by Rafik Schami
Eight times her mother’s belly grew, swelled to a great size above her legs, and then, when her mother was thin again, there was still no child. Noura soon learnt the word miscarriage. But not all her mother’s torments could sap the strength of her dream. The eighth miscarriage was particularly hard, and the doctors were only able to save her mother’s life by luck, although at the price that she would never be pregnant again. Her husband told her she had brought her infertility on herself by taking the diabolical stuff that the quacks prescribed for her.
Noura remembered this eighth and last miscarriage particularly well. Her mother came home from hospital looking years older. At the time, when they were bathing in the hammam together, her mother found the first little swellings of her daughter’s breasts. Noura was eleven or twelve at the time. “You’re a woman now,” she cried in surprise. And there was a touch of reproof in her voice.
From that moment on her mother stopped treating her as the girl she still was, but as a grown woman surrounded by slavering, greedy men.
When Noura told her father about her mother’s exaggerated fears, he just laughed, but later he realized that he ought to have felt more respect for his daughter’s premonitions. Her mother regarded every young man with suspicion, as if fearing that he would instantly attack Noura.
“I have a rope ready down in the cellar. If anything happens to you I shall hang myself,” she said one morning. Noura searched the cellar. All she could find was a thin washing line, but she still feared for her mother, and began keeping quiet about everything that happened to her.
Her father was always ready to listen to questions, and was sought out at home as well as in the mosque by people who wanted his advice. He was famous for his patience and frankness, and he seldom got annoyed, even when he was asked such questions as why God created flies, and why human beings have to sleep. He replied patiently and in friendly tones. But he would answer no questions, none whatsoever, about women. He quite often interrupted a man seeking his advice on the subject abruptly. “That’s women’s business. You’d better ask a midwife or your mother.” He was afraid of women. Quite often, he used to say that the Prophet himself had warned his companions against women’s wiles. But even more often he told the story of the fairy who promised to grant a man one wish. The man wished for a bridge from Damascus to Honolulu. The fairy rolled her eyes and complained that his wish was just too difficult for her. Didn’t he have one that she could grant more easily? Yes, he said, he’d like to understand his wife. At that the fairy asked if he wanted the bridge to Honolulu to be a single or a dual carriage-way.
How was Noura to tell her father or her mother about the young smith who was always lying in wait in the main street, quietly asking if she wouldn’t like him to sew up the crack between her legs? He had just the right needle for the job, he said. At home, she looked at herself in the mirror. Yes, the place between her legs did look a bit like a crack. But sewing it up?
Of course she saw boys naked in the hammam, for on the day when women went they could take their small sons with them until the boys first showed signs of being aroused. After that they had to go to the baths with their fathers instead. But all these years she had believed what a woman neighbour told her in the hammam: boys were handicapped from birth and weren’t very good at peeing, so God had given them a little tube to keep them from wetting themselves all the time.
She learned a lot in the hammam. It was not just a place for body care and cleanliness, but for rest and laughter. She was always hearing stories there, and older women told her things that you wouldn’t find in any book. The women seemed to shed all their inhibitions and shame along with their clothes, and talked frankly about all kinds of subjects. The warm, steamy room smelled of lavender, ambergris, and musk.
Noura enjoyed exotic drinks and dishes here, things she never tasted at home. Every woman was anxious to improve her cookery skills and would bring the delicious results of her efforts with her. Then they all sat in a circle tasting over twenty different dishes and drinking sweet tea. Every time Noura went home feeling her heart was richer.
When she told her school friend Samia about the smith pestering her, Samia said, “Oh, he’s deceiving you. Men don’t carry needles, they have a chisel and they just make the hole bigger with it.” And she advised Noura to tell the young man bothering her to go home and sew up his sisters’ cracks, and if he had enough yarn left after that to try it with his mother some time.
Noura would also have liked to ask her father or her mother why she kept thinking up a thousand reasons to see the pale boy with the big eyes who began his apprenticeship to an upholsterer in the autumn of 1947, when she was in the fifth class at school.
The upholsterer’s shop was quite close. The boy saw her strolling past on his first day, and gave her a shy smile. When she went the same way next day, to see the boy again, he was kneeling on a small mat in the corner praying. He was praying on the next day too, and on the day after that. Noura wondered why, and asked her mother and father about it, but they had no idea why either. “It may be just coincidence that he’s praying when you happen to pass,” said her father.
“Or he’s broken something,” said her mother, before pouring soup into their bowls.
When she saw the boy praying again next time she asked his master, an old man with a short, snow-white beard, whether the boy had done something wrong.
“Dear me, no, he’s a good lad,” said the master upholsterer, with a kindly smile. “But before he learns how to handle cotton, wool, textiles, and leather, he must learn how to handle customers. We do our work in the inner courtyards of people’s homes, and often there’s only the mistress of the house or an old granny there. Sometimes our customers even let us come into their houses when there’s no one there at all, so that we can mend beds, mattresses, and sofas while they’re out shopping or at work, or visiting neighbours. And if an upholsterer isn’t one-hundred percent trustworthy he harms the reputation of the guild. That’s why we’re told to train apprentices to be devout before they first go into a customer’s house.”
