by Rana Haddad
“His name is Nijm? And he’s a storyteller? And a singer too?” Dunya asked.
“Yes, one day he will be an international star, with a voice like his, and people will say that it was us here at Café Taba who first discovered him,” the porter boasted.
“Can’t you make an exception and let me in just for today? I’d like to hear his voice.”
“Rules are rules young miss! When he’s famous you’ll be able to hear his songs on the radio, or you could buy one of his cassettes perhaps, but for now, he’s exclusively ours,” the porter said curtly.
“Is that so?” Dunya replied, before she walked confidently into Café Taba and disappeared into the crowd.
“What a cheek!” the porter mumbled to himself. “The girls of today are not like the girls of yesterday.” But he busied himself welcoming more VIPs and guests and soon forgot all about Dunya.
Dunya hid behind a large column in the back of Café Taba and looked around trying to find Nijm.
“Nijm,” she whispered his name to herself. I wonder who he is? And why on earth he looks like a carbon copy of Hilal? I must find out, I need to know.
Dunya watched as Café Taba was being transformed into a makeshift theater. All the chairs in the café were made to face a large table, on which there stood a chair.
A waiter put his finger on his lips, faced the audience, and said, “Shhhhh!”
Silence filled the café and the waiter opened a side door and from there appeared the handsome hakawati who climbed a stepladder next to the side of the table. He installed himself on the chair as if it were his throne and surveyed his audience from above.
Dunya looked at his curly black hair carefully, and she inspected his florid mustache and antique woollen fez, she observed his eyes and how he moved his fingers and his hands. Even from such close inspection she could still see what had first confused her so much about him—his uncanny resemblance to Hilal.
The hakawati rearranged his fez, as if it were some sort of crown, and from beneath his long and curly eyelashes he looked at the audience for a little while and then into the middle distance, as if he were about to say something.
But he didn’t say a word.
Everyone watched him with entranced eyes, sucking and blowing on their hookahs—until he finally broke his silence with a cough.
“Good evening, my noble and chivalrous men. I hope you have braced yourselves today, for my tale will bring tears to your eyes and make you blush.”
The audience clapped, puffing hookah smoke like chimneys.
The hakawati’s voice was nothing like Hilal’s voice.
“Gentlemen!” he said. “When will one of you offer his seat to our young lady guest? Why is she standing while you’re all comfortably sitting on your asses?”
“A lady guest?” the men focused their gaze on Dunya and seemed taken aback for a moment or two. But then without exception they all stood up and gallantly offered her their seats.
“Come and sit here in front of me!” the hakawati said to Dunya. “So I can keep an eye on you. I like to see girls and women in this café, we need more of you. I congratulate you on your courage, Miss. It is a quality that is rare, in both men and women. Not even I have enough courage, if the truth be told,” the Hakawati said. “Who might you be, Miss, and what brought you to our café? Is it simply wilfulness and a desire to shock, or do you have some other purpose? Come and sit on this chair, here in front of me!”
“I’m a photographer and my name is Dunya Noor,” Dunya answered, choosing a chair that was positioned in front of the hakawati. Then she took her camera out of her bag.
“A photographer? I see. I’ve heard of their existence but I’ve never met one,” the hakawati said. “Neither have I ever had my photograph professionally taken. May I order some copies from you?”
“Certainly,” Dunya said.
Who are you? Dunya wished she could ask the hakawati right there and then. I thought there was only one man in the world who looked like this, not two. . . . Not only did the hakawati look like Hilal, but he also looked at her in the exact same way Hilal did—from beneath his long and curly eyelashes, as if he could see into her very soul.
“Do you,” the hakawati asked the audience, “want me to tell you the Truth about Love?” he added while a waiter handed him an Arabic oud to play.
“Yes! For sure! Indeed! Yes! Of course! Indeed! For sure!” the audience cried out in a combination of baritone, monotone, tenor, countertenor, and bass voices—all expressing deep delight.
“Before I do that, you must first tell me something: do you all know and do you confess,” the hakawati asked holding the oud next to his heart, “that there is not much difference between the human heart and an oud?”
“Yes, yes! We do know and we do confess!” the audience agreed in unison.
“They are similar both in shape and function,” the hakawati said. “Both were made to sing.” He touched his oud lovingly and then added, “I will sing my findings to you in three parts. Please serve me a glass of fresh tea between each part. Yes?”
“Your wish is our command,” shouted a waiter.
“I will pretend to myself that the tea is a whisky,” the hakawati said, smiling. “Spirits raise the spirit. But I am not advocating apostasy, remember that.”
After that, the hakawati gently pulled on the first string of his oud and began to sing in a heavenly voice.
What is the Truth about Love
I scratched my chin, I drank some tea,
I looked in the sky and I looked in the sea.
I looked in a tin and I looked in the bin.
I looked in my pocket and I looked in my jacket.
I asked the rain and I wracked my brain.
I searched in vain!
I looked for it in silences and looked for it in words.
I shouted to the clouds and I asked passing birds.
