Children of the Alley by Naguib Mahfouz
Ignoring Umaima, who was trying to urge him to keep walking, Adham shouted, “Go on, keep acting like a whore—you’re the lowest of the low!”
Idris shook his buttocks as he spun slowly and amorously around. Blind with rage, Adham threw his bundle to the ground and pushed away Umaima, who was trying to hold him back, and leaped at Idris. He got him around the neck and tried with all his strength to crush it. Idris gave no sign of feeling the stranglehold, and continued to dance gracefully. Maddened, Adham punched him again and again, but Idris went on teasing and even sang, in his most grating voice, a babyish rhyme:
Duckie, duckie, duckie, spin!
Where’d you get your kitty’s chin?
Then he stopped, cursed violently and hit Adham so hard in the chest that he was thrown back and staggered, then lost his balance and fell on his back.
Screaming, Umaima ran to him and helped him up, dusting him off “What do you want with this beast?” she said. “Let’s get out of here!”
He picked up his bundle without a word, and his wife took hers, and they resumed walking until the end of the property, when exhaustion overtook him. He dropped the bundle and sat on it, saying, “Let’s rest a little.” The woman sat opposite him and began to cry again.
Then Idris’ voice reached them, as strong as thunder; he stood before the mansion, looking menacingly up at it as he bellowed, “You kicked me out to please the lowest of your children—and do you see how he has treated you? Now you yourself are throwing him out into the dirt, just as you did to me, and you’re worst off of all. Take notice that Idris cannot be beaten! Stay up there with your stupid, sterile sons—the only grandchildren you’ll ever have will creep in the dirt and roll around in filth, and someday they’ll live by peddling potatoes and melon seeds. The gangsters in Atuf and Kafr al-Zaghari will slap them around. Your blood will be mixed with the commonest blood. You’ll squat alone in your room, changing your will in rage and failure—you’ll suffer from loneliness and old age in the dark, and when you die not one eye will weep!”
Idris turned to Adham and continued to shout frenziedly. “You weakling, how will you live by yourself? You have no strength, and no one strong to depend upon! What good will your reading and arithmetic do you in the desert? Ha, ha, ha!”
Umaima was still crying, until Adham grew annoyed and told her dully, “That’s enough crying.”
“I’ll have a lot more crying to do,” she replied, drying her eyes. “I’m the guilty one, Adham.”
“You’re not the only one. If I hadn’t been so weak and cowardly none of this would have happened.”
“The sin is mine alone.”
“You’re just taking all the blame to keep me from yelling at you,” yelled Adham.
Her appetite for self-criticism blunted, Umaima kept her head bowed and said softly, “I didn’t think he’d be that cruel with us.”
“I know him better. I have no excuse.”
She hesitated before asking, “How am I supposed to live here when I’m pregnant?”
“We have to live in this wasteland after having lived in the mansion! I wish tears could help us, but all we can do is build a hut.”
“Where?”
He looked around, and his gaze rested in the direction of Idris’ hut.
“We shouldn’t go too far from the mansion,” he said uneasily, “even if we have to end up near Idris’ hut. Otherwise we’d be all alone at the mercy of this desert.”
Umaima thought a little, and seemed convinced. “Yes, and so we can be within his sight, in case he takes pity on us.”
Adham groaned. “Grief is killing me—if it weren’t for you, I’d think all this was a nightmare. Will he never forgive us? I won’t be insolent to him like Idris—no way! I’m nothing like Idris—will he treat me the same way?”
“This place has never known a father like yours,” said Umaima bitterly.
“When will your tongue learn?” He glared at her.
“I haven’t committed a crime or a sin, for God’s sake!” said Umaima irritably. “Tell anyone what I did, and how I’m being punished, and I bet you he won’t even believe it. I swear to God, in the history of fatherhood there has never been a father like yours.”
“And the world has never known a man like him. This mountain, this desert and this sky testify to that—any other man would have avoided the challenge.”
“The way he acts, none of his children will be left in the mansion.”
“We were the first to leave, and we were the worst ones in it.”
“I am not,” said Umaima hotly. “We are not.”
“The true judgment comes only through a test.”
They fell silent. There was not a living thing to be seen in the desert except for stragglers far off, at the foot of the mountain. The sun cast its fierce rays from the clear sky, and baked the vast sands, which glittered with scattered stones or fragments of glass. The mountain stood alone on the horizon except for a tall boulder in the east that looked like the head of a body buried in the sands, and Idris’ hut at the eastern end of the mansion, planted defiantly but pathetically in the ground. The very air warned of hardship, trouble and fear.
Umaima sighed audibly. “We are going to have to work very hard to make life bearable.”
Adham gazed up at the mansion. “We are going to have to work even harder to make that gate open for us again.”
10
Adham and Umaima started building their hut at the western end of the mansion. They brought stones from Muqattam and gathered boards from the foot of the mountain and from the outskirts of Atuf, Gamaliya and Bab al-Nasr. It became clear to them that building their home would take much more time than they had supposed, and by this time they had run out of the stores of cheese, eggs and molasses Umaima had taken from the house. Adham decided to go out and look for a job; he would sell some of his more expensive clothes to buy a hand cart, from which he would peddle potatoes, chickpeas, cucumbers and other produce, depending on the season. Umaima became so emotional watching him collect his clothes that she burst into tears, but he did not respond. Then he said, with mingled irony and irritation, “These clothes aren’t right for me anymore. Wouldn’t it be silly to hawk potatoes in an embroidered camel-hair cloak?”
