The Beggar, the Thief and the Dogs, Autumn Quail

  Enraged, Tarzan yelled at him, “Shut up, will you! You seem to think a hangman’s rope is some sort of a joke!”

  Said left the coffeehouse. Clutching the revolver in his pocket, walking off into the open darkness, he looked cautiously around him, listening as he went. His consciousness of fear, of being alone and hunted, was even stronger now and he knew he must not underestimate his enemies, fearful themselves, but so eager to catch him that they would not rest till they saw him a corpse, laid out and still.

  As he neared the house in Sharia Najm al-Din he saw light in Nur’s window. It gave him a sense of security for the first time since he’d left the coffeehouse. He found her lying down and wanted to caress her, but it was obvious from her face that she was terribly tired. Her eyes were red. Clearly, something was wrong. He sat down at her feet.

  “Please tell me what’s wrong, Nur,” he said.

  “I’m worn out,” she said weakly. “I’ve vomited so much I’m exhausted.”

  “Was it drink?”

  “I’ve been drinking all my life,” she said, her eyes brimming with tears.

  This was the first time Said had seen her cry and he was deeply moved. “What was the reason, then?” he said.

  “They beat me!”

  “The police?”

  “No, some young louts, probably students, when I asked them to pay the bill.”

  Said was touched. “Why not wash your face,” he said, “and drink some water?”

  “A little later. I’m too tired now.”

  “The dogs!” Said muttered, tenderly caressing her leg.

  “The fabric for the uniform,” Nur said, pointing to a parcel on the other sofa. He made a gesture with his hand affectionately and in gratitude.

  “I can’t look very attractive for you tonight,” she said almost apologetically.

  “It’s not your fault. Just wash your face and get some sleep.”

  Up in the graveyard heights a dog barked and Nur let out a long, audible sigh. “And she said, ‘You have such a rosy future!’ ” she murmured sadly.

  “Who?”

  “A fortune-teller. She said there’d be security, peace of mind.” Said stared out at the blackness of night piled up outside the window as she went on: “When will that ever be? It’s been such a long wait, and all so useless. I have a girlfriend, a little older than me, who always says we’ll become just bones or even worse than that, so that even dogs will loathe us.” Her voice seemed to come from the very grave and so depressed Said that he could find nothing to say in reply. “Some fortune-teller!” she said. “When is she going to start telling the truth? Where is there any security? I just want to sleep safe and secure, wake up feeling good, and have a quiet, pleasant time. Is that so impossible—for him who raised the Seven Heavens?”

  You, too, used to dream of a life like that, but it’s all been spent climbing up drainpipes, jumping down from roofs, and being chased in the dark, with badly aimed bullets killing innocent people.

  “You need to get some sleep,” he told her, thoroughly depressed.

  “What I need is a promise,” she said. “A promise from the fortune-teller. And that day will come.”

  “Good.”

  “You’re treating me like a child,” she said angrily.

  “Never.”

  “That day really will come!”

  TWELVE

  Nur watched him as he tried on the uniform, staring at him in surprised delight, until he’d done up the last button. Then, after a moment or two, she said, “Do be sensible. I couldn’t bear to lose you again.”

  “This was a good idea,” Said said, displaying his work and examining his reflection in the mirror. “I suppose I’d better be satisfied with the rank of captain!”

  By the next evening, however, she’d heard all about his recent dramatic adventure and seen pictures of him in a copy of a weekly magazine belonging to one of her transient male companions. She broke down in front of him. “You’ve killed someone!” she said, letting out the words with a wail of despair. “How terrible! Didn’t I plead with you?”

  “But it happened before we met,” he said, caressing her.

  She looked away. “You don’t love me,” she said wanly. “I know that. But at least we could have lived together until you did love me!”

  “But we can still do that.”

  “What’s the use,” she said, almost crying, “when you’ve committed murder?”

  “We can run away together,” Said said with a reassuring grin. “It’s easy.”

  “What are we waiting for, then?”

  “For the storm to blow over.”

