A Cloudy Day on the Western Shore

by Mohamed Mansi Qandil

  “Believe me, my dear,” she said, “it’s no use waiting. He may not even be here to begin with. Come along now, I’ll take you home. It will kill Madame Umm Abbas if neither one of you comes home tonight.”

  Suddenly reminded of Umm Abbas, Aisha realized she must now be sitting by the window, anxious and helpless. News would have reached her of a massacre that had taken place at the square, and doubtless her worst fears were assailing her now. Nabawiyya’s logic prevailed—there was no one left in the square but soldiers and some informers—all the rest had been felled by despair and exhaustion. Aisha, too, was overcome by this day’s exertions. Nabawiyya took her by the hand and led her away, one hand reassuringly on her back.

  Nabawiyya hailed the driver of a carriage who was sleeping, parked next to the post office. She sat in the back next to Aisha, who, feeling a bit of warmth, realized how chilled and lonely she had been. The carriage set off, the horse’s hoofbeats cleaving the silence. Nabawiyya brushed away the traces of tears from Aisha’s face. “My dear,” she said, “don’t drown yourself in love. Your Mukhtar’s nice, and all that, but men are worthless. If you break things off with them they go to the ends of the earth to keep you from escaping, but if you seduce them they get you pregnant and then they run away. They—”

  Aisha stared at her, astonished at her daring and fearful that the driver would hear her, although he appeared unconcerned. The streets were virtually empty, and unusually dark. Umm Abbas, Aisha thought, would hear her out as she told her story, but she would be very angry with her. She wouldn’t forgive her for what had happened to Mukhtar.

  Nabawiyya kept talking, trying to stave off the dreariness of the silence and the dark. She spoke about the women at the house in the red-light district. Word of the demonstration had reached them as they were preparing to welcome their customers, and they had decided at once that this was no time for work or pleasure, but that they must all join their woes with everyone else’s on that sad night. The lights of the Sayyida Zaynab Mosque appeared, and as human activity filled the square Aisha felt a little more at ease. The two women disembarked together, Nabawiyya insistent upon escorting Aisha to the entrance of the narrow alleyway. In spite of herself, Aisha felt embarrassed that anyone should see Nabawiyya walking beside her, and she wished the night were even darker. Nabawiyya must have sensed what was in her mind, for she stopped and said, “You’ll be all right now—no one in the neighborhood will bother you.”

  Aisha turned to her, grateful for her perceptiveness. “Can you get back home on your own?”

  “Nighttime,” Nabawiyya said simply, “is my cover and my protection. It’s the light of day that exposes me to shame.”

  “I needed your help badly. I don’t know how to thank you.”

  “No need for thanks, my dear. We’ll meet again—I visit the Umm Awajiz shrine at Sayyida Zaynab every Thursday.”

  Aisha said good-bye and stood, perplexed, watching her. Then she dragged herself home with heavy steps.

  The days that followed were heavy as well. Umm Abbas grew flushed and angry, her expression reproachful, and she swore she would not speak to Aisha until Mukhtar returned. Aisha took up her vigil in Citadel Square, consumed with fear and apprehension. The buildings of the Citadel towered grimly over her, British flags fluttering atop its lofty walls. The flags, a blatant symbol of British control over a vanquished city, had been raised on the first day they arrived—the khedive himself had surrendered to them the keys to the Citadel gates—and the flags had never yet been lowered. Every day the ranks of their soldiers, with their red faces, descended from their barracks within the Citadel in a long line, parading their might from the arms bazaar to Khalifa Street.

  Aisha stood amid a crowd of people. The old Ottoman prison, of pallid stone, confined all manner of prisoners behind its walls. Aisha was seized with fright on finding herself among the wives of murderers, drug smugglers, and highwaymen—what, then, must it be like inside the prison, and how would Mukhtar fare in such company? What scars would this terrible ordeal leave upon his soul?

