The House of Jasmine (6 page)

#

I was exhausted when I arrived at the station. The large parking lot in front of it was empty. The station itself was empty, no passengers, workers, or guards. Only iron windows, iron doors, and the cold grim English decor of the walls. I sat alone on a cold wooden bench whose smoothness made it even colder. I was surprised to feel a strange sexual excitement. If I were the one leading these thousands in an official rally, how much money would I have made? I looked around the station. The cold felt different from the cold of the morning. It was piercing, and I could almost see the icy air blowing madly, causing paper scraps to fly over the tracks. The cold empty tracks seemed to extend infinitely, and the few trees around me were bare. I could see only the back of a man far away, dressed in black and urinating against a wall. The place was quickly getting dark. This is really winter, and this is what traveling is like. I put my tired head between my hands and stretched my legs, surrendering to terrible exhaustion and fierce hunger, waiting for a train that might never come. Then I broke into tears, weeping with a sound that resembled a roar.

5

A teacher who had been sent to work in Sharjah returned home. His telegram to his family had not yet arrived. He opened the door of his apartment at night, and stepped in quietly to surprise his wife and two children. He opened his bedroom door to find his wife under a man. She looked at him, and he looked at her. He quietly retreated. His feet found the door to the apartment as he walked backward. He went out and down the stairs backward as well. He went backward into the street, and walked backward down the road. Everyone who saw him confusedly made room for him to pass. His children, who had appeared out of one of the alleys, followed him. They looked at him, and he looked at them. He stretched his hands out to them. They stretched their hands out to him. He could neither stop nor walk in their direction, and every time they caught his hands, they slipped away again, the children crying incessantly. All of Alexandria came to know him. People stepped out of his way, traffic lights and vehicles yielded to him. The man and his children disappeared and people almost forgot about them, but I had a dream about him: he was in space, orbiting around the earth, his children orbiting around the moon.

In winter, when raucous air flows down the roads, blowing paper scraps and screaming through the alleys, when the lights are turned off and you cannot tell the land from the sea, and the café becomes cold and wet, we all, without any prior agreement, refrain from going out. On the warmer nights we meet, also without any prior agreement. We go out at around the same time, and slowly walk down the side streets by the old walls, whose colors have faded. One of us may run into another, and we both smile, shake hands, and walk to the café together. Didn't Hassanayn say that we all functioned according to a secret clock? This has become an established rule, and sometimes we manage to meet by chance at other times, too.

This evening, we weren't playing backgammon. We had met early and sat close to each other, our eyes fixed on the television set, which was placed on a high shelf on the wall.

“The official rallies will start again, Shagara,” Hassanayn said.

“I'll find an excuse for staying out of them,” I answered.

“But why don't you participate. Do you think that what happened to you at the beginning of the year will happen again?” ‘Abd al-Salam said, referring to the fact that I'd been arrested after the workers' demonstrations last January, an incident which had really rattled me. I had only been released because of the testimony of the chairman of the shipyard's board of directors who had said, “Yes, Shagara is usually assigned to lead demonstrations, as I told you, but they are official government rallies that the shipyard arranges to welcome the president and his guests.”

I had almost shouted out that I was really the one who incited all the demonstrators, that I was the one who pulled up the lamp posts, tore out the sidewalk tiles, burned transportation vehicles, night clubs, and police departments. I don't lead official rallies, as he said, but only cheat, and I've never even gone to any of them.

They had arrested me at dawn, policemen lined up on the stairs from the street to the roof. I'm not sure how they opened the door to the building where I'm the only resident, since I always lock it at night. I suppressed my anger and rage. They also released me at dawn. I looked around the calm Pharaohs' neighborhood, where I had never walked before. Who would have guessed that the State Security office was in this beautiful neighborhood? There were many trees, some bare, some tall, some well trimmed. The streets had been washed by both the rain and the city cleaners. There were yards and fences around the houses.

