The Calligrapher's Secret Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  The Rumour or How Stories Begin in Damascus

  The First Kernel of the Truth

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  The Second Kernel of the Truth

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  The end of a story and the beginning of a rumour

  Copyright Page

  Dedicated to

  Ibn Muqla

  (886 – 940)

  the greatest architect of

  Arabic characters, and his misfortune

  The Rumour or How Stories Begin in Damascus

  The Old Town of Damascus still lay under the grey cloak of twilight before dawn when an incredible rumour began making its way to the tables of the little snack bars, and circulating among the first customers at the bakeries. It seemed that Noura, the beautiful wife of that highly regarded and prosperous calligrapher Hamid Farsi, had run away.

  April of the year 1957 brought summer heat to Damascus. At this early hour the streets were still full of night air, and the Old Town smelled of the jasmine flowering in the courtyards, of spices, of damp wood. Straight Street lay in darkness. Only bakeries and snack bars showed any light.

  Soon the call of the muezzins made its way down streets and into bedrooms. Muezzin started after muezzin, setting up a multiple echo.

  When the sun rose behind the eastern gate leading into Straight Street, and the last grey was swept from the blue sky, the butchers, vegetable sellers, and the vendors at food stalls already knew about Noura’s flight. There was a smell of oil, charred wood, and horse dung around the place.

  As eight o’clock approached, the smell of washing powder, cumin, and – here and there – falafel began spreading through Straight Street. Barbers, confectioners, and joiners had opened now, and had sprayed the pavement outside their shops with water. By this time news had leaked out that Noura was the daughter of the famous scholar Rami Arabi.

  When the pharmacists, watchmakers, and antiques dealers were opening at their leisure, not expecting much business yet, the rumour had reached the east gate, and because by now it had assumed considerable dimensions it would not fit through the gateway. It rebounded from the stone arch and broke into a thousand and one pieces that scuttled away like rats, as if fearing the light, down the alleyways and into houses.

  Malicious tongues said that Noura had run away because her husband had been sending her letters speaking ardently of love, and the experienced Damascene rumour-mongers stopped at that point, well aware that they had lured their audience’s curiosity into the trap.

  “What?” asked their hearers indignantly. “A woman leaves her husband because he writes to tell her of the ardour of his love?”

  “Not his, not his,” the scandalmongers replied with the calm assurance of victors, “he was commissioned to write to her by that skirt-chaser Nasri Abbani, who wanted to seduce the beauty with letters, but though he struts like a rooster the fool can’t write anything much himself, apart from his own name.”

  Nasri Abbani was a philanderer known all over the city. He had inherited more than ten houses and large orchards near the city from his father. Unlike his two brothers, Salah and Muhammad, who were devout, worked hard to increase their wealth, and were good husbands, Nasri slept around wherever he could. He had four wives in four houses, sired four children a year, and in addition he kept three of the city’s whores.

  When midday came and the scorching heat had driven all the smells out of Straight Street and the shadows of the few passersby were only a foot long, the inhabitants of the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim quarters alike knew that Noura had run away. The calligrapher’s fine house was near the Roman arch and the Orthodox church of St Mary, just where the different quarters came together.

  “Many men fall sick from arak or hashish, others die of an insatiable appetite. Nasri is sick with the love of women. It’s like catching a cold or tuberculosis, either you get it or you don’t,” said the midwife Huda, who had helped all his children into the world and knew the secrets of his four wives. She placed the delicate cup containing her coffee on the table deliberately slowly, as if she herself suffered from this severe diagnosis. Her five women neighbours nodded, holding their breath.

  “And is the disease infectious?” asked a plump woman with pretended gravity. The midwife shook her head, and the others laughed, but with restraint, as if they thought the question embarrassing.

  Driven by his addiction, Nasri paid court to all women. He did not distinguish between society ladies and peasant girls, old whores and adolescents. It was claimed that his youngest wife, sixteen-year-old Almaz, had once said, “Nasri can’t see a hole without sticking his thing into it. I wouldn’t be surprised if he came home one day carrying a swarm of bees on his prick.”

  And as usual with such men, Nasri’s heart really burned only when a woman turned him down. Noura did not want to know anything about him, and so he was almost crazy for love of her. People said he hadn’t touched a whore for months. “He was obsessed with her,” his young wife Almaz confided to the midwife Huda. “He hardly ever slept with me, and if he did lie beside me I knew his mind was on the other woman. But I didn’t know who she was until she ran away.”

