by Yusuf Idris
“What’s wrong with you?” I asked, seeing that something was obviously wrong.
“I wish I’d died in her place,” he moaned sadly.
“In whose place?”
“Didn’t you hear? My daughter. She died.”
“When?”
“Yesterday. The Primus stove blew up in her face. She died in the hospital.”
I didn’t believe him, for his blank expression hardly altered as he announced this news. I had to ask his Mo‘allem, who was not his boss alone but that of three others as well, all equally ancient. This one did not conform to the traditional image of mo‘allems, who were usually corpulent hulks with fearsome mustaches. He was only in his thirties, tanned and clean-shaven with a severe expression on his face though at heart he loved to frolic. The business had come to him upon his father’s death but not before he had sown his wild oats and knocked about for a while. Looking at him anyone could see he was sharp and clear-witted and knew what he was about. Although he was young he wore the traditional dress of well-to-do mo‘allems: a bright red tarboosh and a woolen cloak over his silk caftan, the rich embroidery around the neckline showing through the opening in the cloak. He wore elegant black shoes and in his hand he held the inevitable amber beads.
He confirmed what the man said. It was true that his daughter had died in the hospital and that by her death he was left alone in the world. I felt sorry for him as he stood so forlorn, leaning toward the ground as if an invisible force were pulling him down, precipitating the moment when he would be laid there for good. He just stood, motionless and dry-eyed.
“Ah well, Am Mohamed,” I said, “don’t upset yourself. This is the way of the world.”
As I said that, I realized I was not even sure of the man’s name, I was only guessing it was Mohamed. Actually I called them all Mohamed and out of deference to me they all answered to that, as if it didn’t matter to them anymore whether they had a name of their own.
“Yes,” he mumbled, “I wish I’d died in her place.”
It is not uncommon to hear such expressions in circumstances of overwhelming grief and one takes them for what they are, a mere burst of emotion. But in the case of Am Mohamed the way he spoke left no doubt he meant what he was saying.
From then on I began to take an interest in the man, as well as in all the other Am Mohameds. I found out the reason why they were all so old, almost as if to do their job it was an essential requirement to be elderly. Most of them, I discovered, were retired school janitors, office boys, or police constables. They took odd jobs during the first few years of their retirement until their strength was gone and they were quite worn out. After that the only way for them to make a living was as undertakers’ assistants. That is if they were lucky enough to find a vacancy. The job did not require much physical strength, and the wages were so poor that none would accept them—none but an old man on the brink of death from weakness and starvation. And yet, in spite of their years when the most they could do was lie in their beds and wait for death to come, their duties were most strenuous.
I’d gone with Mohamed on hundreds of calls, and every time we went through the same act. He was always in a hurry to get the burial license from me in order to get on with his work in time to be able to attend to other business. There was the boss to consider, and like all apprentices he was anxious to please him. So he was always trying to dissuade me from going all the way to the house of the deceased as the journey back and forth took too long. He wanted me to sign without leaving my office. But orders were orders and mine were to examine the body before giving a license. He used to get excited and swear to me that the death was natural, that there was not the slightest suspicion of foul play, that he himself had undressed the body and examined it. He had pulled the hair and stared into the eyes and felt the bones. My comfort was all he was interested in, he assured me every time. I’d shake my head stubbornly and he’d shake his in despair as he started to run in front of me. “As you wish then,” he would say. “Have it your way.”
After a while he would stop.
“I swear by God, my Bey, it’s an old man this time. A simple case of death from old age.”
“Death from old age—in full possession of faculties,” was the term used in the case of an old person’s death when no other cause of death is apparent. The phrase “in full possession of faculties” is thrown in for legal purposes where a legacy is involved and litigations among heirs are likely to arise. It was a common expression widely used by health inspectors, civil servants and undertakers, and it was only natural for Am Mohamed to adopt it too.
Seeing that it was no use persuading me to stay back he would trot on in front of me to show me the way. We went to crowded areas; crowded with people and houses and flies and everything imaginable. There were more people than houses, and more houses than space, and about a million flies to each individual. Everything was piled up in heaps as if the work of someone in a hurry. And Am Mohamed trotted along on his skinny bowlegs, with sweat streaking his face, tinier in stature than a wizened monkey. It was a struggle for him to catch up with me and a struggle to run ahead of me, and a struggle to clear a path for me to proceed. Acting as self-appointed policeman he starts to direct the traffic, signaling carts to halt, and ordering vegetable hawkers to stop yelling and waving their arms about, and to make way for the “Bey.” He gets out of breath but he manages to keep up some sort of dialog with me to keep me entertained. He curses the crowds and those who disobey his orders. There’s no good left in the world anymore. In the old days death came in plenty, and business was good. I ask, panting like him, whether we still have far to go. Oh no, only a few steps, just around the corner. So I proceed and after hundreds of steps we have still not reached the house or the body. We keep winding in and out of lanes and alleys and the people who see us go by turn their faces away with a visible shudder, wondering whom we are after. Am Mohamed keeps trotting on, in front and behind and on both sides of me, trying his best to ward off the disaster of my losing patience and deciding to put off the business to the next day.
