Farid felt as if he were in a theatre with several different stages when he first spent a night in the open air with Josef. Somewhere in the building opposite a play would begin, build to its climax, break off abruptly or continue after a short interval, while a second and then a third drama began in parallel on one of the stages above or below the first. Farid’s marvelling gaze wandered back and forth. The characters in the dramas were quarrelling, playing, weeping, loving, laughing. Josef knew the programme by heart; he could say when and where men and women made love, how they did it, and how long for. To Farid it was all entirely new.
“He screws her seven times a week,” commented Josef as they saw the traffic cop Maaruf through one of the semi-circular windows above the doors. He was thrusting vigorously into his wife as she knelt in front of him. She was pleading, her face twisted in pain, begging him to stop, but the man pushed himself in harder than ever, slapping her buttocks with the flat of his hand. The woman began to weep.
“Same thing every night. Her screams make him even randier. She doesn’t fancy him at all, she loves Said who lives on the second floor next to Fahime,” said Josef, pointing to the big corner room, whose tenant was walking up and down in it, wearing a pair of shorts. “She’ll be there with him in exactly half an hour,” he prophesied.
The attractive man in shorts was a bachelor from the north. He was blessed with an athletic body, almost blond hair, and sky-blue eyes, but he was not particularly bright, and he was also regarded as rather suspect. It was thought that he worked for the secret service on its lowest level, so people avoided him. All the same, women cast him amorous glances.
“You’re joking!” Farid protested. “She must be half dead of pain down there, she won’t want to do anything but rest.”
Josef looked at him with a supercilious expression. “You don’t know anything about women. They have eight souls and the Devil has only seven, so he can never get hold of a woman. She takes refuge in her eighth soul where the Devil can’t reach her any more,” he said, just as Fahime put on the light and began watering her flowers. “Look, she always waits until it’s cool. It’s better for the plants then,” whispered Josef.
Fahime lived in a two-roomed apartment with her husband and three children. Like many Damascenes, she had the art of making ordinary cans, drums, tin containers, and old buckets into the most fascinating colourful pots for flowers, and she had adorned her windows, the stairs and the little terrace with them. Cacti, oleander, small-leaved basil, avocados, jasmine, hibiscus and carnations grew and flourished in these containers.
Even as Farid’s eyes were wandering over all the plants, a fight broke out between two girls in a bedroom to the left of the stairs up to the second floor. Miserly Masud lived there with his wife, who was twenty years his junior, and their two girls, who took after their mother and squinted just like her too. They were having a pillow fight and were in the middle of it when Masud ran into the room, slapped their faces hard and switched off the light. The girls whimpered at first, but then Farid saw them lying side by side in the faint light of a small electric bulb, laughing quietly but heartily at their father’s fury.
At the same time, on their left, the male nurse Butros was quarrelling with his wife over a broken vase. He was trying desperately to stick it together again. Josef giggled. “Maybe he put his prick in that vase.” It was said that the male nurse would stick his penis into any orifice he chanced to find. But his wife was a particularly devout woman, who dressed their three daughters in such old-fashioned clothes that the girls looked like old women before their time. The neighbours often told tales of fights raging in the marital bedroom. Butros wanted to sleep with his wife every night, but she wouldn’t let him.
A narrow corridor led past the male nurse’s apartment to the old sailor Gibran’s room. It was dark in there.
“What did I tell you?” whispered Josef, when something suddenly flitted past on the dark first floor of the house next door.
“What? I can’t see anything,” said Farid.
“She’s waiting down there for Fahime to draw her curtains and go to bed,” said Josef.
Fahime was the only tenant in the building who had thick curtains. The others had either none at all or very threadbare curtains that showed more than they concealed.
Ten minutes later Fahime put out her light, and next minute Samira the traffic cop’s wife, barefoot, was on her way upstairs to the second floor. Silent as a shadow, she floated into Said’s room.
“You’ve never in your life seen a dance of love like this,” whispered the excited Josef. His voice held a promise of much to come. The electric light in Said’s room went out, then there was the brief flicker of a match, and a candle was lit. Its light was so faint that Farid could only guess at the lovers’ bodies. They both kept completely quiet, for the window was open and the curtain thin.
At last the game of love began. The man carried his lover around the room, and she twined her arms and legs around him. He danced with her, pressed her against the wall, laid her tenderly on the bed, lay down on her only to pick her up again as if she weighed no more than a feather. He whirled around in a circle with her, and then sat down on a chair while the woman rode him, perched on his lap. Her upper body moved rhythmically up and down, as if she were sitting on a trotting horse. After a while the man carried her around the room and slowly let her down to stand on her feet again, then embracing her like a dancer from behind. Farid was sure that Samira was smiling; he knew her face. She was pale, with white skin and blue-black hair.
How long they danced and made love in their dancing he didn’t know later, for suddenly old Gibran’s window caught his eye. It was said that the old man had seen both sides of the world. He was wrecked and all adrift, but the Catholic Church had caught him and found him a room in the big building. He had certainly declined to spend a single night in the St. Anastasius Old Folks’ Home. Gibran had once been a sea captain, so the story went, and had made a great deal of money, especially by arms smuggling, but then he lost it all by night in the taverns and brothels of harbour towns and went back empty-handed to Damascus, no better off than when he left the city forty-five years ago as a young seaman.
Gibran told a great many stories, but most of them were lies and often macabre too. However, the young people of the Christian quarter loved him. He was ready to tell a story in return for a cigarette, and if there were women in the story he would want an extra five piastres to buy a shot of arrack. If he was drunk he would tell stories for free, but he needed half a litre of high-proof arrack to get drunk in the first place.
That August night Gibran was walking around in circles, looking at a picture on the wall, weeping, laughing, talking to the invisible hearers who seemed to populate his room.
“What do you bet he’s talking about the crusades again, or his love affairs in Hawaii or Honolulu?” said Josef, who knew the picture on the wall. “All it shows is an ugly old freighter with a tiny little captain waving from somewhere on top of it. Gibran always says that’s him.”
Farid had never visited the old sailor, even though he lived so close. Claire wouldn’t let him. She didn’t like the grubby old man, she didn’t even believe he had ever been to sea. And she said Gibran put too much nonsense about the seafaring life into young people’s heads, more than was good for them.
87. Forbidden Reading
“It’s not suitable for you,” said Elias, when Farid saw him sitting over a fat book one day and asked what he was reading. His father’s repressive reply intrigued him, and he went looking for the book with the brown cover next day. It wasn’t in the modest library in the living room, or lying on any of the tables. Even days later it didn’t reappear. Josef said that when fathers hid books they must be about sex. He’d just have to go on looking for that book, Josef added, and bring it to the attic.