Khan Al-Khalili (36 page)

Rushdi’s father walked directly behind the coffin, his intense sorrow seeking solace in faith and piety. When the funereal procession reached the mountain road, Ahmad’s emotions got the better of him—this very road had been a witness as morning after morning Rushdi had played the role of the young lover in pursuit of his love, heedless of his deadly illness. The love in his heart had been bought at the expense of his health, but then he had lost both of them. Dear God, could this road really bear witness, as the saying goes, to a friend’s deceit? Could it lead him to conclude
that the girl who had watched as Rushdi committed suicide for love of her had started to worry about catching the illness herself and cast him off into the wilderness?

The family tomb loomed ahead of them newly cleaned. The ground was covered with sand, and chairs had been set up in rows in front of the entrance. Water carriers moved among them. The tomb’s entrance looked like a mouth yawning in irritation as it watched life’s tragedy being repeated. The coffin was placed on the ground, and the covering was removed. Rushdi, wrapped in the shroud that Ahmad himself had chosen, was lifted up and clasped by hands, which then placed him into the ground. A moment later they re-emerged and started relentlessly piling earth on top of him. In just a few minutes he had completely disappeared, and the ground was level again. They then poured some water over the grave, as though somehow the crops had not been sufficiently watered yet.

Thus did a beloved person vanish forever and a life come to an end. In the blink of an eye a much-loved person simply disappears, and neither tears nor sorrows are of the slightest use. Now everyone went back, their emotions shattered. The wisdom that only yesterday had decreed that Rushdi should be a much-loved person now willed that he be forgotten. The apartment was gloomy, and the two parents were beside themselves. Rushdi’s room was cleaned, then the door was locked.

Around midnight, Ahmad went to his room, his mind full of reflections. Just then he smelled something in the air. Good heavens, that foul smell was still there, the terrifying stench of death! Next morning it was still hovering in the atmosphere. He worked out that it was coming from the street leading into the old part of Khan al-Khalili. He
opened the window and looked down. On the sidewalk he could see a dead dog, its stomach bloated and its flesh all puckered; it looked just like a waterskin and was covered in flies. For a while he stared at it, then looked away, his eyes welling with tears.

The days that followed were truly grim. Their father began to salve his bleeding wound with faith, but not even belief could find a way to assuage their mother’s abject grief. In fact, such was her agony that she actually started blaming God, “What harm would it have done to Your world if You had left me my son?”

She then turned to her husband. “This is an unlucky quarter,” she said angrily. “I agreed to come here against my will, and I’ve never liked it. It’s here that my son became ill and died. Let’s get out of here and with no regrets!”

Now she turned to Ahmad. “If you want to do something kind for your mother,” she said, “find us somewhere else to live.”

She hated the quarter and everyone who lived there. Ahmad had come to dislike it as well, but how was he supposed to find somewhere else when Cairo was going through such difficult times? Even so he spared no effort to respond to his mother’s wishes, commissioning all his friends to look for a place anywhere in the Cairo area; not only that, but he himself decided that one way of dealing with his own intense sense of loss was to wander far and wide around the city’s streets on the pretext of searching for a vacant place to live. Boss Nunu noticed how miserable Ahmad looked and did his best to cheer him up and draw him into their conversations. On one occasion he even invited Ahmad to visit Sitt Aliyat’s house again, but Ahmad declined.

I
n the days that followed there were a number of significant developments in the war. The Eighth Army withdrew from Jisr al-Fursan, and in the second half of June Tobruk fell into German hands. People kept talking about the danger of invasion. The friends gathered at the Zahra Café discussed the events in their usual way.

“This time,” Sayyid Arif commented gleefully, “Rommel’s march can’t be stopped!”

“All you German-lovers,” Ahmad Rashid commented sarcastically, “do you really imagine that if the Germans invade Egypt they’re going to come in peace? Isn’t it more likely that there’ll be a bloody war that will demolish everything standing?”

“What do we own in this country to worry about?” was Boss Zifta’s flippant comment. “Rich folk who don’t realize that the whole world is transient can worry all they want.”

“All I have,” Boss Nunu said, “is my own soul and those
of my children. They’re all in God’s hands, and Rommel will not have them unless God so decrees. That goes back millions of years, before Rommel was even created.”

He let out one of his guffaws. “I’ve made a pact with God,” he went on. “If Rommel enters Egypt and I’m still alive, I’m going to invite him to spend an evening at Sitt Aliyat’s house. Then he’ll see that Egyptian guns are much more effective than German ones.”

Ahmad shared with his parents the opinions that he kept hearing, telling them about the dangers of invasion and people’s fears that the air raids would now become more frequent and severe. It was almost as though he were trying to take their minds off their misery by making them scared instead.

One evening, Ahmad came home some four weeks after Rushdi’s death. He found his mother waiting for him.

“Nawal came to visit me this afternoon!” she said.

The name made his heart leap, and he grabbed hold of his tie.

“Why did she come?” he asked in amazement.

“She was very upset,” his mother went on. “We had barely greeted each other before she burst into tears. Her voice kept breaking as she spoke to me. ‘I know you’re angry with me,’ she said, ‘I know that you’re all angry. I’m sorry, but God knows, it wasn’t my fault, dear lady. They said I couldn’t visit him; they stopped me coming and kept a close eye on me. They refused to listen to me when I begged to see him and totally ignored my tears. I would never have behaved that way if I had had my way. In spite of everything, I never gave up until I forced my mother to bring me over when my father was out. That’s how we
came to visit you on that awful day that I can’t forget, that I’ll never forget as long as I live. Oh, dear lady, Rushdi gave me such a look, full of contempt and hatred. It tore my wounded, innocent heart to shreds. I realized, of course, that he was getting his revenge and how much he hated me. How I suffered because of that, and I’m still suffering now. But one day he’ll find out the truth; he’ll know that I didn’t do him wrong and I was never unfaithful to him.’ ”

Ahmad’s heart was pounding as he listened to his mother. “Do you think she’s telling the truth?” he asked.

