The House of Jasmine

by Ibrahim Abdel Meguid

  They had arrested me at dawn, policemen lined up on the stairs from the street to the roof. I’m not sure how they opened the door to the building where I’m the only resident, since I always lock it at night. I suppressed my anger and rage. They also released me at dawn. I looked around the calm Pharaohs’ neighborhood, where I had never walked before. Who would have guessed that the State Security office was in this beautiful neighborhood? There were many trees, some bare, some tall, some well trimmed. The streets had been washed by both the rain and the city cleaners. There were yards and fences around the houses.

  It had been bitter cold, and the sky was threatening me with small drops of rain. I’d walked with my hands in my pockets. I don’t like suits. I don’t think that I’ll ever wear a suit except on my wedding day, and I don’t think that I will wear it again after that. I tried to keep my face covered with my upper arm. I saw Alexandria asleep for the first time. The city was relaxed, sighing peacefully, unaware of everything around it.

  Over the next few days, I’d found excuses to avoid participating in the sweeping rallies of support for the regime, which poured out from every governorate in Egypt to ‘Abdin Palace. Al-Dakruri led the workers. It was his second time after the last July 26th. He said that this would be my chance to prove what the chairman of the board had said about me. I realized that he did his job fully, and that my secret was still unknown. I said that I would wait until a year had passed since my mother’s death. He seemed to respect my wish. On the first of May, it was decided that only members of the workers’ union would go to celebrate Labor Day in Cairo. On the twenty-sixth of July the President flew to Alexandria in a helicopter, and so the welcoming rallies were canceled. It was as if they knew that I had no appetite for them.

  In fact, I felt devastated. I remembered my decision to kill ‘Abdu al-Fakahani and felt a strange fear. I had come to feel that I wanted to escape from everybody. I even went to see ‘Abdu and asked him to give me until the end of the year to pay my debt, and he agreed right away. He too seemed to be afraid of me, I don’t know why.

  I ran into Holy Yahya on the street, and went to shake hands with him, but he walked away. I called him, shook his hand, and patted him on the shoulder. His red face had turned yellow, so I eased his anxiety, and said that someday I would need some carpets.

  “I’m at your disposal,” he said.

  #

  “That’s Jerusalem airport,” Hassanayn said, when the television began its live broadcast from there. Magid lit a cigarette. ‘Abd al-Salam became very pale.

  “Begin!”

  “Dayan!”

  “And Golda. . . look at her.”

  The comments were made by other people in the café. We all fall silent when the door to the airplane opens. There is President Sadat himself, his smile wide as he shakes hands with the Israeli leaders. He smiles widely as he shakes hands with Golda, and warmly spends a few moments shaking Dayan’s hand. His teeth are bright white and his mustache neatly trimmed. I thought of the wide street behind us, how empty it was now, and of the silence that had fallen over the people living in the hills. Silence and gloom were filling the space behind me as darkness fell. I was sitting on the edge of a cliff over a deep valley. One push backward would have left me dead.

  “A soft, sly melody, like the groan of helpless, defeated souls,” ‘Abd al-Salam said, commenting on the Israeli national anthem. Then he got up, stuck his hands in his pockets, and paced around us, looking at the ground. The electricity went out.

  “Good,” said Magid with trembling lips. We didn’t leave the café. We sat by the light of the candles brought by Muhsin, the waiter who rarely spoke.

  “How can he do that?” Magid asked as if he were talking to himself. He took off his glasses and started wiping them with his handkerchief. I wanted to joke about it, and so said to Hassanayn:

  “Here he has finished you off with a single trip.” He smiled and blushed. It was not a full smile. Neither Magid nor Hassanayn laughed. ‘Abd al-Salam walked away from us and slowly wandered into the dark street. Whatever I said seemed silly. I suppose I was getting into politics, unintentionally.

