The Testament of Al-Hariqa
CHAPTER TWO
• 1 •
Damascus, summer 1976.
The sun was still merciful at that early hour, its heat not yet risen to the merciless height that made the stones of the old Al-Hariqa Market sear the face as though they themselves were breathing a banked fire. Even the market’s name—the name it had carried ever since a great fire had devoured it decades ago, before it was rebuilt from its ashes—seemed to remind everyone who passed through that fire, once kindled, never forgot the way back to the place it had burned.
Adnan al-Rafi‘i, a twenty-one-year-old, slender and still brown from the sun of the village he had left only weeks before, stood before a broad wooden door. A somewhat weathered sign above it bore, in handsome Arabic script: “Tawfiq al-Nabulsi & Sons — Wholesale and Retail Textiles.” There were, in fact, no sons working in the shop. Adnan had heard from a neighbor in his village that Hajj Tawfiq had lost his only son in a car accident many years earlier, and that the sign had remained unchanged—perhaps because Hajj Tawfiq had never found the strength to alter it, or perhaps because, after losing something so much more important, such small details no longer mattered to him.
Adnan wiped his sweaty palms on the hem of the only decent cotton shirt he owned, the one his mother had carefully washed three days earlier and had been prepared to spend money on charcoal to iron, though in those days charcoal was counted out in their household as carefully as everything else. He looked at the door for a long moment and remembered his uncle’s words, spoken after an old acquaintance with one of the market’s merchants had secured him this opportunity: “Hajj Tawfiq is a hard man, sparing with words, but his hands and his heart are clean. If you prove to him that you can be trusted, you’ll never need another recommendation for the rest of your life.”
He knocked twice, cautiously, and waited.
A man in his sixties opened the door. He was of medium height, his hair completely white, dressed in a clean, carefully pressed white shirt despite its simplicity and dark trousers. A small pair of metal-framed spectacles sat on his nose, making his eyes seem larger than they really were. He looked at Adnan over the rims with a calm, searching gaze that held neither welcome nor refusal, only a precise, silent assessment—as though he were weighing the young man before him on scales no one but himself could see. “You’re Abu Khalil’s nephew?” “Yes, Hajj. I’m Adnan. Adnan al-Rafi‘i.” “Come in.”
Those were the only words Hajj Tawfiq al-Nabulsi spoke that morning. He turned and went back into the shop, leaving the door open behind him, as though granting Adnan the freedom to choose: to enter, or to turn back the way he had come.
Adnan entered.
• 2 •
The shop was far larger than it appeared from outside. It stretched deep into the building, divided into narrow aisles between tall wooden shelves that reached the ceiling, loaded with bolts of carefully rolled cloth: cotton, silk, winter wool though winter had not yet arrived, imported fabrics from Italy and France alongside local cloth from Aleppo and Homs. Every kind had its appointed corner; every color sat beside the shades closest to it, until the whole place looked like a vast painting arranged with severe mathematical precision.
“Listen carefully, Adnan, because I won’t say this twice.” Hajj Tawfiq stood behind his old wooden counter, which looked as though it had borne witness to decades of trade, its surface marked with small scratches and grooves left by fabric-cutting knives over the years. “In this shop, only four things matter to me: honesty, accuracy, order, and silence. A man who has all four stays with me a long time. A man who lacks even one won’t last more than a week.” “I understand, Hajj.” “You don’t yet. But you will.” Hajj Tawfiq looked at him a little longer this time, as though trying to read something in his face. “How old are you?” “Twenty-one, Hajj.” “And what do you know about fabrics?” “Almost nothing, Hajj. To be honest.” Hajj Tawfiq gave the faintest smile, barely visible, but it was the first Adnan had seen on his face that morning. “Good. I prefer someone who knows nothing to someone who thinks he knows everything. The first learns quickly. The second takes a long time to forget what he learned wrong before he can begin learning what is right.”
He led him to the first shelf and began to teach him, in a quiet, even voice that scarcely changed whether he was explaining, scolding, or—rarely—joking, how each kind of fabric was classified, how it was measured, and how it was cut with such precision that not a single extra span was wasted. Every span, he said, “is someone’s livelihood. Whoever wastes people’s livelihood through carelessness will answer for it sooner or later, whether the customer knows or not.”
