Barudi took the carton containing his comb, the two ties he kept in the office for urgent official occasions, his nameplate, which he had had made of walnut wood, and a few journals and textbooks that he used to keep in his desk drawers. Then he left without saying goodbye.
A small hope died in a distant corner of his heart.
BOOK OF COLOUR
The loveliest of all colours is the secret colour of words.
DAMASCUS, BEIRUT, FRANKFURT, HEIDELBERG, MANNHEIM, MUNICH, MARNHEIM, 34 YEARS LATER, SUMMER 2004
304. The Last Piece in the Mosaic
In 1962 a young Muslim woman was murdered before my eyes and those of all our neighbours, because she had crossed the religious divide and loved a Christian man. The sad thing was that the man wasn’t worth it. He was a gigolo.
I thought at the time, as a sixteen-year-old who saw the world as a never-ending chain of stories, that someone ought to write a novel about all the varieties of forbidden love to be found in Arabia, and I longed to do just that with all the naivety of a lover. But my armoury of narrative tools was not well enough developed yet for me to turn such an idea into a story. I made my first attempts from 1965 to 1967. They failed miserably.
In the years that followed, I completed my university studies of chemistry, physics and mathematics. But censorship and political dictatorship showed me that my plans to live in Syria as a teacher and writer were not going to work out. A despotic regime leaves no room for any in-between shades; those who are not for it are against it.
I felt close to suffocation when I left my family and my city of Damascus at the end of 1970. I had written off to several foreign universities applying for a further course of study there, and they still had not replied. But now that my university studies in Damascus were over, and my postponement of military service had thus run out, the authorities could draft me into the army any day. I had to get out of Syria fast and hope to be accepted by a university in another country.
I went to Beirut, where I had friends and relations, which was lucky for me. Three days later my draft card arrived. If I had stayed in Damascus I would have had to report to one of the assembly centres for recruits within forty-eight hours. My name would have been given to all the border posts, and legal emigration would have been impossible. When it comes to subjugating human beings, the most dilatory of Third World bureaucrats are transformed into fast-moving and highly effective servants of the state. I would not have survived my three years of military service.
At the time Beirut was teeming with political groups from all the Arab countries, which made that beautiful city on the Mediterranean a base for the overthrow of their terrible regimes, not infrequently with financial backing from another and yet worse regime. Consequently, the city was also a happy hunting ground for all the secret services in the world. Persecution mania was more infectious than the common cold. Anyone who hoped to survive in that jungle must be constantly on his guard and avoid all unnecessary contacts. Every day I read news in the paper of Arabs in exile who had disappeared or had been abducted or murdered.
I had to wait three months before hearing that Heidelberg University would accept me. During that time I lived very quietly and inconspicuously in Beirut with my friend Samir, a fellow pupil at our elite Catholic school in Damascus from the first year to our final exams. His apartment was large and well furnished. I began on my novel again, but once more I failed. Beirut was full of unrest; the harbingers of the civil war were knocking at the city gates with bloodstained hands. Suddenly my story turned into a sentimental civil war romance, with a happy ending in which society was liberated.
My host, Samir, was from a prosperous Christian family of goldsmiths. After his school studies he had gone to Beirut to build up a business of his own there. He had bought a large apartment for himself and the wife his father had chosen for him, a rich jeweller’s daughter. But a month before the wedding day the bride eloped with a young doctor. Samir was not upset. He hadn’t been in love with his fiancée anyway, he simply meant to marry her. At the time he was in love with a young prostitute and visited her almost every night. Then, a year later, he married a wife chosen by his mother, and this time it worked. But by then I was in Germany.
When I arrived in Beirut, Samir was busy transferring his business as inconspicuously as possible to the USA, because he suspected that there would soon be civil war in the Middle East. There was a sum of over a million dollars to be moved, and he wanted to get it past the excise and revenue authorities as elegantly as possible. In two years, he succeeded. The civil war broke out after another two years.
So Samir was more than busy with transferring his money, conducting his daily business and visiting his girlfriend. I saw him every day, but there was no time for more than a coffee or a brief chat. I had seldom known such intense peace in my life. I was free all day, I lived with my fictional characters, I enjoyed the quiet life by the sea, yet I longed to emigrate. I had nightmares in which I was abducted and taken to a Damascus barracks. Captivity is never worse than when you must suffer it after learning to breathe the air of freedom.
But at last my acceptance from Heidelberg arrived, and a week later I had my visa. Just before I flew out my parents came to say goodbye to me. They stayed with my uncle Elias, my father’s youngest brother, and we spent some emotional days together.
My father liked talking to his brother, whom he seldom saw, although he was very fond of him. They played backgammon or visited mutual friends. I invited my mother out for coffee on the beach or in town, and we walked for hours. One morning we were sitting in a café down by the harbour. It was stormy out at sea, with waves breaking against the harbour wall, tossing and roaring. Their foam was blown inland and sprayed the windows of the café where we sat safely in the warm, enjoying our mocha spiced with stories. I thought briefly that if we were in a film now, Anthony Quinn would surely come in, just the way he walks into the steamed-up café in Zorba the Greek. However, this was real life, and all kinds of people came through the door, but no Anthony Quinn.
“You like stories,” said my mother, looking out at the gulls struggling against the stormy wind. I nodded.
So she began on hers. “No one would believe a woman could be so strong.” She knew Farid’s family only slightly, although they lived not far from our house. But in their inner courtyards and hammams all the women of the quarter were whispering about the elopement of the lovers Rana and Farid, and Rana’s revenge when she sold the entire contents of her and her husband’s apartment to a second-hand dealer. The core of my mother’s story was clear, but there were gaps in the tale before that act of revenge. It drew its narrative power from the fascinating subject of a woman who had dared to play the part of a cactus, survive the desert, and then blossom. In Arabic the word for “patience” suggests courage and endurance rather than toleration. Sabr means both “patience” and “cactus”.
My mother described every moment as meticulously as a detective reconstructing a case from clues. But no CID officer in the world could have given such an exact idea of the look on the husband’s face when he came back to his apartment to find it cleared right out. My mother described it with as much relish as if the revenge had been her own. She laughed till the tears came at the thought of the army officer going to the door of his apartment again, just to make sure he was in the right one, and then, still unable to work it out, seeing the torn wedding photograph on the floor.