The Testament of Al-Hariqa
CHAPTER SIX
1
The two weeks Hajj Tawfiq had asked Kamal al-Hourani for passed slowly, weighed down by a sense of anticipation that never quite left the shop. Kamal and his daughter did not return during that time, yet Hajj Tawfiq behaved as though they might appear at the door at any moment, without warning. Every now and then he looked toward the street outside, reading his secret messages with growing tension, then burning them as he always did—only now his movements were quicker, less composed than before.
Adnan noticed that Hajj Tawfiq had begun to lose some of the composure he had known in him throughout the previous months. Sometimes he would stop in the middle of a conversation with a customer, his mind suddenly elsewhere, before catching himself and returning to the conversation with an apologetic smile. He had begun forgetting small things that were utterly unlike him: the date of a shipment, the name of a customer who had ordered a particular fabric the day before, an accounting detail he would normally have known by heart.
At the same time, Adnan noticed that Reem had sent no further message, despite the promise in that little note that she would try to come back and speak with him. The days passed without a sign from her, and, despite himself, Adnan began looking toward the shop door every morning with the secret hope of seeing her walk in again—a hope he tried to hide even from himself, telling himself that his unease came only from wanting to understand what she had meant by her cryptic warning, and not from anything deeper that might already have begun to grow inside him toward the strange girl with whom he had spent only a few brief minutes.
One day, Hajj Tawfiq asked Adnan to help him clean the large back storeroom, the part of the shop that almost no one ever entered. It was filled with old crates, papers accumulated over many years, and broken furniture whose purpose no one remembered anymore.
“I want to put some old matters in order, Adnan. The time is right for it, before…” Hajj Tawfiq stopped suddenly and did not finish the sentence, leaving Adnan to wonder what, exactly, he had intended to say.
2
They began working together that morning, moving the crates one by one to another corner and opening some of them to see what they contained before deciding whether anything was worth keeping. Dust rose everywhere each time a crate was moved from the place where it had rested for years. Sunlight slipped through a small high window in the storeroom ceiling, revealing golden threads of dust dancing in the still air, as though the room itself were breathing again after a long sleep. Most of the crates held old, damaged fabrics no longer fit for sale, obsolete tools, rusted scissors, brittle spools of thread, and ancient account books dating back to years in which Adnan had not yet been born.
“This crate belonged to my father, may God have mercy on him,” Hajj Tawfiq said softly, with a note of nostalgia, as he opened a large wooden chest carved with simple, weathered patterns. “I inherited this shop from him, as you know, but I could never bring myself to get rid of his old belongings, even though they have not been used for decades.”
They worked in silence for a while, broken only by the sound of crates being moved and an occasional cough caused by the rising dust. But one crate, smaller than the others and tucked into the darkest corner of the storeroom behind a pile of ruined cloth that seemed untouched for years, caught Adnan’s attention. Perhaps it was because there was less dust on it than on the surrounding crates, as though someone had moved it fairly recently.
When he opened it, he found a bundle of old notebooks tied together with thick cord. Some had yellowed with age; others were comparatively newer. Hajj Tawfiq was occupied at that moment arranging another crate on the opposite side of the storeroom, his back turned to Adnan, and did not notice what he had found.
Adnan opened one of the notebooks with innocent curiosity, expecting ordinary accounting records like those he had learned to read during the previous months. What he found was entirely different: pages filled with numbers and strange symbols, abbreviated letters that formed no recognizable words, and scattered dates reaching back across different decades, some of them many years before Adnan himself had been born.
His eyes suddenly stopped at a line repeated several times on different pages, written in Hajj Tawfiq’s distinctive hand, but in slightly darker ink, as though it had been added on separate occasions over the years: “The Trust — 1958.”
3
An irresistible curiosity drew Adnan toward those pages. He turned through the notebook carefully, trying to make sense of the scattered symbols. Beside the repeated phrase “The Trust — 1958,” he found two initials that always appeared with it: “H. N.” Small numbers stood beside them, numbers whose meaning Adnan could not understand—perhaps sums of money, perhaps something else entirely. He also noticed that some pages contained simple sketches resembling plans: intersecting lines that might represent the boundaries of a piece of land, or perhaps a hidden place somewhere inside the shop itself. He could not be certain what they meant.
