by Rafik Schami
Suddenly two girls ran up to the mason and told him, breathlessly, how they had seen a teacher armed with a bamboo cane laying mercilessly into his son Jirji, while shouting insults to the boy’s father and mother, saying they were not Christians but idol-worshippers. The teacher had told Ibrahim’s son to repeat that, and Jirji, in tears, had repeated his teacher’s words after him.
The mason marvelled at the way the girls spoke in turn, telling him all about it in convincing detail in spite of being so upset. His son Jirji could never have done it so well.
He closed his eyes for a second, and saw a fine rain of burning needles against a dark sky. Then he strode ahead of the girls to the school, which was a hundred metres away, and by the time he reached the low wooden gate with the famous picture of St Nicholas – the saint was just taking the children out of the pickling tub – he was accompanied not just by the two girls but also by the barber, who had nothing to do at this time of day but shoo flies away and twirl the ends of his already perfectly waxed moustache for the umpteenth time, as well as the rug-mender, who worked outdoors on a day like this, the two city workmen, the vegetable seller, and two passersby who were perfect strangers and had no idea what was going on, but were sure they should soon find out. Their expectations were to be fulfilled.
Giving the wooden gate a kick, and bellowing like Tarzan, the infuriated Ibrahim arrived in the middle of the small schoolyard.
“Where’s that son of a whore? We’re not idol-worshippers, we’re good Catholics,” he shouted. The school principal, a stocky little man with glasses and a ridiculously camouflaged bald patch, came out of his office, and even before he could express his indignation at Ibrahim’s coarse expressions a resounding slap in the face took him by surprise. It sent him staggering several metres back and falling to the ground. His toupée flew after him, alarming the mason, who thought for a moment that he had scalped the principal, as if he were in some kind of Western.
The principal began wailing, but Ibrahim kicked him in the belly, and at the same time grabbed the man’s right foot, as if he were kicking cotton wool into a sack.
The principal begged him to let go of his foot. He had never doubted, he cried, that Ibrahim was a good Christian, and he had toothache.
“Where’s that bastard who’s mistreating my Jirji?”
School students came streaming out of the classrooms where their lessons had been interrupted by all this noise.
“Koudsi’s in the toilets. He’s hiding there,” one excited schoolboy told the mason, just as Ibrahim saw his son, who was pale and smiling awkwardly at him. Ibrahim stormed off to the toilets, followed by a crowd of children. The sound of several blows was the first thing to be heard in the schoolyard, followed by the voice of Koudsi the teacher begging for mercy and repeating the remarks: “You’re a good Christian… yes, you’re a good, devout Catholic… no, Jirji is a good boy, and I…” Then there was silence.
Ibrahim came back to the yard, sweating, and called out, “And it’ll be the same for anyone else who dares touch Jirji or say we’re not good Catholics.”
From that day on Jirji was left alone. But that was only one of the reasons why Salman envied Jirji: the other reason was that the pale boy, whose father was very poor, like his own, always had money in his pocket. He bought something delicious from the school kiosk at break every day, and licked, nibbled, sucked, and thoroughly enjoyed all kinds of brightly coloured sweets. He never gave anyone else a taste.
Salman’s father had never once given him any money, even when he was drunk.
The neighbours were short of money too. If Salman lent them a hand, at best they rewarded him with fresh or dried fruit. Only Shimon the vegetable seller paid cash for everything Salman did for him. But Salman was needed only when he had too many orders to deliver himself. The pay was small enough, but there were plenty of tips, so Salman was glad to help out when the vegetable seller wanted his services.
At weddings and other festive occasions Salman could spend a whole day earning a few piastres by delivering baskets of fruit and vegetables. And when he stopped for a rest in the shop he could sit on a vegetable crate and watch Shimon selling his goods and throwing in good advice for free.
Shimon himself was an excellent cook, unlike his wife. She was a small, pale little woman who later died of a gastric haemorrhage. She ate little, and wandered about their apartment all day in a bad temper. Shimon, who loved her, once said his wife was looking for something she had lost, but he never told anyone what it was. However, since her mother’s death she had been looking for it all day, going to bed in the evening determined to go on searching the next day.
