It was nearly dawn. Every living creature in the alley had gone to bed, even the gangsters, the dogs and the cats. Darkness lingered in the corners as if it would never leave. Amid the perfect silence, the gate of the House of Triumph in the Al Gabal neighborhood was opened with extreme caution, and two figures slipped out of it, moving quietly toward the mansion, and they followed along its high wall out to the desert. They stepped warily, and looked back every now and then to make sure that no one was following them, and pressed on into the desert guided by the light of the scattered stars until Hind’s Rock appeared to them as a blotch of darkness blacker than its surroundings. They were a middle-aged man and a pregnant young woman, each carrying an overstuffed bundle. When they reached the rock, the woman sighed wearily. “Shafi’i, I am tired,” she said.
The man stopped walking and spoke crossly. “May God afflict those who tired you! But rest.”
The woman set her bundle down on the ground and sat upon it, resting her large belly on her lap. The man stood for a moment to look around, then sat down on his bundle. Breezes laden with the fresh scent of dawn wafted in their direction, but the woman was preoccupied. “Where will I have my baby, do you think?” she asked.
“Anyplace, Abda, would be better than our accursed alley,” Shafi’i said unhappily.
He raised his eyes to the mass of the mountain that loomed from the far north to the far south.
“We’ll go to Muqattam Marketplace, where Gabal went in his time of affliction, and I’ll open a carpentry shop and work just as I did in the alley. I have two hands as good as gold, and enough money for a good start.”
The woman drew her veil closer over her head and shoulders and said sadly, “We’ll be living in exile, like people who have no family, when we are of the Al Gabal, the best people in the alley!”
The man spat with contempt and said bitterly, “Best people in the alley! What are we but cowering slaves, Abda? Gabal and his glory days are gone. We got Zanfil, may God send him to Hell, who is against us instead of being for us, who swallows up our money and destroys anyone who complains.”
Abda could deny none of this. It was as if she were still living through those bitter days and sad nights, but feeling reassured by her distance from the misery of the alley, she turned tenderly to her heart’s happy memories, and she sighed deeply. “There is no other alley like ours, for all the bad things in it. Where would you ever find another mansion like our ancestor’s? Or neighbors like we had? Where could you hear the tales of Adham and Gabal and Hind’s Rock? God’s curse on those evil creatures!”
“They clubbed anyone for the flimsiest reason, and the others stalked around us like fate itself, with their arrogant faces!”
He remembered the horrible Zanfil and how he had taken him by the collar and shaken him so violently that his ribs nearly broke, then rolled him in the dirt in front of everybody, only because he had talked about the estate just once! He stamped his foot at the memory and spoke up. “That damned criminal kidnapped Sayidhum’s baby, Sayidhum the head-meat seller, and the baby was never heard from again. He had no pity for a one-month-old! And you wonder ‘Where will I have my baby?’ You’ll have your baby in a place where they don’t massacre children.”
Abda sighed and spoke gently, as if to soften the meaning of her words. “I just wish you could be satisfied with the same things that satisfy other people.”
He frowned angrily, masked by the darkness. “What have I done, Abda? Nothing but wonder what happened to Gabal, and Gabal’s covenant, and where is the power of justice, and what brought the Al Gabal back to poverty and humiliation? He wrecked my shop and beat me up, and would have killed me if it hadn’t been for the neighbors. If we had stayed in our house until you gave birth, he would have pounced on the baby just as he did with Sayidhum’s.
She shook her head sadly. “Oh, if only you had been patient, Shafi’i! Didn’t you hear people say that surely someday Gabalawi will come out of his isolation to save his grandchildren from oppression and disgrace?”
Shafi’i exhaled a long breath and snapped, “That’s what they say! And I’ve heard them say it since I was a boy, but the truth is that our ancestor has shut himself up in his house, and that the overseer of his estate monopolizes the estate revenues, except what he pays out to gangsters for his protection. Zanfil, the supposed protector of the Al Gabal, takes his share and buries it in his belly, as if Gabal had never appeared in this alley, as if he had never taken the eye of his friend Daabis to pay for the eye of poor Kaabalha.”
The woman was silent, floating in that sea of blackness. Morning would find her among a strange people. The strangers would be her new neighbors. Her child would be born into their hands. The child would grow up in a strange land, like a limb cut from a tree. She had been reasonably happy among the Al Gabal; she had brought food to her husband in his shop, and at night sat by the window to hear old blind Gawad play the rebec. There was no lovelier music than that, and no lovelier story than Gabal’s—the night he met Gabalawi in the dark and Gabalawi told him, “Be not afraid.” He then helped Gabal, loved and aided him until he triumphed. And he had gone joyfully home to his alley—was anything sweeter than a homecoming after exile?
Shafi’i’s face was turned up to the sky and its watchful stars, as he gazed at the first rays of light over the mountain, like a white cloud on the horizon of a black sky.
“We should move. We want to get to Muqattam before sunup,” he warned.
“I still need rest.”
“May God afflict those who tired you.”
How wonderful life would be without Zanfil. Filled with blessings, pure air, the star-studded sky, delightful feelings—but there was also the overseer, Ihab, and the gangsters Bayoumi, Gaber, Handusa, Khalid, Batikha and Zanfil. It was possible for every house to become like the mansion, and for their cries to turn to song, but the miserable people longed for the impossible just as Adham had longed for it before them. And who were these poor people? Men whose backs were swollen from beating, whose buttocks were inflamed from kicks. Their eyes were tormented by flies, and lice infested their heads.
“Why has Gabalawi forgotten us?”
“God knows,” the woman murmured.
“Gabalawi!” shouted the man in mingled grief and anger.
His voice echoed back to him.
“Trust in God,” he told her.
Abda stood, and he took her hand. They trudged south, toward Muqattam Marketplace.