Morning and Evening Talk (5 page)

When his tree burst into leaf and he became an important merchant she said to him, “God has given you wealth to test you. Be careful.”

Baligh loved her, but suspected she was not entirely sound in the head. Shahira had by this time returned to the family house as an outcast and filled it with cats, whereas Sadiqa … alas! What grief she suffered!

Qasim was Galila’s favorite grandchild. He would cover her with kisses and listen to her stories, trusting in her with his heart and senses. When what befell him came to pass she was not worried but said to Radia, “Rejoice. God has given you a saint.”

In the last five years of her life, toward the end of the first quarter of the twentieth century—at the beginning of the 1930s—she finally succumbed to old age. Her window to the world was obstructed by the loss of both her sight and hearing, yet she remained alert and would recognize her loved ones by touch. Shahira looked after her as much as she could until she tired of it; she had more compassion for her cats than for her mother. She would complain about her to Radia whenever she visited, so Radia took turns with her sister and reminded her of the Prophet’s bequest to mothers. “It’s easy to preach. You live venerated in your house and leave me on my own to carry out the bequest!” said Shahira.

On one of her visits, Radia found the hallway teeming with cats, mewing and running about wildly, warning that something was amiss. She discovered Galila lying lifeless on the sofa. Shahira was asleep upstairs.

Bayt al-Qadi Square and its trees weighed down with pasha’s beard flowers had never seen anyone more beautiful, except perhaps Amr’s daughter, Matariya. She borrowed her ivory complexion and wide green eyes from her mother, but had a prettier clove-shaped mouth and a better figure. In contrast to her mother, she surged with vitality and levity and derived the fieriness that tinged her cheeks with pink from her father. She was ahead of her time, not in terms of education, for like her sisters and female cousins her share only went as far as obliterating illiteracy, but in the impulsive, uninhibited behavior her premature maturity and dark yearnings unleashed in her. She would linger at the window watering the flowerpots, strut about the area between her house and her uncle’s next door in the half veil, and meet hungry glances with rebellious coquetry. As a
child, she wandered about the square with her older brother, Labib, and as the years passed Qasim joined them. She was a few years older than Qasim, but as she approached adolescence he was the only one around for her eager heart to toy with. Whenever they were alone together she would play with him to arouse him out of his innocence, and he would comply, confused, intoxicated, and delighted, as though seeing the beauty of dawn for the first time. His twitching fingertips touched jewels, ignorant of their value. He was not yet thirteen when he prematurely fell upon the honey. He opened up to her soft hand, dyed with henna like a rose, and inclined amiably to the effusions of her burning breast. The frivolity set her brother Amir against her. He berated her until she wept in frustration.

“Remember you’re her younger brother,” his mother said.

“But our reputation!”

“I know my daughter inside out. She’s a paragon of good breeding,” said Zaynab with the calm that never deserted her.

When Amir overstepped the mark his father, Surur Effendi, said, “Leave the matter to me.”

Surur Effendi tended toward tolerance and at the time was wondering why his brother Amr’s son had preferred Iffat, Abd al-Azim Pasha Dawud’s daughter, over Gamila.

“God will disappoint him. Isn’t our daughter prettier?” he said to his wife.

“Isn’t he the son of the mad Radia?” Zaynab said scornfully.

“My brother claims he is a Sufi but his desire to be close to the rich transcends his desire to be close to God.”

The truth was that Gamila frightened the conservative families in the neighborhood, and they shrank from her despite her beauty until destiny brought her a newly arrived officer at the Gamaliya police station called Ibrahim al-Aswani. He was tall, slim, and dark skinned. He saw her and found her very attractive and, finding she had a good reputation, proposed to her
without hesitation. Qasim knew only that his seducer and teacher had changed overnight, like an apple gone rotten. The girl he knew vanished and was overtaken by a sobriety that did not dissolve for some time. She was wedded to her groom at his house in Darb al-Gamamiz in a celebration brought to life by al-Sarafiya and the singer Anur.

It was not long before the husband’s work took the new family away from Cairo. Years went by, and they rose and went to bed without the birth of a child. Surur Effendi died before he was able to see any grandchildren through Gamila. Meanwhile, matters transpired for Ibrahim al-Aswani. He was a Wafd sympathizer. His sentiments became known through the lack of zeal he displayed in executing his duties during the dictatorship and, in the end, he was dismissed. He had inherited twenty feddans so traveled to his family in Aswan and publicly joined the Wafd party. He was elected to the House of Representatives and remained a permanent member of the Wafd. After fertility treatment, Gamila gave birth to five sons, of whom Surur and Muhammad survived. Marriage transformed her frivolity into impressive composure, extraordinary gravity, and generous motherhood. Her ever-increasing corpulence became proverbial. Ibrahim al-Aswani was prone to agitation and mood changes, but she was an ocean capable of receiving high waves and surging emotions and absorbing them with patience and perseverance, so as to restore him to perfect calm and self-control. Thus, it was right that she should be the one to advise Matariya’s daughter, Amana, that, “A wife must be a tamer of wild beasts.”

When the July Revolution came, Ibrahim al-Aswani was sure his political life was over. He retired to his land and devoted himself to farming. His sons, Surur and Muhammad, had joined the air force, but this branch of the family was destined for irrevocable extinction: Ibrahim al-Aswani was killed in a train crash in 1955 when he was fifty-five and Gamila only fifty;
Surur’s plane was hit in the war of 1956 and he perished; and his brother, Muhammad, followed in the war of 1967. Gamila was delivered from her loneliness and sadness in 1970, dying of stomach cancer at the age of sixty-three. At the time of her death she resembled a branch without shoots on a family tree.

