A Fifth Colour So We Can Meet

Whenever I grow attached to someone, whenever they touch my soul, they vanished. I do not mean travelling or ignoring my calls. No, they disappear from existence! I think it is a curse I inherited from my father. When I was little, I used to ask him why he had no friends in his life. He would answer from behind a cloud of cigarette smoke hiding his face: “Because they disappeared, son.” I did not understand what he meant by “disappeared” until my first close friend at university, Adam, disappeared. Jokes spilled out of him the way a flower releases its fragrance. But after he made a joke about the President, Adam disappeared, and our laughter vanished with him. Later, several friends and neighbours disappeared during the war. But Maxim’s disappearance was entirely different — not because he was in Canada, but because the way he disappeared was unbelievable.

I met Maxim at the community centre. I just had recently moved into the neighbourhood and wanted to explore the activities at the centre and volunteer as a dance instructor. When I entered the hall, I found a thin man whose thick goat beard and round glasses gave him the look of Anton Chekhov. I smiled when I saw him, but what made me smile even more was the group of children gathered around him like kittens, as he taught them how to draw butterflies and flowers with pastel colours and their tiny fingers. I remember how he lifted his head and noticed me standing by the door. He raised the eyeglasses hanging at the tip of his nose, looked at me for a few seconds, smiled, and invited me in Arabic to join them.

He brought tea and small clear glasses, welcoming me into his home. After our first meeting, he invited me to his tiny apartment. It was very small, crowded with sketches and paintings. There was something strange about them: green skies, violet seas, blue faces. I understood everything when I noticed the black tape wrapped around every paint tube.

Maxim would close the curtains and turn off the lights, then switch on a blue lamp, light incense scented with sandalwood and cinnamon, and pour himself a glass of cheap whisky. After the first glass, he would choose the first paint tube his hand landed on. He would place a colour onto the wooden palette, and with the second glass he would do the same, until he reached the fourth glass. Then he would stand before the empty canvas and begin painting without knowing what those colours were. In the morning, he would wake from his drunkenness, brew a huge pot of Arabic coffee, then open the curtains and sit before the painting, studying it in silence.

Maxim became my best friend, or my only one. He was my father’s age, yet I never once imagined him as a father. Maybe because he was my father’s opposite—or so I believed. Both of them lived without friends, though I do not know whether Maxim’s friends disappeared from his life, or whether he vanished from their lives.

Both loved playing hide-and-seek: one behind a cloud of smoke, the other behind a canvas.

The difference was that if you swept the cloud aside, you would find my father’s face—deeply lined, rigid as stone, emptied of anticipation. Even when he laughed, by accident, he was most likely mocking his own life. Maxim, on the other hand, hid beneath his enormous moustache a smile that never left him. Yet beneath that smile were teeth surrendered to drink, and a shattered heart whose missing pieces could never be put back together.

Maxim let me fly through his apartment like his yellow and blue butterflies, while he spent hours in the kitchen preparing a heavy Syrian meal. Not because he was hiding the secret of those delicious flavors, but because he wanted me to discover him through his paintings and the chaos of his home. And what a difficult task that was—for getting to know Maxim was like walking through a vast dark house.

Photo by Fadi Alagi on Unsplash

Maxim never wanted to come to Canada. Syria was everything to him. He inherited that love from his Russian mother, who fell in love with Syria after leaving Leningrad and arriving there with his father. His father had returned from the Soviet Union with a master’s degree in fine arts and a beautiful Russian wife who spoke` Arabic in an accent that sounded as though she were cracking stones with a metal spoon.

After extremist Islamist groups burned his paintings and his studio in Damascus, and the Assad regime forced him to work as a translator communicating with the Russian troops that had spread across the country like flies, Maxim decided to save what he had left: his wife and daughter. But death had already packed itself into the family’s suitcase, the one packed with fragments and shadows of memory. A few months after their arrival to Canada, cancer consumed the brain of his wife, his beloved, and the companion of his soul, Rose.

At the beginning of summer, Maxim told me he would travel to another province to spend the summer with his daughter and grandchildren. It felt like a long time to me. I had grown adapted to my strange routine with Maxim. We kept in touch once a week, or through random messages, most of them sketches and drawings of his grandchildren. Autumn passed and Maxim did not return, until he called and told me he would come back in mid-November. But he never called me. I told myself he probably needed time to recover from travelling and the energy of the grandchildren. Yet here came the second week, and Maxim still had not called.

I contacted his landlord, and together with the police we entered the apartment. Everything was exactly as it had been, as though Maxim had never left. They searched everywhere, but there was no trace of him. When I saw the curtains closed and the blue light still glowing, an unsettling feeling came over me. He had been here the previous night, performing his painting ritual. But the curtains had not been opened, nor was there any sign of the pot of coffee.

I opened the curtain and approached the painting. Its colours were magnificent, composed with a strange harmony unlike any of his other works. It was a painting of an old Damascene alleyway. In the foreground stood a large blooming pomegranate tree, and above it stretched a blue sky without clouds, but full of butterflies.

However, there were two strange things about the painting. The first was that this time Maxim had painted with five colours instead of four. But what was the second thing?... I stepped closer to the painting and saw, on the ground of that alleyway, heavy footprints trailing patches of snow behind them. And softer ones, smaller ones, beside them, seemingly belonging to a woman!

Calgary, Canada.

2026