Ask the Cat

By N.J. Mahayni

When reluctant, 11-year-old Nick is sent to live with his eccentric aunt in Damascus, Syria, he finds himself in a strange country with relatives he barely knows and no friends. Irritated and determined to be miserable, Nick is consoled by his aunt’s large, white cat, Ajax—who talks and needs Nick’s help to solve a centuries-old mystery. Ajax pulls Nick into a remarkable journey of self-discovery and family secrets, confronting a string of surprising characters as they trip in and out of time, jaunting here and there through the old cities and fortresses of the Middle East and back alleys of Old Damascus. The more Nick and Ajax unravel the mystery, the more complicated things become. Will Nick’s courage hold out as the stakes get higher? Will they solve the mystery before a powerful magic falls into the wrong hands?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Evening Creek Press
• Release date: Sep 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9780996806534

N.J. Mahayni

A secondary teacher of the arts for forty years, N.J. Mahayni lived a decade in the old city of Damascus, Syria. Since retiring from teaching, she has dedicated her time to writing stories of her life in her home state of Oregon and her travels across the Middle East.

Book preview

Ask the Cat

Written by N.J. Mahayni

Published by Evening Creek Press

Cover Design by Nicholas Chase

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2015 N.J. Mahayni

All rights reserved.

This book is available in print at most online retailers.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Thank you for downloading this ebook. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoy this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy from their favorite authorized retailer. Thank you for your support.

This book is dedicated to Nicholas Chase, the boy in the book, without whose imagination this book would never have been published.

I can’t convince you of the truth of this story. I know it wasn’t dreams or wild imaginings, but then, it happened to me, while you are only reading about it. If you are unconvinced at the end of my narrative, and want more proof of the strange events I intend to set down here, I can only say, ASK THE CAT.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Epilogue

Glossary

CHAPTER 1

DREARY! I LOOKED down on the discouraging view as my flight circled the Damascus airport. From the air the famous oasis was a dry, ugly picture. As we descended, I saw nothing to raise my spirits. Brown scraps of land were edged by burnt orange and yellow ones. Here and there patches of gray-green olive trees stood clustered in ancient orchards. Many of the fields were bordered by cypress trees, dark enough green to appear black against the red-brown earth. I was not impressed.

This was not a pleasure trip. I was being thrust upon an aunt and uncle I hardly knew. My protests had been marked and discarded as thoughtlessly as old magazines. Or so I thought.

My parents were not unfeeling—just otherwise involved. And all the protests I could make did not move them. I had just turned eleven—old enough to have some say over the course of my life! My parents didn’t agree. The offer of a roof, three regular meals a day, and a proper school for the year had prompted their acceptance of my aunt’s invitation. Tutoring at their archaeological dig was usually acceptable to them, but I’d had an awful bout of typhoid, and they worried that I needed more constant attention than their busy schedule allowed. So they had decided to ship me off to spend the year with Aunt Maribel, my father’s older sister. I remembered her only faintly from my early childhood.

I had made a good protest. I liked having my mother teach me. It meant short lessons and long hours with my father. It had looked as if they were weakening, but I lost the battle when a friend of my father's offered to escort me to Damascus since he was going there on business. Even with this offer, I thought I had my dad on my side, but my mother was suddenly immovable.

Nick, sweetheart, she had insisted, with that maddening, reasonable tone in her voice, you just got over typhoid. You need a routine and plenty of rest. An archaeological dig in the middle of a desert is no place for you right now. Africa is not Turkey. It was the tone, not the words, that told me there was no hope.

I knew that my parents really did love me. I knew that they were only doing what parents do when their child seems vulnerable. But that wasn’t a comfort. I was packed into an airplane with this fat, interfering person I formerly regarded as a friend.

Mr. Ayub had made an obvious effort. He was very kind, but I couldn’t get over my sulk. During the whole flight, I avoided speaking, answering any attempt at conversation with grunts or single syllables. My world was out of whack, and I wished he would just disappear and let me nurse my misery.

Once we landed we climbed down an exit ladder from the plane and wandered across the tarmac toward the building where motored wagons were hauling the flight’s luggage. There was a small breeze blowing, and the cooler air felt good after the stifling air of the plane. We had definitely suffered limited benefit from the plane’s air conditioning system.

I thought I’d get a better look at the landscape by lingering outside, but a cranky-looking porter motioned us inside, where the heat was already fierce, even though it was still morning.

