Children of the Alley

by Naguib Mahfouz

  “Come to your senses!” he shouted. “Anger will blind you to your real enemy, Hagag’s killer!”

  “Who told you that?” shouted one of the men of Rifaa. “What Desert Rat would dare enter this alley?”

  “How could they kill Hagag today, when they needed him so much?” Rifaat shouted.

  “Ask the criminals, don’t ask us.”

  “The people of Rifaa will not obey a gangster of Gabal.”

  “They will pay dearly for his blood.”

  “Don’t serve the conspiracy,” said the overseer, “or you’ll be seeing Qassem come in here like a plague!”

  “Let him come if he wants, but Galta will not rule us as protector.”

  The overseer wrung his hands. “We are finished! We will be ruined.”

  “Ruin is better than Galta!” they yelled.

  A brick was thrown from Rifaa and landed among the assembled men of Gabal. Someone from Gabal responded in kind, and the overseer quickly withdrew. Bricks began to fly in both directions, and in no time a bloody battle had broken out between the two neighborhoods. Cruel blows were struck, and fighting spread to some roofs, where women pelted each other with bricks, stones, dirt and pieces of wood. The clash lasted a long time, despite the fact that the people of Rifaa were fighting without their gangster; but they lost many casualties to Galta’s lethal blows. Women’s voices now shrieked from windows, a noise that could not be heard above the chaos of the battle, though they could be seen pointing in terror, now to the east end of the alley, now to the other end. The people turned to see what the women were pointing at, and saw Qassem in front of the mansion, leading a band of men with clubs. At the other end was Hassan, leading more men; the place rang with screams of warning, and then everything happened very quickly. As if paralyzed, people stopped throwing punches. On a spontaneous impulse, they intermingled and re-formed, the fighters and the fought, and divided up into two detachments to confront the newcomers.

  “I said it was a plot, and you didn’t believe me!” shouted Galta furiously.

  They prepared for battle, though they were now in the worst state of strain and hopelessness. But Qassem suddenly halted, and so did Hassan, as if they were executing a single plan.

  “We do not want to harm anyone,” cried Qassem as loudly as he could. “We want no winner and no loser. We are all a people with one alley and one ancestor, and the estate belongs to all.”

  “It’s a new plot!” shouted Galta.

  “Don’t push them to fight to defend your gang rule. Defend it yourself, if you want to.”

  “Attack!” bellowed Galta.

  He charged at Qassem’s men, and his men followed. Others attacked Hassan and his men, but many held back. Some who were wounded or exhausted slipped into their houses, and were followed by the hesitant others. Only Galta and his band of men were left, but even so they plunged into a ferocious battle and fought a desperate defensive fight, battering one another with clubs, heads, feet and hands. Galta concentrated his attack on Qassem with blind hatred. They exchanged violent blows, but Qassem met his adversary’s blows with his club, nimbly and cautiously. With their superior numbers, his men surrounded Galta’s gang, who fell under dozens of clubs. Hassan and Sadeq set upon Galta as he fought with Qassem; Sadeq struck his club, and Hassan landed his club on Galta’s head, then a second time, and a third. The club dropped from his hand, and he bounded up like a slaughtered bull, then collapsed on his face like a gate slamming shut. The battle was over. The crack of clubs and shouts of men fell silent. The victors stood up, out of breath, wiping the blood from their heads, faces and hands, but their mouths were bright with smiles of victory and peace. Wailing could be heard from the windows, Galta’s men were scattered on the ground and the brilliant sun shed its fierce rays.

  “You have won,” Sadeq told Qassem, confident and assured. “God gave you victory; our ancestor does not err when he chooses. Our alley will never mourn again after today.”

  Qassem smiled serenely and turned resolutely to look at the overseer’s house, but all their heads were turned to him.

