in which his parents’ love had been too intense at times, too enveloping to allow him breath. Growing up, he had had the comfort of knowing that whatever the challenges, whether it was anxiety over schoolwork or rejection by friends, whether he got disapproval from strangers or simply felt disconnected from the world around him, whatever the break these experiences caused inside him, there would always be someone or something to put him together again. His mother making his favourite sweets and the pleasure in her eyes as she watched him eat them; his sisters, both older, helping him with homework, often doing it for him while he went out to play; his father insisting, at the end of the school week, that he walk down with him to the old souk to help with the shopping. Once there, Anas became so engrossed in the surrounding activity and displays, felt so much a part of them, that he forgot his troubles.
Yet he had felt stifled by this closeness at times, and recalled occasional moments of aloneness that stood out as bright and exceptional: the sun on his back as he bent down on the terrace to play, undisturbed, with a new toy, the joy in that anticipation, or at night, a little while before sleep, shutting his bedroom door and sensing in this instantaneous, temporary solitude the opportunity to be utterly himself, feeling the relief in that, the release. He has always understood that it is exactly this ability to disengage, with fluidity and without notice or regret, that makes way for the artist in him, that defines his deepest being.
He remembers the joy his parents had felt when in his final year at school he passed his baccalaureate exams with distinction, the pride and the boasting, their expressions of hope for his future – medicine perhaps, or law, they advised him –and then their disappointment when he had refused, their despair that he would be willing to give up the opportunity to elevate his standing and that of his family in a watchful and highly critical society. But the urge in him to create, to portray in shape and in colour what defined his essential being was too strong to ignore, and for several years, during which Anas and his parents hardly communicated, he had taken on menial jobs that allowed him to pay for occasional art classes and materials, until the day he was able to announce to them that he had won a scholarship to study art in Germany and their resolve was finally broken.
Anas is aware that in defying his parents’ plans for him as the only son in a traditional Arab family, he became stronger and more determined to succeed as an artist. But this is not a fight he wants to engage in with his children, not the path towards fulfilment that he wishes for them. He sees instead a flexibility in their outlook that they have gained from their mother; this pleases but also at times frustrates him. It is a mirror he is not always willing to look into.
He works on the top floor of an ageing three-storey building, once the pride of Syrian design, with an open stairwell that looks on to a garden overgrown with plants and a small pond that is long dry; and standing right outside his front door, growing in a huge, ancient pot, is a beautiful jasmine bush that dies gracefully in winter and in spring fills the evenings with its perfume. Inside the spacious, high-ceilinged rooms of the apartment are the light and shadows he has always sought, a weightless glowing, and at its edges, a muted gloom, the suggestion of colour that serves as his inspiration.
He spends the best hours of his day sitting at a wooden table placed directly beneath a large, open window, painting with colours he has painstakingly blended together or sculpting materials which he manipulates with nervous hands, slowly but surely drawing the outlines of his better self, he knows, the man he sees clearly in his mind’s eye but who in lesser moments appears dulled and ordinary.
Anas has finally found the recognition that a handful of Syrian and Iraqi artists now enjoy thanks to a greater interest in their work around the world, a recognition that is deserved. However, he comforts himself with the thought that increased material comforts and growing demand for his pieces have neither influenced his outlook nor made him change his work habits. He prides himself on that, trusting that his instincts will continue to carry him through what might turn out to be only a temporary rise. He knows that art is the one thing, above all else, that gives him life.
But if his work has achieved success, his personal life – more specifically his relationship with his wife – has not fared well. That too is a long story which he cannot bring himself to talk about, even to his closest friends.
He had been at art school for almost a year when he met Brigitte at a gathering in the home of a mutual friend. She was tall and attractive, like many of the women he had met since his arrival in Germany, and fair: a striking contrast to his own colouring that appealed to him. Yet he had sensed something about her from the first: a willingness and humility he admired; an interest, too, in him that went beyond that initial attraction. Their affair had been passionate and serious in a way that was unfamiliar to him, demanded from him wisdom that his upbringing and consequent experience had not prepared him for, a view of relationships, of women, that was new and challenging. They had joked once about their closest moments being as lessons in love, with Brigitte as the teacher and he the willing student.
When they married not long after meeting, she had told him she looked on the prospect of moving to Damascus to live and raise a family as a welcome adventure. If she loved her husband so much, she admitted, it was in large part because she was fascinated with his culture, longed to discover a world far outside her own European upbringing.
Syria had lived up to all her expectations at first, as an authentic Arab country that remained largely faithful to its heritage, perhaps – and the irony of this did not escape her – because it had lived so long under dictatorship that Western influences were few and far between. Anas had been charmed, in those first few months after their arrival, by his wife’s wonder at the peculiarities of life in Damascus, at its manifestations of old-world sophistication alongside an innocence that he could see moved her greatly.
Once, using a cashpoint at one of the bigger banks in the city, Brigitte had at first been alarmed when a small group of what were clearly labourers came to stand beside her, apparently watching what she was doing. When Anas explained in German that the service was very new to Damascus and that the onlookers were merely curious, she had smiled and gestured to them to come closer and asked Anas to translate as she gently explained exactly how the machine worked. What she had not known, what Anas did not have the heart to tell her at that moment, was that the men were unlikely ever to need the services of an ATM since bank accounts were a privilege that only a wealthy few enjoyed.
She marvelled also at the daily proximity of people one to the other, the houses in the old neighbourhoods attached to one another in rows, their walls porous, voices and emotions filtering through them in the breathing air, people moving through the crowded alleyways that represented streets, bodies touching as if in a shared dance, the spaces above them filled also with anticipation, and everywhere, at tables eating, in rooms punctuated by conversation, by deathbeds and in silent prayer, the presence of an unseen but nonetheless all-powerful notion of God.
She told him, in those early days when they talked about their almost daily excursions into the heart of the city, that she had never known such clear evidence of vitality, of the feeling that she could, whenever she wished, dip her heart into it and come out overflowing, of the certainty that in loving and being with him, she had finally found her way home.
And if he were to be truthful with himself now, he would have to admit to his wife’s influence on his view of their relationship, the honesty with which she insisted they communicate, the transparency in their dealings with each other.
But neither of them had reckoned on the difficulties Brigitte would eventually encounter in trying to fit in with Anas’s family. His mother, he knew, had been devastated at the news that he would be returning from five years studying abroad with a foreign wife and did not hesitate to show her disapproval at every opportunity. And while his father and sisters tried to make Brigitte feel at home, there was no question as to their disappointment in his choice.
His family’s feelings about his young wife, he was certain, were not personal. Had she been merely a girlfriend who would later return to her own country, they would have found her delightful, would have welcomed her with open arms; but marriage being, to their minds, a lifetime’s commitment, they could not see her playing that long-term role with the dedication to social convention that it deserved; worse still, they could not see themselves settling comfortably