by Rafik Schami
“I’m here, don’t worry,” she whispered through her tears.
He sat up, laid his head on her lap, and in a soft voice he sang her the songs he had learnt from her.
He was hungry but didn’t like to say so, because he was afraid that might cast her into utter despair. All his life Salman never forgot that hunger, and whenever he wanted to say something had taken a very long time, he said it was “longer than a day spent starving.”
“I’ll clean the window tomorrow,” said his mother, suddenly laughing. He didn’t understand.
“Isn’t there a candle here?” he asked.
“Yes, we must think of that too,” she said, as if something had suddenly occurred to her. “Do you have a good memory?”
He nodded in the dark, and as if she had seen him she went on, “Then let’s play. Tomorrow we’ll bring old rags.”
He got the idea. “We’ll bring old rags and two candles.”
“We’ll bring rags, candles, and a box of matches,” she added. And late that night, when he was lying in her arms, so tired that he couldn’t keep his eyes open anymore, she smiled and cried, “Why, if we were really going to bring all those things tomorrow we’d need a truck.”
The rain pattered regularly on the window panes, and Salman pressed close to his mother. She smelled of onions. She had been making his father onion soup that day.
It was a long time since he had slept so soundly.
3
Noura’s mother, who could sometimes treat her husband like an insecure, clumsy boy, trembled before him where Noura was concerned. She seemed more afraid of him then than her little daughter was. She decided nothing without adding, “if your father agrees.”
It was like that on the day when Noura went out with her uncle Farid, her mother’s half-brother, for the last time. He was a handsome man. Only years later was Noura to discover that Uncle Farid had already been penniless in those days, although you couldn’t tell by looking at him. The three textiles businesses his father had handed over to him had gone broke within a very short time. Farid blamed his father, who was always interfering, and whose old-fashioned ideas got in the way of any success.
Thereupon his father, the great Mahaini, had disinherited him. But not even that could spoil the playboy Farid’s sunny disposition.
As he had been educated in the best schools, had a gift for language and beautiful handwriting, he practised the unusual profession of an ardhalgi, a scribe who wrote out applications. In the Damascus of the 1950s, more than half the adult population could neither read nor write. However, the modern state insisted on doing everything in form, and its bureaucrats wanted to have every question, however slight, presented in writing. They could then go through the written application in the approved manner, and return it to the citizen who had sent it in with a number of rubber stamps and other marks pertaining to the state on it. By doing that, the state hoped to win something approaching esteem among the population, whose Bedouin roots always inclined them toward anarchy and lack of respect for any laws.
These applications, petitions and requests proliferated to such an extent that they were the subject of much local wit in Damascus. “If your neighbour’s a civil servant, you’re not supposed to say good morning to him, you have to submit a stamped application to wish him good morning. And then maybe you’ll get an answer back.”
But it was also said that bureaucracy was necessary so that the civil servants of the state could work in a more productive, modern way. If you let the loquacious Syrians make requests and petitions by word of mouth, every application would grow into a never-ending story of arabesques and continuations, all jumbled up. The civil servants could never have got any sensible work done. Furthermore, it was hard to mark the spoken word with a rubber stamp.
So the scribes sat at tiny desks by the entrances to civil service offices under their faded sun umbrellas, and wrote out requests, appeals, applications, petitions, and other paperwork. As the police would allow only one chair and one desk per scribe, their customers had to stand. They told the scribe more or less what it was all about, and he would start at once. At the time it was all handwritten, and the ardhalgi wrote with lavish gestures of his hand, to make it clear how much trouble this particular application was costing him.
The better a scribe’s memory, the more flexible he was, for applications to a court of law were not the same as applications to the Finance Ministry, and those again were different from applications to the Residence Registration Office. Many a scribe had over fifty versions ready, and could move with his chair and folding desk from the entrance of one of those official bodies to another depending on the day and the season.
Uncle Farid always sat outside the Family Court, under a fine red sun umbrella. He was more elegant than any of his colleagues, and so he always had plenty of customers. People believed he would go down better with the judges and lawyers, and Uncle Farid did nothing to shake their belief.
The ardhalgis did not just write applications, they also advised their customers on the best place to make an application, and how much it ought to cost to get the state to stamp and mark it. They comforted the desperate and strengthened the resolve of protesters, encouraged the faint-hearted, and advised optimists to moderate the exaggerated ideas they usually entertained of the effect their applications would have.
If he hadn’t been too lazy, Uncle Farid could have filled a big book with the stories, tragedies and comedies alike, that he had heard from his customers while he wrote, but that never found a way into any application.
Uncle Farid wrote not just applications but letters of all kinds. Most often of all, however, he wrote to emigrants. You had only to tell him the name of the emigrant and the country where he was working, and he would already have a long letter composed in his head. As Noura found out later, they were letters saying nothing, for their message could usually be summed up in a single line. In the case of letters to emigrants, it usually amounted to: Please send us money. But that single line was hidden in voluble paeans of praise, exaggerated expressions of longing to see the recipient again, promises of loyal affection, and protestations sworn by the Fatherland and the sender’s mother’s milk. Anything that stimulated the tear glands was grist to his mill. The few letters of his that Noura was allowed to read later, however, struck her as simply ridiculous. Uncle Farid never talked about these letters during his lifetime; they were his secret.
