It was not long before the villagers spotted the fire. The women slapped their faces and shrieked, the children screamed piercingly, adding to the clamour, and the men ran around in circles not knowing what to do. The village barber yelled out at them, ‘Get pails of water, you animals!’ but when the pails were brought the water never got anywhere near the flames. Each family started to count its children, lead the donkey or the buffalo out of the house, or extract the savings of a lifetime from some nook or hole in the wall.
The Chief of the Village Guard rushed off to the Mayor who had been informed of the fire by telephone. The red fire engine arrived after some time, its bell clanging. It was followed by the ambulance moving along behind. By then the children had tired of watching the fire, and turned to the fire engine with its ladder on which one could climb high up into the sky. As soon as it came to a stop they surrounded it on every side, standing on bare feet, their naked bottoms exposed from behind, their noses running in front. Swarms of flies kept settling on their faces or rising in black clouds.
Before the sun had dropped behind the line of treetops on the far side of the river everything in Kafr El Teen seemed to have returned to normal. Here and there wisps of smoke arose from a bare roof covered in black ashes. A child had suffocated in the smoke and lay dead on the mat close to the door where it had tried to crawl, and the frames of some windows were charred and black. On the dusty ground could be seen the imprint left behind by the wheels of the fire engine, but this was soon effaced by the cows, buffalo, donkeys and peasants returning in long lines from the fields after the day’s work was over.
Fatheya remained wide awake with her arm tightly curled around the child. She could feel the danger which hovered around them, and kept her eyes close to the wall trying to catch what the villagers were saying. Deep down inside her she knew exactly what was going to happen now. And so when the words which were spoken reached her ears she felt no surprise at all. ‘The fire would have consumed the whole village were it not for the grace of Allah. Since that son of fornication and sin descended on our village, we have had nothing but one misfortune after the other. It is time for us to do something about it.’
She felt her heart beating wildly, deep under the weak, distant pulse of the child she held to her chest, wrapped in her shawl. She opened the door slowly to make sure that none of the neighbours would hear it creak, then ran swiftly on bare feet until she had almost reached the river bank, but the eyes spotted her, and surrounded her on every side. She heard a wrathful voice call out, ‘Where is the child, Fatheya?’
‘He’s not with me. He’s asleep in the house,’ she said, holding the little body tightly under her shawl.
‘You are lying, Fatheya. The child is with you,’ said the angry voice.
‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s not with me.’ There was a shiver of terrible fear in the way she pronounced the denial.
She tried to slip away quickly, but a hand moved towards her and pulled the black shawl away, revealing the child as he lay close to her chest with his mouth holding to the nipple of her breast.
‘It’s my son. Don’t take him away from me,’ she shrieked with terror.
‘He is born in fornication and we are a God-fearing people. We hate sin.’
A big rough hand stretched out in the dark to tear the child away from her, but it was as though she and the child had become one. Other hands moved towards her, trying to wrench the child away from her breast, but in vain. Her breast and the child had become inseparable.
The disc of the sun had by now disappeared completely and was no longer visible behind the line of trees on the opposite bank of the river. The night descended on the houses of Kafr El Teen like a heavy silent shadow, breathlessly still as though all life had suddenly ceased. The men high up on the bank moved hither and thither like dark spirits or ghosts which had emerged from the deep waters of the Nile. During the struggle for the child, Fatheya’s clothes were torn away, and her body shone white, and naked, like that of a terrible mermaid in the moonlit night. Her face was as white as her body, and her eyes were filled with a strange, almost insane determination. She was soft, and rounded, and female and she was a wild animal, ferociously fighting those who surrounded her in the night. She hit out at the men with her legs, and her feet, with her shoulders and her hips all the while holding the child tightly in her arms.
Hands moved in on her from every side. They were big, rough hands with coarse fingers. The long black nails were like the black hoofs of buffalo and cows. They sank into her breast tearing flesh out of flesh. Male eyes gleamed with an unsatisfied lust, feeding on her breast with a hunger run wild like a group of starved men gathered around a lamb roasting on a fire. Each one trying to devour as much as he can lest his neighbour be quicker than him. Their hands moved like the quick paws of tigers or panthers in a fight, their eyes lit by an ancient vengeance, by some furious desire. In a few moments Fatheya’s body had become a mass of torn flesh and the ground was stained red with her blood.
But after a while the river bank had become the same as it always was at night, no more than a part of the heavy, silent darkness that weighed down on everything, on the waters of the Nile, on the wide ribbon of land stretching along nearby, and on the dark mud huts and the winding lanes blocked with mounds of manure. The men of Kafr El Teen were now back in their houses, lying on the ground near their cattle and their wives like bodies without life or feeling. All except one man, Sheikh Hamzawi, who never closed his eyes that night, nor lay down to sleep. He kept his ear to the wall until all sound had ceased, and a deep silence had enveloped the village; a silence as dark and as terrifying as the silence of death. Then he stood up, walked towards the door of his house and opened it very carefully with a push of his shoulder so that it should not creak. He walked out into the lane, finding his way with the stick which he always used to ensure that his foot would not collide with a pebble, or a brick, or a dead cat which some boy had killed with a sling.
