by Aeham Ahmad
I knew the piece well—I had practiced it in my piano lessons. Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” I loved its blissful exuberance. It was so different from the plodding militarism of the Syrian national anthem.
“Or I could play a piece by Mozart,” I said, getting carried away. “The ‘Rondo alla Turca’! Mozart’s Piano Sonata no. 11, third movement, ‘The Turkish March,’ one of his best-known melodies. It’s so buoyant!”
“Out of the question!” the principal said.
“Let me try it,” I insisted. “Do you know the ‘Rondo alla Turca’? It’s wonderful.”
The principal stared at me, enraged that I dared to contradict him. I wanted to provoke him, of course, but what could he possibly do? I was being friendly and respectful, and all I’d done was suggest playing classical music. Europe! Mozart! That wasn’t something the principal could punish me for. So he sent me away.
A few Saturdays later, I actually went through with it. I just couldn’t help myself. The students were lined up, standing straight, and we three musicians were playing the Syrian national anthem. The brass was clanging, the flag was flying. But when it was over, I simply continued playing—Mozart’s “Rondo alla Turca,” bouncy and delicate. Many of the students laughed, and it seemed that the military strictness was crumbling.
“Aeham! Stop it!” my music teacher hissed at me. “Right now! Stop it at once!”
I stopped. Did the principal realize what I had done? I couldn’t be sure. He began giving his weekly speech. Order! Discipline! Punctuality! He didn’t appear to have noticed.
* * *
“I hate practicing!”
“Stupid piano!”
“I want to be like other kids!”
“I’m a Palestinian. What do I care about Mozart?”
“I want to play soccer with the others!”
* * *
This happened more and more often. The older I became, the less I felt like practicing piano. One afternoon when I was in middle school, I complained:
“I need more free time! I don’t want to play anymore! I hate my teachers, I hate the music school, I hate music. I hate that damn piano!”
My father was silent.
“I’m not a machine!” I fumed. “Every day it’s the same thing! Practice, practice, practice. Can’t you say something else for a change?”
“Don’t talk like that to me,” my father said.
“You’re blind,” I snapped at him. “What do you know? You can’t even play soccer.”
“You’re hurting my feelings,” my father said. “Stop it.”
“I’m going outside to play soccer,” I told him.
My father thought about it for a moment, then said, “I’ll join you.”
“You? You want to play soccer?”
He insisted. We went down to the street. Some of my friends were already there, kicking a ball around.
“I’ll be the goalie,” my father said.
And he was. I cautiously kicked the ball in his direction. At that moment, he jerked his body around—and deflected! Next came a low shot—goal! Then a medium shot—he heard it coming and caught it. He was able to deflect several balls like that. I couldn’t believe it.
“You see?” he said after the game. “I’m blind, but I can still catch a ball. Anyone can play soccer.” I looked at his glasses in embarrassment. “But not anyone can play piano. I want you to come on up and continue practicing.” So I did.
* * *
A few months later I was sitting at the piano and didn’t feel like practicing. Again. I was irritated, and slammed my palm down on the instrument. “I don’t want to be a pianist!” I ranted. “I want to be a normal kid! Who the hell goes to that music school? Rich kids! A chauffeur drops them off. And me? Everybody hates me. I don’t want to do it anymore! I’ve had enough.”
My father got up and left the room, then I heard him going downstairs. A short while later he returned with some of my friends who’d been playing soccer.
He turned to them. “I’ll give anyone who can play something on the piano ten pounds.”
The first kid sat down at the piano. “I can’t play,” he said. “Try anyway,” my father encouraged him. “Just play a little something.” The boy had never seen a piano before, and he plunked around a little. Then the next kid took his seat. All of them had heard me practice when they were playing soccer outside, and knew how effortlessly I played “Für Elise,” my fingers practically flying across the keys.
When the boys had left, my father said. “You should be proud of your achievements.” I was silent. His medicine had an effect. At least for a few months.
* * *
With each day in middle school, our concentration slipped as our thoughts began spiraling more and more around one specific topic: girls. Who were they? What were they thinking? How could we meet them? Would they like us? How could we impress them? Did you see this girl, that girl? What should I say to her? And what happens next?
Before school, after school, during recess—soon, we boys talked about nothing else. Girls! We were all feverishly looking forward to eighth grade, when sex ed was on the curriculum and the teachers would explain to us how children were made.
I participated eagerly in those discussions, but I didn’t quite understand all the commotion. To me, girls were much less mysterious. After all, I constantly met them at the music school, I sang with them in the choir, I stood in line with them while waiting to take a test.
The girls’ school was on the same street as the all-boys school. When classes ended at noon, life began. We burst out of the school gate, babbling wildly. Some of the boys tore off their dark brown school shirts, revealing colorful T-shirts. Others put gel in their hair and walked around in front of the girls’ school.
The girls came out of the gate, just as eager as we were. Some wore headscarves, some didn’t—it all depended on the girl and her family. Some took out their makeup mirrors and put on powder and lipstick. Both hair gel and lipstick were strictly prohibited inside the school.
