The Cheapest Nights Read online

  “I got you!” he was saying between gasps. “You bunch of idiots, I got you!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You blinking bunch of idiots. You believed everything I said. I never went near Mansura, and I never saw any woman.”

  “Liar!”

  “I swear, boys, I never even saw Mansura.”

  “You son of a dog!”

  “And you blinking idiots!”

  A heavy silence fell upon us as we stared at the lights of Mansura which now seemed to be within reach of our hands. To our fevered imagination the town became the embodiment of a woman with flesh like soft dough, draped in a dressing gown and leaning out from a balcony, beckoning for us to come. We looked back at Mohamed and found him still laughing in scorn.

  “He’s pulling your leg,” someone said.

  “He won’t show us the woman. He doesn’t want us to see the place.”

  “What do you mean, you swine?” snapped Mohamed angrily.

  We swore at him saying we weren’t going to let him go until he took us to the house. He swore back, and scoffed, and called us fools and idiots. We vowed we weren’t going to let him get away with it, he wasn’t going to keep the woman to himself. We ordered him to walk on, but he refused so we dragged him. He kicked one of the boys in the stomach and started lashing out wildly with his hands and his legs. We fell on him in a mass and forced him to the ground, punching at him, slapping his face. He resisted, hitting back savagely until he was overcome and we tied him down again. We smeared his face with mud and somebody spat on him. He tried to shout but we gagged him. For a moment it looked as if he was going to choke to death so we relaxed our grip a little to let him breathe.

  “Drag him to the field and brand him with fire, boys,” someone suggested.

  “Yes, let’s.” And we dragged him into a field and started to look for matches but we found none. We’ll make a spark, we decided, and started to look for flint and found some over the railway line. Now we needed a nail or a piece of iron. We found only a scarp of tin. One boy crouched on Mohamad’s chest and ran the piece of tin across his legs.

  “Are you going to show us that woman’s house, or do you want to die?” He made no reply. We dug our nails into his flesh and scratched. Then we bit him. But he still wouldn’t tell. We realized at last it was no use, that he had been lying all along and we renewed the attack with savage fury.

  “Come on, say it, say you’re a sissy,” hissed the boy who held the tin.

  Mohamed only kicked at him and cursed our fathers in return.

  “All right, give it to him, boys.” And we got to work on the flint trying to produce a spark. A tiny part of ourselves couldn’t help admiring his guts, but for the most part we hated him for having fooled us all that time.

  At last we obtained a spark and it caught on the piece of cotton. We cheered and blew on it. It was a pale, wan, cold fire. We blew harder but it only grew paler. No matter how hard we blew, the fire remained wan and cold.

  Not only the fire but everything all around was starting to wane. Then something whistled in our ears like a cry for help, and we realized with horror that we were in the midst of something dreadful. We stared at one another in a daze as slowly we began to wake to the stark reality. Our faces were bruised and grubby, and our clothes were covered with dust. And flies. Thousands of sticky flies droned and flew around us incessantly.

  How did we come to this torment? What were our people going to say? Surely we would be beaten and roundly abused when we returned. Some of us would have to rise at dawn; there were the water-wheels to be assembled, and the barns to be cleaned, and we’d had no sleep, and our eyes were bloodshot. Had they caught some infection? Was the sun also rising on our town, back home? Why was there shock on our faces, and guilt, and remorse? Why were they blotched and diseased and ravaged with pimples? Why did we realize only now that we were wretchedly poor, and that there was nothing in our homes but barking dogs and roaring fathers and screeching mothers and the suffocating smoke of the stove?

  Horrified, we began to feel our bodies and examine our clothes to see how much damage was done. We saw ourselves with appalling clarity which made us fear to look at the core inside.

  Mohamed lay on the road like a slaughtered beast, his gallabieh in shreds, his body limp and covered with flies. Gory wounds gaped from his flesh and the blood clotted on his nose and down the side of his mouth and inside the cleft of his harelip. Slowly, dispassionately, we loosed his bonds. He groaned with pain and our hearts went out to him.

