The Beggar, the Thief and the Dogs, Autumn Quail (15 page)

           

G
od it's dark! I'd be better off like a bat. Why is that smell of hot fat seeping out from under some door at this hour of the night? When will Nur be back? Will she come alone? And can I stay in her flat long enough to be forgotten? You might perhaps be thinking you've got rid of me forever now, Rauf! But with this revolver, if I have any luck, I can do wonderful things. With this revolver I can awake those who are asleep. They're the root of the trouble. They're the ones who've made creatures like Nabawiyya, Ilish, and Rauf Ilwan possible
.

There was a sound like footsteps climbing the stairs. When he was sure he heard someone coming, he crouched and looked down through the banisters. A faint light was moving slowly along the wall. The light of a match, he thought. The footsteps came higher, heavy and slow. To let her know he was there and to avoid surprising her, he cleared his throat with a loud rasp.

“Who is it?” she said apprehensively.

Said leaned his head out between the banisters as far as he could and replied in a whisper, “Said Mahran.”

She ran the rest of the way up and stopped in front of him out of breath. The match was almost out.

“It's you!” she said, breathless and happy, seizing his arm. “I'm sorry. Have you been waiting long?”

Opening the door to the flat, she led him in by the arm, switched on the light in a bare rectangular hall, then drew him into a reception room, square and somewhat larger, where she rushed to the window and flung it open wide to release the stifling air.

“It was midnight when I got here,” he said, flinging himself down on one of two sofas that stood face to face. “I've waited for ages.”

She sat down opposite him, moving a pile of scraps of cloth and dress cuttings. “You know what?” she said. “I'd given up hope. I didn't think you'd really come.”

Their tired eyes met. “Even after my definite promise?” he said, hiding his frozen feelings with a smile.

She smiled back faintly, without answering. Then she said, “Yesterday they kept questioning me at the police station over and over. They nearly killed me. Where's the car?”

“I thought I'd better dump it somewhere, even though I need it.” He took off his jacket and tossed it on the sofa next to him. His brown shirt was caked with sweat and dust. “They'll find it and give it back to its owner, as you'd expect of a government that favors some thieves more than others.”

“What did you do with it yesterday?”

“Nothing whatever, in fact. Anyway, you'll know everything at the proper time.” He gazed at the open window, took a deep breath, and said, “It must face north. Really fresh air.”

“It's open country from here to Bab al-Noor. All around here is the cemetery.”

“That's why the air isn't polluted,” he said with a grin.
She's looking at you as if she could eat you up, but you only feel bored, annoyed. Why can't you stop brooding over your wounded pride and enjoy her?

“I'm terribly sorry you had to wait so long on the landing.”

“Well, I'm going to be your guest for quite some time,” he said, giving her a strange, scrutinizing look.

She lifted her head, raised her chin, and said happily, “Stay here all your life, if you like.”

“Until I move over to the neighbors'!” he said with another grin, pointing through the window. She seemed preoccupied. She didn't seem to hear his joke. “Won't your people ask about you?” she said.

“I have no people,” he replied, looking down at his gym shoes.

“I mean your wife.”

She means pain and fury and wasted bullets! What she wants is to hear a humiliating confession; she'll only find that a locked heart becomes increasingly difficult to unlock. But what is the point of lying when the newspapers are screaming with sensation?

“I said I have no people.” Now you're wondering what my words mean. Your face is beaming with happiness. But I hate this joy. And I can see now that your face has lost whatever bloom it had, particularly under the eyes.

“Divorced?” she asked.

“Yes. When I was in jail. But let's close the subject,” he said, waving his hand impatiently.

“The bitch!” she said angrily. “A man like you deserves to be waited for, even if he's been sent up for life!”

How sly she is! But a man like me doesn't like to be pitied. Beware of sympathy! “The truth is that I neglected her far too much.” What a waste for bullets to strike the innocent!

“Anyway, she isn't the kind of woman who deserves you.”

True. Neither is any other woman. But Nabawiyya's still full of vitality, while you're hovering on the brink: one puff of wind would be enough to blow you out. You only arouse pity in me. “No one must know I am here.”

Laughing, as if sure she possessed him forever, she said, “Don't worry; I'll keep you hidden all right.” Then, hopefully, she added, “But you haven't done anything really serious, have you?”

He dismissed the question by shrugging nonchalantly.

