She bared her breasts. “You must kiss me here and then they'll grow,” she said in the dark, raising herself until her little nipple
pushed into his mouth. Farid sucked it, and she laughed because it tickled. “Not so hard, or they'll grow too big,” she whispered, giving him her other breast.
72. The Hammam
Later, the word Paradise always made Farid think of the time when he was still a little boy and could go to the hammam with his mother. They went to the Hammam al Bakri, near Bab Tuma. Wednesday was the women's day. Antoinette and her mother were always there.
The hammam was a world of its own. In later years, when Farid saw the paintings of the French Romantics idealizing women in the hammam or the harem, he thought their pictures boring by comparison with what he remembered.
The two most beautiful girls there were Jeannette and Antoinette, although they looked very different. Jeannette had pale skin and green eyes. Antoinette's skin was dark, almost black. Both were maturing rather early, and at the age of ten they already had small breasts and round little backsides.
Jeannette liked playing in the hammam with a blond boy from Ananias Alley. Antoinette, on the other hand, was interested only in Farid. It was she who explained the difference between men and women to him in one of the empty cubicles. Opening her legs, she showed him her vagina. Farid thought it was a wound.
“Have they cut off your little pigeon?” he asked. Children in Damascus called a penis a pigeon in those days, because they thought it looked as if it were sitting on two eggs.
Antoinette giggled. “No, silly. Women keep their little pigeon and its eggs in a nest inside them.”
He didn't understand, and she giggled again, but promised to tell him all about it. However, she never did, for directly after this he was torn away from his dream of Paradise. Overnight, he wasn't allowed to go to the hammam with the women any more. Years later Claire told him how the women would hint delicately to a mother that it
was time she stopped bringing her son. He laughed, but at the time, aged nine and suddenly banished, he had wept in the courtyard for a whole hour.
“Your son will soon be needing a bride.” That was how the coded information went. If a mother didn't catch on, the women put it more clearly. “Next time you'd better bring his father too,” they would say.
Claire had taken the hint. “You can go with Papa from now on,” she had told Farid next Wednesday, and set off alone with her things.
So Saturday after Saturday he followed his father to the baths. Elias always went on his own, and if he met any acquaintances it was by chance. He didn't mind who was there and who wasn't. The men always conducted boring conversations about business and war, extravagant and unfaithful women, the government and the weather.
And then there was the horrible man who did the soaping and whose eyes followed him every Saturday. He would soap and massage the men for a few piastres. He talked to Elias for a long time until he was persuaded to pay for a massage with his son. You never lay there naked, but always with a towel around you, and the masseur too had a thin apron around his hips. His bare torso was tattooed and not very hairy.
Farid didn't like the heavily built man, so he didn't want to go into a cubicle with him, but said he'd rather stay in the large public room. The masseur muttered, but agreed. He worked away on Farid's back for a while. Then, suddenly, he was lying on top of the boy with his penis erect, massaging him with a sisal glove.
Farid tried to get up, but the man pushed him back on the wet stone floor. Elias was drowsing on a bench above the stove at the far end of the room. Everything went blurred before Farid's eyes and suddenly looked dim and misty. His father appeared to be far away and out of reach. Then he felt the man removing the towel that covered his buttocks. “No!” he cried, rearing his upper body up. Only the man's apron separated his excited penis from the orifice it desired.
Elias briefly opened his eyes. “What?” he muttered, and dozed off again. But another man saw Farid's plight, and emerged from the mists.
“What are you doing with the boy?” he asked quietly. He wasn't sure, because he couldn't see properly in all the steam.
The embarrassed masseur smiled. “He doesn't like being rubbed down with sisal,” he claimed. “The boy has skin like a girl's, but he'll soon get used to it.”
“No, I won't,” protested Farid.
Now the man did see what was going on. “And what's that, then?” he asked, low-voiced, taking hold of the erect penis with the towel. The masseur flinched back, and Farid jumped up.
His father was still asleep.