  Once more we found ourselves roaming, back on the same road that saw us coming, driven in spite of ourselves. We were limping and groaning and leaning on one another. Our thoughts were dwelling on the coming dawn, rising suddenly, giving shape to the earth, with grief and care in its folds. And the harsh inexorable day loomed ahead like a huge monster, bigger than the sun. Stark and merciless, awaiting, threatening, his eyes spitting fire as we approached, awed and quivering, knowing full well there was no escape.

  THE CALLER IN THE NIGHT

  It was Hagg Sa‘ad’s funeral ceremony. The time was just after the evening prayers when most people begin to arrive. A modest tent had been erected to receive the guests. It was lit by gas lamps that gave a pale, anemic light. They shone brightly just the same, through the blackness that enveloped our village, guiding the crowds of fellahin who came to bring their condolences. They were not used to lights by night so that they were momentarily blinded the moment they stepped inside and it was some time before they could recognize any of the people sitting there. The front seats, made of tarnished gilt with chipped edges and covered by worn faded velvet, were occupied as usual by the prominent personalities of the town.

  I was considered the most highly educated man there because I was a student of medicine. Everyone insisted on calling me Doctor. The people adopted me, so to speak, and looked upon me as something of a local treasure of which they boasted to the other towns. When they went to market, the women would say arrogantly to those from elsewhere, “Shut up, woman, at least we have doctors in our town.” And children at play stopped to stare when they saw me coming. “He’s a doctor, boys, a real one,” they’d say to one another. Adults followed me with their eyes and called blessings on me, and asked God to guard me from the evil eye and make me a joy to my father.

  So, being elevated to the ranks of the prominent, it was my right and my duty to sit with them although like most others who were educated I would have preferred to sit with the majority who were poor fellahin. Hagg Sa‘ad, God rest his soul, used to say of them that they were made of the rubble left over after God created the brainy folks from the soft clay of paradise.

  We would rather have sat with them, as I said, because there we could be more relaxed, and we did not need to put a strain on our speech or behavior as anything we said was sure to go down as holy writ.

  I was sitting in the corner near the entrance with some university students and a large number of date-palm clippers when a new group of people, who made it a point always to be seen with the educated, came and joined us. They were headed by Abou Ebeid, the orderly from the fever hospital who liked to have what he called “the medical corps” sitting together in one place. He too practiced medicine, in a way. He examined patients, and made diagnoses, and gave injections. He wore a clean white overall, a cotton gallabieh and a tarboosh, and I must say he looked smarter in that outfit than any of the rest of us.

  The last one to join us was Abdallah the barber who passed as a doctor too since besides shaving people and giving them haircuts he performed such things as circumcisions and bleedings and treated boils as well. When he saw us sitting anywhere he would give his shaving kit quickly to his assistant and order him to sit with it somewhere out of sight as though he wanted to shed his identity as a barber. Then he would come and join us with profuse greetings, most notably to me. “You have honored us, Do
ctor,” he would say. He was careful to pronounce the word “doctor” correctly with two short o’s to prove to me and the others that he was enlightened and that for this reason he had a right to claim affinity to the medical profession.

  We were sitting in silence, having resigned ourselves to the ugly voice of Sheikh Moustapha, the village Koran chanter, as it poured on us in flat tones that came through his nose. It didn’t look as if he intended to stop soon. Every time he reached a cadence we thought that was the end, only to be flooded with fresh notes while he craned his neck, and frowned, and placed his hand over his right ear and strained until we thought the veins in his neck would burst. Then he would let out such a loud wail that it pierced right through the darkness, waking the sleepers in the next village and making ours shake. The only person allowed to move freely during a funeral ceremony was the head watchman. With his rifle slung on his shoulder he sauntered about in the tent to show people that the law was present. Then he would dash outside to pounce on the children who had collected to watch the ceremony and look at the petrol lamps and the fascinating patterns on the tent, and he would hack at them with his stick.

