The Dark Side of Love (47 page)

Once a week there was goat meat at the butcher's. Usually it came from young animals, but now and then an old billygoat had his throat cut. On goat days Claire stayed well away from the shop. She was fond of the little kids, and didn't want to see them slaughtered. The elderly
billygoats smelled too strong for her, even if they had been washed before slaughter and the flavour of their meat was disguised by large quantities of choice spices.

The goats never took a step towards the shop of their own accord. The butcher hauled them there on a rope, and they resisted with all their might, bleating not pathetically but indignantly. In the end he had to carry them. He never sang to the goats at all.

“It's worth resisting even in the slaughterhouse,” said Claire, who sometimes consoled Farid in this early and sorrowful hour on the balcony by bringing him a coffee.

In the afternoon – by which time all the meat was sold – the butcher rose from a brief siesta and strolled through the village and past his shop with his goats, about ten of them, and his sheep, taking them to the nearby fields to graze on thyme, thistles, basil, parsley, grapes, roses and anything else they found. That was what made the meat he sold so popular. The surprising thing, however, was that as they passed his shop the goats looked at it, stopped, bleated in agitation for a moment, and only then did they obey the butcher's imperious call.

“The nanny-goats know all about it. They don't just wail like the sheep, they're telling their friends exactly where they're going,” said Claire, who affectionately called the animals “the Devil's daughters”.

The school vacation hadn't even begun when Farid realized, in horror, that his father had planned the summer ahead for him in every detail. If Elias didn't want to go to Mala he thought up some reason to keep his family in Damascus too. This time it was repairs to the house that Claire must supervise, since he had more than enough to do at the confectioner's shop. There were ten weddings imminent in the Christian quarter alone, and he had to provide mountains of sweetmeats for each of them.

“And I've found you two jobs,” he casually told Farid, as if the matter had only just crossed his mind. “You'll spend the mornings
with Abdullah the calligrapher, and the afternoons with the perfumier Sheikh Attar. He's the best creator of fragrances in town. You'll like working with both of them.”

“Why two?” asked Claire. “Wouldn't one job be enough?”

Elias ignored her. “You start with Abdullah at nine on Monday.” Farid knew the calligrapher's workshop; Abdullah was a friend of his father's. Whenever he went there with Farid they spent some time together, and Elias sometimes felt embarrassed about it and bought some examples of fine calligraphy, usually quotations from the Koran. Later, at some suitable opportunity, he would give them to his own Muslim customers, since he wasn't about to hang up passages from the Koran at home.

“So where's the perfumier's shop?” asked Farid, knowing that his father wouldn't put up with any protests.

“Ten minutes' walk from here, on the way to the Buzuriye. You'll learn a lot from old Sheikh Attar, he's a real magician.”

The calligrapher was a shy, stiff, elderly gentleman. Farid had to start by polishing the workshop until it shone, and then he spent several days learning how to clean, sharpen, and trim pencils, pens, quills, and reeds and set them out for his master. Weeks passed before Abdullah finally said anything about calligraphic script itself. “It is the shadow of the voice,” he said quietly, and handwritten script must be as clearly formed as shadows under the Arabian sun.

Farid learned what the calligrapher told him, made tea for him and his customers, fetched water and ran errands for his master. It was very hard work. All the same, he was happier there than at the perfumier's shop, where he went after the siesta. At first he liked Sheikh Attar's smile, but then he found out that it was only a mask. The man was cold as ice. He just wanted to use Farid as cheap labour. He put a seat outside the shop for him, and the boy was supposed to encourage passers by to go in and visit the master perfumier. But Farid himself was never to enter the place.

When he told Claire about it in the evening she didn't believe him, but next day she checked for herself, watching from a distance and seeing her son sitting on a stool outside the shop, looking forlorn. The sight did away with any scruples she might have had.

“This is not what we sent him here for. He isn't learning anything at all,” she informed the perfumier in civil but determined tones.

“I don't have any other job for him,” replied the master, with his mask-like smile. “I can't let anyone into the secret of my perfumes.”

“Then we'll part company, with thanks for your hospitality,” said Claire, patting Farid on the shoulder. “Come along, let's go.”

They went to eat an ice at the Bakdash ice cream parlour in the Suk el Hamidiye, and then set cheerfully off for home. Claire said she would tell Elias about the end of this particular job that evening.

But Farid enjoyed going to the calligrapher, and Abdullah himself liked his young employee and his interested questions. He even began to smile a little. And when the summer was over, he had at least told the boy about the mistakes that a calligrapher must not make, and had agreed that the boy could go on coming to help him out any time.

So during the following school year Farid continued his training with the calligrapher. Whenever he felt like it he took the bus to go and see Abdullah, who always gave him some work to do. Usually it was filling in the characters on large advertising posters. The master painted the outlines of the characters with a thin brush, and the rest of it was tedious, time-consuming work, but it taught Farid patience.

He spent six weeks with Abdullah next summer too, before going to Mala with Claire and Elias for their vacation. From then on Abdullah even gave him exercises to take home. Usually he had to write out certain sayings in one of the seven different kinds of script that he now knew.

Later his master taught him the technique of calligraphic reflection. This was pure pleasure to Farid, and quite often it made him forget the time entirely. Playing with reflections fascinated him so much that even at home he could sit up until late at night over a picture in which a triangular calligraphic figure was reflected six times around the centre of a circle, producing a geometrical game and a maze for the eye to follow.

His father was deeply moved when, at Christmas, Farid gave him a calligraphic version of the name “Elias Mushtak” in the form of a circular ornament. The script was in gold on an olive green background;
both were his father's favourite colours. Elias couldn't take his eyes off the picture.

“Did you do that all by yourself? Did Master Abdullah help you?”

