Palace Walk

57

They stayed on the roof until shortly before noon. The two older brothers entertained themselves by observing the small British encampment. They saw that some of the soldiers had set up a field kitchen and were preparing food. Soldiers were scattered between the intersections of Qirmiz Alley and al-Nahhasin with Palace Walk in an area otherwise deserted. From time to time many would fall into line at a signal from a bugle. Then they would get their rifles and climb into one of the vehicles, which would carry them off toward Bayt al-Qadi. This suggested that demonstrations were underway in nearby neighborhoods. Fahmy watched them line up with a pounding heart and flaming imagination.

When the two older brothers finally went downstairs to the study they left Kamal alone on the roof to amuse himself as he saw fit. Fahmy got his books to review what he had missed during the past days. Yasin selected Abu Tammam’s medieval collection of Arabic poetry, called "al-Hamasa", and Jurji Zaydan’s historical romance "The Maiden of Karbala" and went out to the sitting room. He was counting on these books to help pass the time, which accumulated as plentifully behind the walls of his prison as water behind a dam. Although novels, including detective stories, had the greatest hold over his affections, he was also fond of poetry. He did not like to exert himself too much when he learned a poem. He was content to understand the parts that were easy to grasp and to enjoy the music of the difficult sections. He rarely referred to the margin of the page packed with glosses. He might memorize a verse and recite it, even though he understood very little of its meaning. He might ascribe a meaning to it that bore almost no relationship to the real one or not even try to attribute a meaning to it. Nevertheless, certain images and expressions settled in his mind. He considered them a treasure to brag about and exploit determinedly when appropriate and even more often when not. If he had a letter to write, he prepared for the assignment as though he were a novelist and crammed it full of any resounding expressions he could recall, inserting whatever remnants of the poetic heritage of the Arabs God allowed him to remember. Yasin was known among his acquaintances as eloquent, not because he really was but because the other men fell short of his attempts and were stunned by his unusual accumulation of knowledge.

Until that time, he had never experienced such a long period of enforced idleness, deprived of all forms of activity and amusement for hour after hour. If he had possessed the patience for reading, that might have helped, but he was only accustomed to read when he was with other people and then only during the short periods preceding his departure for his evening’s entertainment. Even on those occasions, he saw nothing wrong with interrupting his reading to join in the coffee hour conversations or to read a little and then summon Kamal to narrate to him what he had read. He enjoyed the boy’s passionate response to storytelling, typical of children of that age. Consequently, neither the poetry nor the novel was able to brighten his solitude on such a day. He read some verses and then a few chapters of "The Maiden of Karbala". He choked on his boredom, drop after drop, while he cursed the English from the depths of his heart. He passed the time until lunch in a bad mood, feeling vexed and disgruntled.

The mother served them soup and roast chicken with rice, but there were no vegetables because of the blockade around the house. She ended the meal with cheese, olives, and whey, substituting molasses for the sweet. The only person with a decent appetite was Kamal. Al-Sayyid Ahmad and the two older brothers were not much inclined to eat, since they had spent the day without any work or activity. This nourishment did assist them to escape from their boredom by helping to put them to sleep, especially the father and Yasin, who were able to fall asleep whenever and however they wanted.

Yasin got up from his nap shortly before sunset and went downstairs to attend the coffee hour. The session was short, since the mother was not able to leave al-Sayyid Ahmad alone for long. She had to withdraw to return to his room. Yasin, Zaynab, Fahmy, and Kamal remained behind to chat with each other listlessly. Then Fahmy excused himself to go to the study. He asked Kamal to join him, leaving the couple alone.

Yasin wondered to himself, "What can I do from now till midnight?" The question had troubled him for a long time, but today he felt depressed and humiliated, forcibly and tyrannically separated from the flow of time which was plunging ahead outside the house with its many pleasures. He was like a branch that turns into firewood when cut from the tree.

