The estate put up houses in two facing rows, thus creating our alley. The two rows ran from a spot in front of the mansion and extended straight out in the direction of Gamaliya. The mansion stood isolated on all sides, at the head of the alley on the desert side. Our alley, Gabalawi Alley, is the longest in the whole area. Most of its houses have courtyards, as in Hamdan Alley, though there are more huts from halfway down the alley to Gamaliya. And the picture would not be complete without the house of the estate overseer at the end of the right-hand row of dwellings, and the gangster’s house at the end of the left row, just opposite.
The mansion had closed its gates on its owner and his closest servants. All Gabalawi’s sons had died young and there was no offspring left who had grown up and died in the mansion, except for Effendi, who was then the estate overseer. Some of the people of the alley were peddlers, though a few ran shops or coffeehouses; a great many were beggars, and there was a business employing everyone who was able—that was the drug business, especially hashish, opium and aphrodisiacs. The mark of our alley then, as now, was crowding and noise. Barefoot and nearly naked children played in every corner, filling the air with their shouts and covering the ground with their filth. The entrances of the houses were jammed with women—this one chopping moloukhia, that one peeling onions and a third stoking a fire, all exchanging gossip and jokes, and curses and swears as needed. There was no end to the singing and weeping, and the insistent drumming of musical exorcisms. Handcarts clattered by constantly, as arguments and fistfights broke out here and there. Cats meowed and dogs whined and both species fought over mounds of garbage, rats scampered down the walls and through the courtyards, and it was not rare for people to band up to kill a snake or scorpion. Flies, outnumbered only by lice, joined diners in their plates and drinkers in their mugs, frolicked around their eyes and buzzed by their mouths, on intimate terms with everyone.
As soon as a young man found that he possessed daring or brawn, he started interfering with peaceable people, attacking anyone minding their own business and imposing himself as a protector on a neighborhood somewhere in the alley. He would take protection money from working people, and live with nothing to do but be a bully. So you found gangsters like Qidra, al-Laithy, Abu Sari, Barakat and Hammouda. Zaqlut was another of these; he picked fights with one gangster after another until he had beaten them all and became the boss of the whole alley, and he made all them pay him protection money. Effendi, the overseer, saw that he needed someone like this to carry out his orders and keep away any trouble that loomed, so he kept him close by and paid him a salary from the estate income. Zaqlut took up residence in a house opposite the overseer’s, and helped to strengthen his authority. When this happened, fights among the gangsters dropped off, since the biggest one of all did not like these rivalries whose outcome might be the strengthening of one of the lesser gangsters, which would threaten his own position. And so they found no outlet for their pent-up mischief but poor and peaceable citizens. How did our alley reach such a pitiful state?
Gabalawi promised Adham that the property would go to benefit his children. The houses with courtyards were put up, money was given out, and for a while people enjoyed a happy life. For a while after the father closed his gate and shut out the world, the overseer followed his good example, but then ambition stirred in his heart and he began to help himself to estate funds. At first he embezzled small amounts and reduced the wages he paid out, then closed his hand over all the money, reassured by the protection of the gangster he had bought. The people had no choice but to take up the most menial and despised jobs; their numbers exploded and their poverty increased, until they were sunk in squalor and misery. The strong turned to terrorizing others, the poor turned to begging, and everyone turned to drugs. They toiled and slaved in return for morsels of food, some of which the gangsters took, not with thanks but with a slap, a curse and an insult. Only the gangsters lived in comfort and luxury; above them was their boss and above everyone was the overseer; the people were crushed beneath all of them. If any unfortunate man was unable to pay his protection money, revenge was exacted against the whole neighborhood, and if he complained to the boss, he was beaten and turned over to the local gangster to be beaten again; if he dared to take his complaint to the estate overseer, he would end up getting beaten by the overseer, the alley boss and every neighborhood gangster in turn. This was the horrid state of affairs which I myself witnessed in this, our own era, a mirror image of what the storytellers describe of the distant past. The poets of the coffeehouses in every corner of our alley tell only of heroic eras, avoiding public mention of anything that would embarrass the powerful. They sing the praises of the estate overseer and the gangs, of justice that we do not enjoy, of mercy we do not experience, of dignity we do not see, of piety that seems not to exist and honesty we have never heard of. I often wonder why our ancestors stayed—why we stay—in this accursed alley, but the answer is easy. In the other alleys we would only find a life worse than what we endure here—assuming their gangsters did not kill us to pay back what our gangsters have done to them! The most incredible thing is that people envy us! Our neighbors in other alleys say, “What a blessed alley! They have a matchless inheritance, and gangs whose very names curdle your blood!” Of course, we get nothing from our estate but trouble, and nothing from our protectors but insults and torment. In spite of all that we are still here, patient in our cares. We look toward a future that will come we know not when, and point toward the mansion and say, “There is our venerable father,” and we point out our gangsters and say, “These are our men; and God is master of all.”