by Rafik Schami
He was looking for the dark hue of black velvet, and dreamed of the absolute black of the universe. Far away there, in the distance, the blackest of all shades is found. And suddenly he discovered his love for the night, and wondered why a desire for women always came over him in the darkness. When he told his master he thought that there was a connection between the night and Eros, Serani said he had better keep to his ink.
He began with well-known methods, let the pressed residue of grapes, logwood, oak-apples, bones, ivory, olive pits, the leaves of the sumac used by tanners, and aniline char in closed vessels, chopped them small, boiled them with salts of iron and copper or silver nitrates – but he did not find what he wanted.
He also tried to extract even more black hues with alcohol and vinegar. All this led to some slight improvements, but he never made the real breakthrough.
He found ancient recipes from Greece and Turkey. Charred beeswax, soot from lamps and petroleum could be used in making ink, mixed with ground resin, boiled, left to steep for a week, then sieved and thickened. Hamid meticulously followed every step, and in the end he had a deep black, but still not what he wanted.
One day, in a café near the studio, he came upon a Maghrebi alchemist. Hamid drank his tea and listened to what the alchemist was recommending his audience do to keep their sex drive going. The white-robed man had an intelligent face, and seemed to be tired of the men pestering him and buying his powders. Suddenly he fixed Hamid with a look that the latter could not forget even decades later. He had not avoided the man’s gaze, but had given him a smile that spoke volumes, and the man had risen to his feet, picked up his glass of tea, and moved over to join him in the corner.
“The gentleman is concerned with other matters than the seduction or poisoning of women. Perhaps he is looking for the secret of making gold?”
Hamid had laughed. “I don’t think we’ll be doing business. I am not interested in either gold or women.”
“But something dark and heavy oppresses your heart,” said the man, undeterred.
“There you are right.” The words had escaped Hamid. “I am looking for absolute black.”
“Ah, then you are a calligrapher,” said the stranger laconically. “The earth is restricted, why do you want the absolute? That exists only in heaven. But of all earthly colours, my black is the darkest,” said the man.
Hamid had only smiled bitterly.
“I will give you a recipe, and if you are satisfied with the results you can send me, at an address in Beirut, a hundred small calligraphic works with sayings from the Quran or the Hadith of our Prophet. The pieces of paper must be no larger than the palm of your hand, and must all be in mirror script. Do you agree?”
“Why Beirut?” asked Hamid, amused.
“I must leave Damascus tomorrow. I am staying in Beirut for a month, and if you do not send me my fee I will curse you, and you will be plagued by misfortune. Write down what I am about to say,” said the man gravely.
Hamid took out the little notebook that he always carried with him to write down ideas and record curiosities. He did it on the advice of his master Serani, who never left the house without a notebook and pencil.
The alchemist seemed to know the recipe by heart. He dictated, looking into the distance, the amounts of ingredients, the procedure, and the time it would all take, as if he were reading from an invisible book.
The recipe turned out to make not, perhaps, absolute black, but no one in Damascus could make the colour any darker yet. This ink was to bring Hamid fame and fortune later, but also sleepless nights, for he forgot the alchemist for a while, and when he did send the agreed fee to Beirut the taxi driver came straight back saying that the Maghrebi had already left the city.
Had the alchemist’s curse caused his misfortune?
To make the ink he had taken the wool from the belly of a black sheep, singed it, ground it, mixed it with resins, gum Arabic, and tannic acids, dissolved the mixture in water, thickened it over a low flame, and kneaded the doughy result. Then he added metal oxide, dissolved it all, thickened it again, and had a paste that dried to a raven-black block as it cooled. A piece of it dissolved in water gave an extraordinarily black ink.
Soon word was going round of the high quality of his ink, and all calligraphers who valued their reputation ordered some. Master Serani did not like it. “We are turning into an ink factory,” he muttered.
When Hamid had his own studio, he produced the fine black ink on a large scale.
Making it was expensive, but unlike the poisonous colours was harmless. Many calligraphers died very young, never guessing that they had poisoned themselves with the minerals from which they made their colours. Hamid thought of his colleague Radi, who had never taken any warnings seriously, and paid for it with his life.
When his first wife Maha was still alive, he often came home half-dead with exhaustion, stinking and with a soot-smeared face. His wife hated the stench that came into the house in his wake, and more and more often she looked for a reason not to have to go to bed with him.
Even when he set up independently, and a large commission from the Orthodox Church enabled him to buy the fine house of Ehud Malaki, a rich Jew, her temper did not improve. Maha did not give the house a single word of praise.
It was also partly for her sake that he had not opened his own studio in the calligraphers’ quarter of al-Bahssa, but decided on the finest street in the Souk Saruya quarter, where only prosperous people lived. The Damascenes called this high-class district Little Istanbul, but Maha didn’t even want to see the studio, and she never set foot in it.
For her sake, too, he stopped experimenting with colours, and came home in the evening just as he had set out in the morning, elegantly dressed and perfumed. But nothing did any good. His wife became ever gloomier and withdrew from the world more and more. For a year he put up with her wilful behaviour, but them, when she once again refused to do her duty in bed, he hit her.