The first day passed slowly, almost interminably, but Adnan did not feel bored for a single moment. Everything around him was new, exciting, utterly different from the village life he had known all his years: working the land, tending the few sheep his father owned, walking long distances to the distant school, then leaving after secondary school because the family could no longer afford his absence from the fields.
That night, walking back to the rented room where he lived, Adnan could not stop thinking about his mother, who was probably standing now at the door of their little mud house in al-Husayniyya village, looking down the dirt road toward the city and wondering whether her eldest son had found work worthy of him, or whether she had sent him to the capital in vain, alone to face the harshness of a city where he knew no one except his distant uncle. His mother, Fatima, was not yet forty, but poverty, six successive pregnancies, and years of hard labor in the fields had made her face look at least ten years older than she really was. She was the one who had insisted, despite his father’s initial objections, that Adnan go to Damascus when she heard of the opportunity. “The land will still be here, Abu Khalil,” she had said, in words Adnan would never forget. “But life waits for no one. Let the boy try his luck. If he fails, he’ll come back to us, and we won’t blame him for anything.”
His father, Mahmoud al-Rafi‘i, was a quiet man, his hands roughened by working the land. He did not speak much, but on the morning Adnan left, he stood at the door, placed his rough hand on his son’s shoulder, and said only one sentence, in a hoarse voice thick with emotion despite his attempt to hide it: “Don’t shame me, Adnan, wherever you go.” More than any long piece of advice, that sentence was what Adnan carried in the inner pocket of his clothes, closer to his heart than any money or document, through those first difficult days in Damascus.
He had five younger siblings: Khalil, named after his uncle; three sisters who were still school-age; and the youngest, a baby not yet a year old. Adnan knew with unmistakable clarity that every lira he saved from his work at Hajj Tawfiq’s shop would go directly toward his siblings’ education, the family’s food, and perhaps, if the days ever allowed it, a small additional plot of land to ease some of the burden of the years from his father’s shoulders.
All of it lived in his chest every morning as he walked toward Al-Hariqa Market—a heavy burden, but also a fuel for his determination that never ran dry.
• 3 •
At the end of that first week, while Adnan was arranging the last bolts of cloth before closing, Hajj Tawfiq suddenly asked him, without preamble, as he calculated the day’s takings in a small notebook with a pencil worn blunt from constant sharpening: “Why did you come from the village to Damascus, Adnan? Don’t you love the land?” Adnan stopped working for a moment, caught off guard by the question. “I love the land, Hajj, but the land isn’t enough. There are six of us children, and the land my father owns isn’t enough to feed two. I’m the eldest, and I have to help.” “And what do you want to be, years from now, when you’re older?”
It was a question Adnan had never seriously considered, at least not put so plainly. He thought for a little while before answering, with a degree of honesty he had not expected of himself: “I don’t know exactly, Hajj. But I know I don’t want to spend my whole life afraid of the coming winter, wondering whether our wheat will last until spring.”
Hajj Tawfiq looked at him for a long, silent moment, then returned to his notebook without comment. Yet Adnan noticed that something in the old man’s gaze had shifted slightly, as though the difficult old merchant had added a new measure to the silent scale by which he weighed people, and had found it in him.
• 4 •
The weeks passed, and the strangeness of the beginning settled into a familiar rhythm. Adnan woke a little before dawn in the small room he rented with two other young men from neighboring villages, in a working-class quarter near the market. He washed with cold water, prayed the dawn prayer, then walked for twenty minutes through the barely-awake lanes of old Damascus, arriving at the shop a few minutes before Hajj Tawfiq every day. He had quickly learned that this small detail—being the one to open the shop rather than making Hajj Tawfiq wait for it to be opened—meant more to the old man than any word of praise he might have offered.
Adnan learned the names of every fabric within a single month. He learned to cut them with a precision that was almost mechanical, and to deal with different kinds of customers: the wholesale trader who wanted to bargain over every last piastre; the woman who wanted fabric for her daughter’s wedding dress but did not quite know what she wanted, and therefore needed time and patience; and the skilled tailor who knew exactly what he wanted and disliked having his time wasted on unnecessary explanations.
