wrapped them in a red felt cloth and gave them to the dark-haired little man with the big bald patch. The ambassador beamed all over his face. He marvelled at the inside knowledge of his friend in the Syrian Foreign Ministry, who had praised Hamid Farsi’s extraordinary powers of reasoning.
“I will inform His Majesty personally of your generosity, because out of respect for you he has ordered me to bring these tools of the calligrapher’s trade, which are indeed beyond price, to Cairo myself,” said the ambassador.
Hamid Farsi did not mourn his loss for long. He spent two days cutting, splitting, and sharpening a new set of reed pens until he was satisfied with them.
A month later the ambassador came back to give Hamid a personal letter from the king. It contained one of the largest commissions ever entrusted to Hamid Farsi, and a question: “Why don’t the pens write such beautiful script as yours?”
Hamid Farsi spent over three months working on the commission, which was more than well paid. It was for large scrolls of script for the palace walls. When he had finished, he wrote a letter to go with them.
“Your Majesty. As you and your ambassador, His Excellency Mahmoud Saadi, know, I sent you my best pens, but I could not and cannot send the hand that used them.”
King Farouk was apparently more impressed by this letter than by the calligraphy, which he used to adorn his bedroom. He wrote in his diary that no one before had ever been able to tell, from a distance, what kind of pen he was using. Only this Syrian, who advised him never to write with the steel pens that had come over from Europe.
Hamid Farsi seldom wrote with a metal pen. He preferred reeds or bamboos, and cut his own reed pens for every script, however fine. There were certain strictly secret methods, decreeing the time when you harvested reeds, and how long you had to keep them buried in horse dung and other secret ingredients to end up with a good writing instrument. The best reeds came from Persia.
“Steel pens are dead metal ore. They write well, but in a coarse, cold way,” Master Serani had always said. “Reed is both hard and flexible, like life.”
The cutting and splitting of his pens was every calligrapher’s best-kept secret. “A calligrapher who cuts badly can never write well,” said Hamid. And when he cut his reeds he would never have anyone near him, not his journeymen and certainly not the errand boys. He withdrew to a small cubicle, closed the door after him, put on the light, and worked without stopping until his pens were cut, cleaned, and split.
He kept his knife hidden in the cupboard with the pens and notebooks containing his recipes for ink. No one was allowed to touch it even if it was left lying around.
11
Governor al-Azm liked the saying on the wall of Hamid’s cell and wanted to own it. Hamid said he would like to keep this one piece of calligraphy, which his beloved teacher and master had given him. Instead, he said, he would write an equally beautiful new one for the governor. “Twice the size, if possible,” said the governor, and smiled on his way back to his office because he could think of no better maxim to quote to his young mistress than, “God is beautiful and loves beauty.” She was always asking, “Why do you love me of all people?” and he had found the answer here. Anyway, the calligraphy on Hamid’s wall was dusty and torn at the edges, so he could make his point better with a brand-new one. Pleased, and proud of his craftiness, he entered his office.
Hamid, on the other hand, was deeply alarmed by the prison governor’s wish. The idea of having to give away this particular work of calligraphy left him speechless, and only after a little while was he able to draft something new for the governor. He did not know the fear before a sheet of blank paper so often described by his colleagues. On the contrary, he felt full of power and courage. And that same feeling was the best moment of the work, the first touch of black ink on the featureless white surface. Experiencing the way black gave shape to white. It was not the ecstasy you could get from music and opium, when you felt airborne and dreaming, but ultimate enjoyment in a waking state. He sensed the beauty flowing from his hand to the paper, giving it life, form, and music. Only when he had finished writing the words did he feel exhausted. Then came the laborious routine work on the shading of the characters, the decorative line, the vowel sounds added below and above the characters to make easy reading possible, and finally the ornamentation of the surrounding surface. All that called for the craft that he had learnt and for patience.
He dipped his pen in the ink and wrote, all in one move at the top of the paper, the word “God.” No word in one of his paintings might stand higher than the name of God.
When he had finished, two days later, he went over to the wall and caressed the old calligraphy. “Saved,” he whispered.
“God is beautiful and loves beauty.” Hamid read the saying, and pictures came before his mind’s eye. His first wife Maha had been beautiful, but she was sick with stupidity. Had God loved her?
He remembered how it had all begun. Serani had recommended him, without circumlocution but very shyly, to take a wife, because Hamid’s glance always became uneasy when he heard a woman’s footsteps. Hamid did not think much of marriage at the time. He liked his independent life, he went to the brothel once a week, and often ate out in cafés. He had his clothes washed, ironed, and mended for a few piastres, so that he would have more time for his work.
A day after this remarkable conversation, and just as if misfortune had sent her, his Aunt Mayyada came to Damascus, in flight from the summer heat and the isolation of Saudi Arabia. She told him straight out that she knew a pearl among women, a girl who might have been made for him. Hamid wondered how a woman who spent nine months of the year in the Saudi Arabian desert could know what girl in Damascus would suit him, and he was even more surprised when she told him the woman’s name: Maha, his master Serani’s pretty daughter. Hamid didn’t know her, but his aunt’s enthusiasm infected him. Mayyada was fascinated by Maha’s quiet beauty, and arranged the whole thing personally, since at this time his parents had already lost touch with the earthly side of life.
Maha was his master Serani’s only daughter, and of course Hamid thought she would be a fortunate choice for him. His master, even though he had urged him to marry, expressed himself with some reserve, but that was his way. Hamid discovered, too late, that Serani did not know his own daughter. Otherwise he would have realized that she was far from loving him and his calligraphy, and indeed thought him a tyrant.
Was he really as bad as she painted him? All the stories Maha told of him, anyway, were horror stories.
“I’d have liked to be a reed,” she once said, in tears, “because my father caressed and tended his reed pens every day, but he never once embraced me.”
And as the similarity between her husband and her father became more and more obvious, she soon wanted nothing to do with Hamid either.
By now he was the leading calligrapher in his master’s studio, and the first in a decade who had received his certificate from the hand of Serani himself. Now it was time to open a studio of his own. However, he dared not tell his master so, particularly when Serani – now that he was his father-in-law – spoke openly of the day when he would pass the studio on to him and retire. “When my hand begins to shake, say in twenty or thirty years’ time,” he added, with an ironic smile. There were indeed old master calligraphers who still wrote neatly and precisely at seventy-five.
So Hamid had to wait patiently for a good opportunity to give his master that bitter pill.
It was the time when he was searching for absolute black. Just after his wedding, he began experimenting in a little cubicle at the back of the workshop with all kinds of materials; he burnt them, dissolved the charred remains in water, and added various salts, powdered metals and resins, but he never achieved a darker black ink than the one they used already.
Serani had wasted ten years of his life searching for pure black. Hamid did not want to outdo his master, only to solve the secret of black and find its purest form. And in gratitude he planned to call the colour Serani Black. But hard as he toiled, putting questions to alchemists, druggists, spice dealers, pharmacists, and magicians, none of them was able to tell him the secret recipe.
Not until he was in prison could he assess how much strength he had squandered in the search for pure black. A whole chapter in his notebook was entitled “Ink,” and under it he wrote later: “My ink is black, so order no rainbows from me.”
“Black is the strongest colour. It extinguishes all other colours and kills the light. Black is bold as reason and cold as logic,” he wrote confidently and with emotion when he had spent months reading all there was to know about the making of inks. Master Serani observed his passion with admiration, and not without amusement when Hamid went home with his face blackened.