11. A Son of the Age

That is what the people around him call him. He is a young man who works neither to pursue an ambition in life nor to support his family back home, but to earn a little money to spend on clothing, adornment, and strutting through the streets like a bride in her chamber.

Fuʾād Barzaq—or, if you wish, call him by the name he gave himself among Americans, Frank Bryan—was strange in his ways. Stranger and more astonishing still was his appearance among people. He devoted all his time to his clothes, and the Syrians therefore called him “up-to-date,” the man of the latest hour—not in his work or usefulness, but in his dress.[52]

People considered him a miracle of smart appearance. In this, as a rule, they were wrong, for attention to one’s dress does not require the expenditure of precious time or the exhaustion of one’s money. Fuʾād Barzaq, however, was a young man whose entire concern in life was buying and wearing: carefully preserving the folds of his jacket and creases of his trousers, and spending nearly an hour before the mirror tying his necktie so that it would be perfectly exact, as though poured into a mold.

A man who, like Fuʾād, directs all his concern toward himself and his outward appearance cares little for work. In fact, had he not needed money to maintain his elegance, his hands would never have performed a task. Thus he always had many clothes and little cash.

He loved to appear in the latest style but could not always do so, since his circumstances did not permit everything he hoped. He haunted clothing stores. If he saw a beautiful necktie, he paid the price without caring how high it was because he loved the thing. Three dollars was not too much for its pistachio color, which matched his socks. On the way home he would pass a shirt shop and his soul would tell him he needed a shirt. He entered and turned over many shirts, then slapped his pocket and found only seventy-five cents. He kept out the streetcar fare and bought a shirt with the remaining seventy cents.

When the band of his hat began to grow greasy, he saved dollar after dollar to buy another for ten. In the meantime he noticed that he needed shoes. Reaching into his pocket and finding only two dollars, he was forced to buy two-dollar shoes.

This was the Syrians’ “up-to-date” man: the man of the hour, the man of the present minute. How many young men among them kill their time and annihilate their lives attending to such things, neither prospering nor benefiting anyone!

Before his countrymen, Fuʾād affected indifference and claimed he preferred to merge with Americans. He said this but did not do it, for Americans paid little attention to a man like him. Syrians, on the other hand, believed he was somebody and were deceived by his clothes. They also regretted his condition: he spent every dollar upon his appearance and saved nothing against the black days that might force him to need others.

At a dance, His Excellency met a non-Syrian girl and became her intimate friend. Association with her lifted him into the highest heavens. He often came to Syrian restaurants hand in hand with her, parading her before his companions.

He spent three years with the girl. Their relationship forced him to work harder and more diligently to earn more than before, since he had to present gifts and fulfill love’s obligations by going to theaters, cafés, amusements, and elegant restaurants. At last he became attached to her and hoped she would accept him as a husband.

She kept his hope alive. He began working hard, economizing where he could, and saving a little in the government bank. Within months he had about eight hundred dollars on deposit.[53] When he asked his beloved to become his formal fiancée, she requested an expensive ring. The words had scarcely left her lips when his heart flew with joy. He took her at once to a jeweler and bought a ring for eight hundred dollars—the entire sum in the bank.

Fuʾād’s beloved rejoiced beyond measure. When they reached her house and he prepared to say good night, she stopped him. In his presence, she coyly asked her mother for permission to kiss him. Her mother consented. She kissed him once, and he went on his way, walking merrily upon the earth while his mind played with the angels above.

He dreamed several times that night and saw his beloved kissing him and clasping him to her breast. Each time he awoke smiling, then returned to sleep so as not to waste a moment of his sweet dream-voyages with the woman who had enchanted his understanding and stolen his mind.

Morning found him filled with joy and bliss. The hours of the day were longer than years at his workplace. He labored like a man possessed—or rather, he performed his work by force while his mind swam through the heavens, whispering and speaking to his beloved. When a colleague’s call awakened him, he resumed the task, but only with difficulty and effort.

At the end of the day, he ate supper and then visited the barber, who adorned him as required. When the clock struck eight, he stood at the door of the house where his beloved lived with her mother.

He rang the bell, rang again, and rang again. Contrary to custom, no one answered, though he had arranged to spend the evening at her home. He could devise no excuse for her failure to wait unless some great cause had intervened, yet his mind could discover no cause great enough to prevent her from remaining home to receive him as agreed. The night before he had left her flying with joy over his diamond ring, and after three years of love she had kissed him for the first time, with her mother’s permission.

For more than half an hour he wavered before the door over whether to turn back. But how could he sleep that night without satisfying his desire to see his beloved? He attacked the bell again in long peals.

After a long time, a neighbor emerged from the floor beside the girl’s former apartment and asked whom he wanted and why he kept ringing. Fuʾād said he wished to visit his beloved’s family. The neighbor replied that they had moved that morning. He himself had helped the girl’s mother finish several tasks because the moving wagon arrived before the household was ready. The driver had wanted to leave, saying he could not wait and lose time, but the woman clutched his arm and begged him with excessive flattery to be patient. Though the neighbor was a stranger who had never spoken with her or even seen her face before that day, she asked him to lend a hand, and he did.

Fuʾād was utterly stunned. He asked whether the man knew where the family had moved. No. Did he know the driver or the moving company? Did he know anyone who knew anything about them? The answer to every question was no. The neighbor shut the door, and Fuʾād went home.

All night he questioned police officers and everyone he saw along the way, but found no one who could guide him to his beloved’s new home.

For weeks he tried to learn the address without success. At last he abandoned hope and decided that the ring was the root of the trouble.

After this incident, Fuʾād wanted nothing to do with non-Syrian girls. Whenever he sat in company, he poured lava from his mouth upon the treachery of women of “foreign stock,” supporting his claims with practical proof that they befriended a man for his money and knew nothing of love.

When he argued with an educated listener, the man answered that America was a mixture of many nations and that Syrians rarely met people from the better classes. If a Syrian associated with a girl, it was generally someone he had attached himself to at a dance or encountered by chance. Fuʾād accepted the argument and added that precisely this had happened to him: after three years, a single kiss had cost him his last installment—eight hundred dollars.

NOTES

[52] Haddad prints an Arabic phonetic rendering of the English “up to date” and immediately glosses it. Fuʾād’s chosen American name, Frank Bryan, is another self-conscious refashioning.
[53] The Arabic says “government bank,” probably referring to the United States Postal Savings System, established in 1911 and widely used by immigrants wary of private banks.