Had it not been for the military blockade, he would have been in his beloved seat at the coffeehouse of Ahmad Abduh, sipping green tea and chatting with his acquaintances among its patrons. He would have been enjoying himself in its historic atmosphere. He was captivated by its antiquity, and his imagination was stirred by its subterranean chambers buried in the debris of history. Ahmad Abduh’s coffeehouse was the one he loved best. He would not forsake it, unless scorched by some desire, for as they say: "Desire’s a fire". It was desire that had attracted him in the past to the Egyptian Club, which was close to the woman who sold doum palm fruit. Desire had also been responsible for tempting him to move to al-Sayyid Ali’s coffeehouse in al-Ghuriya, situated across the street from the home of the lute player Zanuba. He would exchange coffeehouses according to the object of his desire. He would even exchange the patrons who had offered him their friendship. Beyond satisfying the desire itself, the coffeehouse and his friends there were meaningless. Where were the Egyptian Club and those friends? They had gone out of his life. If he ran into one of them, Yasin might pretend not to know him and avoid him. It was now the turn of Ahmad Abduh’s coffeehouse and its regulars. God only knew what coffeehouses and friends the future had in store for him.

In any case, he did not spend too much of his evening at Ahmad Abduh's. He would soon slip over to Costaki’s grocery store, or, more exactly, to his secret bar to get a bottle of red wine, or "the usual," as he liked to call it. Where was "the usual" on this gloomy night? At the memory of Costaki’s bar, a shudder of desire passed through his body. Then a look of great weariness showed in his eyes. He seemed as fidgety as a prisoner. Staying home appeared to him to be prolonged suffering. The sharpness of the pain intensified when he entertained the images of bliss and memories of intoxication associated with the bar and the bottle. These dreams tormented him and doubled his anguish. They encouraged his ardent longing for wine’s music of the mind and the games it played with his head. Those made him warm and happy, overflowing with delight and joy. Before that evening he had never realized how incapable he was of patiently abstaining from alcohol for even a single day. He was not sad to discover how weak he was and how addicted. He did not blame himself for the overindulgence that had ended up making him miserable for such a trivial reason. He was as far as one could be from blaming himself or being annoyed. The only cause for his pain that he could remember was the blockade the English had set up around his house. He was consumed by thirst when the intoxicating watering hole was near at hand.

He glanced at Zaynab. He found her examining his face with a look that seemed to say resentfully, "Why are you so inattentive? Why are you so glum? Doesn't my presence cheer you up at all?" Yasin felt her resentment in the fleeting moment their eyes met, but he did not respond to her sorrowful criticism. To the contrary, it annoyed and riled him. Yes, he disliked nothing so much as being forced to spend a whole evening with her, deprived of desire, pleasure, and the intoxication on which he relied to endure married life.

He began to look at her stealthily and wonder in amazement, "Isn't she the same woman?… Isn't she the one who captured my heart on our wedding night?… Isn't she the one who drove me wild with passion for nights and weeks on end?… Why doesn't she stir me at all? What’s come over her? Why am I so restless, disgruntled, and bored, finding nothing in her beauty or culture to tempt me to postpone getting drunk?"

As usual, he was inclined to find her deficient in areas where women like Zanuba excelled. They were clever at providing him special services, but Zaynab was the first woman who had attempted to live with him in a permanent relationship. He had not spent much time with the lute player or the doum fruit vendor. His attachment to them had not been great enough to prevent him from moving on when he felt like it. Many years later he would recall these anxious moments and his reflections on them. Then he would realize things from his own experience and from life in general that had not occurred to him at the time.

He was awakened from his thoughts by her question: "I guess you're not happy about staying home?"

He was not in a condition to deal with criticism. Her sarcastic question affected him like a careless blow to a sore. He shot back with painful candor: "Of course not".

Although she had tried to avoid quarreling with him from the beginning, his tone hurt her badly. She replied sharply, "There’s no harm in that. Isn't it amazing how you can't bear to miss your carousing for even one night?"

