There’s a warmth and a shadowy longing in my being, but in any case, each of us has his own lost paradise.
In the rooms attached to the house lived several families. Salih al-Naggar, an army enlistee, and his wife from al-Agizi. He was a womanizer and had a library, all of it religious books, and he hung a photo of himself and Sheikh al-Shaarawi facing the door. He sent many letters to the radio, asking the announcer Nadia Salih to visit him and tape an episode for the program From Someone’s Private Library. Across from his room lived Zinat, the wife of Hassanein the mechanic. She was a beautiful, shapely woman who spent her time in a slip, not caring that people could see her from the window. Salih would chat her up and she’d respond, “Not if you were the last man on earth” or “Not a chance, you clodhopper.” Hagg Ibrahim also lived in the alley with his wife and daughters, as did Umm Samra with her four kids and Umm Bisa with her husband the truck driver.
They lived in the alley as one family. When the crab peddler would enter with his basket on his shoulder, he’d leave with nothing. The women would gather around the catch and take it all. In the afternoon the smell of boiling crab laced with cumin would settle over the alley.
One afternoon, during the summer, Zinat got the idea to use the clothesline strung in the middle of the alley as a volleyball net. Three women gathered and took a plastic ball from a boy and started a volleyball match. Sheer joy filled the place, frivolity, fun, and heartfelt laughter—when I recall the scene, my heart hums. I was sitting on the edge of Umm Bisa’s windowsill watching the match, the other women doubled over in laughter in front of the doors.
When we hit puberty, the atmosphere in the alley helped us learn the secrets between men and women without fear or complex. The open life let us experiment with simple, harmless things. Honestly, it’s like the alley was lined with an intense sensuality. We observed sexual tensions from their onset, and we’d ask outright for a kiss or a cuddle. Some of us would furtively watch a woman undressing, and at night whispers would reach us from nearby rooms: the demurral, the negotiations, the small gasps, the consoling words after disappointment.
One day I was studying with the boys on the roof when Zinat came up to feed the ducks, wearing just a slip. Aroused, the boy Sayyid Uthman started whispering and biting his lower lip, pointing her out. I was sure she’d noticed us, but she didn’t look our way. Then disaster struck: she squatted to set out the food for the ducks, and you could see everything—she wasn’t wearing underwear. “Oh my God, she’s trying to turn us on!” the boy whispered. He started saying her name, sighing and shivering audibly as we laughed. But Zinat paid us no mind. She was talking to the ducks without looking at us. Sayyid Uthman couldn’t take it. He went and stood by the chicken coop, pulled out his dick, and started wanking. We laughed at his lack of discipline, especially when Zinat got up to go downstairs and looked at us and smiled.
That environment let us live an almost communal life. The doors were always open and you could enter any door and eat anywhere. In the evening, our living room would fill up with the women, girls, and boys to watch a soap or the program Songs from the Movies. There was no television in the alley save the one in the home of Khawaga Tadrus. The children would fall asleep and some of the women would head home, while one would stay with Umm Yusuf to divulge her sadness or fears or ask for advice. My mother would console, soothe cares, and quote bits of wisdom from soaps and films. The television bolstered our household’s status in the alley.
The day of the abdication in June 1967 I was young. The whole alley was in the living room, from the youngest child to the oldest men whom we virtually never saw except on holidays, since they left in the early morning and only came back late at night.
The television was in the living room. We couldn’t see the screen because of the daylight coming from the stairwell. My father got up and put a blanket on the door, so the rays wouldn’t reflect off the screen. He sat there angrily that day. When the president said that he accepted responsibility and was turning the country over to Zakariya Muhiy al-Din, the women wailed. He stood up from the couch and bellowed at them, and then said to Hagg Ibrahim, “What kind of talk is that? Where’s he going to go? He’s going to leave all these people?”
I didn’t understand the horror of it for people until my mother’s story about my father. He left the house in a fury that day and went to Shamhut’s place, where he drank a pint of gin. At the end of the night he staggered back. That was the only time in his life he ever did that.
My father always felt he owned the alley and was lord of the manor, but he was only home for short spells. Most of his time was spent at the exchange. But when the fog descended on his eyes—and after he closed up shop and went in with Fatin and her husband in the chickpea trade—he started spending lots of time sitting on a wooden chair, resting his chin on his cane.
In the morning he’d sit waiting for Fatin to send one of the workers or her sons to escort him to the display stand. Fatin was even more worried about her father. The streets were no longer safe and cars had multiplied and zoomed up the streets. Accidents were frequent. She had warned us all to take care not to let him walk alone, but the old man’s pride had not died. He’d wait silently for a long time until a certain moment came, then the alley residents would look over and find the chair empty. He had gotten up and walked by himself, putting himself in the Lord’s hands. He’d cross the streets with deliberation and vigilance, until Fatin would see him coming up Umar Saafan Street. Then she would run to meet him and chide him for not waiting for her to get him.
My father’s presence in the alley put a kind of brake on the open life. Even though the man couldn’t see well, his sitting in his chair for long periods led the women to seclude themselves a bit. Anyone who saw him like that, staring into space, wouldn’t believe he saw the world in shadows. He would sit silently in his place, moving his chair with the sun and recognizing people by voice and smell. His keen attentiveness made people doubt the blindness story. The young men would murmur that he could see but was faking it. He would fix his eyes on a person approaching as if he saw him or her.
In the alley my father became aware of details he hadn’t noticed before. He was shocked to learn that Umm Bisa kept company with the jinn and that the boy Tawfiq who lived on the corner was mad and beat his sisters. He smiled with understanding when he realized the appetites Zinat whetted in the neighborhood. He started following the goings-on around him, as if living among us for the first time. Salih al-Naggar took to sitting next to him and joking with him. They would kid around for a long time. Then the conversation gradually turned to religion. Salih imagined he could sway Khawaga Tadrus in matters of religion, until one day he silenced him, saying suddenly, “Salih, son of al-Naggar, you’re a charlatan!”
At night, the young guys would stand on the corner, talking and inventing various kinds of fun: who could drink a bottle of soda in one go, who could hit the lamppost with a brick at a certain distance. At that time, the bet involved catching the rats that had proliferated in the alley after the death of one of Zinat’s ducks. That was the moment my father’s mood soured. He wanted to be out of the house any way he could, for he feared nothing so much as rats.
In the evening, he’d hear Salih and the neighborhood guys hunting rats with a pellet gun. He gave a start with every shot. Their squeals scared him, and he was pleased with the small pops, hoping they’d be decimated. But he hid his feelings and cursed the youths. When he saw one, he’d damn him and his father for having no job and nothing to do.
“Each one of you is as big as an ox,” he’d say. “Go get a job. Why don’t you go to Port Said and buy some goods to sell?”
His dread of rats remained concealed, though it came out in his anxiety and his feeling that a rotten stench pervaded everything. He started bathing often and asking my mother to dab him with cologne. Then things came to a head.
One day he heard a knock on the door.
“Who is it?” he said quietly.
“Tadrus Bushra,” a rough voice said. “A summons from the court.”
He bolted off the couch for the door and reached for the lock, guided by habit. His dim eyes saw a huge rat swaying in the air. In a flash, his eyes comprehended the sight and transmitted