So I told him how the first Christians had to go underground in ‘Quo Vadis?’. I told him about the catacombs, and Peter Ustinov playing Nero so brilliantly, and the Eternal City of Rome burning, and then more about the persecution of the Christians. My father was so moved he even forgot to drink his tea. Tears came to his eyes. But I didn’t say that after the movie we were in a big punch-up with some Muslim kids. It’s a pity you guys weren’t there.
The Muslim kids were in the two rows in front of us, and they’d come with their teacher to get to know about Christianity. But when the lights went up again one of the Muslim boys had to go and tell his mates, ‘Come on, let’s see if that bunch are good Christians.’ And he pointed at us, hit my friend Gabriel in the face, and shouted, acting all naïve and innocent, ‘Okay, so now you turn the other cheek, right?’
Gabriel was startled for a moment, but then he grabbed the boy, who wasn’t very big, lifted him in the air and threw him over the heads of the audience to land three rows forward. Then all hell was let loose. The teachers didn’t know what to do. They said they were ashamed of their pupils. Of course I didn’t tell my father a word about that.
So on Saturday I had to go to confession. ‘I told lies,’ I admitted, kneeling.
‘Why did you do that, my son? Was it out of greed, or fear of punishment, or to get some advantage for yourself?’
‘No, it was for humanitarian reasons,’ I said. There was total silence in my confessional. Finally Father Athanasias told me to say a prayer of repentance and three Our Fathers, to cleanse my soul of the sin of lying. He didn’t understand at all, so I didn’t say any of the prayers.”
102. Jokers
Each season had its own game. Who decided when one period of games began and when it ended remained a mystery of childhood. Only marbles could be played at any time of the year.
In winter the children played with nuts and olive and date stones. The winners ate the nuts and took the olive and date stones to the briquette factory. They burned well, and the children earned a few piastres that way. And they played cards more in winter than in spring.
Just before Easter they played with hardboiled eggs. Farid was never allowed to join in, because Elias and Claire thought egg-cracking was a primitive game of chance played only by the lower classes. They didn’t mean harmless egg-cracking at home, something all Christians did as an Easter custom, but cracking eggs in competition, when you won or lost the eggs you had staked. All the same, Farid slunk off to the road junction with Jews’ Alley, so that at least he could watch.
The game involved all kinds of cheating and fixing, and no day ever ended peacefully. Someone was always caught cheating, and then there was shouting and sometimes fighting. Suleiman was an artful devil. He purposely went looking for innocent children who had brought one or two hardboiled eggs from home to try their luck, and challenged them. Azar had once given him an Easter egg that couldn’t be cracked because of the clever way its young inventor had prepared it. Only he could have thought of such a thing. First he bored a tiny hole in the shell of the raw egg and sucked out the contents, then he filled it with liquid plaster and waited for the plaster to dry hard as stone inside the shell. But Azar himself didn’t have the nerve to cheat, so he gave Suleiman the prepared egg, and Suleiman won at least fifty eggs with it every Easter. If a grown-up got suspicious and asked to look at the egg he quickly disappeared into the crowd.
Just after Easter they began playing with apricot kernels, which were in great demand because they brought in a lot of money. There were the expensive sweet kernels, which were ground to a kind of marzipan, and almond oil was pressed from the rather smaller, bitter kernels.
Then the season came for balls to come flying out of the houses, while the children ran after them to work off all the pent-up energy of the winter months. Football and basketball were the two favourite games. There were always jokers playing in the ball games. Jokers — called after the joker in a pack of cards and known in some streets as “migrant birds” — were children who were too small and too young for the game, but wanted to play all the same. They could go out on the pitch with the others, run around with them, and fling themselves into playing for one team or the other. They kicked the balls all over the place, threw themselves into the spirit of the thing and were accepted and always treated kindly, as they didn’t belong to either team. Their goals didn’t count, but they played, changed sides, and were happy in the belief that they were really part of the game.
When school closed at the end of June, and the streets were hard as stone in the drought, the children played with pebbles. There were all kinds of different games with both pebbles and marbles, all of them calling for stamina, a sure aim, and a good sense of height and speed.
There was constant cheating and trickery. A joke even claimed that Jesus, who wouldn’t work miracles to save himself even on the cross, fell for the temptation when he was playing a game. One day, so the children in Farid’s street said, Jesus and Muhammad were playing backgammon in heaven. When Jesus was losing and had reached the point where his last throw couldn’t win the game even if was two sixes, Muhammad scoffed at him. “Give up, lad!” he said. “Nothing can help you out of this fix!” But his broad grin froze when Jesus, smiling, threw the dice and they landed on the board — two sevens! Muhammad was furious. “You just listen to me,” he spat. “That’s no miracle, that’s cheating!”
103. Superstition
Josef’s neighbour Halime had finally borne a healthy baby after three miscarriages. She was just twenty-two, and Josef said she was very superstitious. During her pregnancy she had done everything the midwife advised, and although she was a Christian she even went with her mother to a sheikh who lived nearby to get talismans from him.
Her mother-in-law had driven her nearly crazy, for she had been against the marriage all along, and was always trying to turn her son against his wife. Whenever he visited his mother he came home in a bad temper, and would shout at Halime for the least little thing.
Her own mother was an attractive woman of forty who looked younger and more feminine than her only daughter. She worried about Halime terribly, and was ready to do anything for her. She gave the Virgin Mary candles, she gave St. Anthony incense, she gave St. Barbara a silver heart. And she donated to charity three times running, because the sheikh said it was possible that the soul of some female ancestor of hers was in need of grace. In such cases the people of Damascus donated food or drink to passers by in the street. The charity offered in summer was usually sus, a black, bitter-sweet brew that tasted of liquorice. The passers by refreshed themselves with it, and wished for God to have mercy on the dead.
When Halime was in her sixth month of pregnancy she donated a huge vat of sus every week. The drinks sellers stood in Abbara Alley and generously handed it out to passers by, until one day a neighbour went to see the expectant mother and told her he kept dreaming of his dead father, who had seen Halime’s ancestors, and they were in Paradise too. But they were calling for help, because great waves of sus were flooding the place. Many of the saints were already up in the treetops, begging for the charitable donations to stop. Halime listened to this request, and in the end she had a pretty and most important of all a healthy baby.