The Cheapest Nights

by Yusuf Idris

  Did you have to turn on the light, Li-Li? Did you have to?

  “I want you to teach me to pray.”

  “I have a book. You can have it.”

  “I want you to teach me, privately.”

  “God forbid that I should sin. Go, and may He forgive you.”

  One day the allowance stopped coming; the money dried up; the mistress was aging and ill health set in. Li-Li’s pitiful earnings were all that remained.

  Many times I tried to avoid her but she stood in my way wherever I went, her eyes like electric sparks flashing from pole to pole, now Saxon now Egyptian, her devastating beauty beyond anyone’s reach. They tried force, money, crawling on their knees, but Li-Li gave herself only to foreigners. That was the secret she revealed to no one. In the end, as with all stubborn cases, they gave up and took her as she was. They bowed to the fact that she belonged to no one, and since she belonged to no one she belonged to them all, for all to guard and protect; forbidden and desired.

  * * *

  —

  Light.

  A window of shining light.

  I am blinded.

  The light is near. Only across the narrow street. The minaret is on a level with the window. I gazed inside. One look swept me up like a whirlwind from the pit of somnolence to the peak of awareness. An awareness full of terror, as I realized I was facing something wondrous and overwhelming.

  There is a high wooden bed in the room, what else besides I do not know. A woman is reclining on the bed, one leg slightly bent, her milk-white form half clad in a flimsy garment that barely covers her breast. It is the first time in my life that so much of a woman’s flesh is revealed to my sight. I came around to myself halfway down the stairs gasping for breath as I fled. My terror turned to a sweeping fury.

  I am caught in a snare.

  I who came here to conquer the devil. My ambition dwindled until I am content merely to ward him off, to shun his abode, and beware of his many disguises. I find myself at the break of this day caught in a snare. I, who sought to defeat him in others, I run for fear he defeats me in myself. But my plea, you demon, is that you tracked me down when I did not know you existed.

  How often was your wickedness engraved on our hearts until you came to be the image of evil. Not once have you been coupled with beauty, although that is where you love to lurk. In the shape of a woman, in the folds of luxury, or in the sweetness of a smile. That’s where you hide your bait.

  I went back upstairs.

  What I saw I erased from my thoughts. The light from the window, the room, the street, the house, the whole area I blotted out of my mind. Let it be a war, a blazing raging war.

  Oh, God! My cry sounded strange to my ears for that was not the sound of my voice. After the benedictions my call went up from my depths to the vault of heaven, sharp and shrill and endless. A powerful call that bore with it the frailty of mortals and all their limitations, as it reached out to the Omnipotent and Everlasting. But now it rose in a feeble gasp, shackled by my impotence, never to reach the heavens but to crash down from the minaret and perish on the ground.

  My heart grows faint. I am afraid. Not of the devil but of myself. How often have I caught myself, too ardently lending an ear to those meretricious and lustful women. I cannot help the searching look in my eyes, nor can I ease the pangs of deprivation or the torments of my flesh.

  Oh, God!

  I was pure as the crystal fountain when I followed Your ways. Solitary, as though I were the only creature of Your hand. To gain acceptance I know I must go through the ordeal. So let it be a hard one.

  I shall not flee.

  I shall look and take my fill of her. The agony is past bearing. By allowing the lesser sin I shall triumph over the greater one.

  It is she, Li-Li. The devil incarnate. Temptation in the flesh, tossing in her sleep, her body spilled on the bed, an incandescent glowing mass of flesh. There. There is her breast and there her belly. Her hair slides gently down to cover them. She turns and it slides back.

  Oh, God! I cry for help. Not the cry of earth to the immensity above but my own desperate call as I sink. I continue to gaze for I cannot tear my eyes away. How evil is man. How evil I was to think I could conquer the devil alone. Alone I am nothing. My strength derives from God and what there is of Him in me.

  Satan has me in his grip. My eyes he has riveted to Li-Li’s white form, and with all his might he seeks to wrench from me my very soul. How little I knew the extent of my weakness.

  Oh, God, who answers every prayer. All powerful God who knows my impotence. You who gives will to the slave, who knows my suffering, have mercy on me. Though I bear up I am defeated. I am horrified to discover at the crucial moment the frailty of what I believed to be my strength. Face-to-face with the devil, I know this is my battle for survival.

  Oh God, will You leave me to fall? Will You have me err? Will You forsake me for Satan to rule and dominate? Help me my God, for I am in the abyss. Come to my aid for You are my only hope.

  Why did you turn, Li-Li? Why did you let your flimsy covering fall away from your body, so dazzling white? So white that it shines with a light of its own. Stark naked, heaving and dashing, twisting and turning, your soft limbs languidly scattered at your sides. . . . What blazing hell is this that dwells in you which neither the rising dawn nor all the cold in the world can cool?

  All in the glaring light.

  Did you have to turn on that light, Li-Li?

  * * *

  —

  It was not his loud voice that roused the people from their sleep for none of them could remember ever being roused from his torpid slumbers by a call to prayer. In truth it was an intimation of something marvelous and beautiful which called them from their beds. The voice was filtering through to their rooms like a heady perfume seeping into their sleepy nostrils; warm and tender like a melody in a dream. But they know they are not dreaming; they know they are thrilling to the stark reality of that voice.

