The world was in its first dawn, devoid of anyone. The virgin air, cloudless and of the desert, had at one and the same time the sea’s moisture and a particular dryness.
The time was noon, quiet and utterly still.
The silence was not a solid one; it was a soft silence. Everything was soft and limpid.
I had returned to this world that never comes to an end, and yet I am a stranger in it; I know that I am not there.
My mother takes me by the hand as we get down from the train at the station in Abu Kir. We are alone: no one but us on the train or at the station.
The platforms are raised, standing directly on the clean yellow sand, their surfaces black, the paving stones glistening.
The station structure with its cool shaded entrance open to the sands on the other side—its triangular roof covered in red tiles—the solitary ticket office with its writing in Arabic and English, and the face of the stationmaster. motionless in the half-darkness behind the iron bars, looked like some enchanted building.
The great black hose, hanging down by its ribbed iron nozzle from the tank, is firmly muscled; its outer skin is damp and hot, with a cohesive stream of water spouting from it, striking the platform, then falling abruptly as though it were something solid, writhing and hunching itself and giving out a foam that is translucent, thick and white and that descends into the rectangular space between the two high platforms and runs along the wooden sleepers, between the iron rails that stretch out confidently to the anvil-shaped iron buffers.
The driver got down from the strong, round-bellied locomotive, wholly black except for the gold-colored writing on it, which was still spitting out thick gusts of white steam into the noon light. He bent down with his whole body and turned, with effort, a great horizontal wheel on the large tap that stood on the platform, at which the flow of water was cut off and changed into a thin trickle that came on and then stopped, dripping from the two sides of the platform on to the coarse sands that lay under the gravel, pebbles and coal dust and quickly and thirstily drank it up.
The man was silent as he worked; the water was silent, the station silent. There was no sound, no one.
I saw a solitary cart beside the station. The horse, clad in a broad brass collar that sparkled in the light, was alone, abandoned, thrusting its head deeply into the sack of straw, and suddenly the little brass bells that hung round its neck gave out a tinkling sound, their echoes quivering in the vast quietness, sharp and high-pitched, tiny and consecutive.
Escaping from my mother’s hand, I set off at a run, with difficulty extracting my feet from the damp sand into which my shoes sank; the canvas shoes that I had cleaned very early that morning with Blanco and a piece of flannel dipped into a coffee saucer full of water.
“In the name of the cross and the sign of the cross,” exclaimed my mother, but she didn’t call me to her. She let me run off and I entered, on my own, into the broad, desert passageways between the huts and the cabins and the few one-story stone houses, from behind their fences that were made of reeds implanted in the sand and tied together with rough, faded twine. As I ran with difficulty along the sands, I would touch them with my hand and the fencing would sway slightly. There were thin openings lengthwise between the reed supports that were scorchingly hot from the sun. The pathways rose and fell, all sandy and clean; the air rose in little eddies of fine sand, making a rustling noise in the brittle reed canes.
The decorations, perforated in geometrical and ornamental patterns in the wood of the closed cabins and the empty, sloping balconies whose paintwork was peeling, faced the light of noon with a special intimate darkness from within.
Between the cabins were random; irregular gaps, small and narrow and ever shady, and on the sand were thin dry sheets of newspaper covered with grains of sand. The tops of lemonade bottles, rusty tins, and sharp dry bits of refuse were submerged in the sand; and rising out of it, between the cabin walls, were tilted date palms, their bark firm and ribbed, with the wind soughing in their tops that swayed with gracefully tremulous fronds.
From behind the huts I heard the dull, lilting call in the vast empty space: Kerosene . . . kerosene; the call had an echo that was full of a warning and a nostalgic desire that had no explanation.
Suddenly the kerosene cart appeared before me, very close, at the broad intersection, with its small, cylindrical body colored red, on it the drawing of an open half of a shell and the writing extending along its belly, being pulled by a solitary slow bay horse, its head lowered, its eyes blinkered. The cart had large round wheels reaching up to its swollen middle, slowly turning and leaving in their wake two lines that bit deeply into the sand as it moved along on its way, encountering no one, no one responding to its call.
