Black Magic: A Modern Arabic Novel

1

No. The place didn’t scare me, and neither did the old man sitting on the small wooden bench at the entrance to the ancient house sewing white shrouds. This old man wore a permanent smile around which his features had rigidified, while his penetrating gaze shifted back and forth from the needle to the cloth and then to the people going in and out, each of whom he would examine fixedly and at length, almost as though he didn’t see them, as though his eyes were immobile in their sockets—or so it seemed to a newcomer to the place like me. He would look searchingly into the faces, weighing them on a sensitive, sympathetic scale, and, whether it were a man, a woman, or a child, and whatever his or her appearance, social condition, and gait, the old man’s lips would generally part and his small deep eyes twinkle in an affectionate smile to which the wrinkles and creases of his face imparted the innocence of incuriosity.

Sometimes I would feel that this continuous smile was directed at his own private world alone, at his long thin needle and the coarse white cotton cloth, which was not tailored to the shape of a garment with collar, neck, arms, and cuffs but yet was in no way a deep mockery of the living, as at first it had seemed to me to be.

From about nine in the morning the old man would be at his usual place, on the bench, whose position was changed according to the movement of the sun and how its rays fell on his face and the cloth. On a fall morning such as this, his tall apprentice would set the bench down in front of the collapsing stone wall of the abandoned house that stood opposite to ours so that the old man could sit directly facing the wide open door of his shop.

In the morning he took pleasure in the warmth of the silvery rays, which he liked to let fall on his neck and back so that they lit up the conspicuous greenish veins of his short, wrinkled neck and revealed the beauty of his dark brown gallabiya as he bent over the cloth, his skillful hand switching rapidly from stitch to stitch, his shrunken body jerking with the monotonous movement that was repeated with each pull of the long, shining needle, which he grasped between his finger and thumb with such effortless mastery and strength that it seemed to those who watched him work like a long, thin, hard sixth finger to his veined right hand.

As the morning wore on and the sun came to rest in the center of the sky, the position of the bench would be changed, the apprentice picking it up and putting it down again as close as possible to the iron door of the house and to the right of the door of the shop. In the shadow cast by my balcony, the short bench would be transformed for about an hour into a small bed on which the old man would stretch out his thin body, dozing off into a pleasant siesta. Within minutes of his lying down he would be sleeping like an unweaned child, the smile never leaving his face, as though he were playing with kind angels and lovely virgins, his sleep not plagued by the sort of nightmares I see in mine.

Whenever I try to sleep in the middle of the day, I see murderers and killers, Amazons and soldiers, and they attack me.

With the coming of sunset, the apprentice would return the bench to its position of the morning and the old man resume the jerking of his body that accompanied the sewing of each new stitch of the shroud. He would finish the latter at around nine in the evening, when he would fold it, take it carefully in his hands and, after crossing the short distance between the bench and the door of the shop with slow, dignified steps, as though he had just finished mixing the elixir of happiness, place it on one of the many wooden shelves that lined the walls of the shop. He would then straighten his little white skullcap and slap the dust off his gallabiya in preparation for leaving.

The dark came early in fall and the number of passersby in the street declined too. Few went into or out of the house. The place went quiet and the children who played in the street disappeared. The apprentice would pull down the metal shutter that covered the door of the shop with a shattering screeching and grating caused by the rust on the cog wheels, the old man would take the apprentice’s arm under his, and they would walk in silence and with slow steps to the corner of el-Rashidi Street, proceeding from there toward the bus stop opposite Qasr el-Aini Hospital’s ‘French’ wing.

The old man’s presence would prevent me from going up to my apartment on the second floor with a woman without worrying deep within myself about his reaction. By the same token, slipping out again—should I happen to be successful in hunting one down—would be problematic during the day, which was the best time for a woman to leave. Anyway, I hadn’t put it to the test yet, though I was determined to try.

Two weeks after moving into the house, the smile with which Old Man Rihan presented me every time I went in or out became more knowing, as though he was quite done collecting the data he needed to form an opinion of this person who daily crossed his field of vision and experience. In this small neighborhood, the presence of a new person, a new resident, meant that the older residents would all take note of his appearance, his age, his social station, his daily routine, his times of entry and exit, his habits, of what food, plastic bags, or suitcases he was carrying, of who, if anybody, came to see him, and so forth. How much more then, I thought, would this be the case with Rihan, Rihan who had built the foundation of his life here on his precise monitoring and observation of others (a monitoring that manifested itself on the surface as complete indifference), especially as he was free to keep his eyes, which seemed to be in excellent condition despite his advanced age, on the lookout. The reason for this good eyesight of his may have lain in his having almost completely dispensed with the use of words in his dealings with the people of the neighborhood, his apprentice, or even his customers, who generally came to him in the form of downcast silent bands incapable of expressing their needs verbally, just as he had no need to hear their voices to know what they wanted; merely by looking at others he could tell what they wanted from him, and he would take care of everything to perfection without any need for an exchange of words.