It had been bitter cold, and the sky was threatening me with small drops of rain. I'd walked with my hands in my pockets. I don't like suits. I don't think that I'll ever wear a suit except on my wedding day, and I don't think that I will wear it again after that. I tried to keep my face covered with my upper arm. I saw Alexandria asleep for the first time. The city was relaxed, sighing peacefully, unaware of everything around it.

Over the next few days, I'd found excuses to avoid participating in the sweeping rallies of support for the regime, which poured out from every governorate in Egypt to ‘Abdin Palace. Al-Dakruri led the workers. It was his second time after the last July 26th. He said that this would be my chance to prove what the chairman of the board had said about me. I realized that he did his job fully, and that my secret was still unknown. I said that I would wait until a year had passed since my mother's death. He seemed to respect my wish. On the first of May, it was decided that only members of the workers' union would go to celebrate Labor Day in Cairo. On the twenty-sixth of July the President flew to Alexandria in a helicopter, and so the welcoming rallies were canceled. It was as if they knew that I had no appetite for them.

In fact, I felt devastated. I remembered my decision to kill ‘Abdu al-Fakahani and felt a strange fear. I had come to feel that I wanted to escape from everybody. I even went to see ‘Abdu and asked him to give me until the end of the year to pay my debt, and he agreed right away. He too seemed to be afraid of me, I don't know why.

I ran into Holy Yahya on the street, and went to shake hands with him, but he walked away. I called him, shook his hand, and patted him on the shoulder. His red face had turned yellow, so I eased his anxiety, and said that someday I would need some carpets.

“I'm at your disposal,” he said.

#

“That's Jerusalem airport,” Hassanayn said, when the television began its live broadcast from there. Magid lit a cigarette. ‘Abd al-Salam became very pale.

“Begin!”

“Dayan!”

“And Golda. . . look at her.”

The comments were made by other people in the café. We all fall silent when the door to the airplane opens. There is President Sadat himself, his smile wide as he shakes hands with the Israeli leaders. He smiles widely as he shakes hands with Golda, and warmly spends a few moments shaking Dayan's hand. His teeth are bright white and his mustache neatly trimmed. I thought of the wide street behind us, how empty it was now, and of the silence that had fallen over the people living in the hills. Silence and gloom were filling the space behind me as darkness fell. I was sitting on the edge of a cliff over a deep valley. One push backward would have left me dead.

“A soft, sly melody, like the groan of helpless, defeated souls,” ‘Abd al-Salam said, commenting on the Israeli national anthem. Then he got up, stuck his hands in his pockets, and paced around us, looking at the ground. The electricity went out.

“Good,” said Magid with trembling lips. We didn't leave the café. We sat by the light of the candles brought by Muhsin, the waiter who rarely spoke.

“How can he do that?” Magid asked as if he were talking to himself. He took off his glasses and started wiping them with his handkerchief. I wanted to joke about it, and so said to Hassanayn:

“Here he has finished you off with a single trip.” He smiled and blushed. It was not a full smile. Neither Magid nor Hassanayn laughed. ‘Abd al-Salam walked away from us and slowly wandered into the dark street. Whatever I said seemed silly. I suppose I was getting into politics, unintentionally.

Hassanayn had once talked about himself. He said that he was a low-level employee waiting for a big financial windfall before getting married. He had failed regular school, but had managed to get his high school diploma through correspondence school. He became a correspondence student in the history department at the school of arts and letters. He didn't have enough time to learn about all the wars and conspiracies that seemed to make up most of human history. It took him two years to pass each year's exams. He also had asthma, not too serious, but it was still asthma. He laughed at his strange circumstances and said that he was the only person in the country who was fighting on all three fronts at the same time: poverty, ignorance, and disease.

“Just like the July 23rd Revolution,” he added with a giggle. We all laughed too. He didn't seem embarrassed and remained cheerful.

I asked Muhsin, the waiter, to bring us a backgammon board. I was afraid that Magid and Hassanayn would let me down, but they both agreed to play. ‘Abd al-Salam returned from the darkened street.