I told myself that we must be in early summer, very early in summer, perhaps just after Easter.
Our going to Sheikh Makar’s cabin at Abu Kir was, on each occasion, a recurrent festive event about which there was no guarantee that it would come round again. There was, first of all, the exciting train journey, after which we would spend the whole day on the beach and in the cabin. While I would remain on the shore, my mother would go out to the last of the barrels in the sea, and beyond them, till I could see no more of her than a black dot. She would be wearing a swimsuit with long legs that showed no more of her than her two arms and was rounded at the throat. She would go down into the sea with her friend whom she called “my darling Victoria,” the daughter of the Protestant minister from Upper Egypt, with the square face and the eyes that were both tender and sly.
Tall and thin, Victoria’s face was smooth and elongated and ended in a chin that appeared as sculpted, angular and delicate; her eyes, tapering to the sides of her face, possessed a very calm and silent look; her voice was always soft, even her laugh was low and had a steady, even rhythm to it. With the short black swimming trunks stretched tight across my thighs, I put on the old white silk shirt which I wore when we went to the sea. I could hear her laugh from behind the wood of the adjoining room as she, together with my mother, took off her clothes.
I loved Victoria and would flee from her in shyness. I never wearied of gazing at her and I yearned deeply for her.
Upon this face has been deposited layers of love whose stormy waves bore forward time and time again and then drew back. I looked at her with clear love of a young man, in which, nevertheless, I was aware of all life’s cracks and flaws.
Did my mother want to go alone and leave me with my sisters in the crowded house in Gheit al-Enab? And had I cried that day with those burning tears of disappointment that fall as the world itself falls? Had I forgotten this recurring drama which was so cruel for the child who has never grown up? Had I forgotten it as soon as the events had gone full circle? Had I run off to drag out my canvas shoes from amid the jumble of things under the bed and to clean them with a coating of the Blanco in the middle of which had been hollowed out a hole made smooth by the rag soaked in water? And had I put on my short black velvet trousers that I wore at celebrations and on feast days?
The floor of the shaded wooden corridor of the upper story of the hut would shake under my feet and sway slightly, between the railing of the balcony that looked down on the street on the one side and the doors of the closed rooms on the other. The long thin cracks between the wooden floorboards would fascinate me: hot lines of noonday light below which, if I bent over and put my eyes to the, I could see the sand of the road.
When I went into the bathroom I was at a loss as to how the water came to the tap and the porcelain basin fixed to the wooden wall, and as to where the flush water went, suddenly gushing forth, then stopping and then once again bursting out. surging and of variable color.
I descended the fragile, steep, dark-colored steps, feeling their cool wood against the soles of my bare feet, and when I looked up I saw Victoria wrapping round her waist the belt of the soft, fluffy blue bathrobe, with slippers of a very old dark brown leather on her feet, and with her thin brown thighs rising up under the clinging robe and ending in the mysterious, magical darkness. Her breasts in the dark blue swimsuit with the high neck, faded by sun and water, were small, cone-shaped, and delicate; they showed directly under the cloth of the swimsuit that clung to them and gently enfolded them, with nothing in between, so that the nipples took shape, rounded and protruding. She descended toward me slowly, as though not heeding. I saw her eyes smiling. We went down, racing each other. We were side by side on the narrow staircase, running.
She said to me, “I’ve beaten you—first there eats the pear.”
She gave her mysterious laugh that was slightly husky. I lowered my face as the blood rushed to it in embarrassment and ran to the sands and was stung by their heat.
Had we gone down to the sea, and returned and eaten, and was I now alone in the afternoon in the utter silence, in the shady, humid gap between the sand of the road and the floor of the cabin, turning my hand around in the sand and feeling its dampness under the granular surface and thinking about the elongated body that the waters had taken far away from me. while I was on the sea shore in the middle of a small bay filled with translucent waters of a crystalline clarity in which wavy lines, as though drawn by a fine moving pen, fluttered, coming and going gently between the small glistening rocks which quickly dried and were again wetted?