  Oh, God!

  How often that call is uttered. In prayer and supplication; in sorrow and in gladness. How often did it come with the last breath of life and the first beats of existence. Uttered by the child, and the man, and the sinful, and the repentant. By the hopeful and the desperate wavering between hope and desolation.

  All woke to that one call. Like a magnet it drew them out of their beds and into the streets with a feeling in their hearts they had not known before. A joyful feeling that they were close to God. A merciful God whom they had nearly reached.

  They met in the mosque, the water from their ablutions hardly dry on their faces. Having never met before at such an hour or such a place they looked at one another like strangers meeting for the first time, their ears picking up the soothing strains of the call to prayer; food for their souls for when they shall hunger.

  Presently, and in great confusion, they began to flock outside heading for the minaret to seek Sheikh Abdel Al. They needed to know whether the voice was truly his, whether it was truly of this earth or whether it flowed from heaven. So great was their rapture they did not realize that the Sheikh had come down without sending out the full call to prayer. Pale and sallow he descended from the minaret and with a sign of his hand stopped the rushing crowd. Immediately he went to the Kiblah and prepared to pray.

  Yes, I prepared to pray for now I was worthy to pray.

  * * *

  —

  Because I have triumphed I am worthy to pray. The first sign of victory was when I was able to recover my erring sight. When my voice awakened Li-Li from her sleep and she sat up, the satin curves of her body undulating languidly on the bed. Rapturously she turned her gaze on me. Desperately I fought, my whole being torn with anguish, just as she was torn with anguish—the anguish of joy and pure exhilaration. Then she got up and stood leaning out of the window. That instant I looked away and I returned to
my senses—a ruin, the very dregs of a life.

  I looked up to the sky in my gratitude. I was no longer myself. My stock of faith I lost in the raging battle. In triumph and with a bleeding heart I went down. Prayer is the balm. I turned my face to the Kiblah and prepared to pray.

  * * *

  —

  They were still prostrate when the sun shone down on the nave. Some had gone to sleep, others were snoring, and the rest were lost in private meditation. They were all still waiting for the words “God is greatest” when a sudden raucous laugh burst upon them. It was Me’eza the Dope who was in the habit of seeking refuge in the mosque whenever his wife turned him out of the house. He nearly split his sides laughing before his words came; sheer drivel, but at least they came.

  “Look at the dopes,” he said, “praying without a leader.”

  * * *

  —

  In triumph and with a bleeding heart, I went down. Prayer is the balm. I turned my face to the Kiblah and prepared to pray. I opened my eyes and Li-Li’s naked form appeared before me, throbbing, voluptuous, her silken hair falling in ripples down her sides. Forgive me oh God, for I have concealed from You the truth. The devil has won the day.

  While all were kneeling together, like a stray flock come home, I stole through the window by the Kiblah and in a flash I was knocking at the door on the second floor of the house opposite. Wrapped in a bedsheet Li-Li opened the door.

  “I have come to teach you to pray,” I said with terror in my smile as I started to unbutton my cloak. The bedsheet slipped from her shoulder. Sharply she pulled it back.

  “Sorry, I bought the English record that teaches prayer. I found I understand it better,” she said as she turned her back and switched off the light.

  Did you have to turn on the light, Li-Li?

  DEATH FROM OLD AGE

  It was on just such a morning that Am Mohamed died. What annoyed me was that people took his death as a matter of course, no reason for anyone to grieve or mourn or even to sigh in sorrow.

  That day I had started work as usual signing birth certificates which made regular citizens, recognized by the state, out of newborn infants. As a matter of fact my job reminded me of Sayyedna Radwan, guardian of the hereafter. For just as no one could leave or enter that abode without his sanction, no one could enter or depart from this world without mine.

  I used to start the day warranting certificates with a long queue of mothers standing in front of me waiting to have their infants’ vaccinations checked. Forty days ago these infants were only a name on a slip of paper, and now they already had a few weeks of life behind them and incipient problems. I rather enjoyed my work in spite of the many troubles I was bound to encounter. It was refreshing every morning to inspect the tiny mites so full of the vigor of new life. Their mothers were all young and newly married and happy to be mothers. They’d probably started to collect since early morning in their best clothes, their eyebrows freshly penciled and their eyes carefully lined with kohl. It was no use trying to keep their line straight for they kept on falling out to go and look at some other woman to see what she was wearing and take a peep at her infant to compare it with their own. There was no malice intended, of course, but they all saw to it that their babies were properly decked with wolves’ teeth and amulets, and the first thing they did when they got home was to read the charms against the evil eye.

  After the women it was the schoolchildren’s turn to line up. Their noisy clatter filled the room. The same children who not so long ago had been carried in here in their mothers’ arms. Now they were back again on their own two feet to get certificates from the office to admit them to school. Then there were the young workers; boys and girls who came for a statement that they were above twelve years of age, which the law on the employment of juveniles required before they were allowed to embark on their lifelong struggle for their daily bread. That lot was never noisy. They just stood, dazed and bewildered, with the awed look of those about to probe a dark interior.

