Sugar Street

146

Over the course of time, the old house assumed a new look of decay and decline. Its routine disintegrated, and most of the coffee-hour crowd was dispersed. These two features had been the household's soul and lifeblood. During the first half of the day, when Kamal was away at his school, Amina was off on her spiritual tour of the mosques of the Prophet's grandchildren al-Husayn and al-Sayyida Zaynab, and Umm Hanafi was down in the oven room, al-Sayyid Ahmad would stretch out on the sofa in his room or sit in a chair on the balcony while Aisha wandered aimlessly between the roof terrace and her bedroom. The radio's voice was the only one heard in the sitting room until late in the afternoon, when Amina and Umm Hanafi met there. Aisha would either stay in her room or spend part of the coffee hour with them. Al-Sayyid Ahmad did not leave his room, and even if Kamal returned home early, he retreated to his study on the top floor. At first, the confinement of al-Sayyid Ahmad had been a source ofunhap-piness, but then he and the others had become accustomed to it. Aisha's grief had been most distressing, but eventually she and the others had grown used to it too.

Amina was still the first to wake. After rousing Umm Hanafi, she performed her ablutions and her prayers. The maid, who was by and large the healthiest of them all, headed on rising for the oven room.

Opening heavy eyes, Aisha would get up to drink successive glasses of coffee and to light one cigarette after another. When summoned to breakfast, she would take only a few morsels. She had allowed her body to waste away to a skeleton covered with a faded skin. Her hair had started to fall out, and she had been forced to consult a doctor to avoid going bald. She had fallen victim to so many ills that the physician had advised having her teeth removed. All that remained of the old Aisha was her name and the habit of looking at her reflection in the mirror, although not to adorn herself. It was simply a custom allowing her to scrutinize her sorrows. Occasionally she seemed to have resigned herself gracefully to her losses, as she sat for longer periods with her mother, took part in the conversation, allowed her withered lips to part in a smile, visited her father to ask after hishealth, or strolled around the roof garden, tossing grain to the chickens.

On one such occasion her mother said hopefully, "It does my heart good, Aisha, to see you like this. I wish you were always so cheerful."

Drying her eyes, Umm Hanafi said, "Let's go to the oven room and make something special."

But at midnight the mother awoke to the sound of weeping from Aisha's room. She rushed to her daughter, taking care not to wake al-Sayyid Ahmad, and found Aisha sitting up and sobbing in the darkness. Sensing her mother's presence, Aisha grabbed hold of Amina and cried out, "If only I had the baby from her belly as a reminder of her… a bit of her! My hands have nothing to hold. The world is empty."

Embracing Aisha, the mother said, "I know more about your sorrows than anyone else. They are so great that any attempt at consolalion is meaningless. I would gladly have given my life for theirs. But God's wisdom is lofty and exalted. What point is there to this sorrow, my poor dear?"

"Whenever I fall asleep, I dream of them or of my life in the old days."

"Proclaim that God is one. I've had my own taste of suffering like yours. Have you forgotten Fahmy? Even so, an afflicted Believei' asks God for strength. What has happened to your faith?"

Aisha exclaimed resentfully, "My faith!"

"Yes, remember your religion and entreat God for merciful relief, which may come from some totally unexpected source."

"Merciful relief! Where is it? Where?"

"His mercy is so vast it encompasses everything. For my sake, visit al-Husayn with me. Put your hand on the tomb and recite the opening prayer of the Qur'an. Then your fiery suffering will be changed into a refreshing peace just as Abraham's fire was" (Qur'an, 21:69).

Aisha's attitude toward her health was equally mercurial. She would visit doctors diligently and regularly for a time, leading people to think that she had regained her interest in life. Then she would neglect herself and scornfully disregard everyone's advice in a virtually suicidal fashion. Visiting the cemetery was the only custom from which she never once deviated. With happy abandon she spent the income from her husband's and her daughter's bequests on the grave site, transforming it into a lush garden of flowers and fragrant herbs. The day Ibrahim Shawkat came to complete the formalities of the bequest, she had laughed hysterically, telling her mother, "Congratulate me on my inheritance from Na'ima."

Whenever he sensed that she was calm, Kamal would visit her and stay for lengthy periods, humoring her affectionately. He would gaze at her silently for a long time, sadly remembering the exquisite form God had bestowed upon her and examining what had become of it. She was emaciated and sickly, to be sure, but also heartbroken in every sense of the word. The striking similarity between their misfortunes did not escape him. She had lost her offspring, and he had lost his hopes. If she had ended up with nothing, so had he. All the same, her children had been flesh and blood, and his hopes had been deceptive fictions of the imagination.

One day he suggested to them, "Wouldn't it be better if you all went to the air-raid shelter when the siren goes off?"

Aisha replied, "I won't leave my room."

His mother said, "These raids don't harm anyone, and the guns sound like fireworks."

His father called out from the bedroom, "If I were able to go to the shelter, I would go to the mosque or to Muhammad IfFat's house instead."

On another occasion, Aisha rushed down from the roof, all out of breath, to tell her mother, "Something amazing has happened!"

Amina looked at her with hopeful curiosity, and Aisha, who was still panting, explained, "I was on the roof, watching the sun go down. I felt more wretched than ever before. All of a sudden a window of glorious light opened up in the sky. At the top of my lungs I shouted, Lord!'"

The mother's eyes grew wide in amazement. Was this the desired merciful relief or a new abyss of sorrows? She murmured, "Perhaps it's our Lord's mercy, daughter."

Her face radiant with joy, Aisha said, "Yes. I shouted, Lord!' and light filled the whole world."

They all brooded about this event and, with obvious anxiety, kept careful track of developments. Aisha stood for hours at her post on the roof, waiting for the light to break through again. Kamal finally asked himself, "I wonder if this is a finale compared to which death would seem trivial". But fortunately for all of them, she appeared to forget the matter in time and stopped mentioning it. Then she became ever more deeply involved with a private universe of her own creation. She lived there by herself, a solitary figure, whether in her room or sitting beside them, although at infrequent intervals she would come back to their world, as if returning from a voyage. Shortly thereafter she would resume her imaginary travels. She developed a new habit of speaking to herself, especially when no one else was present. This made her family quite nervous, but when she spoke to the dead she recognized that her loved ones had passed away. She did not think that they were present as specters or ghosts. This compromise with reality was a source of some comfort to those around her.