  Finally we were delivered of Sheikh Moustapha’s voice and his chanting came to an end. The people rushed up to thank him for his reading with voluble invocations for God to guard him and protect him from evil.

  Soon after, the tent began to hum with the sound of voices as the various groups resumed their conversation in low whispers. We began to chat too, beginning with Sheikh Moustapha and what we thought of him, then we went on to gossip about the important people of the town and ended with recollections from Cairo. The fellahin could only look on and listen, keeping well out of the conversation. They followed our discussions, fascinated by the way we pronounced our words, while with their eyes they felt the quality of our zephyr gallabiehs, and closely examined Abou Ebeid’s tarboosh and my wrist-watch as it flashed about reflecting the light. The infinite admiration they had for us and their absolute faith in everything we said was clearly reflected on their faces. As for Abou Ebeid, every time we happened to meet he never missed the chance to ask me some question, invariably related to medicine. Since he gave treatment to the fellahin himself, he was anxious to show them he was a great man of learning who argued with the Doctor as an equal. He was always careful to drop his local dialect and affect the genteel accent of the townspeople, so as not to put himself on a level with peasants. His tone was bland and unctuous; the same tone he used when he imposed his services on people, asking for a little milk in return or a plate of okra beans in addition to his fee. Clients’ okra beans were always very good.

  He irritated me. I was doing my preparatory year for medicine that year. Most of my work consisted of dissecting frogs and studying worms, and I knew nothing yet about drugs or disease. From his long experience working in the hospitals Abou Ebeid had picked up the technical terms for a couple of diseases as well as the names of many drugs. He was discussing Hagg Sa‘ad’s long illness that night and how Dr. Hanna, the doctor from the central town, had failed to cure him and how he, Abou Ebeid, had prescribed “Seteromycin” injections and “Sulphata Yazin”1 3x3x5 (that’s how he put it) as well as M. Alkaline, and ordered him to abstain from food altogether. But the poor fellow was seized with a sudden longing for salted fish, of which he ate a whole pound all by himself, whereupon he expired. This drew a lot of comment, for the subject of fate and destiny was one which the fellahin were equal to discussing and which they loved to ponder on.

  “You don’t live a day longer than it is written. . . .”

  “God in His wisdom . . .” And so on.

  When Abou Ebeid got started on a subject nothing would make him stop, and he went on to tell us what happened after the man died. It was he, he told us, who got the burial license in spite of the obstacles the doctor was raising; he even got it after hours, he said, and if it hadn’t been for his clever handling of the situation the man would have remained without burial till the following day. I don’t remember how we got to leave him out of the conversation and confine it to ourselves alone. But I remember a discussion about the body and how long it could remain without burial. When the arguments died down, Abou Ebeid turned to me with a very serious expression on his face.

  “Tell me, Doctor,” he began. He too was careful to pronounce “doctor” correctly in order to distinguish himself from the fellahin who could never learn not to say “dactoor.”

  I turned to him, prepared to hear some silly question.

  “How long after death does rigor mortis set in?” he asked me.

  Everybody was terribly impressed by that expression, “rigor mortis.” Even the barber was astounded at Abou Ebeid’s learning. He looked at him with surprise and envy as though he begrudged him that much erudition. All eyes were on me now, waiting for the answer. I was most embarrassed for I hadn’t the faintest idea what the expression could mean. I gave a faint smile.

  “Why do you ask?” I said, stalling.

  “Well, you see,” he said with the air of someone throwing up a public issue for discussion, “I had a little argument today with Dr. Sobhi. You know, the chief medical officer. I was of the opinion that it set in within half an hour, while he insisted it was two hours. What do you say, Doctor?”

  I took on a knowing air.

  “You’re both wrong,” I said, “actually it sets in after about one hour.”

  I looked at the others and saw they were lapping up what I was saying, even though they had no idea what it was all about. There was a brief silence, and I looked at Abou Ebeid to see whether he was satisfied with the answer I gave. His eyes were on the ground, very politely avoiding mine.

