The Time and the Place (16 page)

“The German army has invaded Polish territory….”

The news burst forth from the radio jammed in an aperture in the wall of the sole room still standing in the ruins, and made its way beyond the boundaries of the vast Khafeer area.

“Quiet!” shouted Dahroug sharply. “Listen, the lot of you!”

The boy and his three sisters stopped making a noise. When they saw from their father's face that he was serious, they slunk off between the piles of scrap iron, tires, and spare parts to the most distant part of the ruins. There they continued their games, safe from his wrath.

Amna, hanging out the washing, paused and raised her head above the line stretched between a bar in the window of the room and the roof of an old truck. “You scared away the children,” she called out at her husband in protest. “That blasted radio and its news!”

Dahroug, without anger, ignored her. He took a last puff from the cigarette butt he held between his fingers. “It's war, then!” he said.

Salama realized the words were directed at him, so he raised his head from the tire he had been fixing. With eyes gleaming out of a face surrounded by a thick black beard that reached down his neck, the man stared back, then said scornfully, “Yes, they finally believed it.”

While Dahroug's head was turned toward the radio, Salama seized the chance to steal a glance at the woman. His gaze lingered on her face that craned upward, then descended to her slim body with the full breasts. The woman caught sight of him
before he withdrew his stare, as though she had expected it. Then she turned her back on him, and Salama leaned over the wheel, thinking how terrible was war in the heat of August. How terrible the heat!

Dahroug turned toward him. “For a long time they've been predicting it will bring the world to ruin. But what's it to us?”

“We're far away,” answered the bearded man, smiling. “Let them devour one another.”

Dahroug crossed his legs as he sat on an upturned can and cast a dreamy look far afield. “We heard fantastic things about the last war,” he said.

“The fact is you're old,” said Amna, laughing.

Dahroug gave a laugh through his blackened teeth, saying scornfully, “All you care about is your stomach.”

Salama, who though no longer young was a good ten years younger than his companion, said, “Yes, we certainly heard some fantastic things.”

“Look at al-Asyouti for instance, who was he? Before the war he was nothing but a porter.”

The children, having forgotten the threats, returned and brought with them their rowdiness. Mahmoud, a boy of seven and the eldest, was running about with the young girls trailing after him. His father glanced at him admiringly and called out, “Mahmoud, my boy, take courage—war's broken out.”

In the late afternoon Dahroug and Salama sat together on a piece of sacking outside the fence around the ruins. Before them stretched the desert right up to the foot of the Muqattam Hills, the sands extinguished under their shadow. A faded yellowness, the remnants of choked breaths of high summer, was diffused into the limpid sky. Feeble rays from the inclining sun were quickly scaling the mountain summit, though the desert was puffing out a refreshing breeze with the approach of evening.

Dahroug began counting out piasters, while Salama, his head
resting against the fence, gazed distractedly toward the horizon. Amna brought tea, and the children, barefoot and half naked, ran to the wasteland. Dahroug sipped a little of the hot tea.

“My heart tells me, Salama, that the work's going to really take off.”

“May your heart be right, Abu Mahmoud.”
*

“I wish I could rely on you.”

“I'm your friend and indebted to you for your generous kindness, but I can't leave the ruins.”

Dahroug thought for a while, then asked, “Does anyone in the big city know you behind that beard?”

“They know the very djinn themselves.”

“And will you spend your life in the ruins?”

“Better than the hangman's noose, Abu Mahmoud.”

Dahroug laughed loud and said, “I have to laugh whenever I remember the story of your escape from between two guards.”

“The best way of escaping is when it's not expected.”

Amna was standing facing the wasteland, her shawl drawn back over half of her jet black hair. “And the man got bumped off without any blood money.”

“He was a murderer, the son of a murderer,” said Salama angrily. “He was so old I was afraid death would get to him before I did. My family went on demanding I that take revenge.”

Dahroug guffawed loudly. “And you made your escape when the papers were on their way to the Mufti to endorse the death sentence.”

