God Dies by the Nile and Other Novels (7 page)

So every evening Fatheya would sit on the prayer carpet and repeat the same ritual. Then she would recite the holy verse of ‘The Seat', and perhaps other verses. Her lids would feel heavy, and quite often she fell asleep while kneeling. In her ears echoed the words of Allah and between her thighs crept the hand of Sheikh Hamzawi. She abandoned herself to sleep as though abandoning herself to a man, opening her thighs wide apart and dropping into a deep oblivion right in the middle of the prayer offered to God.

With her ear stuck to the wall, Fatheya followed the tapping noise made by Sheikh Hamzawi's stick as he moved along the lane. She could detect the sound of his foot if it collided with anything on the ground. His eyesight was weak and his stick
or his foot seemed always to be colliding with something, or getting entangled in it. It could be a dead rabbit, or a dead cat, or a stone, or a pebble which he would strike away from the door with a sweep of his stick. Sometimes his foot got entangled in his caftan as he stepped over the threshold of his house, making him falter, or his shoe would land on a clod of manure, or the droppings which a dog had left in front of the door since the night before. The rosary would sway furiously in his hand as he heaped curses over dogs and people alike.

But this time his foot collided with a body that was neither that of a dead rabbit, nor of a dead cat. It was moving, and alive, and also much bigger. He was seized with fright thinking it could be a spirit, or an elf of the night. But a moment later he heard a faint moaning, and when he looked down at the ground despite his dimmed eyesight, he could discern what looked like a rosy face, two eyes with tears at the fringes of the closed lashes, and an open mouth with lips which trembled slightly, as it breathed in air with a gasping sound.

For a moment he stood stock still not daring to move. Could it be that Allah had responded to his prayers? Had the amulet of Haj Ismail at last produced its magic effect? This child seemed as though it had fallen from the night sky right in front of his door, just as Christ had come down from on high to where the Virgin Mary had lain down to rest under a tree.

His lips opened to emit a faint choking sound. Nothing was beyond the power of Allah, praised be His name, and
clamoured to the high heavens. He continued to stand as still as a statue. His long, narrow face looked even longer than usual, but now it started to show up more distinctly as the pale light of dawn touched it. His eyes were slightly misty, and over one of them was a white spot which shone mysteriously. The yellow beads of his rosary were worn away where his fingers had rubbed against them during the endless hours of a lifetime spent in worship and prayer. But now, maybe for the first time during his waking hours, the beads had ceased to go round.

At that precise moment of the new day the Chief of the Village Guard had ended his night vigil and was on his way home. He came upon the figure of Sheikh Hamzawi standing motionless in front of his door. He had never seen him standing like that before, nor ever seen his face look so long and drawn. It was as though he now had two faces. The upper one was that of Sheikh Hamzawi, whereas the lower face bore no resemblance to him at all, nor to any other face he had seen in Kafr El Teen, nor for that matter, in the whole wide world, although he had not seen much of what was outside Kafr El Teen. It resembled neither the face of a human being, nor that of a spirit. For all he knew it could have been the face of a devil, or that of a saint, or even the face of God himself, except that he knew not what the face of God looked like, since it was not a face that he had seen.

He halted suddenly, and stood there as though turned to stone. His eyes were fixed on the strange ghostlike form the
like of which he had never set his eyes on before. For it was not like man, or saint, or devil, or any other of the many creations of God. He saw it bend and lift something that lay at its feet. He felt his fingers close tightly around the huge stick he carried around with the instinctive movement of the village guard. He was on the point of lifting it high up in the air to bring it down with all his might on the head bending low over the ground. But at that very moment he caught sight of a rosy face with traces of tears peeping through the closed eyes, and he heard Sheikh Hamzawi's voice intone, ‘Without God we are indeed hapless for without Him we can do nothing.'

‘What is this, Sheikh Hamzawi?' exclaimed the Chief of the Village Guard in a loud voice.

‘An angel from heaven,' muttered Sheikh Hamzawi.

‘And why could it not be a devil, son of a devil?' said the Chief of the Village Guard.

