The Dark Side of Love (51 page)

Once you start talking about Damascus you must be careful not to founder, for Damascus is a sea of stories. The city knows that, so
for all the Arab love of winding streets and alleys it retains a single Straight Street, which is called just that. It is the guideline and point of reference for every walk and every story. If the countless bends in the winding alleys confuse you, then you can always turn back to Straight Street. It's an outsize compass that for over three thousand years has shown people the way from east to west.

Once upon a time, they say, it was over twenty metres wide, a magnificent avenue with columns and arcades. But the traders moved their stalls further and further out into the street from both sides, and today parts of it are not even ten metres wide. The traders of Damascus are masters of the technique of land-grabbing. They unobtrusively extend the area occupied by their stalls with a crate of vegetables, a little pyramid of inlaid boxes, or a tray of pistachios put out on the sidewalk for a few hours to dry in the sun. Then they put up a light-weight wooden stand and cover it with an even lighter cloth, to protect their wares when the sun is too hot. Once passers by and the police are used to the look of it, the wooden stand sometimes falls over, and the trader finds himself obliged to replace the wobbly structure with something more solid. Then the whole thing gets a door, so that he can enjoy his siesta without fearing thieves, and soon there's a small window with a curtain over it. A week later the thin wood of the construction has been reinforced as if magically with mud brick, and after a covert nocturnal operation the little building is suddenly bright with whitewash, and its doors and window frames are freshly painted blue. Soon there's yet another vegetable crate standing outside it, just to attract the customers' attention. The police officer on duty grumbles, but he is placated with much volubility and a cup of coffee – until the time comes when he is transferred somewhere else. And the new policeman could swear that there'd always been a bend in the road here.

Damascus has seen and endured Arabs, Romans, Greeks, Aramaics, and another thirty-six peoples of different cultures. They ruled the city in succession, or sometimes at the same time, and no race has ever moved on without leaving its own mark on Damascus, so it has become a historical patchwork, a lost luggage office of cultures. Many compare it to a mosaic with pieces that have been fitted together by travellers over a period of eight thousand years.

Its builders have given the Damascenes all kinds of presents. Here you see a Greek column; a Roman bridge; a modest wall built with stones from the palaces of past millennia. There you find plants brought from Africa by slaves. To this day you seem to hear words in the street that were spoken by foreigners hundreds of years ago. And you meet people, whether vegetable sellers or doctors, whose forebears came from Spain, the Yemen, or Italy, but who still think of themselves as genuine Damascenes. The odd thing is that they're right.

Damascus has been a fruitful oasis in the desert of Arabia. At the end of the 1940s several large textiles companies were founded near the city, many schools were opened, the university was enlarged, and newspapers and magazines filled the kiosks, bearing witness to the cultural wealth of Damascus. Cinemas became fashionable. They all had special days when women could go, and sometimes a man in love would wait in the street for three hours just to set eyes on his beloved when she came out. He would have to take the greatest care that no one noticed him smiling at her, but if she returned his smile it was like a foretaste of Paradise.

Grandfather held his grandson's hand tight, for he was afraid of losing little Farid in the crowded souks. He stopped at the entrance to a caravanserai and spoke to a spice merchant. Meanwhile Farid stared curiously at the interior of the great building. Horses and mules were tied up in the yard, and he saw many porters hurrying into large storerooms full of sacks. They carried the sacks out on their shoulders as if they hardly weighed anything, and loaded them up on the carts waiting in the yard. A pale man in a dark suit wrote down what the porters had stacked on the carts. A driver cracked his whip and the horses, who had been dozing with their heads bent, woke up and trotted out. The driver shouted to people to clear the road, so that they wouldn't get their clothes dirty. It worked: a passage was opened
up for his vehicle, and then the crowd closed up again to continue their conversations.

Suddenly Farid saw a camel butcher in a distant corner of the caravanserai. Camel meat is not eaten in the Christian quarter, so Farid had never before seen anything like this, and he was never to forget the horror of the scene.

