It isn’t possible that the idea occurred to me suddenly, for I had always dreamed of having a house. Though in my dreams its features were not sharply defined, it was characterized by a general enveloping air of warmth and serenity. When, therefore, the chance presented itself I grasped it as though my life depended on it.
While the idea was not a sudden one to me, it came as a surprise to my wife, who was unable to hold back her tears of excitement. I didn’t in fact surprise her with it as an idea, which would not have caused her such excitement, but in the form of an actual contract for a vacant plot of land on a new housing estate in the eastern part of the city.
This was on the birthday of my children, Hala and Hisham. The former was four years old and the latter three. Born in the same month, though not on the same day, we used to celebrate their birthdays together.
On returning home that day my wife asked me:
“Have you forgotten that today’s the children’s birthday?”
“No, I haven’t forgotten,” I said softly, attempting to conceal my restlessness.
“Don’t tell me you’re broke,” she said slyly.
“No, I’m not broke.”
“They’ve been waiting for you and yet I see you’ve come back without even troubling to buy them a piaster’s worth of sweets,” she said, indicating my empty hands.
“I’m fed up with getting them only toys and sweets.”
Unable to prepare the way for the surprise any better than this, I produced a large envelope from under my arm and handed it to her.
“My present’s in this envelope,” I said, and she took out the contract and ran her eyes over it while I watched her in an ecstasy of pride. Failing to understand what it was about at first glance, she raised her beautiful face inquiringly.
“What’s this?” she cried.
“It’s a house for them,” I said, smiling.
Hisham crept out from behind, and buried his face between my legs and gave a soft laugh. I bent over, picked him up and began kissing him, oblivious of the unexpected results my surprise had wrought in my wife.
From that moment great changes came over her. No longer did she bring up the old story of my love affair which she had found out about some days ago. Whether she had forgotten about it or merely pretended to have done so I don’t know. She also became more tender and gay and there wasn’t a relative or friend of hers to whom she didn’t announce the news of the house we’d be building. In fact she no longer enjoyed talking to me about anything else.
We went, the four of us, to the plot of land the following day, in order, as she put it, “to give it the once over.” We stood by one corner of it, she beside me, radiant with smiles, while Hala and Hisham ran races nearby, shouting and stirring up little eddies of dust.
My wife was outlining what the house would be like and went on unconsciously repeating herself, “It’ll be a single story, won’t it? But when the children get bigger we’ll add another one. We’ll surround it with a large garden. I’d love a house of mine to have a garden. I’ll look after it myself. I’ll fill it with flowers. What sort of flowers do you like, darling? Isn’t it funny that for five whole years I’ve never known what flowers you liked?”
“I like jasmine,” I said.
“We’ll cover the garden with jasmine,” she cried. Then: “Living in a house like this far away from the smoke and din of the city is beautifully healthy for the children. My grandfather used to have a lovely house in Mansoura—it had an acre of garden. Imagine! By the way, you must make provision for a laundry room on the roof, also a servants’ room—”
“What do you mean by a servants’ room?” I cut her short. “I’ve spent precious years of my life turning a dream into reality and I’d ask you not to turn it into a nonsense!”
“All right—and the garage, the house must have a garage.”
“But I don’t own a car.”
“You’ll have a car some time and where would you put it if the house didn’t have a garage?”
She called out to Hala to bring back her brother, then she let out a shrill laugh and raced after her children with the gaiety of a young girl.
My thoughts wandered far afield as I watched the three of them in the middle of the plot of land. Only when my wife returned and was standing by me did I come to. She repeated what she had told me before, embroidering on it, while I replied to her in between my thoughts with “yes” or “no,” without paying any attention to what she was saying.