  Then the calligrapher had written love letters that could have melted a heart of stone for him, but to the proud Noura that was the height of impertinence. She gave the letters to her father. The Sufi scholar, a man of exemplary calm, wouldn’t believe it at first. He suspected that some wicked person was trying to destroy the calligrapher’s marriage. However the evidence was overwhelming. “It wasn’t just the calligrapher’s unmistakable writing,” said the midwife, and added that Noura’s beauty was praised in the letters so precisely that apart from herself and her mother, only her husband and no one else could have known all the details. And now the midwife’s voice sank so low that the other women were hardly breathing. “Only they could say what Noura’s breasts and belly and legs looked like, and where she had a little birthmark,” she added, as if she had read the letters herself. “And all the calligrapher could say,” added another of the neighbours, “was that he hadn’t known who that goat Nasri wanted the letters for, and when poets sing the praises of a strange beauty with whom they aren’t personally acquai
nted, they describe only what they know.”

  “What spinelessness!” This sigh went from mouth to mouth over the next few days, as if all Damascus could talk of nothing else. Many would add, if there were no children within hearing distance, “He’ll just have to live with the shame of it while his wife lies underneath that bed-hopping Nasri.”

  “She isn’t lying underneath him. She ran away and left them both. That’s the strange part of it,” malicious tongues would say mysteriously, putting the record straight.

  Rumours with a known beginning and end do not live long in Damascus, but the tale of the beautiful Noura’s flight had a strange beginning and no end. It circulated among the men from café to café, and from group to group of women in their inner courtyards, and whenever it passed from one tongue to the next, it changed.

  Tales were told of the dissipated excesses into which Nasri Abbani had tempted the calligrapher in order to get access to his wife. Of the sums of money that he had paid the calligrapher for the letters, Nasri was said to have given him their weight in gold. “That’s why the grasping calligrapher wrote the love letters in large characters and with a wide margin. He could make a single page into five,” said the scandalmongers.

  All that may have helped make the young woman’s decision easier for her. But one kernel of the truth remained hidden from everyone. The name of that kernel was love.

  A year before, in April 1956, a tempestuous love story had begun. Noura had reached the end of a blind alley at the time, and then love suddenly broke through the walls towering up before her and showed her a crossroads of opportunity. And Noura had to act.

  But as the truth is not as simple as an apricot, it has a second kernel, and not even Noura knew anything about that one. The second kernel of this story was the calligrapher’s secret.

  The First Kernel of the Truth

  I follow love

  wherever its caravan goes,

  love is my religion

  and my faith.

  Ibn Arabi (1165 – 1240)

  Sufi scholar

  1

  A shopkeeper staggered out of his grain store to the sound of young men shouting. He was desperately trying to hold on to the door, but the noisy mob struck his fingers and arms, tugged at him and hit him, although not with any particular violence. As if the whole thing were a game, the young men were laughing and singing a ridiculous song, in which they gave thanks to God and at the same time made indecent remarks about their victim. It was in the rhymed obscenities of the illiterate.

  “Help!” shouted the man, but no one came to his aid. Fear made his voice hoarse.

  Like wasps, small children in shabby clothes swarmed about the group of young people surrounding the man, hermetically sealing him off. The children kept whining and begging as they too tried to lay hands on the man. They fell to the ground, got up again, spat noisily over a long distance like adults, and followed the pack.

  After a drought that had lasted for two years, it was raining on this March day in 1942 as it had rained without interruption for over a week. Relieved, the inhabitants of the city could sleep soundly again. Serious trouble had weighed down on Damascus like a nightmare. A flock of Pallas’s sandgrouse, the harbingers of disaster, had arrived as early as September in the first year of the drought, in search of food and water in the gardens of the green oasis of Damascus. From time immemorial it had been known that when these pigeon-sized birds of the steppes with their dappled, sand-coloured plumage appeared there was a drought coming. It came in that autumn of 1942. It always did. Farmers hated those birds.

  As soon as the first sandgrouse was seen, wholesalers raised their prices for wheat, lentils, chick peas, sugar, and beans.

  Imams had been praying in the mosques since December, along with hundreds of children and young people who, accompanied by teachers and those in charge of their education, were descending on the prayer houses in hordes.

  The sky seemed to have swallowed up all the clouds. It was a dusty blue. Seed corn waited in the dry soil, yearning for water, and any seeds that did briefly germinate – putting out green shoots as thin as a child’s hair – died in the summer heat that went on until the end of October. Farmers from the surrounding villages would take any job that was going in Damascus for the sake of a bit of bread, and were grateful for it, because they knew that soon the even hungrier farmers from the dry south would come and would accept even lower pay.

