I SPENT THE ENTIRE NIGHT with Shaykh Nafeh’s corpse. I laid him out in such a way that made it look as if he were sleeping, and then I sat on the floor, rifle by my side, facing the door and the window as I searched through all the papers and photographs and the armoire for any traces that might shed some light on what had happened. I used to say that I have an analytical mind, which is to say that just by glancing over a string of numbers from the Agricultural Bank, I could figure out how well the season had gone, which harvest was better than others… and many other things that are of no interest whatsoever to the reader right now. I’m also good at gathering data, classifying it, and deriving the appropriate interest rates for the Bank in the coming rainy season. Once—and please excuse this additional detour into professional matters—based on the forecasted figures, I expected the following year to be a lean one. I predicted that the volume of rainfall would be low, so I advised my Bank against offering loans as they would only have led to a headache when it was time to collect the monthly repayments from the peasants, who were sure to lose much in that season. As a result, they rewarded me at the Bank by promoting me to Vice-President of the Agricultural Planning division.
With that same desire to analyse data and make sense of it, I sat there working in the departed Shaykh Nafeh’s room. In the briefcase were two travel documents for the married couple Nafeh al-Aghyurli and Jalila al-Aghyurli produced by the French authorities in Aleppo and dated 24th April, 1937, which is to say they had already been married by that point and were travelling together from Beirut to Marseille by steamship on 13th May, 1937. Both documents indicated that they were married, mentioning the name of the wife or husband. The journey by steamship from Beirut to Marseille lasted seven days. The French customs stamp was also unmistakable: 20th May, 1937. Nafeh matriculated at the University of Paris and began studying law. He neither visited Syria nor sent his wife back there throughout his time at the university. They spent their holidays travelling around France instead. There were a number of photographs of them in front of the Eiffel Tower and in the French countryside. But the reader must not surmise that this meant the two of them were doing well. There were also a number of letters in the briefcase from Uncle Ibrahim Pasha encouraging them to reconcile, and on every one of those there was a note scrawled by Hamideh Khanum (who was for all intents and purposes illiterate) offering her daughter advice on how to make peace with her husband and be patient with him. I couldn’t find a single negative word about Nafeh, probably because his uncle and his wife knew all too well that he would eventually read all the letters. One thing that grabbed my attention in the later letters was the uncle’s wife obliquely asking whether or not Jalila was pregnant, although it seemed the answer was always no, because the last time the matter of pregnancy was mentioned her mother had advised her to go see a specialist in Paris.
The final letter was the real bombshell. It was in practically illiterate Hamideh Khanum’s handwriting. She wrote to tell the two of them about the tragedy that had befallen her, had befallen them. Uncle Ibrahim had passed away suddenly. They woke up one morning to discover that his soul had surrendered to the Creator, as she put it, and she asked them to come back home to Aleppo immediately, even if that meant Nafeh would have to abandon his studies. What good would studying law do for him anyway now that he was going to inherit the workshop? A few tears had dropped onto some of those words, smudging them, and it wasn’t clear to me whose they were—those of the widow Hamideh Khanum or Jalila? An autopsy report by the French coroner who had inspected the corpse was laughable, and made me smile. Under cause of death the doctor indicated that the deceased had died in his sleep: by suffocation. He suspected that my uncle’s obese wife had rolled over in her sleep onto his neck and had crushed him. The man had a hernia on his left flank, which was taken as proof that this man had been lifting his overweight wife without the assistance of any servants.
The young couple left France in May 1940, just one month before the Nazi occupation of Paris, which means that they departed the country while Europe was burning during the Second World War, and as the inferno raced towards France with lightning speed. Nafeh dropped out of law school before even sitting his third-year exams. As soon as he got home, he took over the soap workshop and oversaw the division of the inheritance, leaving him with a controlling share in the workshop, the remainder being left to his wife and his uncle’s wife. At the same time, it seemed he was also searching for Widad, having learnt, as he told me before he died, about the story of her flight from Khojah Bahira’s house. But where had she gone? Nobody knew. In the chest I found a few tickets from the Roxy Cinema dated 1940 and 1941. Apparently he got into the habit of going to the cinema, hoping to run into Widad there, or maybe it was simply so he could remember her—I’m inclined to believe the latter because he would always reserve a seat in the same section where they used to sit together on their dates.
