Children of the Alley Read online

  One day when the family was assembled, after lunch, Abda spoke to her husband with a smile. “Tell him!”

  Rifaa saw that this involved him and looked expectantly at his father, but the man addressed his wife. “First you tell him what you have to say.”

  Abda gazed proudly at her son. “Glad news, Rifaa. Lady Zakia, the wife of our protector Khunfis, visited me! I returned her visit, of course, and she received me warmly and presented her daughter Aisha to me—a girl as beautiful as the moon. And then she visited me again and brought Aisha with her.”

  Shafi’i glanced furtively at his son as he raised his coffee cup to his mouth, to see the effect of this story on him. He shook his head at the difficulty that awaited him, and spoke grandly.

  “This is an honor accorded to no other house in the Al Gabal neighborhood. Imagine that the wife and daughter of Khunfis should visit this house of ours!”

  Rifaa lifted his eyes to his mother in bewilderment.

  “How elegant their house is—the soft chairs, the fabulous carpet! The curtains that hang from the windows and doors.”

  “All that luxury came from the Al Gabal’s usurped wealth!”

  Shafi’i stifled a smile and said, “We have promised not to talk about that.”

  “Let’s just remember that Khunfis is the master of the Al Gabal and that the friendship of his family is an answered prayer!” said Abda earnestly.

  “Congratulations on your new friend,” said Rifaa crossly.

  The mother and her husband exchanged a meaningful look.

  “The fact that Aisha came with her mother told me something.”

  “Told you what, Mother?” asked Rifaa, feeling depressed.

  Shafi’i laughed and made a despairing gesture with his hand and turned to Abda. “We should have told him how we got married!”

  “No!” exclaimed Rifaa. “Father, no!”

  “What do you mean? What’s wrong with you, acting like a virgin girl?”

  “It is in your hands,” said Abda with hopeful urgency. “You can make us part of the running of the Al Gabal’s estate. They will welcome you if you go to them; even Khunfis will welcome you. If the woman weren’t sure of her influence with him, she wouldn’t have come here. You can have status that the whole alley will be jealous of from one end to the other.”

  “Who knows,” laughed his father. “Someday you might be overseer of the Al Gabal’s estate, or one of your sons might be.”

  “Are you actually saying this, Father? Have you forgotten why you were driven out of this alley twenty years ago?”

  Shafi’i blinked, a little confused. “Today we live like everyone else. We must not ignore an opportunity that comes begging to us.”

  Rifaa stammered and spoke as if to himself. “How can I marry into a demon’s family when all I want to do is expel demons?”

  “I never expected to make anything more than a carpenter of you,” shouted Shafi’i menacingly, “and now luck offers you an important rank in our alley—but you want to be an exorcist like some black woman! What a scandal! What evil eye is afflicting you? Say that you will marry her, and spare us your jokes.”

  “I will not marry her, Father.”

  “I will visit Khunfis to ask him for the match,” said Shafi’i, ignoring him.

  “Don’t do it, Father,” shouted Rifaa vehemently.

  “Tell me why you are doing this, boy,” his father asked him impatiently.

  “Don’t be hard on him,” Abda begged her husband. “You know how he is.”

  “Don’t I know! Our alley will condemn us for his weakness.”

  “Go easy on him so he’ll think about it.”

  “Boys his age are already fathers and the ground trembles under their steps!” He stared at him, furious, and went on exasperatedly. “Why does all the blood leave your face? You come from the loins of men!”

  Rifaa sighed. He was depressed enough to cry. The bonds of fatherhood are broken by anger. A house may become at times a gloomy prison. What you desire is not in this place or among these people.

  “Don’t torture me, Father” he said hoarsely.

  “You’re the one torturing me, just as you have ever since you were born.”

  Rifaa bowed his head until his face was hidden from his parents. His father dropped his voice and calmed his anger as much as he could.

  “Are you afraid of marriage? Wouldn’t you like to get married? Tell me what is in your heart—or I’ll go to Umm Bekhatirha. Maybe she knows more about you than we do!”

  “No!” cried Rifaa sharply. He stood abruptly and left the room.

  49

  Shafi’i went down to open up the shop but did not find Rifaa there as he had expected. He did not call out for him. It was, he reasoned, wiser to affect coolness over his absence. The day passed, crawling slowly by, the light of the sun left the land of the alley and the sawdust mounted around Shafi’i’s feet with no sign of Rifaa. Evening came and he closed the shop, deeply troubled and angry. As usual, he headed for Shaldum’s coffeehouse and took his seat, and when he saw Gawad the poet coming in alone he was surprised and said, “So where is Rifaa?”

  “I haven’t heard from him since yesterday,” the man replied, feeling his way to his bench.

  “I haven’t seen him since he left us after lunch,” said Shafi’i uneasily.

  Gawad raised his gray eyebrows and sat cross-legged on the bench, tucking the rebec by his side, wondering, “Did anything happen between you?”

  Shafi’i did not answer him, but quickly got up and left the coffeehouse. Shaldum was taken aback by Shafi’i’s agitation and spoke up with amusement.