About two years after the wedding she fell very ill, lost weight rapidly, and came out in a rash all over her body. The neighbours began whispering that Hamid’s wife was sick because of the poison in the coloured inks that he kept in black boxes in the cellar.
Life in his house became hell. He was afraid that she would poison him, but she didn’t want him dead. She did not envy the living. Her revenge, she whispered hoarsely on her deathbed, was to wish him a long life.
At first he had felt guilty, but then he began to relish his freedom and the absolute peace in his house.
Did he grieve for her? He was horrified when, lying now on his bed in the prison, he heard his own voice say, “Not for a moment.”
From then on he lived alone in his fine house with no intention of marrying again. He was not interested in either women customers or lonely women neighbours, who were always finding some excuse to knock on his door. He knew exactly why they were knocking, and gave them a suitably ungracious reception.
And then, one day, along came one of his richest customers, Munir al-Azm. He had heard from his sister, he said, that the daughter of the scholar Rami Arabi, who was famous if not at all prosperous, was a marvel among women. She could read and write better than many men, she was very beautiful, and well brought up. He himself, he added, would have liked to make her his fifth wife, but her father declined his offer because his daughter wanted to be in sole possession of her husband’s heart.
Hamid Farsi scarcely looked up from his work. “I’ll have to wait a month for my aunt to come visiting from Saudi Arabia and take a look at her. Then we’ll see,” he said, joking.
“Why not come and visit us? I’ll get my sister to bring the girl with her,” offered the friendly man, but Hamid just shook his head. He had other things to do.
Soon after that Hamid caught a chill. He ran a high temperature, could hardly move, and wished for a helping hand. His household arrangements were going downhill, and he had to ask an elderly woman neighbour to do the essential cooking and laundry for him,
and look after all the flowers.
By night he felt lonelier and lonelier, the empty house frightened him, and his loneliness was made worse by his own echoing footsteps. His desire for women forced him to seek satisfaction from a whore. But he felt revulsion on meeting the client who was just leaving her. A tall, dirty, vulgar man who, when he saw Hamid, turned to the whore and said, “Your garage can recuperate from my heavy truck with a little bicycle like that.” When Hamid heard the drunken whore laughing, he walked out of the house.
And so he longed for his aunt’s arrival. As for his aunt herself, she was very anxious to make up for her first unfortunate efforts to find him a wife. When he told her the young woman’s name she quickly found, in the tangled maze of her relationships, a friend from her schooldays, Badia, who lived in the same street as the family of the girl in question. Badia too thought that Noura would be the perfect wife for Hamid.
Was she? He’d have given anything for that. She was a little too thin, but there was something irresistible about her face. And she talked too much for his liking. Outwardly she appeared to be well brought up, but she had not learnt to keep her mouth shut. Above all, when he wanted to tell her something she would pick up the thread of the conversation and join in. Sometimes he forgot what he had been going to say. She had somehow or other been brought up like a man, and thought she could talk about everything as men do. At first he thought that was amusing, but soon, as he saw it, she lost her feminine charms for him. He was not comfortable in bed, because she had very small breasts, and even after a month of marriage was getting her hair cut short like a boy’s. But she had a pleasant body odour, and was elegant in all she did. Sometimes he saw that she was crying, but as his grandfather had told him one day, “Women are sea creatures. They have an endless supply of salt water.” If he were to pay attention to his wife’s tears he would never get anywhere.
He had hoped she would get pregnant. People had often told him that such women put on more flesh on their breasts, belly, and buttocks during pregnancy. He tried to sleep with her as often and talk to her as little as possible. And when she talked to him, he acted as if he hadn’t heard her. But instead of getting either pregnant or more feminine, she turned wilful. Sometimes he had a feeling that her mind was unhinged. She would suddenly start laughing in the middle of love-play, and he could not shake off the idea that she was laughing at him.
Sometimes he came home tired and hungry, and realized that she hadn’t cooked anything. She had spent all day reading and thinking, she said. Several times he came home unexpectedly, suspecting that she either had a lover or was spending time with the women neighbours, which he had forbidden her to do. But she assured him again and again that she never visited anyone, and no neighbours visited her, although she said it with a cold smile. The telephone often rang and, when he picked up the receiver, the caller hung up.
His suspicion that she was unhinged was confirmed when he saw her in the inner courtyard one day playing marbles. By herself! He was furious, and she only smiled. It was a shock for him, and at this point, if not before, he ought to have consulted a doctor. But he thought women understood the minds of other women better than any doctor. Next thing he knew, he told his Aunt Mayyada, Noura would be playing ball by herself.
And what did his damned Aunt Mayyada say to him? “Women only do that when they’re left unsatisfied, so they despise their husbands. You must sleep with her more often and break her will. There are women who don’t see reason and won’t behave in a feminine way until then. Break her will, and your balls are the only ones she’ll take in her hand to kiss them.”
