by Rafik Schami
Farid’s parents were already asleep when he came home. He went quietly up to the second floor and from there to the attic above the aniseed warehouse. Josef was sitting at the table, reading.
“There you are at last,” he said.
“Have you been waiting long?”
“No,” said Josef, and then there was a long silence that troubled Farid. “Amin’s a nice guy,” said Josef at last, without looking at his friend, “but he’s a dangerous communist. You want to go carefully with him.”
“Why?” asked Farid, who hadn’t thought the tiler seemed at all threatening, but was very sensitive and straightforward.
“Because communists never love their country. They get their orders from Moscow and carry them out, and if the comrades there tell them, ‘Kill your sister,’ they do just that.”
“Thank God I don’t have a sister, but I do have you. And comrade or no comrade, if the Pope himself tells me, ‘Kill Josef,’ I’ll convert to Islam right away. Satisfied?”
“Don’t act so stupid. First they train you, then they inject a love of Moscow into you, and after that you have no will of your own. They’re not naïve enough to order you to do something that repels you, they do it much more subtly, telling you to do things you don’t think bad at all. And suddenly you may be a decent, honest human being, but you’re a murderer and a traitor all the same.”
“But I’d never do anything to harm my country, my family, or my religion.”
“My God, how simple-minded can you get? The communists don’t even recognise God, religion, and the family. They’d sleep with their own sisters.”
“Nonsense,” growled Farid angrily, remembering that Amin was sacrificing his life for his parents and siblings, while the pampered Josef couldn’t stand any of his sisters.
“I only wanted to warn you because I’m your friend and I’m fond of you,” said Josef. He sounded sad and resigned.
“Then calm down, Papa, going for a single walk with Amin doesn’t make me a communist,” replied Farid cheerfully.
“Not yet, not yet,” whispered Josef despairingly. For he was firmly convinced that Farid had taken a fatal step.
And he was not mistaken.
160. Hakawati of the Night
One night just before school began again in early October, Gibran played the part of hakawati, the traditional Syrian storyteller.
Members were still at the club after midnight, but only sitting in the café and in the table tennis room. Out on the terrace, the noise they made would have disturbed the quiet of the night. However, they could stay in both rooms as long as Taufik let them, and he kept late hours himself. He was always glad to have company, for he felt lonely all by himself in his tiny room in the tenement block at the end of the street.
There was room for ten people in the café, but the big table tennis room would take a hundred chairs. Michel the joiner’s clever design for the large green table meant that it could be folded up in a couple of moves and wheeled away to be stored in a cupboard, leaving a spacious lecture hall. Chairs and benches were stacked in a nearby room.
One evening Farid came to the club and found a number of young people sitting around Rasuk in the table tennis room, drinking tea and laughing. Farid entered quietly, found a chair and joined them. Rasuk was in the middle of a story, but Farid soon realized who it was about: their neighbour Saide, who else? Most of those present knew Saide; in the alley they used to say she had a body like marble and a mouth like a radio station. Men spoke of her as a daring woman married to a simple-minded skinflint. Her husband Sadik was a vegetable dealer. His large store was near the mouth of Abbara Alley, and he was a man of few intellectual gifts, but great malice. His best trick was his well-feigned innocence; his baby face would deceive any customer. Claire couldn’t stand him, and very seldom bought from him. If she did, once she was home she found vegetables in her bag that weren’t as good as those she had chosen and often had even placed on the scales herself. Elias didn’t like Sadik either, and would never shake hands with him, saying he was afraid that if he did he’d lose at least one finger to that rogue. “Even his name, Sadik, the honourable man, is a disguise,” Elias had said.
Saide joked with men and liked it when they gave her presents. In return, she made anyone who gave her something feel that he had conquered her heart.
“She goes to hang out washing on her large rooftop terrace every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon,” Rasuk went on, and Farid noticed a fiendish smile on that sophisticated storyteller’s face, for he knew very well that his male hearers were thirsting for every sentence, so he slowed down. “Want me to go on?” he asked, looking around as he took a long drink from his glass of tea. Of course he knew what the answer would be.
