The House of Jasmine

by Ibrahim Abdel Meguid

  “Have you actually torn up the IOU?”

  “As you wish!” He continued to smile. I threw the two hundred pounds in his face, and he pulled the IOU out of his pocket. As I grabbed it, I noticed that his fingernails were red. Then I left, and I don’t know why but I felt like laughing.

  #

  “How much is in your bank account now, Mr. Shagara?” The chairman of the board asked me after he stood up and came from behind his desk to stand in front of me. I looked at al-Dakruri, who looked like he had shrunk, standing by the desk and biting his lower lip.

  “What account, sir? I don’t have an account,” I replied.

  “You take half of what we decide to give the workers, and only take them halfway to their destination.”

  I felt like swallowing my saliva, but my mouth was dry. I didn’t reply. He was moving closer to me as though he were about to slap me.

  “And I got you out of your trouble with the police. I, who was a general in the army—and believe me, the Israelis never took me lightly! Now I discover that you have been cheating me. I will find a way to put you in jail.” As he spoke, he made a full circle and went back to sitting behind his desk. I looked at him closely as he sat down. I was, in fact, astounded to hear what he said, but I noticed that he was looking down at the floor and had almost closed his eyes. I was amazed, but I realized that I would come out of this a winner.

  “I am innocent, and I believe that you once received a thank-you letter for my efforts. Also, al-Dakruri has taken the workers out several times, and if what you say were true, he would have known it. Al-Dakruri, did you know about any of this?” Al-Dakruri didn’t answer.

  “The last trip was very difficult. No one received us, and we had to stand on the road to the airport by ourselves. It was a big mess, and nobody knows who really participates in the President’s receptions anyway.” I actually managed to go on saying all this. It must have been someone else saying it. Al- Dakruri’s face had turned yellow, and I thought that he was going to disappear. My story about the road to the airport was based on pictures and headlines I had seen in the newspapers on the day following the President’s return.

  “Get out. Get out of my face!” the chairman yelled, so I left. Al-Dakruri ran after me and put his hand on my arm, but I pushed it away and ran in panic.

  I kept the remaining three hundred pounds, in preparation for any punishment I might receive. Every man and woman working in the administration smiled at me or at the floor every time we met. So it became clear that the news had spread as quickly as the turning of the machines, and my disgrace was now complete. I discovered that most of the employees knew who I was, when I had thought that I was alone and anonymous in my office with only the files around me. The third driver came to swear to me that he had not said a word to anyone, and he offered to return the hundred pounds I had given him. I told him that I was the only one responsible for what had happened, and that if he expressed his thoughts to anybody, we would all get in trouble, and maybe all get fired. In the evening ‘Abdu al-Fakahani stood in my way and said, laughing, “I sold the house for ten thousand pounds.”

  “Why should I care about that?” I asked.

  “I told you that you would find out in a few days.”

  At that moment, if I had had his neck in my grip, I would have choked the life out of him.

  “Did you sell it to yourself again?”

  “No. This time I sold it to another merchant. I think you understand now.”

  #

  I confessed everything to Hassanayn, Magid, and ‘Abd al-Salam. I hesitated at first. Maybe I just needed to get a load off my chest. I almost stopped in the middle of the story. I was afraid that they would understand nothing more than the basic facts—that I was a thief. But they only laughed. Maybe they were just trying to avoid hurting my feelings, but they kept laughing. They never criticized any of what I had done. Every night they asked me to repeat the story, and then laughed at it again. I said that although I shared their laughter, I felt afraid every day when I went to work. At the very least, the chairman could force me to pay back what I had taken of the workers’ money. In that case, I would have no choice but to return the apartment to ‘Abdu al-Fakahani and become homeless.

  Hassanayn said that people quickly forgot scandals, and Magid said that there might even be some people who secretly approved of what I have done. Then Hassanayn reminded me that it had been two weeks since my meeting with the chairman, and that if he were planning to do anything about it, he would have done it by now.

