No One Sleeps in Alexandria

by Ibrahim Abdel Meguid

  The mother chose the name Bahi, or ‘Radiant,’ because she gave birth to him on the twenty-seventh of Ramadan, the most sacred of nights. As he was sliding out of her, she saw a beam of light coming out with him and filling the room and the walls with light. The midwife cried as she swathed him, telling his mother to hide him from all eyes for, in addition to the beam of light that came out with him, he was born already circumcised. He was a child of purity destined for great blessings.

  Because of this, no one saw Bahi until he was able to walk, when he sneaked out of an opening in the big wooden gate and rolled down the narrow alley, his face still encircled with that wondrous light. The mother’s apprehension ended only after she gave birth to three daughters, then Magd al-Din—she was no longer the mother of males only. The father’s apprehension, however, did not end. He had realized early on that Bahi’s eyes revealed a recklessness that was unusual in the family. For even though Bahi’s eyes, like all the children, were the same green as his mother’s, only his eyes had a strange blue tinge as well.

  Once Bahi grew to adolescence he took to leaving the house in the morning and coming back in the evening only to sleep, without speaking to anyone. No one questioned where he spent his days. The mother was filled with tenderness toward him, and the father could not explain the weakness God had planted in his heart toward the boy. Gradually Bahi became more like an apparition in the family. The brothers would go to the fields early in the morning, and he would leave after them, but no one knew where he went. They would return in the evening, tired, to have supper and go to bed early, but their mother would not sleep until she heard the squeak of the gate and Bahi’s heart beating as he crept in.

  Eventually he started staying away for longer stretches, and when he came back, he would sleep in the first spot he came across, with the animals or the chickens, on top of the oven, in the hallway between the rooms—anywhere but where his siblings slept. The father still could not figure out the cause of his weakness toward his strange son, and the peaceable boy had caused no harm yet.

  Then Bahi’s secret became widely known throughout the village: he was possessed with love. He followed the women along the canals and through the marketplace. The village women waited for him to pass through the alleys, so that they could look at him from the rooftops and from behind doors. They all learned his appointed rounds by heart. The halo of light that his mother said had slid out with him the day he was born was still with him, but only the women could see it. News of him reached the neighboring villages, and other women and girls began to sit and wait for him by the canal that separated the village from the fields. Women with special needs would rush up and touch him, but little girls were afraid of him. They would stand at a distance and giggle, as their bodies shook uncontrollably.

  His father and brothers were surprised by what they heard about the boy. Then one day, they saw him at the edge of the field. His brothers Fattuh, al-Qasim, Khalil, Imran, and Sulayman were there, but Magd al-Din, the youngest, was not with them that day. At first they were surprised that he had made an appearance, but after he sat down by the water wheel, they got busy with their work. Moments later they saw him get up and walk around the old sycamore several times, looking toward the distant village, then they heard him start to yell. They stood up with their hoes in between the short cotton plants. In the distance, they saw a large number of men charging toward them, their hoes and clubs raised toward Bahi. “The Talibs!” the brothers shouted. There had been no blood between the two families until that day. The men of the Talib family drew together, and Bahi rushed to his brothers in terror.

  “They’re going to kill me!”

  “Run away from here. Go tell your father and your cousins. Quick!”

  Bahi raced past his brothers faster than a horse.

  His brothers attacked the charging men, and a long battle ensued. On his way, Bahi saw his father and his cousins hurrying toward the field carrying hoes and clubs. He did not go back with them but kept running until he reached the house. His mother was standing there, terrified. He threw himself into her chest. He was barely sixteen. He burst out crying.

  She patted him on the back and asked, her voice pained, “Why did you do that, my son?”

  “Protect me, mother.”

  She took him to the nearest room, then changed her mind and took him upstairs—”So your father won’t kill you when he comes home,” she said under her breath and Bahi heard her. She closed the door and went downstairs to wait for the battle to end. That day, she realized that the gates of hell had been opened, and that it would not end before the fire consumed all of them, who were only the firewood.

