His best letter of all was written for young Shafika. She lived at the cobbler Abdo’s house in Abbara Alley, two buildings away from Josef. One day she beckoned to him and asked, in the abrupt manner of all northern Syrians, how much a letter like that to her husband would cost. He told her it was all right, he didn’t charge, and when she asked him in he followed her.
Farid knew Shafika only from hearsay; Josef had once said what a beautiful body she had. After she had offered him a seat she sat down too and asked him to write. He wrote in a kind of daze, for the young woman spoke sadly, in very brief and concentrated language, without any of the usual hackneyed phrases and without repeating herself. She dictated him a wonderful love letter, and he had only to put her words down on paper. The letter was about her loneliness and her longing for her husband, who was working on a building site in Saudi Arabia to pay off the debts he had incurred in Damascus when his little bus company failed.
After an hour the woman fell silent. Her letter covered six pages. Farid stood up when he had addressed the envelope.
“Would you like something to eat?” she asked, without looking at him.
“No, thank you,” he replied. “I’m not hungry. I’ll be happy to write letters for you any time you like.” And with these words he quickly left. He was sorry he hadn’t had a chance to discover whether what Josef said was true and she really did have an enchanting body, and whether, as many said, she smelled of thyme.
When he told his friends later about this commission they laughed at him. “No wonder women invite him in to write letters for them. Our Farid is just a big, innocent baby,” said Josef.
Suleiman looked thoughtfully at Farid. “I think that’s the trick of it,” he murmured.
The beautiful Shafika never asked him to write another letter. Her husband had been angry, she told Farid. He said he was dying a hundred deaths daily there in the hot sand with the Saudis, while she sat in lush, shady Damascus, filling her head with all that nonsense about love as if life were some trashy Egyptian movie.
85. Death
The building next door to Farid’s house had once been very beautiful. You couldn’t tell from outside, for the façade was unpretentious, made of mud brick and wood, like most of the houses in the Old Town. People preferred to keep their riches away from envious eyes. The religious minorities were twice as cautious as the Muslims, for they always had to remember that any display of wealth might injure the vanity of the city governor. Then he would exercise his powers and confiscate a house for the flimsiest of reasons. That had happened to the Jew Josef Anbar, a rich merchant who had a wonderful house built in Damascus. He guilelessly showed his neighbours what he was creating within his four walls. Envious souls among them went straight to the governor claiming that the Jew had said his house would be finer than the governor’s when it was finished. Next day Josef Anbar was arrested and the house confiscated.
So a wise man let only friends and family see his domain. The handsome architecture of the house next to Farid’s was a wonderful interplay of form and colour. The arches around the inner courtyard on the first floor and the mingled pink and white stones of the columns and walls made it look larger, while their recurring patterns and lines delighted the eye. An octagonal fountain of coloured marble stood in the centre of the courtyard.
The man who built this house, Djamil Khuri, had inherited a large fortune. His father, a ship-owner, came from Egypt, and when riots broke out there in the nineteenth century and Christians were at risk he sold his shipping company and went to Damascus, where he grew even richer as a money changer. He married the daughter of an old but poverty-stricken Damascene family. His wife gave him a son, this Djamil Khuri, but before the baby was a month old his mother took her own life. No one could explain why, since she had always seemed happy. Only after her death was it discovered that she had been forced to marry the rich Egyptian. Her family owed him a lot of money.
The suicide and the rumours about it hurt her husband, who had thought he was giving his wife a Paradise on earth. Soon after her death he began drinking, and he was dead within a year.
His son Djamil was brought up by his grandmother. He was cared for well enough, but no one could take his burden from him. As a young man he swore that he would never marry, for he never wanted to do to any child of his own what his parents had done to him. He left the house and all his money to the Catholic Church on condition that the rooms would be let only to poor, needy Christians.
More than ten families had lived there since Djamil’s death, and the building was now in very poor repair. Firewood and drums of heating oil were stored where the fountain once used to play. The walls were filthy, and many window panes had been replaced by cardboard or plywood.
“They’re not poor, they’re just mean,” said Josef, when Farid said he supposed the state of the house was due to its tenants’ poverty. “They won’t pay a piastre for repairs. Those are cunning folk — they live there for almost nothing, pretending to the Church to be poor.”
But Josef was being spiteful. The young widow Salma, who lived on the first floor near the way into the building, really was as poor as a church mouse. Claire and Antoinette’s mother Hanan used to give her clothes and sometimes food or money. Even when Salma’s husband was alive they had been so poor that they could hardly feed their six children.
And then her husband died one day without any warning. Salma’s mother and sister happened to be visiting at the time, and when news of the death reached one of her husband’s brothers he and his wife arrived in haste. After the scanty supper she gave them they stayed, even though there was so little space. Salma put her guests to sleep with the children in the main room, and she herself slept with her sister in the next room, where her dead husband was lying. It was a hot summer, and in the night the corpse began to smell of decomposition. Only slightly, but Salma picked it up. If you live in cramped conditions you’re quick to notice any unpleasant smell. She cursed death, who had robbed her of her husband and left her alone with the children. Towards morning her eyes closed with exhaustion.
86. On the Rooftops
From Josef’s room, you could reach the flat roof down a stairway, and from there you had a clear view of the big building next door and into most of its rooms.
“All the doors and windows are left open, and the walls are so thin that neighbours hear you coughing, farting, and snoring. They know what you eat, what you say, and what you want to keep secret,” said Josef, laughing. His rooftop had a balustrade around it, so he was allowed to sleep up there on hot nights. “You never saw such things. A movie without a screen. A new story in every window,” he assured his friend.
Farid’s father despised the Damascene habit of sleeping out of doors in summer. Those who did, he said, were all uncivilized Bedouin who wanted to feel they were still in the desert, as if no one had ever invented houses. Claire didn’t share his views, but she dared not contradict her husband. However, she told Farid that, to her mother’s annoyance, she had sometimes spent summer nights with her father on their own roof as a girl. She thought it delightful, and had felt very close to the moon up there.
Elias Mushtak greatly respected the Rasmalo family, so he had no objection to his son’s spending the night with Josef now and then. Unlike Claire, however, he never discovered that the two boys slept out on the roof together.