He also gradually learned the faces and voices of Al-Hariqa Market: Abu Salim, the neighboring spice seller, who every morning gave Adnan a small handful of cardamom pods “to sweeten your breath in front of the customers,” as he always put it, with a broad smile that revealed the few teeth he had left. And Umm Riyad, owner of the thread shop at the end of the aisle, who watched every newcomer to the market with wary curiosity and soon grew fond of Adnan for his good manners, beginning to call him “my son” whenever he passed her shop. And Hassan, the young man who worked in a neighboring shop selling buttons and accessories, who became Adnan’s closest friend during those first months.
“You know, Adnan,” Hassan said one afternoon as they shared a fresh loaf of bread, “I envy you your job with Hajj Tawfiq. Everyone in the market knows he’s an honest man. Nothing like my employer, who deducts the price of every button I damage from my wages, even when it’s an honest mistake.” “They say he was a very successful merchant when he was young, before he lost most of his fortune in a bad deal, then started over with extraordinary patience until he built this shop. They also say he lost his only son in an accident, and that his wife died of grief after him, leaving him completely alone, with nothing but this shop.”
Adnan did not know whether the stories were entirely true or whether they had grown and changed, as all stories do when they pass from mouth to mouth through the lanes of a crowded market. But they only deepened his curiosity about the quiet, enigmatic man who had, without intending to, become closer to a second father than to merely an employer.
To Adnan, Al-Hariqa Market was like a small world complete in itself. Some of the market’s merchants, especially those with partners or relatives in nearby Beirut, spoke with growing anxiety about what was happening there, in that coastal city which, only a year earlier, had still been described as “the Paris of the East,” and which had now, according to the fragmentary news that circulated, become a theater of bloody sectarian fighting with no end in sight. More than once Adnan overheard passing stories of entire Lebanese families abandoning their homes and businesses overnight, fleeing random shelling or armed militias that had suddenly taken over their neighborhoods. Some had sought refuge in Damascus, carrying whatever money and gold they could carry, looking for somewhere safe, even temporarily, to place what remained of a lifetime’s savings earned through toil. At that moment Adnan paid little attention to such talk. It seemed far removed from his small new world in Al-Hariqa Market. Yet, without his knowing it, those distant stories were weaving a thread that would one day meet the thread of his own life in a way he could never have imagined that far-off summer.
One day, for the first time since Adnan had known him, Hajj Tawfiq made a mistake in the bill of a wealthy customer well known in the market, a real-estate merchant named Abu Riyad. He had bought a large quantity of fine silk cloth to furnish a new clothing shop he was about to open. Hajj Tawfiq handed the customer his change, but Adnan, silently checking the figures from his usual corner, noticed that Hajj Tawfiq had added the numbers incorrectly, to the customer’s advantage, by a considerable amount.
Adnan waited until the customer had left, then approached Hajj Tawfiq hesitantly. “Hajj, I think you gave Abu Riyad more change than he was due.” Hajj Tawfiq stopped arranging his papers and looked at Adnan with sudden seriousness. “How much, exactly?” Adnan quickly checked the calculation on a scrap of paper. “About four hundred liras, Hajj.” Hajj Tawfiq sat silently for a few moments, checking the figures himself, then slowly nodded, admitting the mistake. “You’re right. I made an error.” He gave Adnan another searching look. “Do you know how many people in this very market would have kept quiet about a mistake like this if they were in your place—especially when the money was in my favor, not yours?” “But it isn’t only your money, Hajj. You made the mistake in the customer’s favor, and the difference will come out of your pocket.” “That is exactly what I mean.” Hajj Tawfiq smiled with the same faint smile Adnan had seen only once before, on his first day. “Most of the people who have worked for me, when they discover a mistake like this, wait to see whether the mistake benefits them before deciding whether to tell me. You told me immediately, even though the mistake had nothing directly to do with you.” Then, in a tone more serious than Adnan was used to hearing from him, he added: “Tomorrow, you’ll come with me to see the man who owes me an old debt in al-Midan. I want you to witness something.”