I remembered an old house, far away in both time and place. The place was the town of Ismailiya; as to the time, I am able to fix it in terms of my age, for at that time I was eight or nine years old. We owned a house in that town, a modest single-story house surrounded by a small but beautiful garden. It did, not, however, possess a servants’ room, for we had no servants; nor did it have a garage, for my father had never been in a private motorcar in his life. I remember that there was a trellis of vines in our garden, and two mango trees, a lemon tree, and a large hen house. I also remember that my father would not be in the house for a minute before he’d take up the hoe and wield it in the garden, the fence of which was covered in strands of jasmine. I don’t remember when it was that we came to own that house or when we moved into it. I do remember, though that my father was extremely proud of it, while my mother regarded our coming into possession of it was a stupendous and historic event. She had thus made of it a set date by which she fixed the events of her life and those of the whole family. Many is the time I have heard her say:
“When we moved to the house I was pregnant with so-and-so—” or “when we bought the house my husband’s salary was so much—” and similar expressions which I still smile at when I recollect them.
I don’t remember any particular happenings that occurred at home during that period other than the birth of one of my brothers, the fifth of us all and the third male child. No doubt the other incidents were all so commonplace that they have left no special impression on my mind. I do remember, though, that when evening came a group of our neighbors would turn up to see my father and they’d gather out in the garden and converse on various topics, while we children would play around them, and the breezes of spring would blow drowsily, made sluggish with the aroma of jasmine. It must be that it was forever spring in our house in those days, for I can scarcely imagine it now without games in the garden and the smell of jasmine.
Then some events occurred which did not immediately break the monotony of life. For this reason I can scarcely remember them now in detail though I do remember vague echoes of them, as for instance that I began hearing the word “war,” a word new to me, being repeated at home far more frequently than the word “bread;” it was also constantly used by the grown-ups in our street without my understanding its meaning to begin with. There were other words I learned by heart despite their difficulty and strangeness because of the way they were repeated: “The Allies—the Axis—the Germans—the Maginot Line” and others, all of which were mere words that I chanced to hear.
My father and our neighbors gathered in the garden would talk only about such matters. They would divide up into two opposing factions, one wanting victory for the English and the other praying that the Germans would win. My father belonged to the latter faction, and I, in my turn, prayed for a German victory. Often I would hear my father say. “A German victory means that the English would get out of Egypt,” though Uncle Hassan, our nearest neighbor, believed that if the English got out of Egypt it would mean the Germans entering it. The grown-ups would carry on long animated discussions which would end on one night, only to begin again on another, while we children, in our games, would divide ourselves up into two groups, one “the English” and the other “the Germans.” I naturally belonged to the latter. We would then indulge in childish warfare which left us puffing and blowing to the point of exhaustion.
When it was time to go to sleep I would slip into bed and lie there for a time listening to the voices of the grown-ups in the garden. I would single out my father’s voice among them and would then try to conjure up a picture of the Germans. I did not picture the Germans as being the same size as the English or as looking like them, but saw them as both larger and more magnificent.
One night the air raid warning sounded. That, too, was something new and exciting in those days. The lights in the street and the houses went out and darkness, weighted down with tense silence, ruled. Ghostly forms gathered at the doorways and the scent of jasmine was diffused more strongly than on any previous night.
“German airplanes!” shouted my father. Gazing up at the sky and listening intently, I was able to make out a disjointed humming that cut through the solid darkness at the horizon’s end and drew nearer.
“Will they bomb the town?” I asked my mother in terror. “No,” my father answered here in the tones of someone well-informed on such matters. “Hitler wouldn’t do that. They’re merely making for the English camps.”
English camps surrounded our small town on all sides, indeed were almost touching it. We heard terrible explosions which I don’t remember ceasing for an instant. An airplane burst into flames in the sky; then ghostly forms with a heavy tread passed by announcing to the rushing people that the planes were laying waste the town and advising them to keep away from the houses.
Bands of phantom figures rushed out, running and stumbling in the street. Our parents got up and hurried us off with the terrified crowds toward the desert which stretched to the northeast of the city; there was no other place of escape.
That night seemed like nothing so much as the gathering of the dead at the end of the world. This was how father expressed it and my mother later repeated his words. People were pushing one another about crazily, barefoot in their nightgowns, calling out to one another in the midst of that solid darkness. “Where are you, Muhsin? Where are the children? Did you close the door? Let the house go to hell! Hurry up, Lawahiz! Wait for me, father,” while the barking of dogs rang out in every direction. I cried as I ran, with three of my brothers and sisters—many were the children that cried in the midst of that solid darkness.
