Bahaa Taher - Sunset Oasis

Sheikh Yahya realized what was going on and stopped his speech, screaming to make himself heard above the din on the road, 'Sheikh Sabir, stop those madmen! They're the ones who'll bring ruin on us!'

I raised my voice too so that he could hear me and shouted, 'Could any ruin greater than that which we are in now afflict us, Sheikh Yahya? They're your men, so stop them yourself.'

Yahya went up to Sheikh Abd el Majid and, bending over him, started shaking him by the shoulders and saying, 'You know I can't run and catch up with them. You're a young man, Abd el Majid. Run and stop them! Tell them that we've tried that before and all it brought us was war, the gallows and prison.'

Abd el Majid bowed his head so that he wouldn't have to look Yahya in the eye and said in a voice I could barely hear, 'It's too late, Sheikh Yahya.'

Yahya straightened himself and stood, his eyes roaming over the assembled sheikhs. In a tremulous voice, he said, 'So you agreed on this before we came here. Am I the only one not to know? You decided to start with the district commissioner and then turn to Maleeka? All your consultations were, as usual, nothing but lies?'

He tried to shout but his voice failed him as he said, 'Even if I have to fight you on my own!'

No one answered him, and if they had, he wouldn't have heard them over the rifle shots and the shouts of the zaggala. He hurried, staggering along on his stick, trying to set off down the hill, but as he was preparing to descend, a sudden silence fell.

The firing and the shouts stopped and we all looked in the direction of the police station.

I stood up to look and I saw terror in the faces of the zaggala. Some of them came up the slope towards us waving in warning towards the south, in the direction of the police station, but before they could say anything a ball of fire burst in the air, distributing a shower of flaming sparks, quickly followed by a roar of thunder. The sheikhs leapt up shouting, the earth shook, the lean-to shuddered, its palm branches falling on our heads in fragments and dust, the shouting of the women rose louder even than the roar of the explosion, and the zaggala who had gone to attack the police station returned in chaos, pushing one another out of the way, not stopping to pick up those who fell, though some found the time during their flight to turn towards us and yell, as though we hadn't yet understood, 'The gun!'

The sheikhs were running around brushing the dust off themselves and coughing. When the row made by the zaggala had faded away and they had dispersed, and the screams of the women had turned to sobs, the sheikhs' terror subsided, though they remained dumbfounded as they looked at the round white cloud of smoke that remained unmoving between earth and sky in the place where the ball of fire had been, all eyes hanging on it as though enquiring what would happen next, while the smell of the gunpowder filled the air.

The answer was not long in coming. District Commissioner Mahmoud Abd el Zahir appeared at the bottom of the hill, riding his white horse and surrounded by a number of mounted policemen.

He paused for an instant at a point below the lean-to, put his horse to the rise, mounting it in two large bounds as though charging us, and then paused again and looked at us.

Without dismounting from his horse he said in a loud voice but in calm tones, pointing to the white cloud, 'That was just a warning, Agwad. Next time, the cannon will pound the walls of your town and your houses, with the results you experienced during the army's last expedition.'

He twisted his horse's reins to go back the way he had come but paused once more and shouted, 'Sheikh Sabir, I want the tax in full within a week. Inform me of the names of the families that refuse. And I want Sheikh Idrees and Sheikh Abdallah to come to me together at the police station tomorrow, after the dawn prayer.'

Then he left with his soldiers, the sheikhs remaining silent and I myself standing in bemusement. After I'd arranged everything! After fate had helped me with the disaster of the ghoul-woman! Even when this time it was between just the Egyptians and the Westerners!

My eye fell on Yahya, who had frozen where he was at the top of the slope, his back towards us as it had been when he left the group. He turned his head towards me all of a sudden, shaking it sorrowfully, before slowly continuing his descent.

As though addressing him, I muttered, 'It doesn't matter, Yahya. There'll be another chance!'

Catherine

Have all these things really happened since yesterday?

Maleeka came and we embraced and quarrelled and I almost killed her, and cannon fire resounded through the oasis, and then I became the ghoul-woman in her prison instead of Maleeka? Was that whole nightmare real?

An hour ago, Mahmoud issued his order that I was to stay in the house, not to leave it, and not even to open the door. He was in a hurry and wanted to go and I could hear the neighing of horses below our house, where his soldiers were waiting for him so that they could return to the police station after having fired the cannon. I took a grip on his arm, stopped him forcibly, and asked him to explain to me the reason. At the end of his tether and trying to free his arm from my grip, he said my life was in danger. The people considered me responsible for all that had happened since the ghoul-woman had left her house. I asked angrily, 'Was it I that asked her to come or was it she who broke into the house?' In fact, the original mistake was his. He was the one who threw Maleeka out of the house and made the whole thing public, and he was the one who threatened the people of the oasis, demanding a vengeance neither they nor I could understand.

He replied that what had happened had happened and I had to understand that the calm prevailing in the oasis after the firing of the cannon was not to be trusted. They were undoubtedly planning something now, so I was to stay in the house until he could find a solution. I screamed, 'I don't care about their threats and I'd rather be dead than live as a prisoner,' and he screamed in his turn as he pulled his arm away that I could die when I pleased but not here and not because of him or while under his responsibility. He left angrily, saying that he'd put soldiers in front of the house to stop me by force if I thought up any rash deeds, and I heard him lock the door from the outside.

Not an hour has passed, but the forcible imprisonment is choking me. I spend many days in the house, never leaving it — reading, or writing — but of my own choice. Now I have been deprived of my will. Mahmoud has become another Michael! And me? What have I become?

I couldn't summon up the slightest desire to do anything, so I gave up and lay on the bed, staring at the bedroom ceiling. What exactly was happening to me? Since yesterday I'd been blaming myself, and the image of Maleeka had never left me. If Mahmoud had hit her and kicked her, I had been on the verge of killing her. A bad end to a beautiful beginning.

I was delighted when I opened the door to her and my heart beat with joy when I saw her beautiful face, after she took off the cloth that was wound around it. She came forwards awkwardly into the room and started pointing at me and then herself. Then she took two small stone statues of women that had been wrapped and tied in a cloth and showed them to me, smiling.

I contemplated them with astonishment. Two statues, primitive but displaying in their sculpting a feminine suavity and flow most appropriate to a woman's form. Where had she come across them, and why was she offering them to me? I looked at her for my part, smiling enquiringly, and she approached me and pointed to the heads of the two statues, so I started examining them in amazement. One of them had features resembling my own, while the other's had hers. I asked her in Arabic, holding the statues out to her,'Who?'