by Rafik Schami
In spite of the heat he was freezing, and her laughter – the wild laughter that kept breaking out of her and leaping his way – released him from his fear only for seconds at a time.
“What a model of proper behaviour you are today,” she teased him as they left the house again a few hours later. “Anyone might think my mother had told you to keep an eye on me. You didn’t even take off your…” And she uttered a peal of laughter.
“It’s nothing to do with your mother,” he said, wanting to explain it all to her, but he couldn’t find the right words. He walked along the narrow streets to Sufaniye Park near Bab Tuma beside her. Every jeep made him jump in alarm.
The President’s words boomed out from café radios, declaring implacable war on the enemies of the Republic. Satlan had a fine, virile voice. He intoxicated the Arabs when he spoke. The radio was his box of magic tricks. With a population that was over eighty percent illiterate, the opposition had no chance. Whoever controlled the radio station had the people on his side.
And the people loved Satlan. Only a tiny, desperate opposition feared him, and after that pitiless wave of arrests a strange anxiety held the city in its grip. But the Damascenes will soon forget it all and go about their business again smiling, thought Farid as they reached the park.
His fear was a beast of prey gnawing at his peace of mind. He kept thinking of Amin the tiler, who must now be suffering torture. Amin wasn’t just his friend. He was also the contact man between the communist youth group that Farid had been running for the last few months and the Party in Damascus. Only a few days ago he had assured Farid that he had gone to ground, cutting all the links leading to him. Amin was an experienced underground fighter.
A few weeks ago, Farid’s mother had suddenly said over her morning coffee that the death of her parents, aunts, and uncles made her feel both sad and naked, for when the defensive wall of the older generation was gone, you came closer to the abyss yourself. Now he was naked too and looking down into the abyss. The ground beneath his feet was giving way. His friend Josef, a fervent supporter of Satlan, railed against the “agents of Moscow”, as the President called communists. Farid was on the wrong side, said Josef, he was the only real human being among a bunch of totally heartless people, it was high time he left the Party. How could Josef say such things?
Rana was Farid’s great good fortune. He loved her so much that he almost wished them to part so that she would be in no danger of persecution. He looked at her ear. He had to love her if only for that innocent ear.
Rana was silent for a long time. She seemed to be watching the children playing in the park, but in fact only one girl attracted her attention, a child staging a performance on her own, a little way from a group. Dancing, she twirled in a circle, then suddenly stopped and sank to the ground as if hit by a bullet. A few moments later she rose again and went on dancing, only to drop to the ground again quite soon.
It was a long time since Damascus had seen such weather: all the good work of the winter rains was undone by this springtime cold. Flowers and buds froze.
This was the first sunny day after a damp eternity. Pale and coughing, the inhabitants of the Old Town streamed out of their mud-brick houses, which weren’t built for cold weather, and went to the parks and gardens outside the city walls. The adults held barbecues, drank tea, played cards, told stories, or smoked their water-pipes and stared quietly into space. Their children played noisily, boys with balls, girls with the hula hoops that had just arrived from America, instantly taking Damascus by storm. Hips swaying, the girls tried to keep the plastic hoops in motion around them. Most of them were still bad at it, but a few could already keep the hoops circling for minutes on end.
The girl dancing alone didn’t seem to mind the cold. Her movements had a strange, summery composure. Rana looked at the child’s neck and wondered, if a bullet really did hit the little girl, what sign her blood would paint in the air. When her aunt Jasmin died, the jet of blood on the wall had traced a number eight lying on its side, the symbol of infinity. That was ten years ago. Jasmin, Rana’s father’s youngest sister, had come back from Beirut, where she and her Muslim husband had been hiding from her family’s wrath for a long time. But she was homesick for her native city of Damascus and her mother. A smile appeared on Rana’s lips for a few fleeting seconds, only to vanish again instantly. It must be in the family, she thought, we all elope to Beirut when we’re in love.
One summer day Aunt Jasmin had invited her to the famous Bakdash ice cream parlour in the Suq al Hamidiye. Sitting there, she had said in a perfectly matter-of-fact and cheerful tone, “Time out of mind, life in Arabia has moved between two sworn enemies, love and death, and I’ve decided in favour of love.” But death did not accept her decision.