  #

  I opened my first bank account with the three hundred pounds. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I read the news in the Al-Ahram newspaper on the bus one morning. I remembered our meeting, and how the chairman had seemed really shaken, even while he was threatening me. He must have known it then. The poor man!

  “You’re lucky, Shagara,” said al-Dakruri when he came to my office later that afternoon. I hid my smile.

  “The chairman of the board has been in a difficult situation since the January demonstrations. The national security police discovered that the shipyard was a communist den, and that there was no record of a worker named Sayyid Birsho, and by the way, they have not found him yet. This week, they arrested three workers who were affiliated with secret organizations.”

  “Did the chairman write a report about me? Does the new chairman know anything about it?”

  He smiled and said, “No. I just came from a meeting with him. He invited me and the department managers to meet with him on his first day.”

  I’m saved, I thought, then said to al-Dakruri, “I will not take part in any more rallies.”

  I added forty pounds to the three hundred after we received a bonus of one month’s salary on the occasion of inaugurating a new ship. A picture of the new ship appeared in the newspapers, with the new chairman standing next to it and smiling. Alexandria was blanketed in winter weather, so I didn’t go out in the evening. I thought of visiting my mother as soon as the weather cleared. She was buried with my father in the cemetery of ‘Amud al-Sawari, in a public graveyard for the people from the town of Dalgamon who had emigrated to Alexandria. I have never seen that town, but I know that it is in the al-Gharbiyya governorate, and that it is between Kafr al-Zayyat and Tanta, and was the home town of ‘Umar Lutfi, founder of the cooperative movement in Egypt. When the weather cleared, I forgot about visiting my mother, maybe because I hate cemeteries.

  At the café, Hassanayn said, “I heard rumors that the new chairman of the board was appointed to punish the workers.”

  “He said it himself in a general meeting! His first decision was to cancel the temporary exemption from military service, which used to be granted to technicians in the shipyard because it serves as a strategic resource. Now more than three thousand technicians have been drafted in one month. Production has dropped dramatically.”

  Magid was busy playing backgammon with ‘Abd al-Salam. After pushing his glasses up on his nose, he said, “It isn’t a matter of demonstrations. The shipyard was a Soviet project in the first place.”

  “Thank God that Bata is Italian!” Hassanayn joked, and we all laughed so loudly that we startled the people around us.

  “If Bata were Soviet,” Magid said, “they would have beaten all of you with shoes. They would have beaten you especially, Hassanayn. Look. Imagine it!” He started pointing at Hassanayn and pantomiming the scene in the air with his hands, while ‘Abd al-Salam and I couldn’t stop laughing. “You’re standing in the middle of a crowd of soldiers. The soldiers are all barefoot, holding their shoes instead of guns. You’re on your knees, blindfolded, and your hands are tied behind your back. Ready. . . Aim. . . Fire! The target is the July 23rd Revolution known as Hassanayn! Ready! Load! Beat!” We almost fell off our seats with laughter. Magid has the face of an innocent child. He seems serious most of the time, and if you thought about it, you would think that he was altogether too serious about most things. But, on the other hand, when
he jokes he jokes with all his heart.

  I got up and stretched my back, which was beginning to ache from all that laughing. The other customers were giggling at our hilarity, and so was the waiter, Muhsin, who almost never laughed, which made us laugh even harder. They say that Muhsin has been depressed since he got married. Three months after the marriage there were strange changes in the voice and body of his wife, who finally turned into a man!

  “You were the one who described yourself as the July 23rd Revolution,” ‘Abd al-Salam said to Hassanayn, whose face had turned quite red. I found myself calmly asking Hassanayn, “By the way, why does your company make such ugly shoes?”

  “A shortage of molds, Shagara,” he replied. Magid was no longer sitting among us. He was bent over, holding his belly, and exploding with laughter. The strangers sitting around us were staring at the strange scene. I had deliberately asked the question seriously, and Hassanayn answered in the same manner. Both the question and the answer became a complete farce.

