by Rafik Schami
Her grandfather was a small, silent man, very old, who used to sit somewhere in this jungle, reading or saying his prayers. His face, with its big ears, was like her father’s, and his voice was even thinner and pitched even higher.
Once she surprised her grandfather by reading the newspaper headlines aloud. “So you can read!” he said in amazement.
When exactly she had learnt to read she couldn’t remember, but she could already read fluently when she went to first class in school at the age of seven.
Her grandmother made Noura a coloured paper kite every time she visited. Her kites were much prettier than the ones you could buy from Abdo the shopkeeper. She flew a kite every time she went out on an excursion, and was always surrounded by a cluster of boys begging her to let them hold the string and make the kite loop the loop in the air.
Her mother was horrified and upset, because kite-flying was a game for boys, not girls. Her father just laughed at that, but when she was ten he told her she must stop.
“You’re a young lady now, and a lady doesn’t need paper kites,” he said.
But what Granny Karima loved even more passionately than growing flowers or constructing kites was making preserves. She didn’t just make the apricot, plum, and quince preserves usual in Damascus, she made everything she could lay hands on into a purée: rose petals, sweet oranges, bitter oranges, herbs, grapes, figs, dates, apples, mirabelles, and cactus figs. “Preserves sweeten the tongue of friend and foe alike, so that they won’t say so many sour things about you,” she claimed.
One day Noura went looking for her grandfather to show him her new dress, but she couldn’t find him anywhere. She suddenly remembered a remark made by her mother, who never touched any of Granny Karima’s preserves, and had told their neighbour Badia that Granny was a witch, she even suspected her of making frogs, snakes, and spiders into preserves.
“Where’s Grandfather?” asked Noura suspiciously. “You haven’t made him into a preserve, have you?”
Her grandmother smiled. “No, he’s gone on a long journey,” she replied, hurrying into the kitchen. When Noura followed her, she saw that Granny was crying her eyes out. Even later she couldn’t understand how Death had taken her grandfather away so quietly that she never noticed.
By the time Noura was ten at the latest, she had given up any hope of playing with the neighbouring children. They were all so innocent! But she couldn’t have played with them anyway, because her mother was always calling to her to come in.
So she began taking an interest in books. And when her father came home from the mosque he read anything she liked aloud to her. Then, one day, he showed her how to write Arabic letters. He was amazed to find how quickly she learned to read and write. She devoured everything, and looked at all the pictures to be found in the books in her father’s large library. One day she surprised him by reciting a poem in praise of the Creation that she had learnt by heart. He was so overwhelmed that he began to weep. “I always dreamed of having a child like you. God is gracious to me,” he said, kissing her, and scratching her cheek with the stubble of his beard.
Until now, whenever Noura climbed up to the top of the house her mother had wailed, “What does a girl want with all these dusty books?” But when her husband called Noura’s love of books “the grace of God,” she didn’t dare to make fun of it anymore.
Noura read aloud slowly and with expression. She relished the taste of the words on her tongue, hearing how every word she read had its own melody. As the years went by, she developed a sense of the way to speak each word to make it sound good, and if her father were to be believed, she could recite quotations from the Quran and poems better than a Class Five child even before she went to school.
Noura counted the summer days that still separated her from school, like a prisoner counting the last days before he gets the freedom he has longed for.
There were only a few girls’ schools in Damascus at the time. The best were the Christian schools, and there was a very good one, run by nuns, not far from Noura’s home. But her mother threatened to leave the house or kill herself if her daughter was sent to school with unbelievers. Her father lost his temper, there were tears and a good deal of noise, and in the end it was agreed that Noura would go to the best of the Muslim schools, a long way off in the Souk Saruya quarter.
The decision to send her to this school was made in August, and then came the greatest surprise of all. One day her father announced happily that his good and very devout friend Mahmoud Homsi had told him at the mosque that his own daughter Nadia was about to go to the good school in the Souk Saruya quarter, travelling there by tram.
Noura’s mother almost fainted away. She shed tears and accused her husband of thoughtlessly risking his daughter’s life, entrusting a delicate girl to that moving iron monster. Suppose someone abducted her because she was so beautiful?
“No one can abduct a tram, it always goes along the same tramlines,” said her father, “and the Number 72 has a stop in the main street only twenty-five paces from our door, and exactly the same distance from my friend Homsi’s house.”
Noura felt so lighthearted and happy that she could have flown through the air. That evening they went to the circumcision party being held by the rich Homsi family, where Noura was to meet her future schoolmate Nadia.
The house was full of guests, and Noura clung to her mother’s hand. People she didn’t know kept patting her head and cheeks. The only guests she did know were their plump neighbour Badia and her husband.
Nadia looked like a princess in her red velvet dress. She took Noura’s hand and led her through the crowd to a corner where sweet cakes were piled up in great pyramids. “Help yourself, or the grown-ups will eat it all and leave only crumbs,” she said, and took a doughnut stuffed with pistachios off one of the pyramids.