Those who had a little more money would make an appointment for Uncle Farid to visit them at home, and dictate what he was to write or apply for at their leisure. Of course that cost more, but those letters were very well composed.
Damascenes who were even richer did not go to an ardhalgi but to one of the calligraphers who wrote beautiful letters, adorned with calligraphic ornaments around the edges, and usually had their own libraries from which to draw words of wisdom and appropriate quotations to offer their clients. Unlike the mass-produced letters written by scribes in the street, these missives were unique.
The calligraphers made the simple act of letter-writing into a cult full of secrets. They wrote letters to husbands or wives with a copper pen, letters to friends and lovers with a silver pen, letters to particularly important persons with a golden pen, letters to a promised bride with the beak of a stork, and to enemies and adversaries with a pen carved from a pomegranate twig.
Uncle Farid loved Noura’s mother, his half-sister, and visited her as often as he could until his death in a car accident two years after Noura’s wedding. Only later was Noura to discover that dislike of their own father, old Mahaini, was the link between her mother and her uncle.
Noura liked her uncle because he laughed a lot and was very generous, but she couldn’t tell her father that. He called her uncle a “painted drum.” His letters and application forms, said her father, were just like him: colourful, loud, and empty.
One day Uncle Farid came visiting in the morning. Not only was he always elegantly dressed, he also wore shoes o
f fine, thin red leather that made noisy music as he walked. That was a sign of distinction at the time, for only good shoes squeaked. And when Noura opened the door, she saw a large, white donkey. Her uncle had tied it up to a ring near the front door.
“Well, little one, would you like a ride on this fine donkey with me?” Noura was so surprised she could hardly close her mouth again. Uncle Farid told her mother that he had to visit a rich client nearby to write some important applications for him. The man would pay generously, he said. So he had thought he’d take Noura with him to give her mother a little rest. Her mother liked the idea. “Then she’ll stop ruining her eyes with reading books. But she must be back just before the midday call of the muezzin, because His Excellency is coming to lunch,” she said with a knowing smile.
Noura’s uncle took both her hands and swung her up on the donkey’s back. She felt her heart slip right down to her knees, and clung anxiously to the pommel emerging in front of her from the saddle, which was covered by a rug.
You often saw donkeys like this one hired out in the city streets, and one of the many donkey-stands where you could get one was in the main street, not far from Noura’s house. Only a few rich families had cars, and apart from the trams there were only two or three buses and a few horse-drawn carriages to transport passengers into and around Damascus, not nearly enough.
The tail of a hired donkey was coloured bright red, so that you could see it a long way off. As a rule customers returned their donkeys when they had done whatever they set out for, and if the customer didn’t want to ride a donkey back himself the man who hired the donkeys out would send a little boy to run along beside the rider until he was home, then take the animal over and bring it back to the stand.
So now Uncle Farid rode along the streets with her. They followed the main street for a while and then turned into an alley. A labyrinth of simple, low mud-brick houses swallowed them up. At the end of one alley Uncle Farid stopped outside a fine stone house. He tied the donkey up to the lamppost near the entrance and knocked. A friendly man opened the door, talked to Uncle Farid for a while, and then he invited them both into his fine inner courtyard, and made haste to bring the donkey in too. Uncle Farid was about to say that didn’t matter, but the man insisted. He tied the donkey up to a mulberry tree and put some melon rinds and fresh maize leaves down in front of it.
Noura was given a lemonade, and soon she was standing around the donkey with the man’s children, patting and feeding it. They were the most unusual children she had ever seen. They shared their biscuits and apricots with her without asking for anything in return, or pestering her for even a moment. She would have liked to stay with them.
Sitting on the shady terrace, Uncle Farid wrote what the man dictated to him. Sometimes they stopped for a little while so that Uncle Farid could think, and then they went on until the call of the muezzin rang out, whereupon they hastily started for home.
As soon as Noura was back her father started scolding her and her mother. Her uncle had prudently made his excuses at the door and gone off in a hurry.
Why did her father always have to be so cross? Noura closed her ears so as not to hear him.
As she didn’t want anything to eat either, she went to her room and lay down on the sofa. “Did you notice how happy that family is?” her uncle had asked on the way back, and Noura had nodded.
“The man is a stonemason. He doesn’t go hungry, but he can’t save anything. Yet he lives like a king. And why?”
She didn’t know.
“Neither my father’s money nor your father’s books make people happy,” he told her. “It’s all in the heart.”
“All in the heart,” she repeated.
Her uncle went on visiting her mother, but Noura was never allowed to go for a ride with him to see a customer again.
4
In the autumn of 1945, when Salman was eight years and seven months old, he went through the low gateway of the St Nicholas School for poor Christian children for the first time. He didn’t want to go to school, but even the fact that he could already read and write was not enough to get him out of it. Sarah had taught him reading and writing, and practised with him again and again. She made him call her Miss Teacher while she introduced him to the mysteries of letters and numbers. When he worked hard and gave clever answers she kissed him on both cheeks, on his eyes or on his forehead, and when he was particularly brilliant, on the lips. When he made mistakes she shook her head and wagged her forefinger back and forth in front of his nose. Only when he was cheeky or grumpy did she affectionately pull his earlobes or tap him on the head with her knuckles, saying, “This is a butterfly calling to warn you not to go too far.”