The tall, distinguished-looking animal stood at the door of the butcher shop. It was looking at Farid, its eyes wide with fear. A dwarfish butcher was whetting his big knife while he talked to another man stitching jute sacks nearby.

With difficulty, two men finally got the camel to kneel down. The animal was still looking at Farid as if pleading for his help. Then the butcher passed his big knife over the camel's throat, as if he were drawing a bow over violin strings. Blood spurted, and fell into a huge bowl. The camel's empty eyes now gazed into eternity. The man stitching the sacks didn't even give the scene a glance. He turned the jute sack he had just finished inside out again, and then added it to a large pile of other sacks.

Farid and his grandfather strolled on from the caravanserai through the Qaimariye quarter that had once been the commercial centre of Damascus, and was now a residential area with a few workshops. On the way he saw a strange sight. A man was sitting on the floor in the middle of his store, reading aloud from the Koran. About thirty cats surrounded him. They were sitting on his lap, on the shelves, on the floor, and in the display window of the otherwise empty room.

“Does he sell cats?” asked Farid.

“No, no,” said Grandfather. “He's a holy man who looks after all the local cats.”

The cats clambered over the man as he sat there, jumped from his shoulder to the shelves and then back again, but he went on reading undisturbed. Grandfather took a lira bill from his wallet and put it in a copper dish near the entrance.

“My thanks for your kind heart,” said the man, and turned back to his Koran. Three cats crossed the street. Making purposefully for the store, they put their catch of three mice down outside the door and went in. The man looked up.

“Ah, those are their love letters,” he said, and smiled when the mouse in the middle suddenly jumped up and disappeared, quick as a flash, through the window of a cellar on the other side of the road.

“A good actor, that mouse,” said Grandfather, turning home with Farid.

Farid was about ten when scooters became the latest craze. Toni, the perfumier Dimitri's son, was the first to take his out on the street the day after Easter. It was a top-of-the-range model in red-painted metal tubing, and the children stared as if Toni were an astronaut.

Toni often got presents of foreign toys from his father, who travelled the world tracking down new fragrance ingredients, but the scooter was the best yet. The girls, particularly Jeannette and Antoinette, were fascinated. They all wanted a ride with him, and he raced past the envious boys with his girl passengers.

Before the week was up, Azar appeared with a clunking, clattering wooden scooter. Its footboard was joined to the vertical steering handle by simple angle irons, but all the same Azar's scooter was a successful imitation. The wheels consisted of large, indestructible ball bearings. They made a racket calculated to bring tears of delight to the boys' eyes. Like Azar himself, the scooter was robust, straightforward, and practical.

“My scooter's not for girls,” he said, when his sister asked for a ride on it. And it was indeed much harder to steer and keep balanced than Toni's scooter with its rubber tyres. But it was all his own work.

Farid could hardly sleep for the next few nights. In his dreams he saw himself racing around on a scooter. Once he even had the parrot Coco on his shoulder. Perhaps the parrot featured in his dream because it had stopped talking since the day when Azar went down the road on his scooter, and just made loud squawking sounds in imitation of the noisy ball bearings. A week later the bird's owner stopped hanging its cage on the window looking out on the street
and gave it a view of the interior courtyard as seen from her kitchen window instead.

The local car repair workshops were suddenly swamped with requests for ball bearings. It was only after a long search that Farid found a pair. They were larger than Azar's, but the larger your wheels the faster you could go.

“You can have them for three afternoons clearing out the workshop, making the men's tea, and fetching their bread and falafel from the restaurant,” said the owner of the place. “Is it a deal?”

It was definitely a deal. Farid spent three afternoons sweeping, scouring, and polishing the workshop until it was clean and neat, and serving tea, sweetmeats, and fresh water. He made good tea for a ten-year-old. The men and their master were very happy, because Farid never gave them tea in dirty glasses, which was what they were used to. He washed the glasses well, and after the men had drunk their tea he rinsed them out again quickly with hot water, so that they steamed and then shone. He had learned that from his father.

