Rafik Schami - A Hand Full of Stars

“Infuriated, the man turned to the picture of Jesus. ’Shut your trap. I’m talking to your mother! But very well, if you don’t want me to, I won’t share with you any longer,’ he scolded, took the eighty pounds, and left.”

The most wonderful thing is how Uncle Salim manages to extract from his memory the right story for every occasion.

September 20 — A splendid day! Today I went to the circus with Nadia. The afternoon show began at three. An impoverished troupe from India is visiting the exhibition center. They don’t even have a cash register; a man just stands there collecting money. With his scant knowledge of Arabic, he has a lot of trouble doing his job, and all the spectators seem to want to haggle.

During the performance nothing went right. The dogs refused to jump through the fiery hoops and raced under them instead. The elephants had diarrhea. The tightrope walker slipped even after his fifth attempt; the rope, however, was only about two meters off the ground.

The master of ceremonies tried hard to introduce the tiger act in an interesting way. “A matter of life and death!” he cried. The tigers slinked around inside the ring, yawning incessantly, then fell asleep. The tamer roared at them like a lion, but the big cats each sleepily opened one eye and went on yawning. The children laughed heartily.

The knife-throwing number, thank God, was the one thing that went smoothly. Upset, Nadia closed her eyes and pressed my hand. I found the act abominable. The poor girl who stood there trembling was as beautiful as a rose.

The loveliest act was that of the sad clown. He told a love story without saying a word. All he had was a withered flower that he took great pains to bring back to life. The spectators howled, but Nadia and I wept.

October 1 — We have solved the problem of the string. After days filled with tears and coughing, we realized that a few drops of diesel oil were enough to make the cord burn slowly but surely.

From atop the roof of an old abandoned factory, we sent up a big balloon with fifty strips inside. The wind carried it over the inner city. Suddenly it blazed up blue in the dark sky. We waited a moment, stashed the bag with our chemical laboratory in a rusty barrel, and hurried home.

October 15 — Habib ran off another three hundred strips of the fourth issue. He gave notice at the pharmaceutical firm, and tomorrow he is going north to work as an orange packer.

By hand he added a note in French: Show this strip to an Arab and let him translate what it says for you. We would be thankful if you would then pass our newspaper on to a journalist.

Hopefully nothing will happen to him. A gutsy guy!

October 18 — How stupid we are despite all! The simplest solution was right under our noses, and we took tremendous detours, perilous detours, and inhaled soot and oil. All this was completely unnecessary. Today we came upon the idea that solved the problem. We filled a small, lightweight raffia basket with the leaflets, fastened it to the balloon, and sent it up. After a few meters, the wind blew the flyers out of the swinging basket. The lighter the load, the faster the balloon rose and dumped it. The wind distributed the papers for us. No more lightning and diesel fuel. So now it’s also a little less dangerous.

November 6 — Three weeks have gone by and Habib is still up north. Nadia and I can meet more often. Best of all is when we make love at Habib’s.

November 8 — I have been looking for the madman. I don’t know why, but yesterday I dreamed about him. He is no longer at the entrance to the Umayyad Mosque. A perfume seller, who offers little aromatic flasks on a table there, told me the madman had grown weaker day by day and one day lay there unconscious. An ambulance picked him up, and since then he has not appeared again.

November 15 — Did I ever have a terrifying nightmare tonight! Habib squatted in front of the mosque with his mouth sealed shut. He had burns on his hands. They were square and red.

November 17 — Uncle Salim wanted to pour me some tea. His trembling hands could not hold the glass. It fell tinkling to the floor and shattered. I tried to make light of it, but Uncle Salim laughed at my concern.

“My friend, you have seen some of nature’s wisdom and endeavor to excuse it.” While we drank, he explained. “Nature, my friend, nature is mute. But she shows what she wants to say. Now she is telling me: Don’t hold on tight to worldly things. You cannot take them along with you, and the more tightly you hold on to them, the faster they will slip through your fingers. That’s what Nature says; she weakens the hands of old people so they can grasp and enjoy life more intensely than ever.”

November 24 — After forty days, Habib has returned. Now he has a gray beard. The radio stations are talking about the fourth issue again. Habib hopes the oranges will soon come into good hands. He told us a lot about the sea and the fishermen.

December 23 — (Have written nothing for nearly a month!) What luck! In Marseille several people who bought oranges passed the strips on to journalists. Habib learned of this through a colleague and had a taxi driver bring a copy of the French newspaper, Le Monde, from Beirut. The Syrian government has banned this edition. They do this whenever there’s anything at all against them in a newspaper. It’s idiotic that everybody else knows things are going badly for us, while we alone are not allowed to learn about it.

This evening we all sat round the French newspaper, which displayed an illustration of the sock-newspaper beside a translation. Habib read us the introduction aloud. A more concise and exact report could not have been written. Both the socks and the balloons were mentioned; above all, they said the sock-newspaper was the only good paper in Syria.

Habib embraced me. “We have you and your pigheadedness to thank for this!” he said.

I nearly jumped for joy. The praise was too much for me, but now for the first time I can write: I AM A JOURNALIST!

P.S.: Habib said that Le Monde is read in many countries throughout the world.

January 2 — I had a second piece of good news today. In the forty days Habib was gone he translated a crime novel. The author’s name is Maurice Leblanc, and the novel is one of twelve in an adventure series whose protagonist is a funny, brave thief named Arsène Lupin. The story is great, and even the author’s life is an adventure. The thief can transform himself into different shapes incredibly quickly. He steals from the rich (good!!!) and gives to the poor. Not only the police but also his colleagues are after him because he snatches the loot away from them. He does all this without firing a shot; his clever head is superior to force. Habib says that Lupin is very much loved in France.

January 10 — Damn it! Mahmud is out of a job again. His boss had to give up. No one comes to him to have his clothes tailor-made anymore. People buy cheap, disposable goods and thus many small shops go under.

Although I offered him money, this time Mahmud did not want to make a secret of it at home. “No, he ought to know. I don’t care whether he gets angry or not.”

His father became raging mad, but Mahmud screamed back at him that he had lost the job not because he was bad, rather because the country was.

His father became quiet and made tea for Mahmud.

January 15 — Mahmud spent the whole day looking for a job. During lunch break I went round to some of our customers who are fond of me and asked whether they might need anybody. All of them were friendly, but nobody wanted help. What a shitty life, always having to look for work!