No One Sleeps in Alexandria

by Ibrahim Abdel Meguid

  Again everything grew quiet, as if a moment of meditation had been sent from heaven. They soon heard the voice of the same man who had been talking to Magd al-Din earlier, reciting in a low voice words that he obviously liked, marveling at their sad meaning, “Council of Alexandria, I am at the end of my patience. Should I speak to you in Greek or Hebrew? You take the people’s money and squander it on a bridge. Instead of sucking the people’s blood, come suck my—”

  He did not say the word that everyone had anticipated. He fell silent, but the silence was broken by laughter that shook the precinct to its foundations. The corporal became angry, and some policemen were startled. The laughter died down in hoarse spasms. Just then, three policemen rushed inside the precinct looking frightened, each holding the wide leather belt he had taken off his pants. It seemed they had been in a battle that they had lost. The corporal shouted at them, “What’s wrong with you?”

  “A big brawl, Mr. Corporal, at Ban Street.”

  “Muslims and Christians?”

  “No. Southerners and peasants.”

  Magd al-Din’s heart beat fast. The corporal said to the frightened policeman, “Peasants can’t fight. It’ll end peacefully.”

  “Not this time. Bahi Khalil fancies himself a big leader and has sworn to break the backs of the southerners.”

  “Any casualties?”

  “Many.”

  Magd al-Din almost collapsed when he heard Bahi’s name. The corporal ordered the policeman to get his colleagues from their room behind the precinct and for them to bring their guns. He called security headquarters on the telephone and requested a security detail. Then he got up, went over to the cell, and opened the door, yelling, “Get the hell out of here. All hell’s broken loose, you sons of bitches.”

  The first one out was Magd al-Din.

  From one town to another I set sail.

  Why is the wind so contrary?

  Why am I ever a stranger, ever on the move?

  Folk song from Egypt

  7

  Ban Street was now almost deserted except for the police. A security force with clubs and shields had been dispatched and took up positions on both sides of the street. A big paddy wagon stood there, filled with peasants and southerners alike. The soldiers were still chasing the brawlers in the alleys and bringing some of them back to the paddy wagon. Women were watching through closed windows; men and boys stood in the doorways. The sound of an ambulance came from the direction of Karmuz. A woman collapsed on the ground near Bahi, crying silently. She was barefoot, her black clothes tattered, hair disheveled, eyes blank, but she did not seem insane. There was another woman, a younger one, weeping quietly in the arms of Magd al-Din, who kept patting her on the back, his eyes fixed on his brother’s beautiful face covered with blood, his eyes still open, gazing at Magd al-Din in sorrow and fear for his destiny. There was a look of apology to his younger brother in his eyes.

  “Go inside, Zahra.”

  It was obvious that the blow had split Bahi’s skull from behind. Nothing could be done. The battle had taken place right in front of the house, as if Bahi had wanted someone to see him fighting. No one had believed his old stories. Only Magd al-Din did, always. Today he no longer had to fight anyone. Magd al-Din stepped forward, then sat down, placing his brother’s head on his thigh. He shook with a pain that no human alive had ever felt.

  The paramedics and a young police officer went over to him. The woman who had collapsed near the body and whom Magd al-Din had not noticed until now was frightened by the police officer. She got up and walked away quickly.

  “Who’s this woman? Anybody know her?” the officer asked a policeman.

  “She’s some crazy woman who was always following the dead man.”

  The officer did not understand, but Magd al-Din’s eyes grew wider as he remembered Bahiya.

  “You know the victim?” asked the officer,

  “He’s my brother.”

  “Do you accuse anyone?”

  Magd al-Din did not reply.

  “After the burial you can make a statement or a charge,” said the officer.

  He motioned the paramedics to carry the body. They removed it from the lap of his brother, who could not stand up. He stretched his hand to the man standing next to him.

  “Give me a hand, brother.”

  It was the gaunt man who had been his lockup companion a short while earlier. The man extended his hand.

  “Dimyan. My name is Dimyan. Get a grip on yourself,” the man said as Magd al-Din got up.

  A man Dimyan recognized came over to them. It was Khawaga Dimitri Faltaws, Magd al-Din’s landlord and one of the neighborhood’s educated Christians, who worked as a labor supervisor at the municipal garage in Hadra. Dimyan had asked him to get him a job, any job in the city, but the man apologized nicely after a month for not finding him a job.

  “Do you know him, Dimyan?” Dimitri asked.

  “Yes. He’s my friend,” replied Dimyan, pleased that Dimitri had not forgotten him.

  “Then ride in the ambulance with him. I’ll catch up with you at the government hospital in a cab. He’s a stranger in town.”

  Magd al-Din listened as his eyes followed the woman who had been sitting near Bahi’s body. It was none other than Bahiya. Now she was at the far end of the street. God have mercy.

  The ambulance drove off, with the body laid on a stretcher between two long seats on one of which sat Dimyan and Magd al-Din, while the two paramedics sat on the other. The ambulance was not going fast, and did not blow the siren that would have cleared the way through crowds. The road was not crowded, and the ambulance was carrying a corpse.