“No, no, I did it by myself here at home. I'm sure Master Abdullah would find all sorts of mistakes in it. I'd rather you didn't let him see it,” said Farid, smiling awkwardly.

Elias gave his son ten lira that day. He had never given him so much money all at once before. “Go and buy yourself the best paints, brushes and pens. And if the money isn't enough, come back to me,” he said. Two days later his name in Farid's fine calligraphy was hanging in a frame on the wall over the cash desk at the confectioner's shop.

Farid scribbled and practised on every piece of paper that he found. Before two years were up he was known as “the boy with the beautiful handwriting”. He was only eleven.

He didn't guess what his reputation might do for him. Girls weren't very interested in the pieces of paper on which he wrote their names in curving script, but their mothers suddenly discovered his talents. They asked him in, turned on the charm for him, and after a while they came to the point. Would he write a letter for them, please? Those were strange sessions, in rooms where the daylight was dimmed because the women drew their curtains to guard against the neighbours' prying eyes, and sent their children out to play in the street when they were going to tell Farid what was on their minds. They had loving letters to send their absent husbands, sons, siblings, and friends.

At first he just wrote down everything the women poured out to him, but as time went on he reworked the texts himself so that they really did sound like love letters. Later came a third phase in which he listened only to the main points and then used his own intuition to write the love letter. Once he had found the right way to say something he repeated it word for word to all the husbands. Their wives rewarded Farid with chocolate, delicious rolls, and candies, and if they were really delighted with their letters they even gave him a hug.

His best letter of all was written for young Shafika. She lived at the cobbler Abdo's house in Abbara Alley, two buildings away from Josef.
One day she beckoned to him and asked, in the abrupt manner of all northern Syrians, how much a letter like that to her husband would cost. He told her it was all right, he didn't charge, and when she asked him in he followed her.

Farid knew Shafika only from hearsay; Josef had once said what a beautiful body she had. After she had offered him a seat she sat down too and asked him to write. He wrote in a kind of daze, for the young woman spoke sadly, in very brief and concentrated language, without any of the usual hackneyed phrases and without repeating herself. She dictated him a wonderful love letter, and he had only to put her words down on paper. The letter was about her loneliness and her longing for her husband, who was working on a building site in Saudi Arabia to pay off the debts he had incurred in Damascus when his little bus company failed.

After an hour the woman fell silent. Her letter covered six pages. Farid stood up when he had addressed the envelope.

“Would you like something to eat?” she asked, without looking at him.

“No, thank you,” he replied. “I'm not hungry. I'll be happy to write letters for you any time you like.” And with these words he quickly left. He was sorry he hadn't had a chance to discover whether what Josef said was true and she really did have an enchanting body, and whether, as many said, she smelled of thyme.

When he told his friends later about this commission they laughed at him. “No wonder women invite him in to write letters for them. Our Farid is just a big, innocent baby,” said Josef.

Suleiman looked thoughtfully at Farid. “I think that's the trick of it,” he murmured.

The beautiful Shafika never asked him to write another letter. Her husband had been angry, she told Farid. He said he was dying a hundred deaths daily there in the hot sand with the Saudis, while she sat in lush, shady Damascus, filling her head with all that nonsense about love as if life were some trashy Egyptian movie.

The building next door to Farid's house had once been very beautiful. You couldn't tell from outside, for the façade was unpretentious, made of mud brick and wood, like most of the houses in the Old Town. People preferred to keep their riches away from envious eyes. The religious minorities were twice as cautious as the Muslims, for they always had to remember that any display of wealth might injure the vanity of the city governor. Then he would exercise his powers and confiscate a house for the flimsiest of reasons. That had happened to the Jew Josef Anbar, a rich merchant who had a wonderful house built in Damascus. He guilelessly showed his neighbours what he was creating within his four walls. Envious souls among them went straight to the governor claiming that the Jew had said his house would be finer than the governor's when it was finished. Next day Josef Anbar was arrested and the house confiscated.

So a wise man let only friends and family see his domain. The handsome architecture of the house next to Farid's was a wonderful interplay of form and colour. The arches around the inner courtyard on the first floor and the mingled pink and white stones of the columns and walls made it look larger, while their recurring patterns and lines delighted the eye. An octagonal fountain of coloured marble stood in the centre of the courtyard.

The man who built this house, Djamil Khuri, had inherited a large fortune. His father, a ship-owner, came from Egypt, and when riots broke out there in the nineteenth century and Christians were at risk he sold his shipping company and went to Damascus, where he grew even richer as a money changer. He married the daughter of an old but poverty-stricken Damascene family. His wife gave him a son, this Djamil Khuri, but before the baby was a month old his mother took her own life. No one could explain why, since she had always seemed happy. Only after her death was it discovered that she had been forced to marry the rich Egyptian. Her family owed him a lot of money.

The suicide and the rumours about it hurt her husband, who had thought he was giving his wife a Paradise on earth. Soon after her death he began drinking, and he was dead within a year.

His son Djamil was brought up by his grandmother. He was cared for well enough, but no one could take his burden from him. As a young man he swore that he would never marry, for he never wanted to do to any child of his own what his parents had done to him. He left the house and all his money to the Catholic Church on condition that the rooms would be let only to poor, needy Christians.

More than ten families had lived there since Djamil's death, and the building was now in very poor repair. Firewood and drums of heating oil were stored where the fountain once used to play. The walls were filthy, and many window panes had been replaced by cardboard or plywood.

“They're not poor, they're just mean,” said Josef, when Farid said he supposed the state of the house was due to its tenants' poverty. “They won't pay a piastre for repairs. Those are cunning folk – they live there for almost nothing, pretending to the Church to be poor.”