THE TESTAMENT OF AL-HARIQA
CHAPTER TEN
1
Damascus, Summer 1978.
Nearly a full year had passed since Haj Tawfiq disappeared from the hospital—a year during which Adnan had run the shop entirely on his own, with a patience and endurance that had surprised even those closest to him. Not a word had come from Haj Tawfiq throughout those long months: no letter, no telephone call, not even a reliable rumor in the market, which ordinarily lived on rumors as surely as it lived on air. In the first few weeks, Adnan had tried to report the disappearance officially to the police, only to meet a cold bureaucratic wall: indifferent officers who recorded his statement without any real interest, in a city already living through mounting political tensions that made the disappearance of an elderly cloth merchant seem, in the authorities’ eyes, a secondary matter unworthy of serious investigative resources.
During that year, Adnan visited Umm Sulayman repeatedly, asking whether she had heard anything. He went to the hospital more than once as well, trying to gather some additional detail from the medical staff, but received only the same answer each time: the man had left of his own accord, and no one knew where he had gone. Even Hasan and Abu Salim, his two old companions in the market, gradually stopped asking—not because they had ceased to care, but because hope itself had begun to wear thin with the passing months, and the repeated question had become more painful than useful.
Adnan continued running the shop in Haj Tawfiq al-Nabulsi’s name, relying on a simple power of attorney the old man had signed for him before entering the hospital, “for emergencies only,” as he had described it then. No one could have imagined that it would be used for an entire year of independent management. Adnan had matured considerably during that year, through necessity rather than choice. He learned how to negotiate directly with suppliers, how to manage the shop’s accounts on his own, and how to face customers who, with growing unease, sometimes asked about the fate of the shop’s true owner. Even his features, as his mother noticed during a brief visit from the village, had begun to carry the gravity of a man far older than his actual age—a seriousness imposed upon him by circumstances he had never chosen.
Yet the same year brought new tensions, deeper and more complicated than the mere running of a business. Since spring, Adnan had begun to notice a stranger whom he had never seen before passing repeatedly near the shop, studying the storefront with long, searching looks without ever entering, then moving on. It happened often enough to become a clear pattern—one that was increasingly difficult to ignore.
2
On a hot July evening, as Adnan was closing the shop, a young man about his own age approached him. He wore simple clothes, but there was something unusually serious in his gaze for someone who appeared to have no connection with him at all. Adnan had noticed him standing across the alley for several long minutes before approaching, as though hesitating—or waiting for the right moment, when the street would be clear of passers-by.
“You’re Adnan al-Rafi‘i, aren’t you? The man who runs Tawfiq al-Nabulsi’s shop?”
“Yes. Who are you?”
“It doesn’t matter who I am. I was sent to tell you something important.” The young man glanced around cautiously, as though making sure no one was listening, then lowered his voice further. “There are people asking about you in places where questions like that should not be asked. About this shop, too. And about a name you may not even know is connected to you: the al-Hourani family.”
A cold shiver ran through Adnan. “Who is asking? And what exactly do they want to know?”
“I don’t know all the details. I’m only carrying a message from someone who knows you but couldn’t come himself.” The young man hesitated, his eyes moving nervously between Adnan’s face and the alley around them. “The message is: ‘The time has come. Go where you know to go, and do what you were asked to do.’”
“Who sent you? Was it Haj Tawfiq himself? Is he alive?”
The young man shook his head, as though he had no answer—or did not want to give one. “I don’t know. Believe me. I was only paid a small amount to deliver the message by a man I had never met before. I met him in a café far from here. That is all I know. Please don’t ask me anything more. I’ve begun to fear that I’ve involved myself in something much bigger than I am.”
Before Adnan could ask another question, the young man turned and disappeared quickly into the evening crowd, vanishing among the narrow lanes before Adnan could even think of following him.