The people of the neighborhood had grown used to Rihan’s presence years ago. A few avoided passing in front of his shop so that their eyes would not fall on him by accident as he sat on his bench and they could escape his glance and permanent smile, and so that they didn’t have to inhale the shop’s deep, ancient odor, a penetrating smell that haunted without respite the narrow street, a street which had no name and which, unlike the rest of the streets of el-Munira, bore no sign attached to the first of its houses. The name used by the residents of the neighborhood was the undertaker’s street, and they used this in a quite ordinary, neutral way to indicate a certain street with a special smell, a smell which started as something almost unnoticeable and which, being almost indistinguishable from that of the meat, fish, and vegetables in the Mawardi Street market, was in no way unpleasant but grew in pungency and weight over the length of the street’s three hundred meters until it became the sole smell, pure and unalloyed, in front of Rihan’s shop, just two doors from the intersection with el-Rashidi Street.

Most of the inhabitants, however, were accustomed to that smell that was as much a part of the place as was Rihan himself, on his bench, sewing shrouds. They would pass him by as though he were invisible, as though he were a stone in the dilapidated wall against which he rested his back. The children and teenagers paid him no heed and had turned the small space in front of the shop into a soccer pitch, using two small stones to make a goal, and they would charge around after the ball, shrieking, playing, and quarreling during Rihan’s siesta. Sometimes his apprentice would join them.

Even though I didn’t exchange a single word with him during those two weeks, even in greeting, a relationship developed between us that was different from mine with the other old residents of the neighborhood, for I neither showed any displeasure at his presence, avoiding him and averting my eyes whenever I found him looking at me, nor took him and his presence for granted, as I might, for example, that of the grocer, the butcher, or the vegetable seller, nor treated him with frank indifference as did the children. It had been many years since anyone new had moved into the street, and, in particular, into that small apartment situated directly above Rihan’s shop. Maybe he was happy now that the person he’d been hoping would come had finally done so, to share with him the pleasure of observing others, of watching their lives unfold before him bit by bit, and of making the discoveries that, with each new revelation, caused the old man’s heart to flutter with a joy that lit up his beautiful round face, a face that must once have been that of an extremely attractive young man.

I was altogether ready and willing to nourish Rihan’s voracious and indomitable curiosity and share with him all those personal secrets of mine that I had a pressing need to reveal to somebody old and wise like him, someone who dealt on a daily basis with ripe, mature bodies that had departed this life, escaped its predicament, someone who saw people at the moment of their ultimate consummation, beyond which there is nothing.

My relationship with Rihan had developed during the past two weeks by means of silent dialogs conducted via the swift looks that we exchanged and by means of which each of us probed the other—stolen looks that repeated themselves in nearly identical form. I would be entering or leaving the house. I would tarry a little in front of the metal door, my small leather bag on my back, while he sat on his bench facing me, working away at his monotonous task. At first, he would dart a quick glance at me without raising his head from the cloth and needle, as though he hadn’t seen me. Then he started pausing for a moment in the act of pushing the needle through the white cloth, raising his face toward me and bending his neck in a gesture of welcome. And then I began to give him a smile and raise my right hand in a quick greeting.

Day after day, a sense of familiarity and harmony, and of ill-defined and mysterious connection, deepened between us. I ceased to worry about whether I should make an experiment of bringing a woman home to see how he would react or of how much he might find out about me. I even started to be able to distinguish his special smell at a distance of several hundred meters: as I proceeded with my unhurried strolls along the Nile corniche at Garden City, I would sniff like a dog looking for its companion, and the closer I got and the shorter the distance between me and his shop and bench, the stronger would that ancient, penetrating, and powerful smell become. As soon as I detected it, I would know that he was at his station, still alive, still sewing shrouds, impervious to boredom or fatigue.

2

As was my two-week-old wont, I entered the apartment to find myself in the darkness of the cramped parlor. Here the smell was transformed into something old and smothered, the smell of stale air absorbed into ancient furniture that had clung to the apartment since the death seven years before of the woman who had owned it. Mahrus, her daughter’s husband, who had asked for 350 pounds a month in rent under the new rent law, informed me that no one had set foot in the place since his mother-in-law had died.

She was one of those women who are as good as ten men. The whole market tried to keep on her good side, said Mahrus.

Then he laughed the long laugh of the habitual hashish smoker and added, "Even at dying she was as good as ten men: she took ten years to do it. In the evening I’d order the shroud and the opening of the grave and the tent for the condolences and the fiqi to read the Koran and before dawn had risen she’d wake up and beat me to the shop. Ten times, my dear sir, till I said, ‘The woman’s never going to