No One Sleeps in Alexandria (2 page)

This becomes the only way to prevent matters from deteriorating any further. The world waits with bated breath through the two-day reprieve. The question now: Can any person or any power save the inhabitants of Earth from the coming hell?

Protests and suicides do no good. The wheels of death are turning. It is decided to open the book of hell.

And he said to me: if you see the fire, fall into it, for if you

fall into it, it will be put out, and if you flee it,

it will seek you and burn you.

al-Niffari

2

On Magd al-Din’s last night, he sat silently amid his family. They were looking at him, incredulous. But he simply sat there, seeming not to have changed at all. He was forty but looked twenty, with an elongated face, strong features, well-defined cheek bones, green eyes, and the hair blond but always covered by a white skullcap. His body retained the strength of a younger man.

“Why won’t you let us fight?” One of his three sisters’ husbands asked. “We can fight the whole village if we have to. We still have some old weapons, and we are men.”

Magd al-Din told them all to go to bed. “Tomorrow is another day. We’ll leave it all to He who is never overtaken by slumber or sleep”—his favorite words with which they, especially his young wife Zahra, were all familiar in times of crisis. They all went upstairs to their rooms in the big house. His mother, Hadya, who had lost her eyesight, went to her room on the first floor, leaning on the arm of Zahra, who carried her one-year-old daughter, Shawqiya, on her other arm.

From all corners of the house came that smell Magd al-Din liked, the smell of the mud walls baked by the heat of the day, mixed with the smell of dung from the animal shed and the smell of the cheese mats and butter churn hanging on the walls. Magd al-Din went up to the roof out of habit. He looked at the white
dovecote, and, listening intently, he heard a faint, almost inaudible cooing. He heard nothing from the rabbit pen. He felt stifled; a heat wave had taken hold for days on end; it was getting more and more humid, as if the summer did not want to end. What had revived this old, dead affair now? Why, really, did he not want to resist?

Like a sudden rain pouring down on the village, people began to talk, publicly and privately, about the old vendetta between the Khalils and the Talibs. The deputy mayor of the village came to ask Magd al-Din to leave the village by week’s end.

The vendetta between the two families had been over for ten years, and none of the Khalils except Magd al-Din was left alive, and none but Khalaf of the Talibs—Magd al-Din, who had been exempted from military service because he had memorized the entire Quran, and Khalaf, his childhood friend. This friendship made each do his best to avoid facing the other in battle. Magd al-Din’s five brothers were killed, and his father died of grief. Only he and his brother Bahí, who was always wandering somewhere or other, remained alive. His cousins, now wedded to his sisters, also remained alive. Khalaf’s six brothers were also killed, and his father likewise died of grief. The whole village learned of the pledge that Magd al-Din and Khalaf had taken. They had decided, more than ten years ago, to stop the river of blood.

Magd al-Din had said to his friend, “And now, Khalaf, only I am left to die. I will not permit myself to fight you.”

“I seek nothing from you, Magd al-Din.”

“Then you will seek out Bahi. If that is the case, kill me instead, Khalaf.”

“I won’t seek anybody out, Magd al-Din. We are all covered in shame, the killer and the killed.”

So the story had ended long ago. And Bahi, who ended up living in Alexandria, never appeared in the village again. Reviving the story of the old vendetta between the Khalils and the Talibs was nothing but a pretext to get rid of Magd al-Din. The mayor had simply succumbed to his weakness and hate. Magd al-Din was doomed, as were all his brothers, to pay for the sins of Bahi. What
did Alexandria have for Bahi to love it so much? Would Magd al-Din join him there tomorrow or would he settle some other place on God’s great earth? “Dear God, most merciful,” Magd al-Din whispered as he sat down, his back against the dovecote. He took a tobacco case from his vest and rolled a thin cigarette. He never loved any of his brothers as much as he loved Bahi, and there they were, about to be united again.

“Your father died, Bahi, saying nothing but your name.”

“I can’t live in the village, Sheikh Magd. Prison has destroyed me.”

“Our village is good, Bahi.”

“You’re a good man, Sheikh Magd. You see the world only through the lens of the Quran. Why do you really stay in this stinking village?”

Magd al-Din had no answer. He did not know then, and he still, to this day, docs not know how to answer Bahi’s question. That day Bahi had added, “Your father’s dead, your brothers have been killed. Nobody’s left except the women and me, and I am no good to you.”

After that, Bahi left for Alexandria—ten whole years of separation. Magd al-Din made sure to visit him once or twice every year, quick visits, never more than one night, and on the following morning he would return with a lot of nice things to say to the mother, Hadya. He always found Bahi wearing clean clothes, a shirt and pants, since he had given up his village garb a long time before. He lived in a room that he kept clean and fragrant with frankincense and musk, and always carried in his pocket a little box of ambergris that gave off a captivating fragrance. But he looked pale and exhausted and hid from Magd al-Din the many pains that he suffered in the city. Magd al-Din never told his mother of his worries about his brother’s pain, only gave her good news about her poor son.

That was the only lie that Magd al-Din told in his entire life. It always pained him to see the life his brother was leading in Alexandria, but he got used to telling his mother otherwise. He loved his brother and told her what he wished he would become. The age difference between them was five years, marching with them like a half-century of strange pain. Bahi was the older of the
two. His father would always look at him and say “God works in mysterious ways! This is my son, from my loins, and these are also my sons, all from the same mother. Some till the land and some trade and some memorize the Quran—but this boy came into this world bearing the sins of all creation.”