  I’m indeed happy to have paid my debts, opened a bank account, ended the scandal, and escaped punishment. I had firmly decided to begin looking for a wife. Now it seemed impossible that I had been the cause of my mother’s death or that God was punishing me. I had escaped many evils with ease, which meant that He was on my side. I thought of wandering around the branch administration offices, away from my office where I was besieged by files and dust, in order to sniff out members of the opposite sex. Now, sitting here at the café, I realized that I knew all the female employees in the administration offices, and that they were all either married or engaged. It had been five years since any new employees were hired, and it isn’t reasonable to expect that a girl would stay unmarried for five years after she starts working. Furthermore, most of the female employees have been working for longer than that. After Magid sat back down, ‘Abd al-Salam said, “We must be going crazy. All this laughing is unnatural.”

  “Why should we go so far?” asked Magid, struggling to keep from laughing further and wiping the tears from his eyes, having taken off his glasses. “Dr. Musa, who works with me at the pharmacy, is constantly swearing at the country and the people, and wondering why people never get well, and why the nation doesn’t just kill them and get it over with. He also says that he will not rest until he has a chance to work abroad, specifically in Kuwait.” Then he laughed again, and we struggled to restrain ourselves from joining in.

  “You must be working with Dr. Hitler without knowing it,” said Hassanayn, and this time we didn’t laugh. ‘Abd al- Salam said, “By the way, I have decided to go work in Iraq.” We all fell strangely silent, as though we hadn’t been laughing our hearts out only a few minutes earlier.

  7

  A baby was born with a tail—a perfectly ordinary event that could happen. A week later, Alexandria found out that it had happened again, and people started talking about it. Just one week later, it was rumored that a woman had had a third child with a tail, and it soon became known that Shatbi hospital was filled with newborn babies with tails. Every pregnant woman hoped for a miscarriage, and some of them died trying to abort themselves. It was said that the year was cursed, so people stopped getting married. Strong-willed men stopped making love to their wives, while the weaker ones sent their wives to their parents or divorced them until the end of the year.

  “No sooner had I graduated from the school of agriculture than I was drafted into the army. I was dragged into defeat in my first war, and I was surrounded in the second. I was neither sad nor frustrated, but now that I’m out, I feel like I’m on one side and the rest of this universe which God created for us is on the other. Do you really think that I like backgammon or sitting at the café? Do you think that we’ll keep doing this forever? If so, then the tragedy will be complete. The normal thing would be for us to separate, for each of us to go his own way, and make a life for himself, and for each of us to remember the others from time to time. Yet we can’t, not because Dikhayla is so small—nothing more than one street and a few alleys—but because none of us has a purpose to his life. Do you know why Hassanayn insists on studying at his age? Don’t tell me that it’s to get a university degree. What is a degree worth in the age of people like ‘Abdu al-Fakahani? In reality, it’s because if Hassanayn doesn’t study, he will find time to think about himself!

  “And you. You have an apartment and you live alone and have no responsibilities. But you also don’t want to get a life of your own. Why don’t you get married, now that you have taken the most difficult step? Are you enjoying the life you’re living? I don’t think so, but I don’t think it’s too bad either. It’s just bland. You must be aware of this, but unwilling to face it. The only one who has found a purpose to his life is Magid. Now he’s the manager of his own pharmacy. Yet instead of making it serve a real purpose in his life—that is, to make it a base for further progress—it has become his life. He hides in it from the world, and rarely leaves.

  “I’m just like the rest of you, or maybe worse. My days present no new challenges in which I can prove myself a winner or a loser, only a routine job in agricultural inspection in Rashid. I often feel too lazy to go to work. I sleep until noon, and my boss never questions me. If you ask me about agriculture, you’ll discover that I have forgotten everything about it, but if you ask me about any other job, I will tell you that I’m only an agricultural engineer. None of us has been successful at anything, but we have not been failures either. We stand in a vacuum.

  “Now I’m out of the army, and I don’t like talking about my experiences there. I don’t know how I survived. This is my final conclusion. I try to put an iron curtain between me and my past.