  91

  Qassem walked ahead of his men to the overseer’s house, and found it steeped in silence and gloom, its gate and windows locked. Hassan knocked forcefully at the gate, but no one answered. Some of the men clustered against the gate and shoved it until both panels flew open, and Qassem entered, his men following behind. There was no sign of the gatekeeper or any of the servants. They hurried to the hall, checking all of the rooms on the way, then searched all three floors, but it was clear to them that the overseer, his family and his servants had fled the house. And the truth was that Qassem was not sorry, because deep inside he had no wish to murder the overseer, in deference to Lady Amina, without whom he would have been killed at the outset. Hassan and the others were furious, however, at the deliverance of the man who had forced poverty and dishonor on the alley for as long as he had ruled it.

  This was how Qassem triumphed and became the uncontested master of the alley. He took over the running of the estate, since the estate had to have an overseer. The Desert Rats went home to their territory, and were joined by everyone who had emigrated from the alley out of fear of the gangsters, and chief among these was Yahya. There were forty days of peace, during which wounds healed, spirits calmed down and hearts came to feel secure. And one day Qassem stood before the mansion and summoned all the people of the alley to come to him, men and women, from all the neighborhoods, and they came, anxious and curious, their hearts pounding with every kind of notion. They filled the square, Desert Rats mingling with all the Al Gabal and Al Rifaa. Qassem smiled gently and humbly, and yet grandly, and pointed up to the mansion.

  “Gabalawi lives here,” he said. “He is ancestor of us all. He knows no distinction between any of his children, between neighborhoods or individuals, between men and women.”

  Their faces were bright and surprised with joy, especially those faces that had expected to hear the treatise of a man who had conquered and taken over.

  “His estate is all around you. It belongs to all of you equally, as he promised when he told Adham, ‘The estate will belong to your children.’ It is up to us to utilize it the best way possible so that it will provide for everyone, and prosper, so that we may live the way Adham wanted to live, abundantly blessed and nourished, totally secure and truly happy.”

  The people looked at one another as if they were dreaming.

  “The overseer is gone and will never be back, and the gangsters have disappeared; they will never again be seen in our alley. You will never again pay protection money to a tyrant or submit to any barbarous bully. You will live in peace, mercy and love.”

  His eyes scanned their delighted faces.

  “It is up to you whether or not things go back to the way they were. Watch your overseer, and if he betrays you, remove him. If any one of you resorts to violence, strike him. If any person or community claims to be above the rest, punish them. This is the only way you can guarantee that things do not go back to the way they were. God be with you.”

  That day some people were consoled for their dead, and others for their defeat. Everyone looked to tomorrow as if it were the appearance of the full moon of a spring night. Qassem distributed the estate revenue among everyone justly, after setting aside an amount for building and renovation. Yes, each person’s share was small, but he enjoyed unbounded feelings of justice and respect. Qassem devoted his tenure to building, rebuilding and peace. Our alley had never before known the unity, harmony and happiness that it enjoyed. Yes, there were some of the Al Gabal who harbored feelings they did not make public; they whispered among themselves, “Are we of the Al Gabal, and ruled by one of the Desert Rats?” And there were some like them among the Al Rifaa. And indeed there were those of the Desert Rats who succumbed to pride and arrogance, but no voice was raised to disturb the peace while Qassem was alive. The Desert Rats saw in him a kind of man that had never existed before and would never be again. He combin
ed power and gentleness, wisdom and simplicity, dignity and love, mastery and humility, efficiency and honesty. In addition, he was witty, friendly and good-looking, kind and companionable. He had good taste, he loved to sing and he told jokes. Nothing about him changed, though his marital life expanded, as if it were following the same course of renewal and expansion that the estate took. While he loved Badriya, he married a beauty of the Al Gabal and another of the Al Rifaa. He fell in love with a woman of his own clan, and married her too. People said that in this he was looking for something he had lost when he lost his first wife, Qamar. His Uncle Zachary said that he wanted to strengthen his ties with all the different neighborhoods of the alley, but our alley needed no explanation or justification for what he did. The fact is that they admired his vigor even more than they admired his character; in our alley, the love of women is a power in which men lose themselves. They brag about it. It imparts a status that equals that of gangsterdom, in its time, or even surpasses it.