On another page he found a different entry, written in a shakier hand, as though it had been written in a moment of great tension or exhaustion: “Trust — 1976 — a box — waiting until the return or the passing of a full year.” Adnan’s heart seemed to stop for a moment. It was the same year, the very year in which he had witnessed that strange night at the back door. Beside the entry was a single phrase in different ink, apparently added later: “Growing danger,” with no further detail explaining what the danger was or where it came from.
He turned another page and found a short list of names reduced to initials alone. Each name was marked with a small symbol: a circle, a triangle, or a straight line beneath it. It was a private code Hajj Tawfiq appeared to have developed over many years to protect the identities of those who had entrusted him with their secrets—even from himself, should age ever bring moments of forgetfulness.
He turned the pages faster, his mind working desperately to connect all the scattered clues, when he suddenly heard Hajj Tawfiq’s footsteps approaching from behind. He had not heard them coming, so completely absorbed was he in what he was reading.
“What are you doing?”
His voice was sharp, utterly unlike any tone Adnan had heard from him before—sharp enough to make him flinch and nearly drop the notebook.
4
Adnan turned slowly. The notebook was still open in his hands. Hajj Tawfiq stood before him, pale and tense, his eyes fixed on the pages with a clear terror he made no attempt to hide this time.
“I’m sorry, Hajj. I found it in this crate and opened it without thinking… I didn’t mean to pry into anything private.”
Hajj Tawfiq reached out quickly and took the notebook from Adnan’s hands. He closed it with a decisive movement and held it against his chest as though protecting something alive. He stood silently for several long seconds, looking at Adnan with an expression that seemed to contain anger, fear, and something deeper still—something closer to exhaustion, the exhaustion of a man who had carried a secret for so long that its weight had finally become more than he could bear alone.
Adnan expected Hajj Tawfiq to erupt in anger, to reprimand him for prying, perhaps even to dismiss him on the spot. None of that happened. Instead, Hajj Tawfiq slowly sat down on a nearby wooden crate, as though his strength had suddenly failed him. The notebook remained in his hands, and he let out a long, deep sigh—the sigh of a man who had finally surrendered to a burden he could no longer carry by himself.
“Sit down, Adnan.”
5
Adnan sat cautiously on another crate opposite him, his heart still racing, uncertain what awaited him.
“I was going to tell you part of this sooner or later, but I was waiting for a moment when I felt you were ready—and that I was ready too.” Hajj Tawfiq looked at the notebook in his hands as though he were looking at the face of an old friend burdened with memories. “But it seems fate has decided that the moment has come now, whether we wanted it or not.”
“You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to share, Hajj. I’m truly sorry I was curious.”
“Don’t apologize, Adnan. Curiosity is not a fault. Sometimes it is a sign of an alert mind, so long as it remains joined to honesty—and you have proved to me again and again that you possess both.” He looked at him for a long moment, with a trace of genuine appreciation despite the tension visible on his face. “After everything you have seen, and after Kamal’s most recent visit, I think it is only fair—and wise—that you know at least part of the picture, even if I cannot share every detail. You are part of this story now, whether you wanted that or not, ever since the night you saw the strange man at the back door.”
He opened the notebook again, more slowly this time, as though he had finally made peace with it, and turned its first pages with fingers that seemed to Adnan to tremble more than usual. “This notebook contains a long history of my life, Adnan. A history I have shared with no one who is alive today—not even Kamal himself, despite how close he is to me.”
“What do you mean by ‘The Trust — 1958’? I’ve seen that phrase repeated on more than one page.”
Hajj Tawfiq paused for a long time, as though weighing every word with extraordinary care before beginning. “In 1958, Adnan, when I was about twenty-five—roughly your age today—the country was going through a period of profound political turmoil. Syria had united with Egypt, and new laws threatened to confiscate the property of many wealthy merchants, especially those regarded as close to the old order. Many wealthy families feared for their fortunes and began looking for someone they could trust with part of their wealth, away from the eyes of the new state and its laws, while they waited for things to settle—or change again, as things always seem to change in our country.”
6
“And I, despite my youth and lack of experience at the time, was known in the market as a man who did not talk, did not reveal secrets, and did not betray a trust, even when doing so cost me dearly.” Hajj Tawfiq continued, his eyes drifting into a distant memory. “A family came to me—a large, well-known family. I will ask you not to ask for its full name now. They asked me to keep part of their wealth for them: gold and property deeds, away from any official record that might expose them to confiscation.”
