God Dies by the Nile and Other Novels (18 page)

‘I know no other place to live in,' responded Sheikh Hamzawi in a voice full of despair and exhaustion. ‘I prefer to die here rather than in a strange place. There no one will lend us a helping hand.'

‘Allah will take care of us, Hamzawi. Do you think He will abandon us to our fate?'

‘I don't know,' said Sheikh Hamzawi. ‘Allah seems to have abandoned me since I gave shelter to this child.'

‘How can you repeat the same things that people in the village are saying?' protested Fatheya.

‘Why does that surprise you? Aren't I like other people? Am I not human? I never pretended to be a saint, or a god.'

‘What are you driving at, Hamzawi? If you don't want the child to stay, then before the sun rises tomorrow you will not find him here, and you will never see him again in this house. But I also will leave with him.'

‘Do as you wish, Fatheya,' answered Sheikh Hamzawi in a weak voice. ‘Go with him, or stay here, it no longer makes any difference. All I want out of life is that people should leave me alone.'

‘I don't want to leave you alone,' she said, wiping the tears away with her hand, ‘but people will give us no peace. Every time something goes wrong in the village, they will blame this poor, innocent child. What has the child got to do with the cotton worm, Hamzawi? Was it he who told the worm to eat the cotton? The brain of a buffalo has more sense in it than the mind of these people here in Kafr El Teen. But where can I go? I know no other village apart from Kafr El Teen.'

A few days passed and Fatheya forgot the questions she had asked herself. People no longer talked about them as they had
done before. It looked as though they had forgotten the whole matter, or that what they had done to Sheikh Hamzawi was sufficient for them. And perhaps people would have forgotten. But one day the wind started to blow, and carried with it a spark from one of the ovens in which a woman was baking bread. The spark was very small, about the size of the head of a match, or maybe even smaller. It could have gone out had it landed on the dust-covered ground. But instead it flew on to one of the roofs, and landed while still partly alight on a heap of straw. If a gust of wind had happened to blow strongly at that moment, it might have put it out before it had time to ignite the straw. In fact, the wind went suddenly still, and during this time a small flame caught hold of one straw, so that when the wind started to blow again after a short while, the one straw was burning and the flames quickly caught hold of the whole heap, then moved quickly to the dung cakes and the cotton sticks jutting out as far as the roofs of the nearby houses.

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 they 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.

_________

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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.