He stood at his parents’ grave, lost among other countless graves, and recited the opening verse of the Qur’an. Then he said, “God have mercy upon you…”
Next he whispered to them in a spirit of gratitude, “Othman is now a respectable government employee taking his first steps on a difficult path, but he is resolved to follow it to the end.” He bowed slightly and added with humility, “All the good things I have I owe to the Lord and to you…”
A blind boy was reciting some of the shorter chapters of the Qur’an. He gave him a half-piastre. Yet, insignificant as the amount was, he still had that feeling of resentment which always possessed him when he gave someone money. When the boy was gone, he addressed his parents again: “Before God I vow to move you to a new grave when He has made my wishes come true…”
He had no idea how much of their dead bodies would remain with the passage of time, but he reckoned that there would be something remaining at any rate. To his surprise his thoughts reverted to Sayyida, and her smiling image took shape before his eyes. It seemed to him that she was on the verge of passing some pointed remark, outspoken and sarcastic. His heart contracted with pain and he murmured, “Guide me, Oh God, onto the straight path, for all I do is done at Your inspiration.”
He lived once again his father’s last days. There was no escape from this. Sickness and old age had crippled him till his only recreation was to sit on a sheepskin in front of the house, hardly able to see or hear. He would contemplate his helplessness, crying aloud in his grief, “Oh Lord, have mercy…”
In his day, he had been counted among the strong men of the alley. Throughout his long life he had relied on the muscles of his arms and legs, toiling without a break and enduring to the end a harsh and poverty-stricken existence. His strength, which had nothing to nourish it, had been wasted; and in his misery he would break into a cackle of laughter, without meaning or reason. One evening he was found dead where he customarily sat on the sheepskin. So no one ever knew how death had come to him or how he had met it. As for his mother, her death was even more shocking. She had been doing the washing when suddenly she had bent over and begun to scream in terrible pain. An ambulance had come and carried her to Qasr al-‘Ayni Hospital, where she died during an operation for appendicitis.
His family was singularly victimized by death. Something inside told him that, for this reason, perhaps he himself would live long, and a wave of sorrow swept over him. Every manner of death was reasonable compared with his brother the policeman’s: a man big as an ox killed by the brickbats of the demonstrators. What a death! He had not known who they were nor had they known who he was. Othman regarded what had happened with the eyes of a spellbound spectator. It made absolutely no sense to him. True, he learned a lot from the perusal of history; he knew about history from the most ancient times up to the eve of the Great War. He knew about revolutions, but he had never lived them or reacted to them. He had seen and heard about things, but always kept aloof and wondering. No common sympathy had ever gripped his heart to draw him to the battleground; and he was always bewildered at the way groups of eminent statesmen and their supporters fought each other. He had been hounded all his life by poverty and hunger, and this had left him no time to extend the range of his thought to the outside world. The alley shut him in, its preoccupations unknown to everyone else, savage, violent, unending. Today, he was conscious of one goal only, a goal at once sacred and profane, which had nothing to do, as far as he could see, with the strange events that took place in the name of politics. He told himself that man’s true life was his inner life, which governed his every heartbeat and which called for toil, dedication, and enterprise. It was something holy, something religious, and through it he could achieve self-fulfillment in the service of the sacred apparatus known as the Government or the State. Through it the glory of man was accomplished on earth, and through man God’s will was accomplished on high. People applauded other, indeed quite contrary, things; but these people were foolish and fraudulent. So he never forgave himself for not having secured a full view of the Director General’s room and of his singular personality which set the entire administration in motion from behind a screen—in precise order and perfect sequence, recalling to the ignorant the stars in their courses and the wisdom of heaven. He sighed deeply. He recited the Fatiha once more and said by way of farewell, “Pray for me, Father!” He moved around the grave, whose two headstones had fallen and whose corner had cracked, and said, “Pray for me, Mother!”