The airport terminal was dirty and noisy; in fact it was not a terminal at all, but a warehouse temporarily being used while a new terminal was built. It was not meant for receiving and discharging passengers. There were no counters or turnstiles. And there was no assistance of any kind.

It took the attendants time to unload all the bags. None of them were in a hurry. An hour later we found our baggage in the haphazard mountain of suitcases piled on the concrete floor. Another hour passed before we were through customs. At last we emerged from the stuffy building into the brighter heat. The breeze had stopped. Mr. Ayub hailed a cab, refusing to share it with a large family of travelers who insisted they lived exactly where we were going.

The drive into the city was hot and dusty, but the landscape was more promising. Across the fields adjacent to the road, I could see borders of dark pine trees.

When we finally reached the city I found myself reluctantly interested in the effect of concrete brick houses built on top of the ancient wall. The wall curved around the old part of the city, dividing it from the building debris and stark surfaces of recent constructions. I could see several slender, white minarets jabbing upward between the ugly juts of rectangular high rises as we drove along.

As we swung south, we passed a pillar-fronted building incorporated into the wall. The sign in front, printed in English as well as Arabic, told me this was the traditional spot dedicated to St. Paul’s escape from Damascus through a window. Why the fake dressing on the front of that historic window? It made no sense to me.

Eventually we swung around a circle with a wide fountain at the center, and shot down one of the side streets that radiated from it.

"Bab Mo Sulla," Ayub informed me, waving in the general direction of the fountain.

"Bab? I questioned sarcastically. That's Arabic for ‘door.’ How can a fountain be a door?"

Mr. Ayub explained that the fountain had been constructed to embellish the circle built to accommodate the junction of the streets. There were at least six streets exiting that circle. I stared out the cab’s rear window at the vanishing fountain, straining to see if there was any sign of a break in the old wall that could be called a door. As far as I could tell there had never been one.

We slowed to a crawl in the heavy traffic of the narrower street. On each side of the street, shops were crammed edge to edge along the sidewalk, with living quarters on the second story. Some of the houses hung over the street. Benches, with a muddled variety of goods displayed, were scattered over the sidewalk in front of the shops. Blankets or tarps were thrown down and every type of small item was sold on them, from cheap watches and custom jewelry to plastic shoes and cigarettes.

The windows of the second story homes were faced with wooden latticing in intricate patterns, but they were so old and weather-abused that they were broken and peeling. The whole length of the street was treeless, noisy, crowded with people, and covered in grime from car exhaust and dust. Everything was a drab, dull color that matched my mood exactly. Dust mixed with exhaust made the air unbreathable; and the heat lay like a heavy blanket over everything.

Occasionally the monotony of shoulder-to-shoulder shops was broken by a strip of black-and-white blocks, the walls of old mosques. These ancient façades, sandwiched between shops, reminded me that I was in the oldest continuously-inhabited city in the world. I was not impressed. There was too much dust.

The only liveliness in the scene came from small boys dashing along the sidewalks, running errands for their families. They carried bright blue, sloshing pails of milk or yogurt, or brown paper packages. Shod in those odd plastic shoes, their hurried gait had a restricting shuffle required to keeping the shoes on their feet.

We approached a tall house which seemed alien to the rest of the street. Our cab stopped in front of it. It was two-storied and dominated all the structures around it with its height. The façade had a more western look than the surrounding buildings. It was flat-roofed with iron-barred windows and huge double doors. The windows were so tall I could tell the ceilings inside must be very high. The windows, paired on both sides of the double doors, were intended to make the house look grand. But their strict balance and the bars just gave it a stern appearance. A walled garden on one side and a wide, paved alleyway on the other separated it from everything else on the street. It was my aunt's house.

There was no one there to meet me. Mr. Ayub had not been pleased that we were not met at the airport. The cool treatment from the servant that answered our ring didn’t help either. She grumbled insistently that I was arriving tomorrow, and Madam was out. It took several minutes of loud conversation to convince her that I had already arrived and was in need of housing.

Reluctantly, she allowed Ayub to place my baggage inside the great doors. He threw me a worried glance, shrugged, and bolted into the cab, leaving me to face my fate alone.

‘Coward,’ I thought spitefully. At that moment I was actually sorry to see him go. At least he was familiar.

The servant scooped up my bags and jammed the carton of my carefully packaged models upside down under one burly arm. Flicking me a cold look of disgust, she stomped across the echoing entry hall and up the stairs. I grabbed my backpack and bounded after her, protesting. It was not a good beginning.

