Umm Tony told him that the monthly rent was 500 liras, which he had to pay in advance. He agreed immediately, opened his wallet and gave her the required amount. She took the money and stuffed it down her ample cleavage. After she and the driver had left, Kamal Medhat shut the door and threw himself on the bed in exhaustion. When he later lifted his head and saw the peeling paint on the damp walls, he replayed the events of the past few days in his mind. He recalled Pari’s changed face, her posture as she sat in front of him, her legs, her arms and her heaving breasts. He was in the grip of a welter of dreams and hallucinations. He felt like a disembodied soul, as transparent and clear as water. But in his throat was a stickiness that suffocated him. His body was limp, as though he were under sedation. His head was awash with memories, details, desires and rosy-cheeked women with long hair. Then he fell into a long sleep from which he awoke in the evening.
He felt hungry when he woke up, so he went out to look for something to eat. On the stairs, he met Umm Tony’s daughter, a pencil-thin, teenage girl with long, slender legs called Aida. In the courtyard, he saw her other daughter, also a teenager with boyish buttocks and round breasts, called Dalia. Umm Tony lived on the lower floor with her two daughters and her son Tony, who was a schizophrenic. The other four rooms were rented by two Iraqis, an Algerian and a Syrian. This was what the Iraqi living next door told him when he met him on his way out to the courtyard.
The man’s name was Saadoun. He was good-looking and elegant and, in his loud voice, spoke a dialect that was a mixture of Iraqi and Syrian dialects. He stood in the yard flattering Umm Tony’s daughters, who were having a good laugh at his silly jokes in front of their mother. On the rug near the fireplace two cats were purring. He turned to Kamal and said, ‘I’ll come with you. I know a restaurant nearby.’ And they went out together.
Kamal looked at the street as though he were in a trance, while Saadoun was cheerful and in high spirits. Saadoun, who was an architect, was highly cultured and exceptionally elegant. He had the superior air of an aristocrat. He was a fugitive communist who’d escaped from Baghdad two years earlier, after Saddam’s crackdown on communists in the late seventies. He earned his living publishing well-written articles in newspapers for which he was paid badly. He ate at a cheap restaurant for students near Seven Seas Square.
They went into the restaurant. Kamal saw the mixture of colours in the onion slices and the green of the rocket and the parsley. He saw the rusty colour of plates piled with liver, the crimson of shrimp heads and their white undersides. Cold beer was also served. He drank two bottles, ate a plateful of liver and felt somewhat full and happy.
Saadoun asked him about his work. He told him he was a violinist.
‘I know a nightclub in need of musicians. You might find work there,’ Saadoun told him.
Kamal didn’t know how to respond. Work at a nightclub when he hadn’t accepted the Iranian musician Shahin’s offer in Tehran to play with the largest orchestra in the Middle East?
He felt the pain of an old wound being rubbed. His rectangular face was pale and sallow. Was it really his face? Then the colours disappeared once again. He got up and went to the toilet. He crossed the crowded restaurant and the light-filled floor and climbed the stone staircase. The toilet door was at the end of the corridor. He slid slowly into the darkness and, for one moment, silence seemed to have descended on him. There was absolutely no movement. He felt only the accelerating beat of his heart. Then he threw up in the sink. He washed his face and went back.
The following day, Saadoun took him to the Al-Rawda café. It was a large café with a big, planted terrace and numerous tables. Mint tea was served, along with hookahs with aromatic tobacco. It was the meeting place of Iraqi refugees, especially journalists and writers who’d fled Iraq in the seventies. With so many people, faces and questions, the noise was unbearable. Everyone he met there bombarded him with questions ranging from the political to the personal. Saadoun told him he had to get used to such questions, because Iraqis mistrusted one another and suspected each other of being Secret Service agents sent by Iraqi intelligence to penetrate the opposition. The place was rife with anger and filled with highly strung faces, constant questions and suspicions. Their mistrust appeared not only on their lips but in their eyes as well. He couldn’t stay in that place for long, where he felt suffocated and tense. Above all else, he was troubled by everyone’s curiosity.
The same day, Saadoun took him to Al-Tahouna nightclub near the Russian consulate. They sat beneath a blue lamp and the music was truly mediocre. The semi-naked dancers danced in a lewd fashion. Facing the nightclub was a garden where cats slept beneath benches. Some of the people sitting there were stoned on hashish, staring vacantly in a cheap daydream. Others sat with their backs against the wall, gazing at the horizon. After drinking several beers, he thought hard about how he might stay in this country. Saadoun asked him how he felt about working as a violinist.
‘I want to go back to Baghdad.’
‘Go back?’ he asked him.
‘Yes, I want to go back there. I have no life here.’
‘What’s your real story?’
‘No story! I was in Iran and I don’t want the Iraqi authorities to know I was in Iran.’
Kamal Medhat learned a few important things from Saadoun. First, he found out that Umm Tony, who hailed from Wadi al-Nasara in Homs, was in the business of forging passports, or at least in the business of handling them. Her husband, Abu Tony, was most probably the chief forger, or perhaps the contractor in charge of handling identities and passports. It was by pure chance that Umm Tony sold passports to some individuals who were later discovered to belong to the Muslim Brotherhood and who were being hunted by the authorities. Although they managed to flee the country, one of them by the name of Khaled al-Shami got arrested. He was the one who secured the contacts between Islamist leaders and some army officers that were planning a coup. Umm Tony was arrested and received a prison sentence of seven years at Tadmor Prison. Her husband managed to get away with it and flee the country. After she’d spent one year in prison, the authorities had released her with the proviso that she worked with them as an informant.
‘Can she help me?’ asked Kamal.
‘Don’t even try, she’s an informant. But we can use her later.’
Afterwards, a girl of twenty called Noosa appeared. She was dressed indecently. Her back was completely bare and her transparent dress revealed her breasts and her red knickers. Her eyes were very large and intensely dark. She wore heavy makeup and puffed smoke in their faces, which came out mixed with the smell of cheap whisky. She sat at their table and ordered a Scotch on their bill. She was either drunk or high and laughed out loud. After she’d got up to continue her performance, Saadoun told him that she was the wife of the driver, Emad, who’d given him the lift to Umm Tony’s guesthouse.
Although Kamal needed money to continue his stay in Damascus, he didn’t have the slightest desire to work at that joint. He felt so repelled by the idea that thinking about it made him queasy and brought tears to his eyes. When he went back to the guesthouse, he lay in bed and thought hard. How could he stay in the country if he didn’t have a job? He felt that he could use part of his musical talent, though not at that type of nightclub. So he decided to look for a place where he could work as a musician. The next day, in the morning, he left the guesthouse to look for work. But he had no idea that a secret war was going on in Damascus.
He walked along Baghdad Street, which stretched from Seven Seas Square to Al-Sadat Square. Then he went to Murshed Khater Street in the Al-Azbakeya neighbourhood, which extended from Al-Qasaa area to Al-Sabaa. It was around half-past eleven when he suddenly heard the sound of shooting on Murshed Khater Street. A minute later, there was a huge explosion. He saw everything around him fly up into the air. The screams of women and the sound of cars blowing up were deafening. There was complete chaos everywhere. A coach on the Duma-Damascus line stood parallel to the blown-up car. A charred part of a human back landed on the street. Kamal also saw burnt and crushed limbs on the pavement. All the pedestrians on the street had been seriously injured. Faces had been mangled by flying glass and the windows of the houses on the street had splintered over the residents.