  Nur stamped her foot in frustration. “But I’ve heard that there are troops blocking all the exits from Cairo, as if you were the first murderer ever!”

  The newspapers! Said thought. All part of the secret war! But he hid his feelings and showed her only his outward calm. “I’ll get away all right,” he said, “as soon as I decide to. You’ll see.” Pretending a sudden rage, he gripped her by the hair and snarled: “Don’t you know yet who Said Mahran is? All the papers are talking about him! You still don’t believe in him? Listen to me; we’ll live together forever. And you’ll see what the fortune-teller told you come true!”

  Next evening, escaping from his loneliness and hoping for news, he slipped out again to Tarzan’s coffeehouse, but as soon as he appeared in the doorway Tarzan hurried over and took him out into the open, some distance off. “Please, don’t be angry with me,” he said apologetically. “Even my café is no longer safe for you.”

  “But I thought the storm had died down now,” Said said, the darkness hiding his concern.

  “No. It’s getting worse all the time. Because of the newspapers. Go into hiding. But forget about trying to get out of Cairo for a while.”

  “Don’t the papers have anything to go on about but Said Mahran?”

  “They made such a lot of noise to everyone about your past raids that they’ve got all the government forces in the area stirred up against you.” Said got up to leave. “We can meet again—outside the café—anytime you wish,” Tarzan remarked as they said goodbye.

  So Said went back to his hideout in Nur’s house—the solitude, the dark, the waiting—where he suddenly found himself roaring, “It’s you, Rauf, you’re behind all this!” By this time, all the papers had dropped his case, all except Al-Zahra. It was still busy raking up the past, goading the police; by trying so hard to kill him, in fact, it was making a national hero of him. Rauf Ilwan would never rest until the noose was around his neck, and Rauf had all the forces of repression: the law.

  And you. Does your ruined life have any meaning at all unless it is to kill your enemies—Ilish Sidra, whereabouts unknown, and Rauf Ilwan, in his mansion of steel? What meaning will there have been to your life if you fail to teach your enemies a lesson? No power on earth will prevent the punishing of the dogs! That’s right! No power on earth!

  “Rauf Ilwan,” Said pleaded aloud, “tell me how it is that time can bring such terrible changes to people!” Not just a revolutionary student, but revolution personified as a student. Your stirring voice, pitching itself downward toward my ears as I sat at my father’s feet in the courtyard of the building, with a force to awaken the very soul. And you’d talk about princes and pashas, transforming those fine gentlemen with your magic into mere thieves. And to see you on Mudiriyya Road, striding out amidst your men you called your equals as they munched their sugarcane in their flowing gallabiyyas, when your voice would reach such a pitch that it seemed to flow right over the field and make the palm tree bow before it—unforgettable. Yes, there was a strange power in you that I found nowhere else, not even in Sheikh Ali al-Junaydi.

  That’s how you were, Rauf. To you alone goes the credit for my father’s enrolling me in school. You’d roar with delighted laughter at my success. “Do you see now?” you’d say to my father. “You didn’t even want him to get an education. Just you look at those eyes of his; he’s goi
ng to shake things to their foundations!” You taught me to love reading. You discussed everything with me, as if I were your equal. I was one of your listeners—at the foot of the same tree where the history of my love began—and the times themselves were listening to you, too: “The people! Theft! The holy fire! The rich! Hunger! Justice!”

  The day you were imprisoned you rose up in my eyes to the very sky, higher still when you protected me the first time I stole, when your remarks about theft gave me back my self-respect. Then there was the time you told me sadly, “There’s no real point in isolated theft; there has to be organization.” After that I never stopped either reading or robbing. It was you who gave me the names of people who deserved to be robbed, and it was in theft that I found my glory, my honor. And I was generous to many people, Ilish Sidra among them.