Jasmin’s nephew Samuel shot her outside a cinema. Her companion fled, uninjured. Samuel didn’t fire after him, but stood over his aunt as she bled, calling out to the passers by, almost shrieking it, “I’ve saved my Christian family’s honour after my aunt dragged it through the dirt by marrying a Muslim.” And many of the passers by applauded.
Samuel, Aunt Amira’s spoilt son, had been sixteen at the time and still a minor. He was released after a year in custody, and his relations, their voices raised in song, carried him home on their shoulders in triumph to his parents’ house, where more than a hundred guests celebrated his heroic deed until dawn. Rana’s father Basil was alone in staying away from the festivities. They were too primitive for his liking, but even he could understand the shooting of his own sister. He thought she had brought shame on the family.
Only Samuel’s grandmother, Samia, made it clear to the boy and his mother that she would curse him every day when she rose in the morning, and every night before she went to bed. Jasmin had been her favourite daughter, which was probably the reason behind the rumours that, never mind exactly who commissioned Samuel to kill his aunt, the act was fuelled by his mother’s resentment. She had always felt slighted.
After that Rana never spoke to her cousin again. Whenever he came to see her brother Jack, she stayed in her own room. Nor did she ever set foot in her Aunt Amira’s house. But she hung Aunt Jasmin’s photograph in her little room, next to the picture of the Virgin Mary.
Rana was silent for a long time that cold March day, holding Farid’s warm hands tight.
The little girl dropped to the ground once more, very elegantly this time, and lay there for a while before her hands began to flutter like a butterfly, showing that life had come back into her prostrate body.
In the distance, someone happily sang lines steeped in melancholy and despair: “I forced myself to part with you / So that I might forget you.” They were from the Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum’s latest song. Ahmad Rami, the shy, sensitive author of those verses, had written over three hundred songs for Umm Kulthum in his fifty years of unrequited love for her.
“I need time,” said Rana, “to find an answer to that question.”
BOOK OF DEATH I
Questions are the children of freedom.
DAMASCUS, AUTUMN 1969 – SPRING 1970
2. A Body in the Basket
A warm wind swept down Ibn Assaker Street from the south. Day had not yet shed her grey mask. Behind the walls of the Old Town, Damascus woke from sleep as unwillingly as a much-indulged girl.
The first buses and vans were clattering noisily as they drove down the long street, taking labourers from the surrounding villages to the many building sites in the new quarter of the city. One of the construction workers, a short little man, was walking up and down beside the road, going a few steps from Bab Kisan, near the doors of the Bulos Chapel, towards the eastern gate and back again. He was waiting for his bus. Like all labourers from the country around Damascus, he carried a bundle of provisions wrapped in faded blue cloth in his left hand. With his right hand, he was gesticulating vigorously as if engaged in earnest conversation with some invisible partner. The loop he traced as he walked grew longer and longer, as if he were w
illing the bus to appear when he next turned around.
Just as the sun began shedding golden light on the top of the old city wall, he turned once more. As he did so, he looked briefly southward. His glance fell on the large basket hanging over the entrance to the Bulos Chapel, where according to legend Bulos himself, the sainted founder of the Church, had escaped from his pursuers over the wall in a basket after his revelation on the Damascus road.
A hand that might have been a drowning man’s hung out of the basket, which was still in the shadows. The construction worker immediately knew that the man attached to the hand must be dead. Suddenly he was indifferent to all else: the bus, the tiles he had to carry up three sets of steps on his back, even his quarrel with his skinflint of a boss.
“There’s a body in the basket!” he shouted excitedly, and when a policeman finally came along, cycling sleepily towards the police station by the eastern gate, he accosted him so vigorously that the stout officer only just managed to keep his balance. An expression of alarm came over the policeman’s face as the little man shook his handlebars like one demented, shouting over and over again, “A body! A body!”
