Palace Walk

13

Yasin threw himself down on the first chair he found. His strength seemed to have given out and he looked somber. He called the waiter and ordered a carafe of cognac in a tone that showed his patience was exhausted. The bar was just a room with a large lantern hanging from the ceiling. Wooden tables with rattan chairs were lined up along the sides. The patrons sitting there included rustic types, workers, and gentlemen. In the center of the room directly under the lantern, pots of carnations were grouped together.

It was strange that he had not forgotten the man and had recognized him at first glance. When was the last time he had seen him? He could not be sure, but most probably he had set eyes on him only twice during the past twelve years, the second time being the encounter that had just shaken him. The man had changed. There was no doubt about it. He had turned into a dignified, sedate old man. If God had only forbidden the blind coincidence that had brought them together… His lips curled in disgust and resentment. He felt he was swallowing a bitter humiliation. How degrading and demeaning! He would hardly recover, with pain and perseverance, from his anguish before it was resurrected by some repressed memory or cursed chance encounter like today's. Once again he would be abased, broken… lost. In spite of himself, he thought back over the odious past, with all the force of the strife lying behind it.

The darkness drew back to reveal the ugly apparitions that frequently grasped at him like emblems of torment and loathing. Among them he could make out the fruit store at the head of the cul-de-sac called the Palace of Desire, or Qasr al-Shawq. An image with blurred features came to him. It was himself as a boy. He saw the boy hurrying to the shop where that same man greeted him and brought him a bag filled with oranges and apples. Joyfully he took it back to the woman who had sent him and was waiting for him… to his mother, not someone else, alas. The memory made him frown with rage and anguish. Then he recalled the image of the man. He asked himself apprehensively whether that man could possibly recognize him if he saw him. Would he recognize in him the small boy he had once known as that woman’s son? A tremor of alarm passed through him. His towering, bulky body seemed to fade and dwindle until he sensed it had become nothing at all.

At that point the carafe and glass were brought. He poured out some cognac and drank greedily and nervously. He was in a hurry to reap the drinker’s share of refreshment and forgetfulness, but suddenly his mother’s face appeared to him from the depths of the past. He could not keep himself from spitting. Which should he curse: fate, which made her his mother, or her beauty, which caused so many men to fall in love with her and enveloped him in disasters? It was beyond his power to change anything destined to befall him. All he could do was submit to the divine decree that mauled his self-esteem. After everything he had endured, it was surely unjust to expect him to make amends for what fate had decreed, as though he were the sinful offender. He did not know why he deserved that curse.

There were many children like him raised by divorced mothers. Unlike many of them, he had found with his mother pure affection, boundless love, and abundant fondling unrestrained by a father’s control. He had enjoyed a happy childhood based on love, tenderness, and gentleness. He could still remember many things about the old house in Qasr al-Shawq, like its roof, which overlooked countless other ones. Minarets and domes were visible from it in all directions. Its enclosed balcony looked down on al-Gamaliya Street, where night after night wedding processions passed, lit by candles and flanked by toughs. Most would lead to brawls in which cudgels were wielded and blood flowed.

In that house he had loved his mother in a way that could not be surpassed. In it an obscure doubt had crept into his heart. There the first seeds of a strange aversion had been cast into his breast, the aversion of a son for his mother. These seeds were destined to grow and mature until they changed in time into a hatred like a chronic disease. He had often told himself that if a person had a strong enough will he might be able to carve out more than one future, but no matter how strong his will he could never have more than one inescapable and unavoidable past.

Now he asked himself, as he had frequently before, when he had realized that he and his mother were not alone. It was unlikely that he had known with any certainty. All he could remember was that at one point in his childhood his senses had noted with disdain a new person who intruded on the household from time to time. Perhaps he, Yasin, had looked at him skeptically and somewhat fearfully. The man had probably done everything in his power to amuse and please him.

He gazed back into the past with intense hatred and revulsion but found he could not fight it off. His past was like a boil he wished he could ignore, while his hand could not keep from touching it every now and then. Moreover, there were matters he could not possibly forget. In a certain place, at a time between daylight and darkness, from beneath the upper window or through a dining-room door with red and blue triangles of glass-in that place he remembered he had suddenly beheld, in circumstances corroded by forgetfulness, the intruder assaulting his mother. He had not been able to keep himself from screaming from the depths of his heart. He had howled and wept until the woman came to him, clearly disturbed. She had attempted to put his mind at rest and calm him down.

At that point the train of his thoughts was cut short by his intense resentment. He looked around him despondently. Then he filled his glass from the carafe and drank. When he set the glass back down he noticed a drop of liquid on the edge of his jacket. He thought it was wine and took out his handkerchief. He started patting the spot. Checking on a hunch, he examined the outside of the glass and saw drops of water clinging to it near the bottom. He surmised it was water and not wine that had fallen on his coat and thus regained his composure. But what a deceptive composure it was! His mind’s eye had returned to the odious past.

He did not remember when the incident in question had taken place or how old he had been at the time. He did remember quite certainly that the seducer kept on coming to the old house and had frequently tried to ingratiate himself with Yasin by giving him sweet and tasty fruit. After that, he had seen the man in his fruit store at the head of the alley when his mother brought him along with her to run an errand. With childish innocence he had pointed the man out to her. She had dragged him forcefully away and forbidden him to point at the man. Thus Yasin learned to pretend not to know him when his mother was with him on the street. This incident had made the man seem even more mysterious and incomprehensible to him. She had also cautioned him against mentioning the man in the presence of an elderly uncle who was still alive at that time and who visited them occasionally. He had heeded her warning and become even more apprehensive.

