Текст книги "No One Sleeps in Alexandria"

Автор книги: Ibrahim Abdel Meguid

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Ibrahim Abdel Meguid
No One Sleeps in Alexandria

From delight to fury and from fury to light; I build myself whole from all beings.

Paul Éluard

The Mediterranean is an absurdly small sea; the length and greatness of its history makes us dream it larger than it is. Alexandria indeed – the true no less than the imagined – lay only some hundreds of sea-miles to the south.

Lawrence Durrell

The gods were disturbed by their noise, which had deprived them of sleep, so they sent a plague to them, but they soon multiplied again and their din rose, so the gods sent them a six-year drought and a seven-day great flood. The flood was so horrific that the gods also were terrified and withdrew further away into the sky.

Babylonian Flood Myth

Secret beloved voices; the voices of those who have died or who, for us, are lost like the dead. They speak in our dreams sometimes and sometimes in thought the mind hears them; with their echoes, sounds of the poems of our first life come back momentarily like a distant music in the night fading away.

Constantine Cavafy

Translator’s Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the following friends and colleagues for help with various aspects of the translation: Evelyn Anoya, Heather Felton, and Emily Teeter (University of Chicago); John Eisele (College of William and Mary); Gregg Reynolds (Datalogics, Inc.); Neil Hewison (The American University in Cairo Press), and Zora O’Neill.

1

Man is clay and straw; God is the potter.

Ancient Egyptian saying

Hitler is pacing around the chancellery in Berlin, stooped slightly forward and hands clasped behind his back, in a state of deep reflection. His lips are pursed, which makes his mustache appear a little askew. His eyes are open wide with vexation, which makes them twinkle all the more. But in fact, his chest and head are about to explode. He is totally oblivious to the Chancellery guards standing at their posts and to his own bodyguards following behind him. He is wishing he could wring the Polish president’s neck.

Today is August 25, a clear day in Berlin. Hitler is thinking of old-time wars, which began as hand-to-hand combat between two commanders and ended in the defeat of one of them, whereupon he and his army surrendered to the victor. But he cannot risk that; he knows very well how small his body is – even though it is he to whom Austria simply offered herself last year like a practiced whore, even though it is he who did not hesitate to invade a well-armed Czechoslovakia and met no resistance. Only the Poles are obstinate; they don’t want to return to the Reich what the Treaty of Versailles has unjustly given them. He will not accept anything less than what Germany had lost. This is exactly the right time: twenty years have passed since his time in the hospital after almost losing his eyesight in the war, which had ended catastrophically for the German nation. His old bitterness haunts him a great deal; it is time he reaped the fruits of his struggle, beginning with when he joined the German Workers’ Party, organized the National Socialist Party and the stormtroopers, was jailed, and fought the communists, up to when he became chancellor and liquidated all his enemies, and the communists before them. The German people had supported him and cheered for him, so that he came to realize that he was the messenger sent by heaven to restore Germany’s dignity. But he does not want to declare war so early. The obstinate Poles are forcing him to do it. He rushes into the chancellery.

It is now 3 p.m. sharp. Hitler signs the order to invade Poland, then heaves a sigh of relief. He orders something to eat in his office, then calls Eva Braun on the telephone and chats with her and tells her that he won’t see her this afternoon. He remembers his former war minister, Blomberg, who had lured him, along with Goering the Luftwaffe chief, to be the witnesses at Blomberg’s marriage to a woman who, as Himmler, the chief of the secret police, later proved, was a prostitute with a police record. He curses Blomberg and all whores and remembers how he removed him from office in a thorough reorganization.

But that was last year. He does not need anyone now. He must look forward, only forward to the future. He finds himself thinking of his friend Mussolini.

It is now 6 p.m. He has not left his office yet. Attolico, the Italian ambassador, presents him with a letter from the friend he had been thinking of a few hours earlier.

“In spite of Italy’s unconditional support of Germany, Italy cannot intervene militarily unless Germany supplies her at once with all the war materiel stated in the list attached to this letter.” Hitler looks at the list, resisting a tremendous urge to explode. Ambassador Attolico does not notice Hitler shaking his head in vexation; the man’s neck is not long enough for the shaking to be noticeable – that would require shouting, which was what he did when he addressed the masses. But he will not give speeches now. He wants, on the contrary, to appear calm.