How quickly the faded blue swimsuit was changed into a far-away dot in the vast sea! My mother had outstripped her to beyond the barrels, and I could hardly see her amid the slight spray raised by the waves,
I was standing in the clear, shallow water and looking at the wooden bridge extending into the sea on short, circular columns of slimy cement on which quivered diaphanous green seaweed, sporting in the water and trembling like living creatures, then emerging wet from the surface of the water, the fibers intermingled, then suddenly drying and growing yellow, crisp and motionless as older paper.
Now, at noon, there was no one standing on the bridge with cane rods and pails of shrimps and small worms. The bridge, with its dry wood, stretched out far into the sea, unending.
The desolation on the shore was absolute. There was not a single bather on that calm noonday. The sunshades, scattered far apart and of aging colors, threw their shade on to the empty, opened-out deck chairs; even the lifeguard, with his shrill whistle, was not there.
I was alone, not knowing how to enter the vast, frightening, deep, magical sea, not knowing how to turn back from it.
On the surface of the white sands were the untouched tracks of birds, small and clearly defined, following one another in a single curving line, then suddenly coming to an end.
I bowed my head slightly so as not to bump against the cabin floor and went in between the short, square, gray stone pillars. I had to bend down and crawl along the sand on my bare hands and knees. Old yellow pages of newspaper, buried in the sand, were rustled by a secret wind that came in a hot blast from the sun outside. The garbage can at the corner of the cabin in the narrow passageway gave out a dry, slightly putrid smell, unfamiliar yet not disquieting. I could feel the movement of the floor above me as it shook slightly under footsteps, and I would be excited by a clear picture of delicate thighs stripped of clothing and moving about naked in a closed room with wooden walls, radiant with light stealing in from behind the cracked wood of the boards.
As my hands rummaged in the sand they came across a small blue bottle with a rounded body, embossed with tiny letters I couldn’t make out. I knew it was a bottle of perfume like those I would find at home on the marble slab of the dressing-table in front of the mirror alongside the silver kohl container with the thin stick at the mere sight of which my eyelids would quiver, and a brass box of powder with its small mirror, and yellow hairpins with two tightly contiguous prongs.
The bottle was filled with sand which I emptied out, cleaning it carefully yet impatiently with my hands. Then I crawled out quickly, my head lowered and my knees scraping against the moist sand.
I went up the steps at a run and rushed into the living-room where my mother was stretched out on the ottoman with colored cushions, I came to an abrupt stop when I saw Victoria sitting at the end of the couch, alongside my mother’s feet, her back resting against a soft pillow, her arms raised as she combed her hair with rhythmic movements, gentle and feminine; the look in her eyes was far-away and had in it neither sadness nor silence: it was as though she had left us all and didn’t know where she was.
I rushed to my mother, saying: “Look what I’ve found.” I stretched out my hand to her with the magical blue bottle that now shone with the sweat of my hands that had been grasping it like some treasure. My mother smiled and said without anger. “What things the crow brings to its mother!” She didn’t take the bottle from me and I didn’t cry.
I walked by the edge of the water on the sea shore, with the world deserted, inside my body a pleasing a sense of exhaustion, the awakening blood of youth and a slight burning from the sea’s sun, with the water not yet dried, I could see it gleaming on my skin, which glowed and pulsated in regular throbs of heat.
The limpid blue waters under my feet were shallow. They were almost motionless except for a slow ripple. They contained the expanse of the imprisoned, upturned sky. slightly deeper in its blueness than the vast emptiness lit up by the sun, an expanse that mingled with the bed of soft sand, smooth and sleek, on whose surface my feet scarcely left any tracks. Once again I extracted my legs from this under-sky and put my wet feet on the first of the marble steps, which swayed with a gentle trembling as though broken and rose suddenly from the skin of the translucent waters that could hardly be seen. The rich, white marble was as old and smooth as vintage wine. The edges of the steps that rose in a scarcely perceptible curve entered anew, in the direction of the sea, into a wide sweep as they ascended toward the scorching sky, step by step, towering and unhurried, with their smooth marble, delicate yet firm, the pores on the outer skin rendering it even smoother. It had been dried by the sun, and the little water left on it by my feet was evaporating, a coating that was soon dispersed and scarcely left any trace other than a dark patch in the tone of the marble, which became more sparkling. I would feel its heat under my feet as I climbed up further and as, little by little, the last drops of water wetting my feet dried away.