  After many long and bitter days, Mukhtar’s comrades began to emerge from the low prison gate, their faces sallow and their eyes wandering, unable to tolerate the sun’s glare, as if they had been kept in the pit of a dark cellar. Hope sprang to life in Aisha’s heart—she expected Mukhtar to appear at any moment. He would be pale, his beard grown long, and he would be starving, but he would be as eager for their reunion as she. She would take him in her arms and kiss both his eyes, so that he would forget his travails. But he did not come out—one face after another appeared, but not his. Every day the prison shut its gates without her having seen him, and that access of hope she had felt faded from her eyes. Umm Abbas’s silence went on and on.

  Aisha saw al-Rafiy coming and going in a state of exhaustion, accompanied by a team of lawyers. She begged him to give her some answers, but he shook his head. “It’s a very difficult situation,” he said. The police chief himself has accused Mukhtar of attempting to kill him. In refuting this charge we are attempting the impossible; it will take time.”

  She couldn’t believe that he would remain alone inside the prison, while she lingered, lost, in the middle of this forbidding square. Her days were bitter, her nights filled with nightmares. How many more days would she have to go on like this? How many weeks? How many months would pass before she could see him once more?

  In the middle of the night Aisha started up in fear, with a nightmare crouched upon her chest and a sound of muffled blows coming from downstairs, like a continuation of the bad dream. She got out of bed and dabbed at the sweat that had broken out on her brow. Barefoot, she went to investigate. She could hear the sound of Umm Abbas’s slow and regular breathing as she stood listening for a moment on the other side of the door. The noise was coming from below—violent blows, sounds of something splintering and falling in pieces. The sounds emanated from the untenanted basement. What was happening? Was it another police raid? Or were thieves wreaking havoc among Mukhtar’s irreplaceable sculptures? What should she do? It was no use rousing the elderly lady—there would be nothing she could do. Aisha picked up a small lamp and opened the door. She went downstairs, the cold steps sending shivers through her as she placed her feet on them one after another. The lamp trembled in her hand, and nearly went out, as the sounds of demolition grew louder. She took the last few stairs, which led to the basement door, shaking with fright. The hour was late, and there was no one she might call for help. There was nothing for it but to confront whatever sort of person might turn out to be within.

  The door was unlocked. Aisha hesitated before pushing it open. Then she held the lamp up and stepped inside. She saw Mukhtar standing in the middle of the room, clutching a hammer, which he was about to bring down upon a sculpture of a peasant woman. When he sensed Aisha’s presence, the hand holding the hammer paused, and he turned toward her. He was tall and gaunt, his visage implacably angry. A thick beard encircled his cheeks, and in his eyes was a savage gleam. She gasped with a mixture of joy and alarm. Setting the lamp down on a small table, she ran to him, embracing him with all her strength. She could feel the protruding bones of his chest pressing against her breasts. She buried her head in his neck, inhaling the smell of prison that clung to his pores. But his face was still distant from her. His arm with the hand that held the hammer was raised high, while the other arm made no move to touch her. “Thank God you’ve come back to us,” she cried. Overcome, she burst into tears, still clinging to his neck.

  She was unaware of how stiffly he stood there, silent and unyielding. She tried to hold him more tightly, to connect with his body and give it some of her own warmth, but then she heard his voice saying, “Don’t touch my back. It hurts.”

  She drew back in alarm. She saw the look he was giving her—a stare that held nothing of either love or enmity, as though she had intruded upon a private moment and she had no right to be there. She gazed at him pleadingly, as if entreating him to shed this grim de
meanor, to let her touch his face and to kiss him, and ease her mind. He turned his face away, avoiding the look in her eyes. She burst out with all her questions at once. “When did you get out? Why didn’t you come upstairs? I never stopped waiting for you. What have they done to you? Why are you destroying these sculptures? Why?”

  He raised his hand and gestured for her to be silent. In the same cold voice he said, “I’m tired. I can’t talk.”

  “And yet,” she replied with some asperity, “you can smash these sculptures.”

  He spoke sharply. “I no longer need them. I no longer need anything.”

  Cautiously, she approached him. She refrained from trying to embrace him, so as not to hurt him or make him pull away. She placed her hand gently on his face, and he didn’t prevent her. She could see plainly in his eyes the pain he was in. She stroked his coarse beard and felt the cold sweat that covered him. She noticed little wounds, purple bruises, and she registered his deadly pallor. He couldn’t bear to look at her, and closed his eyes. At once tears slid from both of them. “Mukhtar!” she cried in distress. “Mukhtar, my love—what have they done to you?”