“What were those days like, Hajj? I haven’t read much about them. I wasn’t even born, of course, and my parents hardly ever spoke about them in the village.”
Hajj Tawfiq sighed deeply, as though the question had opened a door onto memories he had not visited in a very long time. “They were troubled days, Adnan, filled with hope and fear at the same time. Many believed the union with Egypt would open the doors to the future. Others feared that it would bring laws capable of confiscating what their families had built over generations. I watched the great merchants of this very market whispering in the corners of their shops, hiding their records, selling some of their possessions for almost nothing simply to convert them into something harder to trace—gold or jewelry that could be concealed somewhere safe, far from the eyes of the new government.”
“And do you still keep this trust today? After all these years?”
Hajj Tawfiq nodded slowly. “Part of it, yes. The family itself went through difficult times over the years. Its children scattered across different countries; some died, others lost contact entirely with whoever remained of the family. I tried many times to find a clear heir to whom I could hand over the trust, but the matter was always more complicated than it seemed. Time passed, and passed again, until I myself, unwillingly, became the permanent guardian of something no one else even remembered existed.”
Adnan felt the weight of the story settling over him little by little. The man sitting before him was not merely the quiet cloth merchant he had first believed him to be. He was a man who had carried, for decades, secrets far heavier than anything an outsider could have imagined.
“Did it never occur to you to hand the trust over to the state, or to a court, and let them find the rightful heirs?”
Hajj Tawfiq gave a short, bitter laugh, without the slightest trace of amusement. “In those days, Adnan, handing something like this to the state would have meant surrendering it to complete ruin—or perhaps something much worse for the people who had entrusted it to me. Imagine if they returned one day only to discover that their wealth had been confiscated by the very hands they had trusted me to protect it from. Trust, my son, when it is given to one man, becomes that man’s responsibility alone. He cannot simply pass it on to someone else, no matter how official or trustworthy that other person may appear.”
“And what about ‘The Trust — 1976’? The one you mentioned beside the word ‘box’?”
7
Hajj Tawfiq paused for a long time this time, as though this particular question had touched a newer and more painful wound than the old one.
“That, Adnan, is a much more recent trust. And you know more about it than you realize, because you witnessed the moment it arrived at this shop with your own eyes.” He studied Adnan for a long moment, as though deciding how much of the truth he could finally share. “The man you saw that night was not entirely a stranger to me, though he was neither the childhood friend who betrayed me nor a member of the old family from the 1958 trust. He was a man I met only a few years ago, under complicated circumstances I cannot explain now. He asked me for a favor similar to the one that old family had asked of me twenty years earlier: to keep something precious for him, hidden from the eyes of those who were looking for it.”
“Do you know where he is now? Did he come back as he promised?”
Hajj Tawfiq slowly shook his head, his sadness unmistakable. “No. A full year has not yet passed since that night, and the date he set for himself has not yet arrived. But, honestly, I do not know whether I will ever see him again. Men who come in that condition—frightened, carrying secrets heavier than they can bear—do not always return as they promised, Adnan. Sometimes life takes them somewhere from which there is no return. Sometimes death does.”
“Then why did you choose yourself again? Aren’t there other people in this market whom people trust?”
Hajj Tawfiq smiled faintly, sadly. “Because reputation travels in strange ways, Adnan. A man who keeps one secret faithfully becomes, without intending it, the man others turn to when they need other secrets kept over the years. That is the true price of trust, my son: the more you prove yourself worthy of it, the more you are asked to carry, until it becomes a burden almost beyond your strength. Yet you cannot refuse it, because refusing would mean betraying everyone who trusted you before.” He paused and looked at Adnan with a quiet warning in his eyes. “Remember that well, Adnan. You, too, have begun—without realizing it—to walk the same road. The key I gave you, and the silence I asked of you, are both the beginning of a burden that may grow with time if you remain on the path you have started.”
8
Adnan sat silently for a few moments, trying to absorb all this new information before asking the question that had occupied his mind ever since he saw the initials in the notebook. “Who is ‘H. N.’, Hajj? The two letters that kept appearing beside ‘The Trust — 1958’?”
Hajj Tawfiq looked at him for a very long time, as though fighting an inner struggle over whether he should answer this particular question at all. He rose and walked slowly toward the small high window in the storeroom ceiling. He stood beneath it for a moment, the faint light slipping through and drawing pale lines across his tired face.
