The Cheapest Nights Read online

  What was it he had against his uncle Aboul Seba‘ Ismail in particular? There were many others who came to the house and shook hands with his mother, and whispered in her ear, and sometimes they gave him a piastre, and she laughed and chatted with them all. But when this man was around he suddenly felt that the invisible tie that bound him to her no longer existed, that she was no longer aware he was there, while his own awareness of her would mount to a frenzy, working him up to a pitch of rage when it was all he could do to stop himself from poking his father’s cane into her eyes, or suddenly tearing off his clothes to stand naked just to remind her he was there. Life used to be easy and sweet and without complications, and he loved everything in it. He loved their gathering around the table at mealtimes when he was very hungry, together with his sister and his four-year-old brother who still stuttered when he spoke. He loved the feel of his mother’s devotion to them and particularly to himself. And his tea and milk in the morning, and the outings along the riverbank, eating lettuce and lupins, and sitting on the grass in the park. How lovely it used to be, even when they talked about his father, and his mother’s face clouded and he feared she might cry. They always recalled his virtues. They spoke of him as though he were a saint. They remembered how strong he used to be, almost as if he were Antar ibn Shaddad.2 And they talked about the malady that carried him off in a week. He died, they said.

  Yes. By and by this word which until now had no special significance for him began to acquire meaning. His father had died. That meant he had shut his eyes forever, and his face had gone pale and cold, and they had wrapped him in a shroud, and they had buried him. He had seen it all but he had understood nothing, just like the rustling and the whispering in the dark, and the people who kept saying after his father died, “Borham will carry on.” Now the fog was clearing a little and he was able to discern, if nothing very clear, at least vague intimations of something obscure and deep as the mouth of the well where the bear went down with her mate the pig. Even the playing and singing of the children outside left him unmoved that night, although they seemed to be enjoying themselves.

  * * *

  —

  “Well, so you’ve grown, and filled out like a great big bullock, boy,” said the owner of the Duco workshop where he was employed, as he tweaked his ear. “So you’re no longer a child, boy. Well, I don’t like the look of you bending over all day long like that. What’s eating you boy, hey? Couldn’t be old Tshomba making a bid for you, could it?”

  The implication went home. It stung like a whiplash. “Don’t you say that again, master,” he said, hardly knowing how he dared.

  Although he was kicked black-and-blue for that until his face swelled, he was startled when he heard his master say to his friends later on as they sat smoking their water-pipes, “What do you say folks, I like that kid; he talked back at me, but I like him. That kid’s got guts and he’s going to be a lot better than Tshomba.”

  Tshomba (derived from Tshombé) was the master’s head apprentice. He was older than Ibrahim and darker, with kinky hair and a flat nose and a deep gruff voice, unlike his brother Lomumba. All he did all day was kick Ibrahim around and call him names.

  “Remember me to your old woman,” he used to call after him.

  The first time Tshomba had said this, Ibrahim flew at him and struck him on the face, but the beating he got in return was such as he would never forget. Surely the first thing he was going to do when he grew up was to kill Tshomba, together with the first bear to come his way. He felt silly now repeating that silly rhyme with the other children. It didn’t thrill him anymore. And crawling under the bed was a bigger effort now. He found it hard to go to sleep immediately, the moment his head touched the long pillow that had gone flat and stiff as a plank of wood. Now he was able to tell whispering from rustling. He did not wake at the rapping now, but long before it came, when he became attentive to the footsteps in the dark street, and he knew them to be Aboul Seba‘ Ismail’s, and he knew that the café was closing up for the night. He wasn’t the only one to become attentive when the bed creaked and his mother’s feet stole up and her bracelets clinked. Then the rustling. Then the door opening, and his mother’s sleepy whisper, “Good evening.” She was even the first to greet him. And that croak which no effort could bring to a whisper simply would not make sense. And the man’s eyes would catch fire and they looked as if they gave off light making everything in the dark room shine, even his own ugly tawny face, even her naked feet and her toes shrinking under her weight as she climbed up leaving him below with the bedsheet hanging down all around him. And Yasmin, curled up on herself, drooling innocently as she lay fast asleep. And his little brother stretching at her feet breathing audibly like a man. They’re all in the well down there, and the angels are in heaven, and the ceiling of heaven is made of wooden boards through which the mattress bulges, and under the bed everything founders. And the wooden sky threatens to give way. Then the day of judgment will come, and heaven and hell. He’ll hang down his head on the day of judgment. And when Tshomba will come to hit him on the head, the loud thundering voice of God will cry from above, “Keep your hands off!” And the hand will wither. Why doesn’t the day of judgment come now and why doesn’t the thundering voice cry, “Keep your hands off!” so that the pig is stricken still, and his mother’s voice chokes in her throat forever so that he never hears the whispering again? That whispering that made of her a strange woman with a face he didn’t know, a woman he is ashamed of. And when her whispering came muffled and suspicious, her secret, which she should have kept covered like a private part, came out with it. And the more she tried to muffle it the louder it rang so that all their covers and all their blankets could never smother it. Listen. Could this be the voice of the woman who gave birth to him? His mother?