In my ascent of these endless stairs there was an eagerness, a lively expectancy; it was as though I would be finding something I didn’t know-about but which I yearned for deeply, something that excited me, over there in the heart of the pale blueness of the sky.
I arrived at the last step in the stairway without effort; it was as though something were bearing me along, rather was it that I didn’t even feel that something was bearing me along, some power that was outside me yet which, at the same time, emanated from within me. The sea was below me, far away, ever so remote, and the waves were clashing together soundlessly, excessively distant, and the foam, tossed about in a zigzag, slightly frothy line, was melting away in a greeny blueness close to the shore.
The final step was wide and unsupported, creating the impression that one could easily slip and fall, yet it held no danger, not the least threat, as if the descent from it to the surface of the sea that sparkled, deep and unfathomable underneath, would be more like a weightless landing without gravity or shock. Its marble was polished and rounded and contained no little pores, which had gradually decreased the further I climbed, until its full bloom was restored to it, new, warm and utterly smooth.
The sensation of the hot marble had an enjoyment about it; it was as though it were responding, merely through this tender heat, to a particular demand in the body clinging to it, transferring its grateful heat and deferring to its silent, feminine gentleness with a discreet and engrossed enjoyment; an enjoyment that ripples and tumesces and takes in the sky. the distant waters of the sea and the great blaze of the sun quietly burning, cleaving to contours that are easy and pliant, then swirling and massing and swelling till it explodes. The burning disc of the sun flies apart into shreds that are immersed in the belly of the blueness in scattered stabbings with extended echoes and melt away. And the light of noon returns sober, white and silent-colored.
I came to the end of the street and left behind me the last of the huts. I had the sensation that the blood of youth was still flowing in me for a few final years. From behind the church the railway station appeared small and distant and still, as though it were a toy, and on the other side I could see the topmost tips of a narrow grove of date palms spread out in a curving line, drowning and almost submerged between two undulating dunes of white sand, only the tops of the palm leaves, scarcely stirring, showing above them.
I stood in an expanse of sand that appeared to be unclean: piles of heaped-up litter were scattered about at random, having a smell only of a slightly sickly sweetness. I told myself that where we are concerned our garbage easily disintegrates, for what do we throw away as garbage? And yet I saw red Coca-Cola cans that were flaking, newly imported blue cans of Seven-Up, torn nylon bags with faded advertisements for whisky and cigarettes, the spiky tips of splinters of glass projecting from pages of newspapers and an old torn woman’s swimsuit and bits of tattered rags.
At the beginning of the empty space overlooking the stretch of desert, behind the railway lines, stood the huge ten-ton lorries, their enormous wheels of thick black rubber so solidly heavy that apart of them had sunk into the hard sand. Their engines were turning over with a rhythmic rumbling sound. The drivers had left them and were gathered in a small circle, with their imported leather jackets and with their scarves round their powerful necks. One of them was wearing a round white skullcap over his long hair. They were smoking and from their cigarettes there rose up in the stillness of the wintry summer resort a slightly blue, fragrant smoke. They were not talking.
The lorries were weighed down with mixed loads of cement and books and paper and bricks and iron rods piled up with their ends unevenly stacked; they were of differing lengths and the ends of the thin rods protruded, arching upwards and giving warning of how easily they could pierce and rend. Though I was very far away, I turned my head aside as though to avoid them, and came to a stop.
Not far distant I saw a young police sergeant with a thin athletic body, a cap on his shaved head, his revolver in its dark brown holster. He was standing in a bored attitude, his face motionless with suppressed anger, his eyes not looking at anything. Behind him were two plainclothes men with long overcoats and high regulation boots; they were bareheaded and each one held a thin cane which he struck against the side of his overcoat with regular movements.