Still almost unaware of what was going on, Sheikh Hamzawi replied, ‘It's a gift from Allah.'

Before he had time to finish his sentence, Fatheya had poked her head through the door. ‘Say not what you are saying, Sheikh Zahran,' she said in a voice full of anger. ‘It is a gift, a blessing from Allah. Only that which is sinful should be condemned.'

She stretched out her arms and rapidly snatched the child from Sheikh Hamzawi who was still standing in the same place, looking as though he did not know what was going on. She closed the door holding the child closely to her bosom.
She could feel her breasts tingle as the blood flowed through them, like tiny ants moving deeply in her flesh. She pulled her breast out through the open neck of her garment and pressed the nipple, letting white drops of milk ooze out of the little dark opening. She wrapped her shawl carefully around the head of the baby, before slipping her nipple into its greedy, gasping mouth.

_________

^*
Garment worn over a caftan, made of thicker, darker material.

^*
Local midwife.

^*
A long, conical drum.

V

The voice of Sheikh Hamzawi soared into the air as the almost invisible glimmer of dawn crept through the sky. It
floated over the low mud huts, pierced through the dark walls, dropped down into the narrow winding lanes blocked with scattered mounds of manure, to reach the ears of the Chief of the Village Guard who was now sitting in his house. But this time he had not undressed as he was in the habit of doing the moment he got back from his long night vigil. Nor did he ask his wife to bring him something to eat. He did not even take off his leather boots with the usual quick movement followed by two successive kicks which sent them flying into a corner of the room, as though he was ridding himself of a heavy chain wound around his feet.

He reclined on the mat, his eyes wide open, staring at nothing, his boots securely attached round his ankles. His fingers kept pulling at his long thick whiskers as he was wont to do when he had come upon a dead body lying in some
field, or on the river bank, but did not yet know who was the killer, or when a crime had been committed behind his back without
his knowing right from the start how the whole thing had been planned.

When the voice of Sheikh Hamzawi went through the village to where he sat, he turned his head and looked at his wife. His lips parted slightly as though he was about to tell her that something important had happened in Kafr El Teen that night. But his wife was quicker to it this time. ‘Nefissa, Kafrawi's daughter, has run away,' she said, pronouncing the sentence quickly, almost in one breath, with a jerk of her hand which resembled the kick her husband gave with his foot when he wanted to rid himself of his heavy boots. The news had been whispered to her by one of her neighbours the night before. She spent the long, dark hours tossing and turning on her bed. It seemed to weigh down on her chest with a palpable mass of its own. It oppressed her, and yet carried with it an obscure pleasure, like being pregnant and waiting for the dawn in eager anticipation, for the moment when she could shift this weight to someone else, and enjoy the thrill of telling her man the news that Nefissa had fled before he was told about it by anyone apart from herself.

The name Nefissa rang with a strange sound in the ears of Sheikh Zahran. The image of a small, rosy face with closed eyes and still wet tears around the lids floated in space. For a moment the closed lids opened wide, and he looked into the girl's big black eyes – as they stared straight ahead at something on the distant horizon. His fingers let go of his whiskers, and he gave a sudden gasp like a drowning man when he comes to the surface. His voice rang out.

‘Nefissa?'

‘Yes, Nefissa,' she said.

Fatheya still sat huddled up close to the wall, with the baby held close to her chest. Its head was swathed in her dark veil, and its lips suckled at the nipple of her breast. If she had not kept her ear to the wall she might not have heard it vibrate with the name Nefissa. She gave a sudden gasp of relief like a drowning woman who unexpectedly finds herself at the surface.

‘Nefissa?'

The name Nefissa echoed in the dark rooms, pierced through the walls of mud, crept through the lanes blocked with piles of manure, rose into the air over the low irregular roofs covered in cakes of dung and cotton sticks, higher and higher over the minaret of the mosque and the crescent at its top. Before long it was pounding at the high brick walls and the iron door of the Mayor's house. It resounded in his ears like the summons to prayer tolled out five times a day by Sheikh Hamzawi from the highest point in the village of Kafr El Teen, lying like some dark fungus by the waters of the Nile.

