Khan Al-Khalili

  47

  At noon the following day (a Friday), Ahmad did what his brother had asked. He took his money out of the bank, bought him some pajamas, household clothes, and a few other necessities, and then returned home. He was delighted that his brother had decided to go back to the sanitorium in Helwan.

  When he got back to the apartment, he found his brother smoking a cigarette. He was utterly shocked. Rushdi had stopped smoking as soon as the disease had made its first appearance. He looked sheepish as his brother came in and gave him a bashful smile.

  “Who on earth gave you that cigarette?” he shouted, forgetting all about the things he had just purchased. “What on earth are you trying to do to yourself?”

  He gave his mother an inquisitorial look.

  “Rushdi insisted,” she said by way of self-defense, “and I couldn’t resist. He wouldn’t keep quiet until he got what he wanted.”

  “Don’t be hard on me, Ahmad,” Rushdi said without putting the cigarette away. “I had this sudden irresistible urge to smoke a cigarette.”

  “This is absolute insanity!” Ahmad replied angrily.

  “One cigarette’s not going to hurt,” Rushdi said by way of excuse. “It’s so good! Let me take a few puffs in peace.”

  He finished smoking his cigarette with obvious relish. “Don’t get angry, Ahmad,” he said. “That’s my last cigarette. Now, what new clothes did you buy?”

  Immediately after lunch he suddenly felt very weak, but did not feel like lying down. He sat on his bed, stretched his legs out, and rested his back against a folded pillow. His legs looked like two sticks, and his complexion was a pale yellow with a tinge of blue. There were dark circles around his eyes, and his eyes had an unfamiliar look to them, different from the normal sadness, as though gazing at some distant point invisible to the eye.

  Late in the afternoon Ahmad came to chat with his brother before taking off for the Zahra Café.

  “Are you going to the Zahra Café?” Rushdi asked him. “Say hello to all my friends there. How I wish I could spend the evening with my friends in al-Sakakini!”

  Ahmad was much affected by his brother’s words. “God willing,” he replied, “you’ll get better, then you can go back to your friends and their Sakakini nights!”

  “Am I ever going to get better?” Rushdi asked despondently. “Just look at my legs. Will they ever look like human legs again?”

  “Do you think God cannot make that happen if He so wishes?”

  Rushdi shook his head, spoke to his brother in a way he had never done before, as a kind of sage counselor. “Always keep a close watch on your health, Ahmad,” he said. “Never treat it lightly.”

  For a second he stared at the floor. “Illness is like a woman,” he went on in a different tone of voice, “it sucks the youth out of you and destroys all hopes.”

  Ahmad wondered to himself why Rushdi was talking like this and stared at him despondently.

  “Microbes work unseen,” Rushdi went on. “Once they have grabbed their victim, they finish him off.”

  “Rushdi, what are you saying?”

  “I’m sharing a truth before parting. You may not see me any more after today.”

  “What do you mean, Rushdi,” Ahmad asked in a panic, “I may not see you after today?”

  Rushdi paused for a moment’s thought. “Isn’t it likely that you’ll lose patience?” he asked as though in his normal sarcastic tone. “You’ll either get fed up with the illness or else your studies will keep you preoccupied, so you’ll forget all about me in Helwan!”

  “Heaven forbid, Rushdi, heaven forbid!”

  Rushdi gave him a very odd look. “Why don’t they simply burn sick people?” he asked. “That would put them out of their misery and stop making them a burden on others!”

  “Rushdi,” Ahmad protested, “why on earth are you talking this way?”

  Again Rushdi paused for a moment. “God curse all illness,” he went on. “May God protect you from the evil of disease!”

  Ahmad was totally stunned. His mother came back with a cup of coffee that he sipped in silence. He was worried in case Rushdi started talking the same way with his mother there, but he said nothing. Ahmad relaxed a bit and assumed that he was back to his normal behavior. He stole a glance in Rushdi’s direction and was struck by how weak and pale he looked and how skinny his legs were. “Can this really be you, Rushdi?” he asked himself sadly. “A pox on this disease!”

  It was late when he got to the café. He always found that his time there helped calm his shattered nerves and grieving heart. He stayed there until nine-thirty, then came back to the apartment. As he walked past his brother’s room, he noticed that Rushdi had taken a sleeping pill to help him sleep but was not asleep as yet.