“What do you mean, a body? Are you crazy? Let go of my bike!” In his thirty years of service he had seen dead bodies everywhere: in bed, in the canal, even hanging in toilets, but never in a basket on top of the city wall. “Calm down!” he tried telling the man. “That’s not a body. The Christians are celebrating the memory of their apostle Bulos. He escaped over the wall right here, that’s all there is to it.” And he glanced once more at the basket, which had been hanging over the gateway for weeks.
But instead of boarding the bus when it finally arrived, the construction worker went on shouting excitedly. He clung to the policeman’s bicycle. “And I’m telling you there’s a body in that basket,” he bellowed hoarsely.
The bus driver, his curiosity aroused, switched off the engine and climbed out of his vehicle. Several passengers followed him. They all surrounded the policeman, backing up their colleague and his suspicions.
At last the police officer gave in and promised to notify the Criminal Investigation Department, but he also insisted on naming as a witness the man who had ruined his morning. He wrote down the construction worker’s details, and told him to be ready to make himself available at any time. Then he cycled off again. The bus driver continued his journey north.
3. Police Commissioner Barudi
The CID specialists found a man with a broken neck in the basket. A folded piece of greyish paper was stuck into the breast pocket of his pyjama jacket. It said: Bulos betrayed our secret society.
Young Commissioner Barudi looked at this note. The writing was a scrawl, but legible if you made an effort. The paper had been torn from a large sheet of the kind used in the Old Town’s many souvenir shops to wrap glass vases or expensive, delicately inlaid wooden boxes. The writer had tried to neaten up the torn edges.
Around ten o’clock a policeman drove the old and visibly alarmed janitor of the Bulos Chapel to the gateway. The basket hadn’t been his idea, the man explained, it was young Father Michael who had thought of it, keen as he was to remind passers by how the founder of the Church had fled. He added, despairingly, that every day for the last two weeks he himself had had to clear away the rubbish that young people threw into it: bottles, dead rats and cats.
The corpse, a man in his late thirties, was wearing pale blue pyjamas. The medical examiners established that death had occurred around midnight, and the body’s hair and clothing contained large numbers of fibres from a jute sack, in which it had probably been transported to the place where it was found.
Three days later the corpse was identified, thus raising the next question: the man was Major Mahdi Said, so who was the Bulos mentioned in the note?
Commissioner Barudi conducted an initial interview with the man’s beautiful young widow. She was composed, cool, and monosyllabic. Either she really knew nothing about her husband, or she knew too much. Asked if she hadn’t noticed his absence, she responded with chilly irony. “It was normal for him to be away for days or weeks on end. His profession was his mistress. I was only his wife.”
The commissioner felt sure that the dead man’s wife had constructed a defensive wall of cold indifference to conceal either pain or burning hatred. He found her erotically arousing, and would have liked to catch a glimpse of whatever lay behind her façade. After all, he was a bachelor, and lonely.
He told his scene-of-crime team to search the attic storey above the apartment, where the major had been murdered in his bed. He must have struggled with his killer or killers, but it seemed that the widow had heard nothing because she slept one floor lower down, and at the other end of the apartment. Her husband sometimes used to make a lot of noise right into the small hours in the attic above the marital bedroom, playing music, telephoning, pushing his chair back and forth. This had been a trial to her for a long time, because the slightest little noise woke her, so about a year earlier she had been forced to exchange the brightly lit bedroom with its balcony for a dark but quiet one at the back of the apartment.
Her husband’s attic had its own entrance. A small flight of steps led from the big second-floor balcony to the top storey under the roof. Here the major’s domain consisted of two sparsely furnished rooms and a modest bathroom. He slept in one of the rooms and used the other, smaller room as an office, with a desk and a metal filing cabinet in it.
“The murderer must have come up from the street,” said First Lieutenant Ismail, leading the scene-of-crime team, when the commissioner asked for his first impressions. Barudi and Ismail got on well. They were both new to Damascus, and quite often went out late in the evening to eat together.
They were standing on the balcony in front of the steps leading up to the attic. “We found obvious marks left on the old ivy. The murderer climbed up it to the balcony, then just went upstairs to the top floor,” explained Ismail, his right hand pointing. “And then,” he continued, leaning on the balustrade, “he must have taken the body through the balcony room and out of the front door of the apartment. We found fibres from the sack on the sharp metal edge of the safety lock. He went down the main staircase and into the street.”