The women who bought vegetables from Shimon often asked his advice. He knew exactly which vegetables, spices and herbs would stimulate their husbands and which would soothe them at any given season of the year. He recommended tomatoes, carrots, figs and bananas, dill, peppermint, and sage for soothing men’s passions, and advised ginger, coriander, pepper, artichokes, pomegranates, and apricots as stimulants. And he always recommended the women to perfume themselves with neroli oil, which they could distil themselves from bitter orange blossom.
As a rule they were grateful to him, because the effects were soon felt. But it could happen that a man showed no erotic interest at all in his wife anymore. Once Salman heard a disappointed woman saying her husband’s prick was even limper now. Shimon listened intently. “Then your husband’s liver has gone into reverse,” he explained, and recommended a vegetable normally used for people whose livers had not “gone into reverse.” He often gave women “the remedy” for free.
Salman had no idea exactly what a liver in reverse would be like, but many of the neighbouring women were enthusiastic about the cure for it.
Sometimes, when there was nothing to do in the shop and Shimon had a little spare time, he would pick up a vegetable, maybe an aubergine or artichoke or celeriac, stroke it and lean over confidentially to Salman. “Do you know all the dishes that can be made from this one vegetable?” And as he didn’t expect any answer, he would go on, “We counted twenty-two different dishes the other day, old Sofia and I. Twenty-two absolutely different dishes. Think of that – a huge table covered with a snow-white cloth, serving dishes both long and wide, shallow and deep, rectangular and round standing on it, all full of delicious aubergine or artichoke or potato recipes, and red and yellow rose petals scattered among the serving dishes, the platters and bowls. And in front of my plate a glass full of Lebanese dry red wine. What more can God himself offer me in Paradise, eh?”
All Salman could say to that was, “A water pipe and a coffee with cardamom,” and Shimon laughed, stroked his head and affectionately tugged his earlobe.
“My boy, my boy, you’re all right. If your father doesn’t beat you to death when he’s drunk, you’ll amount to something, mark my words.”
Working for Shimon wasn’t difficult, but he insisted on Salman always arriving washed, with tidy hair, and in clean clothes. “Vegetables and fruit delight the eyes and the nose even before the mouth tastes them with pleasure.” He himself was always clean and well dressed, even better dressed than Yousef the pharmacist.
Once he sent Salman away because he turned up straight from football, all sweaty. “You’re my ambassador to my customers, and if you’re grubby and unwashed, what are the customers going to think of me?”
In fact Salman entered houses with inner courtyards rather more beautiful than Paradise itself as the priest described it in religious instruction lessons. So he liked delivering orders better than working in the shop.
The customers were generous, all except for one, who was a miser. He was a professor at the university. He lived alone in a little house and never paid his bill until the end of the month. “Customers like that,” Shimon told Salman, “are decoration for my shop rather than coins clinking in my pocket.”
“Why aren’t you married?” Salman asked the professor one day. The miser laughed. “I’m such a nasty piece of wor
k,” he said, “that I’d get divorced from myself if only I could.”
Three or four of Shimon’s women customers used to give Salman either a piece of chocolate, or a sweet, or sometimes a kiss. But best of all he liked delivering orders to the widow Maria. She was rich and had a house all to herself. The inner courtyard was like a jungle, and even had brightly coloured parrots in it.
The widow Maria ordered in lavish quantities and paid at once. However, she often just picked out one small item from the full basket, and asked Salman to give the rest away to the house next door. “The widow Maria sends the children some vegetables to make their cheeks red!” he would tell the poor people who lived there.
But the main reason why he liked going to see the rich widow was that she would put a chair under the old orange tree for him, and feed him all kinds of exotic jams that he had never tasted before. She made bitter oranges, quinces, blue plums, rose petals, and other fruits and herbs into preserves, jellies, and jams. She worked for hours on new recipes, although as she was diabetic she could never eat a spoonful of them herself. But she liked to see people enjoying all these delicacies. She told Salman, who had gobbled his first roll and jam, to eat more slowly and tell her exactly what it tasted like, and then he would get another one.