She stood up and said, “I'll get some food for you. I do have food and drink. Do you remember how cold you used to be to me?”

“I had no time for love then.”

She eyed him reproachfully. “Is anything more important than love? I often wondered if your heart wasn't made of stone. When you went to jail, no one grieved as much as I did.”

“That's why I came to you instead of anybody else.”

“But you only ran into me by chance,” she said with a pout. “You might even have forgotten all about me!”

“Do you think I can't find anywhere else?” he said, framing his face into a scowl.

As if to head off an outburst, she came up close to him and took his cheeks between the palms of her hands. “The guards at the zoo won't let visitors tease the lion. I'd forgotten that. Please forgive me. But your face is burning and
your beard is bristly. Why not have a cold shower?” His smile showed her he welcomed the idea. “Off you go to the bathroom, then! When you come out you'll find some food ready. We'll eat in the bedroom, it's much nicer than this room. It looks out over the cemetery, too.”

           

W
hat a lot of graves there are, laid out as far as the eye can see. Their headstones are like hands raised in surrender, though they are beyond being threatened by anything. A city of silence and truth, where success and failure, murderer and victim, come together, where thieves and policemen lie side by side in peace for the first and last time.

Nur's snoring seemed likely to end only when she awoke in late afternoon.

You'll stay in this prison until the police forget you. And will they ever really forget? The graves remind you that death cheats the living. They speak of betrayal; and thus they make you remember Nabawiyya, Ilish, and Rauf, telling you that you yourself are dead, ever since that unseeing bullet was fired
.

But you still have bullets of fire
.

At the sound of Nur's yawning, loud, like a groan, he turned away from the window shutters toward the bed. Nur was sitting up, naked, her hair disheveled, looking unrested and run-down. But she smiled as she said, “I
dreamed you were far away and I was going out of my mind waiting for you.”

“That was a dream,” he observed grimly. “In fact, you're the one who's going out and I'm the one who'll wait.”

She went into the bathroom, emerged again drying her hair; and he followed her hands as they re-created her face in a new form, happy and young. She was, like himself, thirty years old, but she lied outright, hoping to appear younger, adding to the multitude of sins and sillinesses which are openly committed. But theft, unfortunately, was not one of them.

“Don't forget the papers,” he reminded her at the door.

When she'd gone he moved into the reception room and flung himself down on one of the sofas. Now he was alone in the full sense of the word, without even his books, which he'd left with Sheikh Ali. He stared up at the cracked white ceiling, a dull echo of the threadbare carpet, killing time. The setting sun flashed through the open window, like a jewel being carried by a flight of doves from one point in time to the next.

Your coldness, Sana, was very disquieting. Like seeing these graves. I don't know if we'll meet again, or where or when. You'll certainly never love me now. Not in this life, so full of badly aimed bullets, desires gone astray. What's left behind is a dangling chain of regrets. The first link was the students' hostel on the road to Giza. Ilish didn't matter much, but Nabawiyya
—
she'd shaken him, torn him up by the roots. If only a deceit could be as plainly read in the face as fever or an infectious disease! Then beauty would never be false and many a man would be spared the ravages of deception
.

That grocery near the students' hostel, where Nabawiyya
used to come shopping, gripping her bowl. She was always so nicely dressed, much neater than the other servant girls, which was why she'd been known as the “Turkish lady's maid.” The rich, proud old Turkish woman, who lived alone at the end of the road, in a house at the center of a big garden, insisted that everyone who worked for her should be good-looking, clean, and well dressed. So Nabawiyya always appeared with her hair neatly combed and plaited in a long pigtail, and wearing slippers. Her peasant's gown flowed around a sprightly and nimble body, and even those not bewitched by her agreed that she was a fine example of country beauty with her dark complexion, her round, full face, her brown eyes, her small chubby nose, and her lips moist with the juices of life. There was a small green tattoo mark on her chin like a beauty spot
.

You used to stand at the entrance to the students' hostel and wait for her after work, staring up the street until her fine form with her adorable gait appeared in the distance. As she stepped closer and closer, you'd glow with anticipation. She was like some lovely melody, welcomed wherever she went. As she slipped in among the dozens of women standing at the grocer's, your eyes would follow her, drunk with ecstasy. She'd disappear and emerge again, your desire and curiosity increasing all the time—so did your impulse to do something, no matter what, by word, gesture, or invocation—and she'd move off on her way home, to disappear for the rest of the day and another whole night. And you'd let out a long, bitter sigh and your elation would subside; the birds in the roadside trees would cease their song and a cold autumn breeze would suddenly spring up from nowhere
.