He said angrily, "Mention one thing that would make staying home bearable".

She became enraged and said in a voice that showed she was on the verge of tears, "I'll leave. Perhaps then you'll like it better".

She turned her back on him to flee. He followed her with a stony glare. "How stupid she is! She doesn't know that only divine decree keeps her in my house".

Although the quarrel had relieved a little of his anger, he would have preferred for it not to have happened, if only because it served to increase his depressing boredom. If he had wanted to, he could have appeased her, but the listlessness of his mind had overwhelmed all his feelings.

In a few minutes, a relative calm took possession of him. The cruel words he had thrown at her echoed in his ears. He acknowledged that they were harsh and uncalled for. He felt almost regretful, not because he had suddenly discovered some dregs of affection for her in the corners of his heart, but because of his desire to treat her politely, perhaps out of respect for her father or fear of his. He had not exceeded these bounds, even during the nerve-racking period of adjustment when with decisive firmness he had undertaken to make her accept his policies. He had apologized when he got too angry.

Anger was nothing out of the ordinary for this family. The only time they attempted to control their tempers was when the father was present, monopolizing for himself all rights to anger. Their anger was like a bolt of lightning, quick to flare up and quick to die down. They would be left with various forms of regret and sorrow. Yasin was like this, but he was also obstinate. His regret did not motivate him to seek a reconciliation with his wife. He told himself, "She’s the one who made me angry… Couldn't she have spoken to me in a gentler tone?" He wanted her to be consistently patient, forbearing, and forgiving, so that he could shoot off in pursuit of his passions, confident about the home front.

After she got angry and withdrew, he felt even more uncomfortable with his imprisonment. He left the room to go to the roof. He found the air pleasant there. The night was tranquil. It was dark everywhere but more profoundly so under the arbor of hyacinth beans and jasmine. On the other side of the roof, the dome of the sky was visible, studded with stars like pearls. He began to pace back and forth on the roof between the wall adjoining Maryam’s house and the end of the hyacinth bean garden with its view of the Qala'un mosque. He gave himself over to contemplation of various mental images.

As he was walking slowly by the entrance to the arbor a rustling sound or perhaps a whisper caught his ear. He could hear someone breathing. Surprised, he stared into the darkness and called out, "Who’s there?"

A voice he easily recognized replied in ringing tones, "Nur, master".

He remembered immediately that Nur, his wife’s maid, retired at night to a wooden hut containing a few sticks of furniture, next to the chicken coop. He looked across the roof until he made out her figure standing a few feet away, like a condensed and solidified piece of night. He saw the whites of her eyes, as pure white as circles drawn in chalk on a jet-black form. He kept on pacing and said nothing more, but her features were automatically traced on his imagination. She was black, in her forties, and solidly built. She had thick limbs and a full chest. Her rear was plump. She had a gleaming face, sparkling eyes, and full lips. There was something powerful, coarse, and unusual about her, or he had thought of her that way since she had appeared in his house.

Suddenly and unexpectedly, an inclination to assault her exploded within his breast like fireworks going off without any warning. This was a forceful, dominating lust. The whole point of his life seemed to be concentrated in it. It got control of him just as it had the night of Aisha’s wedding, when he had seen Umm Hanafi in the courtyard as he was reaching the threshold. His languid being was permeated by a bubbling new life. Restless desire spread through his veins, electrifying him. His ennui and boredom were replaced by an insane, raging, hot interest. All of this happened in the twinkling of an eye. His gait, thought, and imagination all became energetic. Unconsciously he stopped pacing the entire width of the roof. He cut back on the distance by a third and then half. Whenever he passed her, his body was troubled by tempestuous desire… A black maid?… A servant? So what? It would not be the first time for him. Women like Zanuba definitely were not the only ones he craved. Just one beautiful feature was enough for him, like the kohl-enhanced eyes of the doum fruit vendor in al-Watawit, which had compensated for the stench of her armpits and the mud caked on her legs. Even ugliness, so long as there was a woman attached to it, was excused by his blind lust, as it had been with Umm Hanafi or with the one-eyed geomancer with whom he had enjoyed some private moments behind al-Nasr Gate.

