“So is it true,” he asked her with a laugh, “that men are finished at that age?”
“Good heavens, no! But she has no rights to his pension if she marries him after that.”
“So when she marries him, she’s gambling on the fact that he’s going to die! And who pray is this judicious woman?”
“Tawhida Hanem told me that it’s the daughter of Yusuf Bahla, the perfumer. Apparently, she’s a genuine beauty, and in two specific ways, natural and artificial!”
As Ahmad pictured the aged monkey he felt sick. He was shocked that such a man could manage to attract beautiful women whereas he was a total failure at it. After all, hadn’t a woman — who wasn’t even beautiful — rejected his hand with the words, “He’s too old!”? He wanted to picture the beautiful daughter of the perfumer, but instead what came to his mind right out of the blue was that beautiful brunette girl with the honey-colored eyes whom he’d met in the hallway.
“Does the perfumer live in our building?” he asked, his heart in his throat.
“No,” she replied. “He lives in Bayt al-Qadi.”
He gave an inner sigh of relief, then wondered to himself which family the lovely girl belonged to. He only just managed to stifle a groan. At that very moment he remembered the eyes of the young boy, Muhammad, and realized that the place where he had seen them before was in those honey-colored eyes in the hallway! That’s what he had been trying so hard to remember. So, the young boy was the girl’s little brother; there could be no doubt about it! His heart gave a flutter, but, now that he had found a release from all his doubt, confusion, and shyness, he also felt a profound sensation of pleasure and relief. So powerful was his joy at this discovery that he was no longer paying any attention to what his mother was saying. She kept on talking, but he was lost in his own dreams.
8
In the evening he made his way to the Zahra Café again. He did not do so without a certain hesitation; frequenting cafés was not something he was used to doing, it was entirely new. His long-standing desire for cultural seclusion now found itself matched by his favorable impression of the café and its denizens. But for his desire to joust with Ahmad Rashid and lord it over the others, he certainly would not have found it so easy to abandon his normal reclusive habits. When he reached the café, he did not find Ahmad Rashid; when he asked after him, he was told that the pressures of work often prevented him from coming. Even so, the assembled company was by no means dull; both Boss Nunu and Boss Zifta, the café owner, managed to enliven it in their own unique way.
Ahmad Akif talked a lot and laughed a lot. He started enjoying spending time with people, and especially the more refined types; for him at least, consorting with such folk was just like someone who is dead tired surrendering to sleep. He returned home at ten, and spent a couple of hours reading; all the while the images from his new life were dancing in front of his eyes as he perused every line on the page (something he had never done in any detail before). Then he went to bed and fell asleep. He had no idea how long he slept, but he woke up with a start to hear a hateful sound. At first he did not realize what it actually was, then he did, and his heart gave a terrified leap. He jumped out of bed like a madman, felt his way into his slippers, and rushed over to the door. There he bumped into his parents, with a young servant leading the way.
“How do we get to the shelter?” his father asked in a quavering voice.
“I know the way, sir,” the servant replied for him.
The family rushed to the front door in total darkness and went out into the hallway, feeling their way down the spiral staircase. By this time everyone was awake, and the silence was broken by the sound of doors slamming and footsteps rushing down the stairs. There were anxious voices and nervous laughter. The caravan clung to the banisters and stumbled its way downstairs through the darkness, gripped by fear and panic. Ahmad’s family did not need their servant to guide them; the shadowy figures and sound of voices showed people where to go. Outside, the covered streets were just as dark as inside the houses, but the dim starlight made the other streets slightly less gloomy. They all felt the same as they had on that other hellish night — scared out of their wits; they kept lifting their eyes to the heavens whenever they loomed into view. They reached the entrance to the shelter amid a flood of people and went downstairs into the bowels of the earth.
They found themselves in a wide space; the powerful electric light blinded eyes that by now had become accustomed to the pitch darkness. The firm and well grounded walls and ceiling were enough to give observers a profound sense of relief. Long wooden benches were attached to the side walls while in the middle were piles of sand. Ahmad’s family made for one of the corners and sat themselves down, while other people distributed themselves on benches and in corners. There were not enough seats for everyone, so many people had to stand in the middle. At first everyone was scared. Neither the fact that they were together, nor the light, nor the solid walls were of any help in easing their intense anxiety. There followed a tense period of waiting, during which the looks in people’s eyes gave eloquent expression to what they were feeling inside.
“It’s 2 a.m.,” muttered his father, looking at his watch. “Same time as on that dreadful night!”
Ahmad was as scared as his father, or even more so. But he made an effort to appear calm. “That raid was a mistake. God willing, it won’t be repeated!”
Minutes passed in total silence. As time went by, a sense of security began to insinuate its way into the assembly. People started whispering and talking to each other. There was a lot of laughter, and people kept trying to reassure each other. Ahmad looked at the faces of the people next to them, but they were all strangers. Now everyone rushed to say something.
“They’ll never harm the place where al-Husayn’s head is buried!” said one man.
“Say, ‘God willing,’ ” responded another.
“Everything’s according to God’s will,” said a third.
“Hitler claims to have a profound respect for the Islamic countries.”
“Not only that. People say he’s actually a closet Muslim!”
“That’s not so surprising. Didn’t Shaykh Labib al-Taqi say that he saw in a dream Ali ibn Abi Talib — may God bless him — giving Hitler the sword of Islam?”
“Then why was Cairo bombed in the middle of the month?”
“That was al-Sakakini, the quarter where the majority of the inhabitants are Jews.”
“What do you suppose the Muslim peoples can expect from him?”
“Once the war is over, he’s going to restore Islam to its former glory. He will unite the Muslim peoples, and then alliances and treaties of friendship will be signed with Germany.”
“For that reason we pray that God will support him in his war efforts.”
“And he would not be victorious if his motives were not pure — our reward is ultimately a measure of our intentions.”
Ahmad listened to this conversation with a mixture of pleasure and disapproval. True enough, most of them were local folk, but even so it had never occurred to him that their sheer naiveté could reach such a level of illusion or that propaganda — if there were such a thing — had managed to achieve such a comic effect. In spite of that he was unwilling to deny himself the pleasure of this unconscious humor and would not have done so had he not spotted at that very moment his great rival, Ahmad Rashid, walking slowly past him. He jumped up, and they shook hands.
“I didn’t see you today,” Ahmad Akif said.
“No,” replied Ahmad Rashid in his dark spectacles, “I was busy studying a legal case.”