3
Adnan remained standing in the same place for a long time, his heart pounding violently as he repeated the words in his mind: “The time has come.” Was this a signal from Haj Tawfiq himself? Or from someone else who knew about the box and was trying to lure him into opening it for some unknown reason—perhaps to discover its contents later, by one means or another? He wondered whether the stranger who had been watching the shop was the very person who had sent the message, trying to push Adnan toward a step that might reveal the true whereabouts of the entrusted secret to him—or to whoever stood behind him.
He remembered Haj Tawfiq’s final words that night before entering the hospital: “Do not open this box, and do not ask anyone about it, except in one circumstance: if you ever feel that the world no longer protects you.” Adnan thought about that night for a long time, and about all the months that followed it: a stranger watching the shop, an unknown young man carrying coded messages, and absolute silence from Haj Tawfiq himself for an entire year. Added to that was a growing feeling he could no longer ignore—that someone was following every step he took, even though he could not identify its source with complete certainty. It had simply become part of his daily instinct over the past months.
Adnan spent the entire night awake, turning possibilities over in his mind: going straight to the bank, or waiting; finding out more about the identity of the mysterious messenger before acting on his words alone. But as dawn approached, he realized that waiting itself had become a danger no less serious than action. Every day that passed without knowing the truth meant another day of uncertainty surrounding his teacher’s fate, and another day that whoever was watching him might use to pursue an aim whose nature he still did not understand.
The following morning, Adnan closed the shop early, hanging a small sign that read, “Back at noon,” and headed toward the Arab East Bank, Harīqa Branch, carrying the small silver key that had remained around his neck since that night nearly a year earlier.
4
The bank was old but elegant. Its stone façade still bore Ottoman ornamentation from the time of its original construction. Inside, everything was quiet and formal: cool marble beneath the feet, and employees in dark formal suits moving with a slow, deliberate rhythm. Adnan paused for a moment at the heavy glass door, breathing deeply as he tried to calm the heart that had been beating unusually fast since he woke that morning. Then he pushed the door open and entered.
He approached the receptionist with visible hesitation.
“I’d like access to safe-deposit box number 47.”
The clerk gave him a quick, assessing look, then asked for his identification and any document authorizing him to access the box. Adnan produced his identity card and the power of attorney Haj Tawfiq had signed for him a year earlier—which, fortunately, also authorized him to access “all accounts and properties belonging to the principal, including safe-deposit boxes registered in his name.”
The clerk examined the documents carefully, then disappeared for several long minutes to verify the records. At last he returned with a neutral expression. “The power of attorney appears formally valid, but please allow me to consult the manager before I permit access, given the sensitive nature of the matter.”
Adnan waited for a long time, each second seeming to stretch toward infinity. He sat on a hard wooden bench in the waiting area, watching the employees and customers move around him without truly taking in what he saw. His mind was entirely occupied by the question that had not left him since the previous night: What would he find inside that box, after all this waiting?
The clerk eventually returned, accompanied by an older man who was clearly the manager, judging by his more elegant clothes and thin gold-rimmed glasses.
“Mr. al-Rafi‘i, is that correct?” the manager asked in a formal, searching tone. “Haj Tawfiq al-Nabulsi left specific instructions with us before his disappearance. They state clearly that you, and you alone, are to be permitted access to this box whenever you request it, without additional conditions. Unusual instructions, certainly—but they are perfectly valid in legal form.”
“Do you know anything about what happened to him? Did he leave any means of contacting him after those instructions?”
The manager shook his head regretfully. “Nothing, Mr. al-Rafi‘i. Those instructions are the last thing we received from him, more than a full year ago. I sincerely hope he is well. He had been a respected client of ours for many years.”
5
The manager led him to a quiet back room surrounded by thick metal walls. Long rows of numbered boxes filled the walls almost from floor to ceiling. He stopped in front of a relatively small box, number 47 engraved neatly on its metal face.
“I’ll need your key, in addition to the bank’s master key, which I carry. Both keys are required to open the box. A standard security procedure.”
Adnan took the silver key from around his neck with a slightly trembling hand and inserted it into its slot. The manager inserted his own key into the second slot. They turned both keys at the same moment. The small door opened with a faint metallic click.
