He washes for prayer and gets ready. The reciter ends the reading with “Believe in the Supreme God.” A quiet moment passes. We wait anxiously. The cannon at the citadel fires to signal that it is sundown. Its boom echoes from the radio and the megaphone. The sunset call to prayer follows. Father picks up the cup of dates and sips from it slowly. He takes a bite of a date. He spreads the prayer rug out over the floor. He prays the maghrib. Fatima sautés the mulukhiya. She brings the pan to the round table. She follows it up with a pot of rice and two plates. “Do you want anything else?” As he recites Quran, father raises his voice to drive her away. She says: “Okay. I’m going.” She runs out in a hurry. Father finishes his prayer. The light of the day’s end breaks up quickly. The electric lamp shines. He sits at the edge of the bed. I sit on the chair in front of him. He serves me mulukhiya with the ladle. He adds a piece of meat to it. I tear off a piece from the loaf of bread. I dip it in the mulukhiya. He serves himself. A complete silence descends over the alley. Sound of a spoon clanging against a plate. The sound is so close, it is as if it’s in our apartment.
All of a sudden, the alarm siren goes off. Voices from outside: “Put out the light.” I slide the chair back. I run to the light switch and turn it off. Darkness swallows us. Father stands up. He calls me. I answer: “I’m here, papa.” He reaches out his hand and takes me into a hug. We turn towards the balcony. We move close to it. The siren stops sounding. A total silence falls. He says: “Those dogs! The truce hasn’t ended yet.” He reaches his hand out to shut the door to the balcony. Then he goes back and opens it again. He says: “The glass could break.”
I move closer. The alley is swallowed in darkness. I stretch my neck to look up. The warplanes cut through the sky at a feverish speed. Two of them linger over a spot of light. They move away. All at once, they disappear. The sound of a faint and distant explosion resounds. His hand comes down on my shoulder harshly. He says: “Come back in here where it’s safer.”
He pulls off a blanket from on top of the bed. He crawls underneath it. He pushes away the old suitcase and spreads the blanket out over the floor. I do as he does. He gets down on his knees, leaning forward so his head does not hit the box springs. I huddle next to him. He wraps his arm around me.
I crawl to the edge of the bed near the door to the balcony. I stick my head out and look up at the piece of the sky that I can see. One of the stars fades away quickly. The ground defense searchlights gather together and try to catch it. Father whispers: “Where did you go? Come back here.” I go back next to him. We wait in the quiet. A ringing sound draws near. It gets closer and grows loud. Suddenly, it stops. I hear the sound of an explosion. The alarm siren comes on and off. My father switches off the light. Mother refuses to go to the storage closet. He begs her. She shouts back at him: “Is the closet going to protect us? Wake up, man. God is the Protector.” We sit in the living room. He takes me in his arms. The sound of cannons goes off every few minutes. A faint and familiar whistle. It gets closer and louder. It stops. A German bomb lands in front of the building. The glass in the window to the skylight shakes. The sideboard rocks forward. The mirror mounted on top of it falls off. After a while, the all-clear siren goes off. My father gets up to turn on the light while he mutters thanks and praise to God. Mother’s face is so white it’s scary.
I grab hold of father. He hugs me. He crawls out from under the bed and I follow him. We leave the room and go to the hall. We head towards the bathroom. He goes into the toilet. Water runs out of the tap in a strained trickle. He gathers up his gallabiya and leans forward. He presses the tap shut, and takes out a box of matches from his pocket. Strikes a match. The round circle of the toilet appears in the light. He raises the match up and climbs up on the stone base. I hang on to his gallabiya. He stretches out his hand and pulls me to him. I look away towards the wall. I close my eyes. I try to ignore the rotten smell of the toilet. I bury my face in his gallabiya. I listen to the sound of his breathing. My ear rubs against a piece of metal in his hernia belt. The sounds of explosions go on. He shivers. He shouts out: “O Gentle One, be gentle.”
I see after a while that the explosions have stopped. He loosens his grip on my shoulder. Silence starts to settle in. Then a long all-clear siren goes off. His panting settles down. We go out to the hallway. He turns on the light in the living room. We go back into our room. He turns on the light. He lights a black cigarette. We forget about the food and stand on the balcony. The children of the neighborhood come out carrying Ramadan lamps. Sameer carries a lamp with oval-shaped sides. Each side is a different color. Someone else has a lamp shaped like a football. I come back into the room and grab my lamp from on top of the desk. Its side panels are square. I open the main one and light the wick. I close it and it comes back open. I close it harder. I carry it very gently from the ring of tin at its top so I don’t get poked by the sharp edges of its base. I go out on to the balcony.
I watch the children as they chant: “Halloo, ya halloo! Ramadan has come, ya halloo!” In the middle of their chants, I can hear Samir’s delicate voice cutting through the others singing: “Wahawee, ya wahawee! eeyooha!” They’re coming out from deep inside the alley. They make it to underneath our balcony and one of them calls out: “O you fast-breaker! O you duty shaker!” Does he mean us? They pass on, further down the alley.
~ ~ ~
He prays the evening prayer. We put on our clothes to go out. He wraps his brown shoes, with the white tips, in a newspaper. He also rolls up the piece of brown cloth that we bought from the constable. We leave the house. We go out all the way to the street, passing in front of the sheikh of the quarter’s shop. There’s no one inside except Saleem, who stands behind the counter. We stop at the shoe repair shop. He hands over the shoes. The shoe repairman turns them in his hand and says: “The sole’s worn out. At the front and the back.”
Father says: “Put a piece of metal at the front and make it into a half sole.”
“Listen to my advice. Make a whole new sole. This is English. You don’t want to give it up.”
“Like I said, metal and a half sole.”
“Okay. Do you know how much new shoes are running these days, Bey? There’s a new American brand at Nasif for 68 piastres.”
“But it won’t last more than a couple of wearings. . American.”
He turns towards me saying: “Have you bought your shoes for the feast?”
Father answers before I can: “We’re waiting for the big feast, Inshallah.”
He heads for the wooden newspaper rack. He unfolds today’s paper and reads through the headlines. I press my head between his stomach and the newspaper. The king in his dark glasses during a visit to the military hospital comforts the wounded returning from the front. The king of Transjordan is with him. Behind them are the two princesses, Fawziya and Faiza, in military clothes. Fawziya is a three-star general and Faiza a one-star. The shoe repairman says that we’ve become involved in a war that’s none of our business.