  I knew that confounded expression of his which he put on every time he found me in a corner, so as not to embarrass me, as it didn’t do for a doctor to be embarrassed by a mere orderly.

  “I say, Doctor, what’s this . . . this ‘moris rigo’?” asked Saleh suddenly, screwing up his eyes.

  Saleh was a fellah, but he was only a hireling. I believe he belonged to the family of Abou Shendi. He worked in return for food and clothing, and perhaps a small share of the annual crop. His skin was the color of dust and he was so fearfully huge that people called him the Sphinx. I don’t remember ever seeing him smile, or with his eyes fully open. It was almost as if he looked with his eyelashes. They say his heart was dead because he never felt joy or sorrow or fear, and that he was the strongest man in town although he seldom displayed his strength, a little from modesty, and a little from fear of God. He spoke slowly as though every word were wrenched from him and he enjoyed the company of the educated even though he never joined their conversation. People knew he was a silent man on the whole and no one ever provoked him for fear of his mighty blows. He was never known to lose his temper, or grumble, or complain about anything.

  Had not the occasion been a sad one we might well have laughed at this sudden question. As it was, the Sphinx was only asking what everyone else wanted to know, and they all turned to me to hear what I was going to say. All except Abou Ebeid who was telling me with his grin that he could answer that one. I scowled, warning him to shut up.

  “Well, you see, Saleh,” I said, offhand, “the human body is a strange thing,” and I rambled on about how the blood circulated in the body, and what made the heart beat and I went on to describe several other functions. I paused to see how this was going down and whether they had forgotten the question. But Saleh screwed up his eyes again.

  “But what’s this ‘moris’ the Effendi is talking about?” he insisted.

  Abou Ebeid was still flashing his cold smile at me. “That’ll teach you,” he seemed to be saying. When he saw I did not answer Saleh immediately he volunteered.

  “With your permission, Doctor. Well, you see, folks, a human being is all filled inside with lime and iron and arsenic and mercuric chloride, and Markuro Cron . . . and as long as we are alive these thing
s float about in our bodies, but as soon as a person dies they sort of get stuck together in a lump, as you might say, like a mud pie, so that when you come to feel a dead body with your hands you will find it feels exactly like a plank of wood.”

  What he was saying was so preposterous they would not allow themselves to believe it until I approved. They turned to me and waited. I could think of nothing by which to refute Abou Ebeid’s learning, so I nodded, which they took for acquiescence. Only then did their remarks come, all in the same breath.

  “After all, a man’s nothing but carrion.”

  “By God, who’d have thought it?”

  “Why don’t you go and die, Saleh boy, so we can strew the barn with your remains, hey?”

  “Just be thankful for your daily bread, and the air you breathe, you bastards.”

  Abou Ebeid by now had certainly stolen the show. Everyone was looking at him with awe, as if he had the power to strike them all with rigor mortis. That was more than I could take, and soon I found myself declaiming on the subject of death and corpses with the air of an expert. I found myself telling them tales about what went on in the Faculty morgue and how we slashed at the bodies with our scalpels and how we gutted out bellies, although I had never been near a morgue in my life. They were all so entranced by my fabrications that they forgot all about Abou Ebeid and the funeral ceremony.

  Meanwhile a huge man had seated himself on the reader’s bench. He was wearing a caftan and cloak. I recognized him to be Sheikh Abdel Hamid, the local preacher. It must be admitted the man was very devoted to his work. He had made himself very popular, never failing to attend every funeral ceremony in the village. He never failed to occupy the reader’s bench either, the moment he had a chance, walking up to it with a staid and dignified air.

  “In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate,” he began. A deep hush fell on the people as they craned their necks to catch every word. They followed his sermon with great attention. He spoke in deep tones, every syllable loud and clear. Listening to his ringing voice and looking at his ruddy face anyone could see he was a well-fed man, and a glutton. There was no trace of care in his voice or evidence that he was burdened by wife or child. Surely a man destined for paradise in the world to come.