He didn’t want to go to school, but Yacoub the priest had convinced his father that education would make him a good Catholic child. “Otherwise his first communion will be in danger,” he pointed out, and Salman’s father understood that the apartment where he lived solely by the grace of the Catholic Church would be in danger too.
Those were months of hell. In lessons the teachers mercilessly knocked Salman about, and in the schoolyard he was teased because of his thin frame and large jug ears. “Skinny Elephant,” he was called. Not even the teachers thought there was anything wrong in laughing at him.
One day the children were to learn the verbs used for movement. “Human beings?” asked the teacher, and the pupils answered out loud, “Walk.” Fish swim, birds fly, everyone knew that. When it came to snakes, the children were all talking at once to start with, until they agreed that “Snakes wriggle.” All that most of them knew about scorpions was that they sting. “Scorpions scrabble,” said the teacher. “So what about Salman?” he asked. The pupils smiled awkwardly and tried all the verbs of movement they could think of, but the teacher wasn’t satisfied. Salman lowered his gaze and his ears went dark red.
“He sails through the air with his big jug ears,” said the teacher, roaring with laughter, and the whole class laughed with him. Except for one of them, Benjamin who sat next to Salman. “Old Baldy!” he whispered to his downcast friend, and Salman had to laugh, because that teacher did have a particularly large bald patch.
Salman hated school and felt he was going to stifle to death there, but then Benjamin showed him the gateway to freedom. Benjamin had already had to go through Class One twice. He was a tall boy with the biggest nose Salman had ever seen in his life. Even though he was twelve he still hadn’t taken first communion. His father, who kept the little stall on the junction near the Catholic church, fried huge quantities of falafel balls every day, so a powerful odour of rancid oil often clung to Benjamin. His father, like Salman’s, didn’t really want to send his son to school. And he wouldn’t have sent him, either, if Father Yacoub, the fanatical new priest at the Catholic church, hadn’t stirred up opinion in the neighbourhood against him, quietly expressing some doubt of his Christian faith and the cleanliness of his hands. So quietly, indeed, that it was a month before Benjamin’s father heard about it, and then he stopped wondering why many of his regular customers had started going to buy falafel from that terrible hypocrite George, whose wares tasted of old socks but whose stall was crammed as full of crucifixes and pictures of the saints as if it were a place of pilgrimage.
One day, after Salman had been given a thrashing in the schoolyard by the supervisor, Benjamin told him a great secret. “The teachers in this God-forsaken school don’t notice who’s present and who isn’t,” Benjamin told him quietly. “It’s only on Sundays they check the kids before they go to church. Otherwise that bunch often don’t even notice what class they’re in, and they don’t find out they’ve been taking Class Two for Class Four until the end of the lesson.”
Salman was terrified of skipping school. Gabriel the dressmaker’s son had told him truants were shut up for a whole day in the cellar, where the hungry rats nibbled their ears, which had been rubbed with rancid fat first. “Those rats would make a good meal of you,” Gabriel had said, with a nasty laugh.
“Gabriel is a scaredy-cat,” Benjamin explained. Just before Christmas, Benjamin told him how he could skip school for four days, and no one would notice. Now Salman felt brave enough to do it, and on a cold but sunny January day the two of them spent several entertaining hours walking around the markets, amusing themselves by nibbling sweet things when the stallholders weren’t looking.
No one had noticed anything at home, so Salman skipped school more and more frequently. Only on Sundays did he stand in line, well washed, his hair combed, holding out his hands with their clipped fingernails for inspection. He seldom got hit with the broad wooden paddle that came down on grubby hands.
“I’ll have to leave school after my first communion anyway,” Benjamin explained. “Otherwise Father says I’d only get more scars on my behind, and my head would still be just as empty. I’m supposed to earn money to help keep my nine brothers and sisters.”
“And I want to go to Sarah’s school,” said Salman. Benjamin thought that must be some high-class establishment, and asked no questions.
The only pupil whom Salman and Benjamin envied was Jirji, the mason Ibrahim’s son. His father was an imposing figure, two metres tall and one metre broad.
One day the teacher Koudsi hit Jirji for slinking into the staffroom and eating the teacher’s two sandwiches, while Mr Koudsi himself was “engaged in single combat with the powers of darkness in the hearts of his pupils.” He used to deliver this remark to every class, so that even the other teachers called him, derisively, “Sir Powers of Darkness.”
Jirji’s father, Ibrahim, was just repairing the outer wall of the house where the rich Sihnawi family lived. This handsome property lay diagonally opposite the alley leading to school. Today Ibrahim was in a particularly bad temper, because the air stank. Two young workmen were slowly opening up a blocked sewage pipe. And like all employees of the city, they had the gift of spinning out their work. They brought a black, foul-smelling mass into the light of day, piled it up by the roadside, and then went off for coffee in the nearby café.