  In the upstairs room, Bahi realized what had come to pass. It was the bitch, the whore, the wife of Abd al-Ghani, oldest of the Talib boys, who had seduced him. It was she who, in broad daylight on market day, had reached out as he was passing in front of her door and dragged him inside by the back of his neck. “All this light!” she exclaimed, and he said nothing. He let her look into his eyes and run her hands over his chest.

  She bewitched him. She placed her fingers on him, and it was as though armies of ants crawled over him and made him her captive. She dragged him to a nearby room as he succumbed to her, the glances of the chickens and the ducks in the courtyard pursuing them.

  The dark, windowless room was suddenly illuminated. She perceived the light, while he did not realize that he had entered into the dark. “It’s coming out of your body, my bridegroom. I must bear your secret. Light me and take me to hell.” He heard her and let her do as she pleased. She lifted him to the seventh heaven.

  He left her house feeling light as a feather. What had been weighing him down; what had he emptied into her that now made him so light? The narrow streets were no longer narrow, the black houses no longer black, nor did the dung in the streets have a repulsive smell.

  She had been married to Abd al-Ghani for only a month. That was why she had not gone to the market with the family women that day; she was still a bride. Afterwards she still did not go out, and concocted excuse after excuse for a whole year. The Talib boys watched their eldest brother submit to his young, beautiful wife, and they marveled at the power of beauty over men.

  But the women, the Talib boys’ wives, schemed and were successful. One day, Abd al-Ghani lifted his wife off her feet then pushed her to the ground in the midst of his brothers, their wives, his mother, and his father. He placed his foot on her chest and a knife on her neck.

  “Who, bitch?”

  She did not hesitate.

  “Bahi,” she said in a faint voice.

  “That wanton little boy?” Her husband spat in her face and pressed the knife deep into her neck.

  Her laughter rang through the courtyard of the big house. Her husband was thrown down, falling onto his backside, and the knife flew from his hand. He groaned in pain, then his eyes turned away and fixed onto faraway space. He had driven the knife into the neck, he was absolutely certain, but no blood came out—just a beam of light.

  She got up, still laughing. His brothers searched frantically for the knife but could not find it anywhere. Later they would find it in the courtyard and wonder how nobody had seen it that day. It was so rusted that as one of them rubbed it, it turned to dust. The brothers carried him to his room; he could not walk on his own. She stood in a far corner, laughing and crying at the same time. She aroused the women’s pity and fear. The same women who had schemed against her took her to the shed and sat around her in a corner on the straw. She did not stop shaking. They said she would die that night. The men forgot about her, worrying instead about their incapacitated older brother. The women gave her a bowl of fresh milk, which she gulped down, letting half of it spill down her chest and never ceasing to laugh and cry. Then she fell asleep on the straw, and they watched her side move with her breathing, like a tired animal.

  At dawn the men came out of their brother’s room dragging their feet. The women wailed, “Is he dead?”

&nb
sp; “He was murdered!” shouted the men. “His blood is on the hands of the Khalils! The life of the little dandy boy is not payment enough.”

  No one saw the wife sneak out of the shed at first light and disappear. In the morning the Talibs lay in wait for Bahi on the streets. The news had spread. Bahi was returning from a neighboring village. No one had realized that the women and girls washing their pots and pans in the canal had gone far outside the village, so that before Bahi entered the village, the women alerted him, and he turned to the fields, where his brothers were. The women then went back to their usual place along the canal in the middle of the village, where the ducks swam. But the Talibs had planted their own spies, so they knew where the boy was going.

  Magd al-Din climbed down from the roof. He opened the wooden gate and went to the house of Khalaf, his one remaining friend from the other family; he too had been ordered by the mayor to leave the village.

  “What have you decided to do, Khalaf?”