  That’s right, he remembers now. How could he forget that time when he was Yasmin’s age, perhaps younger? He had awakened one night and was about to shout but what he heard made him change his mind. He could hear his father’s voice. He was whispering. He was there with his mother on top of the wooden sky and their whispers had ended in laughter which warmed his heart and made him forget his need to urinate and that only a moment ago he had wanted to shout. There was a smack followed by a playful scuffle, there, on top of the bed. Then a smothered cry, then again the scuffle which seemed to have no end. He could not imagine his father whom he loved and venerated taking part in such a game and when he remembered his mother was in it too, for some reason he was so incensed he could have wept except that he realized it would be foolish. In spite of his resentment the overwhelming feeling was that he was safe in the warmth of their nearness, that he was in the game too. He wanted them to know he was there just the same so he opened his mouth and bawled. To his surprise the only answer was renewed laughter, wanton and unrestrained, which made the bed rock violently. That very same bed where his mother was lying now, so meek, with nothing of the imperiousness she showed in the daytime, or the threatening tone she used when she spoke. Meek and enduring, with revolting submission, inviting the pig to be more brutal. His croaking whispers had turned to bellowing like that of a slaughtered ox. He is no longer a child. Now he knows. But he does not know everything for there were strange things going on up there in the sky above his head, near the brink of the well, which were beyond his understanding. He could beat them up and come out with the truth, but he wants things as they are; only voices detached, incoherent. Only meekness and brutality, and whispering, and the threat of the bedsprings collapsing. But still his blood boils like it boils every time and he keeps breaking into a sweat. He is unable to stop his brain working, to stop it from understanding. And then that terrible fear, as though he had a pair of demons up there above him, openly defiant, who made love in the evenings, recklessly and without fear. The man’s bellow is like a cannibal’s and his mother is an insatiable tigress; her muzzle is still bloodstained from devouring his little brother; she will have more. The savage
ry is mad, unconcealed, like rabid dogs fighting. And the bedsprings sagging under their weight, crouching on his chest. And they, and the earth and the sky, and all the cares of the world lying on top of him, grinding him slowly, pounding on him, stopping his breath. He can take no more. He will die of madness. Fear of the dawn cripples him so that he cannot scream. Fear keeps him from losing control, throwing everything up, falling on them in his fury with his old brown shoe and smashing their skulls with a hammer. But he knows that no matter how far he is driven he will do no such thing. You’ve grown, Borham—you’ve grown to be a great hulk of a bear. Your ear listens, and your eyes pierce the bedsprings like hot pokers, and they see what lies on top. When you were small you did not know. You could only see. Now you see and you know. If only he could obliterate what had happened before and start from the beginning. From tonight, for instance, or tomorrow, as though he had seen or heard nothing before. As though the knowledge were coming to him for the first time and then he would behave according to his reaction. But this will never be because he knows this is not the first time. And before the first time there were blurred and vague perceptions which by and by began to reveal themselves so that when at last full knowledge came it was like stale news; like a distant shadow he recognized long before it came into view.