  The slow movement of the car resembled that of a gentle horse or a boat on calm waters. Magd al-Din was now smiting the sea with his arm since he had no staff, and it parted, and in the middle was a grassy pathway on which the gentle horse moved gracefully. Magd al-Din, vexed, smote the air and it parted, and on each side was a smooth, white, glass wall on which pearl-like snowdrops gathered—white tears, white blood and pain. He walked in the space that the air had deserted and was drenched in sweat. He took off his gallabiya, his vest, and his undershirt, leaving only his underpants, which now stuck to him, becoming part of him. Everything rolled down the walls in front of him. Beautiful women and maidens and stones and monkeys and old women clad in black and a familiar face that he did not remember, a face he had often seen and heard calling out his name, “Come, come, Magd al-Din.” He followed the voice without knowing where. He could not go back and could not break the kind voice’s spell. In front of him rolled all the images he had seen before: his brothers who had been killed, his dead father, his blind mother, his sisters and his cousins, all the Talibs, and the mayor. But they were all children, running and laughing. He wanted to catch one of them, anyone, but could not. The kind voice would not let him go back until he reached the end of the road, the edge, from which white vapors rose and where he could see only tortured arms flailing and hear only groans. He rose up, nearly on the tips of his toes . . . then he collapsed.

  “Don’t cry, friend. You’ll kill yourself.”

  The thin Dimyan patted Magd al-Din on the shoulder and put his arms around him. He had been crying in pain. Bahi’s story had ended. Bahi himself had put an end to it.

  He had returned after the Great War. The country was gripped by the revolution for years afterwards. Bahi told Magd al-Din “This village of ours does not move at all. It’s like a big beetle that never leaves its hole.” It was he who had to stir it back to life.

  His mere appearance on the scene was enough to rekindle the fire. He had come back stronger than he had left, his features scorched by both the sun and the cold. He now had a thick mustache, had become taciturn, and early wrinkles showed under his eyes. His face had also acquired a new pained look.

  The family did not believe that he had been in the army all that time. “Where did they take you?” “From the road.” “Why didn’t you tell them who you were and
what family you came from? They would’ve let you go.” “I told them, but they didn’t let me go.”

  No one believed him except Magd al-Din, who knew that some people have been preordained to endure great pain. Job was one, and now Bahi. That was why Bahi chose to sleep in Magd al-Din’s room. At night he told him a lot about the war, about the boat on which they shipped him with the other soldiers to Europe. He described to him the trenches and the snow in the mountains, the battles at the French-German border, countries that he did not know and cold that he could not bear and beautiful women who came to the soldiers during their rest or to whose villages the soldiers went.

  “I was afraid, Magd al-Din, but they dragged me, physically pulled me. Is God going to punish me for the foreign women also? Was it really me who went there? Listen, I know lots of English words and French ones too: bonjour, which means ‘good morning,’ that’s good morning in English, and comment allez yous?, meaning ‘how are you?’ and how are you? in English, and à demain and à bientôt, which mean ‘until we meet again,’ and also bye bye and see you, and ça va bien, meaning it’s going well, and fine, which also means all’s well.

  “A year later we were taken to Palestine to fight the Turks. May God forgive me, I fought with the English against the Muslim Turks, but it was against my will.”

  Bahi’s reappearance was not enough to close the books on the past. It meant that he was still there, which meant that the vendetta would be rekindled. All hell broke loose. Of the two families, only Magd al-Din and Khalaf remained. Bahi never counted, and that was the root cause of his great pain.

  Of course, there were the sisters, as well as the mother, after the father died of grief. Bahi and Magd al-Din inherited a large chunk of the family land. Magd al-Din’s share was three feddans. Bahi also got three feddans, but he sold them secretly and disappeared again. The mother’s silent crying caused the light in her eyes to grow dim. She loved him very much without showing it; she had never forgotten the beam of light that had come out of her when he was born. He came back from the war without his halo. It seemed that everything about him had been extinguished. How had the life of that pure child turned into darkness? Magd al-Din was certain that he would come back one day. The mother was about to lose her eyesight completely, when Bahi appeared in the middle of the house. As soon as he got off the train, first the women then the children spread the news. Before Hadya’s daughters could bring their mother down from the second floor, Bahi was on his way up.

  “Light of my eyes!” she cried and threw herself in his arms, but he was cold. He kissed her cheeks and hand in silence.

  In the evening he told Magd al-Din about the city where he had spent all that time, white Alexandria, where foreigners from all over the world and poor Egyptians from all over the land went. He chose not to give his address to anyone. He said he would visit them from time to time. In the morning they could not find him at home. Hadya entered into a phase of more profound silence. Magd al-Din did his best to give her courage and urge her to preserve whatever light remained in her eyes. Little by little the mother was reassured, for Bahi was making an appearance from time to time, though sometimes at long intervals.

