The Lives of Shadows: An Illustrated Novel

Julian

Thursday, May 24th, 1945

Afternoon

Julian should have never answered the door. The knocking was too insistent, too loud. It sounded like trouble. But, like a fool, he let his curiosity get the better of him; he unlocked the door and let the trouble in.

A short, stout man, wearing an exquisitely tailored three-piece suit, pushed his way past as though he thought he owned the place. Which, as it turned out, he did.

He was followed by a younger, somewhat shabby and insignificant fellow, who clutched a sheaf of papers. Each jauntily balanced a tarboosh—the headgear of choice for professional men—on his head. A squarely built, uniformed official bringing up the rear sported a beret known locally as a sidara. It gave him the swagger of a bodyguard.

Without a word of explanation, the three strangers spilled into the courtyard, poisoning the tranquil air with their presence. Julian would not have been surprised to see the roses and jasmine wilt as they neared. They strolled around the fountain, inspected the marble, dipped their fingers in the water, frowned at the fallen leaves. Their boldness cautioned Julian to hold his tongue and wait for them to justify their intrusion. He asked himself all the while if he knew them from somewhere, but he could dredge up no recollection whatsoever.

When the official pointed to the delicate plasterwork over one of the doors, prompting nods and sighs from the other two, Julian speculated they were scouting for movie locales; he’d heard that another house had recently been used in an Egyptian film. That would explain the rudeness. But he decided they were tax collectors when the younger man with the papers spun around, his previously placid expression now hard. After shuffling his papers, the man raised them ceremoniously, cleared his throat, and began to read aloud.

French and Arabic legalese poured out, merging into an incomprehensible stream. Julian understood the individual words—bait, parcelle, titre de propriété, référence cadastrale, as-sijill, all had to do with property—though he struggled to make sense of how they were put together and what they had to do with him. The speaker glared when he finished, as if defending himself against protest or rebuttal, but Julian was incapable of any response whatsoever.

Then the words rearranged themselves with disturbing clarity, and he suddenly understood that the middle-aged man was the husband of a niece of Nasim Katib, the man from whom he had bought the house, and that the younger man was his lawyer. Their visit had nothing to do with movies or taxes or anything else Julian might have imagined. They’d come for his home, Bait Katib, one of the oldest houses in Damascus.

Evening

Looking back on the day, Julian wondered why he hadn’t expected this visit. Several years earlier a lawyer had written, warning that relatives of the long-deceased Nasim Katib were planning to contest his title to Bait Katib. He had exchanged letters with the lawyer, challenging the proposed action, but their correspondence had died out—possibly due to the family’s lack of funds—and he forgot the matter entirely. Now it appeared they had scraped together the means to carry on. How they had kept him out of the process was a mystery.

His calmness in light of the shock he had received surprised him. Even though Bait Katib ran like blood through his veins, his first instinct had been to let it go; his revulsion of combat was that strong. Now that he was alone with the wretched document, however, he snapped out of his complacence. He’d protest, he’d appeal, he would relinquish nothing without a fight.

He sat down at his desk in the study that was unchanged since his first day in the house and spread out the document. Then he laid his head upon it, his jaw, cheek, temple, ear, pressing into the sharp, antagonizing words. Why punish himself further by rereading these words? He’d already been dragged through every sentence by the men, who had refused to leave until he’d signed each page in acknowledgment of the contents. This had been laboriously achieved over many cigarettes and glasses of tea, followed by tumblers of potent, milky ‘araq, for though he despised their mission, he was not a bad host.

Without raising his head, he pictured the words stacked in two columns, mirroring each other: French on the left and Arabic on the right. The first page summarized the claim and listed his name, Julian Beaufort, and his address, Bait Katib, Harat al-Hariqa, Damascus, Syria. He always marveled that such a simple address sufficed in a city of more than a quarter million people.

Farther down was the date when his deed was signed, September 17th, 1914, and the date when it was found to be invalid, May 18th, 1945. Below was the date by which he was supposed to leave—May 30th, 1945—in just six short days. Then came details about the self-proclaimed new titleholder and a mass of signatures, stamps, and seals. The document’s dozen or so pages described the building’s condition and size, its features and furnishings, plan and site numbers, and estimated worth. On page nine was a proposal to pay compensation for improvements made over the years. On page ten that exact sum was charged back for outstanding rent and costs. Appended were affidavits from notaries, bankers, and other interested parties.

Still with his head on the desk, he squinted at the papers stretched out before him, hoping, through the distorted perspective, to transform them into a field of harmless scribbles. Instead, the sight was a reminder of what wasn’t written down. His future, for example. What was to happen to him if they were successful? Bait Katib was everything to him, everything he had worked for, his only home, his refuge.