  Sheikh Rami Arabi, Noura’s father, had been utterly exhausted since October, for as well as saying the official five prayers a day in his little mosque, he had to lead the groups of men who sang religious songs all night until dawn, hoping to induce God to look kindly on them, begging for rain. He had no rest by day either, because in between official prayer times, students and schoolchildren arrived en masse, and he had to join them in singing sad songs intended to soften God’s heart. They were lachrymose ditties, and Sheikh Rami Arabi disliked them because they positively oozed superstition. Superstition dominated the people like a magic spell. These were not uneducated but well-respected men, yet they believed that the stone columns in the nearby mosque were already weeping in sympathy with the prayers of Sheikh Hussein Kiftaros. Sheikh Hussein was semi-literate, and sported a large turban and a long beard.

  Rami Arabi knew that stone columns never weep, but in cold air vapour from the breath of those praying aloud will condense on them. However, he couldn’t say so. He had to put up with superstition so that the illiterate in his congregation would not lose their faith, as he told his wife.

  On the first of March, the first drop of water fell. A boy came running into the mosque, while hundreds of children were singing. His shrill cry rose to such a high pitch that they all stopped. The boy took fright when silence fell, but then he timidly and quietly said, “It’s raining.” A wave of relief ran through the mosque, and prayers thanking God could be heard from every corner of it. Allahu Akbar. And as if their own eyes had been touched by the blessing of God, many of the grown men present wept with emotion.

  It was indeed raining outside, first hesitantly, then in torrents. The dusty earth leaped for joy and then soaked up the water, turning calm and dark. Within a few days the paving of the Damascus streets was free of dust, and the yellow fields outside the city were covered with a tender layer of pale green.

  The poor breathed again in relief, and the farmers set off back to their home villages and their fields.

  But Sheikh Rami was displeased. It was as if his mosque had been swept empty. Apart from a few old men, no one came there to pray anymore. “They treat God like a waiter in a restaurant,” he said. “They order rain, and as soon as he brings them their order, they turn their backs on him.”

  The rain slackened, and a warm wind swept its fine droplets into the faces of the young people dancing around the man in the middle of the road. They linked arms to encircle him, and turned him round and round. Then his shirt flew overhead, and as if it were a snake or a spider the smaller dancers on the outskirts of the crowd stamped on it, then reduced it to rags, tearing and biting it.

  The man stopped resisting, because all the blows he was receiving confused him. His lips moved, but he did not utter a sound. After a while his thick-lensed glasses flew through the air and landed in a puddle on the pavement.

  One of the young men was already hoarse with agitation. He was not singing the rhymes any longer, but shouting a tirade of abuse. The others, as if intoxicated, raised their hands to the heavens and chanted, “God has heard us.”

  The man seemed not to notice anyone as his eyes wandered, trying to fix upon something. For a moment he stared into Noura’s face. She was only six or seven at the time, and she was standing out of the rain under the big, colourful awning of the candy store at the entrance to her street. She was about to begin enjoying the red lollipop she had bought from Elias the confectioner for a piastre. But the scene before her held her spellbound. Now the young people were tearing at their victim’s trousers, and still none of
the passersby went to his aid. He fell to the ground. His face was pale and rigid, as if he already had some idea of what was coming next. He seemed not to feel it when the young men kicked him. He did not scream or plead with them, but groped about on the ground among the thin legs of the dancers as if in search of his glasses.

  “In the puddle,” said Noura helpfully.

  When an older man in a shop assistant’s grey coat tried approaching him, he was roughly held back by a man in elegant traditional clothes: backless shoes, baggy black trousers, a white shirt, a coloured waistcoat, and a red silk scarf around his waist. Over his shoulders lay the black and white folded keffiyeh, the headcloth worn by Arab men. He carried an ornate bamboo cane. A muscular man of about thirty, he was clean-shaven except for a big black moustache waxed at the ends. He was a well-known type of thug. The Damascenes called such men kabadai, a Turkish word for a ruffian. They were powerful and fearless, they often invited trouble, and they lived by doing such dirty work as blackmailing or humiliating someone on behalf of prosperous folk who wanted to keep their hands clean. This kabadai seemed to approve of what the young men were doing. “Let the children have their fun with that unbeliever, the robber who steals the bread from their mouths,” he cried in admonitory tones, grabbing the man in the grey coat by the neck with his left hand, bringing the cane down on his buttocks, and laughing as he propelled him back into the shop. The onlookers, both men and women, laughed at the shop assistant, who began pleading for mercy like a schoolboy.

  Now the alleged robber was crouching naked in the street, weeping. The young people moved away, still singing and dancing in the rain. A pale little boy with a thin, scarred face ran back to give the prostrate victim one last kick in the back. Shouting with delight, arms outspread and imitating a plane, he ran back to his comrades.

  “Go home, Noura. This is no sight for little girls,” she heard Elias say in his gentle voice. He had been watching the whole scene from the window of his shop.