Daily Excerpt: Road to Damascus (E. Imady) - Ramadan
.jpg)
From the chapter, "Ramadan," in Road to Damascus -
My first weeks in Damascus, I found any and every excuse to sit on the balcony adjoining our bedroom, writing letters, reading, watching the street action below or, best of all, just looking at the city. I knew this sight was one thing I would miss when we moved downstairs because there, the house across the street blocked most of the view.
The balconies on our building were enclosed by a stone wall about three feet high and were, in typical fashion, surmounted by another foot or more of wrought iron, artfully twisted and bent into arabesque patterns. Some balconies were generously built and could seat a large family and visiting friends. However, even smaller balconies, like ours, were crowded with potted flowers - geraniums, rose bushes, jasmine, climbing vines and one or two caged songbirds
Balcony floors were tiled and had a drain at one end. Mornings I would find Kawsar and other industrious housewives sluicing them down with pails of water and afterwards, bent double over their handle-less brooms, sweeping the water down the drain. Then, watch out below. The dirty water spurted out of a spout down on the street or onto any unlucky passerby. The balcony was also where Kawsar pinned up the larger pieces of the weekly wash which quickly flapped dry in the sun and where she hung pungent garlic bundles and ropes of dried okra.
One day that first week, I asked my mother-in-law, through Abdo, if I could help her with the time-consuming preparations for iftar. She handed me a tray and some lentils to pick clean, and I carried them out to the balcony. I sat down and turned my face up to the delightful and surprisingly hot rays of the March sun.
“What bliss,” I thought, “after the cold of last night. Why do they build their homes as though hot weather was all they ever expected?”
Characteristically for desert weather, the temperature could drop twenty-five degrees Fahrenheit or more from noon to midnight, and the tile floors, high ceilings and drafty windows meant bone-chilling rooms at night. I had never been so cold indoors before: no central heating, and only one room of my in-law’s five-room apartment had a heater. Oh yes, the salon also had one, but it was only lit when guests were expected. I could see my breath in the kitchen and bathroom at night. The water heater in the bathroom was only lit for the weekly wash and the Friday once-a-week family baths.
But if some creature comforts were lacking, there were the more important plusses of life in this strange place. First and foremost, there was my new family who had welcomed me with open arms. Many foreign wives, so I had heard back in New York, received an icy reception from their husband’s family, but I found only the apartment cold.
And then there was the city. I stared out at the sunlit city pinned to a cloudless blue sky by its pointed minarets and could not get my fill of the sight. The fourth-floor balcony where I sat gave a commanding view of Damascus, from the east where the newer districts of Tejara and Kasaa’ spilled over the ancient city walls, to the south where the district of Midan sprawled towards the horizon and finally, to the west past the extensive fields of cactus fruit where one desert road led, beyond my range of vision, to the small village of Mezze and another to the International Airport. The clear air gave almost a supernatural sharpness and clarity to the scene.
Of course, none of the districts of the city had names to me yet. What I saw was an enigmatic panorama: unfamiliar flat-roofed buildings with balconies interspersed with domes and tall minarets. All around me were unfamiliar noises and smells I couldn’t identify. It was strange, stimulating and exciting.
Suddenly, my attention was drawn to the narrow street below by a raucous motorcycle roaring by, followed by an ear-splitting sound I didn’t recognize. Rounding the corner appeared a fellah, a peasant, leading a braying donkey, its saddlebags overflowing with vegetables for sale. I had never heard a donkey bray before and was astonished at the sound. The peasant seemed to be competing with his animal as he chanted in a loud carrying singsong, advertising his wares. Together, they were making almost as much noise as the motorcycle had.
The peasant’s sharwal (baggy pants) and keffiyeh (headdress) and the laden donkey were still novelties to me, and I had a good opportunity to observe them when a neighbor, dressed in her flannel nightgown, but with a scarf on her head, called out to the fellah from her balcony. A lively exchange between them ended with the woman sending a little girl down with a large pot and a handful of coins. The fellah weighed out the vegetables–was it cabbage and eggplant?–with a hand-held scale under the watchful eye of the woman on the balcony. Then he dumped the vegetables into the pot and took the change the girl counted into his hand.
