Children of the Alley

  “It’s a miniaturized mansion,” said Arafa. “Only without secrets.”

  “What about your magic?” asked Hanash. “Doesn’t that count as a secret?”

  “No one even dreams of places like this,” said Awatif, wide-eyed.

  The three looked and smelled different—even their complexions were better. But no sooner had they settled in than a group of men and women visited them; the first said he was the gatekeeper, the second the cook, the third the gardener and the fourth the poultry manager. The rest were house servants.

  Arafa was amazed. “Who told you to come here?”

  “His excellency the overseer,” said the gatekeeper, speaking for the rest.

  Shortly afterward, Arafa was summoned to meet the overseer. Qadri spoke first, once they were seated side by side in an alcove off the reception hall. “We will meet often, Arafa. I hope I didn’t trouble you by calling you here.”

  Actually, he was very troubled by the meeting, the place and the man, but he smiled. “I’m happy to see you,” he said.

  “Your magic has made us all happy. Do you like the house?”

  “It’s more than a dream,” said Arafa shyly. “Especially the dreams of poor people like us. Today all kinds of servants reported to us!”

  “They are my people,” said the overseer, gazing steadily into his face. “I sent them to you, to serve and protect you.”

  “Protect me!”

  Qadri laughed. “Yes. Don’t you know that your moving here is the talk of the whole alley? They’re saying among themselves, ‘He’s the one who made the magic bottles.’ The gangsters’ families want revenge, as you know, and everyone else is dying of envy. What with all that, you’re surrounded by danger. My advice to you is not to trust anyone—or to go out alone, or too far from your house!”

  Arafa frowned. What was he but a prisoner encircled by anger and hatred?

  “Don’t be afraid, though. My men will be all around you. Enjoy the life you want, in your house or here in mine. What do you have to lose except the desert and the slums? Don’t forget that the people of our alley say that Saadallah was killed by the same weapon that killed Agag, and that the murderer who got into Saadallah’s house used the same means to get into the mansion before that. That the same person killed Agag, Saadallah and Gabalawi, and that the person is Arafa the magician.”

  “This is a curse on my head!” cried Arafa convulsively.

  “You don’t have to worry, as long as you’re under my protection, with my servants around you.”

  You bastard, you’ve thrown me into a prison. The only reason I wanted magic was to get rid of people like you, not to serve you. Now the people I loved and wanted to save detest me, and one of them might kill me.

  “Distribute the gangsters’ shares in the estate among the people, and they’ll be happy with both of us!”

  Qadri laughed scornfully. “So why get rid of the gangsters?” he asked. He fixed Arafa with a cold stare. “You’re looking for a way to please them? Forget that. Get used to other people hating you, as I have, and don’t forget that your real safety is my being pleased with you.”

  “I was and still am your servant,” he said hopelessly.

  The overseer looked up at the ceiling as if contemplating its embellishments, then looked down again. “I hope that enjoying your new life doesn’t take you away from your magic.”

  Arafa nodded.

  “And that you make as many magic bottles as you can!”

  “You don’t need more than we have now,” said Arafa cautiously.

  Qadri masked his irritation with a smile. “Wouldn’t it be wisest to have plenty of them on hand?”

  He did not reply. He was filled with despair. Had his turn come this quickly? he wondered. Suddenly he spoke. “Your excellency, if my staying here is a problem for you, let me go away and not come back.”

  “What did you say?” asked the man, looking confused.

  Arafa stared at him candidly. “I know that my life is subject to your need for me.”

  “Don’t think I take your intelligence lightly,” said Qadri with a mirthless laugh. “And I admit that you’re thinking soundly. But how can you think that my need for you ends with bottles? Isn’t your magic capable of other things?”

  But Arafa resumed his statement, somewhat sternly. “Your men are the ones who went around revealing the secret of the services I’ve done for you, I’m sure of that. But you also have to remember that you need me to live.”