  “Such a drama our alley hasn’t seen since Idris built his hut in the desert! When I was young, I used to run away from the alley for days and no one would ask about me. When I’d come back, my father, God rest his soul, would shout, ‘What brings you back here, you little bastard?”

  “The point is, he wasn’t positive you were his son,” was Khunfis’ comment from where he was listening in the heart of the coffeehouse.

  The place erupted in laughter, and most of them congratulated Khunfis on his elegant witticism. Shafi’i headed home, and when he asked Abda, “Has Rifaa come back?” she was seized with anxiety. She said that she had thought he was in the shop as usual. She grew even more concerned when he told her that Rifaa had not gone to the poet Gawad’s house.

  “So where did he go?”

  They heard Yasmina’s voice split the air as she called a fig seller. Abda gave Shafi’i a suspicious look, but the man shook his head tiredly and gave a brief bark of dry, ironic laughter. “A girl like that can figure men out!”

  Shafi’i went to Yasmina’s house driven only by despair. He knocked at the door and Yasmina opened it herself. When she recognized him, she tossed her head in surprise and triumph. “You!” she said. “Well, well, how surprised should I be?”

  The man lowered his eyes at her diaphanous blouse. “Is Rifaa here?” he asked dejectedly.

  “Rifaa!” she said, even more surprised. “Why?” Shafi’i’s embarrassment mounted, and she indicated the inside of her house. “Look for him yourself.”

  But the man turned to go.

  “What, has he come of age today?” she asked sarcastically.

  He heard her addressing someone within: “These days people are more worried about their boys than their girls.”

  Shafi’i found Abda waiting for him in the passage.

  “We’ll go to Muqattam Marketplace together,” she told him.

  “That boy!” he shouted angrily. “This is what I get after a day of hard work?”

  They took a mule-drawn cart to Muqattam Marketplace and asked about him at their old neighbors’, and they asked old friends, but discovered no trace of him. While he used to disappear for hours in the afternoon or early evening in seclusion or on the mountain, no one imagined that he would stay out in the desert until this hour of the night. They returned to the alley as they had left it, but in an
even more anguished state. People gossiped about Rifaa’s disappearance, especially when it went on for days. He became a joke in the coffeehouse, at Yasmina’s house and throughout the Al Gabal neighborhood. Everyone ridiculed his parents’ anguish. Perhaps Umm Bekhatirha and old Gawad were the only ones who shared the parents’ grief. “Where has the boy gone?” asked Gawad. “He isn’t this kind of boy; if he were, we wouldn’t grieve.” Once when Batikha was drunk he yelled, “Little boy lost, good people!” as if he were calling a lost toddler; the whole alley laughed and the small boys repeated it. Abda was sick with grief. Shafi’i worked distractedly in his shop, his eyes red from lack of sleep. Khunfis’ wife, Zakia, stopped visiting Abda and ignored her in the street.

  One day Shafi’i was absorbed in sawing a board when Yasmina shouted at him as she came in from an errand. “Shafi’i! Look.”

  He saw her pointing to the end of the alley, into the desert. He left the shop, still holding the saw, to see what she was pointing to, and saw his son Rifaa walking shyly toward the building. He dropped the saw in front of the shop and hurried to his son, examining him with surprise. Then he snatched him by the upper arms.

  “Rifaa!” he shouted. “Where have you been? Don’t you know what your absence meant for us? For your poor mother, who nearly died from worry?”

  The boy said nothing, and his father perceived how emaciated he was.

  “Were you ill?”

  “No. Let me see my mother,” said Rifaa a little confusedly.

  Yasmina came up to them and asked doubtfully, “But where were you?”

  He did not look at her. Boys gathered around him, and his father led him home. They were quickly followed by Gawad and Umm Bekhatirha.

  When his mother caught sight of him she jumped from the bed and clutched him to her. “God forgive you,” she said weakly. “How could you do this to your mother?”

  He took her hand between his and sat her down on the bed, then sat beside her. “I’m sorry.”

  His father lifted his glowering face, which hid the exulting relief within him as a black cloud conceals the moon, and scolded him. “All we were trying to do was make you happy!”

  “Did you think we would force you to get married?” asked Abda, her eyes filled with tears.

  “I am tired,” he said sadly.

  “Where were you?” everyone asked at once.

  “I was depressed with life, so I went to the desert. I had to be alone and to go to the desert. I never left the desert except to buy food.”

  His father slapped his forehead and shouted, “Is that what normal people do?”

  “Let him alone,” said Umm Bekhatirha kindly. “I know about these conditions. You shouldn’t force someone like him to do anything he doesn’t want to.”

  “His happiness was our only hope, but fate took its course. How thin you are, my boy!”

  “Tell me one thing,” said Shafi’i in exasperation. “Has anything like this ever happened in our alley before?”

  “To me, there is nothing strange about him, Shafi’i, believe me,” said Umm Bekhatirha reprovingly. “He’s a wonderful boy.”

  “We’re the talk of the whole alley,” Shafi’i muttered dejectedly.