In the end Farid got not just the ball bearings but the fixings he would need for them, as well as hinged steering joints with their pins and screws. But the useful tips the men gave him were better than all these presents. Finally, the workshop owner even handed him a simple prop stand, made out of a small metal rod bent into a U shape.

“Fit that on, and your scooter can stand upright anywhere, proud as a Vespa, and it won't have to lean against the wall like a tired old bike,” he said. The workshop owner looked like a baddie in an American B-movie Western, but he was kindness itself.

His most junior employee, a young man of equally sinister appearance with tousled hair, surprisingly gave Farid the most valuable item of all: a brake. Neither Toni nor Azar had brakes on their scooters. It was a piece of rubber tyre, and Farid fixed it to the back wheel like a mudguard.

Finally Farid went off with his bag full of metal parts to his cousin George, who was apprenticed to a joiner, a tight-fisted man. Farid waited until the joiner had gone home at midday, and then slipped into the workshop. He didn't mention the scooter at first, just stood around asking after George's health and how his family was. As he
talked he kept putting the bag down in different places, until his cousin asked what was jingling about inside it. Farid told him it was parts for a scooter, and all he needed now was the wood.

“Why didn't you say so at once, you idiot?” laughed George, and asked Farid to tell him what the scooter was supposed to look like. That didn't take long. George abandoned the jobs he had been doing, and within half an hour he had prepared all the wooden parts, tied them up in a bundle, and put them over Farid's shoulder.

“Now get out before that old skinflint shows up. I guess you can screw it all together yourself, but you'll have to glue the parts first,” he said, and he gave the boy some adhesive too. Farid ran home. Ran? No, he was so happy that he positively flew. He worked for two hours, and then, feeling pleased with himself, stood back to look at the wonderful scooter he had made.

Finally he helped himself to a small rear mirror from his father's worn-out old bicycle and fixed it to the left of the steering handle. And his grandfather gave him several small stars and moons made of coloured tin for decoration.

Last of all Farid found a piece of card and wrote out a charm against envious eyes that he had seen on a mirror in his mother's cousin Michel's salon, showing the palm of a hand with a blue eye in the middle of it, and an arrow piercing the eye. Under it, in beautiful Arabic script, were the words: May the eye of the envious be blinded. As a barber, Michel had a great fondness for handsome polished glass mirrors. A particularly fine example had once broken soon after a customer said, with envy in his voice and salivating greedily, “What a lovely mirror!” The man was famous for casting envious looks, and people said that if he envied a pigeon he could kill it in flight with his glance.

Farid used shiny brass tacks to fix the oval piece of card with the lucky charm on it to the front of his rather broad handlebars. He painted a sunflower and a canary on the scooter too, and next Sunday, his hair combed and perfumed, in white shirt, blue trousers, and tennis shoes, he took his scooter out into Abbara Alley.

“Terrific!” called Azar, and after taking Farid's scooter for a ride himself he braked it, balanced on the spot for a minute, and folded
the stand down. The pedal scooter stood upright in the street in all its glory. If Azar described something as “terrific”, the other boys all took notice, for it wasn't easy to satisfy such a gifted handyman.

Less than three weeks later, ten wooden pedal scooters with ball bearing wheels were racing down the street, and the boys' mothers were cursing the car repair workshops which were to blame for all this racket. And each new scooter was better than the last, so that Farid's “terrific” construction was soon quite ordinary and occupied only a modest place among them. Now there were scooters with ostrich feathers, with bells and horns, and several with padded seats for little brothers and sisters, or the neighbourhood girls. Farid made a basket for Tutu, a spaniel who enjoyed a ride too.

Khalil was the first to master the art of drinking lemonade while riding a scooter. The bottle was securely fixed in a holder in the middle of the handlebars, and a straw enabled the clever inventor to drink without taking his hands off the steering handle or his eyes off the road.