But then you notice that her form is reacting to your stare, that she's swaying coquettishly as she walks, and you stand there no longer, but, with your natural impetuosity, hurry after her along the road. Then at the lone palm tree at the edge of the fields you bar her way. She's dumbfounded by your audacity, or pretends to be, and asks you indignantly who you might be. You reply in feigned surprise, “Who might I be? You really ask who I am? Don't you know? I'm known to every inch of your being!”

“I don't like ill-mannered people!” she snaps
.

“Neither do I. I'm like you, I hate ill-mannered people. Oh no. On the contrary, I admire good manners, beauty, and gentleness. And all of those things are you! You still don't know who I am? I must carry that basket for you and see you to the door of your house.”

“I don't need your help,” she says, “and don't ever stand in my way again!” With that she walks away, but with you at her side, encouraged by the faint smile slipping through her pretense of indignation, which you receive like the first cool breeze on a hot and sultry night. Then she had said, “Go back; you must! My mistress sits at the window and if you come one step more she'll see you.”

“But I'm a very determined fellow,” you reply, “and if you want me to go back, you'll have to come along with me. Just a few steps. Back to the palm tree. You see, I've got to talk to you. And why shouldn't I? Am I not respectable enough?”

She shakes her head vigorously, but, murmuring an angry protest, she does slow down, her neck arched like an angry cat's. She did slow down and I no longer doubt I've won, that Nabawiyya is not indifferent and knows very well how I stand sighing there at the students' hostel. You
know that casual stares in the street will become something big in your life, in hers, and in the world at large, too, which would grow larger as a result
.

“Till tomorrow, then,” you say, stopping there, afraid for her, afraid of the biting tongue of the old Turk who lives like an enigma at the bottom of the street. So you return to the palm tree and climb it, quick as a monkey, out of sheer high spirits, then jump down again, from ten feet up, into a plot of green. Then you go back to the hostel, singing, in your deep voice, like a bull in ecstasy
.

And later, when circumstances sent you to al-Zayyat Circus, to work that took you from quarter to quarter, village to village, you feared that “out of sight, out of mind” might well be applied to you and you asked her to marry you. Yes, you asked her to marry you, in the good old legal, traditional Muslim way, standing outside the university that you had
—
unfairly—been unable to enter, though so many fools did. There was no light in the street or the sky, just a big crescent moon over the horizon. Gazing shyly down at the ground, her forehead reflecting the pale moonlight, she seemed full of happiness. You told her about your good wages, your excellent prospects, and your neat ground-floor flat in Darrasa, on Jabal Road, near Sheikh Ali's house. “You'll get to know the godly Sheikh,” you said, “when we marry. And we've got to have the wedding as soon as possible. After all, our love has lasted quite a while already. You'll have to leave the old lady now.”

“I'm an orphan, you know. There's only my aunt at Sidi al-Arbain.”

“That's fine.”

Then you kissed her under the crescent moon. The wedding was so lovely that everyone talked about it ever after.
From Zayyat I got a wedding present of ten pounds. Ilish Sidra seemed absolutely overjoyed at it all, as if it was his own wedding, playing the part of the faithful friend while he was really no friend at all. And the oddest thing of all is that you were taken in by him
—
you, clever old you, smart enough to scare the devil himself, you the hero and Ilish your willing slave, admiring, flattering, and doing everything to avoid upsetting you, happy to pick up the scraps of your labor, your smartness. You were sure you could have sent him and Nabawiyya off together alone, into the very deserts where our Lord Moses wandered, and that all the time he'd keep seeing you between himself and her and would never step out of line. How could she ever give up a lion and take to a dog? She's rotten to the core, rotten enough to deserve death and damnation. For sightless bullets not to stray, blindly missing their vile and evil targets, and hit innocent people, leaving others torn with remorse and rage and on the verge of insanity. Compelled to forget everything good in life, the way you used to play as a kid in the street, innocent first love, your wedding night, Sana's birth and seeing her little face, hearing her cry, carrying her in your arms for the first time. All the smiles you never counted—how you wish you'd counted them. And how she looked—you wish it was one of the things you've forgotten—when she was frightened, that screaming of hers that shook the ground and made springs and breezes dry up. All the good feelings that ever were
.