Fate had not been satisfied with that. If the man had not visited the house for several days, his mother would send the boy to invite him to come "tonight". The man would receive him graciously and fill a bag with apples and bananas. He would give the boy his acceptance or apologies, as the case might be. It got to the point that when Yasin wanted some tasty fruit he would ask his mother’s permission to go to the man to invite him for "tonight". When he remembered this, his forehead broke out in a sweat from shame, and he exhaled in annoyance. Then he poured some cognac and swallowed it.

Slowly the fiery intoxication spread through his system and began to play its magical role in helping him bear his troubles. "I've said a thousand times I've got to leave the past buried in its grave. It’s no use. I don't have a mother. My stepmother, who is tender and good, is all the mother I need. Everything’s fine except for an old memory I can get rid of. I wonder why I allow it to persist with me and exhume it time after time. Why? It was just bad luck which plunked that man in front of me today. He’s destined to die one day! I wish a lot of men would die. He’s not the only one".

Although his intellect forbade it, his rebellious imagination continued the journey through his gloomy past. Now he felt more relaxed about it. Indeed, there was not much more to the story itself. The rest of it differed from the beginning, perhaps, and seemed relatively bright after the dark period he had endured as a young child. This improvement came in the few years preceding his transfer to his father’s custody. Then his mother had summoned up the courage to tell him openly that the fruit merchant had been visiting her in hopes of marrying her. She had hesitated to accept him and probably would refuse him for Yasin’s sake. How much truth was there to what he had been told? It would be absurd to put too much faith in the details of his memories, but he had certainly attempted to understand and comprehend. He had been afflicted with an obscure doubt, revealing itself to the heart rather than the intellect. He had suffered enough distress to scare away the dove of peace and prepare the earth of his soul to receive the seed of the revulsion, which in time had grown to maturity.

When he was nine, he had been transferred to his father’s custody. Before that, his father had only seen him a limited number of times, to avoid friction with Yasin’s mother. When he came to his father’s house as a boy he was ignorant even of the most elementary forms of knowledge and had to make up for the ill effects of his mother’s excessive pampering. He hated learning and had little willpower to help him. Had it not been for the ferocity of his father and the pleasant atmosphere of his new home he would not have succeeded in obtaining the primary certificate even when he was over nineteen.

As he grew older and grasped the facts of life, he paraded in review his life in his mother’s house and examined it from different perspectives, using his new expertise to cast a glaring light on it. Then the bitter and repugnant realities were revealed to him. Whenever he took a step forward in life, he found the past was like a poisoned weapon attacking him and his dignity from within.

At first his father had tried to ask him about life in his mother’s home. Even though he was young, he had abstained from digging up the sad memories. His wounded pride defeated both a desire to arouse his father’s interest and the love of chattering characteristic of small boys. He kept silent until he received strange news about his mother’s marriage to a coal merchant in the Mubayyada region of al-Gamaliya. Then the boy wept for a long time. His anger was more than he could bear, and he burst out and told his father about the fruit merchant whose offer of marriage his mother had claimed, one day, she had refused for Yasin’s sake.

His link to her had been severed at that time, eleven years ago. He knew nothing about her except what his father related from time to time, like her divorce from the coal merchant after two years of marriage to him. Then she had married a master sergeant the year later. After about two years she was divorced again, and so forth and so on.

During the lengthy separation, the woman had frequently endeavored to see him. She would send someone to his father to ask his permission for their son to visit her, but Yasin rejected her invitations with intense distaste and revulsion, even though his father advised him to be conciliatory and forgiving. The truth was that he held a fierce grudge against her that rose from the very core of his wounded heart. He closed the door of forgiveness and pardon on her and barricaded it with anger and hatred. He believed he was not being unjust to her. He had simply set her down at the level to which her activity had lowered her.

"A woman. Yes, she’s nothing but a woman. Every woman is a filthy curse. A woman doesn't know what virtue is, unless she’s denied all opportunities for adultery. Even my stepmother, who’s a fine woman-God only knows what she would be like if it weren't for my father".

His thoughts were interrupted by a man’s voice which rang out: "Wine has nothing but benefits. I'll cut off the head of anyone who disagrees. Hashish, dope, and opium are very harmful, but wine is full of benefits".

"What are its benefits?" his companion asked.

"Its benefits! What a strange question!" the man replied incredulously. "Everything about it is beneficial, as I told you. You know this. You believe it…"

The companion said, "But hashish, opium, and other narcotics are also beneficial. You ought to know this and believe it. Everyone says so. Are you going to oppose this popular consensus?"

The first man hesitated a little. Then he observed, "Everything’s beneficial, then. Everything. Wine, hashish, opium, narcotics, and whatever comes along".

His companion retorted in a victorious tone, "But wine is forbidden by Islam".

The man said angrily, "Is that all you can come up with? You should give alms righteously, go on pilgrimage, feed the poor. The opportunities for atonement are plentiful, and a good deed is worth ten others".

Yasin smiled with relief. Yes, at last he was able to smile. "Let her go to hell and take the past with her. I'm not responsible for any of it. Every man gets some dirt on him in this life. Anyone who could pull back the curtain would get an eyeful. The only thing that interests me is her real estate: the store on al-Hamzawi, the residence in al-Ghuriya, and the old house in the Palace of Desire. I swear to God that if I inherit all of it one day, I'll have no qualms about praying God to be compassionate to her… Oh… Zanuba, I almost forgot about you, and only the devil could make me forget you. It was a woman who tormented me, and it’s with a woman that I seek consolation. Oh, Zanuba, I didn't know until today that under your clothes you have such a fair complexion… Ugh, I need to erase this thought from my head. The truth is that my mother’s an aching molar that won't stop hurting till it’s pulled".