  The overseer frowned menacingly, but Arafa went on uninterrupted. “You have no gangsters now. The only power you have is from those bottles, and you have too few of them to make any difference. If I died today, you’d follow me either tomorrow or the next day.”

  The overseer leaned toward him like a beast of prey, then suddenly snatched his neck in his hands, squeezing it until his body shook. Then he abruptly released his hold and sat back, with a smile of loathing. “Look what your impudent tongue made me do! We have no reason to quarrel. We can enjoy victory and live in peace.”

  Arafa was breathing heavily to recover from the shock, while the other man continued to speak. “Don’t be afraid that I will take your life. I will protect it like my own. Enjoy the world, and don’t forget your magic, whose blossoms we pick together. And know that if either of us betrays the other, he betrays himself.”

  Awatif and Hanash frowned as Arafa repeated the conversation for them in the new house. It seemed that all three of them lacked true safety in this new life. But they forgot the reasons for their unease at supper around a wonderful table covered with the most delicious foods and mellow old wine. For the first time Arafa’s voice was raised in laughter, and Hanash’s torso shook with mirth. They lived their lives as circumstances required. They worked together in a room behind the hall they had prepared for magic. Arafa diligently inscribed the symbols they had agreed upon in a notebook only the two of them knew about. Once, while they were working, Hanash told him, “What prisoners we are!”

  “Lower your voice,” Arafa cautioned him. “The walls have ears.”

  Hanash looked hatefully over at the door, and lowered his voice to a whisper. “Isn’t it possible for you to make a new weapon, without his knowing, so that we could get rid of him?”

  “We wouldn’t be able to test it secretly, with all these servants,” said Arafa crossly. “He knows everything that goes on with us. And if we get rid of him, the alley people who want our blood will get us before we could defend ourselves from them.”

  “So why are you so hard at work?”

  “Because work is all I have,” Arafa sighed.

  Late in the afternoon, he would go to the house of the overseer, who sat him down and gave him drinks, and come home at night to find that Hanash had prepared a little hashish for him in the garden or the room with wooden screens, and they would smoke it together. Arafa had never been a hashish smoker, but he was carried along by the current, and he was worn down by boredom. Even Awatif began to learn these things. They all needed to forget their boredom, fear, desperation and depressed feelings of guilt, along with the high hopes of the past. Despite all this, the men had work, though Awatif had none. She ate until she felt sick, and slept until she was tired of lying down; she spent long hours in the garden, enjoying all its beauties, remembering that she was now pampered with the life Adham had longed for. It was boring! How could anyone want it badly enough to grieve over it? Perhaps it would be very nice if it were not a prison; not surrounded by enemies and hatred. But it would remain a prison, encircled by loathing, with no escape but the hashish pipe. Once, Arafa was late coming back from the overseer’s house, and she decided to wait for him in the garden. Night advanced like a caravan led by its camel driver, the moon. She listened to the melody of the branches and the croaking of frogs. She heard the sound of the gate opening, and got up to greet him, but the rustle of clothing from the direction of the basement caught her ear. From where she stood, she saw the figure of a servant girl in t
he moonlight, heading toward the gate, unaware of Awatif. Arafa came staggering in. The servant turned to the wall leading out from the terrace, and he followed her, and Awatif saw them come together, hidden from the moonlight by the shadow of the wall.

  109

  Awatif exploded, as would any woman of Gabalawi Alley, and pounced like a lioness on the clinging twosome. She punched Arafa in the head, and he fell back, dazed, and staggered until he lost his balance and fell down. Then she sank her nails into the servant’s neck and beat her on the head until her shrieks split the night’s silence. Arafa struggled up, but did not dare go near the fight. Hanash came running, followed by several servants, but when he found out what had happened, he sent the servants away and got between the two women as decorously and skillfully as he could. He managed to get Awatif back to the house, though she was still hurling curses, insults and obscenities. Arafa reeled up to the room with the wooden screens that overlooked the desert, and dropped onto a cushion, alone in his hashish den. He stretched his legs out and rested his head against the wall, half conscious. It was not long before Hanash caught up with him, and sat across from him around the pipe, in silence. He glanced quickly at Arafa, but went back to looking at the floor until he broke the silence. “It was bound to happen.”

