As small and light as it was, his body could fly through the air like a sparrow. No doubt he would have been able to stay ahead of the shopkeeper (aah, had he only been a real sparrow!), but a feeling of heaviness came upon him, suddenly and just the way it happens in dreams. He felt his body grow sluggish; it seemed to have turned into stone, into a statue whose feet are planted on the ground and whose arms are fixed in place with iron and cement. His thighs, pulled apart, seemed to have turned into marble. In each foot was rammed a nail, as if he had been crucified. The bamboo switch swung into the air, long and thin and curved like a bow, and rained down on something soft and warm, like living flesh.
* * *
When Hamido opened his eyes, daylight was filling the room. He thought for sure that what he had seen had been nothing but a dream. He jumped up from the mat and ran out into the street. His friends – all children of neighbouring families – were playing as usual in the narrow lane extending along the mud-brick facades. Each child grasped the next one’s hand, forming a ring that circled round and round. The thin, high-pitched sound of their singing orbited with the movement of their bodies, yielding a single song, comprising one stanza which repeated itself in a never-ending, unbroken cycle:
Hamida had a baby,
She named him Abd el-Samad,
She left him by the canal bed,
The kite swooped down and snatched off his head!
Shoo! Shoo! Away with you!
O kite! O monkey snout!
Because they were circling and singing uninterruptedly, it was impossible to pick out the song’s beginning or end by ear, just as it was impossible to tell by looking where the circle began and where it ended. For they were children, and when children play they grasp each other by the hand to form a closed circle. But everything does have an end, and so I must end this. Yet I do not know the end point of my tale. I am unable to define it precisely, for the ending is not a point that stands out clearly. In fact, there is no ending, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the end and the beginning are adjoined in a single, looping strand; where that thread ends and where it begins can be discerned only with great difficulty.
Here lies the difficulty of all endings, especially the ending of a true story, of a story as truthful as truth itself, and as exact in its finest details as exactitude itself. Such exactitude requires of the author that he or she neither omit nor neglect a single point. For even one point – a single dot – can completely change the essence of a word in the Arabic language. Male becomes female because of a single dash or dot. Similarly, in Arabic the difference between ‘husband’ and ‘mule’, or between ‘promise’ and ‘scoundrel’, is no more than a single dot placed over a single form, an addition which transforms one letter into another.
Hence the importance of a well-defined point – that is, a real point in the full geometrical sense of the word. In other words, scientific accuracy is unavoidable in this work of art which is my novel. But scientific accuracy can corrupt or distort a work of art. Yet that corruption or distortion is exactly what I wanted, and what I aimed for in this story. Only then would it become as truthful, sincere and real as ‘living life’. For some of the time, life may be dead, like that life which inhabits a person who walks through life without sweating or urinating, and from whose body no foul substance emanates. One who is truly alive cannot imprison his foulness within, or else he will die. Once he is dead, his face will become purest white, while his insides remain putrid, stained by the rottenness of death.
I fancied (and my fancy, at that particular moment, amounted to fact) that one of the children who were circling round as they sang in unison suddenly moved outside of the circle. I saw the small body come loose from the steadily revolving ring, breaking the regularity of its outline. It moved off like a gleaming speck, or a star that has lost its eternal equilibrium, detached itself from the universe, and shot off at random, creating a trail of flame, like a shooting star just before it is consumed in its own fire.
With an instinctive curiosity, I followed his movement with my gaze. He came to a stop so near to where I stood that I could see his face. It wasn’t the face of a boy, as I had thought. No, it was the face of a little girl. But I wasn’t absolutely certain, for children’s faces – like those of old people – are sexless. It is in that phase between childhood and old age that gender must declare itself more openly.
The face – oddly enough – was not strange to me. So familiar was it, in fact, that it left me feeling bemused, and then my surprise turned to disbelief. My mind could not accept the sight before my eyes. It is just not plausible that, leaving home in the morning to go to work, on the way I should run head-on into another person only to discover that the face which met my gaze was none other than my own.
I confess that my body shook, and I was seized by a violent panic which paralysed my ability to think. Even so, I wondered: why should a person panic when he sees himself face to face? Was it the extreme eeriness of the situation in which I found myself, or was it the almost overwhelming familiarity of the encounter? At such a moment, one finds everything becoming utterly confused. Contradictory or incompatible things come to resemble each other so closely that they become almost identical. Black becomes white, and white turns to black. And the meaning of all this? One faces, with open eyes, the fact that one is blind.
_________
* Male name, literally ‘Servant of the Everlasting’, but sumuud, from the same root, also suggests ‘defiance’ and ‘resistance’. According to the author, this song is sung by peasant children, and accompanied by a ring dance; as they reach the line ‘Shoo! shoo!’ they may throw stones outward from the circle.
* An ankle-length gown or robe which is cut to hang loosely; it is worn traditionally by both men and women, although the style, colours and cloth differ.
* Specifically zakat, in Islam the religiously prescribed obligation of giving alms to the poor; it is considered one of the five ‘pillars’ or basic practices that all Muslims are required to carry out to the best of their abilities.
* Muhammad Ali (1769–1849): Born in Kavalla, Macedonia, he came to Egypt in 1801 as a soldier in an Albanian contingent attached to the Ottoman Turkish army. Triumphant in the power struggles which followed the French, then British, evacuation of Egypt, he was named Pasha/Ottoman Viceroy of Egypt in 1805 and ruled until 1848. Founder of the dynasty that ruled Egypt until just after the 1952 revolution, Muhammad Ali instituted reforms aimed at expanding Egypt’s military power; these reforms, centring on education as well as industrial and agricultural development, had the effect of strengthening the country’s economic base.
* In those days, a ten-piastre coin or note.
* A pun on the several meanings of adaab, as ‘etiquette’, as ‘morals’, and as ‘arts’ or ‘humanities’ in the context of higher education. The singular, adab, means both ‘literature’ and ‘good manners’. Kulliyat al-adaab is the faculty of arts in a university.
* An island in the Nile at Cairo which has been a well-to-do residential and business area since the turn of the twentieth century, and where many of the foreign embassies have been sited. Traditionally, Zamalek has had a relatively large proportion of foreign residents, and has often served as a symbol of wealthy urban Egypt with its foreign alliances.
* An old port on the east bank of the Nile, opposite Zamalek and just north-west of the old city of Cairo, which in the nineteenth century became an industrial area. Since, it has developed into a densely populated and largely working-class residential and business area of the city.
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God Dies by the Nile and Other Novels Page 37
