The Pianist from Syria

by Aeham Ahmad

  — CHAPTER SIX —

  In the years before my final exam, as I was getting more and more unruly and less willing to practice the piano, my father had yet another brilliant idea: he began to pay me for practicing.

  At the time, my friends got around seventy-five Syrian pounds each week for pocket money, a little more than ten cents. It was enough money to snack on falafel three times a week. My father paid me the same amount for each hour of piano practice, treating it like paid work. If I practiced a lot, I could easily make over a thousand Syrian pounds a week, almost two dollars. I suddenly had as much pocket money as a rich kid. The money was enticing. So I began playing more.

  But becoming a musician? I never considered that for one second. I wanted to build a house, get married, start a family. For some reason I had the idea of buying property in Dili, in the south of Syria, where my father was born and where my grandfather, after fleeing from Palestine, had leased his first plot of land. I wanted to go back to my roots, even though we had all been uprooted.

  “I want to buy land with my savings,” I said to my astonished father one night. But he didn’t laugh; he asked me what I meant. Then he thought about it for a moment and said, in all seriousness, “All right, let’s drive to Dili and look at property.”

  I had saved about twenty-five thousand Syrian pounds, almost fifty dollars, collecting the bills in a small box. During one of the next weekends, I took the money with me. We took a bus south and got off two hours later in Dili, at the gates of Daraa. For half an hour, we walked over dirt tracks, past olive groves and thorny bushes. My father had made an appointment with a man who had property for sale.

  We greeted him. It’s a good thing my father didn’t tell him that I was the prospective buyer, for he probably would have laughed. No, Papa asked the man to explain everything, and then they negotiated the price. My father haggled him down to a hundred and fifty thousand Syrian pounds, about three hundred dollars.

  I was speechless. So much money! For this far-flung, shabby plot of land! My savings would have probably bought no more than a few olive trees. On the ride back, I sat at the window, brooding, looking out over the dry landscape. But my father kept encouraging me. “Keep practicing piano, keep getting good grades. I’m planning on opening a music store. Then we can work together, and I can buy you an apartment.”

  What was he talking about? We had almost no money.

  A few months later, he asked me to accompany him—he wanted to look at a store. Years ago, he had known a carpenter named Abu Nisar, who had applied for a job with him. But Abu Nisar didn’t want to hire a blind man and had sent my father away. Now Abu Nisar had passed away. The carpenter’s shop had shut down and the sons were arguing about the inheritance. The empty store was for sale, for a fraction of its worth.

  By that time, real estate prices in Yarmouk had exploded. The former refugee camp had turned into a popular shopping area. People were competing for limited space to open new stores. Around 650,000 people lived in Yarmouk, and hundreds of thousands came every day to do their shopping. Yarmouk and Palestine Streets were full of brightly lit stores, one next to the other. Buying a medium-size storefront could cost you thirty million Syrian pounds, around sixty thousand dollars. Renting a store cost about two thousand dollars a year. Several building owners even rented out their entrance areas, that’s how lucrative it was.

  The fabric stores closed at midnight, electronics stores at 4 a.m., and the giant DVD shops and many restaurants were open all night. The souq—the market—was a spice mecca. Here, you could find aromas from all over the world. And that wasn’t all. More than a hundred jewelers and gold traders were competing with one another. The scents of grilled street food hovered above the throngs of people. That was Yarmouk! Alive, vibrant, laughing, pulsating to the heartbeat of an unstoppable future.

  The store we were going to see was on the other side of Yarmouk Street, in an area full of workshops—carpenters, locksmiths, blacksmiths. We met Abu Nisar’s son in front of a dust-covered metal roll-up gate. Apparently, it hadn’t been opened in years. He had a large key chain, and it took him a while to find the right key. He bent down, put it into the massive padlock—and nothing happened. He tried again. Nothing. The lock was rusty.

  “Aeham, go and get some oil,” my father said to me.