  Two eyes looked up at him, shamed but fugitive. “Light the fire!”

  They stayed in the den until it was nearly morning. The servant left, and was replaced. It seemed to Awatif that the atmosphere around her provoked one slip after another. She began to assign some sinister motive to every movement her husband made, in line with her suspicions, until her life was hell. She had lost the one consolation she had enjoyed in this perilous prison. This was not her house, or her husband. It was a prison by day and a brothel by night. Where was the Arafa she had loved? The Arafa who had challenged Santuri by marrying her, who had more than once risked death for the alley, so that she even thought him the kind of man the poets sang of? Today he was nothing but a bastard like Qadri or Saadallah. Life with him was a burning torment, an insomniac fear. One night Arafa came home from the overseer’s house and found no trace of Awatif The gatekeeper swore that he had seen her leave the house in the early evening, and that she had not been back.

  “Where did she go?” asked Arafa. His breath reeked of wine.

  “In the alley,” said Hanash uneasily. “With her old neighbor, Umm Zanfil, the jam seller.”

  “ ‘No woman is won with gentleness,’ as the people of the alley say. I won’t do anything until she comes back humbled.”

  But she did not come back. Ten days passed, and then Arafa decided to go to Umm Zanfil’s at night, intending that no one should know of his visit. At the appointed time, he slipped out of the house, followed by Hanash. They had gone only a few paces when they heard footsteps behind them. They turned around and saw two of the house servants.

  “Go back to the house,” Arafa told them.

  “We are guarding you, on his excellency’s orders,” one of them replied.

  He was enraged, but said nothing more. They walked toward an old building in the Al Qassem neighborhood and went up to the top floor, where Umm Zanfil’s room was located. Arafa knocked at the door until it was opened by Awatif herself, her face sleepy. When she saw Arafa’s face in the light of the little lamp in her hand, she made a face and pulled back, but he went after her and closed the door behind him. Umm Zanfil woke up, in a corner of the room, and stared bewilderedly at the guest.

  “What are you doing here? What do you want? Go back to you wonderful house,” Awatif said sharply.

  “Arafa the magician!” whispered Umm Zanfil uneasily, staring at his face.

  “Come to your senses. Come with me,” Arafa told his wife, completely ignoring the bewildered woman.

  “I won’t go back to your prison,” she said fiercely. “I’ll never find the peace of mind I have in this room.”

  “But you’re my wife.”

  “What’s wrong with your other wives over there?” she said, raising her voice.

  “Let her go back to sleep, and return in the morning,” complained Umm Zanfil.

  He gave her a harsh look, saying nothing, then turned to his wife. “Every man makes a mistake.”

  “You’re nothing but one big mistake,” she snapped.

  He came a little closer to her, playing on every tender note in his voice. “Awatif. I cannot get along without you.”

  “But I’ve done without you!”

  “You left me for one slip I made, when I was drunk?”

  She twitched. “Don’t give me the excuse you were drunk. Your life is one big mistake—you’d need dozens of excuses to justify it. There’s nothing in it for me but trouble and pain.”

  “But at least it would be better than living in this room!”

  She smiled bitterly. “Who knows? Tell me why your prison guards let you come to me.”

  “Awatif!”

  “I will not go back to a house where I have nothing to do but yawn and socialize with my great magician husband’s girlfriends!”

  In vain he tried to dissuade her from her persistence. She met his gentleness with obstinacy, his anger with anger and his insults with insults. He left her in despair, then went home followed by his friend and the two servants.

  “What will you do?” Hanash asked him.

  “What we do every day,” he said with listless resentment.