  “Sheikh Magd, there’s nothing left for me here. For a while now my money and my trade have been in Tanta. I know that I am not the the real target of this action—the mayor has just decided to retaliate for what Bahi did to him so long ago, so he dragged up this vendetta business, which has been over between us for years. I’m leaving the village tomorrow. I know I could just come back the next day, but I won’t.” He offered Magd al-Din a Cottarelli cigarette and asked, “I heard that your cousins, your sisters’ husbands, want to fight the mayor. Is that true?”

  “There will be no fighting. I forbade them.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’ll leave the village tomorrow too.”

  Magd al-Din left Khalaf’s house realizing for the first time that he was acquiescing to the mayor’s order, not out of fear or submission, but out of a deep desire to leave the village and join his brother in Alexandria.

  Two days before Magd al-Din’s last night, the reply that Hitler had demanded came to him in the form of the announcement of the Polish peoples’ speedy mobilization and the Polish president’s appeal to his people to stand behind their army in defense of freedom and honor.

  So the reprieve was over. The machine of evil had been switched on, and there was no escaping it. In the morning following Magd al-Din’s last night in the village, at exactly 4:45 a.m., the full-scale invasion of Poland began.

  It was Friday, the first of September, 1939. Magd al-Din did not usually go out to the field on a Friday; he preferred to spend the whole day in the small village mosque. But on this Friday he went out to the field. He did not want to go to the station directly from his house, and he had asked Zahra to go ahead to the station later that evening. The mayor had sent a number of guards to Magd al-Din’s house, where they learned he was in the field and would leave the village from there. In the evening the chief guard and his men stood at the little bridge that connected the village with the road to the fields, in order to prevent Magd al-Din from going back to his house.

  The mayor had not believed that he would leave the village so easily, but the guards watched him ride away from the village on a donkey so small that it looked like a she-ass. They fired some shots in the air to scare him. Magd al-Din chose not even to look back. He truly wanted to get out.

  Pain is a treasure.

  The core grows more radiant when its shell is removed.

  Jalal al-Din Rumi

  3

  The railroad station that evening, like all evenings, was empty except for the poor stationmaster, who could not leave until after the last train, at ten o’clock. And as on other evenings the platform was a structure of wide, lifeless slabs of stone, and the sign bearing the name of the village was off-white, with faint black lines, and mounted on two rusted iron poles. Not a single sparrow perched on the sign or flew near it.

  There were no sparrows in the nearby trees either. The four rails between the two platforms were black and shiny, but congealed fuel oil stained the crossties and the ballast beneath. Seen from above on summer days, the rails were always shiny, their surface almost white. The road connecting the station with the village was, as usual, a narrow dirt road, hot, with a few curves and a few eucalyptus trees. At that time of the evening there was usually only one man walking on the road. And at that time of day, it took a while for someone standing at the station to decide whether that man was walking toward him or away and toward the village. The truth was that the man always disappeared, as if he were a trick of the eye, and no one knew where he went. What is it in the summer that makes the eye see no change in the scene from one evening to another, or in the distance from the village to the station? Is it the heat and the refraction of the light on the dust? The greenery too was the same as it had been every day, stretched out along the dirt road, with very few birds around or on it—a few crows on the fronds of the tall palm trees, the occasional egret in the branches of the ancient sycamores.