At these words the boy rolled his eyes, and Noura smiled at this brief but unmistakable message.
When the boy went to bring water from the public well to the shop at midday, she was planning to wait for him. Many shops had no water supply of their own, so the boy had to make several trips to fetch buckets.
One day Noura was waiting at the well. The boy smiled at her. “I can help you if you like,” said Noura, showing him her little metal watering can. The boy smiled. “You’d be welcome, but I mustn’t accept or I’ll have to pray for half an hour longer. But I can stay here with you for a moment if you like,” he added, putting a big can under the tap.
Not many people came to the well, and they didn’t linger for long.
Noura often thought of that boy when she heard poems and songs about beautiful angels. She didn’t know why a creature like an angel with huge wings should be beautiful, but Tamim was more beautiful than any other boy in the whole quarter, and when he spoke her heart beat time to every one of his words.
Tamim had spent only two years learning to read and write from a sheikh. After that he had to work, because his parents were poor. He really wanted to be a ship’s captain instead of upholstering mattresses and chairs, beds and sofas. “And praying in every free moment. My knees hurt,” he told her.
Once, when Tamim had told her that he had to go to the Souk al-Hamidiyyeh the next day to get his master a great deal of sewing yarn and coloured thread from a wholesaler, she decided to meet him there. She would wait for him near the Bakdash ice-cream parlour.
In the morning she announced that she had her period. As usual, her mother advised her to stay away from school. She herself hated the school, but didn’t dare to say so, since her father wanted her to take her middle school certificate.
He too thought she looked pale. If she began feeling worse, he said, she could take the tram home. So Noura went to school. An hour l
ater, with her pale face and shaky voice, she convinced the headmistress that she wasn’t well. But ten paces from school her face regained its colour and her steps were firm and steady again. The school wasn’t far from the Souk al-Hamidiyyeh. She saved her ten piastres for the tram and went on foot.
Tamim arrived at ten. He was carrying a large empty basket for his purchases. He looked even more handsome here in the market than at his master’s shop.
“If anyone asks, we’re brother and sister, so we ought to walk holding hands,” she suggested. She had spent all night thinking that up. He gave her his hand, and she felt she would die of happiness. They walked through the lively souk in silence.
“Say something,” she asked him.
“I like your hand,” he said, “it’s warm and dry like my mother’s, but much smaller.”
“I have ten piastres,” she said. “I won’t need them for the tram, I’ll go home on foot. What flavour of ice cream do you like best?”
“Lemon,” he said.
“And I like Damascus Berry best,” she said. “It leaves your tongue all blue.”
“And I get gooseflesh from the lemon ice.” He licked his lips in anticipation.
They bought popsicles and strolled through the market. Spring was filling the streets with the scent of flowers. Noura wanted to whistle her favourite tune, as boys did, but girls weren’t allowed to whistle.
They were walking separately now, because Tamim needed one hand for his basket and the other for his ice. Noura had to laugh at the noisy way he was licking it. But soon the souk was so full that she had to wind her way through the crowd ahead of him. A blind beggar fascinated her with his singing. Why, she wondered, did blind people have that special kind of voice? At that moment she felt Tamim’s hand. She was only halfway through her ice, and he had finished his already! She turned to him, and he smiled. “Don’t worry, it’s only your brother,” he said softly.
When they had to part again, outside the way into the market, Tamim held both her hands in his for a long time. He looked into her eyes, and for the first time in her life Noura felt breathless with joy. He drew her close. “Brothers and sisters say goodbye with a kiss,” he said, kissing her cheek. “And as soon as I’m a captain I’ll come back for you with my ship,” he added, and disappeared quickly into the crowd as if ashamed of the tears that were running down his face.
A month later another boy was kneeling on the little prayer mat.
“But where is…” she asked the master upholsterer, and bit her tongue so as not to say his name. She had been whispering it into her pillow all these nights.
“Oh, him!” said the master upholsterer, amused. “He ran away, sent a message to his parents a few days ago that he’d signed on board a Greek freighter ship. Crazy boy!”
That night her father had to send for the doctor. She had a fever for a whole week.
Two years after Noura’s flight, a strong man in naval uniform knocked at the door of her parents’ house. He was a sea captain, he told her father. Her mother was in the hospital at the time for an appendicitis operation.
When he heard how Noura had run away, it is said that he smiled and shook her father’s hand in a friendly way. “Noura always did go in search of the wide waters of the sea,” he is reported to have said. Her father was so impressed by those words that – to his wife’s annoyance – he often spoke of that meeting, even on his deathbed.
But that was not until decades later.
6
No one asked Salman where he’d been when he failed to turn up at school several days running. And of all the hundred children and five teachers, only one person smiled at him. That was Benjamin who sat next to him on the same bench.
When he came home at midday, his mother was still busy cleaning their hiding place. She worked hard to put the rooms in order. She cleaned and washed, threw the rubbish into the inner courtyard and then swept it into the rooms of the former weaver’s workshop.