I knew it must be hiding from me . . . because,
I couldn’t find the Truth about Love.
So I asked my mother and I spoke to my father,
I questioned the young and talked to the old,
To hairy men and to those who were bald.
They told me that love was bad, very, very bad,
And that it had made them sad.
When Dunya heard the hakawati’s voice, she almost fell off her chair: what sort of voice was this? When she looked behind her and around her, to her left and to her right, she saw that she was not the only one who felt it. The hakawati’s song appeared to be making the audience slightly delirious; they were swaying gently left and right, as if trying not to dance. Their eyes were drawn heavenward, as if in a trance, and it was as if their hearts and their souls had sprung back to life (after a long sleep) with a force which left none of them in any doubt that they each possessed both a heart and a soul (a fact that prolonged periods of sadness, cynicism, and the chronic humdrumness of their daily lives had made them neglect and forget).
And then a bird that lives near my house decided to speak and to open its mouth,
“Love is kept in a jam jar,” it said,
“Somewhere under the staircase,
In a house by the hill where an old lady lives.
Love is invisible but it is like fire.
Run away from it, my son,
Run unless you want to be burnt!
Run away from love, my son,
Run unless you want to be hurt!
This is the Truth about Love,” it said.
Every time the hakawati plucked at his oud, Dunya felt, as everyone else in the café must have also felt, that he was plucking directly at the strings of her heart.
Everyone inside Café Taba was mesmerized. Listening to the hakawati’s voice had the equivalent effect on each one of them of drinking five shots of high-potency arak—in a row. Even the waiter was so giddy and intoxicated with the song that he held his copper tea-kettle at such a dangerous angle, he almost started pouring its contents over a customer’s
head.
Dunya looked above her at the chandelier that hung from the old café’s ceilings and wished that she had not lost her way in Aleppo. It would soon be dark outside, and what would she do if she did not find Hilal tonight, and if the hakawati had never heard of him?
But then, on the other hand, being here, listening to the hakawati sing about love and asking questions she’d always asked herself, using the exact same words, gave her a sense that this could not be an accident, that walking into this café was part of her quest, not only to find Hilal.
Dunya couldn’t wait to hear what the hakawati’s findings were.
“Why should I believe this strange bird’s words?” The hakawati’s voice filled Café Taba and all the hearts of its customers. “Why should I, my love?”
“Why? Why?” the audience asked.
Fear is the opposite of Love,
As Lies are the opposite of Truth!
It is “You,” my darling, who is the Truth about Love.
It is “You” who holds the key.
The word “Yes,” my darling, is the Truth about Love.
And “No” is the secret of Pain.
Say, “Yes,” my darling,
Be mine again.
The customers of Café Taba were tapping their feet on the floor, up and down, following the beats of the hakawati’s song.
The hakawati gulped his third glass of tea, and then continued to sing in his alluring voice, which gave his audience goose pimples, making even the stoniest-hearted of them almost want to cry.
No one knew why.
None of the audience could take their eyes off him, nor could they stop listening to every word and every syllable he uttered even though they were sure that he knew nothing about Love. He was clearly too young and too vain and had never suffered. Even Dunya was sure of it. None of them could fully or even partially understand the theories he was trying to peddle through the vehicle of his songs. How could Fear be the opposite of Love? Wasn’t Hate its eternal enemy and opposite? The hakawati was talking nonsense, trying to be clever, they were sure of that. Even Dunya who thought of herself (relatively speaking) as an expert on the theories of Love and its manifold manifestations did not understand. But none of them really cared whether he was right or wrong because what they loved about him most of all were not his stories, or his theories, nor his rhymes—but the voice in which he sang them. Perhaps in Europe or America people could follow their hearts, some of the men reasoned. But here, in the conservative Republic of Syria, Fear was the master. Fear held everything and everyone under its sway, and everyone respectfully bowed their heads to it.
The audience clapped and clapped and clapped, while a tall, slim, manic-depressive looking waiter replenished their hookahs. Then someone said, “These are not stories for men. Tell us one about the warriors of Arabia!”
“I’ll tell you one about the genie who lost his bottle! That’s a story you’ll love. But I think it must wait until tomorrow. On Friday I’ll read to you from the ancient story of Antar and Abla.” The hakawati winked.
“Another love story?” shouted the waiter.
Everyone looked flushed. His subject matter, which was often and forever Love, was of no interest to them but, despite their frequent protests, they always came back for more. Even the clients of another competing hakawati café were emigrating to Café Taba in hordes. It was shameful and unfair. The hakawati was drawing them in like flies. Was it his unusually entrancing voice? Was it his piercing and passionate eyes? No one knew. He was just a random young man who happened to be a master of spectacle and song and who skilfully, but cruelly, knew how to hold them under his spell.
Suddenly a middle-aged man with a particularly long handlebar mustache stood up: “I don’t understand why, for goodness sake, I mean, why? Why are you singing to us about birds that speak?” He stood up, exposing a very large and round belly that had clearly been nurtured on a lethal and regular diet of stuffed eggplant. “I mean, Sir, are we children that you sing to us of such things?” He reached for his hookah and took a puff. “Nor are we women, for that matter, that we want to hear of Love.”