“Do you know, Adnan, that the hardest part of carrying a secret like this is not the secret itself, but the loneliness it imposes on you? For eighteen years I have not been able to share this burden with anyone—not even in my darkest moments, not even when I was seriously ill years ago and thought I might die without telling anyone where that trust was kept.” At last he turned toward Adnan. “Perhaps that is precisely why I feel a strange relief now, speaking to you about a part of it, despite all my fears.”
At last he closed the notebook with a final movement and sighed deeply.
“That is a question, Adnan, that I am not ready to answer completely today. Not because I do not trust you, but because if I gave you the whole answer now, it might place you in needless danger—a danger I do not want you to carry before you are fully ready for it.” He rose, returned the notebook to the crate where Adnan had found it, then lifted the crate himself and carried it to another place, without telling Adnan exactly where.
But before he had gone very far, he stopped suddenly and turned toward Adnan. There was a final struggle on his face, as though at that very moment he had decided to leave him at least one thread—a small thread that might one day lead him toward the rest of the truth.
9
“I will tell you only one thing, Adnan. After that, no more questions tonight. Agreed?”
Adnan nodded quickly, grateful even for this small measure of trust.
“H. N. are the first letters of the family name that entrusted me with the 1958 trust. I will not tell you the full name tonight.” Hajj Tawfiq paused and drew a deep breath, as though what he was about to say would cost him twice the effort. “But I will tell you one thing, because I believe you will discover it yourself sooner or later, and I would rather you hear it from me than reach it by a more painful road.”
He stepped closer to Adnan and lowered his voice to something close to a whisper, though they were completely alone in the locked storeroom.
“Kamal al-Hourani, whom you met a few weeks ago, Adnan… is not merely an old friend who came asking for a passing favor. His family, the al-Hourani family, is the very family that entrusted me with that old trust—the 1958 trust.”
Adnan stopped breathing for a moment, trying to absorb what he had just heard. “But… Kamal came asking you for a simple loan, money he himself had entrusted to you only a few years ago, not something dating back eighteen years!”
“That is exactly what I mean, Adnan. Kamal himself does not know, even now, the true scale of what his grandparents left with me, nor does he know that it exists in this form at all—the form known only to me. He believes he is asking me for a simple personal favor between friends, an old debt from our private friendship. In reality, without knowing it, he is asking me for only a small part of a family inheritance far greater than he imagines—an inheritance I had long believed had ended with the members of his family I lost, until he himself appeared, by sheer coincidence, at my door a few weeks ago, carrying the same name and the same blood, without knowing anything about the thread connecting him to that distant past.”
“But how could he not know? Don’t people usually know their family history, especially when they come from a family that large?”
Hajj Tawfiq sighed with deep sadness. “Wars and migrations do strange things to family memory, Adnan. Kamal’s grandfather, the original keeper of the trust, died a few years after placing it with me. He never told any of his children the details of what he had done, probably out of fear that someone might learn of it and betray the secret in a time when betrayal could have meant the complete ruin of the entire family. The son who knew part of the story died early as well, in an incident whose full details I never learned. The children and grandchildren scattered between Damascus, Beirut, and other places, and the story was lost, generation after generation, until nothing remained in the living memory of the family except my name, as an old friend—not as the guardian of a trust they did not even know existed.”
Adnan stood rooted to the spot, trying to grasp the magnitude of what he had just heard: Kamal al-Hourani, the desperate man he had seen only weeks earlier pleading with his old friend for a small amount of money, was in fact, without knowing it, the heir to a fortune far greater than he imagined—locked away for eighteen full years behind the silence of one man who had decided to carry the secret alone, afraid of revealing it at the wrong time or to the wrong person.
“Then why not simply tell him? Wouldn’t that be the simplest solution to all this suffering, to all the despair we have seen with our own eyes?”
Hajj Tawfiq looked at him for a long moment, his expression filled with a complexity Adnan still could not fully understand. “It is not that simple, Adnan. First, I am not entirely certain that Kamal is the sole legal heir. There may be other members of the family, in other places, with an equal claim—or an even greater one. Second, if Kamal learned the scale of what is hidden, in his present desperate condition, and in a time as full of danger and greed as this one, he could bring upon himself and his daughter dangers he cannot imagine—from others who might hear of it and want a share, or want to seize it all. Hidden wealth, my son, is both a blessing and a curse, especially when it is uncovered in a time of weakness rather than strength.”