  He took her hand and removed it from his face, not roughly, but firmly. “Nothing,” he said. “They made me hate myself . . . and hate everything around me. Isn’t that enough?”

  He shuddered, trembling all over, and she withdrew her hand fearfully. All she had to offer him was her love, but he didn’t want it. She gestured toward the wrecked sculptures. “You’re angry and exhausted now. You ought not to destroy your life’s work at such a moment. Calm yourself, love—everything will be set to rights.”

  Her words only made him angrier. He waved the hammer at her, shouting, “Nothing will be set to rights! This country is rotten—I could smell the stench of its rottenness from prison, and I understood that it would never wake up, that it would continue, oblivious, under the yoke of oppression and injustice. Here there is nothing to live for; everything invokes death!”

  His voice rose, his rage filling the room. Aisha drew back until her back was against the wall. She composed herself so as not to break into tears. All the feelings of humiliation he had suppressed while in prison had exploded, and he had no one on whom he could vent his rage except for the sculptures and Aisha herself. Nearly choking on her words, she said, “I beg you, Mukhtar—don’t say such things. And please stop waving that hammer.”

  He lowered the hand with the hammer in it, and let out a breath from deep in his lungs, as if he were shifting a burden off his shoulders. “You shouldn’t be here at a time like this,” he said to her. “I want to be alone.”

  He was sending her away—he didn’t need her. He held her responsible for his having gone to prison and for the outrages he had suffered. She didn’t want to take offense—she was still determined to preserve the thread that bound them.

  “I’ll see you in the morning,” she said, “won’t I?”

  “If morning comes,” he said. His voice was cold.

  She dragged herself from the room; her feet felt heavy. She leaned against the wall, breathing hard. She heard no sound of demolition, but his voice rose in sudden, harsh sobs—poor boy, they had hurt him grievously, injuring him in body and spirit. As she went into her room and sat on the bed, she attempted to reassure herself, “He’ll calm down in the morning.” The Mukhtar she knew would come back to her. She closed her eyes and tried to sleep. But she couldn’t.

  In the morning, Mukhtar was not there. Aisha went down to see whether he would come up and have breakfast with her and Umm Abbas, but the door to the room was wide open, and the half-demolished sculptures stared at her, empty-eyed. His clothes lay in a heap, bundles of paper containing his drawings were scattered about—everything was there but he himself, as if he had not yet got out of prison. She wept on Umm Abbas’s shoulder, feeling as though her life had hardened into ice. Where had he gone? Had he gone home to his village? Would he be back come nighttime, or tomorrow? At what time and in what condition would he return?

  She stood at the gate to the School of Fine Arts. Seeing many of his classmates on their way out, she took courage and approached one of them, a young man by the name of Ragheb Iyad, whom she knew from a previous occasion. “I heard,” he told her, “that the school expelled him because of his political activism. He may not be able to finish his studies. It’s a shame that they would treat a talented artist so cruelly.”

  Aisha wandered blindly through the alleyways. She understood what had happened, how devastating it was: not only had he been imprisoned and humiliated, but the dreams dearest to his heart had been laid waste. She went to the offices of al-Siyaasa, and to the café to which most of the students from the School of Fine Arts repaired, where they displayed their work. On a table in the center of the café was a sculpture he had made, of three blind men. She felt she was like them: completely blind, groping about in the streets, unable to see a thing. She went back home, to the old woman who was waiting for her. Umm Abbas wept bitterly, as if lamenting her own lost child, the child she had carried and named, but with whose living reality she had not been blessed.

  He did not return until the evening of the following day. Aisha saw him entering the neighborhood, before he hurried inside the house and hid himself in the basement. He hastened his steps over the small cobblestones, as if someone were after him. He looked even more wretched now than before; his thick beard made his face look darker, but he was still pale, looking as though he might fade away. She hurried into the salon, expecting to hear his footsteps on the stairs, or his knock upon the door of the apartment, but all was quiet, and remained so. Umm Abbas stared at her questioningly.

  “He’s come back,” she said, “but he hasn’t seen fit to come to us and tell us what he intends to do. He’s begun to hate me, truly.”

