‘Tell me something,’ he said, shaking my arm. ‘Tell me, try to remember — were they, by any chance, carrying away our fodder?’
It dawned on me that Khamees was right: the girls had carried away armloads of fodder every time they ran out of the clearing. The reason for their cultivation of ‘Eid’s friendship was suddenly clear to me.
Khamees read the answer on my face, and at once, hitching up his jallabeyya, he jumped on his donkey.
‘That ‘Eid is going to ruin our whole family,’ he cried. ‘Those girls tickle him and tease him and he ends up giving away all our fodder — the fool, he thinks they like him.’
He struck his donkey on the rump, and as it trotted away he turned around in his seat to call out to me. ‘What that boy needs is a wife,’ he shouted; ‘we’ll get him married to one of our cousins — that’ll help him understand life and its difficulties.’
15
‘A COUPLE OF years after you left Egypt,’ said Shaikh Musa, ‘I heard some news about your friend Khamees and his family, and I thought — this is something the doktór would like to know.’
He paused to prod the embers of his shusha, and settled back in his divan.
A friend of his, he said, had stopped by in Lataifa one day, on his way to Damanhour. His friend was from Nashawy, and while they were talking about the crops and the fields, who had planted what and whose cotton was doing well, his friend had told him an amazing tale — a story about a recent event in his village.
There was a parcel of land in one of the village’s fields that was owned by one of the sons of the old ‘omda, Ahmed Badawy Effendi, a highly-placed civil servant who lived in Cairo. It was one of the few pieces of land that had been left to the family after the Land Reforms; a tiny fraction of what they had once owned, admittedly, but still a very large area in relation to the landholdings of the ordinary fellaheen.
One morning, quite unexpectedly the civil servant’s car was seen driving into Nashawy. Everyone was taken by surprise, because he very rarely came to visit the village: he was afraid of getting mud on his clothes, or so people said. But there was yet another surprise in store for the people of the village. When the car stopped and the ‘omda’s son stepped out, the people who were watching assumed that he would go straight to his father’s old house. But no: to their utter astonishment, he headed in the opposite direction — towards a tumbledown mud hut that belonged to the fellah family that had share-cropped his land for the last so many years.
Those members of the family who were at home were astonished when they saw the ‘omda’s son knocking on their door: it was years since they had last seen him, for he always sent one of his minions to pick up his share at harvest-time. But they threw their doors open and welcomed him in, and it was a good hour or so before he emerged again.
No one knew exactly what the ‘omda’s son had said while he was in that house, but everyone agreed later that it was something like this: ‘I am soon going to buy a new apartment in Cairo, insha‘allah (or perhaps a car), and for that reason I need to raise a large sum of money quickly. Pray to the Prophet! I have given the matter much thought, and after speaking to my children I have decided to sell my land. So, as law and custom demands, I have come to your family first, because you have worked on that land for so long, to ask whether you can raise the money to buy it. If you can, you will be welcome to it — everything good is the work of God — but if you cannot, I must tell you that I shall put my land on the market, with God’s permission.’
Now, it so happened that this family was both very poor and very large, and between all of them together they probably had no more than a couple of pounds in savings. But it was many, many years since such good land had been put up for sale in Nashawy, and they knew that they would never again be presented with such an opportunity. So they took their chance and said to him: ‘Give us a month, ya Effendi, to see if we can raise the money, insha‘allah, and if at the end of that time we do not succeed, you will be free to dispose of the land as you please, and we shall not stand in your way, by God.’
The moment the Effendi left, the brothers began to run around the village — even the youngest one, who was just a boy. They went from house to house, from distant cousins to far relatives, borrowing a few pounds here and a few piastres there. They sold their cattle, they sold parts of the house they lived in, they even sold their ploughshares, but on the day the Effendi came back they had the money ready and were able to take possession of the land. They were heavily in debt by this time, but still, from that day onwards they could be counted amongst the largest landowners in the village. They had realized the secret dream that every fellah inherits from his ancestors: they had succeeded in expanding their family’s landholdings.
‘That was six years ago,’ said Shaikh Musa, ‘just a couple of years after you left. It took only three or four harvests for your friend Khamees and his family to pay off their debts, and now they’re so well-to-do they’ve built a new brick-and-cement house on their own land, outside the village.’
‘What about Busaina?’ I asked. ‘What’s become of her?’
Her life had changed too, Shaikh Musa said, but not quite so dramatically as her brothers’. She had decided to set up on her own, with her two sons, when her brothers moved to their new house. She had managed to save a fair bit of money in the meanwhile, because she had become a seasoned businesswoman, trading regularly in the market in Damanhour. With her savings she had bought a little two-room house in the centre of Nashawy, right beside the square. People said she made her two sons study late into the night, and they were both doing quite exceptionally well at school, although they were still very young.
‘What about her husband?’ I asked. ‘The boys’ father?’
Shaikh Musa laughed. ‘He went away to Iraq,’ he said. ‘And no one’s heard from him for years.’
Shaikh Musa recalled the story’s ending later in the night, while talking of something else.
‘I forgot to tell you,’ he said cutting himself short. ‘There’s another piece of news about Khamees and his family: I heard it from Jabir.’
A few months ago, Shaikh Musa said, a large truck had driven past Lataifa, piled high with suitcases and cardboard boxes, of the kind that were used for television sets and such like. It took just one glance at that truck to see that somebody had returned from Iraq, or the Gulf, or some place like that, having made a lot of money. Jabir had seen the truck go past from a window in his house, and had gone off at once to make inquiries about who it was that had driven past in such state. He’d soon discovered that the returning hero was none other than Khamees’s brother, ‘Eid.
‘Do you remember him?’ said Shaikh Musa. ‘You mentioned him sometimes, when you were living in Nashawy. He was a little boy then, of course, but now he’s taller than any of his brothers.’
‘Eid had been away in Saudi Arabia for some three or four years, and had done very well for himself, working in construction. He had come home with a colour television set, a fridge, a washing-machine, and many other things of that kind. On top of that, he had also saved a lot of money and was soon going to buy his family a new tractor.
‘And not long ago,’ said Shaikh Musa, ‘we heard that ‘Eid is soon to be married. He is going to pay a large sum of money as a marriage-payment, and he’s going to have an educated wife. Can you imagine! And him a Jammal, and an unlettered fellah!’
Shaikh Musa shook his head in wonderment.
‘He’s marrying a Badawy girl,’ he said. ‘They say it’s a real love-match, and the two of them have been waiting for years.’