The manager pulled out the inner metal box and placed it on a nearby table reserved for that purpose. “I’ll leave you alone now, Mr. al-Rafi‘i. Press this bell when you’re finished.” Then he left the room, leaving Adnan alone with the box he had waited an entire year to open, through a year of anxiety and anticipation.
6
Adnan lifted the lid with hands that were now visibly trembling. Inside he found several things: a large envelope bearing an unbroken red wax seal; a collection of carefully folded documents carrying old official seals; a small velvet cloth pouch whose contents felt metallic and unexpectedly heavy when he touched it with his fingertips; and, finally, a separate, smaller letter, its envelope bearing Haj Tawfiq’s distinctive handwriting: “To Adnan al-Rafi‘i, personally. To be opened by him alone.”
He opened the last envelope first, his hand trembling more than ever.
“Adnan,
“If you are reading this letter, it means that matters have reached what I feared they might, and that I was unable to return to you as I promised—or that other circumstances forced you to use this key before I could return. Whatever the reason, I trust that you have made the right decision, as you always have since the first day I knew you.
“In this box you will find the title deeds to two parcels of land in the Ghouta, registered under the original al-Hourani family name. The time has come for their legal ownership to be transferred, through the proper channels described in the accompanying documents, to Kamal al-Hourani—or to his lawful heirs if Kamal himself is no longer alive. The first parcel, near Darayya, is fertile agricultural land inherited by Kamal’s grandfather from his ancestors more than a century ago. Its value today is considerable, especially with the city gradually expanding toward it. The second parcel is smaller, but perhaps carries greater emotional value: it was the land on which the family’s old summer house once stood, before it was demolished under circumstances whose full details I never learned.
“You will also find a quantity of gold, set aside to cover any legal costs that may arise from this transfer of ownership. Whatever remains, if anything does, is yours—a modest compensation for everything you have endured and will endure to complete this trust. Do not feel embarrassed or guilty about accepting it, Adnan. You deserve it fully, after all the loyalty and patience you have shown an old man who perhaps did not deserve all that devotion.
“But there is another matter, Adnan, heavier than all these documents and all this gold put together. I delayed telling you about it for a very long time, out of fear of the wrong moment and of the harm an early revelation might cause. But as I write these words now, I believe the time has come—or fate has decided on my behalf that it has.”
7
Adnan stopped reading for a moment. His breathing quickened, and an obscure fear began to rise in his chest before he had even reached the next paragraph. He looked around the small metal room as though searching for something that could anchor him to reality, something that could return him to solid ground after the sudden feeling that everything he knew about himself had begun to shift beneath his feet. He placed the letter on the table for a moment and wiped his damp palms against the edge of his shirt, an involuntary gesture that carried him, if only for an instant, back to the frightened boy who had once stood outside Haj Tawfiq’s shop nearly two years earlier. The contrast was painfully stark between that simple, innocent fear and the far deeper fear now sweeping through him.
He drew a deep breath, picked up the letter again, and continued reading, his heart pounding with a force he had never known before.
“Throughout this year you worked with me, Adnan, I noticed things in you that I could not explain away as mere coincidence: the way you look when you think deeply; certain features of your face when you are angry or moved; even the way you sometimes walk. All of them reminded me, in a way difficult to ignore, of someone I knew a very long time ago—someone who was part of the story of the 1958 Trust itself, before its threads became entangled in the way they have today.
“I will not give you the full name in this letter, Adnan, because I am not sufficiently certain, and incomplete certainty can be more dangerous than complete ignorance when matters like these concern a person’s identity and roots. But I am writing this because I want you to know, when the right time comes and when you have enough evidence to reach genuine certainty rather than merely the suspicion of a tired old man, that you, Adnan, may be far closer than you imagine to this story you now carry upon your shoulders—not merely as a trusted guardian standing outside it, but perhaps as someone who does not yet know that he is part of it.