Farid never let himself be overruled like that again. He didn't want to be either massaged or soaped, and soon he stopped going to the hammam.
But after he had been banished from that female Paradise, Antoinette didn't want to play with him any more. “You're a man now,” she said, “and it's not a good idea for a girl to play with men.” From then on she spoke sharply to him, just as Josef's sister did. And without Antoinette, Farid's childhood was as boring as white cotton wool, until the day when Josef let him join the gang.
73. The Gang
He was to go to the attic at midnight. It was a warm spring night, and Farid lay awake in his bed. His heart was hopping with excitement like a scared rabbit. When the clock struck twelve he jumped up and slipped out of his room barefoot. He heard a brief cough, and froze beside the fountain. Then he went on to the stairway between the bathroom and the drawing room. At the landing on the second floor, a pleasantly cool breeze blew into his face, smelling of jasmine and aniseed.
Farid stopped by the wooden banisters for a moment, observing the inner courtyards, the gardens, and the roof of the aniseed warehouse below him. When he saw a shadow scurrying up to the attic, he climbed on the low banister rail and jumped.
The attic door was open just a crack. Candlelight flickered. Farid slipped into the large room like a ghost, without opening the door
any further. Josef and three other boys were sitting around a large wooden table on which two candles were burning. The only window in the attic was covered with a thick cloth so that the light wouldn't give them away. The room was musty.
Apart from Josef, Farid knew only one boy in the gang: thin Azar from the class above him at school. They were all barefoot and in their pyjamas. He sat down on a chair at the table with his back to the door. That made all of them except Josef laugh. It was only later that he realized why. No one but a beginner, a trusting child, sits with his back to the door.
“This is Farid,” said his sponsor Josef in his dry voice. “I've sounded him out. He's okay. I propose him as a candidate.” The others nodded agreement.
“So if no one objects, he must take the oath now that he'll never betray anyone from our gang and will keep faith with it for ever,” Josef went on. “And if he keeps his word, he'll be a full member in six months' time.”
Word for word and parrot-fashion, Farid spoke the pompous sentences that Josef asked him to repeat. Even years later he remembered that meeting. It had impressed him greatly, and gave him experience of a political discussion for the first time in his life. A few days before, at the end of March, Colonel Hablan had led a coup against the civilian government. It was the first coup in Arabia. Rasuk, one of the members of the gang, said that Hablan had gone proudly to Faris Khuri, a famous and brilliant politician. “Well, what do you think of my coup?” Hablan had asked Khuri. “It succeeded without a single shot being fired. Isn't that brilliant?” But the wily politician replied, “I can't be the judge of that. However, you have opened a door that you'll never be able to close again. Someone else will soon come through that door and overthrow you.” The colonel had laughed, and left. A few months later, Rasuk told them how another man had carried out a new coup and had Colonel Hablan shot.
The gang met almost daily to discuss their operations, although what effect those operations had was not apparent. Far more important were the nocturnal meetings that strengthened their nerves and made them feel brave. Later, they exchanged banned books and secret
plans and ideas. The gang opened the gates of life to Farid, and suddenly he felt as if he had spent his earlier years packed away in cotton wool, like a larva in its cocoon.
74. Boxing
Laila thought boxing the most stupid of all sports. “It's just men making an art out of their wish to beat each other up,” she said, when Farid enthusiastically told her how he had been to a fight with his grandfather, sitting in the front row to have a really good view.
Elias had gone to a friend's funeral in Beirut, and Grandfather Nagib just happened to drop in that afternoon, or so he claimed. When Claire told him that her husband had gone away that morning for two days, he simply gave her a mischievous smile.
“Then I can take my young friend for a good long walk in town again, and he can stay the night with us. That way you'll have peace and quiet and you can do as you like for two days.”
Claire laughed. “When the cat's away the mice will play.”
But she agreed, stipulating only that her boy must come home as early as possible next morning, because his cousin Laila would be passing through Damascus and was going to drop in.
