When Nagib left, Farid unobtrusively followed him back to their seats. “I was looking for you,” he said when they were sitting comfortably next to each other again. Grandfather avoided his inquiring gaze. Some time later, when Farid had almost forgotten this incident, he inadvertently overheard a fierce quarrel between his mother and his grandmother. Claire was defending her father, while Grandmother was talking angrily about Grandfather’s liking for young men. It was downright scandalous, she cried. Claire didn’t want to tell her son what it was all about. Grandmother was always imagining things, she said briefly, and wouldn’t allow her poor father the smallest pleasure.
“She ought to have married my Papa and you ought to have married yours, and then we’d all have been happy,” the boy speculated out loud.
Claire looked at him, her eyes wide. “You may well be right, but time decided otherwise. Mama and I have to love our own husbands.”
It was Josef who explained to him. “If what your grandmother says is true, it means your grandfather fucks boys.”
Farid didn’t understand. “How?” he asked, baffled.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake, don’t you know anything? Or has God sent me an innocent angel? How? How? How many orifices does a man have? Ears and nostrils wouldn’t be much use, right? So what’s left? Your mouth and your bum, idiot.”
75. At the Barber’s
The best barber in the Christian quarter was Michel, a distant cousin of Claire’s. Like all men of good standing, Farid’s and Josef’s fathers went to him. His customers even included the Catholic Patriarch and the bishop. Grandfather Nagib went to Michel too, and praised his elegance in the highest terms. He had a very handsome salon, said Nagib, and was one of the few barbers to wrap warm, moist towels around his customers’ faces after shaving them, to give the skin that special smooth, supple look.
Michel’s salon had large mirrors and a marble floor. Frescos and Arabic ornamentation adorned the ceiling and walls, and the basins were white marble with brass taps that shone like gold. The barber liked to show people his razors and scissors made in Solingen, which cost a fortune in Damascus. He was also an excellent perfumier, and had a secret book with a thousand and one formulas for fragrances. Men swore by his creations, but Claire laughed at them. “It’s all humbug! Michel just adds a few drops of cinnamon, rose, or carnation extract to ordinary distillates of jasmine and lemon blossom, and the men go wild about them.”
Farid didn’t much like visiting Michel the barber. Twice running he had left the boy to an apprentice, who was a nice lad but inexperienced, and kept pulling his hair. “I’m not letting that stupid little chicken loose on me a third time,” muttered Farid on his way home.
Josef too had rebelled against his father and went to a Muslim barber far away near the Ummayad Mosque, where the customers told so many stories that the barber’s attention was constantly distracted, and he gave Josef some very odd haircuts. The man also drew teeth. Quite often he would draw a painful tooth for a customer who had arrived in haste, wailing, while he left a man with his face already lathered waiting to be shaved. He also dealt in houses, songbirds and smuggled goods. He was just the barber for Josef.
“It’s like being in a movie there,” Farid’s friend enthused. “You get a really crazy haircut, you hear two or three exciting stories, you see a tooth being drawn or a deal done under the counter, you get to hear canaries singing, then you have a glass of tea, and all that for half a lira.” A haircut at Michel’s cost at least twice as much.
Farid went looking for a new barber in the Christian quarter, and found a dimly lit salon very close to his own street. He had never noticed it before, although he had passed the dirty wooden door with the smudged little pane of glass in it countless times. This particular day the barber was busy clearing out the salon, so Farid could see into the dark tunnel-shaped room inside. A naked light bulb hung over an ancient mirror. It was left on all day so that the barber could see what he was doing.
“Can I … can I get my hair cut here?” asked Farid hesitantly.
The old man looked up from his broom. “You of course can. Why not? When I finished.” The man spoke broken Arabic like all first-generation Armenians who had escaped the 1915 massacre and found asylum in Syria.
Farid went in. There were a couple of rickety chairs by the wall, and the place looked poor but very clean. Piles of old magazines lay between the chairs. The first page of all of them was missing. Posters of a green landscape with snow-covered hills in the background hung on one wall. There was a picture of the Virgin Mary in the middle of the wall between the posters.
Two large glass jars of water stood close to the barber’s chair. The bottoms of the jars seemed to have a black deposit in them. When Farid’s eyes had become used to the darkness of the room he saw that they were leeches, which his grandmother thought were very good for treating her inflamed leg. “They suck the blood and take the pressure off places where it hurts,” she claimed. Grandfather Nagib spoke of leeches with revulsion, and called anyone he disliked a leech. Here they were, then, swimming about in the two jars, clinging to the inner walls with their front or back suckers. A shudder ran down Farid’s spine.
The Armenian was having a long conversation with his neighbour and seemed to be in no hurry. To give himself something else to think about, Farid picked up one of the magazines and leafed through it. It showed pictures of King Farouk of Egypt, looking solemn, fat, and short-sighted, and surrounded by beautiful women. All the pictures were in unnaturally garish colours. Another magazine was devoted to all that was strange and wonderful, and seemed to find nothing but curious facts on this earth. A third was full of jokes and cartoons, a fourth was a fashion magazine.
“Read more or hair cut?” asked the Armenian shyly. Farid looked up and put the magazine back on the pile. Time passed quickly, for the barber was an excellent storyteller who was short on grammar, but not on wit and adventurous experiences.
This first visit was the start of a friendship that lasted three years, until one day Farid found the salon closed, and heard from the cobbler next door that Karabet the barber had been knocked down by a truck in the night after a party, and died in hospital soon after the accident.
Until then, however, Farid had been to him every other week, and the Armenian never charged him more than quarter of a lira. Farid paid him half a lira, and added the other half to his pocket money. Claire laughed at his haircut, but she let him do as he liked, and his father never noticed.
Karabet was often sad or angry when he told his own story. He had lost his mother and father and fled from Armenia on foot, almost starving. Only when he described his childhood did his eyes shine. Then he stopped cutting hair for a moment, and talked about the sunny afternoons when he used to visit his grandmother. She always gave him a roll with a filling of pasturma, that delicate air-dried beef with its piquant crust of sharp spices. He would stand with his back to the mirror, miming the enjoyable consumption of an enormous pasturma roll.
Karabet earned more from his leeches, which he raised in a pond near the city, than from cutting hair. He was very clean and took good care of his “little beasties”, as he called them. Doctors, neighbours, even university professors bought them from him in large quantities, paying a lira for ten leeches.
It was in Karabet’s salon that Farid learned of the deposition of the king of Egypt, and in the tattered magazines he read about his comfortable life in exile in Rome and St. Moritz. He often went to the salon just to read the magazines. Sometimes Karabet asked him curiously what was in them. He couldn’t read them himself, but was given them free by a newsagent once they were several weeks out of date. And when a new supply came he didn’t throw the old ones away with the garbage, but passed them on to a neighbouring grocer who carefully folded them to make paper bags.