  Umm Abbas studied her for a moment. She tried to get up, struggling for breath, and Aisha went quickly to help her; she was heavy, flaccid in all her limbs. Aisha opened the double doors of the apartment all the way and helped her through the doorway, which she had not passed in years—not since she was widowed, and immobilized by both her sorrow and her stoutness. She shuffled along painfully, and Aisha, taking pity on her, entreated her to come back, but the lady was resolved to go downstairs, despite her labored breathing. She gripped the banister with one hand, clinging to Aisha’s arm with the other. Aisha’s eyes filled with tears, but she collected herself in the face of the old woman’s determination.

  They stopped in front of the door to his room. Aisha hadn’t the courage to knock—she cowered behind Umm Abbas, leaving her to do the knocking and to order Mukhtar, in strident tones, to open up. He did not dare oppose this voice; he opened the door, and presented his ravaged, grieving face. Startled, he stared at Umm Abbas, who was still panting and red-faced, her heart pounding, but who, in spite of all that, raised her fist and faced him down. “Who do you think you are?” she scolded. “You think you have no family, that there’s no one to worry about you or wonder what’s become of you? Have you forgotten your obligation to us?”

  He backed away, caught off-guard by her rebuke, and Umm Abbas stepped forward, entering that room for the first time in many years. She resumed her tirade, gesturing toward Aisha. “And this poor girl,” she said, “who waited for you at the prison gate, exposed to the elements, and stayed awake nights—how can you treat her so callously?”

  He looked at them both, seeming lost and pitiful, as if prison had torn him up by the roots, leaving him no place to which he could assert any connection, no one with whom he might claim any bond. He would have liked to weep, to throw himself into the old woman’s arms and tell her all his woes, everything he had suffered in the cells at Qirrat Maidan, but he stood there before them and kept himself in check. The two of them were, of all people, the last ones before whom he wished to appear weak and defeated.

  “I can’t stay here after all that’s happened,” he said hoarsely. “I’m going away . . .”

  Umm Abbas went abr
uptly quiet, staring at him in consternation. “What?” she exclaimed. “You’re going to go live somewhere else?”

  “Another country,” he said. “Egypt has slammed its doors in my face, stripped me of everything. There’s nothing left for me but to go and find a haven in another land.”

  Aisha gave a muted cry. He glanced at her, then quickly lowered his head. There was nothing he could do to ease the blow for her. He went on hastily, as if to unburden himself of the two of them. “I kept vigil all night long in front of Prince Yusuf Kamal’s palace in Ain Shams. I didn’t leave until I had met with him. He agreed to my traveling to France when he heard that the School of Fine Arts had dismissed me. This is my only recourse.”

  Umm Abbas sat down on the base of a broken sculpture; Aisha was still leaning against the wall, unable to speak. It was all too cruel—there were no words for it. “You did what you did,” Umm Abbas said bitterly, “you made your arrangements and obtained consent, all without letting us know—without saying anything to this poor girl, whom you promised to marry?”

  He did not raise his head or look in Aisha’s direction. In a sharp voice he said, “Things have changed. I can no longer promise anything.”

  Umm Abbas struggled to her feet, supporting herself with whatever she found to hand. “Take me upstairs, child,” she said. She held onto Aisha’s hands, and they went out of the room. The staircase seemed endless, as the two of them mounted it in defeat, Aisha still supporting the older woman and trying to keep her moving forward, and to prevent her from falling. The only sound she could hear was that of Umm Abbas’s hoarse breathing.

  All was silent until the call to prayer at dawn, the muezzin’s voice plangent and supplicating. Umm Abbas did not appear to have stirred from her room. Then at dawn Aisha heard the sound of her wooden clogs upon the floor as she got up to perform her ablutions, and recited the Qur’anic verse of “The Chair.” No sound came from her room, and Aisha didn’t dare get up to check on her. She watched the light of day gradually spreading into her room, without moving from her place, even when she saw Mukhtar leaving the quarter, in the same wretched state and wearing the same clothes as on the previous day. He proceeded in haste, as if fleeing from something, without a backward glance. He knew she was watching him, and didn’t want to meet her gaze with his own.