  Qadri, the overseer, asked him, “Is there any news of your wife?”

  “Stubborn as a mule, God preserve you,” said Arafa, taking his seat by his side.

  “Don’t bother yourself with a woman when you have better than her,” said the overseer disdainfully. He stared very hard at Arafa. “Does your wife know any of the secrets of your work?”

  Arafa responded with a very suspicious look. “No one knows magic but the magician!”

  “I’m afraid that—”

  “Don’t be afraid of something that hasn’t a shadow of an existence.” There was a long silence, which Arafa broke anxiously. “You’ll never harm her as long as I’m alive!”

  The overseer suppressed his anger, smiled and pointed invitingly to the two brimming glasses. “Who said anyone would harm her?”

  110

  When Qadri grew friendlier and more trusting toward Arafa, he began to invite him to his private soirees, which usually began at midnight. Arafa attended a strange party in the great hall, which abounded with all the most delicious foods and the finest wines; beautiful women danced naked, and Arafa almost lost his mind, with the liquor and the sights he saw. That night he saw the overseer’s riotousness go beyond any limit, like a wild beast. The overseer invited him to a party in the garden, in a luxuriant bower encircled by a stream whose surface was bright with moonlight. They had wine and fruit, and two beautiful servant girls, one of them for the brazier and the other for the pipe. The tender night breeze was laden with the fragrance of the flowers, the lute melody and singers’ voices.

  Carnations as fresh as mint in the garden

  Soothe the manly men who smoke hashish.

  There was a full moon whose perfection could be seen whole when a verdant mulberry branch bent with the breeze, and its rays of light shone through the branches and leaves when the branch was still again.

  The scent from the pipe in the girl’s hand made Arafa as dizzy as a star in its orbit. “God rest Adham,” he said.

  “And God rest Idris,” the overseer said, smiling. “What made you think of him?”

  “Sitting here like this.”

  “Adham loved dreams, but the only ones he had were the ones Gabalawi put in his head.” He laughed. “Gabalawi, whom you spared the trouble of old age!”

  Arafa’s heart contracted, and his happiness flickered out. He muttered sadly. “I never killed anyone in my life but one criminal gangster.”

  “What about Gabalawi’s servant?”

  “I was forced to kill him.”

  “Arafa,” Qadri sneered, “you are
a coward.”

  Arafa concentrated on the moon through the branches, leaving the drug party to the lute melodies, then stole a look at the beautiful servant’s hand as she compressed the lump of hashish.

  “Where are you?” cried the overseer.

  Arafa turned to him with a smile. “Do you usually spend the evening alone?”

  “No one here is worth spending the evening with.”

  “Even me, I have no one but Hanash.”

  “If you smoke enough, you don’t mind being alone,” said Qadri disdainfully.

  Arafa hesitated a moment, then spoke. “Aren’t we in a prison, Your Excellency?”

  “What do you want?” said the man sharply. “We’re surrounded by people who hate us!”

  He remembered what Awatif had said, how she preferred Umm Zanfil’s room to his house, and sighed. “What a curse.”

  “Be careful or you’ll ruin our fun.”

  “May life be fun forever,” said Arafa, reaching for the pipe.

  “Forever?” Qadri laughed. “It would be enough if we could breathe one breath as young men in our whole lives, with your magic!” He filled his chest with the smell of the garden, sweetened by the moist late-night air. “Lucky thing Arafa is not without his uses,” he said.

  The overseer left the pipe in the beautiful girl’s hand, and exhaled the thick smoke, silver in the moonlight. “Why do we get old?” he asked regretfully. “We eat the most wonderful food, drink the most delightful drinks and live the best life, but old age creeps up on us in its own time. Nothing can stop it. Like the sun or the moon.”

  “But Arafa’s pills can make the cold of old age hot!”

  “There is something you cannot do.”

  “What is it, sir?”

  The overseer seemed mournful in the moonlight. “What is the most hateful thing to you?”