  “Good evening!” Rushdi greeted his brother. “You’re back!”

  “Yes,” Ahmad replied looking at his brother carefully. “How are you feeling?”

  “Praise be to God. How was the tea at the Zahra Café?”

  “As usual.”

  “Drink it in good health then,” Rushdi said in a barely audible voice.

  Ahmad left him to get some sleep, went to his own room, and got undressed. He was feeling tense, and his nerves were on edge. He could smell something foul, and that made him even more tense and nervous. Could the anxieties that populate the deepest recesses of the human soul actually smell bad? For an hour he tried to take his mind off things by reading, then he got up to go to bed. He spent a long hour, lying there prey to dreadful thoughts and misgivings.

  Next morning he woke up early to the sound of movement inside the house. His senses were immediately on the alert. Looking at his watch, he saw that it was five o’clock. He wondered what could have woken anyone up at such an early hour. He got out of bed and rushed out of his room in a panic. Before he had gone even a couple of steps toward Rushdi’s room, the door was opened suddenly. Their mother emerged, holding her hands above her head as though begging for help. Then she lowered them and started slapping her cheeks violently, crazily.…

  48

  It was a truly awful day, one long procession of pain, grief, and agony. The very memory of it grieved Ahmad, digging a pit inside his heart as deep for him as it was for his poor parents.

  It began with him going into Rushdi’s room, quaking in fear at the very idea of what was awaiting him there. Looking toward the bed, he saw Rushdi lying there. His mother had covered his body with a blanket, and his father was standing close by, weeping, his head downcast. Ahmad went over to the bed and pulled back the blanket. There was Rushdi, lying there as though he were sleeping, his appearance and pallor unchanged. Had the disease left anything for death to change? Leaning over, Ahmad kissed his cold forehead, then pulled the blanket back over him. Now he surrendered to the flood of tears that, fueled by so much grief, had been gathering inside him day after day until they clustered together in the chill of death and flowed in profusion.

  Then his stop at the store in al-Ghuriya. As Ahmad purchased a shroud, he remembered that only yesterday he had bought his brother some clothes for this world. He had chosen the brightest colors because he knew how much Rushdi liked to look well-dressed. In a complete daze he watched the salesman’s hands as he measured out the cloth and then folded it up.

  Next he had to go to get a burial certificate.

  “Name of the deceased?” asked the official casually.

  Ahmad dearly wished that he could not hear his own voice. “Rushdi Akif,” he replied.

  “Rushdi Akif has died,” he told himself. “How horrible can this reality be?”

  “How old?” asked the official in the same cold tone.

  “Twenty-six,” he replied.

  “What illness?”

  As he told the official, he felt increasingly angry. How could he ever forget what it had done to his ill-starred brother? The way his legs and neck had looked, the color of his skin, the hacking cough? He now received a copy of the document that was required before Rushd
i could disappear into the bowels of the earth forever. He expressed his thanks to the official and left. The way this official and the bank’s doctor had acted in such an unfeeling fashion had aroused his anger against all human relationships in general. How could anyone be so casual about death when it was the direst thing that ever happened in life? Did a day ever go by without the sight of a coffin being carried on people’s shoulders? How could they be so casual about the whole thing, as though it didn’t bother them at all? Shouldn’t everyone envision themselves being carried in such a coffin?

  Then the profiteers of death. They came in succession, carrying washing equipment and the coffin itself. Eyes glinting, arms flexing, they all invoked false expressions of sympathy in order to hide the glee they felt as merchants about to make a good profit. For them Rushdi’s beloved body was merely a commodity.

  Then the casket proceeded on its way, carried on the shoulders of men decked in the white garb of youth. Ahmad let his gaze follow it as it went on its usual downward path, passed from hand to hand and shoulder to shoulder. A fez was placed on top, reminding everyone that its owner had always tilted it to the right until it almost touched his eyebrow, a sign of someone with a rakish streak who was well aware of how attractive he was. My God, all his friends were there in force, crying their eyes out. Kamal Khalil was crying too, while Ahmad Rashid looked stone-faced. Ahmad was far from delighted to see the latter among the mourners. He also avoided looking at Boss Nunu, who was flippant by nature; unlike Ahmad, he would always make light of misery and smiled his way through misfortunes.

  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.

  49

  In 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.