  By the time I was through with them I could tell from the racket outside that the next batch was collecting. Male voices in an uproar of oaths with angry references to justice and humanity and the government and the waste of time. Nothing would calm that lot. Not even the repeated assurances of the orderly who vainly tried to keep their line straight, his fist tightly clasped on the measly tips he was collecting from them. He shook his head many times and assured them they would all take their turn. Yes, they will be granted leave. Yes, they will pass the medical examination. Dr. Khaled is a kind man. Yes, he is in a good mood today. Just a little patience friends, and you’ll get your ages estimated. You’ll all be getting what you came for. Everything in good time. Just a little patience. Then they started trailing in, a long queue of people obviously unused to discipline. All you saw was the restless faces of men caught up in a mad race to grab the loaf out of the other fellow’s mouth. Coarse boorish faces bruised and toughened by the daily encounter with life in the raw.

  By ten o’clock I was through with the world of infants and youngsters and adults and I prepared to enter the sphere of the dead. They, too, have their problems. Death is by no means the end of a man. As a matter of fact in dying a man gives a lot more trouble than he ever did while he lived. If the penalty for smuggling someone into the world without a birth certificate is a fine of one pound, the penalty for smuggling him out without a license is a term of imprisonment. And while the state never bothered much about an individual during his lifetime, it suddenly gives him the greatest attention the moment he expires. Just as the law cares nothing for how he lived but will move heaven and earth to know how he died.

  Suspicion in some cases is a crime, goes the saying. But the legislator takes the opposite view: that it is a virtue in most cases. Accordingly, anyone who dies is assumed to have been murdered until it is proved otherwise. It was my job to get “otherwise” proved. My job was to certify the death, to examine the body, and to sniff for evidence of foul play. And after having made an approximate guess as to the cause of death, put it down on the death certificate. Only then did the deceased have a right to get buried and start off for the next world.

  At ten o’clock then, my dealings with the world of the dead began. The first people I had to see from that sphere were the undertakers’ assistants when they came in and crowded around my desk. Am Mohamed used to be one of them. I never noticed him at the beginning for they all looked alike. And although assistants are usually associated with the young, those were a curious lot, the youngest of them well over sixty-five. There was something unwholesome in their senility, unlike the common run of pensioned or retired officials many of whom retained a youthful appearance in spite of their gray hair and wrinkles and rounded backs. These men were somehow disfigured by old age. Their bodies were shrunk to a feeble tottering frame, and their faces were shriveled and dry as a raisin. The tall appeared taller, and the thin appeared thinner, while the short could hardly be seen. Invariably there was a white stubble sprouting on their thin haggard faces, and their eyes were bleary from more than one disease. Their work-clothes may have differed in color and quality but they were all equally old and worn, and reached no lower than the knee. Their headgear, too, was the same for all. A long narrow rag of some sort, wound around a frayed, shapeless head-cover of some sort, or simply around their naked pates.

  They were quite something to look at, what with their great age and the way they were rigged out, in addition to their many infirmities. They looked like creatures from a distant planet where everything is moth-eaten and decrepit.

  Their work began from the moment a man gave up the ghost. Just like the angels who conveyed the soul to heaven, these undertakers’ assistants took care of the departed until they got him safely underground. Some people imagine that the undertaker’s job is easy, but in reality it is much more difficult than simply conveying the soul to heaven. Some may also be under the impression that
it is an unpleasant job, which is another mistaken notion. It is a job like any other. If people work only to make a living then any other. If people work only to make a living then any job is unpleasant, which means that work must have rules and regulations. Here the rule was for the boss to sit in the shop and receive the death notices. It was he who dealt with the clients and cashed in advance payments, and only in rare cases did he personally undertake to wash the deceased.

  After he clinched a deal, his assistants took over. They’d run to the house of the deceased in order to get him dressed. Then run for the doctor at the Health Department office. Then back to the shop or to the herbalist’s. It was they who had to heat the water and carry the body on their lean arms to the wash-basin and wrap it in the shroud before they placed it in the coffin. Sometimes too they were made to help carry the coffin to the mosque or to the graveyard. The coffin usually had long rough handles of unpolished wood that settled viciously on the lean old neck, sometimes making it bleed. Very often it was heavy, and the distance always long. Summertime was hell. But the biggest torture were the obese.

  So at ten o’clock it was their turn to come in, crowding before me, each of them stretching a skinny arm with a death notice. Each trying to get me to start off with him first, to see his client and give him the burial license which would allow him to get on with his work before it got late.

  There was something in those boys at once pathetic and grotesque. I couldn’t resist a quip sometimes.

  “And when shall we be writing out one for you too?” I used to say to the first of them to reach my desk.

  The poor devil could only laugh. They were always anxious to please me, and they generally went along with anything I said. That’s why I was astonished one day when one of them did not respond when I made the same quip to him. I stared at the man. He looked just like the others. The only difference I noticed was that a slight shadow covered both his eyes like a winter cloud.