“Right, so she’s stretched her washing line where she can be seen by people in the surrounding buildings, just as if she were presented to them on a platter. Then she begins to sing, and young men in all four buildings run for the lavatories with doors or windows looking out on Saide’s rooftop.
Soon she acts as if her skirt is getting in her way as she moves around, so she tucks the hem up into her belt, showing her bare legs, walks around the outside of the terrace, and she knows that behind those doors the young men’s eyes are popping out of their heads, practically lodging their pupils in the cracks in the walls. When she’s in the mood, she does a little dance in front of every door until she thinks she can feel the hot breath of the boy behind it, and then she goes on to the next, and while the first young man, quietly and hunched with exhaustion and shame, creeps out of the lavatory, she turns her charm on the second and then goes on to the third.”
“And are you in the audience yourself?” asked Suleiman boldly, but Rasuk wasn’t to be shaken.
“Of course. Who told you I was made of stone?” he replied, to the sound of murmured agreement. “But sometimes she’s in a bad temper, or she doesn’t feel like playing tricks on the boys. Then she lures them into the lavatories but she does her round very quickly, without stopping anywhere, and then …” Rasuk broke off his story and drank some more tea. The air was crackling.
“Yes, what then?” asked Toni the perfumier’s son impatiently. The others laughed.
“Then she leaves the poor milkmen in the lurch,” said Rasuk.
“What milkmen? What are they milking?” asked the naïve Toni. The company roared with laughter. “They’re milking their billygoats,” cried Suleiman.
“How do you mean? What billygoats?”
“Someone had better tell Toni the facts of life some time,” cried Masu’d, a strong builder’s assistant with unruly hair.
“Then what happens?” asked Samir, the mechanic’s son.
“Then she goes away leaving the laundry basket there,” replied Rasuk. “She stays in her apartment for hours, clearing up, cooking, or drinking coffee with a woman neighbour. She takes wicked pleasure in thinking of all those young men gradually emerging from the lavatories again.”
As if Rasuk’s story had been the newsreel before the main film show, Gibran now rose and came forward. He asked Rasuk for his place, and Rasuk moved to sit next to Farid in the back row. Meanwhile, Taufik came in with twenty glasses of tea on a large tray and offered them to the audience. Everyone who took a glass put ten piastres on the tray, leaned back, and enjoyed the fragrant aroma.
Gibran sat down, put his glass to one side, and for a while he just looked gravely at the men in the audience. “Rasuk’s story,” he began slowly, “reminds me of another clever woman.”
“Even the Prophet Muhammad feared women’s wiles,” agreed Taufik, taking a glass of tea himself, and sitting where he had a view through the window of the table tennis room and could see if anyone came into the café.
“However that maybe, we were living in the outskirts of Damascus at the time, near the south gate of the city, Bab al Sigir. My parents were poor peasants. A woman whose name was Balkis lived near us. Her husband was big and strong as a camel, but he was almost blind. He own
ed a flour mill behind their house, and vegetable gardens and vineyards, which ensured him a certain amount of prosperity. Balkis was very beautiful. Indeed, to be honest I’ve seen many women on my travels, but only one more beautiful than Balkis, and she was a Berber from the Atlas Mountains whom I met in a nightclub in Marseille harbour, but that’s another story, and I’ll tell it another time.
Balkis lived a happy life except that she had a neighbour who pestered her, and that neighbour was my father. He thought himself irresistible, and kept pressing his attentions on Balkis.
It annoyed her, so one day she had a word with my mother, and the two of them thought up a fiendish plan. Do you want me to go on with the story?”
“Yes, yes, go on!” cried the massed ranks of his audience.
“I need a good cigarette if I’m not to forget any of it,” said Gibran craftily. Old Taufik laughed and shook his head. Five or six cigarettes were handed to Gibran. He collected them all, lit one, and put the others in his baggy shirt pocket.
