by Rana Haddad
In Britain, the supermarket seemed to have become more important than the church and the British Isles soon seemed to Dunya more like a gigantic shop than a country. Everything had a price tag and a label.
It was hard, almost impossible, for her to try and adjust to the temperatures, both physical and metaphysical, of what seemed to her a sub-zero climate, an emotionally frozen island that prided itself on being a PLC.
Was freedom, then, just the freedom to shop? Dunya wondered during that time. Or was it also the freedom to open your mouth and say whatever you liked without anyone taking any notice of you?
Yes, she was technically fifty percent English. Her feet were in England, her head was in England, her nose was in England, her eyes were in England, and her hair was in England.
But she had left her heart in Syria.
BOOK TWO
The Tailor’s Son
How did the only son of a tailor in Aleppo grow up to be a
boy who dared to dream?
8
The History of Hilal
Hilal was a rare name in Syria, and despite its poetic meaning (crescent moon), due to obscure historical and social evolutions, most people had come to consider it archaic and low class. He was the son of an idealistic and mild-mannered tailor and a soft-hearted seamstress who had set up business in Aleppo in 1970 after they were forced to flee from their small village in the south of Syria. Tailoring had been in Hilal’s family since his great-great-great-grandfather Hisham Kamil Shihab set up a tailoring practice in 1880, making uniforms for the Ottoman army that ruled Syria until 1922.
It was no mystery why Hilal did not become a tailor. His parents had noticed how clumsy their son was with needles and how hopeless with a sewing machine. They had also noticed that he had a terrible sense of color coordination and concluded that because of all this he would be a mediocre dress designer. But if Hilal wasn’t going to take over their successful His & Hers Sewing Atelier on Plum Street, who was going to?
When Hilal received the highly coveted Aleppo University Physics Prize, which included a full postgraduate grant to study in London, both his parents cried with happiness. Hilal couldn’t understand why they were suddenly so happy when they knew that they might now lose him for almost four years and possibly even longer. Wasn’t he their only son, the apple of their eyes? Hilal knew that his mother had her doubts about his studies as she had no idea what kind of career path they would lead him to. He’d explained to her that he wanted to become an astronomer who specializes in the moon and that his dream was to set up Syria’s first astronomical observatory. He told her how the first astronomers were Arab and how they had studied the moon and used it as a calendar and that he now wanted to make a contribution to this science. He wanted to discover new things about the moon and then write a paper about it.
This did not make sense to Suad and, in fact, it worried her, for although the moon and the stars were beautiful to look at, she could not understand how anyone could make a living from studying them or writing papers about them, papers consisting mainly of numbers and symbols. What was the use of such activity and who would give him a job doing this? And could the son of such humble people as her and Said dare to dream such impossible dreams or think that he could ever be paid a salary to spend his time theorizing and writing equations about, of all things, the moon? Who did he think he was? Syria was a poor country where people needed bread, not obscure and irrelevant information about an alluring object in the sky. Shouldn’t Hilal become a physics teacher or a doctor or an architect or even, in the worst-case scenario, a poet? In a country like Syria, poetry was more useful than astronomy. At least it filled people’s hearts. Was he not setting himself up for failure and disappointment by trying to reach for the stars? Suad often thought these thoughts but never dared to speak them out loud, for theirs was a family where silence spoke louder than words and where actions were substitutes for verbs.
Neither she nor Said were in the habit of asking their son too many questions, for he had always been the secretive type and they had both always encouraged this quality in him because they were even more secretive than he. They were also rather afraid that if they dared to ask Hilal personal questions, he would start asking them questions too, the answers to which they had been trying to hide from him since he was born.
A simple question that Hilal had often wished he could ask both his parents was, “Why are you so unhappy?”
They could not tell him the answer to that and nor could they tell him that now, secretly in their hearts, they were indeed temporarily happy—as he had suspected—because he was going to live in London (or as they called it: “Landun”). Since his birth, their hearts had often quaked with fear for their son. His going to London was maybe for the best, because London was as far away from the map of his destiny as could be.
According to their neighbor Farida, who was known to read the future fluently in coffee cups, something would one day cause their son a devastating loss, something more obscure than run-of-the-mill diseases or the universal condition of mortality. He is not ill, she’d told them but ill-fated. “The probability was high,” she’d said and had also claimed that it was in Aleppo that ill fate awaited Hilal around every corner. And although no one knew exactly what this ill fate looked like, both Suad and Said had been categorically told and given definite proof that in this instance, for Hilal, it would come in the shape of a girl.
The source of his parents’ unhappiness became more and more of a mystery to Hilal as the years went by. He knew certain things about them. He knew for example that Said was descended from a family of Sunni Muslim tailors, while Suad belonged to a family of Alawite Muslim tailors, and that for generations both groups of tailors had made sure that their children never married one another. If they’d ever tried to (or even dared to contemplate it), the punishments were always brutal. Ostracism, banishment, and sometimes murder were the fates of those who disobeyed.