  However that may be, our alley had never known its true sovereignty, never felt that it could be independent, without an exploiting overseer or a gangster to humble the people. It had never before known the brotherhood, friendship and peace of Qassem’s time.

  Many people said that if the plague of our alley had been forgetfulness, it was now free of that plague, and would be free of it forever.

  That is what they said.

  That is what they said, Gabalawi Alley!

  Arafa

  92

  No one contemplating the state of our alley would ever believe what the poets say in the coffeehouses. Who are Gabal and Rifaa and Qassem? What sign is there, besides the coffeehouse stories, that any of them accomplished anything? All the eye can see is an alley sunk in darkness and poets that sing of dreams. How did this happen to us? Where is Qassem and the united alley, and the estate to be used for everyone’s good? Where did this greedy overseer and his insane gangsters come from? You will hear, around the pipe passed from hand to hand in the hashish dens, between the sighs and the laughter, how Sadeq succeeded Qassem as overseer, and followed the same course; how one group saw Hassan was worthier to be overseer, because he had been related to Qassem and since he was the man who had killed the gangsters. They urged Hassan to raise his club, which no one could withstand, but he refused to return the alley to the era of the gangsters. The alley had been divided among itself, however, and now some of the Al Gabal and Al Rifaa began to say out loud what they used to keep secret. When Sadeq left this life, repressed ambitions revealed their ugly faces and hostile looks. The clubs came out of hibernation, and the blood flowed within every neighborhood, and in fights between neighborhoods, until the overseer himself was killed in one of the battles. Things got out of control, security and peace were buried; the people saw no alternative to bringing back a scion of the old overseer, Rifaat, to be overseer, the position over which so many ambitious men were fighting. This was how Qadri came to be overseer, and the neighborhoods resumed their old clannishness, as each was taken over by a gang, and battles raged over who would rule the whole alley, until Saadallah won. He occupied the protector’s house and became the first overseer, while Yusuf took over the Al Gabal, Agag the Al Rifaa and Santuri the Al Qassem. At first the overseer distributed the estate revenues honestly, and the rebuilding and renovation activity continued, but before long greed began to toy with his heart, and the same with the gangsters, as expected; and they went back to the old system. The overseer took half the estate income and divided the other half among the four gangsters, who kept it instead of giving it to its rightful owners. They did not stop there, but insolently forced their miserable followers to pay protection money. This brought a halt to construction activity, and stopped work on houses that were only half or even a quarter finished. It seemed that nothing had changed since the old days, though the Desert Rats’ territory had now become the Al Qassem neighborhood. It was ruled by a gangster like the others, its buildings were surrounded by huts and ruins, and its people had gone back to being what they had been in the black days, enjoying no honor or sovereignty. They were worn down by poverty, menaced by clubs and constantly being slapped. Filth, flies and lice were everywhere, and there was no end of beggars, swindlers and cripples. Gabal, Rifaa and Qassem were nothing but names, or songs chanted by drugged poets in the coffeehouses. Every group was proud of its man, of whom nothing was left, and competed to the point of quarreling and fistfights. Drunken slogans were passed around; going into a drug den, a man might say, “It’s no good,” meaning the world, not the drug den. Another might say, “There’s one way out, death—better God should get you than a gangster’s club. The best thing is to get drunk or smoke hashish.” They sang sad popular songs about depression, poverty and disgrace, or chanted filthy, obscene ditties, bellowing them into the ears of the women and men who sought comfort or amusement even in these low, dark dumps. When one of them felt especially tormented, he would say, “What’s written is written. What good is Gabal, or Rifaa, or Qassem. We’re flies in this world and dirt in the next.” How strange that our alley should have remained the most favored among all the alleys. Men in neighboring alleys pointed to us and said admiringly, “Gabalawi Alley!” while we squatted solemnly, gloomily, as if hypnotized by our cherished memories of the past, or listening raptly to an unseen voice within us, softly whispering, “It is not impossible for what happened yesterday to happen again tomorrow, or for the dreams of poets to come true once more, or for darkness to recede from our world.”

