“Oh, do be quiet! Her mind was absolutely set on marrying me off, and finally she won my father over too, just as I’d feared. But who do you think they picked for me? Even in my worst nightmares I’d never have expected it to be my cousin Kafi. He’s my Uncle Sami’s son. Do you remember Sami Kudsi who was always doing shady business deals? That’s his father.”
Farid shook his head at the mere idea.
“Anyway, he has five sons and they’re all in the army. The youngest, Kafi, is my own age. A religious fanatic, quite dreadful. I always thought he was certain to found a sect of his own some day. As he sees it, the Catholic Church is a hotbed of atheists and you Catholics are well on the way to damnation. Once, much to my mother’s delight, he said that Catholics and Protestants are all devil-worshippers. He’s always trying to convert people. Very embarrassing — and to think someone like that is my cousin!
“So my mother didn’t just want to be rid of me, she wanted to punish me by inflicting this fanatic on me. I knew making a fuss wouldn’t help. I had to keep calm about it.
“On his first visit I made myself up like a tart. As for him, he came in uniform, looking incredibly old and stiff-necked. Of course my mother noticed my trick, and said thank goodness Kafi would cure me of all that vain frippery. And he smiled, very sure of himself, and launched straight into a sermon on the decline of morality.
“Suddenly my mother went away, and Jack, who never usually takes his eyes off me, disappeared too. There I was, left alone in the drawing room with this bore. I was full of plans for making him dislike me. So I told him I didn’t really believe in anything, but I was thinking of converting to Islam just for fun, because I thought Christianity preached too much suffering and abstinence for this life, short as it is anyway.
“Instead of being shocked, my cousin Kafi, who could send anyone to sleep, suddenly turned really enthusiastic. He was dead set on preserving me from such a mistake. He didn’t come just once a week any more, he came every day, hanging around with a stack of religious tracts to convince me that Orthodox Christianity was the right way. And my mother beamed at me because her nephew praised my frankness and my clever mind.
“When I was alone with Kafi again, I told him coldly that I couldn’t stand him, and any marriage between us would bring him only grief. But that made him even keener, and he said oh, that was as nothing by comparison with Our Lord’s suffering on the cross, and for love of the Lord he would bear the cross of my dislike.
“I was beginning to panic now. For days I couldn’t think about anything but ways to shake off this leech. He brought me huge quantities of Arabic editions of Reader’s Digest, all going on about the miracle of love and marriage. The Reader’s Digest was where he got every miserable thing he knew. I was in a trap.
“Then I found a chink in his armour after all. There’s nothing he fears more than strong-minded women. The kind of women he likes are poor weak souls who need him to save them, but he’d see a woman who has power, or would like power, as a major disaster. I’d listened to him long enough to find that out.
“So next time he visited I told him that I really trusted him now, and I was going to tell him a secret. He pricked up his ears. I went on to say that for a year I’d been a member of a religious group which firmly believes Jesus was really a woman in disguise, and the Gospels were forged later, by men. ‘We’re fighting for there to be priestesses in the Orthodox Church, and we won’t just have female bishops and matriarchs, we’re aiming for a female Pope to head the Church some day, and she will terrify the Catholic Pope.’ He might like to join us, I suggested. Several carefully selected men had been accepted into the group already.
“Kafi backed out of the drawing room without even saying goodbye, and he never came to visit again. He hasn’t said a word to my mother since that day either,” Rana finished her story, and she embraced Farid, gurgling with laughter.
182. Azar’s Machines
How Azar came by all his ideas was a mystery. There wasn’t a single book on technology in his home. While Farid was in the monastery, all the same, he had built a water clock that kept perfect time. Similarly, he had already found out how the gang could tell the time at their nocturnal meetings in the attic, even without a watch. He used to bring a candle with small pins stuck into it all the way up, at a distance of about two centimetres from each other.
“When a pin falls out, an hour has passed,” he had explained, and indeed his method worked. The principle was simple, but the brilliance of Azar’s inventions lay in their very simplicity.
The big water clock stood in the inner courtyard of the Catholic bishop’s palace until it was stolen in 1965. You could tell the time by it almost to the minute. A valve with a float ensured that the water pressure in the upper compartment was constant.
“And what did the Patriarch give him for it?” asked Farid.
“His blessing,” replied Josef, with a wry smile.
Later, Azar built solar collectors out of old barrels which he painted black. He put them on the roof, and they provided his family with hot water for the kitchen and bathroom. At the age of seventeen he invented a small vacuum pump in physics at school, thereby astonishing his teacher.
At the same time he developed another brilliant idea for his family’s use. They were living in a large tenement block with ten neighbours, and had two rooms on the second floor. Every time someone knocked at the front door of the building, all the neighbours emerged from their apartments to see who it was.
But there was no need for Azar’s family to do that any more. They went downstairs only if the visitor really was for them. Just how they knew was a mystery to the other families for months, but it was all done with a length of pipe and two mirrors that Azar connected up so that you could stand in the kitchen and see who was downstairs.
“That’ll protect you from annoying strangers,” said Azar.
“And annoying relations too,” agreed his mother.
Next he made an automatic flatbread press out of the old roller from the drum of a washing machine, adding a tiny engine. It saved his mother a lot of hard work.
A neighbour saw this device and bought it from her for the fabulous sum of a hundred lira. Azar’s father didn’t earn that in a whole month, and Azar could easily build another machine from materials costing ten lira.
But he hadn’t reckoned with one thing: soon after buying it, the neighbour put the dough roller on the market as a mass-produced item. It cost a lot of money, and all the bakeries bought one to help with making flatbread. The man made a fortune, and moved into a villa in the new quarter north of the Old Town. There was nothing Azar could do about it. He ended up as a poor vegetable dealer.
183. A Women’s Meeting
“I was just drinking my coffee this morning when I saw all the women of the quarter streaming into Samira’s inner courtyard to see her.” Gibran sipped his tea. “You all know Samira, the traffic cop Maaruf’s wife. At first I was afraid Maaruf might have died. I expect you heard he’s been in hospital for a week after stopping a driver who went over the pavement, the flower beds, and a traffic island. Maaruf asked for the man’s papers, but he was hopelessly drunk, he didn’t have either his driving licence or his vehicle registration document with him, and he swore at Maaruf and told him to clear off. Maaruf looked at this young man in his sharp suit, thinking there might be money in this — well, you all know Maaruf, he’ll turn a blind eye any time if the colour of your money is right. And the blue of the hundred-lira banknote is his favourite colour.” Gibran grinned. “But the man shouted that he wasn’t going to pay anyway, he called Maaruf a bastard and told him just to write out a parking ticket. Then, at the very latest, Maaruf ought to have woken up to the facts. I mean, who calls a cop a bastard? But Maaruf was slow on the uptake that morning. Samira said later he’d been absent-minded for days, she thought he had a relationship with some woman.