  Hassanayn had once talked about himself. He said that he was a low-level employee waiting for a big financial windfall before getting married. He had failed regular school, but had managed to get his high school diploma through correspondence school. He became a correspondence student in the history department at the school of arts and letters. He didn’t have enough time to learn about all the wars and conspiracies that seemed to make up most of human history. It took him two years to pass each year’s exams. He also had asthma, not too serious, but it was still asthma. He laughed at his strange circumstances and said that he was the only person in the country who was fighting on all three fronts at the same time: poverty, ignorance, and disease.

  “Just like the July 23rd Revolution,” he added with a giggle. We all laughed too. He didn’t seem embarrassed and remained cheerful.

  I asked Muhsin, the waiter, to bring us a backgammon board. I was afraid that Magid and Hassanayn would let me down, but they both agreed to play. ‘Abd al-Salam returned from the darkened street.

  “As-Salamu ‘Alaykum,” he said, shook hands with each of us, and sat down, while we looked at one another. He greeted us as though he had just come in, as though he had not been sitting with us a few minutes before. He probably realized that his behavior seemed strange. Maybe he noticed our surprise as we shook hands with him. He sat in silence for a while then joined our backgammon game. When the electricity finally returned, we were the only customers in the café. The waiter didn’t turn the television back on, and we didn’t ask him to. We talked about the summer, and how we had not met then, and we asked Magid how his work was going at the pharmacy he was renting. He had finally fulfilled his dream of being self-employed. He said that setting up the pharmacy had kept him too busy to meet us, but that now he had more time, since he had hired another pharmacist to help him. ‘Abd al-Salam told us about his father’s health, which had deteriorated because of prostate trouble. He said that his father was getting better, and that the real problem was just old age.

  “Of course you were busy planning to kill ‘Abdu al-Fakahani and Holy Yahya,” Hassanayn said, and we all laughed loudly. Then we asked Hassanayn why he hadn’t come to the café in the summer.

  “You weren’t here,” he said.

  #

  “Of course you’re bitter, because you fought in the wars twice,” I said to ‘Abd al-Salam on the road. We had left the café and it was almost midnight. We realized, a bit too late, that Hassanayn had left us and was waiting alone at the bus stop. A little while later, Magid entered his house on Mosque Street. As usual, I was left alone with ‘Abd al-Salam. We lived on the same street. He lived in the middle, and I lived at the end, where it overlooks the sea.

  We walked in silence, broken only by a distant stifled moan coming from the police department. I shivered in the November breeze. All the stores on both sides of the street were closed.

  “No, I’m not,” he finally answered.

  We walked along, sometimes moving away from each other, then getting closer together again.

  “What do you know about that villa on our street, the one surrounded by jasmine trees?” I asked him suddenly. I don’t know why I chose to ask him at that particular moment.

  “Have you seen anyone in it?” he asked. He knew what I wanted to talk about.

  “Every day, in the early morning, I see a beautiful face looking out the window, a face as bright as light itself. Today, she waved at me.” We returned to our silence. The street was uneven, and I almost tripped several times.

  “Stay away from the house of jasmine.”

  I didn’t understand. Something made me hesitate to ask him why, even though I wanted to. The scent of jasmine had attracted me ever since I had moved from the south of Alexandria to the north. The villa, standing behind high walls crowned with white and yellow flowers, seemed mysteriou
s and magical. Its high round windows, its circular walls, its marble columns—everything about it seemed to have been made carefully and painstakingly. The face I saw in the mornings and evenings excited my imagination and curiosity, awakened my desire to get married. I could not confess any of this to ‘Abd al-Salam.