Slowly, tears began streaming down his face. They rolled onto the document, and when, in sudden fury, he crushed it in his hands, the ink smeared. He pushed it aside, letting it fall onto the floor, and wiped his face on his shirtsleeve. It’s the shock; pull yourself together, he scolded himself. Get organized and fight this.

What to do first? Visions of judges, land titles offices, and lawyers jammed his brain and spun his thoughts round. He shook them away. What he needed was proof of ownership. All at once, he leaped for the door, the desk drawers, the shelves. Just as suddenly, he paused. What if these proofs, these deeds, letters, and receipts that he’d amassed over the years, were dismissed as trivial detritus from the past? In that case, maybe he could argue the right of current possession. It was the strongest single proof of ownership in this country, had been for centuries, but would it apply to him, still a foreigner in spite of his twenty years of living there?

It was no good, his thoughts flying helter-skelter like this. He needed to catch them and write them down. The thing would be to chronicle his occupation of the house, from the day he moved in, right up to the present. He switched on the desk lamp and removed a notebook from the drawer. Opening to the first page, he wrote November 2nd, 1925.

Now what? Should he explain how he had come to own the house, or should he skip to when he moved in? He went and took down a half-dozen books from shelves inset into the far wall. From an adjacent wooden chest, he drew out rolls of paper. Over the course of the next half hour, he made many trips back and forth between the shelves, chest, and desk, trampling the document underfoot with relish, thinking all the while about the best approach.

Searching for the right books, the necessary papers, took his mind off that afternoon’s unpleasant meeting. He even began looking forward to the task ahead. The idea of plotting a strategy gave him the sensation that he had nothing to fear. He lapsed into absentminded humming, at one point breaking off and saying aloud, You like that song, don’t you? Looking round the study, he then smiled, saying, I could use your help, you know. Ah, it’s no use, I mustn’t go crazy. Then they really would take the house away. He continued humming, the smile now gone from his lips but still visible through his sparkling, purposeful eyes.

When the desk’s surface became too crowded to accommodate the growing mass of material, he laid the overflow on the floor, covering up the hateful document. Then, engulfed with photographs, sketches, maps, ink, pens, pencils, glue, and brushes, he started his account.

November 2nd, 1925, Beirut to Damascus

The house was bringing me back to Damascus. And now I was almost really there, after eleven years of anticipation, of planning and longing and of declaring, every single year of those eleven interminable years, that next year I would return, next year I would live in my house.

I can remember looking at my watch and timing my arrival. Eight minutes till the train pulled into Beramke station, a few minutes to get my bearings and find a taxi, a ten-minute ride if the traffic was heavy, and a five-minute walk down narrow alleys. If I could have sped up the train I would have, yet in some absurd way I also wanted to stretch out my arrival. I must have been reluctant to surrender the sensation of longing that I had lived with for so long.

I don’t remember exactly, but I’m sure I reached into my pocket and felt for the deed for the thousandth, no, ten thousandth time. I knew it by heart: Bait Katib of al-Bab al-Jabiyya quarter is hereby transferred from Nasim Katib to Julian Beaufort, on this day, the 17th of September, 1914. Signed two days before I left to go back to a Europe by then irrevocably engaged in war.

I’d stumbled across the house during my graduation trip through Egypt and Syria, which I suppose could have been called a watered-down, 1914 version of the Grand Tour. While on this trip I’d discovered—to my shame—that outwardly I was the same as all the other young travelers I encountered. Whether they were eighteen, or twenty-five, or twenty-two, as I was, each one had the impression that these exotic lands existed for him alone. We all waxed romantic about the soft, languid nights; the furtively seductive looks bestowed upon us by veiled women; and the intoxication of smoking a narghile in dark and mysterious cafés, where our overworked imaginations saw great plots being hatched by ruthless men slyly fingering the tips of savage mustaches, the likes of which we aspired to in vain.

But by the time I’d sailed in a felucca to Aswan, trekked by camel across the Sinai to Petra, and ridden with a caravan into Damascus, I knew that my love for the East was different from the others’, even though I followed their well-trodden path. I belonged to this part of the world. I felt it with every nerve, every instinct. Any attempt to live elsewhere would have been a sham. It wasn’t an esoteric yearning but, rather, an emotion that hits you when the rhythm and temperament in a certain place matches your own to a degree that you’ve never experienced before. Within the enduring, sepia-toned walls of Damascus especially, I envisioned a place for myself with such clarity that leaving threatened to break my heart. I vowed to thwart fate.

My original plan had been to make my way from Damascus