The wheel of death kept on turning. There was a death certificate stamped with the hospital insignia attesting that Jalila Ibrahim al-Aghyurli died during childbirth in November 1945. The document confirmed the death of the foetus as well. According to the report, the cause of death was morbid obesity, which had resulted in elevated blood pressure, leading to cranial haemorrhaging. So Nafeh was already a widower at the age of thirty. I didn’t find any pictures hanging on the walls from after that date. I didn’t find the division of an inheritance following the death of his wife; apparently he had been in no rush to produce one, and Hamideh Khanum passed away the following June. Ownership of the soap workshop devolved in its entirety, all 2,400 shares, to Nafeh al-Aghyurli.
Nafeh lived alone. There was no trace of the servant Khadijeh. Perhaps she had died as well. He never remarried. He travelled the world instead. His old passports contained an incredible number of entry stamps from many different countries, including India, China and Mexico. The real surprise came in 1950. In the briefcase I found a letter written on brown paper in a woman’s trembling hand, which I share with you here and now. I should say that I have taken some liberties in revising the structure. I brought it back to Aleppo with me because it is particularly significant:
My most highly respected Dear Mr Nafeh al-Aghyurli,
Greetings and good wishes from a faithful heart to an esteemed gentleman, etc…
My dear sir. You may wonder what has happened to me and where I now call home. I beg you to forgive me for all I have done, but your affection being ever in my heart, my desire for you to live your life drove me to depart Khojah Bahira’s house without leaving an address. Were it not for my profound affection for you I would have come back. That is the reason why I have remained silent all this time. Before you left with your virtuous wife Jalila Khanum, I felt I was carrying your child in my womb. I never had any intention of mucking things up in your life. First I left you, and then one day I ran away from the Khojah’s house to the village of Maydan Ekbas, which is the village where I was born and where I lived until my mother’s death. It was there that I lied to Shaykh Abd al-Sabbour, the imam of the village mosque, telling him I was married and that the French had imprisoned my husband in the Arwad Prison. The people of the village welcomed me with open arms, and I lived there under the guardianship of Bayonet Abduh until the baby was born. God granted me a son and Shaykh Abd al-Sabbour named him Ismail. I was pleased with such a beautiful name. You must know by now that Ismail is your son as much as he is mine. He was born on New Year’s Day, 1938. I then became acquainted with an Egyptian family travelling from Istanbul whose journey had been interrupted in Maydan Ekbas. I invited them to stay with me. Once their problems were resolved they invited me to accompany them to Egypt. I thought long and hard about it. They told me I could become a dancer in Cairo and earn a lot of money. I agreed to go with them. Cairo is such a massive city, with a wide river running through it. They helped take care of my son Ismail whenever I went to dance at weddings to earn a living. But God—blessings and praises be upon Him—punished me, and I became ill. I’m not going to tell you the name of the illness, but I would cough a lot and grow fatigued very easily and I could no longer continue to dance. After a few weeks I started coughing up blood. I feel as though I am going to die soon, my dearly beloved. That’s why I sat down to write you this letter. I’m going to write down your exact address and ask this Egyptian family, my only friends in the world, to send my son Ismail to Aleppo along with this letter and the address. If he makes it to you safely, this means that I am dead and may God bless me and may you have mercy on my soul by reciting the Fatiha for me, if only once. I loved you with all my heart and did this only so that you could live an honourable life.
P.S. I repeat that Ismail is your flesh and blood. I swear before Almighty God that he is your son. I pray that his arrival doesn’t cause you any trouble with your relatives and that you will take care of him, that you will be able to pretend that he is your servant. He’s a smart and sensitive boy. He always asks about his father. He’s constantly quarrelling with me and is embarrassed that I’m a dancer.
