‘Shaikh Musa’s,’ I said. ‘Do you know him?’
‘No,’ he shook his head. ‘La.’ In front of us, half the road seemed to have dissolved into the canal which ran beside it.
‘I don’t know if we can go on for long,’ said the driver. All that was visible ahead through the shimmering rain-drenched windscreen was a small patch of road lit by the headlights.
‘How will you find the house in this darkness?’ the driver asked. ‘Everyone’s asleep — no one can show you the way.’
‘I know the house,’ I said. ‘If you stop where I tell you, I’ll be able to find it.’
‘How do you know the house?’ He was suddenly curious. ‘Aren’t you a foreigner? Why are you going there all alone so late at night?’
I explained how I’d been brought to Lataifa by my Professor at the University of Alexandria, but his nerves were on edge and the story only served to arouse his suspicion.
‘Why did they bring you here?’ he said sharply. ‘Why here, and what was it that you were doing exactly?’
I tried to reassure him as best I could, but my Arabic had become rusty in the years that I had been away, and my halting explanations only served to deepen his suspicions further.
‘I’ll come with you to the house you’re going to,’ he said, glaring into the windscreen. ‘Just to make sure you find it.’
‘And you will be welcome,’ I said, hoping that he was not one of those people who were disposed to carry tales to the police. ‘You will bring blessings with you. It’s not much further now.’
Suddenly I saw Lataifa’s little mosque on the left, through the driver’s window. ‘There,’ I said, pointing ahead. ‘Stop — I’ll get off there.’
He stamped too hard on the brakes, inadvertently, and the truck skidded across the wet mud and came to a halt with its nose poised over the edge of the canal. Climbing out gingerly, I stepped back from the edge, squelching heavily through the mud. When next I looked up I saw a slight, ghostly figure in the distance: a boy in a jallabeyya, leaning against a wall, under an overhang, watching me. For a moment I was certain it was Jabir and I almost shouted out aloud: in the reflected glow of the headlights he seemed to have the same blunt, rounded features, as well as the ruddy complexion of all the Latifs. But it took only that moment to remind me that I was thinking of a Jabir I had known eight years ago, when the figure in the shadows would have been a seven- or eight-year-old boy.
I shifted my feet awkwardly in the mud, and then, raising my hand, I said: ‘Al-salâm ‘aleikum.’ My tongue was suddenly heavy, weighted with an unexpected shyness.
“Aleikum al-salam,’ he said, responding in full. ‘Wa ra
matullâhî wa barâkâtu.’
The truck suddenly started up again and came to a halt between us, engine roaring.
‘Hey, boy,’ the driver shouted. ‘Who’s Shaikh Musa? Do you know him?’
The boy stepped forward and looked into the driver’s window. ‘Yes,’ he said, in the gruff, surly voice which the boys of the village kept for townspeople.
‘Where’s his house?’
‘There.’ The boy pointed down the lane.
‘Good, let’s go,’ said the driver. He stepped out of the truck and kicked his feet, to dislodge the long tentacles of mud that had attached themselves to his shoes.
‘Come on, yalla,’ he said, in irritation. ‘I want to talk to this man, this Shaikh Musa.’
Halfway down the lane the boy fell in beside me. ‘I know you,’ he said, smiling in surprise. ‘You used to come to our house when I was little and you used to walk in the fields when we were out picking cotton.’
I looked at him carefully, trying to remember his name, but of course, he’d been a child when I had last seen him, and at that time I was myself of an age when I had hardly noticed children. Before I could ask him his father’s name he came to a stop and gestured at Shaikh Musa’s door. The house was in complete darkness. I could not see so much as a chink of light behind the door or between the shutters of the windows. The boy saw me hesitating and gave me a nudge, pointing at the door.
Scraping the mud carefully off my shoes, I went up to the door and knocked. A long time seemed to pass before a voice answered, asking: ‘Who’s there?’ It was a woman’s voice and it seemed to echo all the way down the lane.
‘Ana,’ I said stupidly, my legs oddly unsteady, and that very instant Shaikh Musa’s voice began to roar—‘Amitab, ya Amitab, ya doktór, where have you been?’—and for all the time it took his wife to undo the latch he kept repeating: ‘Amitab, ya Amitab, where have you been?’ When the door was open at last we brought our hands together with a great resounding slap and shook them hard, first one, and then both together, and all the while he kept saying—‘where have you been all this time? where were you?’—but there were tears in his eyes now, as there were in mine, and so it was not until months afterwards that it occurred to me to wonder how he had recognized my voice when all I had said in answer to his wife’s question was ‘It’s me’.
The driver stepped up to Shaikh Musa and shook his hand. ‘So you know him?’ he asked with a nod in my direction, smiling a little sheepishly.
‘Yes,’ Shaikh Musa laughed. ‘Yes, we all know him here.’
‘That’s all right then,’ the driver said, turning to leave. ‘I just wanted to make sure that he reached you safely.’
‘Come in and have some tea with us,’ Shaikh Musa shouted after him, but he was already gone, stamping noisily down the lane.
Shaikh Musa’s wife ushered us into the guest-room, out of the rain, showing us the way with a kerosene lamp. ‘You sit here and talk,’ she said. ‘I’ll bring you some tea and food in a couple of minutes.’
Placing the lamp on a window-sill, she gave its sooty glass chimney a rub with her sleeve. ‘We hardly bother to clean our lamps any more,’ she said, ‘we have electricity now. It’s just fate that you should arrive in the middle of a power cut.’
‘Everything’s changed in all these years that you’ve been away,’ said Shaikh Musa. ‘All this time I used to say to myself, the doktór will come back one day, he will come back soon, everyone comes back to Masr; they have to, because Masr is the Mother of the World.’
His wife gave the lamp a final scrub and opened the door. ‘Do you know?’ she said, as the cold wind whistled in, shaking the flame. ‘He used to ask about you every day. “Where’s the doktór al-Hindi? Where is he? What is he doing?” Every day he used to ask.’
There was a long moment of silence when she left the room. Shaikh Musa sat on the divan with a leg crossed under him, watching the flame with a gently quizzical smile: except for a few wrinkles at the corner of his mouth, he was completely unchanged.
Then, raising his eyes, he pointed to a framed photograph hanging on the wall, an enlargement of the picture of his son Hasan that he had always carried in his wallet. ‘I had this big one made in Damanhour,’ he said. ‘In a studio near the railway station,’
He had hung it beside his own picture, taken when he was a young man serving his draft in the army. They were very alike, father and son, both in uniform, Shaikh Musa in a peaked cap and Hasan in combat fatigues.
‘You were away in Masr when he died,’ he said. ‘When you came back the mourning ceremony was already over.’
He looked down at the floor, fingering his worry-beads with the slow, deliberate gesture that had become inseparably linked with him in my memory.
‘All the officers came,’ he said. ‘The officers and all the soldiers in his unit. They all came and we had a Quran-reader from Damanhour. But by the time you came back it was all over.’
Then, unaccountably, his eyes lit up and he jumped to his feet and opened the door. ‘Wait a moment,’ he said, and hurried out of the room. He was back in a few minutes, carrying an ornamented box in his hands. Setting it reverently upon the divan he turned to me: ‘Do you know what this is?’