No one contemplating the state of our alley would ever believe what the poets say in the coffeehouses. Who are Gabal and Rifaa and Qassem? What sign is there, besides the coffeehouse stories, that any of them accomplished anything? All the eye can see is an alley sunk in darkness and poets that sing of dreams. How did this happen to us? Where is Qassem and the united alley, and the estate to be used for everyone’s good? Where did this greedy overseer and his insane gangsters come from? You will hear, around the pipe passed from hand to hand in the hashish dens, between the sighs and the laughter, how Sadeq succeeded Qassem as overseer, and followed the same course; how one group saw Hassan was worthier to be overseer, because he had been related to Qassem and since he was the man who had killed the gangsters. They urged Hassan to raise his club, which no one could withstand, but he refused to return the alley to the era of the gangsters. The alley had been divided among itself, however, and now some of the Al Gabal and Al Rifaa began to say out loud what they used to keep secret. When Sadeq left this life, repressed ambitions revealed their ugly faces and hostile looks. The clubs came out of hibernation, and the blood flowed within every neighborhood, and in fights between neighborhoods, until the overseer himself was killed in one of the battles. Things got out of control, security and peace were buried; the people saw no alternative to bringing back a scion of the old overseer, Rifaat, to be overseer, the position over which so many ambitious men were fighting. This was how Qadri came to be overseer, and the neighborhoods resumed their old clannishness, as each was taken over by a gang, and battles raged over who would rule the whole alley, until Saadallah won. He occupied the protector’s house and became the first overseer, while Yusuf took over the Al Gabal, Agag the Al Rifaa and Santuri the Al Qassem. At first the overseer distributed the estate revenues honestly, and the rebuilding and renovation activity continued, but before long greed began to toy with his heart, and the same with the gangsters, as expected; and they went back to the old system. The overseer took half the estate income and divided the other half among the four gangsters, who kept it instead of giving it to its rightful owners. They did not stop there, but insolently forced their miserable followers to pay protection money. This brought a halt to construction activity, and stopped work on houses that were only half or even a quarter finished. It seemed that nothing had changed since the old days, though the Desert Rats’ territory had now become the Al Qassem neighborhood. It was ruled by a gangster like the others, its buildings were surrounded by huts and ruins, and its people had gone back to being what they had been in the black days, enjoying no honor or sovereignty. They were worn down by poverty, menaced by clubs and constantly being slapped. Filth, flies and lice were everywhere, and there was no end of beggars, swindlers and cripples. Gabal, Rifaa and Qassem were nothing but names, or songs chanted by drugged poets in the coffeehouses. Every group was proud of its man, of whom nothing was left, and competed to the point of quarreling and fistfights. Drunken slogans were passed around; going into a drug den, a man might say, “It’s no good,” meaning the world, not the drug den. Another might say, “There’s one way out, death—better God should get you than a gangster’s club. The best thing is to get drunk or smoke hashish.” They sang sad popular songs about depression, poverty and disgrace, or chanted filthy, obscene ditties, bellowing them into the ears of the women and men who sought comfort or amusement even in these low, dark dumps. When one of them felt especially tormented, he would say, “What’s written is written. What good is Gabal, or Rifaa, or Qassem. We’re flies in this world and dirt in the next.” How strange that our alley should have remained the most favored among all the alleys. Men in neighboring alleys pointed to us and said admiringly, “Gabalawi Alley!” while we squatted solemnly, gloomily, as if hypnotized by our cherished memories of the past, or listening raptly to an unseen voice within us, softly whispering, “It is not impossible for what happened yesterday to happen again tomorrow, or for the dreams of poets to come true once more, or for darkness to recede from our world.”