Behind me all the huts were locked; along their fronts had been let down coverings of intertwined matting, fixed to the ground by great iron rings, coarse and rusty, while the wintry setting sun cast long shadows on to the deserted sandy pathways. As I stood there without moving, I looked around me anxiously. There was no longer anyone but myself at the end of this sandy world; anxiously I waited for someone to come, as though to save me from some danger I didn’t know of, for someone to appear and to bring with him—merely by making his appearance—companionship, affection, and security, for a voice to be raised, for a cry or a scream. And no one comes.
There is nothing there but the murmur of the sea waves, their relentless rhythm ever repeated, so far away.
The workers from Upper Egypt were circling round the lorries in small groups. They were unloading the stacked-up piles of iron bars, and the iron would fall with a muffled thud, immediately scoring long lines on the sandy ground. Sacks of cement, covered on the outside with their own white dust which had erased the writing on them so that all that showed were the faint letters ‘Portland’ in English, were being lifted by an Upper Egyptian with a powerful back, who had got into the lorry and had placed an old piece of sacking over himself to protect his head and body. He would let the sacks slide down from his braced back to be snatched up by his fellow workers from below, their arms raised, strained, and they would throw them on to the iron, and from underneath them he would gather up motley piles of books and magazines, and pieces of paper of various shapes and sizes, which he would throw to them, and the books would fall from their hands on to the sand, and the covers, their colors faded, would be ripped apart. In among them would fly in all directions sheets of paper, new and shiny and old and yellowed, printed and written in strange handwritings, and on typewriters, as if they were governmental communications or love letters or rough notes taken of lectures, and I saw old numbers of the magazines al-Fukaha, al-Hilal, Kullu shay’, and al-Muqtataf and al-Lata’ if al-musawwara, and al-Magalla, al-Katib, and al-Kawakib, with their differently sized and variously colored covers and their nostalgic pictures and drawings. The workers were throwing one pile on top of another so that the books and papers were being crumpled. I had the sensation of the red bricks scraping against their rough hands as they quickly transferred them, four at a time, throwing them on to the books and the cement and the sand and the iron so that thin, brittle chips would break off from their symmetrical edges.
They were all silent. The only sound was that of the iron grating against the side of the lorries as it slid down and hit the sand, the rustling of the papers, and the sound of the sacks of cement rasping against the dryness of the bricks. No one was talking.
I said to myself. “Where is the joyful singing of the Upper Egyptians with echoes of faraway sadness, when they take up and put down the loads of the world?”
I did not hear the sound of what I had said to myself
With a burning, irrepressible urge I wanted to approach the circle of drivers. I knew with a knowledge of utter despair that they would not see me, and that if I addressed them they would not hear me. And yet I wanted to move toward them, while my bare feet, wet with seawater, shifted around on the sands, digging, with their slowed, heavy turning, a deep, determined hole, and yet they did not move.
The first tongues of fire rose up from amid the debris. In the pure air there was an acrid, penetrating smell. The flames advanced slowly, with timorous wariness at first, then writhing with greater confidence and all at once plunging down until they disappeared and no trace was to be seen of them among the iron and cement, then suddenly bursting forth, as though from deep within my anxious self, from the other side of the piles, above the bricks whose color I saw was blackening slightly. And I saw the fires take on their full glory, robustly in command, and there was the sound of them babbling with quick, successive cracking and popping, with the smoke from the paper giving out a smell of burnt lime.
I saw the red covers of Hours of Pride growing white between the flaming tongues, their white pages folding in upon themselves, curling and falling as the fire consumed them. I heard the voices of old friends I hadn’t seen for a long time; among them were some who were now living in London, in Paris and Harvard, and among them was a friend I had loved dearly who had died a short while ago of cancer of the brain, also a friend who had drowned twenty years ago in Agami, and Victoria was running with them in the faded blue fluffy bathrobe. There were many of them and they were running after things that are not easily attained. They were running toward me, toward the fire, and calling out for help, to telephone the fire brigade, and for buckets of seawater, while other voices were saying there was nothing to be done about it. Then the fires exploded into a roar of radiant light.