  I went into the workshop next door, where they made aluminum window frames. I asked to borrow a small bottle of oil, then I brought it to Nisar. He put a few drops into the lock, tried again—and click! It opened. As he pushed up the rattling metal gate, my father smiled quietly. He saw with his ears, and evaluated rooms by sound. He seemed to like what he heard here.

  The store was dark. I went inside—and stumbled. I had not seen the two steps leading downstairs into the workshop. Nisar walked ahead of me and turned on the light. I was amazed. The room was gigantic.

  “Papa! This is much too large for my twenty-five thousand—” I started to say.

  I didn’t get any further. “Shhh,” my father hissed at me. I understood. Nisar didn’t need to know any of this.

  We began inspecting the old workshop. Abu Nisar’s sons had already sold all the machines. The floor was covered with wood shavings, and the walls were black from soot. Whenever it was cold, Abu Nisar had lit a fire in a barrel, then he had worked in the midst of all that soot and pollution. No wonder he had died at age fifty.

  My father went through the room toward the right-hand wall.

  “Careful,” I said. “The wall is dirty.”

  But he continued. He felt the wall, put his ear against it, and listened. Then he went to the left wall and did the same thing. Again, he gave a knowing smile. We said good-bye to Nisar.

  On the way back, he explained to me what he had done. He had wanted to check if he could hear the neighbors. If so, the walls were too thin and the neighbors might be bothered when we played music in the store. But he had heard nothing.

  A few days later, Nisar came to sign the contract. Half of the purchase price had to be paid at once. I realized that my parents had been saving money for a long time. They had put the money in a wooden safety box that my father had built into their massive wardrobe. Now, in front of my astonished eyes, he put seven hundred and fifty thousand Syrian pounds—almost fifteen hundred dollars—on the table and asked me to sign the contract.

  His father-in-law had lent him the money for the next payment. Like most Syrians, my grandfather didn’t have a bank account. Instead, he had used his savings to buy gold and jewelry for his wife. He gave my father a gold chain worth another thirty-five thousand dollars. My father would have to repay him with a similar chain within one year.

  We began renovating. My father had not a penny left, so we did everything ourselves. The floor was useless, and because Papa didn’t want to compromise the height of the room, he and Uncle Sadik decided to tear the flooring out. Each Friday, Uncle Mohammed came to help us. They shoveled debris onto a pushcart, then my father and I brought it far outside Yarmouk, to a dumpster. It took an hour per load. After two loads, we were completely exhausted.

  For half a year, we worked each weekend. My brother, Alaa, hardly did anything. Sometimes he tagged along and reluctantly helped a little for about an hour, then he would get into an argument with my parents and leave. One time, when friends of mine had come along to help and my brother sat around playing games on his cell phone, I confronted him. He angrily got up and shoved me to the ground.

  “How can you do this?” I yelled. “In front of my friends!”

  “You’re not my boss!” he grumbled. And with that, he was gone.

  How I miss those fights today!

  When all the debris had been carted out, my father installed electrical wiring. A proper electrician could have done it in two days. My father needed several weeks. But it was the first time he had done anything like this. We painted the walls in three different colors, with leftover paint that an acquaintance had given us. Uncle Mohammed tiled the floor with bright gra
nite. After that, the shopwindow was delivered. And last but not least, we put up a sign above the door. Two men attached it, and I looked on with pride: AEHAM’S MUSIC SHOP, it said, visible to everyone. My father solemnly handed me the keys.

  The first thing we sold, a few days later, was a risha, a pick used for the strings of the Arabic oud. We sold it for five Syrian pounds, a little less than a cent. But a few years later, Aeham’s Music Shop was booming, and we had hundreds of students. My father had 450 ouds built each month in a separate workspace, to be shipped to Dubai and from there all over the world. And we would always remember: It all began with a pick.

  — CHAPTER SEVEN —

  And then I discovered music. Previously, I had played piano only because my father wanted me to. I simply obeyed him, wanting to be a good son. And yes, there had been moments when I was gripped by ambition and tried my best to become a brilliant pianist. But in truth, it was never something I was passionate about.