F
ROM THE VERY BEGINNING
he was antisocial and reclusive. He would stand in front of the house, away from his brothers and sisters and cousins, and watch people coming and going from the alleys off the square. He never once entered his uncle Amr’s house. Amr would laugh and say to Surur, “Your son Hazim hates mankind.” He was good looking like his mother, small like Bahiga, and nearsighted to the point of blindness in his left eye. He was never seen laughing or excited. His brilliance became clear in Qur’an school and he was near to repeating the success story of his older brother Labib. He kept to himself and had no goal in life other than to succeed; his relatives from Ata and Dawud’s families did not even know he existed. His outstanding achievements meant his father did not spend a millieme on his education and he entered the faculty of engineering with a remission of fees fully deserved. It was clear to his brother Amir that he did not know the prime minister’s name, read the papers, or connect emotionally with any wave in the sea of events stirring the nation. “Do you think the world is just about study?” Amir asked him. But no one could draw him into a discussion. When Amir was martyred in his jihad, Hazim was perplexed, silent, and dejected. But he did not utter a word or shed a tear and it was not long before he resumed life as usual.

He graduated as an engineer in 1938 but, because of his disability, did not head for the civil service. Instead, he found a better job at the building contractors of Dr. Muhammad Salama, who had been one of his teachers at school. The engineering professor was impressed by him and liked him. He regarded him as a model of intelligence and action, who steered clear of trouble. He would visit his teacher at his villa in Dokki and carry out various tasks, and there got to know Samiha, his daughter. Samiha was acceptable looking, but more importantly she was the daughter of his manager and teacher. He noticed the bey encouraged the acquaintance and this surprised him, given the man knew his humble origins and poverty. Nevertheless, he let vanity get the better of him until they were married and he had taken up residence in one of the apartments in a building the doctor owned and reckoned himself king of the world. The truth then began to emerge and he faced a situation that bespoke trouble: the bride’s nervous side. She soon revealed a personality that was impossible to get along with. She was a hurricane that blew up and spread for the feeblest reasons, sometimes no reason whatsoever. He had a constitution that naturally deflected lightning bolts, inherited from his mother, Sitt Zaynab. He lived by his head, not his heart. Thus, seated in his living room, wrapped in navy blue silk robes and submerged in an armchair, he said to himself: So be it. The marriage is equitable at any rate. It promised him a future free of the need to dream while he possessed the intelligence and ambition to exploit what advantages there might be. If Samiha had been a perfect bride, or even just average, she would have married someone from the upper class to which she belonged, or a diplomat. Her father had given her to him after much thought and deliberation and he must accept the gift with similar thought and deliberation. He also said to himself: If she’s the patient then I’m the doctor. And so he was.

The major deaths in Surur and Amr’s families came in
succession shortly before the Second World War: first Amr, then Surur, then Zaynab. Samiha tired of visiting Hazim’s mother, father, and siblings and decided in a moment of madness not to take part in the mourning ceremonies.

He looked at her pleadingly. “But.…”

His tone was loaded with meaning but she shot back vehemently, “I’m not going anywhere near that vermin-infested square. Nor do I want anyone from it coming to me.”

He did not get angry and his face gave nothing away. Relations between him and his family were soon severed and he merged into her family, becoming a shadow of it and forgetting his roots. Yet his blind obedience did not guarantee him peace. Once, when he and his wife were alone after an evening in his apartment with his mother-in-law, her sister, and some of her relatives, she said to him, “I’m not impressed. You were too quiet. What few words escaped you were meaningless.”

“Too much talking gives me a headache and no interesting subjects came up,” he apologized with the utmost decorum and delicacy.

“So if we’re not talking about engineering it’s nonsense?” she bellowed.

He obliged her with a smile but she flew into a rage and roared the cruelest insults. She grabbed an expensive vase and hurled it at the wall. It shattered and the shards showered onto the embroidered sofa cover. He looked at her and smiled apprehensively then said affectionately, “Nothing in the world is worth you getting this angry about.”

But the apartment also witnessed embraces and parenthood, and she gave birth to Husni and Adham. Hazim rose through the company, relying on perseverance and aptitude, and Muhammad Bey Salama relied on him increasingly as the days passed. Then, after the bey’s death, he took his place as Samiha’s proxy. He added to the capital with his own savings and, under him, the company prospered even more than it had
previously. He built a villa in Dokki and his family moved there. He digested all Samiha’s outbursts with extraordinary heroism, though some were difficult to stomach. For instance, Muhammad Bey Salama had been a member of the Wafd party whereas Hazim was indifferent to politics but, confronted with Samiha’s zeal, would profess Wafdism in the home at least. His cool announcements were not, however, enough. He returned to the apartment one day to find a picture of al-Nahhas hanging in place of the picture of his father, Surur Effendi. He looked in silence without daring to comment. “I’m superstitious about pictures of the dead. This is a picture of the nation’s leader,” Samiha said. He said nothing, even when Muhammad Bey Salama and al-Nahhas died and their pictures remained in their places. On the day the family moved to the new villa she laughed loudly and said, “Praise be to God, you fool. We’ve raised you from the bottom to the top.”

“Praise God for everything,” he said submissively.

She frowned. “Don’t forget the gratitude you owe me.”

“You are generous and blessed,” he replied with usual cool.

When the July Revolution came he worried his feigned Wafdism had spread beyond the walls of the house, but he was not exposed to any trouble. He assiduously applauded the revolution in the workplace while berating it at home in front of Samiha, his eyes scrutinizing his surroundings and seeking refuge in God. “Have you heard of a country ruled by a group of constables?” she would say in exasperation at every opportunity.

He would interrupt and whisper in her ear, “Be careful of the servants … the walls … the air.…”