Salama tugged at his arm in gratitude. “And I found myself desperate and said, ‘I've got no one but Dahroug, my childhood friend,' and you gave me shelter, you noblest of men.”

“We're men of honor, Salama.”

“In any case the storehouse here is in need of a man—and I'm that man.”

Their conversation was interrupted by the appearance of a funeral procession on the horizon. It was coming from where the buildings stood and it continued toward the road opposite the western fence of the ruins that led to the Khafeer cemetery. The coffin, shrouded with a white silk covering, came into view. “A young girl,” muttered Amna. “How sad!”

“This place is beautiful and safe,” said Salama. “The only thing wrong with it is it's on the road to the cemetery.”

“Isn't it the road we all take?” said Dahroug, laughing.

The wasteland had remained substantially unchanged since war was declared. It was a playground for the sun from its rising to its setting, a place of passage for coffins, and an encampment for silence. The sirens were sounded in exercise for imaginary air raids. The old battered radio achieved the height of importance when it allowed Dahroug to calculate the shells exchanged between the Siegfried and Maginot Lines.

Whenever Salama's senses registered the tones of Amna's melodious voice, or a playful movement or glance, even if not intentional, he became aflame with a voracious fire and at the same time with a merciless anger against himself.

“Things haven't changed,” said Dahroug morosely. “Where's all we heard about the war?”

“Be patient. Don't you remember what your Jewish commission agent said?”

Dahroug looked toward the piles of iron with which, acting on the advice of his agent, he had filled up the place. “Let the days pass quickly.”

“Let them pass quickly—and let them swallow up fifteen years.”

“Fifteen years?”

“Then my sentence becomes null and void.”

“What a lifetime! By then we'll be on the brink of a third war.”

Salama began singing in a strange, hoarse voice, “Come tell me, Bahiyya.” Then he called out, “Master Dahroug, none of my family will be left but the women.”

He told himself that Amna, without knowing it—or perhaps knowing it—was turning his head and that he would be going through hell before death took him. The war did not concern him in the least, but in between musical intervals on the radio he heard the news of Holland and of Belgium being overrun, and of the fall of Paris. In front of his eyes there passed the successive columns of refugees, and the void was filled with sighs and tears. Then Italy declared war. “It's knocking at the gates,” said Dahroug uneasily.

But Salama was indifferent. “For us it's neither here nor there.”

“The good Lord will look after us,” muttered Amna as her gaze followed the naked children playing around a barrel filled with water.

For the first time the siren sounded for a real air raid. Dahroug and his family awoke, as did Salama, bedded down in the truck. Amna was frightened for the children and said that the shelter was too far away.

“Stay in the room,” said Dahroug. “They won't bomb the wasteland or the cemetery.”

Salama raised his head toward the full moon which stared down at them, eternally calm. “I see nothing but crazy lights,” he said.

From the truck window he directed his gaze at the closed room. It stood against the fence to the left of the entrance, with
a roof that sloped toward the door, and a colorless wall. The wall was daubed with moonlight; the room enclosed within itself hearts filled with apprehension. It was like some abandoned hut, and he imagined it veiled the night and the ruins.

The raid plunges down at the city and destroys all that exists in it: it topples the law, the Mufti
,
the judge
,
the warder
,
and the hangman's noose. The innermost parts of the earth hurst open
,
and it sweeps everything aside. Even noble-mindedness has its breathing choked. From out of the debris there rises a naked man and a woman with clothes tipped apart; the wardens have been killed
.

Night after night the raids followed in close succession, raids that were either as silent as the wasteland or interspersed with antiaircraft fire. Dahrough would go to Salama in the truck to look up at the sky and talk.

“The raids aren't as we heard.”

“The Italians aren't like the Germans.”

Dahroug laughed and clamped his hand on Salama's beard. “You're cheating the angel of death by going on living.”

“Yes, I should have been in the grave at least a year and a half ago.”

“Is that why you don't fear death?”