The boys whistled at the girls, the girls giggled, and some of the more daring boys went over to talk to them. The most adventurous among us soon had girlfriends. Having a girlfriend meant that you were allowed to accompany a girl on her way home and talk to her. But sometimes a girl changed her mind, first going out with one boy, then with another. And sometimes the boys got into a fistfight over the femme fatale, who enjoyed being the center of attention.
I admired the other boys. But I just wasn’t able to emulate them. Colorful T-shirts? Hair gel? That wasn’t me. My pants and shirts were as dull as my haircut. Instead of sending me to a barbershop, my father cut my hair himself. I had a bowl cut, and felt like a donkey among horses.
But one day on my way home, I saw a girl who caught my eye. She wasn’t the prettiest one, and she didn’t wear as much makeup as the others. Perhaps she didn’t feel the need to be the center of attention. I liked that. Maybe she wasn’t all that different from me. She always walked home by herself, looking around absentmindedly, as if in a dream. One day our eyes met, and she quickly averted her gaze. My heart seemed to burst. Should I dare speak to her? If so, when? I took heart and went over to her.
“Marhaba,” I said to her, hello. She stared at the ground. She seemed very shy, but at least she had stopped walking.
“Marhaba,” I said again, and held out my hand.
“My father says I’m not supposed to shake hands with boys.”
“You know, I go to a music school, and girls and boys are in the same class. We always shake hands. There’s nothing to it.”
“No, I can’t,” she said, then turned around and walked off.
I went home blushing. I had finally approached a girl! But I’d been rejected. It felt like someone had slammed a door in my face. After that, I gave up trying.
* * *
I became lazy and sullen again about practicing. “What good does it do, playing the piano?” I snapped at my father one afternoon. “
What good is it? Why should I care about Mozart?”
“I want you to learn a language anyone can understand,” my father said. “We’re refugees. We can’t return to our homeland. I want you to be international.”
“But we live in Yarmouk! In Yarmouk! In Syria.” I’d had enough. “I quit,” I said, standing up and slamming the piano lid down.
My father stayed calm. He always stayed calm. He thought for a moment, then he said, “You’re coming with me tonight. We’ll play at a wedding together. Be ready at around six.”
Right, I thought. Some kind of joke. I didn’t believe him and went outside to join my friends. But at six o’clock, he said, “Let’s go.”
“I’m tired, I don’t feel like it,” I said.
Suddenly, he yelled at me. It was one of the few times in his life he had done that. “You’re coming with me!” he said, explosively loud. I got scared and gave in. So we went.
At a Palestinian wedding, women and men celebrate separately. The groom joins his friends and the men of the family on the one side; the other side is reserved for the bride and her girlfriends, the mother, aunts, and cousins. Both men and women dance the dabkeh, but apart from each other. The dabkeh is an Arabic line dance, popular all across the Eastern Mediterranean. The dancers grab each other’s hands and shoulders, undulating back and forth, and forming a line through the room.
The wedding took place on a rooftop terrace. It was a mild night in May. Several hundred men had come. I set up my keyboard. I was happy to see al-Chadra there, the man who had given me my first music lessons. When the band was ready, my father took the microphone. “We are proud to present our new keyboard player tonight, Aeham Ahmad,” he said, and gestured toward me. Some of the men applauded, but others were jeering: “He’s just a kid! Since when do kids play at weddings?” My father just grinned.
I didn’t know any of the songs. There was no sheet music, and we had never practiced together. “No problem,” my father had said. “When I give you the signal, you just play chords: A minor, C major, A minor, C major, and so on. Most of the songs are based on those two chords. When I give you the next signal, you take a pause.”
We began. I played A minor and C major chords until my father nodded at me. I paused and looked at the men, all of them dancing exuberantly. My first performance! I had the jitters, but I loved it, I loved the attention. It felt great to see everyone dancing to our music. Then came my father’s next signal: A minor, C major, A minor.
Around midnight, my father and I went home. He put two hundred and fifty Syrian pounds into the palm of my hand, almost five dollars. My first wages! I was beaming. Everyone had clapped for me, and on top of that I had earned money! I decided to buy a new soccer ball.
However, at the end of the night, I realized that my father had turned the volume of my keyboard almost completely down. No one had heard me. But I didn’t care. The performance, playing in a band . . . I had loved every moment of it.
I spontaneously decided to become a wedding musician. For weeks and months, I pleaded with my father to take me with him again. “Good idea, Aeham, we’ll do that,” he said. But when the time came, there was always a reason why it wouldn’t work that night. But next time! Promise!
In the end, he never took me to another wedding again. But he had managed for me to make my peace with music. I hated playing the piano a little bit less. And I continued practicing.
— CHAPTER FOUR —
Meanwhile, my father had become a sought-after piano tuner. He had an excellent ear, he charged reasonable prices, and it didn’t take him six months to show up for work. I often went with him. First, I brought him to his customers and then I tested the piano he had just tuned, to hear how it sounded. And this is how I learned about the world of Damascus’s upper class. In Syria, wealthy people were cut off from the rest of the country, as if they were on a distant planet.
