But after a while his imaginary bus ride bored him, and he found wandering among the pictures and statues in the church more exciting. For almost three years he always sat in the same place, a pew with a good view of almost all the paintings hanging near the altar.
He liked the angels best. They were not gentle but often looked positively violent, armed with swords, spears, and fire. They were strange beings, their faces radiating feminine charm, while their bodies and posture were warlike and virile. For Farid, however, their greatest fascination lay not in this contradiction but in imagining how it would feel to be such a creature himself, both airy and of the earth, able to walk on foot or rise in the air with powerful wings, free of all earthly bonds.
He had favourite pictures, but the light decided which painting or which figure attracted his attention on any given Sunday. However, the great cross behind the altar where Jesus had died with an infinitely sorrowful expression on his face was always at the centre. The letters I.N.R.I. stood above the Saviour’s head, and Farid always tried to understand this word INRI as a secret message.
Every time he saw the crucified Jesus he couldn’t help thinking of his friend Kamal Sabuni, who like a few other sons of prosperous Muslim families went to the elite Christian school. Kamal thought Christianity interesting, but he could make nothing of the crucifixion of a God who could have turned the entire Roman Empire into a swamp and the Caesars and their soldiers into ants, just by lifting his little finger. And the young Muslim thought the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost a very strange idea.
“Muslims are too primitive to understand it,” said Farid’s father, but even he couldn’t explain the Holy Ghost, although he knew a lot about religion.
INRI. What message lay behind it? The religious instruction teacher at school explained the meaning of the letters in Arabic: Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. But that wasn’t mysterious enough for Farid. Why did INRI have such an effect on him?
“It was all part of the big theatrical show,” said Josef portentously. “He had to be killed in the Roman way. They were the rulers, so the notice had to be written in their language.”
In his mind’s eye, as Josef talked, Farid saw Pilate the Roman governor standing pale, slender-boned, and full of revulsion before the rabble of what, to him, was a strange and dusty province.
“Pilate found himself on a kind of stage,” Josef went on, “facing a trembling young man, and he, the Roman, quite liked him: a young Easterner condemned to death and abandoned by his whole clan. So there stood sensitive Pilate, a man who didn’t like the death penalty, and opposite him was a young revolutionary who simply wanted to get dying over and done with and didn’t even notice when he was offered a way out. Anyway, but for the Romans his death wouldn’t have had any INRI or the huge symbolical weight of the cross. Jesus would have died a miserable death by stoning, that was the usual kind of execution in the Middle East at the time. A heap of stones as a symbol wouldn’t have lasted for even a century. But,” said Josef, lowering his voice as he always did when he was about to broach the subject of conspiracies, “I.N.R.I. didn’t just mean Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudae-orum, it was a coded message to the Romans saying: Iustum necare reges Italiae: It is just to kill the kings of Italy. That’s what it says in this book,” concluded Josef, showing Farid a work about Italian secret societies.
93. Saying Goodbye
“Parents are weird,” said Josef. “They never ask if you want to be born, they just go ahead and produce you. And they don’t often ask any children they already have if they want a new baby in the family. They have it off with each other and expect the rest of the family to be glad. But in terms of the actual results, the cost of those five minutes of pleasure would give even a math teacher goose bumps.
I mean, what harm did I ever do Rimon and Madeleine for them to dump me in this house full of females? Did I ask them to do it? I’d have liked to be an only child with two ordinary parents, mother and father, and then I’d have some peace now. ‘Mind what you’re doing, Josef! That’s not a thing to say to a girl! Josef, dear, we don’t say that kind of thing when there are women in the room! Josef, that’s no way to speak to your sister! Josef! Josef! Josef! The hell with their Josef! He’s not me. I’m not him. I’ve been secretly calling myself Jacob for some time, so when they call for Josef I don’t feel as if it’s me they want.
And what about your own respected father? Did he ask the rest of us if he could put you in a monastery? He’d have had a shock if he did. Elias Mushtak, sir, we’d have said, we don’t give a damn for your monks. Leave Farid here with us. He hates the monastery idea. We don’t mind praying for the elm tree that burned down, but leave your son here. I’m just beginning to like him. But what does your good father go and do?
I overheard Madeleine and Claire talking yesterday, and they’re dead against it too, but they don’t get a chance to open their mouths.”
Josef looked up, and for the first time ever Farid saw tears in his tough friend’s eyes. This was at the beginning of June 1953, a week before he left for the monastery.
BOOK OF LAUGHTER I
The world of the imagination welcomes children more kindly than their parental home.
DAMASCUS, 1940 — 1953
94. Damascus
Damascus isn’t so much a city, a place marked in an atlas, as a fairy tale clothed in houses and streets, stories, scents and rumours.
The Old Town has fallen victim to epidemics, wars and fire countless times in its eight thousand years of history, and for want of anywhere better was always rebuilt on the same site. The hand that has moulded Damascus to this day was that of a Greek town planner, Hippodamos of Miletus. He divided the city into strictly geometrical quarters with fine streets, all laid out at right angles. The Greeks loved straight lines, whereas the Arabs preferred curves and bends. Some say it has something to do with their exhausting journeys straight across the desert. A bend shortens the distance, at least for the eye. Others claim that life is expressed in curves: the olive tree bows under the weight of its fruits, a pregnant woman’s belly is curved, the branches of a palm tree form a rounded shape. The old Damascenes had a more prosaic explanation: the more bends in your streets, the easier they are to defend.
Once you start talking about Damascus you must be careful not to founder, for Damascus is a sea of stories. The city knows that, so for all the Arab love of winding streets and alleys it retains a single Straight Street, which is called just that. It is the guideline and point of reference for every walk and every story. If the countless bends in the winding alleys confuse you, then you can always turn back to Straight Street. It’s an outsize compass that for over three thousand years has shown people the way from east to west.
Once upon a time, they say, it was over twenty metres wide, a magnificent avenue with columns and arcades. But the traders moved their stalls further and further out into the street from both sides, and today parts of it are not even ten metres wide. The traders of Damascus are masters of the technique of land-grabbing. They unobtrusively extend the area occupied by their stalls with a crate of vegetables, a little pyramid of inlaid boxes, or a tray of pistachios put out on the sidewalk for a few hours to dry in the sun. Then they put up a light-weight wooden stand and cover it with an even lighter cloth, to protect their wares when the sun is too hot. Once passers by and the police are used to the look of it, the wooden stand sometimes falls over, and the trader finds himself obliged to replace the wobbly structure with something more solid. Then the whole thing gets a door, so that he can enjoy his siesta without fearing thieves, and soon there’s a small window with a curtain over it. A week later the thin wood of the construction has been reinforced as if magically with mud brick, and after a covert nocturnal operation the little building is suddenly bright with whitewash, and its doors and window frames are freshly painted blue. Soon there’s yet another vegetable crate standing outside it, just to attract the customers’ attention. The police officer on duty grumbles, but he is placated with much volubility and a cup of coffee — until the time comes when he is transferred somewhere else. And the new policeman could swear that there’d always been a bend in the road here.