Finally we reach our destination. Am Mohamed picks up the hem of his gallabieh and holds it between his teeth as he rushes on double-quick to make way for me. No sooner do I step into the house than I am greeted with terrifying screams followed by a chorus of wails.
“The doctor has come for you, my love!” they cry, as if the doctor were Azrael himself. But Am Mohamed pays no attention.
“Hey, out of the way, you,” he shouts. “This way, my Bey. Get out of the way, I said. God damn those women, where the hell do they all come from! This way, my Bey.”
The black bundles crowding the room begin to move but not before they have peered into my face to take a close look at the doctor. At last there is no one in the dead man’s room but the nearest relative, Am Mohamed and myself.
“There, my Bey,” says Am Mohamed, rushing toward the body, hardly waiting to recover his breath. He rips the cover away to reveal the dead man.
“See? I told you, just dandy. Not a scratch.” He goes on as if in self-defense, wanting to prove he was right when he said the death was natural.
“Here’s the chest. Look. And the belly. And here’s the mouth, clean as a whistle. And the hair.” He pulls at the hair to show me there is no evidence of poison. He becomes irritable as it is nearly midday, and he wants to have finished by then.
“And the legs, here.” He pulls up the leg. “I told you, my Bey, it is only old age. Look at the back.”
He tries to haul the body over but it proves beyond him even though he calls God’s saints to his aid.
“Lay off, damn you,” his boss would scold gruffly as he takes over. But Mohamed insists on helping if only by supporting a leg, or straightening a finger.
When the examination was over and we have left the room, Am Mohamed would still not take his eyes off me, like a schoolboy awaiting the results of an
examination. He breathed with relief only when I signed the certificate and he held it thankfully in his hand like a gift from heaven. Then he would bite on his gums and his pupils would dilate, and his smile would say, “I told you so.” And he would scurry down ahead of me, back to my office.
One day I saw a tear in Am Mohamed’s eye. A tiny liquid speck, as if it were the last drop in his sockets. It came after he’d received a quick slap on his face from the boss. He had made a mistake. I had gone to examine a body and it was still not undressed when I got there. Before I had time to reprove the boss for it, the latter had come down with a slap on Am Mohamed’s face as if to show me it was not his mistake and that he had seen to it that justice was done. It made me furious but Am Mohamed never moved. He just stood with his hand on his cheek, a guilty expression on his face, like a reproved child.
One day I went to my office and found it packed with Am Mohameds, all standing glum and silent as usual, decrepitude having sapped them of even the energy to talk. I was not a little astonished when I found them crowding my office, for I was not used to having so many at a time. As soon as he saw me their boss came forward with a broad grin on his face wishing me every kind of good morning, fragrant with jasmine and roses and honeydew, which he accompanied by a great roar of laughter. Then, as if he suddenly remembered something, his expression changed. He stood with his fists resting on his belly and an expression of profound grief on his face.
“Didn’t you hear?”
“Hear what?”
“The man, he died.”
“What man?” I spoke carelessly as the boss was in the habit of talking to me of people and things I had never heard of as if I knew all about them.
“One of my boys.”
“You mean Mohamed?”
“That’s right, God give you a long life.” Then immediately his professional look came back and he was brisk and businesslike. “If you please doctor, for the sake of the Prophet, kindly let us have the death certificate without delay. You know, it’s summer, and him an old man and all that.”
I couldn’t help a smile. Only yesterday Mohamed was trotting all over me on our way to a call, and today he was dead and his boss was as eager to rush him through his own burial as he himself used to be for his clients.
“Well, my Bey, what do you say?”
“So he went and did it,” I murmured, addressing no one in particular.
“That’s right, and if God hadn’t sent us a new boy, heaven knows how we were going to manage today.”
“A new boy?”
“That’s right. There he is. Come, Guindi.”
Guindi came. Another shriveled old man no less decrepit than the others. He hadn’t got into his official clothes yet for he was still wearing a crumpled, shapeless tarboosh.
“If you will be pleased to sign, my Bey,” the Mo‘allem was saying.
“No, I’ve got to see him first.”
“Well, it’s not as if he’s a stranger to you. I just don’t want to put you to any trouble, that’s all. I wouldn’t be deceiving you; after all, he was an old man, and you knew him. You can sign right here, ‘old age,’ that’s all there is to it.”
Here all his boys joined in to back him, eager to do their departed colleague a last good turn. But I insisted on what I said, if only to have one last look at Mohamed. After all, we were pals.
Presently, we left my office and set out for Am Mohamed’s house. It was a grim procession, with me in the front and the Mo‘allem at my side holding his gallabieh up by the hem with one hand while he gesticulated with the other, telling me all about Am Mohamed’s funeral and how he was giving it to him free although times were bad, and one never knew. Behind us came the rest of the Mo‘allem’s crew. People stopped to stare as we went by, wondering who the eminent person could be whose death formalities required the whole lot of us.