With sudden elation he remembers the day he entered Austria with his troops without facing a single shot. That was the morning of March 12 of last year. That day he went to Linz, where he had first gone to school as a child. There he excitedly delivered a speech to the frenzied masses. His envoy to Rome, Prince Philip of Hesse, had telephoned him the day before to convey Mussolini’s warmest greetings and to intimate that Austria meant nothing at all to the Duce. Hitler responded to his envoy with overwhelming joy, saying that he would never forget the Italian leader’s support, no matter what happened, and that if Mussolini ever needed him, he would stand by his side, even if the whole world were against him.

The day of his invasion, he had pondered the frenzy of the Austrians as he addressed them. He remembered how he had been born to a poor customs official and how, as a young man, he had wanted to be an artist but failed to gain entrance to the Arts Academy in Vienna, which caused him to leave Austria for Germany. Then he pondered his triumphant entry into his childhood home. Remembering the telephone conversation of the day before, he became ecstatic with joy. What more could anyone want, than to feel that providence was on his side? He had made his decision to annex Austria to the Reich. Today, however, Mussolini was letting him down before he even started the war.

Hitler becomes a bit depressed. He almost calls Eva Braun to summon her to his office. The arrogant Poles are standing like boulders in my way, he thinks. My dear friend who brags about my believing in his ideas is letting me down. What kind of people are these Italians? Real pirates! But these pirates can go into battle in the Mediterranean against the French and keep them busy until Poland is no more. Mussolini’s letter was not a good sign.

Therefore, when the telephone rings, he hesitates before picking it up. He lifts it to his ear and listens as his foreign minister, Ribbentrop, tells him that a mutual defense treaty between England and Poland had just been signed.

At this moment, the Führer cannot think of anyone but Keitel, the chief of staff. He summons him at once and calmly tells him, as if dismissing the whole matter, “Stop everything at once. I need time for negotiations.”

It is not a long time, just five days. There is a blackout in Paris; leaflets urging women to volunteer in the army are distributed in French cities. France declares full confidence in her generals: Gamelin, Darlan, and Vuillemin, the chiefs of staff of the army, navy, and the air force. General mobilization is declared; troops and convoys pass through the streets of Paris on their way back to their barracks. In London, the platforms of Waterloo station fill with suitcases and luggage as women and children leave for the countryside. In Italy, Mussolini issues an order dividing the army in two: one branch commanded by Crown Prince Umberto, and one commanded by Marshall Graziani; the government confiscates coffee beans from the markets, declaring that the government will handle the coffee trade in order to supply the armies. All this despite the fact, as Hitler understood from the letter, that Mussolini was reluctant to side with him in the war.

Every country in the world is shaken and attempting to define its position if the war breaks out: to fight, to stay neutral, or to wait. Unrest continues in Palestine. A ship carrying twelve hundred Jews approaches the coast in order to smuggle them into the country. A few people in Germany take to the streets to protest the war; some throw themselves in front of trains rather than witness a new war annihilate the world. This happens in many European cities. The ship Maritt Pasha crosses the Suez canal carrying French and Senegalese troops to Syria and Lebanon to reinforce French defenses. In Cairo the commencement ceremonies for Victoria College are postponed, police patrols increased, anti-espionage measures intensified, and reserve officers mobilized. Mahmud Ghalib Pasha, minister of transportation, orders a number of railroad cars converted into field hospitals. Air raid sirens are tested; seven steamers are stationed in Bulaq to evacuate the inhabitants of Cairo if the need arises. In Alexandria, Admiral Cunningham, commander in chief of the British Mediterranean Fleet, meets Prime Minister Ali Mahir Pasha in the Egyptian government’s summer headquarters in Bulkely to discuss necessary naval procedures if war breaks out. The Committee for Protection against Air Raids, headed by the mayor of Alexandria, meets and decides to increase fire stations to three and to order car owners to paint their headlights dark rather than light blue. The air raid alarm system is also tested there. Metal nets are set up outside the harbor to repel naval attacks. Night tests of searchlights are conducted above the city to prepare against air raids. Mr. Miles Lampson, the British ambassador, arrives from London to meet His Majesty the King at the Muntaza Palace. Hitler proposes to the British government to settle the dispute by having Poland surrender Danzig at once and hold a plebiscite for the inhabitants of the corridor. He sets a deadline of two days and asks that the Polish president himself, or an official emissary authorized to negotiate, give him the answer.