Seated next to the Mayor was his youngest son Tariq. He had just entered college and had come down to the village for his holidays. As he listened to her story his eyes shone with the glint which can be seen in the eyes of a youth barely nineteen when he thinks of a woman's body, with the relief which can come from images and words when the act itself is forbidden. His voice was husky when he said, ‘Last week in college we discovered a child in the water closet. And the week before we
caught a couple kissing in an empty lecture room. Now here in Kafr El Teen a girl gives birth to her child, abandons it in front of the house of the village Sheikh, and runs away. Girls have no morals these days, father.'

‘Yes, son, you are quite right,' the Mayor answered. ‘Girls and women have lost all morality.' He accompanied his words with a quick sidelong glance which lingered for a moment on the bare thighs of his wife showing beneath her tight skirt. She crossed one leg over the other with a barely contained irritation, and commented heatedly, ‘Why not admit that it's men who no longer have any morals?'

The Mayor laughed. ‘There's nothing new to that. Men have always been immoral. But now the women are throwing virtue overboard, and that will lead to a real catastrophe.'

‘Why a catastrophe? Why not equality, or justice?'

The son shook his long-haired, curly head, and gave his mother a reproving look.

‘No, mother, I don't agree with you when you talk of equality. Girls are not the same as boys. The most precious thing they possess is their virtue.'

The Mayor's wife burst into soft peals of sarcastic, slightly snorting laughter evocative of the more vulgar mirth that could be expressed by the lady patron of a brothel if she had been involved in the conversation. She raised one eyebrow and said, ‘Is that so, Master Tariq. Now you are putting on a Sheikh's turban and talking of virtue. Where was your virtue
hiding last week when you stole a ten pound note from my handbag, and went to visit that woman with whose house I have now become quite familiar? Where was your virtue last year when you assaulted Saadia, the servant, and obliged me to throw her out in order to avoid a scandal? And where does your virtue disappear to every time you pounce on one of the servant girls in our house? Matters have gone so far that I have now decided to employ only menservants. Pray tell me what happens to your virtue when you are so occupied pursuing the girls on the telephone, or across windows, or standing on our balconies, or don't you know that our neighbours in Maadi have complained to me several times?'

She directed her words to her son, but kept throwing looks of barely disguised anger towards the Mayor. The rigid features of his face convinced the boy that the usual quarrel was about to break out between them, so he quickly switched back to the story of Nefissa.

‘Father, do you think Sheikh Hamzawi will adopt the child?'

‘It looks as though he intends to do so,' said the Mayor. ‘He's a good man and has no children. His wife has been wanting to have a baby for years.'

‘Then the problem is solved,' said the son with an air of finality.

‘It's not solved at all. These peasants never calm down unless they wreak vengeance on whoever is the cause,' chimed in the mother.

After this parting shot she stood up and went off to her room. The son did not notice the small muscle which had started to quiver below his father's mouth. He pretended he was scratching his chin or playing with an old pimple in order to hide its nervous twitch. His blue eyes wandered away, as though his thoughts had become occupied with something else. After a prolonged silence he said, ‘I wonder who the man could be? And whether he's from Kafr El Teen? Which he most probably is. However, he might easily have come from somewhere else.'

‘People like Nefissa know nothing outside Kafr El Teen,' commented the boy.

‘Why do you say that?'

‘Well, you know these peasant girls. They're so simple.'

‘I don't think Nefissa was that simple. I've never seen a girl whose look was so brazen.'

‘Yes, she was a rather forward girl, and the man must have been pretty rash himself.'

The Mayor said hastily, ‘That's why I'm inclined to think that he's not from Kafr El Teen. I know all the men here, and I don't think there's a single one of them who has any guts, let alone the guts to do a thing like that. Don't you agree with me, Tariq?'

Tariq was silent for a moment. The faces of the men he knew in Kafr El Teen started to parade before his eyes. He heard his father say, ‘Could you guess who it might be?'