His mother thought for a moment. “What I heard was her speaking from the heart,” she replied deliberately. “I can’t see why she’d take the trouble to tell lies now that it’s all over. I believe she was telling the truth, although I have to say that it only increases my hatred for her parents.”

Ahmad was deep in thought as he changed his clothes. Like his mother, he was inclined to believe the girl, and that made him happy. How sad that Rushdi had died, despairing of love just as he despaired of a cure. How unlucky they both were, the one who had died and the other who was still alive. Memories came flooding back to stir up his misery yet again.

“I beg Your forgiveness, O God!” he muttered to himself. “Couldn’t you have chosen me instead and left my brother alone? My life has been a failure and doesn’t deserve to continue, whereas Rushdi’s was rich and fulfilling and should have gone on forever. Again I beg Your forgiveness, O God!”

Just at that moment he felt a sudden urge to visit his brother’s locked room; he had wanted to do so several times, but had decided not to. This time, however, he could
not resist the temptation, moved as he was by feelings of both love and sorrow. As he left his own room, it was completely quiet; his father was asleep. Approaching the door, he was beset by a wave of depression. He turned the key in the lock, went inside, and turned the light on. He let his gaze wander distractedly around the empty room. A musty smell filled his nostrils; furniture had been piled up, and the desk was covered in a layer of dust that he wiped off. Everything suggested farewell. God, why had he ventured into this room when his tears had yet to dry? As he looked around, his eyes were drawn to the drawer in the middle of the desk and he remembered that Rushdi had kept his diary and photograph album in it. His heart told him to take them both back to his own room since the furniture was going to be sold either today or tomorrow. Opening the drawer, he took out the diary and album and blew the dust off them. Casting one final look around the room, he went out, convincing himself that he had gone there specifically to get the diary and album. He put them down on his own desk and stared at them long and hard. Opening the album at its first page, he discovered a large photograph showing Rushdi standing with his hands in his pockets. How handsome and full of life he looked! Just then he remembered the dead dog that had fouled his life for two whole days, and that made him even more morose.

He was anxious for the album to preserve its secrets, so he did not look any further. He picked up the diary without feeling any need to pry into its secrets, but even so he could not resist the urge to thumb through the final pages. He skimmed some of the headings: “new love,” he read,
“mountain road,” “talk of love,” “our hopes,” and then, “the kiss that kills.” That made his heart thump. What could that mean? Hadn’t Rushdi used the same expression sometimes when he was feeling particularly miserable? The heading was dated the 12th of January 1942, in other words when he had first found out that he had tuberculosis. Ahmad could not stop himself reading that section, his entire being throbbing with emotion:

Ahmad closed the diary and started pacing around the room, staggering as though he had just received a bang on the head. Throwing himself down on the bed, he started banging his forehead.

“O God,” he yelled, “how I wronged him! How often I accused him of being thoughtless!”

It felt like a saw cutting into his heart, and he let out a groan of pain.

T
he rest of June went by, ushering in the incredible heat of July. The family was still in mourning, and a general atmosphere of gloom pervaded the house. Out of pity for his parents Ahmad was still diligently searching for somewhere else to live; in fact, he was tired of Khan al-Khalili as well. The shock of Rushdi’s death had badly affected his sensitive nerves, and his old insomnia returned. This nervous sensitivity brought with it other symptoms: he could become emotional very quickly and often fell prey to worries that drove him into depression. Sorrows over both past and present clustered together inside his churning heart, and he was permanently fearful about what griefs, worries, and sorrows the future might be holding in store.

“Whatever happiness we may feel toward our loved ones today,” he told himself with his parents in mind, “is merely a pawn for the tears that we’ll be shedding when we say farewell to them on the morrow.”

He recited a line of poetry by Abu al-Ala’ al-Ma’arri: “If
calamity does not strike at night, then fortune’s decision will find you on the morrow!”

His nerves were useless when it came to enduring fate’s vicissitudes or life’s troubles, and he was on the point of falling prey to his old illness. All of which helps explain why he was so keen to leave the quarter, added to which was the fact that sirens kept going off day and night (although the city was not actually bombed as had happened the previous September).

The general situation became much more tense when Axis forces kept on advancing, crossed the Egyptian border, and penetrated deep into the country. They moved on past Marsa Matruh which was generally reckoned to be the most significant defense point for Egypt, then overran Fuka and Dab’a. When the invasion got as far as al-Alamein, general panic reached its height. The city of Alexandria was now in the invaders’ sights, and people started saying that the necessities of war were such that they threatened to turn Egypt into a crumbling ruin watched over by hooting owls and a mosquito-breeding swamp.

On the day German forces reached al-Alamein, the friends gathered at the Zahra Café as usual. They were all delighted to see each other, and there was much laughter. None of them had thought about leaving the quarter or stocking up on food. Not a single one of them had bothered to assess the potential impact of an invasion on the city; or, if they had, they were treating the whole thing as something to joke about, as though it really did not concern them at all.

“The whole thing’s in God’s hands,” was the word of the hour, “so whatever happens to everyone else can happen to us as well!”