  93

  One day, in the early afternoon, the alley spotted a foreign young man walking in from the desert, followed by another who seemed to be a dwarf He was wearing a gray galabiya and nothing underneath, and a belt around his waist that divided his galabiya in half—the upper half bulged and sagged with the things inside. He wore faded and worn-out red leather shoes, and there was no hat on his thick, disheveled hair. His skin was dark and his eyes were round and alert, with an eager and penetrating look, and there was a certain confidence in the way he moved. He stopped for a moment in front of the mansion, then walked slowly on, followed by his friend. Everyone looked at him as if to say, “A stranger in the alley! How insolent!” He read the same look in the eyes of the peddlers, shop owners, the men sitting in the coffeehouses and women watching from the windows; even in the eyes of the dogs and cats. It seemed to him that even the flies avoided him out of scornful protest. Boys turned provocatively toward him, and some of them walked close to him, while others loaded their slingshots or searched the ground for a stone to throw. He smiled warmly at them and slipped his hand into his breast pocket. He drew out some mints and began to give them out, and the boys came closer to him gladly, sucking the mints and staring at him curiously. He smiled as he spoke to them.

  “Is there a basement for rent around here? Come on, men—the one who finds me one will get a bag of mints.”

  “A thousand misfortunes on you!” snapped a woman sitting on the ground in front of a building. “Who are you to live in our alley?”

  “Arafa, at your service.” He laughed. “A native of your alley, like the rest of you, coming home after a long absence.”

  She stared at him closely. “Whose son are you? You must be your mother’s favorite.”

  He laughed very hard, overdoing it slightly, but politely. “Gahsha, of fond memory. Did you know her, dear lady?”

  “Gahsha? ‘We read the future well!’ Her?”

  “The very same.”

  There was a woman nearby, leaning against a wall and following their conversation, picking lice from a boy’s head. “You used to follow your mother around back then, when you were a boy,” she said. “I still remember you. Everything about you has changed, except for your eyes.”

  “Yes, by God,” said the first woman. “Where is your mother? She’s dead! God rest her soul. I used to sit in front of her basket asking about the future, and she’d whisper and see my fortune in the shells she threw, and then she’d tell me. Go
d rest your soul, Gahsha!”

  “God bless you,” he said gratefully. “God willing, you can guide me to a vacant basement.”

  She peered at him with bleary eyes and asked, “What brings you back here after all this time?”

  “Every living thing journeys back to its home and family,” he said, imitating the accent of a learned man.

  She pointed to a building in Rifaa. “There’s a basement there that’s been vacant since the tenant died in a fire, God rest her soul. Does that bother you?”

  A woman listening from her window laughed. “The demons themselves are afraid of this man,” she said.

  He lifted his face, which was pleasant with laughter. “My sweet alley! Who is funnier or sweeter than my people? Now I know why my mother told me on her deathbed to come back here.” He looked at the woman sitting on the ground. “We’re all going to die, my late mother’s customer—from fire, drowning, demons or clubs.”

  He saluted her and walked to the building she had indicated, with everyone watching him.

  “We know his mother—who knows his father?” one man said ironically.

  “God has not willed that we know,” said an old woman.

  “He can claim that he’s the son of a man of Gabal, or Rifaa, or Qassem, however he wants, or will do him the most good. God rest his mother’s soul!”

  “Why did you bring us back to this alley?” his companion whispered irritably in his ear.

  Arafa smiled still as he answered. “I hear this kind of talk everywhere, and anyway this is our alley, and this is the only alley we can live in. We’ve done enough wandering around the markets and sleeping in the desert and in slums. Besides, these are good people, even if they have dirty tongues; and pretty stupid, clubs or no clubs. We’ll make a good living here. Remember that, Hanash.”