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.

2

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

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.

“Who, bitch?”

She did not hesitate.

“Bahi,” she said in a faint voice.

“That wanton little boy?” Her husband spat in her face and pressed the knife deep into her neck.

Her laughter rang through the courtyard of the big house. Her husband was thrown down, falling onto his backside, and the knife flew from his hand. He groaned in pain, then his eyes turned away and fixed onto faraway space. He had driven the knife into the neck, he was absolutely certain, but no blood came out – just a beam of light.

She got up, still laughing. His brothers searched frantically for the knife but could not find it anywhere. Later they would find it in the courtyard and wonder how nobody had seen it that day. It was so rusted that as one of them rubbed it, it turned to dust. The brothers carried him to his room; he could not walk on his own. She stood in a far corner, laughing and crying at the same time. She aroused the women’s pity and fear. The same women who had schemed against her took her to the shed and sat around her in a corner on the straw. She did not stop shaking. They said she would die that night. The men forgot about her, worrying instead about their incapacitated older brother. The women gave her a bowl of fresh milk, which she gulped down, letting half of it spill down her chest and never ceasing to laugh and cry. Then she fell asleep on the straw, and they watched her side move with her breathing, like a tired animal.

At dawn the men came out of their brother’s room dragging their feet. The women wailed, “Is he dead?”

“He was murdered!” shouted the men. “His blood is on the hands of the Khalils! The life of the little dandy boy is not payment enough.”

No one saw the wife sneak out of the shed at first light and disappear. In the morning the Talibs lay in wait for Bahi on the streets. The news had spread. Bahi was returning from a neighboring village. No one had realized that the women and girls washing their pots and pans in the canal had gone far outside the village, so that before Bahi entered the village, the women alerted him, and he turned to the fields, where his brothers were. The women then went back to their usual place along the canal in the middle of the village, where the ducks swam. But the Talibs had planted their own spies, so they knew where the boy was going.

Magd al-Din climbed down from the roof. He opened the wooden gate and went to the house of Khalaf, his one remaining friend from the other family; he too had been ordered by the mayor to leave the village.

“What have you decided to do, Khalaf?”

“Sheikh Magd, there’s nothing left for me here. For a while now my money and my trade have been in Tanta. I know that I am not the the real target of this action – the mayor has just decided to retaliate for what Bahi did to him so long ago, so he dragged up this vendetta business, which has been over between us for years. I’m leaving the village tomorrow. I know I could just come back the next day, but I won’t.” He offered Magd al-Din a Cottarelli cigarette and asked, “I heard that your cousins, your sisters’ husbands, want to fight the mayor. Is that true?”

“There will be no fighting. I forbade them.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’ll leave the village tomorrow too.”

Magd al-Din left Khalaf’s house realizing for the first time that he was acquiescing to the mayor’s order, not out of fear or submission, but out of a deep desire to leave the village and join his brother in Alexandria.

Two days before Magd al-Din’s last night, the reply that Hitler had demanded came to him in the form of the announcement of the Polish peoples’ speedy mobilization and the Polish president’s appeal to his people to stand behind their army in defense of freedom and honor.

So the reprieve was over. The machine of evil had been switched on, and there was no escaping it. In the morning following Magd al-Din’s last night in the village, at exactly 4:45 a.m., the full-scale invasion of Poland began.

It was Friday, the first of September, 1939. Magd al-Din did not usually go out to the field on a Friday; he preferred to spend the whole day in the small village mosque. But on this Friday he went out to the field. He did not want to go to the station directly from his house, and he had asked Zahra to go ahead to the station later that evening. The mayor had sent a number of guards to Magd al-Din’s house, where they learned he was in the field and would leave the village from there. In the evening the chief guard and his men stood at the little bridge that connected the village with the road to the fields, in order to prevent Magd al-Din from going back to his house.

The mayor had not believed that he would leave the village so easily, but the guards watched him ride away from the village on a donkey so small that it looked like a she-ass. They fired some shots in the air to scare him. Magd al-Din chose not even to look back. He truly wanted to get out.