Maps of the Soul

Chapter 5

THREE

Your first day in the city was filled with amazement and discovery. Your second day was filled with a fear of the unknown, and this fear grew with the third and fourth days, as you began to knock on the doors of offices and agencies looking for clerical work. You discovered that no one was in need of your knowledge of the Arabic language, because all commercial transactions in the markets or the government departments were carried out exclusively in Italian, and that there were no positions anywhere for someone who hadn’t mastered reading and writing this language.

The only food that you could afford to buy in the city was a loaf of bread with a cup of tea. Anything more substantial would use up your remaining money in a single day. So you went to the New Gate where there was a station for horse-drawn carriages and a circle of people drinking tea. A man was sat in the middle of that circle before the burner preparing tea from a large pitcher and distributing three rounds of red tea in small elegant cups to those around him. You sat with them and sipped your cups of tea like them, and when the last cup came it was tea mixed with slipping through the cracks in the wooden slats and sheets of metal, and you hadn’t a single franc left.

The new clothes you had arrived with had become dirty. Your shirt collar was filthy and some mud had stuck to your Arab trousers, leaving nothing but your waistcoat, which would at least give you a somewhat presentable appearance for when you met the owners of shops and offices asking them for work. You really didn’t know how you would find time to wash your only shirt, and if you did find time you would have to remain wrapped in your cloak until the shirt dried, something that would have to wait until after you had secured some sort of work, no matter how lowly or degrading. Any job was better than standing in front of the mosque begging for charity.

It would suffice to be granted enough pay to buy a loaf of bread. That was all you wanted. It would not be hard to begin your day without tea or breakfast, but what about lunch and dinner? If you didn’t find work, what would you do about tomorrow and the next day now that you had cut the strings that once tied you to your village? There was no going back now, a matter to which the other men staying at the Shushan Agency couldn’t relate. They took pity on you and, seeing the plight you had got yourself into, knew no remedy other than for you to return to your family in Awlad Al Sheikh. They broached the topic with you, and when they found you insistent on staying and continuing to suffer daily, they looked at one another, shaking their heads with the collective phlegmatic wisdom of the ages, and hummed the melancholy folk song that says that whoever tastes the bread of the city can never leave.

You didn’t explain that your problem was different, that it wasn’t you who refused to return to your village, but the village who had ejected you and wasn’t prepared to welcome you back, leaving you no choice but to face your fate in the city by any means possible. Telling them all this would be embarrassing and disgraceful. You were happy that the story of your flight from the village was unknown to these people.

Some of the porters at the Tuesday Market harassed you when you tried to lend a hand with the sacks and boxes of goods being loaded onto a cart. Even they had rejected you from their menial craft, perceiving your actions as a threat to their livelihood. In crude, rough voices, they ordered you to seek your fortune elsewhere.

As you passed through the markets, you saw people sitting around large bowls of food. You stared at them enviously, then tore your gaze away and moved on. The longer you looked, the more your hunger would grow. You could have found a discarded tomato on the ground of the Tuesday Market and made that your breakfast, but you refrained from picking up something so covered in dirt, and the entire day passed without a morsel to eat.

Night came and your stomach began to pang.. The pain was no longer due only to hunger. It was a different sort of pain, as though hot pincers were gripping your entrails for short agonizing moments, then stopping, only to return with renewed intensity. Your desire to find food of any kind to stop this torture was so great that you considered plucking the leaves off any tree you might happen across, even one of the trees planted for decoration on the streets, just to chew on something to stop the convulsions in your stomach. But you also feared you might make the pain worse rather than better if you ate something, for this was not the result of today’s fasting, but also of the four days before when nothing had entered your stomach but loaves of bread and cups of tea. But now even those items of low nutritional value were unattainable.

