The Cheapest Nights Read online

  “You mean take her back to Dakahlia?”

  “That’s right.”

  Come to think of it, El Shabrawi told himself, perhaps it was just as well. But a sudden thought struck him.

  “But that’s not possible, my Bey, I have only one return ticket form, for me alone.”

  “I told you, one of her relatives must be present.”

  “Please, my Bey, I beg of you.”

  “That’s a responsibility I am not prepared to take.”

  El Shabrawi had had more than his bellyful of responsibility by now. Just as he was about to give vent to his fury and smash everything in sight, the air was rent by one of Zebeida’s choice trilling-cries and in less than a second she had ripped off her threadbare gown and dashed out stark naked into the courtyard while everyone looked on, speechless and immobile.

  El Shabrawi was the first to move and he shot after her like a dart. A crowd of policemen and detainees ran to encircle her. El Shabrawi succeeded in holding her down but she wriggled out of his hands, calling for the Omdah’s downfall. Then she turned and dug her teeth viciously into his flesh. He cried out in pain and came down harshly with a slap on her face. Blood trickled slowly through her teeth. She was carried back struggling and screaming, wildly shouting her battle-cry, her shrieks piercing the sky.

  It took four people to get her into the straitjacket.

  She rolled on the ground as she fought to get free, foaming at the mouth, her face scarlet with the streaming blood. The doctor filled out a form in a hurry, and El Shabrawi looked on horrified, his whole being wrung with pity at what Zebeida was doing to herself.

  The sight of Zebeida in a straitjacket made him realize for the first time that she was really insane. It was a shock. He realized too that she had no understanding whatever of the things she was saying, that she was not to be blamed for what he had gone through, and that she had had nothing to eat or to drink since they had left their town. The sight of her rolling and writhing on the ground filled him with pity.

  “All right,” the doctor was saying.

  Now at last Zebeida was off his hands and he was finally rid of her. When that moment arrived he had promised himself a feast in celebration. But now he felt strangely unmoved, as if none of it all had anything to do with him.

  The ambulance arrived and Zebeida was hustled in calling long life to His Majesty the President, her shrill cries never relenting, to the delectation of the jeering crowd.

  Suddenly El Shabrawi darted forward like one stabbed in the heart and begged the driver to wait. He ran to the corner and bought her a loaf of French bread and a piece of halva, which he gave to the policeman escorting her.

  “Will you see that she eats them,” he pleaded, “and will you take good care of her? Please . . . for the sake of all your departed loved ones. . . .”

  When the car rolled out of sight El Shabrawi stole away straight to the station. He had had enough of Cairo, and enough of the whole world. From time to time he’d stare at the hand that had struck Zebeida and his flesh would creep with a sense of shame he had never known before in his life.

  HARD UP

  Abdou was hard up. Not for the first time. The condition was chronic. He had spent most of his life until now trying to make ends meet.

  He had started out as a cook, having learned the trade from Hagg Fayed, the Syrian, and mastered it to the extent that the master himself used to exclaim over the well-seasoned, perfectly spiced sauces he could make. But then nothing lasts forever. From being a cook he got himself employed in the workshop next door to the restaurant where he was working. Then he was fired, and he found another job as a doorman looking after a block of apartments ten stories high. When for some reason he quit that too, his enormous frame and strong muscles qualified him to be a porter loading trucks, until he developed a hernia. Besides good muscles he had a good voice, not a particularly pleasing one but powerful enough to bring the whole street to him when he found himself hawking cucumbers and melons and grapes.

  At one time he worked as a middleman roaming the alleys night and day, in search of a vacant room. He generally succeeded in finding one, and the ten piastres that went with it. Eventually he worked his way up to the inner circles where he learned how to wangle the ten piastres from his clients without having to roam alleys or necessarily to find a room. As for being a waiter, there was none to compare with him. He remembered how, when he was in his prime, on the eve of a feast, he could handle an entire café single-handed without once delaying an order or breaking a glass.

  He had a wife with whom he lived in one room surrounded by many neighbors. The neighbors were decent people on the whole, if one overlooked the brawls that erupted periodically between his wife and theirs. They sympathized with him and lent him money when he was out of work, and prayed for him to find a job and borrowed from him when he did. And so life went on providing their daily bread, growing daily more niggardly, it is true, but then, such was life.

  So Abdou was hard up. Only this time it had lasted longer than usual, and there seemed to be no end in sight. His feet were worn out from calling on old friends and acquaintances, and every time he returned home and knocked on the door with a frown on his face and nothing in his hands. His wife would not greet him when she opened the door, nor would he greet her, instead he made straight for his straw mat and tried to go to sleep, shutting his ears to Nefissa’s incessant chatter. But she would force him to listen, droning on about the events of the day, and the landlord’s threats, and the scraps of bread the neighbors sent out of charity, and about the coming feast, and how much she was yearning for peaches, and their little girl who had died, and the boy she was expecting who was going to be born with a peach for a birthmark because she was yearning so for peaches. And she would go on and on, getting so carried away that her voice would grow unbearably shrill, until he could stand it no longer.

