He heard the voice of the muezzin from the top of the minaret, and the faithful chant curled up to him with tender trills. Yusef stood still and listened for a moment to the faraway cantillation, the words and sounds pricking his heart.
“Allah will punish you!”
He walked to his room, stooped and broken. All eyes were on him, and were then lowered once the door closed.
At that very moment, the front door opened and Victor barged in, wearing a bathing suit and sounding the battle cry of a savage.
25. BECAUSE OF A GAME
The yellow marble rolled on the carpet, heading toward the red marble, which was lying peacefully, unaware of its approaching fate. Crystal touched crystal — a tap. Robby jumped for joy. He’s never been a good shot, which is why any hit was a victory. Victor was a lot more skilled than he was, and Robby attributed this to his friend being a year older. The marbles in their pockets collided joyously with one another.
Outside, eastern winds grunted and the sun was veiled with haze, like an eye plagued with trachoma. David and Joseph were out practicing on the tracks. Emilie tried to dissuade them from going, due to the heat wave, but her husband looked at her with contempt and dragged his son along. Ever since his loss in the match, father and son had been working ceaselessly, with fervent zealotry. David maintained a strict diet and weighed himself any chance he had. Still, he did not lose any weight. Allah’s ways are wondrous and mysterious! His father was the one to lose weight. His cheeks were sunken, his hair graying, his eye sockets slowly turning black. Only the eyes burning with an alien fire hinted at the hidden treasures of raging life within this dead man’s skull. “David must win!” he repeated to himself, as if possessed. As if this were a matter of life and death. He barely spoke at home. His usual taciturnity became crushing speechlessness.
Grandma sighed and said, “Did you see Emilie? She’s so worried, the poor thing.” She liked Emilie and was sad to see her husband treat her so badly, all for that horse racing nonsense. Had Robby’s father not strictly prohibited her from interfering, she would have spoken her mind to Joseph Hamdi-Ali ages ago.
“What’s that Emilie got to be so worried about?” Madame Marika said impatiently. Once more, Emilie Hamdi-Ali managed to get everyone’s attention, as if the entire world revolved around her. “Big deal!”
“Wouldn’t you worry, Renée, if Vita stopped eating all of a sudden?”
“Vita, stop eating? That’s not a concern. He’d never give up food.” She burst out in fat-jiggling laughter. “He eats and eats and never gets fat. And I fast and fast and never get thin!” Another series of loud jolts. Then she said with contempt, “People are experts in making mountains out of molehills!”
“And over horses, no less!”
“She tried to get him to go see a doctor …”
“Did she?”
“You should have heard how he answered her. I’ve never heard him speak to her so rudely!” Grandma sighed.
“Those men …” Alice said with a heavy sigh, shifting her large behind in her seat. “Each and every one of them, without exception, is bound to suddenly lash out at you with the whip of his anger, and you never know why and what for … It’s so hot today … this girdle is killing me!” She looked around her, watching her friends as they formed a sort of wall of flesh to protect her from her husband Isidore’s hotheadedness.
“Only my late husband was different,” Aunt Tovula said unexpectedly. The other women waited on alert, not wanting to encourage her to tell yet another story they’d heard many times, and which always ended with a river of tears. But their efforts were for naught. “He never said a bad word. Never.” Already she was on the brink of tears. None of the women said anything. Any talk would only serve to prolong things. Even Madame Marika held back from making a statement such as, “Your husband didn’t have many chances to say anything to you, good or bad,” hinting at how in his final years he lived in Jerusalem, far from his wife and children, working as a night guard at the Anglo-Palestine Bank, where he died in the great explosion on Ben Yehuda Street. Once in a while, Robby heard about his aunt taking the train to Palestine to see her husband. She’d return full of stories and experiences, but with few keepsakes and purchases, as fit her meager earnings. She stopped making the trip in 1948, because her husband was no longer alive, and the border was closed.
“My husband never said a bad word about me!”
“He must have been an angel,” Madame Marika couldn’t resist, but Robby’s aunt was in her own world, staring out beyond her friends’ ridiculing smiles. Her gaze clung to the small, green, alert eyes of her sister, Robby’s grandmother. Her sister had also become a widow in the same year, 1948. Three years had gone by, the eastern winds kept blowing and their pain was slightly dulled.
The story of this unfortunate woman, who, years later, when she died in Israel, was described as not having known a moment of peace her entire life (which is a slight exaggeration), the story of this widow and her three daughters and one son, Raphael, is one of those Alexandrian stories that deserves to be told, and maybe it shall be, but our story is about the Hamdi-Alis, a family from Cairo that came to spend a summer of joy on the shores of Alex; Aunt Tovula’s story must wait, along with others, for its proper time.
The conversation is back on course: “What can I tell you, good women, if you haven’t heard Joseph curse in Arabic and Turkish, you haven’t heard proper cursing in your life!”
“And all because Emilie dared suggest he go see a doctor?”
“As I live and breathe.”
“And how did she react?”
“Locked herself in her room and cried and cried.”
The women sighed. Crying, tears, that was the only outlet for women in this world of men.
“In Arabic and Turkish!”
A riddle floated through the air: What’s going on with Joseph? His response was in no way proportionate to the scale of the catastrophe. It was clear that a much deeper crisis was taking over the old man. Something that touched his essence, his flesh, and was beyond winning or losing a race at the Alexandria Sporting Club. But who could think hard enough to figure it out in this heat and this dry air …
“Salem, salim idak!” Marika burst out with joy. “Bless your hands, Salem!” The servant walked in carrying a large tray with glasses of cold water and a plate of jam, snow-white and sweeter than honey, the kind Grandma called dulce blanco. Each woman enjoyed a spoonful of jam and a sip of refreshing water. Emilie and Joseph and the echoes of their drama melted away in all the chewing and gulping.
The only member of the Hamdi-Alis who continued with the normal course of life was Victor. No one thought of him or bothered him, everyone was preoccupied with David and his fateful race next Sunday. The marbles formed tracks through the rug. Sometimes they tapped one another, other times they overtook one another, working with a kind of secret regularity known only to them. In the dark coolness of the hall, the heat wave seemed faraway and unreal. The game went on, like a kind of ceremony, in almost complete silence. Suddenly Robby told Victor, “Your father … why is he taking this whole thing so hard?”