  But now, at age sixteen, I had an awakening. I suddenly understood that I had begun to learn a beautiful language. And now I wanted to explore it more deeply.

  The year 2004 was to be a fateful one for me. I began going to high school, which was the most terrible place I had ever set foot in. The teachers were inept and the majority of the students were ignorant and brutal. All they thought about was getting laid and getting stoned. I skipped school as often as I could, climbing over the high wall. I would get on my bike and escape—to our store. In the mornings, the shop was closed, which meant I had a place of my own. An incredible luxury.

  No one was ever alone in Yarmouk, the most crowded and noisy neighborhood in all of Damascus. Our apartment was small, and my brother and I shared a bunk bed—he was on top and I was on the bottom. Whenever I practiced piano, my father would listen in. The moment I played something other than Beethoven or Bach, he’d scold me: “Aeham, that will get you nowhere, please stick with classical music.” In his view, playing piano wasn’t meant to be fun. For him, it was serious business. He was always looking to the future—to the admissions test at the conservatory, which was still a few years away. So I had to play Beethoven and Bach. All day, every day. Jazz? Arabic music? A waste of time. “First, my son, you need to practice for the test,” he said. “You can have fun later.”

  But when I was alone in our shop, I could play any music I wanted. Or all of it together, in my own pop-jazz-Arab fusion.

  Just a short while ago, my father had had to cajole me into practicing. Now I couldn’t get enough. On some days, I played for five hours.

  My hero in those days was Ziad Rahbani, a political commentator and satirist from Lebanon, a gifted composer and a virtuoso jazz pianist. He had started at age sixteen, writing songs for his mother—Fairouz, the great diva from Beirut. I wanted to be like him. I began to dream: What if I became a musician after all? If I stood on huge stages, applause all around me?

  Besides the changes in my own life, Syria, too, was changing dramatically. In 2000, when I was twelve, Hafez al-Assad died, and his son Bashar came to power. The dictatorship was just as brutal as before, and the torture chambers were as full as they’d ever been, but to some extent the regime loosened the chains a little bit. When the old Assad was in power, you could go to jail for even having a television antenna on your roof. They were afraid you might be watching foreign TV stations. Bashar was less strict. He allowed his subjects to watch satellite TV, buy cell phones, and surf the internet, even though many websites were blocked.

  In 2003, when I was fifteen, the first season of Star Academy was shown on satellite TV. It was a casting show, produced in Beirut and broadcast all over the Arab world, from Mauritania to Iraq. Many people in Syria saw music as something dubious—God forbid you wanted to become a musician! But with Star Academy and later the Arabic SuperStar, a whole generation was swept up by the glamour of pop music. Countless young people suddenly wanted to learn an instrument—and suddenly, they all looked to me . . . a pianist.

  My grades, meanwhile, were taking a nosedive. Until then, I had been a halfway decent student—my mother had seen to that. My elementary and middle schools had been administered by the UN, and the teachers there made good salaries and were highly motivated. But at my new high school, the teachers were paid next to nothing, just like everywhere in Syria’s state-run schools. They earned around five thousand Syrian pounds per month, around ten dollars. It was barely enough to live on. No wonder, then, that many teachers weren’t particularly interested in their jobs. Many of them just wanted to get private students for after-school tutoring, since that’s where the real money was.

  My high school was located outside Yarmouk, and was attended by both Syrians and Palestinians. To me, it was like a jail. The only freedom you had was during recess, but you were constantly bullied. Some of the kids smoked hash; others secretly drank Armenian gin from a flask, or sipped “Simo”—a Syrian cough syrup whose effects were like codeine. The walls of the schoolyard were defaced with obscene words and drawings. And in the three years I went there, I only once dared to enter the bathrooms.

  In the middle of the schoolyard was a basketball hoop. This is where the bully from my class administered his brutal punishments. His henchmen would grab you by the arms and legs and ram you—legs spread wide—against the pole of the hoop. I tried to stay away from these people. I avoided looking at them and tried my best to not cross paths with them. Still, one time, they got me.