She worked until early in the afternoon at home in their apartment to get everything ready for her husband, and then fled back to her hiding place with the boy. Shimon told her there was no need to worry. She could stay there for a few years, because the old weaver’s heirs were going to court against each other. Apparently the tiny house was likely to bring in good money because it was so close to the historic chapel of St Boulos.
After a short time his mother stopped crying, and their hiding place didn’t smell of mould anymore but of onions and thyme. There was no electricity in the house, but candlelight banished the darkness and cold. And the lavatory and bath were in working order, because in their quarrel about the inheritance the weaver’s heirs had forgotten to turn off the water.
Soon mother and son were beginning to laugh like two conspirators as they imagined the stupid expression on Salman’s father’s face when he came home in the evening dead drunk, and found no one there for him to beat.
But the happiness of the poor is short-lived.
One night Salman’s father was suddenly there in the room with them. His shadow danced frantically over the walls. The two candles seemed to tremble before him. His voice and his odour, an unpleasant mixture of arak and decay, filled all the space that his body left available. Salman hardly dared to breathe.
Only later did he learn from Sarah that their neighbour Samira, wife of the fuel station attendant Yousef, who lived at the other end of the yard between the chicken run and the baker’s journeyman Barakat’s apartment, had given the secret away in return for a lira. Nothing escaped Samira. From her own apartment, she watched all that went on in Grace and Favour Yard: the eight apartments in all, two lavatories, two woodsheds, and the chicken run. Salman could never forgive her for that act of treachery. He would not speak her name, but called her only “the telltale woman.”
That night Salman’s father dragged his mother downstairs by her hair and out into the street, and if Shimon and Kamil, who came hurrying up, hadn’t barred the way he would have hauled the poor woman all the way back to the yard. They freed Mariam from his grasp, and while Shimon helped her to her feet, Sarah’s father the police officer pushed the furious man ahead of him back into Grace and Favour Yard. “Now then, calm down and don’t make me put my uniform on, or you know where I’ll be taking you,” he growled, to bring the furious man to his senses.
Salman stood at the window and looked at his tear-stained face in it. He was afraid his father would come back and haul him out of the house by the hair as well. But when all was still, there was only one thing he wanted, and that was to go to his mother. At that moment he heard loud barking from the ground floor. It changed to a whine, as if a dog down there was afraid or hungry.
Salman held the candle above his head and tried to look down at the inner courtyard from the window, but deep darkness swallowed up the candlelight before it reached the ground.
Curious and frightened at the same time, he slowly went downstairs. Even before he reached the last step a tangled mass of black hair collided with his legs, and a pair of bright eyes stared at him.
The dog was large, but his clumsiness and playfulness showed that he was young. He had a fine head and a large muzzle. Only the encrusted blood on the hair of his chest showed Salman that the animal’s throat was wounded. It looked as if someone had injured the dog severely and left him in these ruins.
“Wait here,” Salman said, and went back upstairs. He found a clean piece of an old dress among the rags that his mother kept in a drawer. He wrapped it carefully around the neck of the injured dog, which had followed him and stood surprisingly still.
“You’re not going to die,” said Salman, patting his head. “Like my Mama,” he added, and he hugged the dog. The dog was whining hungrily. Salman remembered the mutton bone that the butcher Mahmoud had given them. His mother had used it to make their last bowl of soup, and she had kept the bone so that Salman could nibble the scraps of meat off it next time he was hungry. Salman gave it to the dog, who devoured everything on it
happily, wagging his tail constantly. Only when Salman stroked his head for a long time did the dog calm down. They looked at each other like two outcasts, and Salman was never to forget the expression in the dog’s eyes.
He slipped away, but not without closing the door to the courtyard carefully, as if he were afraid the dog would disappear.
Day was already dawning when he slipped into his parents’ apartment. His mother was still crouching on the mattress, while his father snored loudly in the second room
“He won’t be scaring you much longer,” he whispered into his mother’s ear. “I’ve got a big dog, and he’ll soon grow even bigger and eat up anyone who touches you, Mama,” said Salman, and his mother smiled, took him in her arms, and fell into a deep sleep at once. But Salman stayed awake and didn’t move until his father shouted “Coffee!” and his mother woke up. When she went into the kitchen Salman nodded off. He saw the dog, huge and powerful as a stallion with snow-white wings. He, his mother, and Sarah were on his back, flying over the Christian quarter. His mother clung to him anxiously, and Salman heard Sarah reassuring her, saying that the dog was an enchanted swallow who knew its way around very well and would never throw them off.
Above his mother’s head, Sarah called out to him, “Salman, Salman, you must give the dog a name or he’ll get lost.”
“What shall I call him?” he shouted into the wind.
“Pilot,” he heard his mother and Sarah say in chorus.
The dog flew round the Church of St Mary. It was the first time Salman had seen it from above. Then they flew down Abbara Alley to Grace and Favour Yard. Salman saw the neighbours come out of their homes. They pointed up and called out, “Pilot!”
He woke with a start. His father was just lighting his second cigarette and setting out on his way to work. “My dog’s name is Pilot,” murmured Salman, jumping up.