Nur at any rate had a solid, firm body. Touching it would no doubt inspire him to be virile and active. The very fact that she was a black maid would lend interest to the tryst and novelty to the experience. He would be able to verify the rumor about girls of her heritage, who were said to be hot and passionate.

The circumstances seemed propitious. It was dark and secure on the roof. His desire intensified. His nervous energy was bounding. His heart raced. He cast a piercing glance in her direction and changed course slightly so that he would just happen to rub against her one way or another when he passed her. He would postpone making an open declaration of his intentions until he had a chance to sound out the situation cautiously, for fear that she might be a fool like Umm Hanafi and cause the house to echo with a new scandal.

Staring at her, he advanced with deliberate steps. He wanted to have all the lust raging inside him conveyed to her by the message in his eyes, in spite of the encompassing darkness. When he got close to her, his heartbeats became irregular. He came up beside her and his elbow touched the upper part of her body. He kept on walking, as though it had been an accident. A tremor passed through his body when he collided with her. He was not sure what he had touched, for he was wandering in a trance world. All he could remember as his mind cleared a bit at the edge of the roof was that he had felt something tender and appealing and she had stepped back nonchalantly. His suspicion that she was not worried about him was corroborated by her reaction.

He turned around, determined to attack again. He went back toward her with his arm folded so his elbow would touch one of her breasts. His senses did not mislead him this time. He did not move his elbow away, as one would have expected from a person who had simply lost his way. He left it there to brush gently past the other breast, no longer trying to avoid awakening her suspicions. He walked on, telling himself, "She'll no doubt understand what I'm after. Perhaps she has understood and wanted to step aside but was slow to do it. Perhaps she was taken by surprise and startled. At any rate, she didn't push me away with her hand and she remained still. She won't start screaming suddenly like that other bitch. Let’s try a third time".

On this occasion his pace was quick and impatient. He slowed down when he reached her. Then he stretched his elbow out to her breasts that swelled like a full pair of little waterskins. He moved his arm in a hesitant, doubtful manner. He started to walk on, driven by a desire to flee, but found her so yielding or dull that the remnants of his conscious mind were drowned in an insane flood. He stopped. With a voice that emerged from a fog of lust, trembling and fading away, he asked, "Is that you, Nur?"

The maid, who was backing away from him, replied, "Yes, master".

To prevent her from escaping, he pursued her until her back was against the wall and he was almost touching her. He wanted to say anything he could think of to declare his inner turmoil, like a boxer waving his fist in the air while watching for an opportunity to deal a final blow. Breathing on her forehead, he asked, "Why didn't you go into your room?"

Blockaded by him, she stammered, "I was enjoying the fresh air a little".

His greedy appetite overcame his hesitation. He put his hand on her waist. Then he pulled her gently toward his breast. She put up some resistance and kept him from achieving his goal. Putting his cheek next to hers, he whispered in her ear, "Come to the room".

She muttered uneasily, "Shame on you, master".

Her voice rang out in the silence in a way that disturbed him. She had not raised her voice intentionally, but it did not appear easy for her to whisper or her whisper had a resonance to it, even if less pronounced than that of her normal voice. His panic quickly deserted him, both because his lust was fully ignited and because her tone lacked the protest that her words suggested. He took her by the hand as he murmured, "Come along, sweetheart".

She did not attempt to free her hand, either because she was pleased or because she was obedient. He was lavishing kisses on her cheek and neck, swaying from the intense emotional impact, in a delirium of happiness. He began to say, "What’s kept you from me all these months?"

She answered him in her normal tone of voice, lacking any ring of protest, "Shame on you, master".

Smiling, he commented, "Your objections are very attractive. Make some more".

She did resist a little when they reached the entrance to the room and said, "Shame on you, master…" Then, as though to caution him, she added, "The room’s full of bedbugs".