The girl, no more than a wisp of a child, I knew was a servant. I could spot these little housemaids after only a few days in Damascus. Like Amira, my sister-in-law’s servant girl, they were invariably dressed in ill-fitting clothes, wore slippers on their bare legs, and, unlike the spotlessly turned out children of the city, had an unkempt, but often capable and cheerful, look about them. I felt a pang when I saw this child. Perhaps, as I had been told, these girls were better fed by the families they worked for and lived with than they would have been at home, and possibly they were learning skills they might not have acquired back in their villages, but surely even the poorest child would prefer to be with her own family.
Mohammed assured me that issues like schooling and playtime for these girls were not relevant. If they were at home, their parents would have them hard at work and would certainly not send them to school. It went to show how far from home I was and what a different a world I had stepped into.
I looked down at the lentils I was supposed to be picking clean. There were small stones and twigs to be removed before they could be cooked. However, as I looked closer, some of the lentils seemed to move. To my horror, little insects, brought to life by the warm sun, were wriggling their way out of the lentils and flying away. I quickly put these lentils in the discard bowl which reduced the pile on my tray drastically.
Suddenly Abdo and my mother-in-law appeared at the door of the balcony. She looked at me anxiously and said something in her sweet voice. Abdo explained, “My mother says the sun can kill. You shouldn’t sit too long in the sun.”
“How funny,” I thought. “They worry about this lovely sun and not about the frigid bathroom at night.”
My mother-in-law noticed the large pile of discarded lentils on my tray and smiled. She gestured for me to hand her the tray and scooped up the rejected lentils and added them back to the pile. I decided I’d lost my appetite for lentil soup that day.
The balcony was my lookout and my first “classroom”. It was there I discovered our neighbors raised chickens on their balcony and that a troop of black, nimble-footed goats passed by our building every morning on their way to pasture and back again every evening, chased by a skinny, little goatherd.
Then, there was Shasho the dwarf, who sold fruit and vegetables on our street. I was told he was a fixture in our neighborhood, that all the housewives bought from him. Mohammed told me he did a good business because you got your money’s worth from him. Every day I saw him from my balcony setting up his wares on the corner of our block. He arranged his fruit and vegetables artistically on an oilcloth spread over the sidewalk and sometimes his much taller, pretty young wife could be seen helping him.
A close neighbor raised pigeons on his roof, and around sunset I would watch him, mesmerized, as he stood on the rooftop and directed his flock with a rag-topped stick. The birds flew in the sky swooping in circles, now left, now right, now higher, now lower, perfectly matching the motions of their owner’s stick which he wielded like the baton of a symphony conductor. The swirling and wheeling of these birds through the twilight sky seemed a kind of mute music to me. I was disappointed to learn the ulterior purpose of all this. Mohammed said pigeon fanciers try to steal valuable birds from their neighbors, that when the pigeons wheel in the sky close to a neighbor’s flock, some birds may desert their owner and join the neighbor’s birds Maybe so, but still it was lovely to watch the birds flying graceful arabesques in the darkening sky.
Waiting with Mohammed on the balcony for the daylong fast to end, I saw all the minarets simultaneously illuminated as the sunset call to prayer floated over the city. Before this call, both a summons to prayer and a signal to break the fast, the whole city seemed hushed, holding its breath, a city full of fasting people like ourselves, lightheaded with hunger and thirst, almost ready to see visions, hear voices.
The days passed in this strange city with its extremes of temperature and its volatile people. Sometimes I could hardly believe where I was and would awake disoriented in the morning, blinking in the bright morning sun and thirsty from the dry air of Damascus. The neighbor’s peacock screeched on its rooftop, the voices of Kawsar and her sisters could be heard in the kitchen, and far above my head was the ceiling of this unfamiliar room. Where was I? To reassure myself, I would reach out for Mohammed; without him it all would have been too alien. Some of the foreign wives I came to know in Damascus had visited the city and their in-laws before deciding to start a new life in Syria. I found this odd. For me, all that mattered was Mohammed.
For more posts about Elaine and her book, click HERE.
For more book excerpts, click HERE.
Sign up for the MSI Press LLC newsletter
Follow MSI Press on Twitter, Face Book, and Instagram.
in exchange for reviewing a current or forthcoming MSI Press LLC book?
Contact editor@msipress.com.
Want an author-signed copy of this book?
Purchase the book at 25% discount (use coupon code FF25)
and concurrently send a written request to orders@msipress.com.
Comments
Post a Comment