We enter Hajj Abdel ’Alim’s shop and find him at a desk in the back, sitting under a big picture of the king. He looks skinny in his thick brown overcoat over his woolen robe. There’s a white kaffiyeh around his neck and he is wearing a fez. He lets out a choppy cough every few minutes. He pushes to his feet to greet father. Father seems short next to him. He puts our shopping bags on top of the desk and sits in the chair next to him. I stand between my father’s knees. In front of me, a poster hangs on the wall with calligraphic writing that says: “Credit is forbidden, and anger overridden.”
Father says hello to Salim, who stands behind a sales counter. He is wearing a gallabiya with a yellow overcoat that looks like the ones worn by janitors and office boys. He has a small woolen skullcap on his head, and his face is very pale. He answers my father in a voice that is cold and weak.
Abdel ’Alim says: “Young Abbas is all ready. Do you want to move the furniture tomorrow?”
My father nods his head to say yes: “It just better not be ruined by all the grease and butter.”
“Not at all. I put all your things out of the way.” He calls out: “Abbas! Where’ve you gone? You better not be dipping into that sauce of yours again.”
A dark, barefoot man appears at the entrance to the shop. His eyes are bloodshot. He’s wearing a dirty gallabiya and cap. He is moving slowly and he reeks.
“Move the rest of Khalil Bey’s furniture from the warehouse tomorrow morning.”
Abbas stammers: “I’m busy.”
Abdel ’Alim says with more force: “It’s a couch, two chairs and a table.” He turns to father: “And I found a nice maid living nearby. She cleans and cooks and takes her salary by the month.”
“How much?”
“Give her a pound.”
Father asks him about the man that has moved into the vacant room next to ours. Abdel ’Alim plays with the tips of his moustache for a while, then says that he is a police constable.
“Is he married?”
“No.”
Father asks Salim for ten eggs, fifty dirham worth of cheese, fifty dirham of halva, a box of Sheikh Al-Shareeb tea, a piece of Nablus soap, and a block of dark kitchen soap.
Salim asks rudely: “On your account?”
Father nods his head. Salim opens a large register and records our order in it, and father warns him: “Only fresh eggs, no rotten ones.”
“Yes, of course, only fresh. We have butter from buffalo milk too.”
Father shakes his head and asks for a pound of clarified butter instead. Salim asks in the same rude tone: “Do you have anything to put it in?”
“No.”
His brother yells at him: “Just put it in a glass jar.” He places our groceries in two paper bags, and my father gathers them up against his chest. We leave the shop. I ask him if I can carry one of the sacks. He tells me no because I’ll drop it. The reading textbook. Sirhan in the Field and at Home. He puts the eggs in his pockets and they are crushed. He tries to ride the lamb but it will not move. He drags the duck by a leash and chokes it to death.
We head back to the alley. I ask him why he didn’t buy butter. I like it with honey or molasses. I love the murta.
He tells me that Salim puts salt in the butter cones to cheat on the price, and that his brother Hajj Abdel ’Alim had warned him many times to stop doing it but it had not made any difference.
We go carefully into our darkened alley. We walk slowly. Weak light from the slats in the wooden shutters on the balconies. The blinds in the balcony of the house in front of ours are open, but the glass panels and the thin curtains behind them are closed. We stumble at the front of the house. We go up our couple of worn, broken-down steps. The darkened door to our apartment is to the right of the stairs that lead up to the higher floors. To the left, a black opening leads to the grocer’s storehouse. I try not to look at it.
He hands me one of the bags and says: “Hold tight.” He unbuttons his overcoat and pulls it to the side. Feels for the key in his coat pocket. He puts the key in the keyhole of the door and turns it. He pushes the door. I cling to his coat. We walk in cautiously.
He mutters a few times: “God protect us from Satan, the curséd. In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful.” He feels around with his hand until he finds the light switch. A weak ray of light comes from the dirty electric bulb that hangs from the middle of the ceiling. The light shines on a hall with a rectangular dining table. We stop in front of the door to the bedroom by the front door. Father takes another key out of his pocket. He leads me inside, and turns on the light.
He puts his bag on the desk, then turns his attention to my bag, gesturing to me as he takes it from me and puts it beside the other one. I sit on the edge of the large iron bed frame. To my right is the shuttered door to the small balcony. In front of me is the slanted wooden wardrobe. It rests on three wooden balls, each the size of a pomegranate, under its three corners. The fourth ball was lost during the move, so father put a small piece of wood under that corner. Still, the left flap would not close all the way, so it stays open a crack. A wooden clothes rack next to it, and the door is next to that. To the left, the desk is squeezed between the bed and the wall with the door.
He takes off his overcoat and hangs it on one of the rails of the clothes rack. Then he hangs his suit coat. On its buttonhole, there is a round patch that is bronze-colored and has the words “Quit Egypt!” written on it. He puts his fez over the top of the clothes rack, showing the balding top of his head surrounded by hair that is almost all white. He puts on a skullcap made of goat’s wool, camel colored, with a wide border turned up to its tip. He keeps on the grey woolen waistcoat with wooden buttons. He puts on his brown robe and ties it up with a thin red rope belt. He wraps a wide scarf, made from the same material as the skullcap, around his neck and chest.
I untie my shoes and set them down next to the door. I put on my slippers without taking off my socks. I take off my coat and throw it over the back of the office chair. I do the same with my sweater and my shirt, then I shudder from the cold. After I put on my pyjamas, I put the sweater back on. He grabs a canvas bag nearby on the desk and takes out a loaf of twice-baked bread. A small black cockroach hops out of the bag. I stumble back, away from the desk. He asks me if I would rather have cheese or halva. My eye is stuck on the spot where the cockroach crawled out. I say I’m not hungry. He says: “Shall I make you an egg with dates?” I shake my head. He puts the loaf back in the bag.
I start to get my school bag ready. I make sure I have my blotting paper and ink bottle. I notice he is still wearing his trousers and shoes. I ask him: “Why don’t you undress?”
He says: “I want to sauté the meat first.”
“Leave it till morning.”
“Then it’ll spoil.”
He bends over and pulls back the bed sheet used as a dust cover. Shoes, plates, cartons, and metal pots. Syringe for an enema. He grabs a metal pan. He looks around for its lid until finally he finds it. Then he leaves the room and I follow him. He takes hold of the package of meat and empties it into the pan. He heads towards the start of the dark hallway in front of our room. The toilet with its door hanging open and a sickening smell coming out. A large bathroom is closed, its door held shut by a wooden latch. A metal sink has a faucet mounted on the wall above it. He washes off the meat well. He walks to the kitchen at the end of the hall. He enters with me hanging on his clothes from behind. He picks up a box of matches and lights one of them. The light falls on the side of the wall covered in water. There is a wooden table with a kerosene primus lamp on it. He squashes a big red cockroach with his foot. He presses on the primus lamp several times, then lights a match and moves it close to the opening that lets the fumes out. The flame flickers. I grab on to him and blink. The beauty dangles the long braids of her hair from the window so that Hassan the Brave can climb them. Suddenly, the ghoul can be seen coming from far away. It is a big blur that looks like a huge bale of hair riding the wind as it covers wide spaces, kicking up dust and gravel around it. It stops under the window and cries up to the woman: “Unfasten yourself and let down your long braids; take in the ghoul from the heat, give him shade.”