“I remember describing you in a line in my old notebook with a phrase I never explained to you at the time: ‘The son who does not know his father.’ I did not mean it as an insult to your true father, Mahmoud al-Rafi‘i. I know him to be a good man who raised you with honesty and genuine love, and I will never dispute with him the fatherhood he fully deserves. But I meant something else, something deeper than the fatherhood in which you were raised—something connected to roots farther back, roots that perhaps even those closest to you have never known, and that perhaps will not be fully revealed until God wills it, and until you are ready to bear their weight.”
8
Adnan stopped reading altogether. His hands were now trembling visibly, beyond any possibility of concealment, even had there been someone watching him in that empty room. He read the paragraph again, more slowly, trying to absorb its full meaning: “You may be far closer than you imagine to this story.” “The son who does not know his father.” What exactly had Haj Tawfiq meant? Was he hinting that Adnan himself was connected by blood to the al-Hourani family, in a way no one knew—not even his mother? Or did it concern something else entirely, something deeper and more complicated, perhaps something connected to Haj Tawfiq himself and his own past?
Adnan thought of his mother, Fatima, back in the distant village, of her kind, tired face, and of all the years he had lived believing he knew everything about his origins and roots. Had she been hiding something from him? Or had Haj Tawfiq, in a moment of exhaustion and overwhelming longing, seen in a poor young man from a distant village a phantom resemblance to someone he himself had lost, and projected upon him desires and fears that had no real foundation? Suddenly he remembered small details from his childhood to which he had never paid attention: a fleeting look his mother sometimes gave when a nosy neighbor asked about his resemblance to his father, Mahmoud. In his innocence he had always explained it as nothing more than fatigue or preoccupation. Now, in the light of this letter, that same look seemed to carry an entirely different meaning—perhaps concealing a secret she had carried alone for years.
He thought, too, of Mahmoud al-Rafi‘i, the father he had known all his life: a quiet man of the land, broad-handed and sparing with words, who had seen him off on the morning he left for Damascus with a single sentence Adnan had never forgotten: “Do not shame me, Adnan, wherever you go.” Had he known? Had his constant silence—which Adnan had always understood as simply the nature of a man of the soil who spoke little—actually hidden another burden, a painful knowledge he had chosen to carry in silence rather than inflict harm upon a son he had raised with a love no less genuine than that of any father by blood? Adnan felt a sudden pang of guilt merely for entertaining the possibility, as though suspicion itself were a betrayal of a man who had never failed him for a single day of his life.
He finished reading the letter, his heart pounding with a force he had never known before.
“I do not ask you, Adnan, to accept this as confirmed fact. I myself am not completely certain of it. I ask only that you keep these words somewhere safe in your memory, and keep your eyes and your heart open to any evidence you may encounter in the future, near or far, that might shed more light on this mystery. And if one day you arrive at genuine certainty, whatever its source, I hope you will remember that truth, however painful or confusing, is always better than comfortable ignorance.
“Whatever happens to me, Adnan, and whatever the coming days reveal, know that choosing you was, and remains, the soundest decision I made in the final years of my life. You are my son in every sense of the word that deserves the name—whether you are my son by blood, and that is a possibility I have never settled with complete certainty, or my son by my own free and wholehearted choice, and that is a certainty nothing can shake in me, whatever happens.
“With boundless love, Tawfiq.”
9
Adnan remained seated in the cold metal room for a long time after finishing the letter. It lay in his hands while his eyes stared into the empty space before him, unable to move or think clearly. It felt as though the ground beneath him had suddenly shifted, as though everything he had believed to be certain about his identity and origins had, in a single instant, become an unanswered question.
He looked at the other documents in the box: the deeds to the lands in the Ghouta, bearing old official names and seals, and the velvet pouch, which he finally opened with a hand still trembling. Inside were several gleaming gold pieces, astonishingly heavy for their small size.
He thought of everything he now had to do: transfer ownership of the land to Kamal al-Hourani, who did not yet even know the land existed; try to discover the fate of Haj Tawfiq himself, if he was still alive somewhere; and finally—and perhaps most difficult of all—try to understand the mysterious sentence that, with a single stroke of the pen, had altered everything he believed to be certain about himself: “The son who does not know his father.”
