Father puts the yeast in the can. He stirs it. He tells her to wait three days and then give some of it to Abbas. He says the mixture is called “booza” and that it is good for the stomach and it will give him a buzz too. He says it will help him to get off the liquor. She bends over and kisses his hand: “Our Lord preserve you, Sidi.”
He tells her to move the pillows to the other end of the bed so we can face the balcony and catch a bit of the breeze. I smell herring being cooked. I ask him why they don’t just eat it. He says that it is the food of poor people.
I stand on the balcony. My eye is on the apartment of the bride. A pushcart comes into the alley carrying a big load of chairs and colored curtains like the ones that people use at memorials too. They are carried up to the roof of the building. Father lets me go out. I meet the children gathered around the door to the building. We go up the stairs to the roofs, then come down. The sun goes down and the mantle lamps are lit up. They test the megaphone: “Hello. Hello. One, two, three.” We crowd around the table with the wedding punch. We take the chairs in the front rows and they scold us and chase us to the back. We wait anxiously. Finally, the couple appears at the entrance to the rooftop. Hekmat looks pretty in her wedding clothes. The groom is shorter than her. . fatter too. He wears a black suit and a necktie shaped like a bow. They take their seats on a platform at the end of the roof.
The belly dancer arrives. Short and dark. The drummer starts reciting jingles from the films of Shakookoo and Soraya Helmi. The dancer goes away for a second and then comes back in a dance costume. Her arms are bare. I can see the top of her chest. We clap along. She dances to the song “The Postmen Complain Because of All My Letters.” She circles the wedding couple. She bends backwards as she dances. She puts her head in the groom’s lap. For a second, you can see the top of her thighs. She sits in the front row to rest. One of those sitting in the front gives her a piece of cardboard to fan her head and chest and shoulders with. I sneak between the chairs to get closer to her. I stand right behind her. I reach out and touch her plump arm just below the shoulder. I am expecting it to be hot. I am surprised by its coldness.
~ ~ ~
Dr. Aziz asks me: “How’d you do in the makeup exam?” Father answers: “He passed, thank God. The main thing is to not have to do it again.” Everyone looks at a plump woman wearing trousers on the opposite pavement. The lights from the shops shine down on her back and make clear the roundness of her bottom. The turbaned sheikh says: “See the old lady that has no shame. Everything’s showing.” The priest slaps his hands together and says: “The world’s gone to hell.” The turbaned sheikh says: “Do you think we lost in Palestine for nothing? That was a punishment from our Lord.” Refaat says: “Our cannons were blowing up in our faces.” Father says: “King Abdullah was colluding with the Jews.” Dr. Aziz says: “The Jewish forces expelled half a million Arabs into Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt and all Azzam Pasha can tell us is that they’ll burn in hell for it.” They laugh.
Refaat is suspicious. He says: “Was our loss in the London Olympics another punishment from God?” Abdel ’Alim says: “Thousands of pounds were thrown at our team and it all went to waste. We should give it the same name as the war, the Olympic ‘Catastrophe.’ Now they’re trying to say we’ll start getting ready right away for the 1952 Olympics.”
The sheikh offers the things he bought for the hajj: a cloth pouch for water to drink and to wash with and a wide leather belt called the kamar that the pilgrim wraps around his waist under his clothes to keep his money in. Father looks impressed by the new shirt that Refaat Effendi is wearing.
“Where’d you get it?”
“From Shimla for 58 piastres.”
A plump, dark man comes up to us. His fez is in his hand. His hair is thick and black. He has a huge head with a big wide face. Hajj Abdel ’Alim and Refaat Effendi stand up: “Please join us, Mandour Bey.” Father kicks me, so I’ll get out of my chair for him. Abdel ’Alim says: “Dr. Mandour is from my same village of Minya al Qumh. He was involved in the 1919 revolution.” Dr. Mandour is shy as he speaks: “Really, I was just a child then. I’d come back from school on a donkey. From on top of the Mathoubus Bridge, I saw a demonstration of effendis and fellahs together, chanting for independence and for Saad Zaghloul. The English soldiers came out of the police station and started to fire at them. That day, more than 100 were shot and many of them died. I went back to the village with the news. People gathered and grabbed their axes to go break up the government’s railroad tracks, but Othman Abaza, who was a pasha and the biggest landowner in the area, caught up with them and calmed them down.”
Refaat says: “Just the same, we’ll consider you one of the heroes of the revolution and vote for you to represent our precinct.” Dr. Mandour laughs: “That is if we even have the elections.” Abdel ’Alim says to the priest: “What about you, your holiness? Who are you voting for?” The priest says: “God’s truth be told, I committed to vote for Girgis Salih, the candidate of the Saadist Party.” Father says: “Me too.” Dr. Aziz says: “This country needs an election sweep that’ll bring in a new government.” Refaat says: “That’s not possible as long as we have emergency law.” Father says: “We need the emergency laws because of all these political assassinations and the war. If they let them expire and had elections, the Wafd party would come to power.”
Dr. Mandour challenges him: “So what’s wrong with that?”
“We’d go back to bribes and abuse of power.”
Dr. Mandour tries to control himself: “So, you, sir, believe that right now there’s no bribing and abuse of power going on?”
Abdel ’Alim says: “The doctor is right. We saw what the papers wrote about the Minya airport and the relationship between the politicians and the land owners.”
Dr. Mandour keeps going: “Besides, the Wafd isn’t just Othman Muharram and Fouad Serag el-Din. There are other members who are good, patriotic people. The important point is that this state we’re in now won’t do. Prices are going up every day. School fees are rising. The king goes to the automobile club every night and gambles. The other officials go to the tiro gallery to place their bets.”
The turbaned sheikh asks: “What is this tiro thing?”
“It’s betting on shooting matches at the Rifle Club.”
A breeze stirs up a pile of dirt at the end of the street and it comes down on us. Abdel ’Alim says that repair workers have been digging up the streets and leaving their dirt on the sides to be stirred up by wind and traffic. Then they start to level off the street with gravel, but without paying attention to how high they go, so that the street level comes up higher than the street that meets it, so they have to start the repairs all over again to make the street level with the rest of the neighborhood, and so on and so forth. Dr. Mandour says: “It is all to the benefit of the sub-contractors. They’ve become millionaires with guard dogs and servants collecting salaries that university graduates can only dream of.”
Refaat says: “It’s gotten to where we can’t even get on the bus because it’s so damn packed.” Dr. Aziz says that the companies being taken over by the government are losing lots of money. “Nationalization does no good.” Dr. Mandour starts to get worked up: “That’s what Aboud Pasha is telling people. The companies themselves are causing overcrowding. They’re making the drivers and the ticket collectors let on more and more passengers. They want to grab as much money as they can before they get nationalized, and then leave nothing but pieces of scrap metal that they call buses.”