On Wednesday he was complaining of Bardoni’s powerful housekeeper. “His wife has no objection, oh no, but that old crone doesn’t want him woken by the sound of drums, cymbals, and trombones. Just try telling the bandleader that he must do without one-third of his musicians! But there’s nothing we can do against that woman’s will. Monsieur Antoine Bardoni is her slave. He may shout at his wife, he never shouts at his housekeeper.”
On Friday Elias couldn’t sleep. “There’s an insoluble problem,” he told Claire. “We managed to hire Monsieur Antoine’s favourite singer. His secretary told us that in private the eminent Monsieur Bardoni listens to records by the Egyptian singer Abdulmuttaleb. Amazing! The son of one of our richest Christian families, a fan of this hashish-smoker from Egypt! Well, we were in luck: the singer happens to be in Damascus, appearing in the evenings at the Scheherazade nightclub, where they don’t pay much. So he was glad of the idea of earning something extra, and he agreed. Then comes disaster: he can’t sing, he tells us this afternoon, because he’s clean out of hashish. His head’s empty, would you believe it? He can’t find the melodies, they’ve gone into hiding, or so he claimed — what a childish excuse! — he needs hashish to entice them out of the closets and drawers of his memory. I thought I must be going crazy. A singer who can’t remember his tunes! Would you believe it, he wants to go back to Egypt because he doesn’t know his way around Damascus, and the nightclub owner won’t get him any hashish? Which is understandable, because they come down on you hard for possession: as little as five grams will get you a life sentence. But if he flies back to Egypt tomorrow the heart goes out of our birthday surprise.”
“Why don’t you just lay in a day’s supply for him?” replied Claire equably. “He can fly anywhere he likes after the event. The main thing for you and your friends is to have him there performing.”
“Where would we get the hashish? Here I am trying to organize a birthday party, that’s all! Do you see me landing in jail for the rest of my life?” Elias laughed bitterly.
“You could always ask my cousin,” said Claire after a moment. “Butros is legal adviser to the CID. He told me they have tons of confiscated hashish there waiting to be destroyed. Why don’t we simply abstract a little of it from the CID offices and give it to the singer? Butros is friendly with the head of the anti-drugs department. He’s won a case for him twice already.”
Bewildered, Elias looked into his wife’s unfathomable eyes. “Then … then call him and ask if he’ll help us out,” he stammered.
Next day Claire came back from the CID headquarters with a lump of best Lebanese hashish the size of a tennis ball. She gave Elias the handkerchief containing her valuable loot. “That would make even an elephant sing,” she said.
Elias turned pale. In Damascus, you could get three life sentences for possession of such a large quantity of hashish. But that evening, when the singer said he’d never smoked such fine hash before, he was happy.
Sunday came at long last, and the party began. Later Elias said the unfortunate outcome was because the first person he met that day happened to be the hunchbacked, one-eyed widow Mathilde, and she had grinned at him and shouted, “It’ll all go wrong!” Elias hated the widow.
“So then the band didn’t play cheerful tunes, it churned out Austrian marching music instead, the stuff they usually broadcast over the radio when there’s a coup. The millionaire was frightened to death and ran down to the cellar in his pyjamas. It was difficult to convince him that it had all been arranged specially for his birthday,” said Elias, taking a sip of water to moisten his dry throat. “Well, so he reluctantly followed the procession to the Catholic church, and he didn’t cheer up until the Patriarch of the Middle East and the Bishop of Damascus welcomed him at the church door. He was pleased as punch then, and the lavish meal was the very best quality. I supplied the cakes and cookies myself, made with the finest butter as usual. But it all still went wrong. The Egyptian singer made for the wide blue yonder before he was due to perform.”
“Why on earth did he do that?” asked the incredulous Claire.
“Because when he’d just smoked his third hashish cigarette, some joker backstage asked if he knew where the stuff came from. When the singer shook his head — he had no idea — that son of a whore whispered, ‘It’s from the CID.’ Then the singer cracked up. Maybe he’d smoked too much hash, or maybe fright turned his brain. Anyway, he started screaming that he’d been lured into a trap and they’d put him in prison. And then he was gone, said he wouldn’t stay in Damascus a moment longer.”
98. The Photographer
Few things fascinated Farid as a child more than photographs. In the first few years after his birth they were rarer than pictures of saints. Seven pictures of the Virgin Mary hung on the walls at home, along with two crosses made from the wood of the olive tree in Jerusalem, which was in great demand. A small statue of St. Anthony of Padua with the child Jesus stood in a niche in the dining room. It was a copy of the famous work by Juan de Juni, and such things were distributed by the Franciscans all over the world. The abbot of the Franciscan monastery had given it to Elias shortly before Farid’s birth, not only in thanks for his generous donation, but because St. Anthony was the patron saint of bakers, and also stood by women in childbirth and helped people to find things they had lost. The abbot enumerated over ten instances in which the saint’s protection had apparently been beneficial, and Elias fervently hoped that Anthony of Padua would both find his keys for him and help Claire in childbirth after all her miscarriages.
However, only three photographs hung in the drawing room: one of Farid’s mother when she was sixteen, another of both his parents, his father in a dark suit and his mother in a white wedding dress. The suit and the wedding dress had been borrowed. The third photo was of Farid himself aged two, in a sailor suit. He was asleep on his mother’s lap, and she was smiling at the photographer. His father stood stiffly beside her, looking gravely past the camera. Behind Farid’s parents stood Grandfather Nagib and Grandmother Lucia. Lucia posed looking as stiff as her son-in-law, but Grandfather was laughing and glancing up with his head on one side.
At the end of the forties, Basil opened the first modern photographic studio in the Old Town. He called it the Studio of Stars, and tried to give his customers a touch of Hollywood gloss when they posed for his camera.
Farid felt there was something mysterious about a photo. The people in it were alive, yet frozen on a piece of paper. But he understood the deep dimension of the magic only when he saw a photographer at work in the street. Farid was just seven that summer, and for some reason his grandfather urgently needed a picture of himself.
“Come on, we’re going to the photographer’s,” he told Farid.
Close to Bab Tuma, three photographers stood in front of their remarkable apparatus, large wooden boxes on adjustable tripods also made of wood. Their customers sat on folding stools in the open air, in front of a wall with a black cloth over it.
Farid and his grandfather had to wait. There were two farmers and a young man in line ahead of them. One of the farmers was cross because he didn’t want to puff out his cheeks as the photographer asked. The photographer snapped at the farmer to do as he was told or his face would look like a crumpled pair of underpants in the photo. The other farmer was afraid that the photograph might steal his soul.