  “This house of jasmine is older than you or me,” he said. “My mother and father and everyone else knows that. I was spanked repeatedly when I was a child for climbing that wall to pick a few jasmine flowers. The owner of the house and his wife prefer to remain isolated, and don’t mix with anybody. They have only daughters—the most beautiful of all creatures. Everyone knows this, and only a lucky few have ever seen them. It may happen by chance. I don’t believe you when you say that you see the girl’s face every day. The man and his wife don’t allow their daughters to go out into the street for school or work, and they don’t let them stand at the windows, either. You may be lucky enough to see them once every so often in the very early morning—at dawn, before the man and his wife get up— but it rarely happens at night. Darkness enfolds the garden, the high windows are closed, and the thick blinds are pulled down, whether it’s winter or summer. I had forgotten that the house was on our street, and I don’t even smell the scent of jasmine anymore. Only once did I long for it, when I was trapped with the third army. Can you believe that? The air was full of the smell of smoke and gunpowder, and for a moment there, like a bright flash of light, I could smell jasmine. By God it happened, but only once. After I returned home, I watched the windows for a while, but I was not as lucky as you are, to catch even a glimpse of the only daughter left in the house. . . ”

  “How do you know all that?” I asked him at once, as if I could hardly wait for him to finish his last sentence.

  “Secrets get revealed despite all efforts to conceal them. All of Dikhayla knows the secret of that house. A strange event occurs every few years. One of the girls suddenly arrives at the house in a taxi with a man in broad daylight, carrying a baby. It is the same taxi each time, and the same driver. She looks around for a few minutes before the iron gate opens for her, looks at the surrounding windows and balconies, as if to announce her arrival. That’s how people know that one of the daughters was married the previous year.”

  “A strange family!” I said as if I were letting out a sigh.

  “No one knows what’s right and what’s wrong,” he said cryptically, and then stopped and held my hand. At that moment I was thinking that ‘Abd al-Salam had his own secrets, and that I didn’t really know him that well. A flock of white sheep came out of a side alley raising up a small cloud of dust. It was a strange sight at that time of night, and it seemed that the flock, which was now passing in front of us, was endless.

  “Do you notice something?”

  “Most of the sheep have three legs. Most of them limp.”

  “They all do.”

  I almost confessed that I was frightened. ‘Abd al-Salam said that he felt that he was going to throw up. The flock came to an end, and a man appeared behind it, his body and neck bundled in several layers of clothes.

  “He also has one leg, and is hopping with a cane.”

  I was covered in sweat and found that ‘Abd al-Salam was leaning heavily on my arm. We trudged along in complete silence. We were in the vacant lot that leads to our street and almost out of Dikhayla. My nose was racing ahead of me as usual to smell the jasmine. Then we stopped. There was a taxi, its headlights turned off, stopped in front of the villa. The iron gate opened and we saw her step out in a flowing white wedding dress that shimmered in the darkness. She wore a crown, whose gems were also glittering. At her side was an old man in a dark suit, and the whole world was silent. We saw the driver open the taxi door for them and watched as they entered through the gate. Then we heard the iron gate close, and the taxi quietly drove toward us down the uneven street. I didn’t want to look at ‘Abd al-Salam’s face, and maybe he felt the same way. As soon as the taxi passed us, we both turned and saw her looking at us through the glass. Was she looking at me or at ‘Abd al-Salam? Neither of us said a word.

  A few minutes later, I found myself alone. How did I fail to notice my friend turning toward his house? Did he say good night to me, and I have forgotten? Why am I looking around as though I’ve lost something? I went up to my apartment and opened the window. My God! I hadn’t even noticed the cold sea breeze at the entrance to the building!

  I looked at the endless darkness and the faint light of a faraway ship. This ship has been anchored outside the harbor for a month now. I’m sure it is the same ship, although there haven’t been any storms to prevent it from leaving. I listened to the sound of the waves—angry, content, or cowardly, I couldn’t tell. What if I threw myself onto those solid rocks? Would I die? So be it. That stupid sea has been doing nothing except ebb and flow for millions of years, all by itself, refusing to share anything with anybody, indifferent to the ships riding it, the garbage dumped into it, or the fish fighting in its depths. Would the world even miss one of its forgotten creatures? But then I thought about the reception for the President when he returned from Jerusalem in a few days.