Noura felt excited. She had never seen so many people and such a big house before. They were all cheerful, the mood was festive. That day was the first time that Noura had heard of the tuhour ritual circumcision ceremony. Nadia explained that it would make her brother into a real, pure Muslim.
The tables groaned under the weight of all the delicious things to eat, as if the hosts were afraid their guests might die of starvation. The sight of those pyramids of sweet puff pastries filled with nuts and sprinkled with sugar soon made Noura feel hungry, but she was shy and didn’t like to take anything, while Nadia stuffed herself with pastry after pastry.
Suddenly there was a sense of anticipation in the room, and several women whispered, “Here he comes, here he comes!” And Noura saw Salih the barber, who had his salon on the main street not far from Elias the confectioner’s shop. He was a tall, thin man, always well shaved, with his hair oiled and combed back. He always wore a white coat, and had five canaries who chirruped in unison like a choir. Sometimes, when he had no customers, Noura saw him miming as if he were conducting them.
Mr Salih responded to the men’s greeting with a dignified nod. Carrying a case in his right hand, he went to the far end of the inner courtyard, which had been decorated for the occasion. At that moment Noura saw the pale boy in brightly coloured clothes. Many of the children at the party were making their way over to him. He wasn’t much older than her.
“You stay here,” Noura heard her mother call as she and Nadia slipped through the crowd of grown-ups, who were keeping a respectful distance from each other, but she had already reached the front row.
A man, probably an uncle, told the circle of children to move further out so as not to disturb the barber at his work.
“Don’t be afraid,” said the barber. “I only want to see how big you are so that I can make you a shirt and trousers.”
“Why would a barber make a shirt and trousers? Why not go to Dalia the seamstress?” Noura asked Nadia, who didn’t hear her question. All her attention was on the man asked by the barber to measure the boy for his shoes. It was the man who had told the children to widen the circle around the boy and the barber. He ca
me up behind the boy and took hold of his arms and legs, so that the child – who now began crying – couldn’t move. The grown-ups started to sing, as if a choirmaster had given them a signal, clapping their hands at the same time. No one could hear the boy’s cries for help. Only Noura heard him calling to his Mama.
The barber took a sharp knife out of his case. A boy standing next to Noura groaned and put his hands in front of his legs as if something there hurt, and he retreated to the back rows. Noura couldn’t see what exactly was being cut, but Nadia’s brother was crying pitifully. When she looked around, only she and another pale boy were still in the front row. Nadia too had retreated to the back of the crowd.
Now two women put a wreath of flowers on the boy’s head and gave him some money, but he looked miserable all the same. Everyone applauded him. Noura stroked his hand as he was carried past her and up to a quieter room on the first floor. The boy looked at her with tired eyes, and a faint smile touched his mouth.
Noura’s mother accompanied the two girls to school only on their first day. After that they went by tram on their own. Nadia always sat still, staring at the streets down which the tram took them without much interest, but to Noura it was like an almost daily adventure.
Nadia was a quiet, red-haired, rather plump girl. She didn’t like either school or books. Even at the age of seven, what she wanted was to get married and have thirty children. She never wanted to play either. She thought all the games played by the girls in their neighbourhood and at school were childish. Noura, however, played whenever and wherever she could.
Besides skipping, there were other games that Noura particularly liked. One was hide and seek. It was her father’s opinion that the first ever to play hide and seek had been Adam and Eve, when they hid from God after eating the forbidden fruit. When it was Noura’s turn to hide, she imagined she was Eve, and whoever was looking for her was none other than God.
The other game that she liked had been invented by Hanan, a very clever girl in their class. Two schoolgirls stood facing each other, one defending women, the other defending men.
The first listed all that was bad, nasty, and masculine, and the second responded to everything she said with the feminine equivalent. They had to get the grammatical gender in Arabic of everything they said right.
“The Devil is male, and a coffin is masculine too,” said the first.
“And sin is feminine, and so is the plague,” replied the second.
“The ass is masculine, and so is a fart,” said the first quietly, and the schoolgirls standing around giggled.
“And Hell is feminine, and so is a rat,” replied the other. This went on until one of them made a mistake of gender or didn’t reply fast enough. A third girl, acting as referee, had to decide on that. If the game went on for a long time, and neither was the winner, the referee would raise her hand palm upward to signal a change. This time the competitors had to concentrate on what was best, finest, and most noble about the two sexes.
“Heaven is masculine, and so is a star,” said one girl.
“And virtue is feminine, and so is the sun,” said the other, and so on, until one of them won or the referee raised her hand and turned it again to make them describe the two sexes in gloomier terms.
Nadia didn’t think that was any fun. With difficulty, she made it to the end of the fifth year and then left school. She got fatter and fatter, and at the age of fifteen married her cousin, a lawyer, who was able to set up in a modern office with the dowry his rich father-in-law gave them. Nadia, so Noura heard from neighbours later, had no children, but that didn’t make her husband divorce her, as was usual in such cases at the time. He loved her.
From the sixth class on, Noura went to school alone, and soon noticed that she wasn’t even missing Nadia.