“Early one evening, then, Balkis told my father that her husband had work to do in the fields, and she asked if he’d like to come and see her. What a question! The old goat was there within minutes. She told him to undress and get into bed, she was just going to freshen herself up a little and then she’d join him.
My father, who was usually slower than a lame turtle, was stark naked in seconds.
But instead of preparing for love-play, Balkis came running into the bedroom, still fully dressed, and said in a voice made almost inaudible by terror that her husband had come home and was at the yard gate. And if she knew him, he’d lock the gate before he came indoors.
‘I’m lost!’ wailed my father. He was sure that if her husband caught him he’d pound him to mush in his rage.
‘There’s only one way,’ whispered Balkis. ‘A door leads from the bedroom to the terrace, and you can get into the mill from there. Once you’re inside, you must turn the millstone as if you were our donkey, and the moment my husband is asleep I’ll get the key from his trouser pocket and open the gate for you.”
‘Oh, thank you, you’ve saved my life,’ whispered my father, and he ran through the back door to the terrace and on into the mill. Then he began going around in a circle, pushing the beam that turned the heavy millstone ahead of him. Every time the beam had gone right around once, a little bell rang. That told the farmer out in the yard when the donkey had stopped.
There was a hole up in the roof, and wheat was poured down into the mill through it. My father heard the man coming home and asking his wife what she’d been doing all day.
‘Grinding wheat,’ she replied. The farmer pricked up his ears and heard the bell.
‘You’re a good hard-working woman. But at this late hour?’ he asked in some concern.
‘Ah, well, the donkey slept half the day. It was dreadfully hot. It’s cooler now, and he woke up, so I thought he might as well grind a few more sacks of grain,’ replied his wife.
‘You must hit him a couple of times. He’s been too well fed recently and very contrary,’ said her husband.
‘No, no, he works for me like a lamb,’ replied Balkis. My father made haste to turn and turn the millstone until he felt quite queasy. The farmer tipped another sack of wheat through the hopper that carried the grain down to the millstone.
Balkis and her husband sat out on the terrace for a good deal longer. It was a night of full moon, and they were talking contentedly. And whenever my father wanted to stop and get his breath back, the husband said crossly, ‘There goes that donkey, stopping again. I ought to give him a taste of my whip.’ But Balkis begged him to stay with her, and my father scurried around in circles as if he had a bumble bee on his tail.
When Balkis finally brought him his clothes, long after midnight, and opened the gate, my father couldn’t even walk straight any more.
A week later Balkis asked if he fancied visiting her again. And she gave a very sly smile as she spoke.
‘Why?’ my father spat at her. ‘Do you and your husband need more flour ground?’”
When they were all on their way out, Farid saw that Matta was there too, sitting at the back of the room. “Brother,” he cried, and came up to Farid. Farid took Matta’s outstretched right hand in both his. He felt a strange warmth.
161. Wars Large and Small
There are certain turns of phrase slipped unobtrusively into conversation in Damascus to find out if someone you don’t know well is of your own religion. If a Muslim suddenly cries, “God bless the Prophet Muhammad, on whom be peace!” then another Muslim will reply in the same words. “God bless the Prophet Muhammad, on whom be peace!” But a Jew or a Christian will say, “God bless all the prophets.”
Farid had to master countless such secret messages and rituals.
Claire had warned him from his childhood to remember those who fasted during Ramadan, and never eat or drink in a Muslim quarter at that time. The Muslims reckon time by the short lunar months, and so Ramadan wanders through all seasons of the year. Going without a drop of water from sunrise to sunset in the hellish temperatures of summer was bad enough; provocation from those of other faiths would not be tolerated.