So Salman was sorry he had been greedy. He would have loved to take some of these delicious confections back to his mother or Sarah, but he dared not ask the widow to let him do that.
When he had eaten enough she would tell him about her life, but like many other widows she never said a word about her dead husband. And there was always a sense of sadness about her.
When Salman asked the vegetable seller why, he only sighed. Maria’s husband had wounded her deeply, and that was why she never talked about him. It was not a story fit for children anyway, he said, spraying radishes with water and arranging apples in a crate.
Only years later did Salman learn that Maria came from a well-known and very rich family. She was one of the first girls ever to gain a higher school certificate in Damascus in the 1920s. Her husband was unfaithful to her with the cook on the second day after their marriage. But he always pretended to be madly in love with her, so she would forgive him, and by way of thanks he was unfaithful again. Even at the age of sixty he was still chasing every woman he saw, drooling, until syphilis carried him off.
After that she lived very quietly. She wasn’t even in her mid-sixties yet, but she looked like an old lady of eighty.
When Salman, talking to Sarah, went into ecstasies about the widow Maria’s delicious jams and jellies, Sarah started wondering how she could get rolls spread with those exotic confections for herself.
“Maybe I’ll just knock on her door,” said Sarah, “and tell her I’m very poor, and I dreamed she has a warm heart and lots of different kinds of preserves, and I’m soon going to die, so I’d really, really love to eat ten rolls spread with different preserves, just for once.”
Salman laughed. Faizeh, Sarah’s mother, had heard what they were saying through the open window. She came out and gave Sarah a loving hug. “You don’t have to do that,” she said. “I’ll make you rose-petal jelly tomorrow.”
Sarah smiled happily. “And quince jelly the day after tomorrow,” she said, just as a police officer rode into Grace and Favour Yard on his bike. He spotted Sarah and Salman, smiled briefly, and asked where a certain Adnan lived. Adnan was going to be arrested for breaking into several expensive limousines, stealing car seats, radios, and in one case even the steering wheel, and selling them on.
“Aha,” said Sarah, and she pointed to the apartment where Samira, Adnan’s mother, lived at the other end of Grace and Favour Yard.
“With all his wonderful talents, that Adnan could be a famous car mechanic or a racing driver,” said Sarah.
“You’re crazy,” Salman protested. All Adnan’s ideas were unpleasant. He would grab cats, small dogs, rats and mice by their tails, whirl them round and round in the air, and then put them down again. The poor creatures staggered away as if they were drunk, tottering back and forth, and sometimes throwing up. The people who lived in Grace and Favour Yard laughed themselves silly and encouraged him to think up other brutal tricks. Salman just thought he was horrible.
And it was Adnan who finally forced Salman to get fit. It was on a Sunday, and Sarah was going to let him have a lick of her ice again. They strolled off to the ice-cream vendor on the Kishleh Road junction, and Sarah decided to have a lemon popsicle. They turned, and were on their way home again. Not far from their alley, the unpleasant Adnan was standing with three other lads, grinning all over his face.
“If you’re scared, just run off fast. I’ll be all right,” Sarah whispered. But Salman saw how she was trembling.
“Don’t you worry, I’ll deal with them. Eat your ice and don’t let them bother you,” he said, feeling his chest swelling with the pride of showing off.
“Jug-Ears, Elephant-Ears!” Adnan struck up this chant, and the other boys fell about laughing. Adnan grabbed Sarah’s shoulder and held her. She licked her ice at amazing speed, breathing fast and audibly like someone with asthma.
“Take your filthy fingers off my girlfriend,” cried Salman angrily, and before Adnan knew it, Salman had kicked him in the balls. He bent double. Sarah ran away, but the other boys stopped Salman from following her. The ice-cream vendor saw the scuffle, and shouted to the boys to stop. When they didn’t react but went on laying into Salman the man made for them with a broom, bringing it down with all his might on their backs and buttocks. They let go of Salman and ran away, screeching.
