Sophia Read online

  First published in 2018 by

  Interlink Books

  An imprint of Interlink Publishing Group, Inc.

  46 Crosby Street, Northampton, MA 01060

  www.interlinkbooks.com

  Copyright © Carl Hanser Verlag München 2015, 2018

  English translation copyright © Monique Arav and John Hannon, 2018

  Originally published in German by Carl Hanser Verlag München 2015

  Cover photograph: Tiled background © Javarman | Dreamstime.com

  All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data:

  Names: Schami, Rafik, 1946- author. | Arav, Monique, translator.

  Title: Sophia, or the beginning of all tales / Rafik Schami ; translated by Monique Arav and John Hannon.

  Other titles: Sophia, oder, Der Anfang aller Geschichten. English.

  Description: Northampton, MA : Interlink Books, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017031326 | ISBN 9781566560313

  Subjects: LCSH: Damascus (Syria)—Fiction. | LCGFT: Romance fiction

  Classification: LCC PT2680.A448 S6513 2017 | DDC 833/.92--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017031326

  To request our complete 48-page full-color catalog, please call us toll free at 1-800-238-LINK, visit our website at www.interlinkbooks.com, or send us an e-mail: [email protected]

  Printed in the United States of America

  The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut in the framework of the “Books First” program.

  For Root and Emil, who always get a foretaste of my stories, and for all those who take mirages for their Paradise lost.

  I

  1

  Baptism by Fire

  Damascus, summer 2006

  Aida was still riding her bicycle unsteadily that day. Although she managed to keep her balance, her eyes stayed glued to the handlebar, as her front wheel drew snaking curves along the ground. Karim kept warning her, “Look straight ahead, forget about the handlebar.” But her gaze remained fixed—as if hypnotized—on the gleaming bar between her hands.

  Aida would call her ride down Jasmine Street that day her baptism by fire. On that afternoon she wore white sandals, blue trousers, and a red-and-white striped shirt. She had tied her long gray hair back in a ponytail. Time and again she would begin to wobble, and she would laugh out loud when she did, as if to drown out the sound of her heartbeat, while Karim kept a tight hold on the bike saddle.

  It was a sturdy Dutch bicycle that he'd bought secondhand thirty years ago. He loved that bike and in all those years had never let anyone else ride it. He'd never imagined that anyone else would until, about a month earlier, Aida had asked him if there was anything he couldn't do that he had always wished he could. By then they had been together for over six months.

  “Play a musical instrument,” he answered immediately, and then hesitated. “Actually, conjure up my favorite tune on an oud,” he added quietly and then almost swallowed the words, “like you can,” because he was sure that for him it was too late. His fingers were nimble enough, but he was already over seventy-five.

  As a child, Karim had dreamt of playing music, but it was frowned upon at home. Although his well-to-do family owned a radio and his father would listen to an occasional song or instrumental piece, as well as the news, he forbade anyone to sing or play music. Karim's mother had a wonderful voice, but she only sang in secret, when his father was out. The day when his brother Ismail once dared to quietly play the flute he had bought, he got a beating. “That's gypsy stuff,” his father scolded contemptuously.

  Aida beamed at Karim. “I can teach you the oud in three months. If you practice hard every day, the melodies will find their way to your hands. All it takes is a bit of patience,” she said, and then added while stroking his face, “and a sense of humor.” He laughed self-consciously, trying to hide his shyness.

  “Riding a bike is what I always dreamt of doing when I was a little girl,” she went on. “I envied my brother, his friends, and all the boys in the neighborhood who could just float around on their bikes as light as feathers. But when I said I wanted to learn to ride, my mother nearly had a fit, just like she always did when she was frightened. She told me to put that idea right out of my head. Women stayed at home and didn't need bicycles. She said that riding a bike could have terrible consequences. And when I asked what they were she warned me that many young women had lost their virginity riding bikes. ‘Try explaining to stupid men that you are still intact.'”

  I couldn't believe it—it was like everything else that my mother said when she was frightened. She'd make such drama out of things that in no time you found yourself lost in a maze of superstition and fear: young girls grow beards from drinking coffee, broken mirrors bring seven years' bad luck, playing cross-eyes can make your eyes stay that way, pregnant women should get all the different fruits they want or the baby could be born with a birthmark in the shape of the fruit they craved—the story was that Uncle Barakat rode all the way to Jaffa and back in four days just to pick up a basket of famous Jaffa oranges for Aunt Mary, who then delivered a healthy baby. As for me, riding a bike was just elegant—a balancing act like a circus artist walking a tightrope.”

  “You'll have it down in two or three weeks,” Karim promised her, but then realized he was being rash. He would never break an arm or a leg playing the oud, but Aida very well could, riding a bike. Her dark eyes beamed at him, she jumped at him and kissed him full on the lips, banishing all his pangs of conscience like mist in the sun.

  “Keep teaching me,” she begged, and he could see tears of joy in her eyes.

  It was amazing how long they both had lived with their secret wishes. Over the six months they'd been a couple, they had shared their pasts openly, yet suddenly they'd both discovered that they still had lots to learn about each other.

