Five Parts of Twenty-Seven

by Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The frets of an ʿūd are not fixed. They are gut, tied twice round the neck and knotted at the back, and a fret that is pushed hard enough with the thumb will slide. This is how the old players kept a lute in the manner of their teachers: they moved the frets until the instrument agreed with what they had been taught to hear. The Shaykh said that every lute in Baghdad was therefore a record of somebody's ear, and that most of the records were bad copies of other records, and that he wanted one good copy before the last ear died.

That was my work in the month of Shaʿbān: to sit with the lute on my knee and my thumb on the middle-finger fret, and move it.

I am Ḥabīb ibn Būluṣ. I copied books for the Shaykh, and for others, at so much the quire. I am of the Jacobite church, and I set this down because he asked me to write what was done and not what was said about it.

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The singer was called Ṭayyiba. She lived in the Karkh quarter, in a house on the lane behind the dyers', where the gutter ran blue and red on alternate days according to the work. In her youth she had sung in the houses of men whose names she did not repeat to us. She had been taught, she said, by a woman who had been taught by a pupil of Zalzal, and that was four mouths back to the man whose fret it was.

The Shaykh had heard of her from a drum-maker. He had gone to her himself first and come back and told me to bring the good lute, the one with the new strings, and a lump of wax, and a reed pen, and nothing to eat, because she would feed us and it would be rude to refuse.

Her house had three rooms and a court the size of a prayer mat. I will set down how it was ordered, because the Shaykh made me look at it before we began.

In the first room, by the door, there was a jar of water standing in a bowl of wet sand, so that the water would be cool but not cold. In the second room, where she slept, there was a pot of honey with a horn spoon in it, and a brazier that was kept low even on the hot days, and a kettle over it with fennel seed in the water. The window of that room had been closed with a board and the cracks of the board stuffed with rag. Nobody in that house raised their voice. The girl who lived with her, Lubāba, the daughter of a cousin, was ten years old and spoke in a whisper even in the lane, and when the water-carrier called his trade at the door she went out to him quickly so that he would not call it twice.

"Everything here serves one thing," the Shaykh said to me in the lane, before we went in. "Find what it is."

I said it was her throat.

He said, "Then you know where the fret is going to come from. Not from her hands."

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She was a small woman, and old, with a cloth over her hair the colour of a dove, and the backs of her hands were spotted brown. She did not play. Her fingers had stiffened at the joints some years before and she could not stop a string any more. She held the lute when I gave it to her and turned it over and looked at the frets, the way a woman at the market looks at the teeth of a sheep, and gave it back to me.

"Your middle fret is a Persian's," she said.

The Shaykh said that it was, and that this was why we had come. I should explain that on a lute of that time there was more than one place a player might tie the fret for the middle finger. The old Arab players tied it in one place and the Persians a little higher, and they had quarrelled for a hundred years over which was right, and the quarrel was carried on in their hands, so that two men of different teachers could not play together. Zalzal had put his fret higher than either, nearer to the fret of the ring finger, but not so near. Nobody now living could say exactly where, because the men who had learned it from him had learned it in the fingers, and had moved their frets by the ear, and had died.

"Sing me the note," the Shaykh said, "and Ḥabīb will move the fret until the string agrees with you. Then I will measure it."

She looked at him for some time. Then she said, "I do not sing a note."

"One note. The third above the open string. You need not make a song of it."

"I know what you want," she said. "I am telling you I do not have it. If I sing it to you out of nothing it will be wherever I put it. I could put it anywhere. I could put it where your Persian is. It is in the song. When I sing the song it is in the right place, and when I stop, it is not anywhere."

The Shaykh said, "Then sing the song."

---

The song was a lament. I will not write all of it, because she asked me not to, and it is not mine. It was for a man who had gone out with the summer caravan to Raqqa and not come back, and the first verse said that the road he took was the same road as before, and the dust on it was the same dust, and the woman who watched it was the same woman, and only the road was empty. The middle fret came in the second half of the line, on the word for empty, where her voice went up from the open string and did not go all the way.

She sang it sitting on her mattress, with her eyes closed and her hands open on her knees. Her voice was thin with age, and there was a crack in it at the top, but the crack was always in the same place, and I came to think it had been there since she was young and that it was part of the song.

I sat in front of her with the lute and plucked the open string under her, softly, so that she had something to stand on, and when she came to the word I stopped the string at the middle fret and pushed the fret with my thumb, up the neck or down, to bring the string to her.

I could not do it. The word lasted the length of a breath. By the time I had heard which way I was wrong, she had left the note and gone on down to the end of the line. And there was this also: that on the first singing, when she came to empty, I did not think of the fret at all. I sat there with my thumb on the gut and the string stopped under it and I did nothing, and when she finished the verse I found that my face was wet.

Lubāba was crying in the doorway, into her sleeve, with no sound. The Shaykh was not. He was watching my hand.

"Again," he said. "And Ḥabīb, do not listen to the words."

---

We came on eight days, between the noon prayer and the afternoon prayer, when the heat in the lane was at its worst and the dyers had stopped work. The Shaykh sat by the board over the window with his knees drawn up. On the first day Ṭayyiba gave him a dish of dates and he took one and thanked her, and he still had it in his hand when we left, and I saw him put it down on the step outside her door for whoever would want it.

He did not let her sing more than nine times in a day. He said the throat was a thing that tired like any other organ, and that after the ninth time she would sing the note where the tiredness put it and not where the song did. When she had sung, Lubāba gave her the fennel water from the kettle, warm, and a little honey from the horn spoon, and then she rested with her eyes closed, and I worked the fret back and forth between my finger and thumb so that the gut would not grow stiff and stick where it was.