Hilal knew that he was born to a couple on the run. He knew that they’d had to flee and that they’d hidden in the heart of the city of Aleppo in a small apartment above a soap shop where no one could find them, where they still lived to this day. He’d heard how they’d brought with them a sewing machine, two excellent pairs of scissors, and a collection of measuring tapes. And how very soon after their arrival, word had spread around the ancient souk that a nineteen-year-old tailor and seamstress of unknown origin had set up a workshop in their rented apartment, making dresses and suits that were the envy of Aleppo.
No one understood how a young couple from an obscure village in the south could produce such stylish designs that made the poorest and least attractive woman look like she was blessed with both looks and money, or how their suits made men appear taller and more distinguished. A man wearing one of their suits looked like a man with prospects, it was said. And so it was that many men who wanted to convince their potential in-laws to grant them their daughter’s hand in marriage would come and order one of their suits, as well as scores of men who wanted to cut important business deals. Lovers, wannabes, and charlatans became their regular customers, as well as social climbers, self-promoters, and diva types, both male and female. This was in addition to regular run-of-the-mill folk, who just needed an outfit and were not expecting to see themselves so transformed after their innocent visit to His & Hers Sewing Atelier.
Ironically, Said hardly ever wore suits himself and was often seen wearing a simple pair of trousers and a white shirt without a tie, and Suad always wore a black dress, something that was very unusual. Only women who were in mourning wore black in Syria. The only time Said and Suad ever dressed up in fancy outfits was on their wedding day, which no one had attended apart from themselves and the young sheikh who signed the register and who wore a robe and a turban. Afterward, the couple had visited a photographer and had their first ever photograph taken. This photograph fascinated Hilal for years and provided him with more clues and evidence that something must have happened
to his parents after their marriage. This photograph showed him very clearly how happy his parents once were. The expression on their faces was of pure joy and intense love, the sort of expression that could not be faked. Their photograph was almost ablaze, their faces seemed to ignite, their bodies almost alight. Hilal couldn’t understand what it was that had happened to his parents since that time. Since he could remember them, they had seemed like a couple who had lost something precious and could not recover from their loss. Why did they look so disappointed and so full of fear and anxiety when they had managed to achieve instant acceptance and success upon their arrival at this vast city and when they had made such a name for themselves in one of the most bustling and competitive souks in the region?
The mystery behind their unhappiness could not be that their love had faded, because they still seemed deeply attached to one another. Theirs was a strange love that did not seem to fade like many other loves did.
Although Said was a naturally handsome man who possessed exquisitely romantic eyes, which caused almost all his female clients to become determined to seduce him somehow or another, Said only seemed to have eyes for his wife. Many took it personally and disliked Suad for her hold on him and envied her such love. They even resented seeing her so unhappy as they could not understand how she could be so with a devoted husband like him by her side. It was a mystery to all (not only Hilal) why, with all the blessings that they appeared to possess, Mr. and Mrs. Shihab hardly ever smiled. It became clear to all who met them that Said and Suad were the sort of couple that one sometimes heard about or saw in tragic films and novels. No one knew their true story, nor the source of their woe. Hilal knew that Suad often cried in secret, because her mascara always ran and, as they didn’t have mirrors in the house, she didn’t notice and did not wipe away the tears that betrayed her.
Hilal also noticed that his mother never did any sewing any more, that she was always planning to make a beautiful yellow dress, thinking about it, mentioning it, but that she never actually sewed. She dreamed of this dress, and even produced drawings of it. But it was never perfect enough, and so the burden of the His & Hers Sewing Atelier fell squarely upon his father’s rather wide shoulders. Gradually Hilal became convinced that he was not imagining things and that his parents’ silence enveloped a mystery that he was purposely excluded from.
When he was a boy, it was rare for Hilal to see the sky at night; inside the bustling covered alleys of the Aleppo souk the sky seemed irrelevant.
At the age of nine or ten Hilal saw the sky in full for the first time, when his father took him to see the Aleppo citadel. And up there, at sunset, he saw the sun disappearing gradually on the right side and on the left a shape drawn in white appeared.
“What is this?” he asked his father.
“This is a hilal, a crescent moon.”
“A Hilal?” He jumped up. “What do you mean a Hilal? I thought I was a Hilal. . . .”
“It is your namesake, my darling,” his father said. “I named you after it, didn’t you know?”
“No, I didn’t know, Dad. Does it appear every evening?”
“Sometimes it does and other times it does not. It looks different every night. It grows a little wider until it becomes a circle and then it continues to diminish until it disappears. Half of the month it’s not there. Have you never seen it, my son?” Said looked at him with pity and concern.
“No.” Hilal ran to the highest point of the citadel and stared up into the sky.