  Said shouted in anger to the darkened room: “Are you really the same one? The Rauf Ilwan who owns a mansion? You’re the fox behind the newspaper campaign. You, too, want to kill me, to murder your conscience and the past as well. But I won’t die before I’ve killed you: you’re the number one traitor. What nonsense life would turn out to be if I were myself killed tomorrow—in retribution for murdering a man I didn’t even know! If there’s going to be any meaning to life—and to death, too—I simply have to kill you. My last outburst of rage at the evil of the world. And all those things lying out there in the graveyard below the window will help me. As for the rest, I’ll leave it to Sheikh Ali to solve the riddle.”

  Just when the call to the dawn prayers was announced he heard the door open and Nur came in carrying some grilled meat, drinks, and newspapers. She seemed quite happy, having apparently forgotten her two days of distress and depression, and her presence dispelled his own gloom and exhaustion, made him ready again to embrace what life had to offer: food, drink, and news. She kissed him and, for the first time, he responded spontaneously, with a sense of gratitude, knowing her now to be the person closest to him for as long as he might live. He wished she’d never leave.

  He uncorked a bottle as usual, poured himself a glass, and drank it down in one gulp.

  “Why didn’t you get some sleep?” Nur said, peering closely at his tired face.

  Flipping through the newspapers, he made no reply.

  “It must be torture to wait in the dark,” she said, feeling sorry for him.

  “How are things outside?” he asked, tossing the papers aside.

  “Just like always.” She undressed down to her slip and Said smelled powder moistened with sweat. “People are talking about you,” she went on, “as if you were some storybook hero. But they don’t have any idea what torture we go through.”

  “Most Egyptians neither fear nor dislike thieves,” said Said as he bit into a piece of meat. Several minutes passed in silence while they ate, then he added: “But they do have an instinctive dislike for dogs.”

  “Well,” said Nur with a smile, licking her fingertips, “I like dogs.”

  “I don’t mean that kind of dog.”

  “Yes, I always had one at home until I saw the last one die. That made me cry a lot and so I decided not to have one again.”

  “That’s right,” said Said. “If love’s going to cause problems, just steer clear of it.”

  “You don’t understand me. Or love me.”

  “Don’t be like that,” he said, pleading. “Can’t you see the whole world is cruel enough and unjust enough as it is?”

  Nur drank until she could hardly sit up. Her real name was Shalabiyya, she confessed. Then she told him tales of the old days in Balyana, of her childhood amid the quiet waters, of her youth and how she’d run away. “And my father was the umda,” she said proudly, “the village headman.”

  “You mean the umda’s servant!” She frowned, but he went on: “Well, that’s what you told me first.”

  Nur laughed so heartily that Said could see bits of parsley caught in her teeth. “Did I really say that?” she asked.

  “Yes. And that’s what turned Rauf Ilwan into a traitor.”

  She stared at him uncomprehendingly. “And who’s Rauf Ilwan?”

  “Don’t lie to me,” Said snarled. “A man who has to stay in the dark, waiting by himself, a man like that can’t stand lies.”

  THIRTEEN

  A little after midnight, with a quarter-moon shining faintly in the west, Said headed off across the wasteland. A hundred yards or so from the café he stopped, whistled three times, and stood waiting, feeling that he had to strike his blow or else go mad, hoping that Tarzan would have some information at last.

  When Tarzan appeared, moving like a wave of darkness, they embraced and Said asked him, “What’s new?”

  “One of them’s finally turned up,” the stout man replied, out of breath from walking.

  “Who?” Said asked anxiously.

  “It’s Bayaza,” said Tarzan, still gripping his hand, “and he’s in my place now, clinching a deal.”

  “So my waiting wasn’t wasted. Do you know which way he’s going?”

  “He’ll go back by Jabal Road.”

  “Thanks very much indeed, friend.”

  Said left quickly, making his way east, guided by the faint moonlight to the clump of trees around the wells. He moved on along the south side of the grove until he reached its tip, ending in the sands where the road up the mountain began. There he crouched behind a tree and waited.