With the desert as a backdrop, he pushed his cart toward Gamaliya, Gamaliya which had not yet forgotten his wedding; his heart sank and his voice died—he stopped calling out for buyers, and he almost sobbed aloud. He quickly switched to the more remote neighborhoods, and doggedly pushed his cart and cried his wares from morning till night, until his hands were hard, his sandals were worn out and his feet and limbs were racked with pain. How hateful it was—haggling with the women, being forced by exhaustion to nap on the ground by a wall, stopping in a corner to relieve himself. This life seemed unreal, and the days in the garden, running the property, the little room that overlooked Muqattam were like fairy tales. He said to himself, “Nothing is real in this world—the mansion, that unfinished hut, that garden, this handcart, yesterday, today and tomorrow. I probably did the right thing to build the hut in front of the mansion, so that I don’t lose my past the way I’ve lost my present and future. Would it be inconceivable for me to lose my memory as I’ve lost my father and myself?” He went home in the evening to Umaima, not to relax, but to work on building the hut. One noon he sat in Watawit Alley to rest, and fell asleep. A movement woke him, and he saw boys stealing his cart. He got up and threatened them, and one boy who saw him warned his friends with a whistle; they overturned the cart to distract him from going after them. The cucumbers tumbled all over the ground while the boys dispersed like locusts. Adham was so enraged that he forgot his decent upbringing and screamed obscenities at them, then bent down to retrieve his cucumbers from the mud. His anger redoubled with no outlet, so he asked emotionally, Why was your anger like fire, burning without mercy? Why was your pride dearer to you than your own flesh and blood? How can you enjoy an easy life when you know we are being stepped on li
“How much are the cucumbers, uncle?”
Idris stood there with a mocking grin, wearing a brilliantly striped long shirt, a white turban on his head. When Adham saw him smiling and scornful, not wrought up or angry, his world turned black. He pushed the cart to leave, but Idris blocked his way and spoke in surprise: “Doesn’t a customer like me deserve good service?”
Adham tensely raised his head and said, “Just leave me alone.”
Idris did a sarcastic double take. “You don’t like having your brother talk to you this way?”
“Idris,” said Adham patiently, “haven’t you done enough to me as it is? I don’t want you to know me—I don’t want to know you.”
“What kind of talk is this? We’re practically neighbors!”
“I didn’t want to be your neighbor, but I wanted to be near the house I was—”
“—evicted from,” snickered Idris.
Adham fell silent, but his bloodless face showed his anger.
“The soul yearns for the place it has been thrown out of, isn’t that right?”
Adham said nothing.
“You want to go back to that house, you shrewd thing—you really are weak, but full of cunning. But let me tell you that I’ll never let you go back and leave me here—not if the sky falls to the earth.”
“Haven’t you done enough to me?” asked Adham, his nostrils flaring with anger.
“Haven’t you done enough to me? I was kicked out because of you, and I was the brilliant star of the mansion!”
“You were kicked out because of your own pride.”
Idris shrieked with laughter. “And you were kicked out because of your own weakness—there’s no room in the mansion for strength or weakness! Look what a dictator your father is! He allows no one but himself to show strength or weakness. He is so strong that he ruins the people closest to him, and so weak that he marries a woman like your mother!”
“Let me go,” stammered Adham, frowning angrily. “If you want trouble, find someone your own size.”
“Your father starts trouble with the strong and the weak.”
Adham kept silent and glowered even more darkly.
“You don’t want to be lured into disparaging him! How clever of you! It proves that you dream of going back there.” He took a cucumber from the cart and made a face. “How did you let yourself get sucked into peddling these dirty cucumbers? Is this the best you could do?”
“I’m happy with this work.”
“You mean poverty has left you no choice—while your father lives like a king. Think about that. Wouldn’t you do better to team up with me?”
“That’s not what I was cut out for,” said Adham sullenly.
“Look at my clothes! The owner was parading around in this yesterday, as if he had any right to!”
Adham looked shocked. “How did you get it?”
“The way strong people get anything they want.”
He had committed robbery or even murder!
“I can’t believe that you are my brother Idris,” said Adham sadly.
“Why should anyone be surprised,” laughed Idris, “who knows that I’m a child of Gabalawi?”
“Now will you get out of my way!” exclaimed Adham, his patience gone.
“Whatever you say, moron.”
Idris filled his pockets with cucumbers, threw Adham a look of contempt, spat on the cart and walked away.
Umaima rose to greet him when he arrived at the hut. Shadow was enveloping the desert, and a candle guttered inside the hut. The stars flashed in the sky, and in their light the mansion loomed like a giant apparition. Umaima saw from his silence that she was better off avoiding him in this mood. She gave him a jug of water to wash in and brought him clean clothes. He washed his face and feet, changed his clothes, then sat on the ground and stretched his legs out. She approached him cautiously and said, to placate him, “I wish I could bear some of your burden for you.”
