Printed in Beirut by Jabbour Douaihy

Author:Jabbour Douaihy [Douaihy, Jabbour]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Interlink Publishing Group Inc
Published: 2020-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

20

Farid Abu Shaar wrote standing up. He’d heard once that standing keeps you alert, so up he stood. He didn’t write wearily, but with all his senses ignited. He liked to imagine himself burning like a flame as he wrote, always with his favorite fountain pen—the silver Montblanc he inherited from his father, who in his time had received it as a gift from his relative Suleiman Abu Shaar to encourage him, when, in his youth, he had shown a fleeting curiosity for books and writers. But Farid’s father dreamed of a different world and never took the expensive pen out of its case except the day of his wedding so he, his bride, and their witnesses could sign the church registry, and another time to sign the IOUs—with prepaid interest—he took out from loan sharks when he had no other choice and needed money to open up his salon, Chez Hulim, in Furn al-Shubbak, and furnish it with two circular barber’s chairs and large mirrors. Halim died young and left the pen to his youngest son.

Farid was in fourth grade when he composed his first original lines. It was in Arabic class, prompted by one of the Arabic teacher’s favorite assignments—”Compose a sentence using this word.” On that day, he started them with the word “apple.” The goal was for the children to build a “subject,” “verb,” and “direct object” around this common fruit, and come up with a simple sentence such as, “The boy ate the apple.” Maybe the advanced ones among them would make a longer one, like, “Adam left Eden because he ate the apple.” And so, it was quite the surprise to him and to his classmates when Farid stood up and said in a poetic tone:

“The earth is a red apple that moves along gingerly.”

The teacher raised his hand, signaling the class to be silent, as though not to taint the miraculous event that had just taken place there in the classroom. He then proceeded to ask the boy how old he was, if he’d had private tutoring, and so on. When Farid’s answers eventually revealed his family name, the teacher shook his head and let out a great sigh of relief for having found in the boy’s relation to the Abu Shaar family a genetic basis for his proficiency with the Arabic language and his poetic precociousness.

Farid did his writing up in his village where, while deep in thought searching for expression, the sounds of cannon fire reached him from beyond the chain of mountains—a battle in the Syrian interior raged at night and the dead were left strewn in the open for days, as was broadcast in the news media the next day. He wrote standing up, with his papers and pen resting on the village church lectern that the priest agreed to let him borrow throughout the summer, except on Sundays. It was the same stand on which they placed the Holy Gospel, or the Synaxarion—the book of the lives of the saints, left open even when there wasn’t a reader standing before it.

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