  Nor could he stand to see the pity in the eyes of his neighbors who felt sorry for him, or listen to them wishing him better luck, because their wishes were no good to his empty stomach or to Nefissa’s almost naked body.

  One day on his return home Nefissa announced that Tolba had sent for him, which gave him a glimmer of hope, ungrounded perhaps, but still better than nothing. So he got up immediately and took himself over to Tolba’s. Tolba was undoubtedly the best tenant in the building because he worked as a male nurse at the hospital. He was also the most recent tenant.

  Tolba received him with much cordiality which threw Abdou a little out of countenance. No sooner had they exchanged the perfunctory words of greeting than Abdou was already telling him all about himself. He loved to dwell on the good old days and tell of the various jobs he had held at one time, and all the people he had known, particularly when he noticed the revulsion which his worn and threadbare gallabieh aroused. He felt somehow that speaking of his days of glory covered up for his shabby dress. He swelled with pride and he felt elated talking of the days when he occupied positions of importance. But when he remembered his present plight he grew dejected again. He deplored the evil in men’s hearts, and bemoaned the old days of plenty, his voice tapering to a bare whisper which rose from the abyss of his degradation, asking Tolba in the end if he could find him a job.

  Tolba listened, although he interrupted him many times, but told him in the end that there was, in fact, a job waiting for him.

  That night Abdou went home in a transport of joy. He spoke at length to Nefissa about Tolba’s kind heart, and told her she must go to his wife the next day after she’d finished with her washing for the students she was working for, and give her a hand and keep her company.

  Next day Abdou was up at the crack of dawn, and by sunrise he and Tolba were standing before the Blood Transfusion Department of the hospital. He waited. Others came and waited too. At ten o’clock the door opened and they all went in. The silence impressed him. The air was permeated with carbolic aci
d which gave him a slight nausea. They were made to line up and a cross-examination began. They wanted to know his father’s name, and his mother’s, and they wanted to know what his uncles had died of, paternal and maternal, and they asked for his photograph and he could only produce the one stuck on his identity card which he always carried with him in case of an accident or trouble with the police.

  They stuck a needle in his vein and drew out a bottleful of blood and told him to come back next week.

  During the week he was still hard up, still searching for a job and nothing was left of the scraps of bread the neighbors had sent in charity. On the appointed day of the following week he was at the hospital department again. At ten o’clock the door opened. “Not you,” they said to the man standing in front of him. The man refused to budge. “Your blood’s no good,” they said to him as they shoved him out of the way.

  Abdou’s heart sank, but when his turn came and they told him they would be taking blood from him his apprehension was gone. He stood obstinately in his place and cheered and laughed much like his old ways, resigned to wait although he was feeling very hungry.

  Soon his turn came. They put his arm through a hole just large enough to hold it. He was a little alarmed but when he saw there were two other men on either side of him his fears subsided. Suddenly he felt as though his arm were encased in a block of ice. Something like an obelisk seemed to penetrate it. He gave a moan and then he was quiet. Presently he began to take a look at his surroundings. He raised his head a little to look through the glass partition behind which pretty girls who did not have crooked and protruding front teeth like his wife’s, and who did not wear dull black dresses like her, moved about quietly. Peering more closely he realized they were not all girls. Some were young men with clear shiny faces. He envied them for being inside with the pretty girls and he wished that by some freak he could make his arm stretch and stretch until it reached the mask on the girls’ faces and he could pull it away and pinch one of those lovely cheeks.

  Abdou kept watching the masked faces until they started to blur and fade out, and the glass screen began to send flashes of light, and the masks kept sliding on and off. Suddenly he felt very tired. His arm went cold, then hot, then cold again.

  “How much are they taking?” he asked the man on his right.

  “I don’t know. Half a liter, they say,” said the man. The conversation ended there.

  “All right, it’s over,” someone said, tapping his arm.

  Abdou got up, walking unsteadily. When he asked for the money he was told to wait, so he waited. They gave him one pound and thirty piastres minus tax. They were even so generous as to give him breakfast.

  Before going home he called at the butcher’s and bought a pound of meat, and at the greengrocer’s to buy potatoes, and when he knocked on the door of their room he was all smiles. Nefissa beamed with pleasure and cheerfully returned his greeting when she saw what he was carrying. She was quick to come forward and relieve him of his load, and only coyness kept her from telling him how much she loved him.

  Soon she was busy cooking, and the frying smells filled the room and escaped outside to the whole building and reached the neighbors, which made some of them smile and others sigh with pity.

  Abdou ate until he could eat no more and on a rash impulse went out and bought a watermelon. That night his wife, for once, did not start up her usual racket. She was docile and meek and they cooed like lovers.

  Before the week was out Abdou had spent all the money. On the appointed day he went back to the hospital and stretched out his arm and they took their ration of blood and gave him his ration of money and a meal in addition.