  “There’s no other boy in the whole alley like him!” said Umm Bekhatirha angrily.

  “That’s the whole problem,” said Shafi’i.

  “By the unity of God,” exclaimed Umm Bekhatirha, “you don’t know what you’re saying, or understand what others say!”

  50

  The sight of the carpentry shop now suggested activity and success. On one side of the table Shafi’i stood sawing wood, and on the other Rifaa clasped the adze or hammered nails, while underneath the table the heap of sawdust reached the middle of the can of glue. Window shutters and the leaves of doors leaned against the walls, and in the middle of the room stood a stack of new crates of light, polished wood, needing only paint. The smell of wood filled the air, along with the sound of sawing, hammering, sanding and the gurgle of the water pipe as four seated customers smoked and chatted by the door.

  “I’ll really try your skill with this sofa, and God willing your next job will be furniture for my daughter’s wedding,” Higazi said to Shafi’i. He turned to his friends. “I’m telling you again, the times we are living in, if Gabal came back, he’d lose his mind.”

  They all nodded sadly as they puffed away, and Burhoum the gravedigger smiled at Shafi’i. “Why don’t you want to make me a coffin? Doesn’t everything have its price?”

  Shafi’i stopped sawing for a moment to laugh. “Absolutely not! A coffin in the shop would scare customers away.”

  “That’s true,” Farhat agreed. “Damn death and all that.”

  “Your problem,” Higazi resumed, “is that you’re too afraid of death. That’s why Khunfis can control you, and Bayoumi can rule you, and Ihab can rob you.”

  “Aren’t you afraid of death, too?”

  Higazi spat. “It’s a fault we all have. Gabal was strong, and with strength and action he won for us rights that cowardice has lost.”

  Rifaa abruptly stopped hammering and took the nails from his mouth. “Gabal wanted to win our rights through fairness. He resorted to force in self-defense.”

  Higazi laughed derisively and asked, “Tell me, boy, can you hammer nails without force?”

  “People are not wood, sir,” said Rifaa very earnestly.

  His father gave him a look and went back to his work.

  “The truth,” Higazi went on, “is that Gabal was one of the toughest gangsters this alley ever knew, and how he tried to make the Al Gabal be like him!”

  “He wanted them to protect the whole alley, not just their own people,” Farhat added.

  “And what are they now but mice, or rabbits?”

  “What colors do you want, Higazi?” asked Shafi’i, wiping his nose on the back of his hand.

  “Choose a color that won’t get dirty too quickly. That’s better for cleanliness.” He resumed talking to his friends. “The day Daabis took Kaabalha’s eye, Gabal took his eye. Through power he established justice.”

  “We have no lack of power,” said Rifaa with an audible sigh. “Every hour of the day and night we see people beating up people, fighting and murdering. Even women bare their nails and blood flows, but where is the justice? How obscene it all is.”

  They were all silent a moment, then Hanura spoke for the first time. “This little teacher looks down on our alley! He’s too soft, and it’s your fault, Shafi’i.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes. He’s a spoiled boy.”

  Higazi turned to Rifaa and laughed. “Better than this you should find yourself a bride!”

  There was loud laughter and Shafi’i frowned. Rifaa blushed.

  “Power—power,” Higazi resumed. “Without it, there is no justice.”

  “The truth is that our alley needs mercy,” insisted Rifaa despite the way his father glared at him.

  Burhoum the gravedigger laughed and said, “Do you want to ruin me?”

  Again they roared with laughter. This was followed by fits of coughing until Higazi spoke up, his eyes the red tint of glue. “In the old days Gabal went to ask for justice and mercy from Effendi, who sent him Zaqlut and his men instead, and had it not been for clubs—no, not mercy, clubs—Gabal and his people would have perished.”

  “Please, everyone! The walls have ears. If they hear you, no one will listen to a word you have to say,” Shafi’i warned.

  “He’s right,” said Hanura. “What are you but good-for-nothing hashish addicts? There’s no good in you—if Khunfis passed by now, you’d all prostrate yourselves in front of him.” He turned to Rifaa. “Don’t take offense, my boy, hashish addicts have no shame. Haven’t you ever tried hashish, Rifaa?”

  “He doesn’t like parties. If he takes more than two puffs, he either chokes or drops off to sleep.”

  “What a fine boy,” said Farhat. “Some people think he’s an exorcist because of his attachmen
t to Umm Bekhatirha, and others think he’s a poet because he loves old stories so much.”

  “And he hates hashish parties the same way he hates marriage!” laughed Higazi.

  Burhoum called the coffeehouse boy to take the pipe away, then they got up quietly, their little party at an end.

  Shafi’i abandoned his saw and gave his son a look of rebuke. “Don’t make yourself the talk of those people.”

  Boys showed up to play in front of the store. Rifaa walked around the table to stand before his father, then took his hand and withdrew with him to a far corner of the shop where no one could listen. He seemed agitated and uneasy, but his lips were set determinedly. There was a strange light glowing in his eyes that made his father’s eyes questioning.

  “I cannot be silent after today,” Rifaa said.