  Then the people of the village noticed that a new building was being constructed with red bricks brought over from the kilns of Kafr al-Zayyat. They asked the construction workers about the house and its owners, and they said they knew nothing except that it was a government building. The house was being built outside the village limits on deserted land that no one owned. Then the mayor received an official letter stamped by the Islamic civil court in Tanta, requesting him to render assistance as it was requested of him by the representatives of justice in the new court that would be built in the village. By the end of the year the court had been built, and the mayor eagerly awaited the representatives of justice. When a sign was erected reading “The New Courthouse for Civil Law,” with the emblems of justice—the scales and a hand placed on the Quran—beneath it, the mayor saw that the time had come for him to render assistance to the representatives of justice. The court judge, usher, and clerk came to him, and the clerk presented the mayor with a new letter in which it was requested that the mayor assign two watchmen to guard the court. The mayor gave the representatives of justice an elaborate banquet.

  The courthouse was a one-story building. It had three rooms, a hall, and a bathroom. The court began to accept cases. The first complaint came from an extraordinary woman. Khadra, daughter of the deputy mayor, was complaining that her husband had beaten and insulted her.

  Khadra was one of the village’s beauties. Her husband was her dreaded cousin. To the amazement of the villagers, the court summoned her husband. That was the first time in their life that they had heard of a woman taking her husband to court. It had never happened once in the history of the village. The husband did not go to court, and he decided that the wife would not come back to his house, even if she were to withdraw her complaint. The court, through the clerk, summoned him again to appear within a week. He did not, and the judge ordered that Khadra be granted a divorce. The village was shaken to its foundations by this unheard-of verdict. The judge disappeared from the courthouse for a week. Bahi appeared in the village streets for a few days, then disappeared again. People saw Khadra’s father, a broken man, walking in the street in shame. How could a woman complain to the government about her husband? What courage! And what heresy!

  It was natural after that that men would give their wives strict orders not even to pass in front of the courthouse. A whole year passed without a single complaint or verdict. So people were reassured, especially since Khadra had disappeared from the village and her ex-husband had married an even better wife. The truth was slightly different. It was simply that the story of Khadra and her husband was now past history. Another woman lodged a complaint asking for justice against her husband, who had seized her inheritance. The judge ruled that she be given her inheritance back and granted her a divorce since the husband was not faithful to his legal duty. The village was shaken again.

  Then, at intervals over a long period of time, a number of men were surprised to receive summonses to appear before the court. The husband would go, not knowing what awaited him. Before going, he would beat his wife, pressing her to admit that she had lodged a complaint against him. The poor, helpless wife would deny doing anything of the kind. Then the husband would go and be surprised not only that his wife had complained, but that the judge knew intimate details about his personal life as well. Thereupon the husband would fall to pieces and not wait for the verdict, which in a number of cases was simply that he should go back and treat his wife better. He would go back and divorce his wife without any discussion. In three years, twenty women were divorced. Bahi would disappear and then reappear riding a gray horse along the canal or the edges of the fields. The painful story of the vendetta was over and done with. The village’s biggest preoccupation now was the court that had so shaken families and homes and whose activities extended to the neighboring villages, especially in matters of inheritance.

  It turned out that dozens of women had lost their rights because of husbands or strong brothers. The court always found in favor of these wronged women. Then came an ominous day when the court summoned the mayor himself.

  The mayor went, thinking that at most, the court needed some help carrying out the verdicts. But the judge did not receive him in his chamber, but rather in open court, and did not permit him to sit down. True, he was a mayor, but the court had its own traditions that applied to great and small alike. The shocking question to the mayor was whether he was abusing his wife. It was she herself who had lodged the complaint that he did not treat her well, that he did not take her the way the sharia, the Islamic civil law, ordained, but that he took her from behind.

  You can imagine the mayor as he sprang forward, as he attacked the judge and the usher, held back only by the guards who had gone with him. They prevented him from making that mistake. They were in a state of gr
eat surprise and fear. The mischievous among them hid their smiles.

  The mayor left the courthouse without answering any questions. He rode his horse and raced the wind. Halfway home he stopped. The vast open space and the green fields around him restored his feeling of calm. This village had been calm throughout its history. The calm was broken only by the vendetta between the Khalils and the Talibs, which was over and now remained only as a memory. He did not think that similar events would befall any two families after the tragic end of the Khalils and Talibs. Then came this court, which had shaken the village and unearthed all its heinous deeds. The judge, usher, and clerk must be killed and the courthouse demolished. He must contact the authorities requesting that the court be moved somewhere else. It was Satan’s court. But his wife could not have done that. Or could she have? He had tried more than once to sleep with her in a non-customary manner, but she kicked hard and he never tried it again. He had been an impetuous young man. It was impossible that his wife would remember that now and complain against him.

  In a few minutes the mayor reached his house. He stood in front of his wife, shaking with anger, nearly breaking into thousands of little pieces. He would die if he did not do something about it. Those dogs, the guards, would spread the news. But she was his beautiful, rich wife from a great family, and he truly loved her. He broke down in tears before her and said nothing. He slept, asking God for death.

  His wife was the daughter of one of the notables in the next village. The news made it there instantly. In the evening, her father and his men came. The father said in an almost inaudible voice, “In the morning, we’ll go to the court. If there is a complaint, we’ll kill our daughter and that’ll be the end of that.”