“Why do you say he? Are you sure it was a man? And are you certain he was acting on his own?” asked Barudi, his eyes tracing the way from the street back up to the balcony.
“That broken neck is clearly a man’s work, no woman did it, but of course there could have been several men,” replied Ismail.
“So why not a man and a woman?”
The expert smiled. “That may sound likely, but if the murderer had the wife helping him, he was a fool. Far too risky to climb the ivy into the apartment if you can just walk through the front door unnoticed.” He paused briefly. “No, I have a feeling that the murderer didn’t care about anything, even being arrested himself, so long as he killed the major. There’s a whiff of bitter vengeance about this, not cold-blooded murder by the wife’s lover.”
“And suppose the whole thing was planned well in advance? It seems our man had a sensitive position in the secret service. I don’t know details yet, but he was a major, after all, and such men live dangerously,” said Barudi.
“We can’t rule that out. The climb itself wouldn’t take a real pro more than two or three minutes,” replied Ismail, going thoughtfully up the steps to the top floor, just as the widow came to tell the commissioner that his adjutant Mansur wanted him on the phone.
It was after eleven by the time he left the widow’s apartment. He couldn’t help thinking of her. “Major Mahdi, my husband, had many enemies,” she had said straight out, only quarter of an hour into the interview. And Barudi had the impression that she herself didn’t much like her husband either. She didn’t even bother to pretend she did. Instead, she always called him Major Mahdi, like a stranger, and then, quietly and almost as if ashamed of it, added the explanatory “my husband.”
What was the woman’s sec
ret? How dead inside must a man be, the commissioner kept wondering, to sleep alone in a rundown attic instead of in the soft arms of this beauty? He could find no answer.
A ravenous hunger for bread was gripping his guts. The widow had served him coffee and sweetmeats five times. He drove his beat-up Ford to Iskander’s delicatessen shop in Straight Street, near Abbara Alley and, as usual, ordered a flatbread filled with thinly sliced pas-turma. Iskander knew this delicious air-dried beef with its piquant crust of sharp spices was his favourite food, but nonetheless, every day he asked politely, “The usual?” And as usual the commissioner had a flatbread sandwich and a glass of cold water. Together they cost a lira, and while the commissioner ate his sandwich Iskander quickly made two coffees, hoping to hear some tale or other about the depravity of human nature. His wish was quite often granted. Commissioner Barudi liked talking to the little man, although on condition that he never asked for names.
Today the commissioner said, “No coffee, thank you. I’ve drunk five already and I feel quite dizzy.”
The man could tell that the commissioner didn’t plan to tell him anything, so he kept quiet and hoped the net of his silence would soon catch a bigger fish.
Omar the ironer had stepped out of his little shop opposite Iskander’s for a moment, to get a breath of fresh air. On seeing him, Barudi remembered that he wanted to bring the ironer his own laundry. What a terrible job Omar’s was! He seemed to be nothing but skin and bone. His shop was small and stuffy, and he stood at his ironing board all day, emaciated and sweating, pressing other people’s laundry with his hot, heavy iron. And all for a few paltry piastres.
Commissioner Barudi paid, finished drinking his water, and hurried back to his small apartment. On days like this he despaired. He felt he was doing everything wrong. Moving to the capital without a wife had been a mistake, and he blamed himself for it every morning. There was no one here to look after him. He even had to do his own laundry, and now he must take it to the ironer instead of sitting in the office thinking about this murder case. Every morning he made his own coffee and drank it alone in the kitchen, with a view of an ancient, yellowed calendar on the wall. What was he to do? Nadia had chosen the village schoolteacher instead. “He won’t rise far, but he won’t fall far either,” she had said, when Barudi threw his future as a high-ranking police officer into the balance against the poor elementary schoolteacher’s expectations. But the prospect of the good life hadn’t weighed with her. Barudi could offer no more. The teacher was a handsome man with a captivating voice.