As he shuffled along slowly his stick hit something which his senses told him was not a stone, nor a brick, nor some small dead animal, but something still warm with the blood of life. He stopped short, and stood as still as a ghost, not moving one bit, so that even his yellow-beaded rosary ceased to go round between his fingers. His eyes were fastened on the naked body of his wife lying on the ground high up on the bank of the river.
Fatheya was moaning in a weak voice, and her breast still heaved up and down with a slow, irregular gasping movement. He sat down beside her and took her hand between his own. ‘Fatheya, Fatheya, it’s Hamzawi,’ he whispered.
She opened her bloodshot eyes and parted her lips slightly as though trying to say something, but no sound came out. He glimpsed someone approaching from a distance, took off his caftan, and covered her naked body with it. When the man came nearer, he recognized Sheikh Metwalli and said quickly, ‘She is breathing her last. Can you carry her with me so that she can die in her bed?’
Sheikh Metwalli immediately bent over her ready to lift her bleeding body from the ground. But before they had time to take hold of her, she opened her eyes and looked around.
‘She’s looking for something,’ said Sheikh Metwalli in a low voice.
‘She’s unconscious. Let’s carry her to the house,’ whispered back the old man, wiping the sweat from his brow.
But when they tried to lift her, the body of Fatheya held to the ground as though stuck with glue. Each time they tried to lift her, she would open her eyes and look around searching for something.
‘She won’t move. I’m sure she’s looking for something,’ said Sheikh Metwalli, his eyes probing here and there in the dark. Suddenly his eyes picked up a small shadow lying on the bank of the river, a short distance away. He went up to it, lifted it from the ground and came back carrying the torn body of her little child. Sheikh Metwalli held it out in his arms and laid it down softly on her chest. She curled her arms around it tightly and closed her eyes. And now when they lifted her the
y found that her body was light and easy to carry.
They carried her as far as the house, and on the following morning buried her with the child held tightly in her arms. Hamzawi bought her a shroud of green silk and they wrapped her in it carefully. They dug a long ditch for her and lay her softly down in it, then covered her with the earth which lay around. When it was over Metwalli wiped the sweat off his brow. His hand came away moist with something like tears when he touched his eyes. It was something which had never happened to him before, or at least he could not remember himself ever crying except perhaps when he was a child.
Only Allah and Sheikh Metwalli know that Fatheya’s body and Fatheya’s shroud both remained intact and unsoiled in the burial ground.
_________
* Baby talk for ‘Shame on you!’
XVI
He rested the big, hot palms of his two hands on the ground, and sat down with his back against the trunk of a tree, stretching out his legs as far as they could go. He had come a long distance, and they ached painfully. He could see his large feet against the setting sun. They were swollen, and the skin over them was cracked and inflamed.
He closed his eyes and tried to sleep, but they opened again. His look remained fastened on the endless ribbon of the river, with the fields rolling out beside it as far as his eyes could see. He was trying to find out where his world of Kafr El Teen began, to spot the first things he could recognize; the big mulberry tree where the river bank sloped down to the ditch, or to smell the odours he could pick out amongst a thousand other things: dust sprayed with water from the village stream, or wetted by the soft fruit of the mulberry tree, or dung mixed with the bran of bread from a hot oven, or his mother’s shawl flapping in the wind when he walked beside her, or her breast when he slept on the mat huddled up against her in the winter nights.
For many years he had not smelt the odour of these things. He had left them behind in Kafr El Teen and gone away. He had never known these odours existed until the day he could smell them no more, until the day he donned his army uniform and became a private. He spent a long time not knowing that he had smelt them before, and they had a place in his life. During that time he slept in a small tent a few miles away from Suez, living with other odours, with the smell of bullets and shells fired from a gun, or burning leather, or conserves packed in rusty tins, or the sand of Sinai when planes unloaded their bombs on it, or winds unleashed their desert storms. But one night he opened his eyes just before dawn and suddenly there was that smell invading his nose. He did not recognize it on the spur of the moment, but it went through him with a strange happiness, like some drug which he might have swallowed or smoked. He was suddenly seized with a yearning to close his eyes and lay his head on his mother’s breast. When he woke up in the morning he discovered that he had spent the night with a parcel she had sent him under his head. It was tied in a small bundle, and a colleague of his had carried it with him all the way from his village. Before opening the knot he brought it close to his nose, and for the first time recognized the odour with which he had lived for years in Kafr El Teen without ever having known it.
He breathed in the air blowing down between the river waters and the fields lying alongside, trying to detect the familiar odour of dust sprayed with muddy water from the nearby stream, but his nose failed to catch anything that smelt like it. He threw a searching glance in the same direction but nowhere could he find anything to indicate that he was near the approaches to Kafr El Teen.