Nagib took Farid to a boxing match in the main hall of the club, where he always had the best, upholstered seats. The first fight was boring. “Beginners,” said a spectator to their right.
Grandfather disappeared during the intermission, and didn't come back even when the bell rang for the next fight. Farid, feeling anxious, left his seat and went in search of Nagib. He suddenly felt afraid that his grandfather might have fainted in the men's room, so he ran that way. There were four or five cubicles in a large room. The first two were empty, but as he was about to open the third door he saw his grandfather coming out of a small room a little way off. There was a young man with him. Grandfather adjusted his jacket and checked his flies, then took out his wallet and gave the stranger some money. Obviously overwhelmed by his generosity, the young man kissed
Nagib's hand. Nagib took the man's face in his hands and kissed him on the lips. Farid, who had just been going to hail his grandfather, felt strangely moved, and stood rooted to the spot in the shadow of the door.
When Nagib left, Farid unobtrusively followed him back to their seats. “I was looking for you,” he said when they were sitting comfortably next to each other again. Grandfather avoided his inquiring gaze. Some time later, when Farid had almost forgotten this incident, he inadvertently overheard a fierce quarrel between his mother and his grandmother. Claire was defending her father, while Grandmother was talking angrily about Grandfather's liking for young men. It was downright scandalous, she cried. Claire didn't want to tell her son what it was all about. Grandmother was always imagining things, she said briefly, and wouldn't allow her poor father the smallest pleasure.
“She ought to have married my Papa and you ought to have married yours, and then we'd all have been happy,” the boy speculated out loud.
Claire looked at him, her eyes wide. “You may well be right, but time decided otherwise. Mama and I have to love our own husbands.”
It was Josef who explained to him. “If what your grandmother says is true, it means your grandfather fucks boys.”
Farid didn't understand. “How?” he asked, baffled.
“Oh, for goodness' sake, don't you know anything? Or has God sent me an innocent angel? How? How? How many orifices does a man have? Ears and nostrils wouldn't be much use, right? So what's left? Your mouth and your bum, idiot.”
75. At the Barber's
The best barber in the Christian quarter was Michel, a distant cousin of Claire's. Like all men of good standing, Farid's and Josef's fathers went to him. His customers even included the Catholic Patriarch and the bishop. Grandfather Nagib went to Michel too, and praised his elegance in the highest terms. He had a very handsome salon, said
Nagib, and was one of the few barbers to wrap warm, moist towels around his customers' faces after shaving them, to give the skin that special smooth, supple look.
Michel's salon had large mirrors and a marble floor. Frescos and Arabic ornamentation adorned the ceiling and walls, and the basins were white marble with brass taps that shone like gold. The barber liked to show people his razors and scissors made in Solingen, which cost a fortune in Damascus. He was also an excellent perfumier, and had a secret book with a thousand and one formulas for fragrances. Men swore by his creations, but Claire laughed at them. “It's all humbug! Michel just adds a few drops of cinnamon, rose, or carnation extract to ordinary distillates of jasmine and lemon blossom, and the men go wild about them.”
Farid didn't much like visiting Michel the barber. Twice running he had left the boy to an apprentice, who was a nice lad but inexperienced, and kept pulling his hair. “I'm not letting that stupid little chicken loose on me a third time,” muttered Farid on his way home.
Josef too had rebelled against his father and went to a Muslim barber far away near the Ummayad Mosque, where the customers told so many stories that the barber's attention was constantly distracted, and he gave Josef some very odd haircuts. The man also drew teeth. Quite often he would draw a painful tooth for a customer who had arrived in haste, wailing, while he left a man with his face already lathered waiting to be shaved. He also dealt in houses, songbirds and smuggled goods. He was just the barber for Josef.
“It's like being in a movie there,” Farid's friend enthused. “You get a really crazy haircut, you hear two or three exciting stories, you see a tooth being drawn or a deal done under the counter, you get to hear canaries singing, then you have a glass of tea, and all that for half a lira.” A haircut at Michel's cost at least twice as much.