  “I only failed with one person, a young soldier who joined the army five years after I did. I was drawn to his beautiful baby face and his calm soothing voice. I always felt that he was older than I was. He used to fill our trenches with stories from every time and place. He always had a new novel for you to read. I could hardly believe that he was a medical doctor. A few days before the war, he met with me alone after midnight and said that we had to meet after the war. ‘I agree. After the war,’ I said, with a smile. He said that he was not joking and that the war was going to begin in a few days. How did he know that? I, and thousands like me, were bored with the military drills and the waiting, but we didn’t see a war coming. He was different from everyone I knew. He wasn’t in contact with any authority which could inform him of the date of the war. He was just an ordinary soldier, and none of us knew anything about the war until it started. Even the officers didn’t know about it, and the rest of the people must not have known about it either. You must have read about this in the newspapers. I asked him why he wanted us to meet after the war. He asked me in turn what I did on my days off. I said that I saw my parents, my brothers and sisters, played backgammon with my friends, and slept. He asked me what they talked about. I said that at the café, we only played backgammon, and at home everyone fought. He said that our life was lost between fighting and playing. The country itself was lost, and had to be saved. Then he said, in an amazingly casual manner, that he and I could do it, and that, of the hundreds that he met in the army, I was the only one fit for this mission.

  “He said that we were going to conquer Israel, not because we were stronger, but because we were going to fight with a suicidal spirit. ‘The trenches and the continuous drills make death part of daily life. We will fight because we will be ready to sacrifice ourselves. Suicide can also be an investment. This is what will happen,’ he said, and once again added, ‘in a few days.’

  “I was shaking as I listened to him talk, and almost cried with him when he cried. I couldn’t sleep that night, nor for several nights afterward. During the first few days of the war, the battles seemed to me like dreams. I was asleep as I crossed the Suez Canal, asleep as I ran on the sands of Sinai, and once I actually fell into a real sleep for a long time. It was during a big attack on our new position on the east bank of the canal. The
raid ended and the dead were carried to the west bank while I was actually in a deep sleep. I haven’t seen him since that day. I didn’t shed a single tear, because soldiers don’t cry. But the question has often tortured me: Am I really capable of leading a revolution in this country? And why? I don’t personally feel that anyone else has a problem. Everyone I know manages somehow. I have often tried to define a goal for myself, but I can never find one. When I got out of the army, I realized that I was thirty-three years old, and that even the clothes and hairstyles had changed. Someone over thirty like me can’t do anything, but you, you, Shagara, and Hassanayn and Magid, are really at fault, because you have had a real opportunity to keep track of the years as they passed by. You can think I’m crazy if you wish.”

  This was what ‘Abd al-Salam said to me on the last night before he left for Iraq while the two of us were walking home together. We always passed by the house of jasmine and found it dark except for a faint light behind the windows. We fell silent, and I wondered what ‘Abd al-Salam was thinking as he passed the house. Maybe he also wondered what I was thinking. After he left, I decided to always walk home on a parallel street and not pass by the house of jasmine again.

  I thought that ‘Abd al-Salam was like the thousands of young men who worked abroad to earn the money necessary for securing an apartment and getting married, but then I realized that this was not his goal. The modest means of his family didn’t bother him either, for he never talked about that, explicitly or implicitly. At some point I thought that he was like Sayyid Birsho, but the sadness in his voice told me that he was different, a type of person that I have never been able to fully understand. In any case, he wasn’t crazy. He was like the many young people who stand at the bus station, distracted and oblivious to the burning sun over their heads, unaware that if they moved a few steps they could be standing under an awning. I often noticed these people and caught myself at the bus station counting the people standing at a distance from the awning. Maybe ‘Abd al-Salam was different from those people, too. The fact was that I couldn’t understand him. I liked him even before we met, and I still like him. Magid received a letter from him and brought it to the café, so we learned that he had found a job in a place called Khalis, not far from Baghdad, on a greenhouse farm. We took down his address, and every time we met, we said that we should write back to him. Each one of us decided to write, but never did. It seemed that we only remembered him when we were together. Maybe we felt guilty, or felt like vindicating ourselves. The summer and winter had already passed.