Meat Bazaar

by Lazar Pascanovic (Serbia)

Making a local connection Syria

The rain drummed on the vaulted roof made of stone, plastic, sheet metal and colored glass, leaking here and there in thin streams, aiming right behind my collar. A heavyset, bull-necked man with a pencil moustache emerged from a store and violently shook my hand. He wanted to know where I came from and what I was doing in Damascus, so I told him. He inquired if I had any children, then asked why not, and went on to tell me that he had eight. Lest I thought it was putting too much strain on his wife, he divulged that he actually had two wives. Not knowing what to say but anxious to keep the conversation going, I asked him if they were jealous. No, he said, why would they be? They help each other, and they love me, just as we all love our children, for what would life be without children? The house would be empty and silent. Like a tomb, he added, shooting me a pitying look apparently reserved for tomb-dwellers. In the evenings, he continued, when he comes home from work, he always brings presents for all his kids and wives. The man was a classical dad: sturdy, confident, with a pot belly and gentle, cheerful eyes. Seeing that we were running out of conversation, and prompted by the social anxiety of standing with strangers in awkward silence in meat bazaars, I asked him what his job was, even though I knew. He pointed to his bloody apron and said that he was a butcher, but not only that, he owned a shop and was, therefore, his own boss. This is my shop, he said, do you like the canary? My wife gave it to me for my birthday, but it doesn’t want to sing. He caught my eyes uneasily observing the camel’s head that, hanging by a chain, lazily swayed in the draught, a strand of parsley between its drooping lips. I killed it yesterday, he said, would you care to see it? Not sure how it was possible to see something that had already happened, and even less sure if I would want to anyway, I gave a half-hearted nod. From his apron pocket the dad took a cellphone, fiddled around with his thick fingers and then stuck it into my face. Leaning onto the soot-covered wall and inhaling the air fetid with scents of decomposing meat, I looked at the display and saw: a cobbled square flanked with yellow brick houses, a spotless blue sky, a crowd of people. In the center was a large camel, and next to it my friend the dad who, I worriedly realised, wasn’t the camel’s friend, as he was holding a sword. Like in a twisted, archaic dream, I saw the steel flash, followed by a blood-curdling cry from the famously silent animal as it abruptly fell to its knees. One more flash and it was lying in a pool of blood, the dad wiping his blade with a dirty cloth. The video ended, transporting me from the sunny yesterday to the rainy today. He looked me in the eyes, waiting for a reaction. What to say to this eightfold dad, this sure-handed slayer of camels? After all, I thought to myself, exotic trimmings aside – the sword, the cobbled square, the camel – this is something that happens a million times a day, on every continent, in every country. I wondered if he had told me about the wives and showed me the video as genuine acts of sharing, or in order to stay true to his role of a real, primal man in front of a frail, bespectacled foreigner. I opted for the local equivalent of "well done, brother" and patted him heartily on the back, evoking a blissful grin on his part. He took a pair of sausages off the hook next to the horrified canary, wrapped them in a newspaper and handed them to me. I thanked him and resumed my walk through the tenebrous maze, waiting for the rain to subside, wondering why, by the same sheer coincidence, I couldn’t have wandered into a sweets bazaar instead.