Damascus has seen and endured Arabs, Romans, Greeks, Aramaics, and another thirty-six peoples of different cultures. They ruled the city in succession, or sometimes at the same time, and no race has ever moved on without leaving its own mark on Damascus, so it has become a historical patchwork, a lost luggage office of cultures. Many compare it to a mosaic with pieces that have been fitted together by travellers over a period of eight thousand years.
Its builders have given the Damascenes all kinds of presents. Here you see a Greek column; a Roman bridge; a modest wall built with stones from the palaces of past millennia. There you find plants brought from Africa by slaves. To this day you seem to hear words in the street that were spoken by foreigners hundreds of years ago. And you meet people, whether vegetable sellers or doctors, whose forebears came from Spain, the Yemen, or Italy, but who still think of themselves as genuine Damascenes. The odd thing is that they’re right.
Damascus has been a fruitful oasis in the desert of Arabia. At the end of the 1940s several large textiles companies were founded near the city, many schools were opened, the university was enlarged, and newspapers and magazines filled the kiosks, bearing witness to the cultural wealth of Damascus. Cinemas became fashionable. They all had special days when women could go, and sometimes a man in love would wait in the street for three hours just to set eyes on his beloved when she came out. He would have to take the greatest care that no one noticed him smiling at her, but if she returned his smile it was like a foretaste of Paradise.
95. The Cat-Lover
Grandfather held his grandson’s hand tight, for he was afraid of losing little Farid in the crowded souks. He stopped at the entrance to a caravanserai and spoke to a spice merchant. Meanwhile Farid stared curiously at the interior of the great building. Horses and mules were tied up in the yard, and he saw many porters hurrying into large storerooms full of sacks. They carried the sacks out on their shoulders as if they hardly weighed anything, and loaded them up on the carts waiting in the yard. A pale man in a dark suit wrote down what the porters had stacked on the carts. A driver cracked his whip and the horses, who had been dozing with their heads bent, woke up and trotted out. The driver shouted to people to clear the road, so that they wouldn’t get their clothes dirty. It worked: a passage was opened up for his vehicle, and then the crowd closed up again to continue their conversations.
Suddenly Farid saw a camel butcher in a distant corner of the caravanserai. Camel meat is not eaten in the Christian quarter, so Farid had never before seen anything like this, and he was never to forget the horror of the scene.
The tall, distinguished-looking animal stood at the door of the butcher shop. It was looking at Farid, its eyes wide with fear. A dwarfish butcher was whetting his big knife while he talked to another man stitching jute sacks nearby.
With difficulty, two men finally got the camel to kneel down. The animal was still looking at Farid as if pleading for his help. Then the butcher passed his big knife over the camel’s throat, as if he were drawing a bow over violin strings. Blood spurted, and fell into a huge bowl. The camel’s empty eyes now gazed into eternity. The man stitching the sacks didn’t even give the scene a glance. He turned the jute sack he had just finished inside out again, and then added it to a large pile of other sacks.
Farid and his grandfather strolled on from the caravanserai through the Qaimariye quarter that had once been the commercial centre of Damascus, and was now a residential area with a few workshops. On the way he saw a strange sight. A man was sitting on the floor in the middle of his store, reading aloud from the Koran. About thirty cats surrounded him. They were sitting on his lap, on the shelves, on the floor, and in the display window of the otherwise empty room.
“Does he sell cats?” asked Farid.
“No, no,” said Grandfather. “He’s a holy man who looks after all the local cats.”
The cats clambered over the man as he sat there, jumped from his shoulder to the shelves and then back again, but he went on reading undisturbed. Grandfather took a lira bill from his wallet and put it in a copper dish near the entrance.
“My thanks for your kind heart,” said the man, and turned back to his Koran. Three cats crossed the street. Making purposefully for the store, they put their catch of three mice down outside the door and went in. The man looked up.
“Ah, those are their love letters,” he said, and smiled when the mouse in the middle suddenly jumped up and disappeared, quick as a flash, through the window of a cellar on the other side of the road.
“A good actor, that mouse,” said Grandfather, turning home with Farid.
96. The Scooter
Farid was about ten when scooters became the latest craze. Toni, the perfumier Dimitri’s son, was the first to take his out on the street the day after Easter. It was a top-of-the-range model in red-painted metal tubing, and the children stared as if Toni were an astronaut.
Toni often got presents of foreign toys from his father, who travelled the world tracking down new fragrance ingredients, but the scooter was the best yet. The girls, particularly Jeannette and Antoinette, were fascinated. They all wanted a ride with him, and he raced past the envious boys with his girl passengers.
Before the week was up, Azar appeared with a clunking, clattering wooden scooter. Its footboard was joined to the vertical steering handle by simple angle irons, but all the same Azar’s scooter was a successful imitation. The wheels consisted of large, indestructible ball bearings. They made a racket calculated to bring tears of delight to the boys’ eyes. Like Azar himself, the scooter was robust, straightforward, and practical.
“My scooter’s not for girls,” he said, when his sister asked for a ride on it. And it was indeed much harder to steer and keep balanced than Toni’s scooter with its rubber tyres. But it was all his own work.
Farid could hardly sleep for the next few nights. In his dreams he saw himself racing around on a scooter. Once he even had the parrot Coco on his shoulder. Perhaps the parrot featured in his dream because it had stopped talking since the day when Azar went down the road on his scooter, and just made loud squawking sounds in imitation of the noisy ball bearings. A week later the bird’s owner stopped hanging its cage on the window looking out on the street and gave it a view of the interior courtyard as seen from her kitchen window instead.
The local car repair workshops were suddenly swamped with requests for ball bearings. It was only after a long search that Farid found a pair. They were larger than Azar’s, but the larger your wheels the faster you could go.
“You can have them for three afternoons clearing out the workshop, making the men’s tea, and fetching their bread and falafel from the restaurant,” said the owner of the place. “Is it a deal?”