One day, we found ourselves in the salon of a man whose name inspired fear. One of the men who had done the dirty work for the old Assad. A man who had the blood of thousands on his hands.
Of course, I didn’t know any of that back then. I only knew that my father was oddly tense that afternoon. We started our journey at an intersection outside Yarmouk. A huge BMW with tinted windows picked us up. My father took a seat in front; I sat in back. We drove off. I had never been in such a big car.
We passed the neighborhood where the music school was, then we drove uphill. In Damascus, the farther up the hill you live, the more money you have. The wealthiest live high up, on the slopes of Mount Qasioun. At the very top, Assad had one of his villas.
I had never been in this neighborhood before. The houses were set back from the street, the properties were larger than anything I had seen, and the lawns were deep green and well watered. The car stopped. A checkpoint. This was something else I hadn’t seen before: armed men stopping us. Who were they? They didn’t seem to be soldiers, but they also didn’t look like ordinary policemen. The chauffeur lowered his window.
“Who are these guys?” one of the armed men asked. He seemed to be in charge.
“A blind man and his son. They’re supposed to tune the boss’s piano,” replied the chauffeur. The commander motioned for us to get out. He started with my father. Papa had to take off his jacket, crouch down, and open his mouth wide.
Then he was allowed to get back in the car.
The commander turned to me: “Why are you here?”
“I’m guiding my father.”
“Where are you from?”
“Yarmouk.”
“I still don’t get it,” he said. “Why is your father bringing you?”
“I’m supposed to play the piano, to test the sound.”
He seemed interested in that; he wanted to know where I studied. Then he asked, “Are you Palestinian?”
“My father is. I guess that means I am as well.”
He grinned. I was allowed to get back in the car.
We drove on, and after a while came another roadblock. Once again, it was manned by armed guards in strange uniforms. This time, they said we could stay in the car, but the chauffeur had to get out. The men patted him down. He had to open the trunk, and one of the guards examined the underside of the car with a mirror, like the kind dentists use, only much larger. I was surprised—wasn’t the chauffeur one of them?
We drove on. I saw men with Kalashnikov rifles standing at the street corners. We stopped at a wrought-iron gate with gilded ornamental spires. Two armed guards opened the gate from the inside. The car came to a halt in front of a second, massive fence made of metal. The chauffeur brought us to a door. The door was opened from inside. I heard several loud snapping and clicking noises as the dead bolts were opened one after the other. We entered—and found ourselves in Europe.
Two smiling women greeted us. One of them was blond. They both wore their hair uncovered. The lawn was perfectly manicured. In the back, I could see a swimming pool. There were several luxury cars in the parking lot, Mercedes and BMWs. The two women led the way. I took my father by the hand. We entered the house through arches overgrown with roses.
I could feel my father’s tension. He was petrified. But there was no way out. It would seem suspicious if we turned back now.
The entrance hall had floors of white marble, and paintings of idyllic landscapes adorning the walls. To the left was a bar with colorful liquor bottles; farther to the back was a statue. Its hand was broken off. It seemed to be thousands of years old. On the left and right sides of the room, a vast set of stairs led to the second floor. And in the middle of the entrance hall stood a huge concert piano.
I had never seen an instrument like this. It was a Steinway Model D, worth almost two hundred thousand dollars, made in Hamburg and New York. This was the instrument we were supposed to tune. My father opened the piano cover and braced it. I opened the lid and played a sonatina by Mozart. The piano sounded crisp and clear. No comparison to that old music box we had at home.
&nbs
p; Then I noticed a change in the air. The two women suddenly straightened. I paused. A man came down the right side of the stairs leading a girl by the hand. She had red hair and was dressed in a sweatsuit. The man had a gray mustache and gray, slicked-back hair, and was wearing a black suit and a white shirt.
He slowly clapped his hands. “Bravo, bravo!” he called. “Welcome! How are you?” He approached me and shook my hand.
“I’m Aeham Ahmad, and that’s my father,” I hastily replied. The man looked only at me, not my father. It made me uncomfortable.
“Where did you learn to play piano so well?” he asked me.
I told him of the music school.
“Excellent!” he boomed. “So young, and such a fine pianist already.”
He asked me a few more questions, then finally turned to my father and shook his hand.
Sometimes it seemed my father couldn’t hide his feelings very well. Maybe because he was blind. In any case, I could always tell what he was thinking; his face was like an open book to me. And I knew that, in this moment, he was afraid. He tried to hide it. He reminded me of a turtle pulling its head in. He didn’t want to talk, he wanted to do his job and not make any mistakes. He just wanted to get out of here in one piece.
“The piano is excellently tuned,” my father said cautiously.
Not really, the man explained, which was why we were supposed to tune it again. Also, one of the hammers was defective, could we please take a look at it?
“The two ladies”—they flinched when they heard this—“will take care of you.”
Then he turned away and went back up the stairs. The girl in the sweatsuit, probably his granddaughter, stayed downstairs. She sat on one of the steps and looked at us.