That day Salman decided to make his muscles stronger. He dreamed at night that Adnan barred Sarah’s way again, but he, Salman, flung him right through the vegetable seller’s first-floor window and up into the sky.
As if heaven were ready to oblige him, soon after that he found an iron bar over a metre long by the roadside. He took it home. He knew how to make any metal bar into dumbbells. You poured concrete into a bucket, put the metal bar into the mixture of cement, sand and water, and let it dry. Then you put the other end of your bar into the same mixture. Mikhail the mason gave him the concrete. For the first end of the dumbbells, Salman used the rusty bucket he found behind the henhouse. Unfortunately he couldn’t find a similar bucket for the other end, but after searching for a long time he decided to use an old and battered cylindrical tin can.
When the whole thing had dried, the dumbbells looked rather funny, with a cylindrical lump of concrete hanging from one end, and a peculiar shape like a squashed sausage from the other. That didn’t bother Salman. He was impressed by the idea of raising the dumbbells, which weighed almost ten kilos. It was difficult, because the cylindrical end was more than a kilo lighter than the sausage-shaped end. So Salman could raise the whole thing in the air only for a few seconds before he fell over sideways and the device crashed to the ground. Sarah, much amused, was watching the whole performance.
Salman went on training, but always with the same result. Once Sarah found him lying on the floor and staring at the ceiling. The weight lay askew behind his head.
“That thing’s never going to give you more muscle power,” she said. “It’ll only leave you walking sideways like a crab and falling over like my father when he’s drunk and sees his bed.”
So Salman broke off the two ends with a hammer, and took the iron bar to the any-old-iron man, who weighed it and gave him a whole thirty piastres for it.
“Six ices,” whispered Salman, whistling with delight at his new wealth. He bought Sarah three ice-cream cones, and her loving look made his chest muscles expand. He could feel them growing.
5
The Midan quarter lies southwest of the Old Town of Damascus. The caravans of pilgrims bound for Mecca used to set out from that place, and they were welcomed back to it on their return. So there are many mosques, shops selling the things that pilgrims need, hammams and wholesale dealers in wheat and other grains along the broad main street that bears
the name of the quarter: Midan Street. A branching network of many small alleys lay around this long street. Ayyubi Alley turned off the busy main street, and had only four houses, and a large aniseed warehouse in it. The entrance to the warehouse was in the parallel street.
Noura loved the smell of aniseed. It reminded her of sweets.
Ayyubi Alley was called after the great clan that had once lived in those four houses. The head of the clan, Sami Ayyubi, had been wanted by the police after the 1925 uprising against the French occupying forces. He and his family fled to Jordan, where he was protected by the British. Later, after the founding of the kingdom of Jordan, he became the king’s private secretary and spied for the British in the royal palace. He took Jordanian citizenship, and never went back to Damascus.
Soon after Ayyubi’s flight a rich merchant called Abdullah Mahaini bought the four houses cheaply. Mahaini, a rich man whose ancestors had come from central Syria in the seventeenth century to settle here in the Midan quarter, dealt in textiles, fine timbers, leather, weapons, and building materials through the several branches of his company all over the country. He also represented a Dutch electrical firm, a German sewing machine manufacturer, and a French car constructor.
The small house at the end of the blind alley was an architectural and artistic gem of old Damascus. Mahaini gave it to his daughter Sahar, Noura’s mother, as her dowry when she married. He sold the other three houses at a large profit. Unlike Mahaini’s first wife, who bore him four sons, his second, Sahar’s mother, seemed to have only girls in her womb. She gave birth to eight healthy girl babies, and the merchant had no intention of feeding a single one of them longer than necessary. He wanted each girl to have a husband to look after her from her fifteenth year of life onward. A number of his neighbours said, maliciously, that only the age difference between his daughters and the seven wives he had married in the course of his life embarrassed him. The older the rich merchant Mahaini grew, the younger his wives became.