The house where Am Mohamed lived was out of the way, at the foot of a hill. It consisted of a large courtyard with an enormous heap of garbage in the center, surrounded by rooms, most of them dilapidated but not unoccupied in spite of that. Our arrival did not stir the slightest motion. Not a wail, not a cry, not a sob went up. Everything seemed to be going on much as usual, as if death had never called there. Only a few dogs began to bark when they saw us coming but they stopped and scampered away when the Mo‘allem shouted at them.
The room was dark and only the open door let in some light. Am Mohamed was lying near the wall covered by old German newspapers; nobody could explain how they found their way there.
“All right,” shouted the Mo‘allem to the new boy.
The “boy” bent down and removed the newspapers with trembling hands. Am Mohamed lay stretched out with his face to the wall like a punished child. He was wearing his work clothes, his body was shrunken, and his feet, so often seen scurrying as he went on his rounds, were now lying still in a thick cast of dried mud and dirt.
“There,” the Mo‘allem was saying, “nothing wrong at all. Turn him over, let the Bey see him properly.”
The old “boy” tried to haul him over but the effort proved beyond him. I could imagine then old Am Mohamed rising from the dead and reproving him in his own gruff way.
“Lay off, damn you. Here, my Bey, I’ll turn myself over. No need for you to trouble. Here I am, absolutely nothing wrong. Here are my legs.” And he stretched out his legs, two long desiccated twigs. He took off his clothes and stood naked in the middle of the room, a skeleton in a covering of skin with not an ounce of flesh between. Am Mohamed turned himself around. “I told you, my Bey, I’m an old man. Here’s my arm.”
He tried to stretch his arm but it seems the rheumatism which had long troubled him when he was alive had left him with stiff joints so he gave up and went on to show his head, a little shrunken ball, the cheeks sucked into the mouth, and one jaw clamped on the other.
“And here’s my hair,” he said, pulling at the little that was left, “and my feet,” he added sticking out his two colorless feet that looked as if they had been dead for decades.
The effort of thus displaying himself must have tired him for he lay down again turning his face to the wall.
“You could have spared yourself the trouble. I told you, it’s only ‘old age,’” and he sighed as he settled down.
I came around to myself at the sound of the Mo‘allem’s voice.
“Well?” he was saying.
“You may go ahead.”
Immediately a great bustle started as the Mo‘allem removed his cloak and stood like a captain on deck briskly giving out orders.
After a while Am Mohamed was settled in his coffin and the coffin was settled on the bearers’ backs, all of them his pals. They started on their way, the coffin swaying as they carried it out of the house where not a sound or a single wail went up to bid farewell to Am Mohamed.
After the Mo‘allem had checked that everything was all over and that he had done his duty in giving his “boy” a decent funeral, I was surprised to see him suddenly go back and squat on the ground near the wall, hiding his head between his knees. I saw him give vent to a long muffled sob, and in a low sad lament he called Am Mohamed’s name over and over.
When his sobs subsided, remembering formalities, he lifted a tear-stained face to me.
“You did sign the license, Doctor, didn’t you?”
I nodded.
“Wasn’t it . . .”
“Yes, ‘old age.’”
He wiped the tears from his eyes.
“And ‘in full possession of faculties . . .’”
“That’s right. ‘In full possession of faculties,’” I replied.
BRINGING IN THE BRIDE
The fact that the people of El Sharkieh province, where I come from, are generous goes without saying. But their being so impetuous in their generosity as to “bring in the bride” is another matter. In fact i
t was a strange custom of theirs which they stopped only about two years ago.
When a country girl married into another town it was usual, on the wedding day, for her entire family to go with her to the groom’s town. And since the roads in those far-flung provinces were not safe in those days, it was also the custom for the family to be accompanied by a great number of the people of the town, walking in a long procession headed by the camel on which the bride rode, and which was usually led by the groom himself or a man who was his deputy.
That was not unusual, indeed it was the custom in all country weddings all over Egypt. But what was unusual, and unique to the province of El Sharkieh, was that when the bride and her procession passed by the towns and farms lying on the way, the people from those places, young and old, would all come out to greet them and invite them to call on their respective homesteads. And to prove the sincerity of the invitation they’d have a beast slaughtered and its head impaled on a long pole. They would wait until the procession drew near and then go forward to meet them, presenting them with a fait accompli by saying, “Kindly step this way. The beast is slaughtered and your dinner is prepared. Tonight you will be our guests.”
Naturally the bride’s people could not accept the invitation, explaining that this was the wedding night and that there was no time to pay calls or accept hospitality on the way. The hosts would not accept the excuse, taking the refusal as an insult, whereupon they would insist more vehemently while the bride’s people refused more emphatically. Very often the contest ended with a brawl involving violence and abuse and not infrequently a few dead or wounded. But invariably it ended in one of two ways: either the bride’s party won and proceeded unmolested to their destination, or the other party won, in which case the defeated company was led forcibly into the town and compelled to accept the hospitality. In most cases it was the bride’s people who triumphed because it was their pride and honor they were defending. Whereas in the case of the people of the various towns it was merely a perfunctory show they put up to demonstrate their generosity but not to the extent of exposing themselves to danger.