• 5 •
Hajj Tawfiq explained nothing more. The next day Adnan accompanied him on a short visit to another elderly merchant in al-Midan, a district some distance from Al-Hariqa Market, to collect an old debt he had once lent the man without a written note, relying on trust alone. The road to al-Midan was relatively long, and they walked most of it in silence. Despite his age, Hajj Tawfiq kept a steady pace, his wooden cane tapping the ground in a regular rhythm that almost sounded like the ticking of an old clock.
When they finally reached a small, somewhat run-down shop deep in al-Midan, they were received by an elderly merchant named Abu Faris. Anxiety was visible on his face from the first moment, as though he had both expected and dreaded this visit.
Adnan noticed how respectfully Hajj Tawfiq dealt with the man, without pressure or humiliating reminders. He even asked after his health and his children before mentioning the debt at all. The man paid it in full, in silence, gratitude plain on his face. He even tried to add a token sum “as an expression of thanks,” but Hajj Tawfiq gently, firmly refused. “I gave you what you needed when you needed it, and you returned it when you were able. That is all there is to it. There is no need for anything more between us.”
On the way back, Adnan asked with a boldness he did not know where he had found: “Hajj, aren’t you afraid to lend someone money without a written note? What if he denied the debt?” Hajj Tawfiq looked at him for a long while as they walked through the narrow lanes crowded with the movement of the market, before answering with a sentence Adnan would never forget, one that would return to him decades later at many decisive moments: “A written note protects your money from a stranger, Adnan. But the real note—the one no one can tear up or forge—is knowing the heart of the man you deal with. I do not lend my money to someone whose heart I do not know, no matter how strong the paper in my hand may be. And the money I sometimes lose because I trusted is far less than what I would lose if I lived my whole life trusting no one.”
He paused, then added in a lower voice, as though speaking more to himself than to Adnan: “From this moment on… you are not merely a worker for me.” He did not finish the sentence. Adnan looked at him, waiting for more, but Hajj Tawfiq had already turned his face toward the façade of a neighboring shop, as though he had suddenly regretted what he had said. Adnan did not ask what he meant. In those few weeks he had learned that Hajj Tawfiq did not like being drawn into speaking about matters he had not decided, of his own accord, to speak about.
• 6 •
Toward the end of July that summer, small changes began to appear in Hajj Tawfiq, changes Adnan noticed without understanding at first. Sometimes he arrived at the shop a few minutes late, though he had not been late once in the previous two months. Sometimes he would glance toward the shop door with faint apprehension when he heard footsteps in the alley outside. And whenever someone entered unexpectedly, he began closing his account book more quickly than usual, even when that someone was Adnan himself.
Adnan also noticed that Hajj Tawfiq had begun corresponding frequently with someone through short messages he wrote by hand on small scraps of paper. He folded each one with extraordinary care, then secretly handed it to a young boy who worked as a porter in the market, whispering a few words Adnan could not hear before watching the boy disappear among the alleys in a direction Adnan did not know. Once, when Adnan casually asked whether everything was all right, Hajj Tawfiq answered with an unusual sharpness: “Mind your work, Adnan, and I’ll mind my affairs.” Then, apparently regretting his harshness, he added more quietly: “Forgive me. I’m not angry with you. It’s just… some old matters have come back to occupy my mind these days.”
Adnan did not dare ask anything more. But he began watching, with a sense he did not know where he had acquired, the small details that accumulated day after day. Without being able to explain the feeling clearly, Adnan sensed that a storm was gathering on the horizon—a silent storm whose rumble no one could yet hear, but which was drawing inevitably closer.
One evening, after the shop had closed its doors to customers, Hajj Tawfiq asked Adnan to stay a little beyond the usual time to arrange some bolts that had recently arrived from Aleppo. The request itself was not strange, but something in Hajj Tawfiq’s voice that evening was different, slightly more tense than usual, almost imperceptibly so. Adnan noticed that Hajj Tawfiq’s hands trembled a little as he closed the cash drawer, and that he checked the front-door lock twice in succession, something he had never done before.
Adnan had almost finished arranging the bolts and was preparing to leave when he heard a soft knock at the shop’s back door, the small door that opened onto a narrow, dark alley rarely used.