She liked the tram conductor in his fine grey uniform with his box of tickets. The inspector, who came once a week and asked to see the passengers’ tickets, wore a dark blue uniform. He looked like a king, wearing gold rings on both hands, and for a long time Noura thought he was the owner of the tramline.
Two stops further on, an old gentleman in a black suit boarded the tram every day. He was over seventy and still a fine figure, tall and lean, always neatly and elegantly dressed, and he carried a handsome cane with a silver knob. Noura soon found out why neither the conductor nor the inspector ever made Baron Gregor buy a ticket. He was crazy. He firmly believed that he was going to find out one of Solomon’s secrets, and when he knew that secret he would be king of the world. Until then, everyone had to call him Baron. He was an Armenian and had a wife, and a son who was already a famous goldsmith and watchmaker in Damascus.
The Baron walked around the city all day, handing out grand positions in the world he would rule one day, with his blessing, to the passersby and passengers he met. If someone pretending to respect him deeply bowed and called him “Your Excellency,” the Baron smiled. “I’ll make you governor of Egypt, and Libya into the bargain,” he would say, patting the joker kindly on the shoulder. He could eat and drink for free in all the restaurants and cafés, and the tobacconists gave him the most expensive cigarettes. “For you, Baron, no need to pay, just remember my humble self when you crack that secret.”
“I certainly will, my dear fellow. You can print the banknotes, and after work in the evening you can get a few more printed just for yourself.”
Week after week, so Noura’s father told her, the Baron’s son would pay all his father’s expenses, and he was so grateful and polite that many of the people who gave the old man their wares even asked for less than they were worth.
“He’s mad, but he lives the kind of life others can only dream of, even if they toiled for it all their days,” the conductor told a tram passenger one day when he was making fun of the Baron.
The Baron got out of the tram one stop away from Noura’s school, after saying a majestic goodbye to everyone. The tram driver rang the bell twice in his honour, and the Baron would turn and wave. The pallor of his hand and the slow gesture made him look extremely dignified.
Sometimes Noura would ride all the way to the tram terminus and then back again to school just out of interest. The conductor turned a blind eye. “Oh, we forgot to ring for your stop,” he would say, and she smiled, with her heart thumping. She explored parts of the city that her mother didn’t know at all, but she couldn’t tell her about them, because her mother always expected the worst, so she was waiting anxiously to collect her from the tram stop every day when she came home.
That went on from Noura’s first day at school to her last.
As an example of Arabic architecture, Noura’s school in the elegant Souk Saruya quarter was a true work of art, a fantastic structure with an inner courtyard and a magnificent fountain in the middle of it. The windows had stained glass borders, and arcades gave the pupils shelter from the blazing sun during breaks as well as from rain. About two hundred schoolgirls were educated here from Class One to Class Nine.
Soon after Noura had passed her middle school certificate exam, the building was torn down and a tasteless modern one put up instead, with premises for several shops and a large warehouse for domestic electrical items.
There were eighteen schoolgirls in Noura’s class. Each girl was a world in herself, but they stuck together like sisters. At school, Noura discovered that she had a beautiful singing voice. She liked singing, and sang a great deal, and even her mother enjoyed listening to her. Her father admired her voice, and spent years training her to breathe properly. He himself couldn’t sing at all, but he was a master of the art of breath control.
Noura’s favourite lesson, however, was religious instruction.
Not just because the teacher was a young sheikh, a student of her father’s, and one of those who revered him most, but also because he was a very handsome man. He admired Noura’s voice, so he was always asking her to recite texts from the Quran. She put her whole heart into it when she sang the verses, making many of the girls shed tear
s. He would stroke her head gratefully, and his touch went through her like lightning. She was all aflame. Soon she realized that she wasn’t the only one; all the girls in her class were in love with the young sheikh.
Years later, Noura still had happy memories of her schooldays, apart from one bitter experience. She was the best in all subjects in Class Seven, except for mathematics, where she had problems. She did not like the new math teacher Sadati at all, and geometry was in the nature of a medium-sized disaster to her. The simplest calculations of the angles and sides of triangles turned into a maze through which she could never find her way. The whole class was bad at math, but to Noura the subject was like sweating in a hot bathhouse with her heart thudding.
So what was bound to happen did: one day the teacher was in a bad temper for some reason, and called her up to the board to give clear examples of all the rules of geometry that they had learnt so far. Noura fervently wished he would catch the plague while she herself died on the spot.
She didn’t say a word until the bamboo cane went whistling through the air and the first blow struck her hand. Her heart stood still. More blows followed, on her legs and her back, until she realized that she was supposed to keep her hand held out, palm upward. She didn’t feel the blows of the cane raining down on her. Through her blur of tears, she saw the whole class sitting there as if turned to stone. Some of the girls were crying and asking the teacher to stop, but he didn’t until he was out of breath.
At home Noura’s mother scolded her, but her father stood up for her. Sadati was a donkey, he said, not a teacher. He knew him, his father, and his uncle, and they were a whole herd of donkeys. Noura heaved a sigh of relief.