Until now almost all Farid’s friends had been Christians, and at school his few Muslim fellow pupils like Kamal Sabuni came from rich families and understood Christian customs. So the attitude of the butcher Mahmud’s errand boy horrified him. It was the summer of 1956, and the radio was constantly broadcasting reports of imminent war between the British and French on one side, and Egypt on the other. Farid had heard from his father that the bone of contention was the Suez Canal, but that was all he knew. Suddenly an ugly boy who always stank of mutton fat stood squarely in his way.
“If the Christians and Jews attack Egypt we’ll burn your quarter down,” he threatened, and to emphasize his words he lit a match and threw it at Farid. Farid didn’t even know the boy, only that he had recently been working as assistant to the butcher Mahmud. All the butchers in the Christian quarter were Muslims, but he had never thought anything of it before. Even as a child he used to go to see Mahmud. Claire and Elias trusted the man, and Farid thought him witty. His shop in Straight Street had verses pinned up all over it praising patience or condemning envy. The best maxim, which Farid knew by heart, hung right above the chopping block: As a poet I begged from dogs, today dogs beg from me.
“He must be crazy,” said Claire. “Reciting poems while he chops meat and cracks bones! Did you ever hear of anything like it?”
Early in October, Britain, France, and Israel attacked Egypt. Farid had nightmares. There was a Muslim butcher in every street, and if what the butcher’s boy had told him was true, the entire Christian quarter might go up in flames at any moment. He confided his fears to Josef, who didn’t laugh, as Farid had feared, but just said, “A stupid boy, and a dangerous idea too. The buildings are wood and mud-brick. They’d burn like a torch.”
One night Farid dreamed that he was leading the Christians of the burning quarter across a river into a safe, green countryside. Josef grinned. “Rehearsing for the part of Moses?” He clapped Farid on the shoulder. “Come on, I know a secret tunnel used by Christians centuries ago to escape. You get into it below the underground chapel of Ananias.”
They went to the chapel, and as it was empty they went straight to the side door, which led into a dark passage. Farid shuddered. It smelled of mould and moisture. But Josef went ahead undeterred, carrying a flashlight. The corridor came to an abrupt end, and the foundation walls of new buildings and sewerage shafts blocked the tunnel. “No way of escape any more,” whispered Josef gloomily as they retraced their steps.
Two days later the whole quarter was rejoicing. The Syrian Jules Gammal, a young Christian officer stationed in Egypt for training, had rammed the French naval destroyer Jean-Bart off Port Said with his torpedo boat, dying a martyr’s death. His portrait, swiftly painted in oils on canvas, was hung up everywhere. All of a sudden the entire quarter felt j
oyful release. The young officer’s death had resolved the guilt feelings of the Christians. “Our own Jules Gammal has liberated Egypt,” they told each other. It was not in fact true, but to them he was a hero who had stopped all the Europeans in their tracks. Later on streets, squares, and schools all over the country were named after him.
The facts were that the young officer died in a desperate action against the superior forces of the French and British, who had landed in the harbour city of Port Said at the northern end of the Suez Canal. He set out at random with his torpedo boat. The fires of hell were spewing out from the horizon at the city, whose inhabitants would not surrender.
Finally he rammed the French destroyer Jean-Bart with his explosive vessel. The destroyer was not sunk, but the impact rendered it unable to manoeuvre. It was not until three hours later that a second fast torpedo boat blew it up.
Neither Jules Gammal nor anyone else, apart from a single British Navy man, knew that he very nearly took all the war strategists to their deaths with him. His torpedo boat raced past the British warship H.M.S. Tyne with only three metres between them. All the British and French war chiefs were assembled on board, only one sailor was standing in the bows. He saw the boat and shouted, but his voice was drowned in the noise of the engines and explosions ringing out in the Suez Canal. He watched the boat race on until it rammed the French warship and went up in flames.
“What about that, then, Stinker?” cried Josef three days later, looking in at the butcher’s shop. Mahmud had no customers at that moment, and was reading a book about pre-Islamic poetry. He looked up in surprise. After all, he knew Josef and Farid. His assistant was standing there with his head bent, looking like a beaten dog.