“I’m a terrible father. How did I forget to show you the moon?” Said pulled him close.
There was a world up there no one knew about, a world whose mystery caught him by the lapels. Hilal’s look of distraction and his habit of asking questions and living in his own head became something that he would never outgrow, something that became a part of him. And now, instead of looking at his parents and asking questions, he began to look at the sky and take notes. He read every book he could find about science, astronomy, poetry, philosophy, myth, geometry, and gradually discovered the beauty and mystery of numbers.
When Hilal was fourteen he made his first reflecting telescope. But when he went up on the roof to test it at night, all the men of the neighborhood went up in arms, thinking he might use it to spy on their wives and daughters. They made him swear he’d never use it in the vicinity of the city of Aleppo, so he hid it in a box.
From then on, on two Friday afternoons a month Hilal would pack some sandwiches and take a bus into the countryside and wait for evening to fall. He wouldn’t come back home until the next morning, with his hair full of dust.
Just as Hilal used to look at his mother and father and wonder at what their silence hid, they too looked at him.
“Does he love a girl, do you think?” his father Said used to whisper in his wife’s ear.
“Those dreamy eyes of his never reveal anything,” Suad said.
Most boys in Aleppo at that age had seen a girl whom they would never be allowed to speak to and with whom they fell in love at first sight. Perhaps, Said thought, his son was suffering from such a predicament too. At any one time in Syria, thousands of boys were busy writing poems for the object of their love and contemplating her beauty and all the virtues they imagined her to have. It was always this girl (the object of their undying love, the idol of their young hearts) whom they secretly thought about when they were silent or writing notes in their notebooks. Most boys in Aleppo were forced to become poets out of necessity, as a result of never being allowed to love the girl they gave their hearts to. Said often watched his son sitting at his desk during the evenings, filling an ever-growing number of notebooks with writings from his silver fountain pen, notebooks that he then locked in a box and took with him to London.
9
The Moonologist
It was perhaps the way his hair curled just so or the way the white lapels of his shirt turned to the left and to the right, like this or like that. He seemed like a man from another era, almost. Or maybe it was the way he held his silver fountain pen and moved it across the pages of his book from right to left with such love and satisfaction, while he underlined certain sentences, or maybe it was the look of intense concentration and delight that she saw on his handsome face, while he flicked its pages one by one. Its title—she could see it: A Biography of the Moon—was printed in Arabic.
It was such an innocent thing to do and Dunya had done it so many times before. She looked down into the viewfinder of her old-style camera and began to observe her subject more closely.
He was wearing an elegant sky blue suit, the sort that very few young men still wore (and in Dunya’s lexicon of colors, blue had always been the color of dreams). And although his suit was exquisite, his hair (which was pitch-black) was un-brushed and very curly. He was unshaven and he didn’t seem like someone who was particularly fashion-conscious or vain. He had the aura of a man who didn’t live in this world, but in the world of the imagination.
Dunya couldn’t focus her lens properly, nor could she decide what shutter speed she needed to take the right sort of photograph of him, or what aperture. Instead she just stared: at his hair, at his eyes, at his suit, at his hands, and at his book. Every time she looked at him she felt her heart jump. His beautiful dark eyes sometimes moved in her direction and she could stare directly into them—without him guessing it. His apparent familiarity baffled her: had she met him before? She thought about it, and tried to remember when it might’ve been, until she realized that it was never.
He raised his head and looked in her direction again. Dunya pressed the shutter button, and then began to pack her things, but he was already walking in her direction.
“Good morning,” he said.
“Good morning,” Dunya answered and then she went bright red. “I’m sorry that . . .” she said.
“That what?”
“Well that I took a photo of you, without asking.”
“I don’t understand. You don’t even have a camera on you.
Anyway, I just came to ask you the time.”
Dunya blushed again.
“Well, unless your camera is invisible,” he continued.
“It is invisible,” she pointed at a box next to her on a wall. “And I don’t have a watch.”
Hilal examined the box and saw a circle on its side that faced toward his bench. Then he looked at its top and saw the old-fashioned viewfinder. “What a clever contraption. It’s like an earthly telescope,” he said. “Why did you want a photo of me, have I become a celebrity overnight?”
“I wasn’t taking a photograph of you particularly. I don’t know you,” Dunya said. “I come here every day at this time and I take a photograph of whoever might be sitting on this bench. Today was my last day, then I will have an exhibition.”
“And will you invite me to it?” he asked. His voice touched her in a strange, almost physical way. It traveled through the air in definite and speedy steps, in a straight line to her heart.
At that moment it was impossible for Dunya not to feel that this must be him, that it could only be him: no one but him.
*
The next day Hilal turned up to her house to pick up a copy of his photograph.
“I’m a scientist of the moon,” he told her, sipping tea out of her favorite yellow porcelain cup.