He slept with Noura every day now, and when, once, she laughed again, he hit her and then she wept for days on end and looked anxious. She didn’t say much anymore, and she was getting paler and paler. Her father came to see him three times and told him to look after Noura; he had never see her so unhappy before, he said. Hamid must not immerse himself entirely in calligraphy, Rami Arabi told his son-in-law. Books and script were there to make human beings happy, but for him, Hamid, happiness, hospitality and marriage existed only as sacrifices on the altar of the book. He asked Hamid straight out when he had last entertained a guest in his house.
Hamid did not know what to say. He tried spoiling Noura, but she didn’t want that anymore. She built a wall of housework and headaches against his attempts to take the fortress of her loneliness by storm.
One day her mother came to his studio and acted as if she herself had fallen in love with him. He went out to a nearby family café with her, because in the workshop Samad would have heard every word they said. In the café, Noura’s mother confessed that she would willingly have come to his studio just to see him and for no other reason, but her husband had sent her. He wanted her to say that Hamid shouldn’t work so much, and should take better care of his wife, but she herself knew that Noura was unable to judge men properly. She was immature, said her mother, for a mature woman would want a husband exactly like Hamid. Noura, her mother went on, had inherited many characteristics from her father, including her ready tongue. As Noura’s mother, she was very sorry about that. But, she said, surreptitiously patting his hand, together they would teach the child to be a proper wife to him.
When they parted she kissed him ardently, and her body radiated a heat that he never felt in his wife.
He could make nothing of his father-in-law’s advice, and his mother-in-law’s warm affection alienated him from his wife. She came to see him more and more often to talk to him about Noura, and on her fourth or fifth visit to the studio he had to ask her not to come by herself anymore, because his assistants and the neighbours were beginning to whisper. That was a lie, but every time the woman touched him he felt a kind of frenzy. She was only three years older than him, and seemed to him younger and more erotic than her daughter.
When his Aunt Mayyada saw the mother with him once she said, smugly, that she could act as go-between here as well, exchanging the mother for the daughter.
“You bring bad luck,” whispered Hamid, directing his gaze from the prison bed where he lay to the little photograph and assuming, from the right-hand half of it, that it showed Aunt Mayyada.
12
Hamid paced restlessly around his cell. He was wide awake, as if he had slept for ten hours. It was a long time since he had known such nights. Shortly before parting from his master he had been agitated in the same way. He slept no more than three hours a night then, and all the same, none of his preparations were any help. Weeks before he told his master his decision, Serani looked as old and sick, as sad and abandoned as if he could guess at the coming severance of the umbilical cord.
When they said goodbye Serani wished him success and good luck, but two days later he was calling the parting treachery. Even many years afterwards Hamid wondered why his master spoke of treachery when he himself had declined the large commission with which Hamid intended to finance the step he was taking into independence.
A month earlier, Serani had turned down work for the Catholic churches twice running. These were small but well-paid commissions, but Serani wasn’t interested in the money. He refused to create calligraphic works for Christians on religious grounds. Both Arabic script and the Arabic language were sacred to him, closely bound as they were to the Quran, so he would never sell his calligraphy to unbelievers. Many of his colleagues held that against him, saying that Damascus had always been a city open to all, where Christian, Jewish, and Muslim architects and masons had often worked together on the renovation of mosques. Hamid had spent days trying to persuade Serani to change his mind, but in vain.
One day Alexandros III, Patriarch of the Damascene Orthodox Church and a great admirer of Arabic calligraphy, had sent an envoy to Master Serani with his request. He was asking him to adorn the newly renovated Church of St Mary with Arabic calligraphy and arabesques, and said he could name his own fee. Serani brusquely refused. He did not write in divine Arabic script for unbelievers, he said. All his life Serani bel
ieved that calligraphy makes the mosque a great religious book for the wise, while unbelievers turn their churches into picture books for simple souls.
Alexis Duhduh, the patriarch’s envoy, stood there rooted to the spot, and for the first time Hamid felt ashamed on his master’s behalf. He showed the elegant man out and told him, as they parted, to say nothing to his Excellency the Patriarch about Serani’s abrupt refusal. He, Hamid, would visit him in his office within the next few days and discuss the whole thing with him again.
A week later, when Hamid had signed the contract with the Patriarch and received the first advance payment, he returned to the studio, took his few instruments, said a civil goodbye and indicated that he was setting up on his own. Serani, sitting hunched in his chair, murmured barely audible, “I know, I know. As your father-in-law I wish you luck, and as your master I give you God’s blessing.” Hamid felt like shedding tears of grief and embracing his master, but he turned away without a word and left.
So now he was independent, and doing the best-paid work in his life for the Orthodox Church. He designed the sayings as the architects and church elders wanted them, without doubting for a moment that Christians were stupid for believing in a God who sent his son to earth, had him tormented by a few emaciated Jews, and then executed by the Romans. What kind of God was that? In his place, Hamid would have pressed his thumb down on Palestine and made it the deepest point of an ocean.
The church elders were so grateful to him that they accepted his condition of putting in only three days a week working in the church himself, and then having the scripts, ornamentation, and arabesques he had pre-designed executed by his journeymen and apprentices in colour, marble, stone, and timber. On the other days he fitted out his new studio and looked for his first customers.