It was definitely a deal. Farid spent three afternoons sweeping, scouring, and polishing the workshop until it was clean and neat, and serving tea, sweetmeats, and fresh water. He made good tea for a ten-year-old. The men and their master were very happy, because Farid never gave them tea in dirty glasses, which was what they were used to. He washed the glasses well, and after the men had drunk their tea he rinsed them out again quickly with hot water, so that they steamed and then shone. He had learned that from his father.
In the end Farid got not just the ball bearings but the fixings he would need for them, as well as hinged steering joints with their pins and screws. But the useful tips the men gave him were better than all these presents. Finally, the workshop owner even handed him a simple prop stand, made out of a small metal rod bent into a U shape.
“Fit that on, and your scooter can stand upright anywhere, proud as a Vespa, and it won’t have to lean against the wall like a tired old bike,” he said. The workshop owner looked like a baddie in an American B-movie Western, but he was kindness itself.
His most junior employee, a young man of equally sinister appearance with tousled hair, surprisingly gave Farid the most valuable item of alclass="underline" a brake. Neither Toni nor Azar had brakes on their scooters. It was a piece of rubber tyre, and Farid fixed it to the back wheel like a mudguard.
Finally Farid went off with his bag full of metal parts to his cousin George, who was apprenticed to a joiner, a tight-fisted man. Farid waited until the joiner had gone home at midday, and then slipped into the workshop. He didn’t mention the scooter at first, just stood around asking after George’s health and how his family was. As he talked he kept putting the bag down in different places, until his cousin asked what was jingling about inside it. Farid told him it was parts for a scooter, and all he needed now was the wood.
“Why didn’t you say so at once, you idiot?” laughed George, and asked Farid to tell him what the scooter was supposed to look like. That didn’t take long. George abandoned the jobs he had been doing, and within half an hour he had prepared all the wooden parts, tied them up in a bundle, and put them over Farid’s shoulder.
“Now get out before that old skinflint shows up. I guess you can screw it all together yourself, but you’ll have to glue the parts first,” he said, and he gave the boy some adhesive too. Farid ran home. Ran? No, he was so happy that he positively flew. He worked for two hours, and then, feeling pleased with himself, stood back to look at the wonderful scooter he had made.
Finally he helped himself to a small rear mirror from his father’s worn-out old bicycle and fixed it to the left of the steering handle. And his grandfather gave him several small stars and moons made of coloured tin for decoration.
Last of all Farid found a piece of card and wrote out a charm against envious eyes that he had seen on a mirror in his mother’s cousin Michel’s salon, showing the palm of a hand with a blue eye in the middle of it, and an arrow piercing the eye. Under it, in beautiful Arabic script, were the words: May the eye of the envious be blinded. As a barber, Michel had a great fondness for handsome polished glass mirrors. A particularly fine example had once broken soon after a customer said, with envy in his voice and salivating greedily, “What a lovely mirror!” The man was famous for casting envious looks, and people said that if he envied a pigeon he could kill it in flight with his glance.
Farid used shiny brass tacks to fix the oval piece of card with the lucky charm on it to the front of his rather broad handlebars. He painted a sunflower and a canary on the scooter too, and next Sunday, his hair combed and perfumed, in white shirt, blue trousers, and tennis shoes, he took his scooter out into Abbara Alley.
“Terrific!” called Azar, and after taking Farid’s scooter for a ride himself he braked it, balanced on the spot for a minute, and folded the stand down. The pedal scooter stood upright in the street in all its glory. If Azar described something as “terrific”, the other boys all took notice, for it wasn’t easy to satisfy such a gifted handyman.
Less than three weeks later, ten wooden pedal scooters with ball bearing wheels were racing down the street, and the boys’ mothers were cursing the car repair workshops which were to blame for all this racket. And each new scooter was better than the last, so that Farid’s “terrific” construction was soon quite ordinary and occupied only a modest place among them. Now there were scooters with ostrich feathers, with bells and horns, and several with padded seats for little brothers and sisters, or the neighbourhood girls. Farid made a basket for Tutu, a spaniel who enjoyed a ride too.
Khalil was the first to master the art of drinking lemonade while riding a scooter. The bottle was securely fixed in a holder in the middle of the handlebars, and a straw enabled the clever inventor to drink without taking his hands off the steering handle or his eyes off the road.
Soon Abbara Alley wasn’t large enough for so many scooters, so all the boys adopted Josef’s suggestion of moving to parallel Saitun Alley, where Farid lived. The women of Abbara Alley blessed St. Joseph that day.
From then on a wonderful spectacle was to be seen in Farid’s street every Sunday afternoon. Ten boys, all spruced up, rode their scooters in a line two abreast to the forecourt of the Catholic church, and slowly paraded there before the eyes of the girls who, equally smartly dressed, were waiting for the scooters to arrive. The riders dismounted with solemn, almost majestic mien, folded down their prop stands in slow motion, and sat on the stone benches opposite. They crossed their legs and began talking about their scooters.
“Can I have a go on yours? Just to the tobacconist’s and back,” Toni begged humbly one day. He had never let Farid touch a single one of his many toys.
“Yes, okay, but be careful,” said Farid.
“That’s right, you watch out,” called Khalil. “His scooter bites children …”
“… who eat Dutch cheese,” Azar added, laughing. Josef grinned too, and his laughter infected the others too. For the first time Toni’s scooter was left lying on the ground, and no one condescended even to look at it.
97. Hashish
Arabs have all kinds of celebrations, but they never celebrate birthdays. They believe that just makes you grow old faster.
But early in the fifties, upper-class Christians began to adopt the European custom of marking birthdays. Elias, Farid’s father, who was on all the committees of the Catholic Church, had a good business idea: why not encourage rich Christians to make larger donations by celebrating their birthdays publicly? So he found out the dates of birth of the richest Catholics, and took the bishop and six priests into his confidence. The millionaire Bardoni’s secretary, wife and housekeeper knew that he was to be woken early in the morning by the Catholic Pathfinders’ brass band, and the day-long festivities would open with a folk dance performed outside his house. Two newspapers and Radio Damascus had also been told about the forthcoming event.
Then the plan was for the birthday boy to be led in solemn procession, amidst singing and dancing, to the church forecourt, where a festive table would be waiting for him and the guests.
After the meal, a singer was to keep the celebrations going from afternoon until well into the evening, his performance interspersed by occasional songs from the orphanage choir, while the St. Nicholas School for poor Christian children put on an amusing little play, and a sturdy pensioner delivered a rhymed greeting from the Old Folks’ Home.
What with all the organization, Elias was in a state of agitation for days before the birthday. He complained to Claire of the difficulty of teaching Arabs good manners. “They can’t even sing a little song in an orderly way,” he groaned on the Tuesday. “Everyone’s singing by himself, bawling out the tune regardless, no idea of harmony, just as if they were on their own in the desert and had never realized that we live in cities now.”