  Abdou was quite pleased with his new job as he did not have to take orders from anybody, and no one bullied him around. All he was asked to do was turn up every week at that nice clean place where everything was white, and give half a liter of blood and cash in the price. His wife managed to make do with what he gained, and his body managed to replenish its blood supply, and then he went back at the end of the week and gave them more blood and they gave him more money.

  And so it went on. Many people envied him.

  As for his wife, it all depended. When he came home with food she’d smile in his face and nearly cry out for joy. But when he slept all week she wouldn’t leave him alone. She’d nag about his skinny legs and haggard face, and tell him in no polished terms what the women in the neighborhood were saying about him. How they threw it in her face that her husband sold his blood for a living. Sometimes she’d fuss about him like a hen, seeing that he was warm enough at night, pulling up his cover if it happened to slip. By day she wouldn’t let him move from his place and she’d hover around him answering his every call as if he were a sick child.

  All this did not escape Abdou. It made him bitter, but then what did it matter? It’s true he felt dizzy every time he gave blood, and he had to lie down by the hospital wall until late afternoon. It was also true that people talked, but at least the stove was going and the rent was paid. People could go to hell.

  Except that one day when he went to the hospital as usual they did not put his arm through the hole. Instead they called him and said no.

  “Why not?”

  “Anemia.”

  “What’s anemia?”

  “No red corpuscles.”

  “So what?”

  “It won’t do.”

  “And what am I to do?”

  “Come back later, when you’re stronger.”

  “I’m strong now. Here. I can tear down that wall.”

  “You’ll collapse.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  “You could die.”

  “I’ll take the risk.”

  “That wouldn’t be human . . . your own good . . .”

  “And is what you’re doing human?”

  “That’s how it is . . .”

  “You mean nothing doing?”

  “Nothing doing.”

  That day they forgot to give him a meal, and Abdou was hard up again.

  THE QUEUE

  In the countryside all marketplaces look alike, more or less. They all consist of a large vacant lot with a fence and a gate. They all have stalls with empty wooden shelves distorted by the heat and the winter cold. Here and there you will find a few benches made of hay, stuck together with dried mud.

  Of all the days of the week market-day is the most wonderful. A gathering that occurs at regular intervals announcing, like an enormous human clock, the lapse of seven days in which fortunes were made and fortunes were lost, in which some people earned their wages honestly, some dishonestly; when some found food in abundance while others starved. It measures the span of life.

  After the fair the vacant lot remains deserted except for the crows, and stray herds of sheep and goats, and teams of schoolboys coming in for football.

  So, although in the countryside marketplaces are alike for the most part, it was different in the case of the Saturday market around that area. For that one had a peculiar characteristic. It had a fence around it made of iron spikes except for a gap of about two meters where the spikes were replaced by a sturdy wall made of cement and rubble.

  People had long been speculating about that bit of wall. They said at first there was a treasure underneath which led to a cock who would one day crow at the break of day and bring fortune to whoever found him. But soon the story faded out. To believe it was like believing in miracles; a story they repeated from wishful thinking. Then they said it had been built in order to cover the mouth of a well from which genii stole to the earth from the underworld. So the wall was built and a Koran, a Bokhari,1 amulets, and bits of glass were placed inside, which were meant to hold back the genii. But this story too, like the others, faded out.

  Then came a new generation, less imaginative than the preceding one, who saw in the wall an abortive attemp
t to build the entire fence of cement and rubble.

  The people never tired of trying to account for that incongruous part of the fence. Yet for all that the simple truth was unbelievable.

  That marketplace was never intended to be one in the first place. It was just a barren piece of land where nothing would grow. Folk from the neighboring villages found it a convenient place where they could meet, laden with barley and dates and cheese which they exchanged for calico and bits of mirror and knives fresh from the blacksmith’s hand. The land happened to be part of the vast possessions of an aristocratic landowner from those parts who was descended from a long line of Turks, or maybe Mamluks, God only knew.

  He was quick to grasp that the presence of those people and their cattle on his land was profitable; an excellent means by which to fertilize it and eventually make it fit for cultivation. So they were permitted to come. In fact they were encouraged to come when he rode in their midst on his mare and dispensed his benevolent smiles generously.

  When the droppings left behind by the cattle had accumulated sufficiently to fertilize the land the owner decided it was time he had it plowed. But the people trampled in just the same and left only after they had held their market and flattened the furrows. He had them driven away and then plowed the land again. They were back the following week, again flattening the furrows.

  His old bailiff ventured to point out there was a means by which he could use the land to better advantage and that was by letting the people carry on their trade as usual in exchange for a toll. This advice he accepted readily and the following week his collectors were rampant all over the grounds collecting the toll. And in order to reduce expenses and raise the returns, a wooden fence was erected around the vacant lot with a gate leading out to the agricultural road at which only one collector was stationed.

  That’s how the Saturday market came to be held. Business was brisk. They traded in everything conceivable: from fermented barley-bread and licorice to livestock. Soon an extension had to be added in order to accommodate the latter.