out.
At the square, empty on that summer night, we heard the clamor of moviegoers leaving the last show, their voices loud as we entered Aziz Fahmi Street. I noticed he was mumbling something. Forgetting the small boy leading him, he was talking to himself.
“Just hold tight, Tadrus. You’re not one to be broken by a debt of a thousand pounds.”
He was leading me now. When I tried to walk on Taha al-Hakim Street, he gripped my shoulder and led me forward, continuing his mumbling. When we reached the alley, he couldn’t enter the house.
“Get me a chair, Yusuf, my son,” he told me. It was the first time I’d heard him speak my name: Yusuf, my son.
He sat on the chair in front of the house, still whispering to himself, his crisis at its peak. No matter how they tried to persuade him, he wouldn’t agree to go back to carrying a seal tied to a woven string in his vest pocket. For him there could be no business without his signature. He began to doubt his ability to carry on with the trade. His end came when his faith in his signature collapsed.
He continued to leave the house every morning, imperious and wanting to rely on himself. The daylight helped him find his way in streets and alleys he knew every inch of. Workers at nearby exchanges would help him open up his shop and sit there. Fatin would come running from the square.
“When are you going to stop this, Khawaga?” Fatin would tell him. “Listen, pack in the business and come work with us—with me and my husband.”
He’d answer with his oft-repeated response: “Your husband’s greedy. He’d eat up my money and then wipe the bowl clean with me.”
In the end, he was compelled to quit his business and do what Fatin urged. He finally submitted to his fate, saying in a low voice, “Futna’s right.”
Yusuf Tadrus says:
The alley where I grew up is like a courtyard, closed on itself. My father bought it in the late 1940s, a house with some outlying rooms. He used it to store goods, and then he started renting out the rooms to small families. So each room became an independent house, but it preserved the feel of one home. The people of the alley were one family whose center was the house of Khawaga Tadrus. That was the world I was born into. My mother said the women used to spirit me away as a child, and at the end of the day she wouldn’t know which house to fetch me from. That’s the part of my life I don’t know, and what I don’t know may have had more of an impact on my constitution than what I know and tell you. There’s a warmth and a shadowy longing in my being, but in any case, each of us has his own lost paradise.
In the rooms attached to the house lived several families. Salih al-Naggar, an army enlistee, and his wife from al-Agizi. He was a womanizer and had a library, all of it religious books, and he hung a photo of himself and Sheikh al-Shaarawi facing the door. He sent many letters to the radio, asking the announcer Nadia Salih to visit him and tape an episode for the program From Someone’s Private Library. Across from his room lived Zinat, the wife of Hassanein the mechanic. She was a beautiful, shapely woman who spent her time in a slip, not caring that people could see her from the window. Salih would chat her up and she’d respond, “Not if you were the last man on earth” or “Not a chance, you clodhopper.” Hagg Ibrahim also lived in the alley with his wife and daughters, as did Umm Samra with her four kids and Umm Bisa with her husband the truck driver.
They lived in the alley as one family. When the crab peddler would enter with his basket on his shoulder, he’d leave with nothing. The women would gather around the catch and take it all. In the afternoon the smell of boiling crab laced with cumin would settle over the alley.
One afternoon, during the summer, Zinat got the idea to use the clothesline strung in the middle of the alley as a volleyball net. Three women gathered and took a plastic ball from a boy and started a volleyball match. Sheer joy filled the place, frivolity, fun, and heartfelt laughter—when I recall the scene, my heart hums. I was sitting on the edge of Umm Bisa’s windowsill watching the match, the other women doubled over in laughter in front of the doors.
When we hit puberty, the atmosphere in the alley helped us learn the secrets between men and women without fear or complex. The open life let us experiment with simple, harmless things. Honestly, it’s like the alley was lined with an intense sensuality. We observed sexual tensions from their onset, and we’d ask outright for a kiss or a cuddle. Some of us would furtively watch a woman undressing, and at night whispers would reach us from nearby rooms: the demurral, the negotiations, the small gasps, the consoling words after disappointment.
One day I was studying with the boys on the roof when Zinat came up to feed the ducks, wearing just a slip. Aroused, the boy Sayyid Uthman started whispering and biting his lower lip, pointing her out. I was sure she’d noticed us, but she didn’t look our way. Then disaster struck: she squatted to set out the food for the ducks, and you could see everything—she wasn’t wearing underwear. “Oh my God, she’s trying to turn us on!” the boy whispered. He started saying her name, sighing and shivering audibly as we laughed. But Zinat paid us no mind. She was talking to the ducks without looking at us. Sayyid Uthman couldn’t take it. He went and stood by the chicken coop, pulled out his dick, and started wanking. We laughed at his lack of discipline, especially when Zinat got up to go downstairs and looked at us and smiled.
That environment let us live an almost communal life. The doors were always open and you could enter any door and eat anywhere. In the evening, our living room would fill up with the women, girls, and boys to watch a soap or the program Songs from the Movies. There was no television in the alley save the one in the home of Khawaga Tadrus. The children would fall asleep and some of the women would head home, while one would stay with Umm Yusuf to divulge her sadness or fears or ask for advice. My mother would console, soothe cares, and quote bits of wisdom from soaps and films. The television bolstered our household’s status in the alley.
The day of the abdication in June 1967 I was young. The whole alley was in the living room, from the youngest child to the oldest men whom we virtually never saw except on holidays, since they left in the early morning and only came back late at night.
The television was in the living room. We couldn’t see the screen because of the daylight coming from the stairwell. My father got up and put a blanket on the door, so the rays wouldn’t reflect off the screen. He sat there angrily that day. When the president said that he accepted responsibility and was turning the country over to Zakariya Muhiy al-Din, the women wailed. He stood up from the couch and bellowed at them, and then said to Hagg Ibrahim, “What kind of talk is that? Where’s he going to go? He’s going to leave all these people?”
I didn’t understand the horror of it for people until my mother’s story about my father. He left the house in a fury that day and went to Shamhut’s place, where he drank a pint of gin. At the end of the night he staggered back. That was the only time in his life he ever did that.
My father always felt he owned the alley and was lord of the manor, but he was only home for short spells. Most of his time was spent at the exchange. But when the fog descended on his eyes—and after he closed up shop and went in with Fatin and her husband in the chickpea trade—he started spending lots of time sitting on a wooden chair, resting his chin on his cane.
In the morning he’d sit waiting for Fatin to send one of the workers or her sons to escort him to the display stand. Fatin was even more worried about her father. The streets were no longer safe and cars had multiplied and zoomed up the streets. Accidents were frequent. She had warned us all to take care not to let him walk alone, but the old man’s pride had not died. He’d wait silently for a long time until a certain moment came, then the alley residents would look over and find the chair empty. He had gotten