I am unable to say exactly how many people took refuge in the desert on that confused night. AU I know is that the black desert was filled with them so that we were like people “at an anniversary feast of some saint—at the anniversary feast of Sheikh Hitler,” as Uncle Hassan said ironically.
“Help me dig,” said my father to my mother in the voice of an expert on these matters. “Dig, children! Hassan Effendi, make a hole for your children to protect them from the shrapnel.”
We dug a large hole in which my father fitted us tightly together, while explosions thundered in the town and the disjointed humming filled the sky and sudden flashes of light burst forth like lightning from time to time. Then the airplanes were circling above us.
“They’re right over our heads.” shouted my father. My mother gave an anguished scream and threw herself on to us to cover us with her body. My father did likewise. Voices were raised throughout the desert ordering the people to be silent, followed by other voices telling them to shut up. I craned my neck, thrust up my head, and took a look, over my father’s shoulder, at the sky in the hope of seeing a German in his airplane so that I might verify the picture I had stored up in my head of the Germans. However, my father violently pushed my head back into the sand.
“Why are they bombing us if it’s the English they’re fighting?” whispered my mother.
My father answered not a word.
“Aren’t we their friends?” I asked.
“God’s curse be on both of them!” my father shouted angrily.
The airplanes came so close to the ground that I could feel the reverberation of their engines shaking my body. Then sudden, fearful lights that whistled stripped bare the desert and were followed by shots that “sprayed the people like rain” as Uncle Hassan’s wife said the day we met her for the first time two years after that night.
The shouts that rose up from the ground mingled with the explosions coming from the sky, forming an inferno of clamor that still echoes in my ears despite the passage of years. When morning came my mother gave herself up to a fit of hysterics, as did all the women around us. and it was in vain that my father attempted to bring her back to her senses.
Eventually the slaughter came to an end, the airplanes dissolved from our skies and the explosions and all the other noises from the heavens ceased, making way for the crazed noises of the earth, until the blackness of night melted away before the first thread of daylight.
We got up out of our hole and followed our parents in utter exhaustion, our eyes tight closed as ordered by them lest we should see the carnage around us. We made our way to our house but didn’t find it; nor did we find Uncle Hassan’s house, nor a third house and half a fourth in the same street: they had all become heaps of rubble. On the heap that had been our house one of our geese roamed around in bewilderment; she was followed by one of her young of whom there had been five. There was not a trace of the scent of jasmine in the air.
Like someone in a daze my father stood looking first at the ruins, then at my mother who had been rendered speechless by the unexpected sight. The final and ghastly event of that day was to see my father crying, something I had never seen in all my life.
“A whole life’s hard work gone in an instant,” my mother muttered through her tears.
“Thanks be to God,” mumbled my father, drying his tears, “we weren’t inside it.” Silence enveloped us for a while, then he said. “You must emigrate into the country—” and in “emigrate” I learned a new word that day.
“Let’s go now to your aunt’s house,” my father resumed, “if it too hasn’t been destroyed, until we arrange our affairs.”
The melancholy procession re-formed and off we went with miserable gait, “as though at a funeral”—as I used to say whenever I recounted the story to my friends when I had grown up. Before moving away from the ruins of our house I saw my father pick up a protruding piece of stone and hurl it at the big heap of rubble.
“When the war ends,” I heard him say, “we’ll return and build it again.”
And the war ended . . .
My reverie was broken by a jog at my shoulder and my wife’s voice saying. “What’s wrong with you? Aren’t you listening? When shall we start building?”
The specter of the ruins of our house still filled my head.
“Those people who invented all these terrible means of destruction,” I said, “why didn’t they think of inventing something to protect houses against them?”
Surprise appeared on my wife’s face. She stared into mine with questioning tenderness. I smiled and added, sighing and waving my hand as though to chase away my thoughts, “‘It doesn’t matter, because I don’t believe there’ll be another war.”
Which only increased the signs of surprise on my dear wife’s face.