Naguib Mahfouz: Khan Al-Khalili

At the same time, we should not overlook another key factor in the father’s recovery, namely the role of the mother. When it came to keeping the family content, she possessed a number of estimable qualities. She was a beautiful woman; when she was young, she had attracted the attention of Cairo’s menfolk who clearly admired her looks.

By now she was fifty-five years old, and yet she was still comely and elegant, well made-up and colorful in her choice of dresses. Full-figured and well padded, there was just a touch of flabbiness about her. She knew all there was to know about cosmetics. Above all, she was known everywhere for her sense of humor, her funny stories, and jokes; no other woman came close to her when it came to making friends and telling stories. She had lots of friends, and would spend a lot of time welcoming visitors and visiting people. She would be gladly welcomed into homes by women, married and unmarried alike. That was how it came about that, when her husband’s tragedy struck the house, she was not really affected. When her husband was no longer able to provide her with the things she needed, other hands, those of her female friends, were glad to step in and offer her presents; all of which meant that she was able to keep herself well presented and made-up. She was able to stay one step ahead of her husband too; her gentleness, sense of humor, and optimism all combined to sweep away any residual feelings of sorrow.

“You’re done with the government, Akif Effendi,” she would chuckle, “so now you can concentrate on me!” “If it’s roses you’re after,” she would say as she toyed with his beard, “then you have to water the weeds as well!”

But in spite of it all, she still felt sad when she watched her husband bent over the Qur’an and her eldest boy at his desk.

“Why don’t you both teach me how to read?” she would yell at them, “so I can sit by you.”

The way Ahmad neglected his appearance made her furious. She used to rub her cheeks as though she were about to slap them. “You’ve made your mother feel old,” she yelled in exasperation, “and ruined her reputation! Get your scruffy clothes properly ironed and your beard nicely trimmed. There are all kinds of celebrations going on in the world, and all you do is sit there pouring over those yellowing books of yours. How come you’ve let yourself go bald and your temples turn gray? You’ve made me feel so old, so old!”

Ahmad would smile sarcastically at her. “You can slap your cheeks all you like,” he would reply to aggravate her. “But you’re in your forties, aren’t you?”

The brutal frankness with which he told her the truth horrified her. “Shut your mouth,” she yelled at him, “and watch that insolent tongue of yours! Has any son ever before dared to mention his mother’s actual age?”

For all that, her life was not without its sorrows. She was ill, or at least she thought she was, and yet no one around her showed any sympathy. As the years went by she became convinced that secret powers were at work and the only way she could be cured was through the zar ritual. Many times she had asked her husband for permission to hold such a ceremony, but Ahmad disliked the idea, even though he had no doubts about the existence of such spirits. At the time he could vividly recall his own experiences with the occult, something that had almost driven him mad. The mother had eventually despaired of ever convincing the two men and made do with attending zar rituals at the homes of friends.

One day Ahmad broached the topic. “Truth to tell,” he said in amazement, “our family is a genuine victim of the devil. Didn’t he tempt my father to be so insolent to that dog of an investigator, with the result that he lost his job? Then didn’t he tempt me to learn about magic until I almost went mad? And now here he is harassing my mother, and that’ll end up destroying us all!”

But — God be blessed! — Sitt Dawlat, Ahmad’s mother, managed to show her cheery side more often than the sorrowful one, and judicious use of henna managed to keep strands of gray duly hidden.

Ahmad found he could not concentrate on reading because the change in location made him edgy and nervous. For an hour or so he tried to read in a desultory fashion. The daytime din outside had died down by now, but in its place came an even louder, sharper kind of noise that soon turned the entire quarter into a kind of stage for popular drama like the ones in Rud al-Farag. The source of this din was all the cafés scattered around the quarter, where the radios would be broadcasting songs and stories at full volume; the noise was so loud that it felt as though the radios were in his room. The waiters kept yelling out the orders like tuneful chants: “Black coffee,” “Mint tea,” “More coals,” “Shisha!” Then there was the clicking of the backgammon and domino pieces and the voices of the players.

“I feel as if I’m right in the middle of a street full of passersby,” he told himself, “not in an apartment!” He asked himself in amazement how people in the quarter could possibly stand so much noise or how they ever managed to get any sleep.

He sat there on the mattress until nine o’clock, then stood up to get ready for bed. Turning out the light, he decided to close the windows before getting into bed. Even so, the noise still filled the room and battered his ears. He recalled how quiet the suburb of al-Sakakini had been at this time of night, and that made him regret the move his family had made. He cursed the air raids that had forced them to abandon their nice, quiet neighborhood. At the same time, it all brought to mind that hellish night when the whole of Cairo had been shaken awake; the very memory of it frazzled his nerves, and the whole thing was only made worse by the ongoing din from the street below.

On that terrible night the whole world had been sound asleep; the time was close to dawn. As usually happened in Cairo at such an hour, the sirens had started their dire, intermittent wailing. The entire family had got up; Ahmad turned off the light in the outside hall before going back to bed and his habitual snoring. Before this particular night Cairo had only ever experienced air reconnaissance missions; there had never been any anti-aircraft fire. This time, however, he could not get back to sleep; lifting his head off the pillow he listened with increasing concern. He could clearly hear the whining noise made by the planes; that was obvious enough. But this time it went on and on. There was no let-up; in fact, the noise intensified and came even closer, and that alarmed him. But there was one thought that managed to calm him down: the gap in time between the sirens going off and the noise from the planes was only a minute or so; needless to say, that was not enough for fighter planes to arrive since the usual interval in such cases was at least fifteen minutes. On that basis he assumed the planes were British; they were circling overhead to launch an attack. He waited for the noise to stop, but it went on and on, getting louder all the time; it almost felt as if the planes had selected their house as a focal point for their circling. The din was totally nerve-wracking.

He got up again, left his room and felt his way slowly in the dark toward his parents’ room.

“Are you both awake?” he asked when he reached the doorway.

“We haven’t managed to get any sleep yet,” his mother replied. “Did you hear something?”

“Yes, planes buzzing overhead. I heard them as soon as the sirens went off.”

“They’re probably British,” said his father.

“Could be,” Ahmad replied.

After sharing this opinion with his father he decided to go back to his own room. But before he had even made it back to his bed, his entire room was lit up by an incredibly bright light in the sky. It was followed by a horrible screeching sound and loud explosion that reverberated across the city of Cairo. In a panic he leapt out of bed again and, heedless of everything else, rushed toward the door like a madman. What made him panic even more were the bright bomb flares that were still lighting up his room; they managed to penetrate through the windows all the way into the interior of the room as though to direct the bombs right toward their intended targets. There now followed a whole string of powerful bomb blasts, each one preceded by that dreadful screeching noise. The ground shook, and the whole house kept rattling. The bombs kept falling one after the other, as though a fit of overweaning obstinacy was causing the sky to maintain this fiendish barrage.