“Do men not think of Love then?” the hakawati said in a surprised and chastising tone. “I don’t believe it.” He stood up on the table and swayed a little, as if to find his balance. “Is it men who write most love songs and love poetry or is it women? You tell me!” he demanded. “You do have a lot to learn, before you truly understand what a man is. A man who doesn’t love is no such thing, and a man is not as different from a woman as you might like to convince yourselves.”
The audience made no suggestion of sound.
“So you’re not a hakawati then,” the mustachioed man said. “You’re a teacher.”
“I’m not a teacher, make no such mistake,” the hakawati said confidently. “I’m a Professor—a Professor of Love.”
What a peacock and a dandy! Dunya adored everything about Nijm. He seemed nothing like other young men in the city, not even like Hilal who wasn’t theatrical like that and not so verbose and spectacular.
“Are you lot good at mathematics?” the hakawati asked the audience.
“Of course we are,” the audience composed mainly of shopkeepers and such insisted.
“The world is mathematics, some things are systematic. A mathematical turn of mind, the ability to be calculating and to make correct calculations, is very beneficial when one is in the throes of trying to survive the trials and tribulations of an impossible love,” the hakawati declared. “Here is my lesson for all you people with heartache. Have any of you, by the way, ever suffered heartache?” the hakawati asked.
“No way!” the audience cried.
“That is what they all say!” The hakawati looked at his audience and continued:
“A Lesson in Emotional Mathematics—or the Mathematics of Love.
“L + O + V + E = ?
“I collected the letters ‘l,’ ‘o, ’ ‘v, ’ and ‘e’ and looked at them all separately. They were only four. They were so easy to write, so easy to pronounce, so easy to look at or glance at. But why could the state they describe not be easy, too? Two? The answer might be three.”
The hakawati made the shape of a triangle with his hands.
“One + One = Love.
“One + One + One = Pain.
“In love, One + Two = Zero
“Love is a game, which only pairs can play.”
The café burst into a frenzy of claps.
“We have been told that to be happy each one of us must only love one thing, must always give our heart entirely to the One we love, and that a heart can never be divided by two or three or four or more,” the Hakawati lectured. “We have been ordered and repeatedly told that we must only worship one god, blindly follow one leader, that we should only be loyal to one nation, only obey one father and honor one mother—everyone else we must hate. Why can’t we love both black and white, worship both day and night. Why do we have to choose only one? One is a lonely number.”
Nijm now plucked at his oud strings tragically as the audience looked at him. They began to huff and puff rather nervously.
What was the hakawati trying to say? they wondered. Did he not believe in one god any more, did he not agree that Hafez al-Assad was Syria’s only possible leader or was he trying in a rather convoluted but polite way to advocate polygamy? Everyone hoped and prayed that it was the latter, because only the latter was acceptable and permissible—in the ancient souk of Aleppo, everything else was blasphemy or treason. The men of Café Taba loved the hakawati so much that they did not want to think of what might happen to him were he to be accused of some ineffable thought-crimes against religion or the state.
“Come drink another cup of tea,” the waiter said to him. “And stop giving us all a headache!”
The hakawati’s eyebrows were highlighted in a dramatic way and the lapels of his shirt flew out to the sides in an endearingly pretentious manner. He had both humor and glamor, something rarel
y seen in typical staid hakawatis who were always and forever in the autumn of their lives.
“How do you do it?” one of the men asked the hakawati. “How do you manage to hypnotize us with your lies, young sir?”
“These are not lies, I promise you, boys. I only sing about the truth. All I have in my profession are the twenty-eight letters of the Arabic alphabet. With them I must capture your hearts and souls. I think of them the same way a musician thinks of his musical notes. These are not lies, I promise you, boys. I only sing about the truth, your heart’s truth.”
“We’re not boys,” the audience protested all together in unison, like boys in a classroom.
Dunya looked at the strange assortment of men sitting on rickety chairs all around her, some holding their bellies as if in anticipation of what the hakawati might say next, while others tried to rearrange their hairdos in an attempt to look as alluring as possible, possibly as alluring as the hakawati himself. He seemed to be reminding them of how they could or might have been. He effortlessly outshone them all and that was not something they were used to from a hakawati. For normally a hakawati was a dusty and rather rusty man, not so young and full of himself. And if he happens to be young, he should not be so jumped up and pleased with himself, but must be respectful of those who are older than him, and in awe of them! This young man broke all the rules.
The hakawati watched Dunya take photographs of everyone in the café as if she didn’t think it was an issue. Most of the men thought that she should have at least asked them if they minded but they were too shy or polite to say anything. With her green eyes and light brown hair and unusually scruffy dress-sense, Dunya appeared European, and so they saw her as a woman who operated outside their realm of rules and regulations. They were feeling very spaced-out and open-minded in any case that evening and everything seemed acceptable and possible to them.