Hajj Tawfiq stopped what he was doing and looked sharply toward the back door with an intensity Adnan had never seen in him. Then he looked at Adnan. “Adnan, go to the back room and start counting the empty boxes. I’ll come to you in a little while.”
This was the first time Hajj Tawfiq had ever asked Adnan to leave the place in such a direct way, without any clear reason.
Adnan pretended to obey and walked toward the back room, but a powerful curiosity—a curiosity he could not say where, exactly, it had come from—made him slow down at the bend in the passage. From behind a stack of bundled cloth, he could see what was happening at the back door without being clearly seen himself.
Hajj Tawfiq opened the back door with extreme caution, first making sure, judging by his movements, that the alley was completely empty.
A man entered. From where he stood, Adnan could not see his face clearly. The man wore a dark cloak covering most of his body despite the suffocating summer heat, and a keffiyeh wrapped around his head in a way that concealed half his face. He carried a relatively small wooden box, no larger than a large shoebox, yet from the way he held it, it seemed disproportionately heavy for its size—or perhaps precious enough that its bearer feared letting it fall.
• 7 •
“Tawfiq.” The man’s voice was low and hoarse, carrying the strain of deep exhaustion, and perhaps something of fear as well, as Adnan sensed from his hiding place, though he could not see the man’s features clearly enough. “I don’t have time to explain now. I need you to keep this for a while.” “What’s happening? I haven’t seen you in months, and now you come like this, through the back door, this late at night?” Hajj Tawfiq’s voice was more tense than Adnan had ever heard it. “Things… have become more complicated than I expected. There are people looking for this box, and there are people who may reach me personally soon. I can’t keep it with me any longer. It isn’t safe, at least.” “Why me, specifically? Why don’t you go to your relatives, your brothers?” The man gave a short, bitter laugh with no trace of real amusement. “Because I don’t trust any of them, Tawfiq. Not the way I trust you. You are the only man I have known all my life who has never betrayed me, not once, despite all the chances you had to do so.” He paused, then added in a lower, almost whispered voice: “Keep it, whatever happens to me. Don’t open it. Don’t ask anyone about it, and don’t tell anyone it exists here—not even the people closest to you. I’ll come for it myself when things settle down, or…” He stopped again. “Or someone else will come, carrying a sign I’ll tell you about, if I cannot return myself.”
A long silence settled between the two men, a silence in which Adnan felt that even the air inside the shop had frozen for a moment. “And if you don’t come back?” Hajj Tawfiq finally asked, this time in a very low voice.
The man did not answer at once. Instead, he reached out and handed the box to Hajj Tawfiq, who received it in hesitant hands. “If I have not returned within a full year from today, open it yourself. Learn the truth, and do with it what your conscience tells you. I trust you with this more than I trust myself.” Then he added, his voice suddenly touched by a rare tenderness: “And thank you, Tawfiq, for everything. I will never forget this, in this world or in whatever world comes after it.”
Before Hajj Tawfiq could answer, the man slipped out through the back door with the same speed with which he had entered and disappeared into the darkness of the narrow alley, leaving Hajj Tawfiq standing alone, the small wooden box in his hands. In the dim light of the lamp above the back door, his face bore an expression Adnan had never seen there before: a strange mixture of deep sorrow, suppressed fear, and something else—something like the weight of an immense responsibility that had just fallen upon his shoulders without warning.
• 8 •
Hajj Tawfiq remained standing where he was for several long minutes after the stranger disappeared, staring at the box in his hands as though looking at something he could scarcely believe was real. Then he closed the back door with extreme care and locked it with a key that looked old and rusted to Adnan, a key he had never seen Hajj Tawfiq use during all the preceding months.
Adnan withdrew in complete silence toward the back room, careful not to make any sound that might reveal he had watched the entire scene from behind the stack of cloth. He began pretending to count the empty boxes as he had been told, his heart pounding, his mind drowning in a whirlpool of questions to which he could find not a single answer.
After a few minutes he heard Hajj Tawfiq’s footsteps approaching the back room. The old man entered without the box; it had vanished somewhere Adnan knew nothing about. “Finished arranging things, Adnan?” he asked calmly, as though nothing had happened only minutes earlier. “Yes, Hajj. Almost.” Adnan tried to make his voice sound as natural as possible, though his heart was still beating far too fast.
