The neighbours picked up the delicious seeds and ate them thoughtfully. Many decided that they had never tasted so good before, others claimed to have been cured of chronic stomach ailments the day after eating them.
So this was a time of blessings. Now that Colonel Shaklan had risen to power in Damascus, heaven appeared to be content. There had been plenty of rain last winter, which augured well for a record harvest in summer. And now sugar-coated fennel seeds had fallen from heaven. Some of the neighbours were reminded of the manna that God had fed to the children of Israel on their flight through the desert. Was this a sign from heaven that the lord of the universe was pleased with President Shaklan? The ever-suspicious Josef suspected that government airplanes had dropped the sugar-coated seeds, but no one had seen or heard any planes.
The gang sat in the attic above the aniseed storehouse, thinking about it. Azar joined them late that evening, and brought the answer to the riddle with him.
“It was Burhan and me,” he said. “A thank-you to the neighbours.”
Burhan was not a man of many words, and found talking hard work, but when he did come out with complete sentences he sounded surprisingly clever. Normally he was regarded as simple-minded for the time it took him to put two words together — hours, days, even weeks.
Burhan was small and strong and had a job that suited him perfectly: he was a stonemason. Stonemasons are silent folk, and he liked to keep quiet.
He worked as a labourer for Josef’s father, he was a bachelor, and he lived only a couple of houses away. He and his sister had inherited their house. He lived on the second floor, she lived on the first floor with her husband and four children. Burhan didn’t want to get married. Marriage would have meant talking a lot, which would be too much of a strain on him. He liked best spending time with his pigeons. He had over a hundred, and knew every single one of them better than he knew some of his neighbours.
He paid his sister a third of his wages, and for that he shared her family’s meals. He spent another third on his pigeons, and with what was left he allowed himself a small pleasure here and there. Burhan was at ease with himself and the world. He ate what was put in front of him, he found fault with nothing, but he never praised anything either.
Josef’s father liked Burhan but not his love for his pigeons, because it meant that the man always put his hammer down on the dot of four in the afternoon to go and see to his birds.
Pigeon breeders had a bad reputation in the city. They were considered obsessive and lazy, and their witness statements were worth nothing in a court of law because they were regarded as notorious liars. Furthermore, they were always up on their rooftops, where they could spy on other people’s houses. And their neighbours were bothered by the pigeon breeders’ calls and whistles, and all the garbage that they threw at hawks, cats, or even their own birds if they turned awkward. The garbage often landed in inner courtyards, even on tables where people were eating, and the pigeons themselves were lavish with their droppings.
All that was true of pigeon breeders in general, but Burhan was different. He loved his pigeons, and never threw anything at them. He conducted them the way a musician conducts an orchestra, and he always tried not to bother anyone. Curiosity was far too strenuous for him.
Josef, Farid, and the other boys in the gang had no great opinion of pigeons. Azar was the only one who liked them, and as he couldn’t afford any of his own he went to see Burhan almost every day and admired his birds, which had a very high reputation in the pigeon fancy. Over the years, Azar became almost like Burhan’s assistant. On Sundays he was even allowed to go to the Pigeon Café in the Suk el Sinaniye with him, where breeders met and offered their birds for sale.
Like Burhan, Azar was silent and given to brooding, so the two of them got on well. One day Burhan asked Azar how he could thank the neighbours for their patience with him and his pigeons. Azar immediately had an idea. He made little boxes of lightweight card, and fastened them to the pigeons with short rubber bands cut from the inner tube of an old bicycle tyre. The boxes had little holes in their bases, and just before the pigeons took off the boxes were filled with the sugar-coated fennel seeds.
Then, early that summer morning at the first light of dawn, Burhan sent fifty pigeons up into the air. He guided them soundlessly on their round trip, and before anyone had begun getting up in the morning, the pigeons were back from their flight over the Christian quarter of the city.
113. Grandfather’s Salt
Farid hated the idea of leaving Damascus for the monastery, but he sometimes consoled himself with the thought of being closer to the Mediterranean. Josef, Suleiman, and Azar had never been away from the city for long. Of the friends, only Rasuk had once spent two years outside the country, in the Lebanese monastery of Christ the Redeemer.
One night, two weeks before Farid’s departure, Rasuk came up to the attic where they were all sitting gloomily. No one was saying a word about the Flash Gordon movie they’d all seen together that afternoon.
“You’ll like the sea, Farid, I’m sure you will,” he began. “I was eight when I saw it for the first time. I spent hours, fascinated, sitting on a rock outside the monastery the day after I arrived. I could look down on the waves from up there, and a week later I found a huge book all about the Mediterranean in the monastery library, with illustrations. The underwater sights, the sea creatures, the amphorae, the shipwrecks — they were all there in large, hand-coloured photographs. It was the mysterious blue of the sea that I liked. I played by the water whenever I could. Later I learned to swim, and the salty taste of seawater surprised me.
“Then I came back here to Damascus in the summer vacation, and my parents took us away from the heat, the way they do every year, to our home village of Sabadani, fifteen hundred metres above sea level up in the mountains, where we always stayed with my grandparents.
“One afternoon I was sitting on the terrace with my grandfather. He used to drink coffee there just before sunset. The coffee was spiced with cardamom and smelled delicious. I loved my grandfather, because he told good stories.
‘Tell me about the sea, Grandfather,’ I asked him.
“He smiled slightly. ‘I can’t tell you much about the sea. Ask your grandmother. She comes from Latakia, the northern harbour town.’ But Grandmother was away with her family for three weeks just then, and when she came back my vacation would be over and I’d have to be back at the monastery. So I said what bad luck that was, and the old man nodded and took a big gulp of coffee. ‘The sea,’ he whispered, and then he fell silent. ‘The sea is — well, the sea’s quite something,’ he added, finishing his thought out loud at last. He stood up. ‘The Mediterranean lies over in the west, beyond the mountains, and I can tell you a little story about that. Thirty years ago I was planning to escape the First World War and emigrate to America, but when I saw the sea, and I found out that an even mightier ocean lay beyond that great stretch of water, and I’d have to cross it, I decided to stay in port for the time being. So I leased a tavern. Evening after evening I listened to the bragging tales of sailors, smugglers, adventurers. One day an Englishman gave me a lot of money to go to Cyprus with him and smuggle gold and weapons to Beirut for Lawrence of Arabia. So I stepped into his rotten boat. But I couldn’t swim, and the sea was rough …’
“And Grandfather told me such a long tale of weapons, gold, and smugglers that I can’t repeat it all to you now, but he was so excited that every now and then his voice sounded hoarse, as if he were reliving the moment when he was near drowning, but a dolphin rescued him and brought him safe ashore.