Nevertheless, you went to the tea circle where you had already been, to see the tea maker lighting a lantern beside the burner so that he might see better while he prepared the tea. He had placed a turban around his head to protect him from the night-time dew. It was April, and Spring had just begun, however the warm weather of the mornings couldn’t withstand the waves of evening chill, which turned the Spring weather to Winter. You had felt the cruel aching cold whenever you returned to the shelter at the agency, throwing yourself onto the mangled mat, holding your knees up against your chest and trying to ward off the cold with your light papery cloak. Nothing worked, so you had been forced to resort to using card-board from shipping boxes to cover your body.

You had come to the tea circle this time without any money, hoping to get a cup of tea from the proprietor by promising to pay him later. Then, because drinking tea alone would only serve to increase the pain in your stomach, you would try to get him to loan you five bara with which to buy a loaf of bread. You had high hopes that this man would agree. From the very first day, you had felt that he sympathized with you, which was what incited you to continue coming here to the exclusion of all the other circles of tea makers, as a kind of camaraderie developed between the two of you.

He had started to call you by your name whenever he handed you your tea, while you began to call him Uncle al-Sharif. Why were you embarrassed, or even afraid, to approach him then? It was not as if you were asking for his daughter’s hand in marriage, it was only a franc, which you would pay back. It was certainly a better option than starving, and more dignified than begging. Even so, the task was difficult for you, because it was the first time in your life you were asking a stranger for money.

You remained still, hesitating for a while, moving your gaze over the men sitting in the circle before moving towards him slowly so as not to startle him or draw people’s attention to your plight. You began to get closer to him without anyone taking note of your movements until your shoulder touched his, and you put your mouth beside his ear. You wet your throat again and again, you recited the Fatiha and the Surat Ikhlas to yourself so that your efforts would succeed. Finally you put your trust in Allah and began your speech by greeting him, although the turban that was wrapped around his head and ears prevented your whispered voice from reaching him. You were forced to raise your voice and risk being discovered by one of the men sitting around him. Hunger is an infidel, as they say, and it was hunger that forced you to swallow your pride and tell him what you had come for as quickly as you could.

He didn’t reply, but merely raised his head and shouted, “Yousef!” His son, who helped him hand out the cups of tea, appeared above the heads of the sitting men. He was a young man in the middle of his teens, and his father spoke to him in a sentence you didn’t understand even though you heard it perfectly, “Take this man to Abdullah’s place.”

Yousef took you to a bakery up against the city wall in the opposite direction. Abdullah was the owner of this bakery, and had just finished putting the loaves of bread he had prepared onto the boards in front of the oven. A young black assistant greeted customers, gave them their bread, and took their money, placing it in a drawer beside him. From the bakery’s entrance a man came burdened with a heavy load of firewood and straw, which he placed on top of another pile of firewood. The bakery owner reached into the drawer to give the firewood porter some money, and asked him to stay there for a few seconds.

He then turned to you, placing a hot loaf of bread between your hands, he said, “Are you truly looking for work?”You answered him around a chunk of the burning bread that you had already put in your mouth, “Yes, yes.” From the next day onwards, gathering straw and firewood from the public parks, the rubbish dumps, or the forests surrounding the city, and transporting it to Abdullah’s bakery became your regular job. Every morning you came to work. While shepherding sheep in the mountains and valleys of Awlad Al Sheikh had been far easier, the difference between was that shepherding doomed you to follow sheep until old age overtook you, whereas here gathering firewood was just one step to help you over the threshold and begin life in the city.

You practised your new profession with this thought in mind, and without sharing the enthusiasm of your co-workers, who viewed their employment as the chance of a lifetime. Take for example the man who led you out to the forest the first time. Like you, he came from the countryside, but all he wanted was an opportunity to make some money, even if he frittered away an entire decade doing it. Then he could return to his village and open a grocery shop, or a bakery of his own. That’s why he worked two shifts a day, one at dawn, and the second in the afternoon, working until dusk. You, meanwhile, contented yourself with just one shift in the morning, because the point of working was to meet your costs of living temporarily until you found work commensurate to your education.