As if she had picked at a scab, he shouted, “Shut up! You’re the source of all this trouble and hardship!”
She slid away from him, so far that she became almost invisible in the darkness, but he shouted at her again.
“You’re the best reminder of my stupidity. I curse the day I first saw you.”
He heard her sobbing in the dark, but it only made him angrier. “God damn your crying! Your tears are just leaks from the wickedness that fills your whole body.”
“Nothing you say is worse than what I’m going through!” she bawled.
“I don’t want to hear another word! Get away from me!”
He wadded up his discarded clothes and threw them at her.
“My belly!” she moaned.
His anger began to cool and he began to worry about what might happen. She inferred from his silence that he was sorry and said in a pained voice, “I’ll get away from you, since that’s what you want.” She got up and started off.
“Do you think this is a good time to act like a spoiled brat?” he shouted. He started to get up, and called, “Come back. Forget it.”
He squinted into the darkness until he saw her shape coming his way. He rested his back against the wall of the hut and looked up at the sky, wishing he could be sure that her belly was unhurt, but he was too proud. He would ask her very soon; and he eased into it by telling her, “Wash some of the cucumbers for our supper.”
11
A peaceable enough place to sit. No greenery or water, no birds singing on branches, just the bleak, hostile desert ground, which at night wore such mysterious blackness that a dreamer could imagine it to be whatever he wished. The dome of the heavens, studded with stars, the woman inside the hut, and solitude that speaks. Sorrow like coals buried in ashes. The high wall of the mansion repelling the sad exile. This tyrant father, how can I make him hear my cry? It is wisest to forget the past, but the past is all we have; that is why I hate my weakness and curse my depravity. I can stomach misery as a mate and beget children for him. A sparrow, which no power can bar from the garden, is more fortunate than I am in my dreams. My eyes yearn for the water that gushed between the rosebushes. Where is the fragrance of the henna plants and jasmine, where the peace of mind, my flute, you cruel man? Half a year has gone by—when will your icy cruelty thaw?
From a distance Idris’ raucous singing could be heard: “A strange world, God, a strange world!” And here he was, lighting a fire in front of his hut, a flame that shot high and then sank into the ground. His hugely pregnant wife came and went, bringing food and drink. Overcome by a wave of drunken resentment, Idris broke the silence with a bellow directed at the mansion: “Time for your roast chicken and greens, people! I hope it poisons you!” Then he resumed singing.
“Every time I manage to be alone in the dark,” Adham said sadly to himself, “that devil stokes up his fire and makes noise and ruins my peace.” When Umaima appeared at the door of the hut, he realized that she had not slept, as he had thought; her pregnancy had exhausted her, and hard work and poverty had worn her down.
“Why aren’t you sleeping?” she asked tenderly.
“Just let me enjoy the only hour I have to enjoy life,” he snarled.
“You’ll be out pushing your cart first thing in the morning—you need to rest.”
“When I’m alone I’m a respectable man again, or I can pretend to be. I contemplate the sky and remember days gone by.”
She sighed audibly. “I wish I could see your father leaving the house or going in—I’d throw myself at his feet and beg him to forgive me.”
“How many times have I told you to forget that idea?” asked Adham impatiently. “That way will do nothing to get us back in his good graces.”
Umaima was silent for a long time, then said, “I’m thinking of the fate of this thing in
“That’s all I think of too, even though I’ve become one of the lower beasts.”
“You are the best man in the world,” she murmured sadly.
Adham laughed derisively. “I’m no longer a man at all. No one but animals think only about food.”
“Don’t be sad. How many men have started out like you, and then got rich and ended up owning stores and houses.”
“Are you having labor pains in your brain?”
“You’ll be an important man someday,” Umaima persisted. “Our child will grow up rich.”
Adham slapped his hands together in sarcastic despair. “Will I make us rich selling beer, maybe? Or hashish?”
“By working, Adham.”
“Working to eat is the worst curse in the world!” he snapped. “In the garden I used to live, and do no work except for looking at the sky or playing my flute, but now I’m just an animal. I push that cart in front of me day and night to earn some garbage to eat in the evening, and to shit in the morning. Working to eat is the worst curse of all. The only life is in the mansion, where no one works so they can eat—everything there is fun and beauty and singing.”
Idris’ voice split the air. “That’s the truth, Adham, work is a curse—it’s a humiliation I haven’t learned yet. Didn’t I invite you to team up with me?”
Adham turned toward the voice and saw Idris standing nearby. He often sneaked over unnoticed in the dark and eavesdropped for as long as he pleased, and joined the conversation when he felt like it.
“Go home,” said Adham irritably.
“I was just saying,” Idris pronounced with mock seriousness, “as you were, that work is a curse which impairs the dignity of man.”
“You’re inviting me to be a thug, which is more disgusting than a curse.”
“If work is a curse and crime is disgusting, how is a man supposed to live?”
Adham said nothing; he hated this conversation. Idris waited for him to speak, and when he didn’t, he spoke again.