  Through this lifeless landscape, Magd al-Din made his way to the station. The world appeared to him like something cast aside, something seen from a hilltop at noon on a day in the blazing hot month of Bauna. Was what happened to him a short while ago real? Was it really he who had complied with the mayor’s order so easily, and left the village as easily—more easily, even, than a thorn pulled from dough? From a distance, he saw Zahra standing on the platform, her brother next to her, and their little daughter Shawqiya on her arm. At her feet were two small baskets and one large one. She was waving at him to hurry up. The donkey was slow, and he urged it on as much as he could. Before he reached the crossing, though, he left the donkey behind and continued on foot. The train had nearly reached the station, and Magd al-Din rushed on. He tripped over a wire stretched between the switches, and had to leave behind his shoes, which had slipped off, but he finally crossed the rails and climbed onto the platform. He saw the stationmaster in his official uniform, its brass buttons shining in the distance, and the red fez above his black face seemed to be floating in the twilight. The stationmaster looked to him like one of those fierce-looking border guards. He wished he could take his time greeting the man and shaking his hand, for it was his friend Abd al-Hamid from the next village who, like him, had memorized the entire Quran. They had met twenty years earlier at the governorate headquarters in Tanta when they were taking the Quran memorization test, on the basis of which they would be exempted from military service. Both of them passed the test, and both were exempted. By law, neither of them was supposed to do any work but recite the Quran. They both spent ten years without work, then they had to find other jobs—surely after ten years the government could not still be monitoring them. So Magd al-Din started working the land with his brothers, while Abd al-Hamid worked for the railroad. They became reacquainted, and then met every time Magd al-Din went to visit his brother Bahi in Alexandria. Why had neither of them worked as a Quranic chanter or a singer of hymns? It could be the voice: Magd al-Din’s was faint and cracking, but Abd al-Hamid’s was loud and strong. Magd al-Din had often thought of bringing it up with Abd al-Hamid, then changed his mind, or rather, forgot.

  The train pulled into the station just as Magd al-Din joined Zahra. Magd al-Din saw his old friend coming toward him with one of the small baskets, which he put into the train car, then went back for the other one while Zahra’s brother carried the big basket on board.

  “Take your time, Sheikh Magd,” said the stationmaster. “I’ll keep the train waiting for a bit. I want to greet you properly, my friend.”

  They rushed to embrace each other. Magd al-Din wondered if his friend knew the reason for his trip today. The train let out white smoke and blew its whistle. The stationmaster also blew his whistle. Magd al-Din leaned out the window to tell Zahra’s brother, “The donkey is just before the crossing.” The train gathered speed, and the sound of the wheels grew louder.

  It was only then that Magd al-Din realized that it was over, that he had been kicked out of his village, although he did have a secret desire to leave. This was someth
ing that had never happened to anyone before—at least he had never seen it in his lifetime.

  The conductor came and Zahra showed him the two tickets she had purchased before Magd al-Din’s arrival. When the conductor left, Magd al-Din noticed the terror in Zahra’s eyes. He turned his eyes away from hers and noticed at the end of the car a woman around whom sat five boys and girls, barefoot and wearing old, tattered gallabiyas. He had seen this very woman and these same children on the train when he went to visit Bahi in the middle of last year. Merciful God! He did not believe it, but it had actually happened; he had seen her before that on yet another trip. It seemed that ever since he had started visiting his brother, he had seen this woman and these nearly naked, barefoot children. Despite the years that had passed, the woman and her children had not grown any older. The silence in the car was profound, with the exception of the sound of the wheels beneath them. Zahra had moved to the edge of the seat and spread out a gallabiya that she had taken from the large basket. She laid the baby to sleep on it and covered her with a black shawl from the same basket. She asked Magd al-Din to close the window tightly. It was now dark, and cold air was rushing in with the movement of the train.

  How could the train ride continue? What could be said now that Zahra had laid the baby down to sleep and sat there looking at her husband who kept looking back at her, though his eyes did not seem as frightened as hers?

  Zahra felt pained because she had no brother except the one who came to see her off at the station, and he was only her half-brother. Her sisters and mother could not fight the mayor. Yes, she wished she had many strong men in her family to fight the mayor, since Magd al-Din had forbidden his cousins to fight him. Magd al-Din must have feared that his sisters would become widows if their men died. But someone should have prevented them from leaving, even if he acted against Magd al-Din’s will. Since she could not offer her husband the protection that strong men in her family would have provided, she was leaving with him, broken-hearted. But she had accepted what a faithful wife had to do. The frightened look in her eyes would soon disappear, without a doubt. And it did—it changed into a look of profound compassion. She wished they would let him go back home tonight.