  “Maybe I was afraid you'd laugh at me,” said Aida, explaining her hesitancy. Karim concurred with a nod. “I haven't talked about my dreams since I was twenty. If anyone asked, I'd say I'd like to dance, and fly like a swallow. But I kept putting things off, and after my wife Amira died, I stopped dreaming.”

  “I could never relax when I was dancing,” Aida confessed. “I always kept counting the time and watching my steps. So when I was ten or twelve, I gave it up. But I never stopped dreaming of riding a bike.”

  ~

  Aida was diminutive in height. When she was barefoot, her forehead came up to Karim's shoulder. She was slim and athletic, and if you didn't know that she was in her mid-fifties, you would have thought she was forty. When people paid her compliments, she'd say, “Love makes you young! Fall in love and you'll see,” and then she'd laugh.

  Aida had always been daring, as Karim soon found out. He worried about her and her high spirits.

  Not far from the neighborhood where both she and Karim lived, there was a big parking lot that had belonged to a textile factory just outside the Eastern gate. It was almost always empty. They practiced bike riding there for a week until Karim thought it was time for her to learn how to ride on a busy street. He accompanied her to her street, which was a bit wider and ran parallel to Jasmine Street on the western side. Aida rode quite calmly, with Karim holding on to the saddle. Neighbors watched from their windows or from their doorways, shaking their heads in disapproval, but she wasn't bothered in the least. Soon Karim could let go of the bike without her noticing. He ran alongside her, and when she saw him she nearly fainted. “Hold me tight,” she cried out, “have you gone crazy?” and sh
e almost collided with the wall. Karim held on and she braked and came to a stop with a sigh of relief.

  It took another five days before she was able to give Karim the okay to let go, after the first few meters. Off she went along the street, ringing her bell nonstop, turning around at the corner of Jew Street and riding back to him with a big wide grin. But she still was not so good at turning. Twice she skinned her knee against the wall after taking too wide a turn. Both her knees were bleeding and she had torn her brown trousers—but she hadn't fallen off her bike. After a week of solid riding, Karim suggested that she practice on Zeitoun Street, where cars were allowed to drive, but only slowly. Zeitoun Street was wide and rambling, passing the See of the Catholic Patriarch and the big Catholic Church.

  Aida was not in favor. “It's swarming with priests and bishops over there, and just the sight of them makes me nervous.” She smiled as she imagined herself kneeling in the confessional, something she hadn't done in fifty years, and saying, “Father, I have sinned.”

  “What have we done? How have we sinned—in thought, in deed?”

  “Yes, in deed, with a bicycle,” she answered. Her friend Sahra had told her that cycling made women come. “You know,” Sahra said, “a saddle does a better job than most men.” Without ever having ridden a bike herself, Sahra was convinced this was true.

  “What about Jasmine Street?” said Karim, bringing Aida back to her lesson.

  “That will do,” she said. She wanted to show the neighbor women that she had become a full-fledged cyclist. “It would be best around three in the afternoon when they're all sitting in front of their doors,” she said, laughing as she imagined the twin rows of open-mouthed faces. Karim rolled his eyes. It was his street. “If I can do that, I can ride through hell with no hands,” she said. She had known that street for a long time, and since becoming Karim's lover she'd come to know the women there better, too.

  ~

  Jasmine Street is located in the Christian Quarter of Damascus, near Straight Street, running parallel to Abbara Street and Zeitoun Street. You enter it under a stone arch, along a dark, narrow corridor not even a meter wide, and come out onto the street proper, which then widens out to four meters. This bottleneck saves the street from cars and motorbikes. Most tourists overlook the entrance to the street, which looks more like the door to a house. The view into the street from outside is blocked by the arch of two overhanging balconies that almost touch, completing the camouflage.

  Until the 1950s, the entrance had been graced by a gate decorated with wrought ironwork and bronze, which mysteriously disappeared after the 1959 Gates of Damascus exhibition. Decades later, rumor still had it that an oil sheikh had paid the exhibition director a handsome sum for this beautiful piece, which he had then taken back with him to Kuwait.

  However, even when curious tourists did go through the tunnel, they would only be disappointed—Jasmine Street had little to offer, except for an unusually well-kept flagstone surface, countless benches, climbing plants, and flowerpots, all of which made for a tacky impression. There were no strikingly elegant buildings, just the plain earthen façades of single-story houses lining the street, looking much the same on each side. Little did visitors know that these modest façades were actually a sophisticated disguise that had effectively protected residents for centuries, keeping both the envious and the tax collectors at bay. Inside, behind the doors, inner courtyards opened to the sky, bearing witness to the Damascenes' sensual way of life.

