“But not an endless nothing,” Farid said, trying to make his friend laugh. It didn’t work. Josef was head over heels in love with Nadia, but he hardly knew her, and their engagement had taken her further from him rather than bringing them closer. More and more often, she struck him as a split personality. With her family she was conformist and docile, at the university she was an enlightened, lively woman.
And now he was to marry in haste just to get rid of her pest of a brother Girgi. “In Europe a couple can be happy or not, live together or part from each other, just as love dictates. Here you get married or divorced for hundreds of different reasons, and none of them has anything to do with love.”
The trouble was he couldn’t decide what to do, and that put him in a bad temper.
“Come on, let’s go to the cinema. They’re showing West Side Story. You asked me to tell you when they were screening it again …”
“Exactly, that’s what I need now,” Josef interrupted his friend. “A film to make me forget this ghastly society of ours for a couple of hours.”
The film was moving. It wasn’t just that it was yet another version of the Romeo and Juliet story, this time set in the slums of New York. They were both fascinated by the dancing of the young cast and Leonard Bernstein’s music. When they came out of the cinema Josef was in a much better temper, and invited his friend to the Havana for a coffee, hoping to pick up some unofficial news there.
But before they had finished their coffee, a man of dwarfish stature climbed on a table in the middle of the room and tapped his empty glass with a knife. The place fell silent. “I have to announce, gentlemen,” he cried in emotional tones, “that the Damascus brothel is closing its doors for ever at eight sharp tomorrow morning.”
Expressions of outrage were heard.
“You omen of bad luck!” said the café owner angrily, for within a few minutes the men were rushing out.
“How much money do you have with you?” asked Josef.
“Twenty lira.”
“That ought to be enough.” He paid for their coffee and left the café with Farid. They were the last to go. The proprietor just shook his head.
225. Goodbye
There was chaos in the brothel that last evening. Farid had never been there before. Josef had gone three or four times, he couldn’t remember the exact number. Farid’s own ideas of a brothel were abruptly terminated that evening. He had always imagined such a place as something like a palace out of the Thousand and One Nights. You went in, you were bathed in scented water and massaged with aromatic oils. You were dressed in magnificently coloured flowing robes, led to a room where semi-veiled women awaited their suitors, you inspected them and chose one, then you plunged into an erotic orgy, surfacing only occasionally to bathe and recover your strength. In Farid’s imagination, there were also naked dancing girls whirling about.
None of this bore the slightest resemblance to what he saw in the Damascus brothel. The plain yellow building, not far from the university campus, was surrounded by a high wall, impossible to scale, against which all and sundry had pissed. There was a small shelter for a doorman at the entrance. Two police officers usually stood at the gate to check that no men under twenty came in.
That last night, however, both officers were drunk, staggering about the small inner courtyard, so there was no one on the gate. Young men and ragged children were running about the corridors open-mouthed, trying to catch a last glimpse of the women’s naked bodies. The place did brisk business that night. Men stood in line outside the doors of the whores on offer for five, ten, or twenty lira. Only on the top floor did peace and calm prevail. A few customers waited here in comfortable armchairs, and the women cost between fifty and a hundred lira.
Josef borrowed ten lira from his friend and waited in line for his favourite whore, a dark-skinned Egyptian girl. Farid saw her as she glanced briefly out of the door and shouted for a matron called Badria.
Next moment he heard the woman Badria’s deep, masculine voice reply. She exceeded all notions of obesity as she came rolling along, hung about with massive, tasteless gold jewellery.
Farid didn’t feel attracted to any of the whores. Some of them were really pretty, but the idea of man after man emptying himself into a woman at ten minute intervals made him feel nauseated rather than sexually aroused. However, he was glad to have satisfied his curiosity. He had never thought he would ever walk about a brothel so freely.
Josef thought he would have to wait at least two hours, so they agreed to meet in the café on the top floor.
Farid sat down at a small bistro table. A man in his fifties was amusing himself with a young whore at the next table, drinking a bottle of red wine with her. He seemed to have known her for a long time, spoke to her in friendly tones, and didn’t keep touching her like all the other men, who missed no opportunity to paw a passing prostitute.
Suddenly another girl stormed into the café, brought a bouquet of red roses down on a young man’s head, and pursued him to the bar, where she flung the now battered bouquet in his face, shouting, “I never want to see you again, never, understand?”
The man protested pitifully, but the whore, a small, wiry girl, turned and marched out.
“The coward,” said the young whore at the table next to Farid. “He only wants Fatima here in the brothel. First he says he loves her, and when she finally believes him, he won’t even take her to the cinema in case someone sees them together. I’ve seen enough of his sort.”
A little later, the young whore suddenly laughed out loud and pointed to a thin man just coming into the café, who went to the bar and ordered a coffee. This gentleman, who was extremely elegant but had a rather dusty look about him, seemed deeply offended by the idea that the President was going to close the brothel down.
“Do I interfere with his politics? Do I tell him not to take money from Saudi Arabia? Of course not. So why does he want to deprive me of my only pleasure?”
“That’s Hassan Sabbat, notary, multi-millionaire, and lover of our matron Badria,” said the young whore, giggling.
“You can’t be serious! Badria? Surely he couldn’t even offer himself as a wick to light her fire!” said the man with her. The whore giggled. “Very true, but love is blind.”
Here in the café, Farid learned how mistaken were all the myths in Arab novels and films about honest girls turning whore in desperation. My father raped me, they said, and forced me into prostitution. Or my wonderful husband, my mother, my sister fell ill, so I just had to sell myself to get money for medicine and doctors. These ridiculous moral tales ended with some old actor regretfully telling the fallen woman, “My child, a woman’s honour is a match that will burn once only.” And at almost all screenings of such films young men would call out, in the dark auditorium, “But a lighter will burn thousands of times.”
The young whore at the next table had already packed her bag, she said. She was moving to Beirut, to work in an establishment in Mutanabi Street. Sad as her fate might be, she sounded more self-assured than most of the married women in Damascus.
When Josef came up to the café it was after midnight, and they were just in time to catch the last bus to Bab Sharki.
“I’m going to marry Nadia, but I won’t celebrate the wedding with any of those bastards in her family. And I want you to be my witness,” he said. Farid must have been looking at him with such a baffled expression that Josef asked, quite concerned, “Did something upset you here among the whores?”
A day after the brothel was closed down, Matta came to see Farid, his chest swelling proudly. “My brother,” he said, “you must come for a ride with me.”