I will set down what happened in the room over those days in its order, because it was not what I had expected, and the Shaykh said it was the part that mattered most after the number.

On the first day and the second, everybody in the house wept when she sang the verse, the girl and I and once a woman from the next house, who came in to borrow a sieve and stayed in the doorway with the sieve in her hand.

On the third day Lubāba wept at the first singing and not at the second. At the fourth singing, when the crack came at the top of the voice, she laughed. She put both hands over her mouth at once and looked at the old woman in terror. Ṭayyiba opened her eyes and looked back at her, and then she laughed too, which I had not heard her do, a dry sound like a cough, and had to stop the song and drink.

"She has heard it too often," Ṭayyiba said to the Shaykh. "Now she hears that I am an old woman with a broken voice."

"She hears the same voice," the Shaykh said. "It is in the same place."

"Then why does she laugh?"

He said he did not know yet.

On the fifth day Lubāba did not weep or laugh, and by the third singing she was asleep against the doorpost with her mouth open and a fly on her knee. Ṭayyiba sang over her as if she were not there. I found I was listening only for the word, and only for one sound in the word, and I could not have told you what the verse said. I had become, the Shaykh said afterwards, a deaf man with an excellent ear. He meant it as praise.

On the seventh day I had the fret close. I knew this because the string under my thumb and the voice above it stopped beating against each other. When two sounds are nearly together but not quite, you hear a slow wavering between them, like the wobble of a pot on an uneven floor, and the nearer they are the slower it goes. Hers and mine wavered so slowly that I could count it. One, and two, and she was gone down the line.

I pushed the fret half the width of a barleycorn toward the bridge.

On the eighth day, at the second singing, the wavering stopped. The string and the voice became one sound on the word empty, and the sound was larger than either of them, and it filled the closed room like water fills a jar. I held my thumb still. I did not breathe. She went down to the end of the line and stopped, and I lifted my hand off the lute very slowly as though the fret were a bird.

The Shaykh got up from beside the window, for the first time in eight days, and came and knelt by me and looked at the neck of the lute without touching it.

"Again," he said to her. "Only that line."

She sang only that line. It was there.

He put a little of the wax against the neck on each side of the gut, pressing it with his thumbnail, so that the fret could not move.

---

He measured it in her court, where there was light. He set the lute flat across his knees and laid a thread along the string from the nut, where the strings leave the pegbox, to the bridge, and cut the thread at the bridge with my penknife. He folded the thread and folded it and measured it against a ruled board he had brought, and then took his brass dividers out of his sleeve and walked them down the string, many times, opening them a little and closing them a little, while I held the lute still and Ṭayyiba watched from her mattress through the open door.

It took him the time between the afternoon prayer and the sunset prayer. The dyers had started again and the gutter in the lane ran red.

When he had done he said to me, "Write."

I wrote what he said. The open string, from nut to bridge, divided into twenty-seven equal parts. The fret for the forefinger, which stands at the whole tone, at three parts from the nut, where every lute has it, and he checked it and it was so. The fret which the old Arab players used, a little more than four parts. The fret of the Persians, where it had been tied when we came, a little more again, but not yet four and a half. The fret of the ring finger, between five and six. The fret of Zalzal, as sung by Ṭayyiba in the Karkh, the woman taught by a woman taught by Zalzal's pupil: five parts of twenty-seven, exactly, from the nut. So that the part of the string that sounds, from the fret to the bridge, is twenty-two parts of twenty-seven.

"Twenty-two to twenty-seven," he said, and made me write that too, in figures and then in words, so that a copyist could not mistake it.

Then he went in and sat down in front of her and told her what he had found. He did not say it differently to her than he had said it to me. He told her about the twenty-seven parts and the five, and showed her the dividers. She listened politely, the way people listen to the explanation of a debt they have already paid.

When he had finished she said, "And now it is in your book."

"It will be."

"And a boy in Basra who has never heard me, and never heard the woman who taught me, will tie his fret with a thread and those brass legs, and play my song, and it will be right."

"The note will be right."

"And he will make people weep with it."

The Shaykh said, "I do not know. You made Ḥabīb weep. On the fifth day you put your own girl to sleep. It was the same note on all those days. He wrote it down."

She looked at him, and I could not tell what she thought. Then she held out her hand, and he put the money in it. I do not know how much. It was in a twist of cloth and he had brought it with him on the first day and carried it in his sleeve for eight days, under the dividers.

---

The good lute stayed with me. The Shaykh said it was mine now, because a lute with a fret fixed in wax was no use to a player, who must be able to move his frets, and no use to him, who had the number. He went back to his lodging by the river and his garden, and I went back to copying. His book on music, when it was done, was very long, and the part about the middle-finger frets is a few lines in the middle of it. I copied those lines twice, for two different men, and both times I copied the figures and then the words, as he had told me.

One evening at the end of Ramaḍān, when the fast had been broken and the house where I rented my room was quiet, I took the lute down from its nail. The wax was still on the neck where he had pressed it with his thumbnail. I tuned the open string. I did not sing, because I do not sing, and I did not think of the words. I played the line as she had sung it, the open string and up to the fret at five parts of twenty-seven and down again, slowly, twice.

In the court below my window my landlord's wife was scouring a pot. She was a woman from Wāsiṭ and I had never heard her sing, and I do not think she had ever been to the Karkh. The scouring stopped.

Then from below, in the dark, without any lute at all, she sang the second line.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (17 October 2026), ab Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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