  Five hundred meters farther on, Jasmine Street ended at Monastery Square, lined mostly with houses and with two shops selling groceries and household goods. Karim's large house stood on the corner; his door was the last on the left-hand side of the street. A second door in the long, high stone wall bordering the square led into his garden. Just next to it stood a weather-beaten, age-old bench that had been chiseled out of a single block of white stone and where Karim often came to enjoy his late-afternoon coffee in the summer. There he was always met by the unexpected sight of a little monastery, with sparse grass peeking out between the big stone blocks and the remains of the walls. Built in the tenth century and dedicated to Saint John, the monastery had been completely destroyed in 1157 by an earthquake, which had claimed eighty thousand dead in Damascus and the surrounding area alone. Two-thirds of the population were killed, but the Damascenes arose from the ruins, as so often before in their history, and built their city anew. They never rebuilt the monastery, though. Its stones found their way into the many houses of the Christian Quarter, as if both the monastery and its patron saint should live on in each of these dwellings.

  Here the historic city wall in the background had been robbed of any vestige of beauty by the skimpy, rushed, and ugly repairs, which had made use of a variety of small stones from as many centuries, and which bore the unmistakable mark of the tragedies that had preceded them. Seen from the outside, the city walls reached over nine meters high above busy Ibn Assaker Street, but on the inside, on the edge of Monastery Square, they were barely three meters high. There the mass of rubble reached up to two-thirds of the height of the wall. This was because the Damascenes had not been allowed to carry the rubble left over from earthquakes and fires out of the city, so as not to destroy the surrounding fertile plain that fed its inhabitants.

  In the midst of the ruins in front of the wall, two poplars reached proudly to the sky, lofty against the low background. Strangers scarcely noticed that every 23rd of June, at seven o'clock sharp, the sun would shine exactly between the trunks and light up the tip of the simple burial stele, a granite column two meters high that tapered toward the top. The modest grave beneath this monument was often covered in flowers. Most visitors know little about the lovers buried here, who were united in death when life had forbidden them to fulfill their love. But those who live in the Christian Quarter tell the story of Fadi and Fatima, whose different religions would not have them live together. They were buried where they lay entwined in a final embrace. Many a tale was told about their love and how the poplars had grown to whisper their story with every gust of wind. The funeral stone bore no marking, but all the children in the neighborhood knew the names of these martyrs to love. And every year, hundreds of women would come from the Christian Quarter and gather in a procession to the grave, where they would wait for the sun to shine through the poplars to sing a long lament over the injustice both lovers had suffered. The procession lasted two hours, and the women would return home red-eyed and tearful.

  The well-kept street had fortunately been spared motorized traffic, and it looked like the inner courtyard of a housing estate. Except during the three months in the year that were cold and rainy, the women and the old men usually went out around three o'clock in the afternoon and sat down at the entrances to their houses. The children would be shooed away for two hours to play on Monastery Square or in the ruins with their balls, marbles, and scooters. This is when the street would be hosed down with water, not just to wash it clean but to make it cool and pleasant. Coffee and tea would be sipped, rumors collected and traded to much laughter. The session would end around five o'clock, and the children would reclaim the middle of the street with all their noise and their own raucous laughter.

  There wasn't a peddler or a cyclist who dared to disturb the peace and tranquility of these two hours. The sharpness of the women's tongues was not feared only by residents of the Christian Quarter; many a street trader, postman, policeman, and beggar who ventured into the neighborhood had felt it, too. The saying went that the Damascenes had their legendary steel knives—and Jasmine Street had the tongues of its women. Karim knew about that. Aida, however, absolutely insisted on cycling past the women at that very time. She knew that many of them were envious of her love for Karim. As long as she had been a mere widow, the women had felt compassion for her, on her own street and on Karim's. But that a widow should fall in love, “ere the earth be dry on her late husband's grave,” that was immoral. Yet love doesn't ask the heart for permission, m
uch less does it worry about graves. The funniest thing about it was these were the very same women who mourned the death of the two lovers on the 23rd of June each year, although he had been a Muslim and she a Christian.

  In the Christian Quarter, Aida wasn't despised only by the women for having fallen in love with the Muslim Karim, but by the men as well. “As if there weren't any Christian men,” they would grumble when they spotted her. Although they took no small pride in their street being a peaceful home to the followers of many different religions, they regarded this love as overstepping the mark that they themselves had set. As if love checked IDs before conquering hearts.

  And Karim? He gave his pat answer, whether at the greengrocer's or the barber's: “I'm not a Muslim, a Christian, a Druze, or a Jew. Love is my religion, do you understand?” But no one understood, whether they nodded politely, shook their heads, or smiled in embarrassment.

  Aida had fallen passionately in love with Karim in the autumn of the previous year, and this made her look younger with every passing day. The women in the street had noticed that her clothing had become more colorful; not only that, but the way she walked, the way she laughed, the way she looked made her resemble a bold teenager going through life fearlessly and full of curiosity. But had they been honest and acknowledged this, it would have been an admission of defeat. That is why, on both streets, the inhabitants maintained that their dislike of Aida had to do with her loose morals and her disregard for her own Christian religion. It was quite beside the point that their knowledge of Christianity only ran as deep as the Hail Mary and Our Father, for most of them.

  The women who'd invite any passerby in for tea or coffee now refused to show that hospitality to Aida. No, no one liked the widow anymore, that same widow who had landed this attractive, humorous widower before several of the women were able to weave their own plans for him. Aida knew about it all, and that is why she wanted this baptism by fire at all costs.