Threads of light were beginning to weave the day. He held her close once more. “I want to live with you and no one else,” he said.
220. Treasure Hunting
A new craze had broken out in Damascus in the early sixties: searching for hidden or buried precious metals. Treasure hunting was strictly forbidden, since the government regarded any finds as state property, and private appropriation of them counted as theft.
But people still went out at night searching, some of them with beeping devices, many with magic spells and mysterious cards. They tapped walls and floors everywhere, trying to find any hollow spaces. When they did turn up, however, they were seldom evidence of a lucky find, and generally just showed that repairs were urgently needed.
Josef laughed at his aunts, tapping their way around the house. His father threatened, in desperation, that if they broke so much as one of his expensive tiles he’d make them sell their own gold bangles to pay for the damage. After that his aunts did their tapping with a rubber hammer.
“People want to get their hands on money quickly, and do you know why?” asked Josef, as so often not waiting for an answer. “The emigrants have turned their heads. My cousin Nicolas goes about in midsummer looking like a really big shot, all dandified in a suit. He drives the fifty metres from his house to the vegetable store in his Mercedes, parks it in the middle of the street, and no police officer dares take his number down. Then he stands there, shouting his order for vegetables over the heads of the people waiting in line, and the vegetable seller doesn’t even object to such discourtesy, he leaves all his other loyal customers to serve Nicolas. And do you know why? Because Nicolas will tip him a whole lira. The neighbours have never done any such thing. I mean, imagine tipping a vegetable seller. And would you like to know what Nicolas did before he emigrated?” asked Josef bitterly.
Farid nodded.
“He was breaking stones for my father at three lira an hour. Two days ago he invited my parents around to his place and showed them his gold bath taps. Madeleine hated it, but you should have seen the wonder and amazement in the eyes of my father and my aunts — they were bowled right over.”
At the end of November Kamal came to drink tea with Farid. He was devastated; he had lost his entire fortune overnight. The government had nationalized his factory again, leaving him with nothing but his debts. The whole thing was like some English comedy, but Kamal didn’t feel like laughing.
Soon after that he went to join his father in Saudi Arabia, and came back ten years later a multi-millionaire. But he wanted no more to do with textiles, and instead opened new casinos everywhere in partnership with the new President of Syria’s cousin.
BOOK OF LAUGHTER III
Both chemical factories and dictators contaminate their surroundings.
DAMASCUS, 1961 — 1965
221. Fasting in Space
Josef said that a good friend had given him two tickets to an interesting event being held by the Muslim Brotherhood, and asked Farid if he would like to go along. “Space From the Viewpoint of the Muslim Brotherhood” was the title of the event.
“And here you see again how backward our church is,” he said, with a trace of envy in his voice.
“Aren’t you afraid?” asked Farid, who couldn’t stand the extremely conservative Muslim Brotherhood. They were financed by Saudi Arabia, and were the most brutal of anti-communists and misogynists.
“Afraid? What would I be afraid of? That they’ll persuade me to convert? I don’t even believe in my own religion, why would I believe in theirs? Or do you think I ought to fear they’ll beat me up for being a Christian? First, I’m not a communist; second, I’m not a woman; and third, even the government courts their favour these days. They’ve turned moderate and socially acceptable. They probably want to prove that we were in space long before the Russians and Americans.” Josef laughed. “You know how Orientals have been in space for thousands of years. Way back we had that old Syrian liar Lucian, who said he flew through space. Remember Sindbad’s flying carpet, and how the Prophet Elijah went up to heaven in his fiery chariot, remember the ascension of Christ and the Virgin Mary, and Mi’raj, Muhammad’s ride to heaven. A Muslim Brother told me the other day, in all seriousness, the French were calling their most powerful warplanes the Mirage after it.”
But no one talked about any of that in the lecture hall of the chemistry faculty. Farid was annoyed. The Muslim Brothers always got the best hall in the university for their events so that they could make propaganda out of it. It was said that over half the university authorities sympathized with them.
When the bearded speaker entered the hall the audience rose and said a short prayer. Then they sat down again. After a brief introduction about modern times the scholar, who held two doctorates, came quickly to his subject. He put the central points of his lecture in the form of questions and answers. “Where does a Muslim direct his prayers when he is in space? How can he locate Mecca when he is in space? How will he fast in space? How often should he pray when his rocket orbits the earth ten times, how often if he flies twice as fast? And may a Muslim astronaut marry a being from another planet?”
Josef looked in astonishment at Farid, who had a hand over his mouth to keep from bursting into laughter.
The scholar provided all these questions with answers that appeared in all seriousness to be giving religion a modern face and yet keep it Islamic, but there was no way of sitting through too much of this. After quarter of an hour, the two friends quietly left the hall.
222. Munir’s Father
If you didn’t know Munir well you would have thought he was a Swede or a Dane, for he was blond and blue-eyed. But he was born in a village on the Euphrates, a long way from Europe.
His parents, however, had been living in Damascus for over twenty years, not far from the French hospital. They owned the biggest bakery in the Christian quarter. Munir was studying mathematics. He was far too down to earth and rational to be religious, but in the Middle East religion is more than just your faith, it is a part of your cultural identity. The overwhelming majority of students of the natural sciences were Muslims. When Munir found out that Farid came from Mala he was pleased to know another member of the Christian minority, and from the first called him “my cousin”.
One day he came into the cafeteria when their fellow students happened to be telling jokes about their parents’ generation, which still wasn’t politicized in spite of the turmoil in the Middle East. Munir didn’t like that.
“It wouldn’t be exaggerating to describe my father as the best-read baker in Damascus,” he said. “Bakers have a tough life. They wake up when everyone else is still fast asleep, and then they have to go to bed just as the evening’s getting interesting. Day in, day out, seven days a week. But my father wasn’t going to give up reading every evening, writing down wise things, putting them in order, and he was proud that he could recite them without making any mistakes.
“Three of his customers in particular noticed: a communist lawyer, a nationalist teacher, and a third man called Khalid, who worked in a bank. Khalid’s political affiliation? Well, for the sake of simplicity let’s say it was liberal.
“The three of them admired my father and listened to him when he spoke of the mood among the people. His bakery was large, and made two tons of flour into bread every day. Anyone who serves so many customers, day after day, can tell exactly how people are feeling.