  He did not even dare to make his presence felt. It was different with his father and mother because with them he was safe. But these two were nothing but strangers. A pig and a bear, up there in the sky, on the roof of the world, while he and his brother and his sister are entombed, like their father, down below in that grave with the white sheet hanging around it. Should he cry and appear even in his own eyes like Tshomba’s “plaything” as his master calls him? Should he yell and make a show of himself? He could kill her, even when the stranger goes, but that would destroy whatever was left that kept him close to his mother. For in spite of everything she was still his mother and he was alive because he had a mother, and he could not imagine a life without her. Much less that he should kill her and put an end to her life. He was alive because he had that particular mother. To lose whatever linked them, no matter how frail, was to lose his life. Up there now, with that stranger, she was cut off from him, leaving him in the cold with death in his heart. No one in the world belonged to him, nor he to anyone. Only hope kept him alive. That this passing phase should come to an end and that she would return to him. If he were to cry out, if she were to know that he knew, she would spurn him forever, and the spring from which his life welled would cease to flow, and his mother would cease to be. Only that other woman with the black dress slipped over the transparent silk shift would remain, who sometimes peddled and sometimes went as a go-between, toiling to earn their living. Food made him happy not for its own sake but because it came from her toil and her love. And since she toiled for their food it was proof that she loved them. He would rather die than confront her or have her exposed, because his need of her was a thousand times greater than her need of them.

  Ever since that man had come into their lives he had the feeling she had no need for them. But her being their mother was the center upon which their lives were riveted. That was why she must continue to live and he must continue to remain silent. Let her deal with hundreds of men to make a living and support them. Let her talk to him with menace in her voice. Of all the men let her pick that stranger and even be the first to greet him with her husky voice when he came. He will not fight. He will spend long nights listening to those voices coming from the wooden canopy. Voices without laughter, without joy, without the dear and tender tones of his father. Only the grunts of a pig and the panting of a bear that fell into the well. A wide embrace where of her own will she enfolds the corpulent man. And their diabolical and brutish encounter makes his young being sink deeper and deeper under the bed. And now he had grown. Ever since he was a child he had heard it all, but now it drives him to insanity, and in the last resort he can only follow the wise path and continue to say nothing. And yet the day of judgment will not come, and the thundering voice will not cry, “Keep your hands off!” and the stranger pig will not be stricken and the woman with the husky voice will not die to let the mother return. A cry reaching out from below the wooden canopy to the sleeping town and the vast earth and the endless vault of heaven. And because the day of judgment will not come he wakes up every morning with despair in his heart and as he leaves the house he steals a look at her and he feels the shaky bond grow weaker, and the mother recedes. Years have passed since his father died and the whispering woman prevails. Forlornly he goes to his work and Tshomba’s blows fall on the back of his head. The head of a small dark boy.

  “Well, so you’ve grown and filled out,” says Tshomba, “like a big fat bear . . . and the bear fell into the well.”

  THE FREAK

  Every town in this vast country God gave us has got its own worries. It’s got its own people, young and old, male and female, families big and small, Copts and Muslims. A vast universe regulated by laws and also troubled by them. Every once in a while something out of the ordinary appears, like in the case of our town which alone of all others happens to have produced that strange monster which could not be classed as human, nor yet as animal. Neither was he the missing link. A curious creature with no name. Sometimes people called him Sheikh Mohamed, sometimes Sheikha1 Fatma, but only rarely, to identify him. The fact remained that he was nameless, fatherless, and motherless.

  Nobody knew where he came from. He was endowed with human features, nevertheless. Two eyes, two ears and a nose, and he walked on two feet, but he still wasn’t anywhere near a human being. His neck, for instance, leaned horizontally on one shoulder like the trampled-down stem of a plant. Only one of his eyes was open while the other was shut, and never once did he narrow the one or widen the other. His arms hung limply at his sides like those of a washed gallabieh dangling on the line. Short, thick and woolly, his hair was neither that of a man nor of a woman, and his massive build reminded one of a sturdy wall. There was no trace of a beard on his face. His voice might have determined his sex except that he never spoke. He never moved either, unless he was hurt or in pain, in which case he would emit a low whine which was hard to attribute to anything sapient.

  He was rarely seen to walk and when he did he shuffled awkwardly in short narrow steps as if his feet were bound. He would post himself in front of one’s shop or courtyard and remain standing there for long hours without stirring once. How he fed himself was a mystery, as he never accepted any food that was offered him. Some said he fed on weeds which he picked in the fields, and that he had a liking for clover, and that he drank from the edge of the stream like cattle. But no one could say he had actually seen him do it.

  Anywhere else such a creature would have been looked upon as a phenomenon calling for special study, or at least he would have provided the press with a sensational scoop. But in our town nobody looked upon him as someone abnormal, only different. And since he was living peacefully in our midst, doing no harm, no one had a right to mock or molest him. His deformity was a manifestation of God’s will which none had a right to contest. His was a vast universe where all had a right to live, the maimed and the crippled and the wise and the insane. All moving in the same slow, fearful procession leading to their end and to infinity.