  A cool breeze sent a whisper through the grove. It was a desolate, lonely spot. Gripping his revolver hard, he pondered the chance that might now be at hand, to bear down on his enemy and achieve his long-awaited goal. And then death, a final resting place. “Ilish Sidra,” he said aloud, heard only by the trees as they drank in the breeze, “and then Rauf Ilwan. Both in one night. After that, let come what may.”

  Tense, impatient, he did not have long to wait for a figure to come hurrying in the dark from the direction of the café toward the tip of the woods. When there was only a yard or two left between the man and the road, Said leaped out, leveling his revolver.

  “Stop!” he roared.

  The man stopped as if hit by a bolt of electricity, and stared at Said speechless.

  “Bayaza, I know where you were, what you’ve been doing, how much cash you’re carrying.”

  The man’s breath came forth in a hiss and his arm made a slight, hesitant movement, a twitch. “The money’s for my children,” he gasped.

  Said slapped him hard across the face, making him blink. “You still don’t recognize me, Bayaza, you dog!”

  “Who are you? I know your voice, but I can’t believe…” Bayaza said, then cried out, “Said Mahran!”

  “Don’t move! The first move you make, you’re dead.”

  “You kill me? Why? We’ve no reason to be enemies.”

  “Well, here’s one,” muttered Said, stretching his hand to reach into the man’s clothing, locating the heavy purse, and ripping it loose.

  “But that’s my money. I’m not your enemy.”

  “Shut up. I haven’t got all I want yet.”

  “But we’re old pals. That’s something you should respect.”

  “If you want to live, tell me where Ilish Sidra is staying.”

  “I don’t know,” Bayaza replied emphatically. “No one knows.”

  Said slapped him again, harder than before. “I’ll kill you if you don’t tell me where he is,” he shouted. “And you won’t get your money back until I know you’re telling the truth!”

  “I don’t know. I swear I don’t know,” Bayaza whispered.

  “You liar!”

  “I’ll swear any oath you like!”

  “You’re telling me he’s disappeared completely, dissolved like salt in water?”

  “I really don’t know. No one knows. He moved out right after your visit, afraid of what you might do. I’m telling the truth. He moved to Rod al-Farag.”

  “His address?”

  “Wait, Said,” he pleaded. “And after Shaban Husayn was killed he took hi
s family away again. He didn’t tell anyone where. He was scared, all right, and his wife was, too. And no one knows anything more about them.”

  “Bayaza!”

  “I swear I’m telling the truth!” Said hit him again, and the man groaned with pain and fear. “Why are you beating me, Said? God damn Sidra wherever he may be; is he my brother or my father that I would die on his account?”

  At last, and reluctantly, Said believed him and began to lose hope of ever finding his enemy. If only he wasn’t a hunted man, wanted for murder, he would bide his time and wait patiently for the proper opportunity! But that misdirected shot of his had struck at the heart of his own most intense desire.

  “You’re being unfair to me,” said Bayaza. When Said did not reply, he went on: “And what about my money? I never harmed you.” He held a hand to the side of his face where Said had struck him. “And you’ve no right to take my money. We used to work together!”

  “And you were always one of Sidra’s buddies, too.”

  “Yes, I was his friend and his partner, but that doesn’t mean I’m your enemy. I had nothing to do with what he did to you.”

  The fight was over now and a retreat was the only course. “Well,” Said told him, “I’m in need of some cash.”

  “Take what you like, then,” said Bayaza.

  Said was satisfied with ten pounds. The other man left, dazed, as if he scarcely believed his escape, and Said found himself alone again in the desert, the light from the moon brighter now and the whispering of the trees harsher. So Ilish Sidra has slipped out of his clutches, escaped his due punishment, rescued his own treacherous self, adding one to the number of scot-free traitors. Rauf, the only hope I have left is in you, that you won’t make me lose my life in vain.

  FOURTEEN

  By the time Said had returned to the flat, dressed in his officer’s uniform, and left, it was well after one o’clock. He turned toward Abbasiyya Street, avoiding the lights and forcing himself to walk very naturally, then took a taxi to Gala’s Bridge, passing an unpleasant number of policemen en route.