Damascus Nights by Rafik Schami

Author:Rafik Schami [Schami Rafik]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781566568319
Publisher: Interlink Publishing

8

How

one person's

true story was not believed,

whereas his most blatant lie was

Tuma the emigrant was a vigorous, wiry man of slight build. His gait was more a skip, despite the seventy-five years he carried on his back. He would bound up stairs as if he were a love-stricken fourteen-year-old on his way to see his sweetheart. None of the other gentlemen looked as young and strong as Tuma, whose entire philosophy of health consisted in taking an ice-cold shower every morning, in winter as well as summer. He always said he felt reborn after his shower.

Tuma came from a village on the coast, not far from Latakia. When he returned from America, not one member of his family was still living in the port city: some had died, and the rest had either moved to different cities or left the country. Tuma and his wife, Jeannette, decided to settle in Damascus. She was a second-generation emigrant, born in California; her mother came from Mexico. Her father, on the other hand, came from the mountains of Lebanon; an only child, he had lost his parents in the massacres of 1860. Sixty years later, shortly before his death, he made his only daughter swear never to return to Arabia, neither by land nor by sea. So when she did return, she insisted on a city with an airport, and Damascus did indeed boast an airport.

Tuma rented a very small house on Lazarists Street. If his wife Jeannette hadn't been so petite and thin, the two of them would never have been able to move at the same time inside the tiny rooms of their doll-house. Nevertheless, in his forty square feet of courtyard Tuma was not to be deterred from constructing the pride and joy of every Arabian palace: what he had been raving to his wife about for thirty years—a fountain ... in this case, no larger than a soup bowl. Surrounding this treasure was a miniature jungle of plants growing out of a thousand tiny flowerpots, which Tuma's clever hands had first fashioned from tin cans and then painted and arranged with such skill that the plants actually made the courtyard appear larger than it was. The only thing that bothered his friends was a plastic penguin, which spat water into the soup bowl in an uninterrupted noisy stream; if it hadn't come from America, then Salim, Mehdi, or Junis would have suggested to Tuma that he throw it in the trash. Or else Isam would have smashed the plastic bird into a thousand and one pieces. Faris and Musa, on the other hand, both agreed that the presence of the ice dweller in the middle of Damascus had a cooling effect on the soul.

Jeannette spoke a broken Arabic, but she said what she thought directly and without the slightest embellishment. Whenever he visited, Salim couldn't get enough of her. He liked the freshness of her language. The neighbors appreciated—and even envied—this petite, gentle woman, for although she spoke so softly she was nearly inaudible, she never had to repeat a word she said.

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