Across the entry hall, high ceilings and marble-like tile floors extended to the open door of a courtyard. The wide stairway was cut into the wall at a right angle to the arched courtyard windows. There were enticing glimpses of greenery and the splash of water through those windows, but I did not dare stop to investigate with my models in danger.

The cat stood on the landing, regarding me through squinted eyes. He flicked his tail disdainfully and sat down. I stopped in astonishment. He was nothing like any other cat of my acquaintance. Snowy white, he was enormously fat with giant paws and a great plume of a tail, but his eyes were his most amazing feature. They were odd eyes: one blue as the Mediterranean on a sunny day, the other a brilliant yellow.

A torrent of complaint came from above. The servant's head appeared over the rail and jerked sideways in a command for me to follow. Her dark-skinned face was disfigured by an angry scowl that appeared permanently fixed. The cat regarded her coolly, and returned his gaze to me. He flicked his tail in comment and proceeded up the stairs. I stared after him. A flood of language came from above and I hurried up the steps. The cat, walking with dignity across a long room, vanished into a door at the far end. I followed, judging from the thuds and bangs that the servant also had entered that room.

I had hoped that the cat would stay with me and make friends, but he inspected the smell of my baggage, examined me again with those disturbing eyes, and left. That was the last I saw of him for several days.

****

The misery of those first days occupied my mind completely, leaving little energy or interest for my new surroundings. I was bored and angry. Although very upset at herself for her absence during my arrival, my aunt did not manage to make me very welcome. I didn’t try very hard to be accepting either.

The confusion over my arrival date was typical of her. She was kind but easily rattled, often unable to deal with things that required forethought. When she was at home she read or painted pictures, but most of the time she was not at home. She was out. I had no idea what advantage I would gain from her being in. Almost anything she did to distract or entertain me fell flat. I felt lonely and deserted.

I knew very little about my aunt and her family. I had met her only twice, when I was quite young. What I remembered hardly added up to a person: a froth of reddish hair, nervous, blinking eyes, and hands that fluttered like captive birds. She was married to a Syrian businessman and she had one child, a grown daughter who went to college in England. I did not remember my uncle at all, although my parents assured me that, at two, I had liked him very much. My cousin I had never met. Now I was deposited in their lives like a piece of rented furniture, to be used a bit, cared for carefully, and returned.

My aunt did try to amuse me. She took me with her to the old al Hamidiyeh Souk, or bazaar, a famous feature of the old city. It has been a center of trade for several thousand years. Everything is sold there. There are different shops for each type of merchandise: brass pots, some inlayed with copper and silver; Persian carpets; fabric from China, Japan, India, and Egypt, as well as Syria. Towels, sheets, woven bed spreads, and hooded bathrobes, called burnooses, all of the finest cotton, are featured in a large shop. A burnoose is a very colorful item. My aunt bought me one that had red, blue, orange, and yellow all woven into the pattern. On the street, called the Gold Souk, whole windows are hung top to bottom with real gold chains. The first time I saw that I totally lost my breath. The sight is stunning!

Once I stopped being overcome by the number of people crowded into that street, I did love these trips. I even interrupted my sulks for them.

On our first trip my aunt took me to a shop that sold everything, including embroidered peasant costumes. She collected these costumes, always searching for special ones. This meant that we went to that particular shop every time we visited the souk. It was located near the great Umayyad Mosque at the far end of the long, straight, tin-roofed main street of the souk. To get to it you climbed a narrow, circular stairway to the second story. Once up this steep, scary entry, the shop is spread out in several rooms.

I made friends with the shopkeeper, Abdulah, who was a regular Sherlock Holmes.

A very interesting occupation is reading people by what they have on, Abdulah told me, taking me to a spot overlooking the street to demonstrate. Every village has its own identifying costume. Most peasant men wear black balloon britches and boots, with differently woven vests and sashes to identify their village. Village women are easier to recognize than men. Their common uniforms for public wear have a wide range of cuts. For instance, the village of Darayya, southwest of the city, uses long lengths of orange and black striped fabric draped around the waist, across the shoulders, and over the head. See those two there? They are actually wrapped in cloth. In contrast, black skirts and jackets with colorfully banded edges are worn by the women of Zakheeya, a village to the southeast. He pointed to a woman with a large rolled headband worn over her black veil.

Then he showed me how to pick out the wealthy in the crowd by their well-cut but conservative clothes. I asked him about the flashy, modernly dressed men.