Cairo, February 1950
Sincerely yours, always,
Widad
The letter calmed me down. The story was complete. There were no more grey areas. I sat in my place, examining Widad’s handwriting. Her hand had trembled as she wrote. I tried to imagine the anguish that tormented her during her last few days. No doubt she had suffered a slow and painful death. I was struck with deep sadness for her. Through the story I had come to have great affection for her, through all the things that Shaykh Nafeh had held on to. His love for her was transmitted into my heart.
The idea of writing the story down first came to me as I sat there on the floor. But when I thought about how to actually go about doing it, I realised I had never written a story or even an essay longer than a single page. I hated myself for not being a good writer. I decided that as soon as I got back to Aleppo I would call up a writer and ask him to write it down exactly the way I described it at the beginning of this book. But first things first: I would have to figure out how to get out of there. Ismail was ready to kill me if he sensed that the story was going to make it back to the city, where he was most probably thinking about moving after his father Shaykh Nafeh died. He even threatened to follow me there, to hunt me down if I managed to sneak away. He clearly resented his mother for having been a dancer. He hated the fact that he was a bastard child, and had to pretend he was his father’s servant. He had forced his father to move out of the city and into the countryside in order to keep him away from other people, fearful that his secret would be revealed. Life is hard, Ismail. It led me out there to hear your story and to solve its riddles despite the death of the storyteller. But is it worthwhile to try and write it down, to use real names to describe everything and everyone? For example, out of respect for Ismail’s secret and my own fear of him, I could change the names of all the characters in the story. I could even change the names of the neighbourhoods and the streets, the village where Badia and Widad once lived. The story could still live on after its characters were gone. The one detail I insisted on retaining was Cairo, where Widad and her son wound up going. As for the rest, dear reader, I decided to dispense with their names. I changed what was manufactured at the workshop Shaykh Nafeh inherited, made it soap despite the fact that it produced something one hundred per cent opposed to soap. I chose soap because one of my childhood friends’ fathers used to own a soap workshop, where we spent good times learning how soap was made, wishing we could take part in the process of sliding rings around the individual bars. While sitting among Nafeh’s documents and photographs with his body on the bed right there in front of me, I decided what I had to do, and that is what I actually did, as you now know, dear reader. After all, people’s privacy and their secrets should be respected.
The chirping of wild birds outside jolted me out of my reverie. I looked out the window and noticed, somewhat embarrassedly, that dawn was breaking. I had to get out of there right away, or else I was sure to wind up a dead man. I wanted to live, so I could carry out my mission of writing down this story and publishing it for others to read. I stood up, gathered together the papers and photographs and scarves I had strewn all over the place, having decided to take them with me, and stuffed all of them inside the old leather briefcase. Everything else I put back in the armoire. I borrowed a jacket from the old man to shield me from the cold, took out a few bed sheets and firmly tied one to another to help me escape safely out the window and down to the garden below. I stood beside the bed and recited the Fatiha over the old man’s soul, kissing him and letting my tears flow. I said goodbye to him and threw one final glance around the room. Then I stealthily opened the window and the shutters and tossed down the rope made out of sheets. With the rifle slung over my shoulder and the briefcase hanging from my waist, I climbed down.
My feet safely touched ground in the garden. The sky was clear. The rain had finally let up around midnight. Everything was damp. I heard not a sound as I moved forward. Clutching the rifle, I left the garden, cautiously looking around before finally allowing my feet to run like the wind. I didn’t look back. I broke into a sprint and kept on going until I ran out of energy, at which point I stopped and turned around. The house had completely disappeared. I found it strange that it could vanish so quickly. I began walking at a normal pace, and three hours later I came across a shepherd tending a flock of sheep. I came nearer and asked him to show me how to find the main road. After he had pointed out the way I gave him the rifle in exchange for his help. Half an hour later I was able to flag down a passing car. By two p.m. I was knocking on my own front door because I had forgotten my keys back at Shaykh Nafeh’s estate. The moment my wife Nadia laid eyes on me, she fainted. Everyone thought I must have got lost in the wilderness and had long since been eaten by wild animals.