He felt that the distance which lay before him might take long hours, or even days of walking. His lids closed over his eyes by a will stronger than his own. When they opened again, after a little while, he found the sun high up in the sky. A few moments went by before he realized that he had slept two days and two nights. He placed his palms flat on the ground and lifted his body upright. The skin of his palms was thick and coarse, and over it was the imprint of the groove made by his rifle. When he had paraded, or stood at attention or held the rifle to his shoulder and took aim it had rested in the groove made by long years of work with the hoe and dug it even deeper than before. When he stood up his body was like a bamboo cane, tall and thin, but his feet were swollen. Pus and blood oozed from the cracks in their skin, and the cracks had dark, muddy edges from miles and miles of walking. The burning disc of the sun was straight above his head and poured its rays down on him, and under the soles of his feet the ground was like hot needles. He could no longer tell where he was, for the Suez Canal was a strip of water and the hot needles under his feet was the silica sand of the retreat from Sinai cutting into his tortured skin.
His breath came in gasps, and before his eyes danced red circles. He closed his eyes to arrest the whirling movement. Suddenly there was an explosion. He knew the sound so well. It was terrifying like thunder, or an earthquake, or both, as though the sky and earth had collided. In less than a second he was lying curled up on the ground, with his chin tucked in, and his head held tightly protected under his arms. Then he crawled quickly over the ground looking for a ditch, or a hole, or a hollow between two sand dunes. There he lay on his belly perfectly still like a man who had died or was frozen.
The sound faded away and was replaced by a silence even deeper than before. He opened his eyes slowly, shooting frightened glances at the sky, looking for something flying high up. But there was nothing. No plane, or burning flame, no smoke, or cloudy greyness. Just the fiery disc of the sun burning down from above. His eyes dropped down from the sky and looked around, and when they ran over the river and the fields he realized he was no longer in the desert. The war was over, and he was returning home on foot to Kafr El Teen. The next moment he noticed that a group of children were gathered around him. They had seen him leap suddenly down the slope of the bank into the ditch. Behind swarms of flies their eyes were opened wide with surprise. He staggered away from them on his swollen feet. He could hear them laughing behind him. A shrill voice cried out, ‘There goes the idiot.’ Immediately the other children joined in and chanted in one voice, ‘There goes the idiot.’ Then they started to throw stones at him.
When he reached the outer limits of Kafr El Teen the sun had dropped behind the treetops on the other side of the river Nile. The dark night crept slowly over the low mud huts, and the lines of buffalo and cows slouched along the river bank on their way back home. Groups of peasants walked wearily behind, their backs bent by unceasing toil, their feet worn out from the daily coming and going.
Zakeya was already home. The buffalo was in the stable, while she squatted as usual near the door on the dusty threshold of her house with her back to the wall. She neither moved nor spoke. She did not even move her hand or nod her head. Her large black eyes stared into the night. It made no difference to her whether she kept awake or dozed, whether her eyes remained open or closed, for the night was always like a dark cloak. She did not know when she slept, or when she awoke, she did not know whether what she saw was real, or just another dream, or ghost. She could not tell whether the man who emerged in front of her at that moment was her brother Kafrawi or her son Galal. Her son Galal was not at all like her brother Kafrawi. The last image she had of him was the day they took him away to the army. She watched him walk away between two men. He was young then, and strong, and he walked upright with his eyes fixed on something he could see straight ahead. But the last image she had of Kafrawi was the day on which they had taken him away to gaol. He walked between two men, old-looking and bent, with his eyes on the ground. Yet now she did not know who of the two suddenly appeared before her eyes. The face was that of Galal, but the broken look in his eyes and the back which bent was without a doubt Kafrawi’s.
She heard a voice like Galal’s whisper in the dark. It sounded weak and spent. ‘Mother… don’t you recognize me? It’s Galal. I’m back from Sinai.’
She continued to stare at him with her black eyes. She could not tell whether they were open or closed, whether this was real or a dream. She stretched out her hand to touc
h him. Whenever she used to grope for him in the night, his face would seem to fade away, and her fingers would clutch at a dark nothingness. But this time what she held was a hand of flesh and blood, a big warm hand just like Galal’s. She brought it close to her face. It had the same smell as her breast, the same smell as her milk before it dried up. It was the smell of his hand, there was no doubt about that.
‘My son, Galal, it’s you!’ she whispered in a weak, husky voice burying her face in his hand.
‘Yes, mother, it’s Galal,’ he said, bowing his head. She touched his head and neck, his shoulders and his arms, his legs and his feet with her big rough hands. She was making sure that there was no wound, no part missing, making sure he was whole.
‘Are you all right, my son?’ she whispered.
‘Yes, mother,’ he said. ‘I’m all right. And you? Are you well, mother?’
‘Yes, my son. I’m well.’
‘But you’re not the same as you were when I left you,’ he said, looking at her with anxious eyes.
‘That’s four years ago. It’s time, son,’ she said. ‘Time, and you too, Galal, you are not the same.’
‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘I’m tired from the long distance I walked. It was very long. I need to rest.’
He lay down next to her on the dust-covered ground. She rubbed his feet in warm water and salt, then wrapped them in her shawl. His eyes were wide open, staring at the ceiling of the mud hut. She squatted next to him, and her lips were tightly closed. At one moment she parted them slightly as though about to tell him the story of what had happened, but she closed them again and kept silent. But after a while she heard him ask, ‘How is my uncle, Kafrawi?’
God Dies by the Nile and Other Novels Page 14