Hajj Tawfiq looked at him for a long, searching moment, and for one instant—only one—Adnan imagined that the old man knew exactly that he had seen him, that he had heard every word.
But Hajj Tawfiq said nothing. He merely said, in his usual quiet, even tone: “Good. Lock the door behind you when you leave, and come early tomorrow. We have a large shipment of cloth arriving from Aleppo.” “Yes, Hajj.”
• 9 •
In the days that followed, Adnan tried to behave as normally as possible, as though that night had never happened. Yet despite all his efforts, he noticed that Hajj Tawfiq himself was no longer quite the same. At certain moments of the day he seemed more absent-minded, more alert to any unfamiliar sound coming from the back alley. Adnan also noticed that he had begun locking the back door with two locks instead of one and checking them at least twice a day, in a motion that was almost involuntary, already part of his new daily routine as though it had always been there.
One day, without any preamble, Hajj Tawfiq asked Adnan a somewhat strange question as they arranged a new shipment of cloth together: “If you found something belonging to someone else, something very valuable, and you were asked to keep it without asking why, would you do it?”
Adnan stopped working, somewhat startled by the question, but answered honestly after a brief thought: “I think I would, Hajj, if I trusted the person who asked me.”
Hajj Tawfiq nodded slowly, as though satisfied with the answer, then returned to his work without another comment, leaving Adnan once again wondering whether the question had been mere passing curiosity, or another small test—entirely different from the test involving money that he had passed only a few weeks earlier, a test this time concerning something much deeper than simple honesty in keeping commercial accounts.
Adnan left the shop that night carrying in his chest a weight he had never known before: the weight of a secret he had not asked for, did not understand, yet which had become part of him simply because he had seen it with his own eyes. He walked through the lanes of old Damascus toward his room, the moon suspended above the ancient city’s minarets, the market asleep around him in its familiar silence. But for the first time since he had begun working at Hajj Tawfiq al-Nabulsi’s shop, Adnan no longer felt that the silence was entirely innocent, as it had seemed to him in the weeks before.
That night he sat on the edge of his simple wooden bed in the rented room while his two roommates were already asleep, trying to summon every detail of the scene he had witnessed: the exhausted stranger’s voice, the little box that seemed heavier than its size, and the last sentence the man had spoken before disappearing: “If I have not returned within a full year from today, open it yourself, and learn the truth.” Who was this man? What did the box conceal that could make a grown man speak with such unmistakable fear in his voice? And why had Hajj Tawfiq chosen him, of all the people he knew in Damascus, to entrust with a secret of such magnitude?
Adnan also thought, staring up at the dark ceiling, about his own position in all of this. He knew nothing for certain. He had seen only shadows and heard fragments, and his name had not been mentioned even once in that mysterious conversation. If he wished, he could forget what he had seen entirely, behave tomorrow as though nothing had happened. Yet he felt, in a strange way he could not explain logically, that he could no longer truly forget, and that something—a fine invisible thread—had just tied his fate to that small wooden box, to that mysterious man whose identity he did not know, and to the secrets of Hajj Tawfiq al-Nabulsi that were beginning to reveal themselves to him, drop by drop, without his asking for any of it and without possessing any way to stop it.
He knew, dimly but with absolute certainty somewhere deep inside him, that what he had witnessed that night—that small box that had entered his life without asking permission—would change something fundamental in his destiny. He had no idea then how great that change would be, nor how far its consequences would reach years later, when that same box, or at least what it represented, would come knocking on the door of his life again, in a city unimaginably far from Al-Hariqa Market, and in a time the young Adnan could not even begin to imagine.
He went to sleep very late that night. When he woke the next morning to the familiar call to dawn prayer, he felt that something inside him had already changed. Simply by walking toward Al-Hariqa Market that morning as he had every day, he was no longer walking toward just another ordinary workday, but toward an entirely new chapter of his life—a chapter he would never know, as he opened the shop’s broad wooden door in those early hours, would take him forty-five full years, and an entire continent, before he finally discovered what the small, heavy box had been hiding, and what it truly meant, in the eyes of a man like Hajj Tawfiq al-Nabulsi, to be worthy of a trust that could not be measured by any known scale.