The shadows are lengthening now. It's getting dark in the room and outside the window. The silence of the graves is more intense, but you can't switch on the light. The flat must look the way it always has when Nur is out. Your eyes will get used to the dark, the way they did to prison and all those ugly faces. And you can't start drinking,
either, lest you bump into something or shout out loud. The flat must stay as silent as the grave; even the dead mustn't know you're here. God alone can tell how long you'll have to stay here and how patient in this jail. Just as He alone could tell you'd kill Shaban Husayn and not Ilish Sidra
.

Well, you'll have to go out sooner or later, to take a walk in the night, even if only to safe places. But let's postpone that until the police are worn out looking for you. And let's hope to God Shaban Husayn isn't buried in one of these graves here; this run-down quarter could hardly stand the strain of such a painful irony of fate. Just keep cool, keep patient, until Nur comes back. You must not ask when Nur will come back. You'll have to put up with the dark, the silence, and the loneliness—for as long as the world refuses to change its naughty ways. Nur, poor girl, is caught in it, too. What, after all, is her love for you but a bad habit, getting stuck on someone who's already dead of pain and anger, is put off by her affection no less than by her ageing looks, who doesn't really know what to do with her except maybe drink with her, toasting, as it were, defeat and grief, and pity her for her worthy but hopeless efforts. And in the end you can't even forget she's a woman. Like that slinking bitch Nabawiyya, who'll be in mortal fear until the rope's safely installed around your neck or some rotten bullet is lodged in your heart. And the police will tell such lies that you'll be cut off forever from Sana. She'll never even know the truth of your love for her, as if that, too, was just a bullet that went astray
.

Sleep came over Said Mahran and he dozed off for a while on the sofa, unaware that he had been dreaming in his sleep until he awoke, to find himself in complete darkness, still alone in Nur's flat in Sharia Najm al-Din, where
Ilish Sidra had not surprised him and had not fired a hail of bullets at him. He had no idea what time it was.

Suddenly he heard the rattle of a key in the lock and then the door being closed. A light in the hallway went on and filtered in above the door. Nur came in smiling, carrying a big parcel. She kissed him and said, “Let's have a feast! I've brought home a restaurant, a delicatessen, and a patisserie all in one!”

“You've been drinking,” he said as he kissed her.

“I have to; it's part of my job. I'll take a bath, then come back. Here are the papers for you.”

His eyes followed her as she left, then he buried himself in the newspapers, both morning and evening. There was nothing that was news to him, but there was clearly enormous interest in both the crime and its perpetrator, far more than he'd expected, especially in
Al-Zahra
, Rauf Ilwan's paper. It discussed at length his history as a burglar and the list of the exploits revealed at his trial, with stories about the great houses of the rich he had burglarized, comments on his character, his latent insanity, and an analysis of “the criminal boldness that finally led to bloodshed.”

What enormous black headlines! Thousands upon thousands must be discussing his crimes at that moment, all amused at Nabawiyya's infidelity and laying bets as to what his fate would be. He was the very center of the news, the man of the hour, and the thought filled him with both apprehension and pride, conflicting emotions that were so intense they almost tore him apart. Meanwhile, so many other thoughts and ideas crowded in confusion into his mind that a kind of intoxication seemed to engulf him. He felt sure he was about to do something truly extraordinary, even miraculous; and he wished he could somehow communicate with all the people outside, to tell them what
was making him—there all alone in the silence—burst with emotion, to convince them that he'd win in the end, even if only after death.

He was quite alone, separate from everyone else. They didn't even know, did not comprehend the language of silence and solitude. They didn't understand that they themselves were silent and alone sometimes, and that the mirrors dimly reflecting their own images were in fact deceptive, making them falsely imagine they were seeing people unknown to themselves.

His mind's eye focused on the photograph of Sana with a sense of wonder, and he was deeply moved. Then, in his imagination, he conjured up all their pictures—his own wild-looking self, Nabawiyya, looking like a whore—coming back to the picture of Sana. She was smiling. Yes. Smiling. Because she could not see him and because she knew nothing. He scrutinized her intensely, overwhelmed by the sense that he'd failed, that the night out there through the window was sighing in some kind of sympathetic sadness, desperately wishing he could run away with her to some place known to no one else. He yearned to see her, if only as his last wish on earth before his execution.