‘I don’t know about all that,’ Zaghloul said stubbornly. ‘What I want to know is whether they have ghosts in his country like we do.’
‘What ghosts?’ Ustaz Sabry exploded. ‘These ghosts you talk about, these ‘afârît, they’re just products of your own imagination. There are no such things, can’t you see? What’s the use of asking him about ghosts, what can he tell you? People imagine these things everywhere; in India just as here, there are people who think they see ghosts, and in England and Europe too there are people who point to certain houses and say, “This house is haunted, the ghost of Lord So-and-So walks here at night.” But all these things are purely imaginary — no such beings exist.’
‘Imaginary!’ cried the weaver. ‘What do you mean imaginary? How can something be imaginary if someone sees it with his own eyes, right in front of his face?’
‘Have you ever seen such a thing?’ Ustaz Sabry shot back.
A dreamy look came into the weaver’s faraway eyes. ‘No,’ he said, ‘but listen to me, I’ll tell you something: my father saw a female ghost once, an ‘afrîta, at night as he was walking past the graveyard. He never went that way at night again, by God. Why, and just the other day my neighbour’s wife saw a ghost running down the road near the canal, wrapped in a blanket. I can even tell you whose ghost it was; but only if you want to know.’
‘Who was it?’ someone asked.
‘It was Fathy, the Sparrow,’ he announced triumphantly. At once, two of the men sitting next to him recoiled in horror, and began to whisper the Fatiha and other protective prayers.
‘Do you mean,’ I said, ‘the man who was killed at the mowlid in Nakhlatain — a few months ago?’
‘Yes,’ said Zaghloul, ‘on God’s name, it was him, the Sparrow, who was knocked off a swing and killed at the mowlid. They’re saying his ghost has come back to haunt us because his kinsmen were too weak to start a feud or to get the murderer’s lineage to pay the proper blood-money.’
At this Ustaz Sabry and one of the college students immediately took issue with him. There was no question of a blood feud, Ustaz Sabry said. The man’s death had been proved to be accidental — there had been a police inquiry and the matter had been settled. Feuds and vengeance killings were things of the past; nowadays it was the government’s job to deal with crimes and murders.
‘The world is wide,’ said Zaghloul, ‘and with prayers to the Prophet, God have mercy on him, I’ll tell you something and you give it mind: something wasn’t right about how the whole business of the Sparrow’s death was handled. The elders of the killer’s family should have gone to the elders of the Sparrow’s family, and said to them: Let us sit together and read the Quran and reach an agreement, insha‘allah. And while they were sorting things out, the killer should have sought sanctuary somewhere else. But instead there he was, walking freely about, showing no respect for the dead man’s rights.’
‘But it was an accident,’ said Ustaz Sabry. ‘The matter went to the police and it was settled, and that was that, khalas.’
‘God fortify you, ya Ustaz,’ the weaver said, deferential but obstinate. ‘You know many things we don’t, but something must be wrong, otherwise why is the Sparrow’s ghost appearing to so many people?’
Ustaz Sabry clapped his hands to his temples in despair.
‘This happens every time,’ he said to me. ‘Whenever there’s an accidental death the talk turns to ghosts and jinns. A few years ago the whole village was gripped by a panic when a boy fell off a roof and died, during the Nashawy mowlid.’
‘Does the doktór al-Hindi know about our mowlid?’ Zaghloul said eagerly, with a glance in my direction. ‘That is a story he should be told.’
Later, when I got to know Zaghloul better, I discovered that besides being very fond of stories, he had a manner of telling them that was marvellously faithful to the metaphorical resonances of his chosen craft. I would often come upon him out in the fields, squatting on his haunches, with his eyes fixed on his hands in an absent, oddly melancholy gaze, spinning yarn, and waiting for someone to talk to. He was, in fact, much better at telling stories than at weaving, for the products of his loom tended to look a bit like sackcloth and never earned him anything more than a generous measure of ridicule. Zaghloul himself had no illusions about the quality of his cloth: he was overcome with shock, for instance, when I asked him to make me a couple of scarves to take back as mementoes. ‘You’re laughing at me,’ he said, ‘you want to use my cloth to show your people that the fellaheen of Egypt are backward and primitive.’
His wife was even more astonished than he, especially when she discovered that I intended to pay for the scarves. ‘Can’t you take him too?’ she said, bursting into laughter. ‘To show him off to your people?’ Later, I discovered that there was a festering bitterness between them that sometimes exploded into ugly quarrels; Zaghloul would threaten to divorce her and marry again, while she retaliated with the taunt—‘Do you think anyone would marry you, you shrivelled old man? You’re the old man of the village, the ‘ajûz al-balad, no one will have you.’ It was probably because of these scenes that Zaghloul spent an inordinate amount of time out on the fields, and was always glad to have an audience for his stories.
‘The doktór doesn’t know the story of Sidi Abu-Kanaka,’ Zaghloul announced to the room, and then, leaning back on the divan he took a deep, satisfied puff of his shusha and began at the beginning.
The story was an old one, he said; even when he was a child there were very few people alive who had witnessed the events of that time, and they too had never seen Sidi Abu-Kanaka in the flesh: he had died long before they were born. But everyone knew of him of course, for he had achieved great renown in his lifetime. He was universally mourned when he died and the villagers had even built him a special grave in their cemetery.
Many years later, long after Sidi Abu-Kanaka’s death, when the land around Nashawy had become green and thickly populated, the government decided that the time had come to build a canal to serve the farmers of the area. The work began soon enough and the canal proceeded quickly, past Lataifa, all the way down the road, and everyone was glad, for the area had long needed better irrigation. But when the canal reached Nashawy the villagers discovered that a calamity was in the offing, for if it went ahead as the engineers had planned, it would go directly through their cemetery. Everybody was horrified at the thought of disturbing the dead and the elders of the village went to see the government authorities to beg them to change the route. But their complaints only made the effendis impatient; they shut their doors upon the village shaikhs, saying that the canal would have to go on in a straight line, just as it was drawn in the plan.
So the villagers had watched with heavy hearts as the canal ploughed through their graveyard. Then one morning the workmen, to their utter astonishment, came upon a grave that would not yield to their spades; they hammered at it, for days and days, all of them together, but the grave had turned to rock, and no matter how hard they tried they couldn’t make the slightest dent in it. When all their efforts failed, the engineers and the big effendis tried to do what they could, but it was to no purpose — they still weren’t able to make the least impression on the tomb. At last, realizing that their efforts were in vain, they spoke to the village shaikhs, and upon learning that it was the tomb of Sidi Abu-Kanaka that had thwarted them, they went to his descendants and begged them to open the vault if they could.
‘By all means,’ the Sidi’s grandson said, ‘we are at your service,’ and at his touch the tomb opened quite easily. Then all the people who had gathered there saw for themselves, what they would never have believed otherwise: that the Sidi’s body was still whole and incorrupt, and that instead of being affected by the decay of time, it was giving off a beautiful, perfumed smell.