“No, I've feared it ever since I sniffed the smell of it as they carried me off to the Mufti.”

“Just imagine what you'd look like now!”

“I give thanks to God who has spared me that I might see the searchlights and the antiaircraft guns.”

A new energy pervaded the ruins, then things advanced apace in a manner undreamt of by Dahroug. Every day he would spend several hours away from the place. Later his business outside took up the whole of his day. Salama meanwhile worked diligently in the ruins as watchman and warehouseman. In his leisure time he would sit on a rubber tire with his back resting against the bumper of a truck, smoking a cigarette or combing
through his beard, his sharp eyes yielding to an increasing compliance with his unruly desires. He told himself that she was ignoring his stares but that she was acutely conscious of them all the time and that his piercing gaze dominated her every movement as though manipulating some unseen thread. He looked at the sky and followed a kite as it made its farewell patrol at early evening, then looked down and saw her standing a few meters away in the direction of the tap from which water was flowing into a jerry can. “It's been a very hot day,” he said.

She nodded her head in agreement and looked into his staring eyes, then lowered her head and hid a smile. The smile swept away the impediment of generosity of spirit in his breast, and he was carried off by a tornado of emotions. He gave an audible sigh, and the woman scolded Mahmoud, who, at the door, had pulled his sister by her pigtail. “Shall I make you tea?” she asked Salama.

“It's likely that he'll travel shortly to Sharqiyya province,” he said in a tone rebelling against his control.

With evening Dahroug returned. He appeared tired and begrimed, but the gleam of success shone in his eyes. He laughed loudly as he said to Salama, “Man, war's not as they say. War's a real blessing.” And he gave Amna a large parcel of meat, saying, “Hurry up—I haven't had a bite all day.”

As he was changing his clothes in the room, his voice could be heard outside. “Tomorrow I'll be traveling to Sharqiyya.”

He was away for two days. Late in the afternoon of the third day, Salama waited for him, seated on the piece of sacking outside the fence. Quiet and heavy lidded he sat, running his fingers through his beard, counting the kites that were still to be seen, and looking out at the wasteland with languorous self-surrender. From inside he heard Amna as she scolded the children in a voice vibrant with a sense of well-being, and he gazed at the sun's hem as it began to disappear suddenly behind the
crest of the mountain. Night would soon descend. A noise from the west caught his attention, and he saw a taxi approach and draw up at the far end of the fence. Dahroug got out of it. He approached, striking the ground with firm, heavy tread, his head held high. Getting to his feet, Salama greeted him, and the two men shook hands, then Dahrough gave the other a punch in the chest and said, “Salama, you son of a bitch, the English are real men.”

Salama gave him an inquiring look, and Dahroug continued boastfully, “They must be from Upper Egypt!”

Salama called on God to grant Dahroug continued success, and the man entered the ruins, calling out gleefully like a child, “Mahmoud, my boy…!” Then he began singing, “Give my greetings,” and he snapped his fingers and danced.

Before dawn the siren wailed, and Dahroug and Salama went out to the wasteland beyond the fence as they had taken to doing of late. “The siren no longer frightens anyone,” said Dahroug.

The desert flowed away under the moonlight, fertile ground for dreams. Dahroug gave a long laugh, and when Salama asked him what he was laughing about, he motioned with his elbow to the room. “Tonight saw your old Uncle Dahroug as he used to be during the nights of his youth.”

A short silence descended, roofed by searchlights, then again Dahroug spoke in a tone that was both serious and brotherly. “Salama, today's not like yesterday. A lot of new clients will be coming, and I'm frightened for you.”

“Must I go away?” asked Salama dejectedly.

“Yes, I'll smuggle you out to Palestine, and you'll work there for me. How do you feel about that?”

“Whatever you think best.”

“Everything's planned and decreed, you son of a bitch.”

Suddenly the earth shook with the convulsive reverberation
of an explosion that paralyzed their heartbeats. Dahroug pulled nervously at Salama's arm. “What's that?”