From an early age Bahi came to hate any attempt to teach him anything in a Quranic school, the village mosque, or at home, and he hated nothing more than peasants and working the land. Some said that was a result of being handsome; others said it was because of fear in his heart. The father always said, with sorrow in his eyes, “God made him this way.”

The mother chose the name Bahi, or ‘Radiant,’ because she gave birth to him on the twenty-seventh of Ramadan, the most sacred of nights. As he was sliding out of her, she saw a beam of light coming out with him and filling the room and the walls with light. The midwife cried as she swathed him, telling his mother to hide him from all eyes for, in addition to the beam of light that came out with him, he was born already circumcised. He was a child of purity destined for great blessings.

Because of this, no one saw Bahi until he was able to walk, when he sneaked out of an opening in the big wooden gate and rolled down the narrow alley, his face still encircled with that wondrous light. The mother’s apprehension ended only after she gave birth to three daughters, then Magd al-Din—she was no longer the mother of males only. The father’s apprehension, however, did not end. He had realized early on that Bahi’s eyes revealed a recklessness that was unusual in the family. For even though Bahi’s eyes, like all the children, were the same green as his mother’s, only his eyes had a strange blue tinge as well.

Once Bahi grew to adolescence he took to leaving the house in the morning and coming back in the evening only to sleep, without speaking to anyone. No one questioned where he spent his days. The mother was filled with tenderness toward him, and the father could not explain the weakness God had planted in his heart toward the boy. Gradually Bahi became more like an apparition in the family. The brothers would go to the fields early in the morning, and he would leave after them, but no one knew where he went. They would return in the evening, tired, to have supper
and go to bed early, but their mother would not sleep until she heard the squeak of the gate and Bahi’s heart beating as he crept in.

Eventually he started staying away for longer stretches, and when he came back, he would sleep in the first spot he came across, with the animals or the chickens, on top of the oven, in the hallway between the rooms—anywhere but where his siblings slept. The father still could not figure out the cause of his weakness toward his strange son, and the peaceable boy had caused no harm yet.

Then Bahi’s secret became widely known throughout the village: he was possessed with love. He followed the women along the canals and through the marketplace. The village women waited for him to pass through the alleys, so that they could look at him from the rooftops and from behind doors. They all learned his appointed rounds by heart. The halo of light that his mother said had slid out with him the day he was born was still with him, but only the women could see it. News of him reached the neighboring villages, and other women and girls began to sit and wait for him by the canal that separated the village from the fields. Women with special needs would rush up and touch him, but little girls were afraid of him. They would stand at a distance and giggle, as their bodies shook uncontrollably.

His father and brothers were surprised by what they heard about the boy. Then one day, they saw him at the edge of the field. His brothers Fattuh, al-Qasim, Khalil, Imran, and Sulayman were there, but Magd al-Din, the youngest, was not with them that day. At first they were surprised that he had made an appearance, but after he sat down by the water wheel, they got busy with their work. Moments later they saw him get up and walk around the old sycamore several times, looking toward the distant village, then they heard him start to yell. They stood up with their hoes in between the short cotton plants. In the distance, they saw a large number of men charging toward them, their hoes and clubs raised toward Bahi. “The Talibs!” the brothers shouted. There had been no blood between the two families until that day. The men of the Talib family drew together, and Bahi rushed to his brothers in terror.

“They’re going to kill me!”

“Run away from here. Go tell your father and your cousins. Quick!”

Bahi raced past his brothers faster than a horse.

His brothers attacked the charging men, and a long battle ensued. On his way, Bahi saw his father and his cousins hurrying toward the field carrying hoes and clubs. He did not go back with them but kept running until he reached the house. His mother was standing there, terrified. He threw himself into her chest. He was barely sixteen. He burst out crying.

She patted him on the back and asked, her voice pained, “Why did you do that, my son?”

“Protect me, mother.”

She took him to the nearest room, then changed her mind and took him upstairs—”So your father won’t kill you when he comes home,” she said under her breath and Bahi heard her. She closed the door and went downstairs to wait for the battle to end. That day, she realized that the gates of hell had been opened, and that it would not end before the fire consumed all of them, who were only the firewood.

In the upstairs room, Bahi realized what had come to pass. It was the bitch, the whore, the wife of Abd al-Ghani, oldest of the Talib boys, who had seduced him. It was she who, in broad daylight on market day, had reached out as he was passing in front of her door and dragged him inside by the back of his neck. “All this light!” she exclaimed, and he said nothing. He let her look into his eyes and run her hands over his chest.

She bewitched him. She placed her fingers on him, and it was as though armies of ants crawled over him and made him her captive. She dragged him to a nearby room as he succumbed to her, the glances of the chickens and the ducks in the courtyard pursuing them.

The dark, windowless room was suddenly illuminated. She perceived the light, while he did not realize that he had entered into the dark. “It’s coming out of your body, my bridegroom. I must bear your secret. Light me and take me to hell.” He heard her and let her do as she pleased. She lifted him to the seventh heaven.

He left her house feeling light as a feather. What had been weighing him down; what had he emptied into her that now made
him so light? The narrow streets were no longer narrow, the black houses no longer black, nor did the dung in the streets have a repulsive smell.

She had been married to Abd al-Ghani for only a month. That was why she had not gone to the market with the family women that day; she was still a bride. Afterwards she still did not go out, and concocted excuse after excuse for a whole year. The Talib boys watched their eldest brother submit to his young, beautiful wife, and they marveled at the power of beauty over men.

But the women, the Talib boys’ wives, schemed and were successful. One day, Abd al-Ghani lifted his wife off her feet then pushed her to the ground in the midst of his brothers, their wives, his mother, and his father. He placed his foot on her chest and a knife on her neck.