“Hajj…” Adnan began, but Hajj Tawfiq gently raised a hand, signaling him to stop.
“That is all I can tell you tonight, Adnan. Please do not tell Kamal any of this, not even by implication, if he ever comes back. The matter is far more complicated than it appears, and there are reasons I cannot fully explain now that make me afraid he will learn the whole truth before I can be certain that he and his daughter will truly be safe when they do.”
“I promise you, Hajj. I will not tell him anything, nor any other human being on earth.”
Hajj Tawfiq looked at him for a long, searching moment, as though weighing the sincerity of the promise directly in Adnan’s eyes. “I know you won’t. That is exactly why I chose you over anyone else, from the first day you walked into this shop—even before I knew myself that one day I would need to share part of this burden with someone.” He placed a hand on Adnan’s shoulder in a warm, almost paternal gesture he had rarely shown him. “But I want you to understand something too, Adnan: the promise you have just made is not an easy one, however simple it may seem in this moment. There will be times, perhaps soon, when your ability to remain silent will be tested before people you love—or people who, on the face of things, deserve to know the truth. Silence in those moments will be far harder than any test you have faced so far.”
Adnan nodded solemnly, understanding the weight of those words, though he could not yet imagine how precisely they would foretell what awaited him in the days and weeks ahead.
Hajj Tawfiq left the storeroom without another word, leaving Adnan alone among the crates and the drifting dust illuminated by the slanting sunlight through the small high window, trying to comprehend that, by a chance accident and the curiosity of a single moment, he had now become the bearer of a secret far greater than anything he had ever imagined.
10
That night Adnan returned to his rented room later than usual, his mind still crowded with everything he had heard that day. He sat on the edge of his bed, the brass key hanging around his neck as always, but for the first time since receiving it he felt its true weight—a weight entirely different from anything he had ever felt before.
He tried to arrange all the tangled threads in his mind: the al-Hourani family, which had entrusted its fortune to Hajj Tawfiq eighteen years earlier out of fear of confiscation laws during the union with Egypt; the strange man who had arrived on a summer night in 1976 carrying another box, containing an entirely different trust whose identity had not yet been revealed; and Kamal al-Hourani himself, who had no idea that he was descended from that old wealthy family and believed he was merely asking a friend for a simple favor, while in truth he stood on the edge of an inheritance he had never imagined.
Adnan thought of Reem as well, and of the cryptic warning she had whispered to him: “Beware of him.” Did she know something about this family history? Was her father hiding something from her too? Or had her warning concerned something entirely different, unrelated to money or the old inheritance, something more personal, more urgent?
As he finally lay down, trying to find his way toward sleep, Adnan wondered about the strange man from the night of the box, whose name and true relationship with Hajj Tawfiq had still not been revealed. Was he somehow connected to the al-Hourani family as well? Or was his trust entirely separate, another story waiting for its own turn to be told? He felt that every answer he received opened two new questions before him, as though the truth he was approaching was not a single fixed point but an entire web of secrets crossing one another over decades.
Adnan realized, with a maturity beyond his years, that what had been given to him that day was not merely a passing piece of information. It was a real fragment of a burden Hajj Tawfiq had carried for decades—a burden he had finally decided to share with one person in this world: Adnan, the poor young man from a distant village who, only a few months earlier, possessed little beyond determination and an honest heart.
Before finally sinking into troubled sleep, Adnan thought of a sentence Hajj Tawfiq had spoken that day, a sentence he could not forget: “Hidden wealth is both a blessing and a curse, especially when it is revealed in a time of weakness rather than strength.” With growing unease, he wondered when the “time of strength” Hajj Tawfiq had spoken of would come—and whether it would come at all before the desperate Kamal ran out of patience, or before another hand, far less merciful, intervened and settled the matter in its own way.
Adnan did not know, as he finally drifted into broken sleep filled with overlapping faces—Hajj Tawfiq, Kamal, Reem, and the faceless man carrying a wooden box—that the secret Hajj Tawfiq had shared with him that day was only the first layer of a far deeper truth, one that would take decades, and an entire distant continent, for him to discover. Its threads would reach, in ways he could never have imagined that night, into the deepest details of his own life—not merely into the life of a kind old man who had entrusted him with secrets that, in truth, had never belonged to him alone.