From the first everything had been open to boys and girls alike, and as prices in the café were affordable it became a favourite meeting place for young people. In less than three years the club had acquired two hundred active members and a hundred honorary members, including the minister of culture, who was a Christian and could always call on the club members as voluntary assistants in election campaigns.
All Farid’s friends were already in the club, and his father was an honorary member and generous with his donations. Two weeks after he came home from the monastery, Farid joined. He played chess well, he was reasonably good at basketball, and very good at table tennis.
All the inhabitants of the buildings around the square took down the boards that had been nailed over their windows. Vermin, the penetrating stink, and the unappetizing garbage lying around the yard had made it impossible for them to have them open before. Now they sat at their windows, cracking roasted nuts and drinking tea, while they watched a strange, foreign game in which young men struggled for possession of a large red ball, aiming to throw it up and through a dangling, basket-like construction. Before two years were up, all the neighbours knew so much about the game that they sometimes even whistled derisively at the referee.
Now that this new meeting place was available Farid’s friends seldom met in the attic or at Rasuk’s place. They preferred going to the club. And someone else started coming to it every day: the old seaman Gibran. He became best friends with Taufik, who leased the café. It turned out that they had known each other in their youth, but then lost track of one another for decades.
Gibran helped Taufik to clean the café, water the flowers, and buy supplies. In return he could eat and drink as much as he wanted there. He stopped wandering around town and cast anchor at the club. There was only one thing he couldn’t do there, and that was to drink alcohol. Taufik was inflexible on that point. He himself never drank, and one day when Gibran turned up tipsy Taufik wouldn’t let him in, hard as the young people begged him. They had hoped to hear one of the old seaman’s spicy stories.
159. Amin
Farid met Amin in September over a game of chess. He said of him later that no one else apart from Claire and Rana had such an enduring influence on his life as the small tiler. Even years later, Farid remembered their first meeting. He had of course seen Amin at the club before, but only that day, during their game of chess, did he first talk to him. At the time there were no very good chess players in the club, so Farid, with the sketchy knowledge of the game that he had picked up in the monastery, was like a one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind and beat everyone. One September afternoon, Amin came over and asked him to teach him how to play chess.
Amin was five years older than Farid, he worked laying tiles, and he laughed a great deal at the evening meetings. You could tell from his sharp comments that he knew a lot about politics. Josef had always kept a respectful distance from him. Now and then they did argue, but they always stayed friendly.
Amin got Farid to tell him all about chess, and learned with an eagerness and gratitude that were all his own, marvelling at the thought processes behind the moves. He was an emotional player who swore volubly when he lost.
On that first day the game lasted only ten minutes. Amin invited Farid to have a tea, and when Taufik served the slender glasses, the tiler sipped his and then asked, with interest, “I hear you were in the monastery, is that so?”
“Yes, but it doesn’t mean anything to me. I had a horrible time there, and the place was anti-Christian anyway.”
“How do you mean, anti-Christian?” asked Amin in some surprise.
“Because Christ preached love but they practise hate, pure hate. Jesus never tortured anyone, and shared his bread with all comers. But the monks torture people until they collapse or get to be as heartless as they are.”
Amin lit a cigarette. “It’s odd what the Church has made of Jesus, don’t you think?” he said. “He sided with the poor of this world, but the Church is always on the side of the rich and powerful.”
“You’re right. A friend of mine in the monastery said the Church makes the way to God not shorter but longer.”
“Building in curves, barriers, and detours along the route,” added Amin grimly. “And charging tolls and admission tickets whenever it likes.”
Josef came in and went up to them. “Hello, Amin, trying to palm a Stalin icon off on him?” he joked.
Amin shook his head, grinning. “No, they’re all sold out, and I’m not selling any of Satlan.”
Josef forced a smile, but there was discord in the air. Soon Rasuk, Toni, Suleiman and a number of others joined the two opponents. Farid had no idea what it was all about, but he sensed that each was trying to hold the other’s ideas and convictions up to ridicule.
Suddenly they were all talking at once, and Farid couldn’t keep up. He felt like a small child, inferior to the rest of them as they pronounced instant judgement, juggled names and events, and defended their claims with fanatical zeal. He could think of nothing and no one, apart from Rana and Claire, whom he could defend knowing so certainly that he was in the right.
Unobtrusively, he withdrew from their circle and sat down in the café.
“It’s all just froth,” said Gibran, who was sitting there too, nodding in the direction of the fighting-cocks out on the terrace. “All just froth,” he repeated after a while. His voice faltered, and sounded as lonely as Farid’s soul.
Farid read a magazine lying on the counter. Taufik kept carrying tea and coffee out to his customers on the terrace, where over thirty men and women were now involved in a debate that was getting nowhere, but was frequently interrupted by roars of laughter.
“Do you feel like a walk?” he suddenly heard Amin say. “We can’t hear ourselves speak any more here.”
“Good idea,” said Farid. He paid, and waited for Amin, who had to go to the men’s room first.
“Off already?” asked Josef, suddenly materializing behind him.
“Yes,” replied Farid.
“Will you drop in at my place later?”
“What if it’s late?”
“Doesn’t matter. I’ll wait for you upstairs.” Farid realized that he meant in the attic.
Amin seemed to know Farid’s family. He lived close to Grandmother Lucia, near the Ananias Church. When Farid went home three hours later, he was feeling remarkably cheerful. He knew that he had made a friend who talked to him like a big brother that evening. Amin was knowledgeable and very witty, yet he could well have complained day and night of the hard times his family had suffered. They had been resettled time and time again over the generations, and every time they lost all they had. His father, descended from a highly regarded Christian nobleman, worked as a doorman in Damascus, and his wages only just paid for his cigarettes and arrack. Amin had had to leave school early and start work to feed the family, including three younger sisters who were still at school. But none of that could quench his love of life. He saw his poverty not as a private misfortune, but as part of even greater wretchedness all over the world that left millions of people starving and suffering. He said he would lend Farid books about world poverty, and they agreed to meet again.
Farid’s parents were already asleep when he came home. He went quietly up to the second floor and from there to the attic above the aniseed warehouse. Josef was sitting at the table, reading.
“There you are at last,” he said.
“Have you been waiting long?”