Adnan gathered every item from the box with extraordinary care and placed them in a small leather bag he had brought with him specifically for this purpose. Then he pressed the small metal bell to signal that he was finished. When the manager returned and they locked the empty box together with both keys, the manager noticed the unmistakable pallor in Adnan’s face.
“Is everything in order, Mr. al-Rafi‘i?”
“Yes. Thank you.” Adnan answered in a voice he scarcely recognized—a man’s voice emerging from a room that had contained questions far heavier than any documents or gold.
10
Adnan returned to the shop with slow, heavy steps, refusing to take a taxi despite the relatively long distance. He needed the extra time to walk alone through the streets of Damascus, trying to absorb the weight of what he carried in that small leather bag: not merely land deeds and pieces of gold, but an entire existential question about his identity—one that had never crossed his mind until that very hour.
He closed the shop early that day, hanging the same sign he had put up that morning, but this time he did not return until the following day. He sat alone in his rented room, rereading Haj Tawfiq’s letter again and again until he had memorized every word. He thought of going to the village immediately and confronting his mother with the question directly, but then he drew back. How could he put such a question to a woman who had loved him and raised him all his life—a question that might wound her deeply if it had no real basis, if it were nothing more than the suspicion of a tired old man, as Haj Tawfiq himself had described it in his letter?
After a long night of wakefulness and thought, Adnan decided to keep the secret to himself, as he had kept so many other secrets during the previous two years. He would not ask his mother—not yet, not without stronger evidence than the mere intuition of an old man, however wise and sincere his intentions might have been. He would carry the question with him, just as he had carried the brass key and the silver key before it: another silent trust added to all the trusts he had come to bear without ever asking for any of them.
In the days that followed, Adnan began, with great caution and a patience no less than that with which he had learned to handle every other matter from Haj Tawfiq, to move step by step toward carrying out what had been asked of him. He contacted a lawyer he trusted, recommended by one of the market’s older merchants, to begin the procedures for transferring the two parcels of land into Kamal al-Hourani’s name, though he still did not know how he would reach the man himself, who had not returned since that single visit two years earlier. He kept the gold in a safe place, carefully divided among several hiding places, just as Haj Tawfiq himself had taught him to do with anything precious. And he concealed Haj Tawfiq’s personal letter in a place no one knew but him, carefully folded inside the lining of his old leather bag, where it would remain for many years to come—a silent witness to a question that had not yet found its answer.
But one sentence, among everything he had read that night, continued to echo in his mind more than any other. Simple on the surface, yet carrying both a promise and a warning: “And if one day you arrive at genuine certainty, whatever its source, I hope you will remember that truth, however painful or confusing, is always better than comfortable ignorance.” Adnan repeated it to himself again and again, trying to draw from it enough strength to face the uncertain days ahead—days he sensed, with an instinct that rarely failed him, would bring trials far harder than anything he had faced until then.
Adnan did not know, as he finally turned off his small lamp on that stifling summer night, how much time would pass, or how many continents he would cross, before he finally found the certainty his absent teacher had promised him. Nor did he know what price he would have to pay to reach it, when the time finally came, after crossing seas and borders he had never imagined he would cross, carrying with him wherever he went the small, heavy question planted in him by an old man who had loved him as a son—in a letter that, as he would discover decades later, was only the first step on a long road toward a truth far deeper than he had imagined in that cold bank room, in that distant summer of 1978.
Adnan stepped out of the bank onto an ordinary Damascus street. The blazing July sun struck his face, and life around him moved on at its accustomed rhythm, as though nothing had changed. Yet inside him he felt that everything had changed forever. He did not know, as he walked with unsteady steps toward the shop that was now his sole responsibility, that this very question—the mysterious question of his true identity—would follow him like a heavy, silent shadow through the decades to come and across an entire distant continent, until, exactly forty-five years later, he would find the final thread that might at last lead him to an answer he both feared and longed to know.