  6

  Suddenly, the people were talking of nothing except Shaykh Lashin, who gave the sermon at Friday prayers in the Sidi al-Qabbari Mosque. Every Friday, the mosque became as crowded as Mount ‘Arafat on the day of the Hajj. People were packed in the streets and on the roofs of houses around the mosque. Everyone was attracted to the fiery sermons of the Shaykh, who talked about issues that were not usually part of the Friday sermon. It became known that Shaykh Lashin did not memorize the sermon dictated by the Ministry of Awqaf, and that he did not improvise either. He memorized his sermons out of books that were inaccessible to everyone else.

  A few weeks ago, he ended his sermon with a prayer in which he said, “May God make the armies of the Muslims victorious over the armies of the Franks and the Tartars. May God support the Caliph of the Muslims, Al-Mustakfi Billah Suliman, and bless the ‘Abbasids. May God aid our Sultan, Muhammad bin al-Malik al-Mansur Qalawun, and his soldiers. . . ” and the crowds continue to come. . .

  What inspired me to be so daring? Was it the mystery of the house of jasmine? Did I really hope to find the girl in the window? If that were true, then I was quite unlucky. If my mother’s death were a punishment for my plans to get married, then my bad luck must have been a punishment for my mother’s death. What vicious circle from hell is this? Perhaps that was why I hesitated. But as soon as the three buses arrived at Damanhur, I made them stop. I took Usta Zinhum aside, but he spoke before I could say anything: “I do not feel comfortable about it this time.”

  For a minute I was dumbfounded, then I said, “Neither do I, but let’s go back, and come what may.”

  I signaled to the two other drivers to join us. Usta ‘Abbas had done this with me before, but the third driver said, “You will take two pounds from the payment of each worker, and that makes eight hundred. Do you seriously intend to give each of us a hundred pounds and keep the whole five hundred for yourself?”

  “So you’re not against the plan in principle?”

  “The money should be divided fairly.”

  “You will take the hundred pounds or nothing at all.”

  It was as if I had set myself on a suicidal course. A few of the workers were looking at us and laughing. Many of them had gone out with me before, and they were usually the ones who convinced the others. I gave each worker three pounds. The administration had decided to give them five each. When we arrived at Alexandria, the third driver took a hundred pounds, and left, laughing. I knew that he had realized that he had to accept what I gave him, and that he couldn’t rat, because there were four hundred workers and two other drivers ready to deny that any of his claims were true.

  In the evening, I went to see ‘Abdu al-Fakahani.

  “You bought my house, and sold it for three thousand pounds within the same year. You blackmailed me twice. I will not pay you anything more
, and I will find a way to get back what I have already paid you,” I said to him, then left. I imagined that I had a torch burning in my hand and was running with it like a madman, burning down houses and stores. He trotted behind me, and when he finally caught up, he stood in front of me, his head barely level with my chest, and stretched his arms out to block my way. A knock on the head would have scattered his brains. I was puzzled to see that he was smiling. We returned back to the shop, as people watched this strange scene.

  “Who did you hear bought the house for three thousand pounds?” he asked me.

  “Ahmad Karioka.”

  “Does he own two pennies to rub together? Do you really believe that? Besides, that was a long time ago. I haven’t asked you to pay the two hundred pounds you owe me, and I have even torn up the IOU you wrote for me.” He was smiling as he spoke very confidently. He reminded me that this Ahmad Karioka fixed kerosene stoves and probably didn’t earn much these days.

  “Mr. Shagara, it was indeed I who bought the house both times. Both Holy Yahya and Ahmad Karioka, and their like, are my puppets. Garbage.”

  “What exactly do you mean?”

  “First, your house really wasn’t worth more than a thousand pounds. Second, you work in a government office, and know nothing about what we do. And you’ll find out in a few days anyway. Besides, I have rented out the rest of the apartments in your building for three thousand pounds each. So I was generous with you, and you may ask the rest of the tenants about it.” His smile was getting wider as he spoke. I was almost standing on the tips of my toes.

  “Ha!” I said. “All the renters are in the Gulf countries.”

  “Well, the oil will run out some day, and they will come back. Oil wells are not bottomless, and maybe there will be a war, and all hell will break loose. . . ”