“
As-Salamu ‘Alaykum,
” he said, shook hands with each of us, and sat down, while we looked at one another. He greeted us as though he had just come in, as though he had not been sitting with us a few minutes before. He probably realized that his behavior seemed strange. Maybe he noticed our surprise as we shook hands with him. He sat in silence for a while then joined our backgammon game. When the electricity finally returned, we were the only customers in the café. The waiter didn't turn the television back on, and we didn't ask him to. We talked about the summer, and how we had not met then, and we asked Magid how his work was going at the pharmacy he was renting. He had finally fulfilled his dream of being
self-employed. He said that setting up the pharmacy had kept him too busy to meet us, but that now he had more time, since he had hired another pharmacist to help him. ‘Abd al-Salam told us about his father's health, which had deteriorated because of prostate trouble. He said that his father was getting better, and that the real problem was just old age.

“Of course you were busy planning to kill ‘Abdu al-Fakahani and Holy Yahya,” Hassanayn said, and we all laughed loudly. Then we asked Hassanayn why he hadn't come to the café in the summer.

“You weren't here,” he said.

#

“Of course you're bitter, because you fought in the wars twice,” I said to ‘Abd al-Salam on the road. We had left the café and it was almost midnight. We realized, a bit too late, that Hassanayn had left us and was waiting alone at the bus stop. A little while later, Magid entered his house on Mosque Street. As usual, I was left alone with ‘Abd al-Salam. We lived on the same street. He lived in the middle, and I lived at the end, where it overlooks the sea.

We walked in silence, broken only by a distant stifled moan coming from the police department. I shivered in the November breeze. All the stores on both sides of the street were closed.

“No, I'm not,” he finally answered.

We walked along, sometimes moving away from each other, then getting closer together again.

“What do you know about that villa on our street, the one surrounded by jasmine trees?” I asked him suddenly. I don't know why I chose to ask him at that particular moment.

“Have you seen anyone in it?” he asked. He knew what I wanted to talk about.

“Every day, in the early morning, I see a beautiful face looking out the window, a face as bright as light itself. Today, she waved at me.” We returned to our silence. The street was uneven, and I almost tripped several times.

“Stay away from the house of jasmine.”

I didn't understand. Something made me hesitate to ask him why, even though I wanted to. The scent of jasmine had attracted me ever since I had moved from the south of Alexandria to the north. The villa, standing behind high walls crowned with white and yellow flowers, seemed mysterious and magical. Its high round windows, its circular walls, its marble columns—everything about it seemed to have been made carefully and painstakingly. The face I saw in the mornings and evenings excited my imagination and curiosity, awakened my desire to get married. I could not confess any of this to ‘Abd al-Salam.

“This house of jasmine is older than you or me,” he said. “My mother and father and everyone else knows that. I was spanked repeatedly when I was a child for climbing that wall to pick a few jasmine flowers. The owner of the house and his wife prefer to remain isolated, and don't mix with anybody. They have only daughters—the most beautiful of all creatures. Everyone knows this, and only a lucky few have ever seen them. It may happen by chance. I don't believe you when you say that you see the girl's face every day. The man and his wife don't allow their daughters to go out into the street for school or work, and they don't let them stand at the windows, either. You may be lucky enough to see them once every so often in the very early morning—at dawn, before the man and his wife get up— but it rarely happens at night. Darkness enfolds the garden, the high windows are closed, and the thick blinds are pulled down, whether it's winter or summer. I had forgotten that the house was on our street, and I don't even smell the scent of jasmine anymore. Only once did I long for it, when I was trapped with the third army. Can you believe that? The air was full of the smell of smoke and gunpowder, and for a moment there, like a bright flash of light, I could smell jasmine. By God it happened, but only once. After I returned home, I watched the windows for a while, but I was not as lucky as you are, to catch even a glimpse of the only daughter left in the house. . . ”