He pushed her inside, whispering with his mouth at the nape of her neck, "I'd lie among scorpions for your sake, Nur".

She was a servant in every sense of the word. She stood submissively in front of him in the dark while he placed his lips on hers and kissed her in a fiery, passionate manner. She was still and submissive, as though watching a scene in which she had no part. He told her emotionally, "Kiss me!" He put his lips to hers again and kissed her. Then she kissed him.

He wanted her to sit down. She repeated her phrase, "Shame on you, master," which was becoming comic through monotonous repetition.

He sat her down himself and she complied without any resistance. He began to enjoy the juxtaposition of her protests and her obedience. He sought to elicit more. Her verbal resistance continued, combined with her active obedience. He forgot the time.

He imagined that the darkness around him was moving or that there were strange creatures prancing about in it. Perhaps the exertion was beginning to tell on him after he had stayed at it such a long time-if he had been there long. He certainly did not know how much time he had spent with her. Perhaps the raging currents crashing against each other in his head had impinged on his vision, causing him to see imaginary lights. But not so fast… the walls of the room were undulating. A faint light flowed over them into which the pitch-black darkness dissolved so thoroughly that the room’s secrets were disclosed. He raised his head to stare. He saw a faint light slipping through the cracks in the wooden wall, intruding on his privacy.

Then his wife’s voice was raised to call the maid: "Are you asleep, Nur? Nur… Have you seen Mr. Yasin?"

His heart trembled in alarm. He leapt up and quickly and regretfully grabbed his clothes to put them on. With roving eyes he searched the room on the chance that he might find a hiding place among its cast-off furnishings. One look was enough to make him despair of concealing himself. Meanwhile the sound of approaching slippers assaulted his ears. The maid could not keep herself from saying in a tearful voice, "It’s all your fault, master. What am I going to do now?"

He hit her hard on the shoulder to make her stop. He stared at the door with terror and despair. Without thinking about what he was doing, he retreated to the corner farthest from the entrance and pressed against the wall. He froze there and waited. The calls were repeated, but no one answered. Then the door was pushed open. Zaynab’s arm appeared, holding a lamp in front of her. She was crying, "Nur… Nur".

The maid was forced to murmur in a sad, weak voice, "Yes, madam".

She chided her in an angry voice, "How quick you are to fall asleep, old lady… Have you seen Mr. Yasin? My father-in-law sent for him. I looked for him downstairs and in the courtyard. Now I haven't been able to find him on the roof. Have you seen him?"

As soon as she finished speaking, her head poked inside the room. She looked down at the compromised maid in astonishment. Then, instinctively, she turned to her right and her eyes fell upon her husband, whose enormous body was plastered against the wall, looking flabby and weak from shame and disgrace. Their eyes met for an instant before he looked down. Another instant of lethal silence passed. Then a scream like a howl escaped from the girl. She retreated. Beating her breast with her left hand, she cried out, "You scandalous black slut… You! You!"

She began to tremble and the lamp in her hand trembled along with her. The light reflected on the wall opposite the door shook. Then she turned and fled. Her wail rent the silence.

Swallowing, Yasin told himself, "I'm ruined. What’s done is done". He remained standing where he was, oblivious to everything around him. When he came to his senses, he left the room for the roof, without thinking about going any farther. He did not know what to do. How widely known would the scandal become? Would it be confined to his own apartment or travel to the other one? He began to scold himself for being too stunned and weak to catch up with her in order to contain the scandal in the smallest possible circle. He wondered with intense discomfort how he would deal with this scandal. Would he be resolute? Perhaps he could be if the news did not get through to his father.

He heard movement coming from the direction of the ill-omened room. He turned and saw the figure of the maid leaving it with a large bundle in her hand. She hastened to the door of the stairway and departed. He shrugged his shoulders disdainfully. When he touched his chest he realized he had forgotten to put on his undershirt and quickly returned to the room.