  “Hey, Aeham, what are you looking at!” one of the boys called. And then he said to his boss, “I think he needs a lesson.”

  “Yeah!” the boss cheerfully agreed. Then they grabbed my legs and dragged me to the pole. Luckily, no one was holding on to my arms, so I was able to cushion the impact with my hands. But it hurt for days.

  This was their idea of fun. Sometimes, however, things would get serious. At times, someone would pull out a knife and cut their opponents, to teach them a lesson. Was there a teacher looking out for us? A principal who punished them? Nowhere in sight.

  The bully from my class also bestowed a nickname on me. Fijle, he called me, Little Radish, because I was so small and skinny. Everyone called me that and I hated it.

  But in one respect I was fortunate. Someone had chiseled some makeshift steps into the school wall, which turned out to be my escape from hell. Whenever things got tense and no one was looking, I’d climb over the wall, jump on my bike, and ride back to Yarmouk. There I would quietly push open the gate to our shop, unlock the glass door, slip inside, and relock the door, waiting until I reached the back of the store to turn on the light, since I was always afraid that someone would notice me. I put some water on to boil and made my first instant coffee of the day with “3 in 1,” which also contained powdered milk and sugar. Then I opened the piano lid—and began my journey.

  I have no idea how my father never noticed. But one day he went to my high school with Mohammed, my stern uncle, looking for me. The principal took them to my classroom and asked the teacher where I was. The teacher merely shrugged and said he hadn’t seen Aeham Ahmad.

  And how could he have? I was sitting in the store playing piano. Suddenly, my cell phone rang.

  “Aeham, where are you?”

  “Um . . . at school?”

  “Where? We’re standing outside your classroom with the principal.”

  “Oh . . . I’m in the bathroom,” I said. “I’m not feeling well!”

  “What are you talking about? Come here, at once!”

  My thoughts were racing. I had to get to school, I had to protect my secret.

  “I don’t feel well,” I said, moaning dramatically, as I locked up the store.

  “Why didn’t you tell your teacher?”

  “I’m coming!”

  I started biking. I ran several red lights, and I must have cut off countless cars. Seven minutes, eight minutes. After ten minutes, my father called again.

  “Aeham! Where are you?” he snapped.

  “The bathroom! I could
n’t get the door to open!”

  “What?”

  “It’s open! I’ll be right there.”

  I locked up my bike, ran toward the wall, climbed to the top, swung myself over it—and found myself looking straight into the principal’s face. He stared back at me, completely dumbfounded. He’d been searching for me out in the schoolyard and now approached me, menacingly tapping his cane.

  “So, you’re not feeling well,” he growled. Then he grabbed my ear and dragged me to his office. Tears welled up in my eyes. It’s over, I thought. They’ll find out, and I’ll never get out of this hellhole again.

  We entered the office, where my father and uncle were waiting for me. “Your son Aeham is a liar,” the principal said. “He wasn’t in the bathroom. I caught him climbing over the wall.”

  “Why have you been lying to us?” my father said, furious. “Where have you been?”

  In my despair, I immediately confessed. I told him that I’d been hiding in our store. “You have no idea what it’s like here. I can’t take it anymore. People pick fights all the time, everyone smokes hash. I have no idea why I’m even here.”

  “What were you doing in our store?” my father asked.

  “Playing piano.”

  “Do you do that often?”

  “Yes.”

  Now the principal chimed in. Not to respond to my outburst, no, he was curious about the music. “What kind of store do you have?” he asked my father, who told him. Within minutes they were discussing wedding music, and realized—to everyone’s delight—that they had a mutual friend from back in their university days. Not only that, but in two days they’d all be at the same wedding.

  The principal reached for his phone and called the custodian. “Some tea, please!” he said. “Tea for the gentlemen!” Then we sat in his office and shared several cups of sweet black tea. I supposed that meant we were no longer enemies. While my father chatted amiably with the principal, my uncle whispered into my ear, “You’re a bad person.”