The Seventh Heaven

The Rose Garden

All of it happened such a long time ago. The shaykh of our alley told me the story as we sat one day in a garden full of roses….

Hamza Qandil was found after a long disappearance, a stiffened corpse lying out in the desert. He had been stabbed in the neck with a sharp object. His robe was soaked with hardened blood, his turban strewn down the length of his body. But his watch and his money had not been touched— so clearly robbery had not been the motive. As the authorities began to look into the crime, word of what happened spread through the quarter like a fire through kindling.

Voices rang out from within Hamza’s house. The neighbor-women shared in the customary wailing, and people traded knowing looks. An air of tense drama spread out through the hara. Yet some felt a secret satisfaction, mixed with a certain sense of guilt. “Uncle” Dakrouri, the milk peddler, expressed some of this when he whispered to the prayer leader of our alley, “This murder went beyond what anyone expected — despite the man’s pig-headedness and lack of humor.”

“God does what He will,” answered the imam.

The prosecutor’s office asked about the victim’s enemies. The question exposed an atmosphere of evasion, as his widow said that she didn’t know anything of his relations with the outside world. Not a soul would testify that they had ever seen a sign of enmity between the murdered man and anyone else in the quarter. And yet, no one volunteered any helpful testimony. The detective looked at the shaykh of the hara quizzically, saying:

“The only thing I’ve been able to observe is that he had no friends!”

“He got on people’s nerves, but I never bothered to find out why,” the shaykh replied.

The investigation revealed that Qandil used to cut through the empty lot outside of our alley on his way to and from work in the square. No one would accompany him either coming or going. When the traditional question was asked—”Did the folks here complain about anyone?”—the consistent response was a curt denial. No one believed anybody else, but that’s how things were. But why didn’t Hamza Qandil have a single friend in the alley? Wasn’t it likely that the place held a grudge against him?

The shaykh of the hara said that Qandil had a bit more learning than his peers. He used to sit in the café telling people about the wonders of the world that he had read about in the newspapers, astounding his listeners, whom he held entranced. As a result, every group he sat in became his forum, in which he took a central place considered unseemly for anyone but local gang bosses or government officials. The neighbors grew annoyed with him, watching him with hearts filled with envy and resentment.

One day, tensions reached their peak when he talked about the cemetery in a way that went far beyond all bounds of reason. “Look at the graveyard,” he grumbled. “It takes up the most beautiful place in our district!”

Someone asked him what he wanted there instead.

“Imagine in the northern part houses for people, and in the south, a rose garden!”

The people become angry in a way they had never been before. They hurled reproaches at him in a hail of rebuke, reminding him of the dignity of the dead and the obligation to be faithful to them. Most agitated of all was Bayumi Zalat; he warned him not to say anything more about the cemetery, shouting, “We live in our houses only a few years — but we dwell in our tombs till the Day of Resurrection!”

“Don’t people have rights, too?” Qandil asked.

But Zalat cut him off, enraged. “Religion demands respect for the dead!”

With this, Zalat, who didn’t know the first thing about his faith, issued his very own religious ruling. But later, after the battle began to cool, the shaykh of the hara came, bearing a decree from the governor’s office. Thep order called for the removal of the cemetery by a fixed deadline — and for the people to build new tombs in the heart of the desert.

There was no connection between what Qandil had said and this decision, though some thought there was— while others believed, as the Qur’an says, that it’s wrong to suspect someone unless you have proof. Meanwhile, most people said, “Qandil certainly isn’t important enough to influence the government — but in any case, is he not like an evil omen?”

All in all, they blamed him for what happened, while, from his side, he made no effort to hide his pleasure at the decree. The people’s frustration and anger kept getting stronger and stronger. Finally, they gathered before the shaykh of the hara, the men crying out and the women lamenting, and demanded that he tell the authorities that the government’s order was void and forbidden: that it was against religion, and fidelity to the dead.

The shaykh replied that his reverence for those who have died was no less than theirs. Nonetheless, they would still be moved, in absolute compliance with the laws of God, and of decency. But the people insisted, “This means that a curse will fall upon the hara, and upon all who live there!”

Then the shaykh called out to them that the government’s decision was final, and charged them to ready themselves to carry it out. At this, Zalat pulled away from them. In a braying voice, he declared:

“We haven’t heard anything like that since the age of the infidels!”

Their anger with the government mixed with their anger at Qandil until it became a single, seething fury. Then, one night, as Bayumi Zalat was returning from an evening out, he took a shortcut through the tombs in the cemetery. There, at the little fountain, a skeleton loomed before him, wrapped in a shroud. Zalat halted, nailed where he stood, while everything that had been in his head instantly flew out of it. Then the skeleton spoke to him:

Woe unto those who forget their Dead, and who neglect the most precious of all their possessions — their graves.

Zalat stumbled back to the hara, his heart filled with death’s whisperings. And in truth, he didn’t conceal from anyone that it was he who had killed Qandil. Yet no one divulged his secret, whether out of fear, or out of loyalty. Gossip said that this fact had even reached the police commissioner himself. But he, too, had been against moving the cemetery in which his ancestors were interred. The blame was laid against a person unknown — and so Hamza Qandil’s blood was shed unavenged.

The shaykh of the hara ended his talk on a note of regret, as we sat in the rose garden that — once upon a time — had been the graveyard of our ancient quarter.