Those characters? he laughed. They are cab drivers and chauffeurs. They dress like that to look western so tourists think they speak languages well. They don’t have any real money. It is men like that old man in the well-cut, dark suit, wearing the smooth, bright red fez who have money. They are business men who know how to make a profit.

After that I wanted to practice and learn to be an occupation detective too. But these trips did not happen as often as I would have liked.

Aunt Maribel gave me a ring of keys and permission to enter any room in the house as long as I didn’t disturb the desk in Uncle’s study, or the clutter in her studio.

Determined to be miserable, I put the keys in my desk and shut myself in my room for hours, laboriously repairing my damaged models.

My uncle was often away on business, but he gave me full access to his study, which held the library. He had every kind of book in there—even science fiction. He encouraged me to read the guide books on the ancient ruins of the area, and the histories of Syria.

Once, when he was available, he took me on a trip into the eastern desert to visit the ruins of Palmyra, an oasis city on the old silk road. But I found the Roman-influenced ruins very disappointing. Lots and lots of pillars marching off across the desert did not interest me. I’d seen nicer ones in Greece and Rome.

There was a mysterious-looking fortress on the mountain just north of the ruins. I wanted to climb up there and look that over, but our guide said no one was allowed up there. The place was not safe. He told us it was a 13th century castle refortified by a Druze Emir, Fafhr ah Din, in the 17th century when he rebelled against the Ottoman Empire. Later, an earthquake nearly destroyed the building. A black box of a place, high above the ruins of Palmyra, it seemed interesting and I was sorry to miss exploring it.

The day we went to Palmyra was extremely hot. Since the guide got his information out of the same tour books that my uncle had loaned me, I already knew all the stuff he told us. The trip was a bust, and only encouraged my sulks.

The servant, Zaynab, was a depressing presence in the house. She had no chance of acceptance from me after her thoughtless destruction of my treasures, and she swiftly expanded her image into that of an enemy.

She was a big woman, tall and heavy-set. She was always cross and accusing. She spoke in torrents of some language I had never heard before. But I did not need to understand it to understand her meaning. I stayed away from her, avoiding any area of the house where she might be.

****

One afternoon as I sat sulking on the window ledge, staring into the hot street below, I heard rumbling. Looking up and down the street for a truck or piece of heavy equipment, I found none. The rumbling grew louder although there was nothing but ordinary street traffic below. Suddenly the cat leapt up to the window ledge beside me. The rumbling came from him! During my days of sulking I had forgotten him. He rubbed against me, his purr vibrating his whole body. He fixed me firmly in his gaze for the span of half a minute, then jumped down and paraded across the floor to the bed, plumed tail waving. There he arranged himself dead center. Paws tucked, he lay watching me. In spite of myself I felt immensely comforted by his presence.

After that he spent most of each day with me. During this time I started talking to him, speaking as I would to a companion of my own age, complaining about the servant, or commenting on the progress of my model restoration.

I don't recall when he first spoke to me. Sometime during a one-sided conversation he inserted an opinion, and we began discussing the people moving in the street below, my models, my homesickness, my parents, my dread of school in the fall, or whatever came to mind. It seemed exactly right that he should talk. I didn't bother to question it. The thought did come to me that I might be imagining things but I was too grateful for the companionship to examine the idea. He told me his name was Ajax. I explained that I preferred Nick to Nicky and we became friends.

CHAPTER 2

I HAD BEEN a guest in Aunt Maribel’s house for nearly a month. The hot July sun had given way to a hot August sun. I didn’t see much of my aunt. I was convinced that I was more of a worry to her than I should be, so I avoided making any demands on her time. She occasionally whisked me off for afternoons beside someone's pool, which I found embarrassing since I had never learned to swim.

The scorching August was dragging on. School wouldn’t start for another three weeks. It looked as if I was getting enough practice at lonely and miserable to become professional. So I settled down to give the role detailed attention.

It was on a day when I was giving a particularly good performance that the cat took the situation firmly in hand.

I was sitting on the window ledge in my room, staring at the street. I had been in a fury over some business with Zaynab, but in spite of holding my breath and banging my foot on the wall, the anger had begun to burn out.

The street was full of traffic. Three-wheeled mini-pickups dominated. They played at being tanks, rushing in and out of traffic with total disregard for slower vehicles: pedestrians, donkey carts, or anything else.

It was close to sunset; the air was getting cooler. Evening visiting hour had come. Yellow taxies, madly beeping their horns,