The House of Jasmine by Ibrahim Abdel Meguid Read Free Book Online Page B

exhausted when I arrived at the station. The large parking lot in front of it was empty. The station itself was empty, no passengers, workers, or guards. Only iron windows, iron doors, and the cold grim English decor of the walls. I sat alone on a cold wooden bench whose smoothness made it even colder. I was surprised to feel a strange sexual excitement. If I were the one leading these thousands in an official rally, how much money would I have made? I looked around the station. The cold felt different from the cold of the morning. It was piercing, and I could almost see the icy air blowing madly, causing paper scraps to fly over the tracks. The cold empty tracks seemed to extend infinitely, and the few trees around me were bare. I could see only the back of a man far away, dressed in black and urinating against a wall. The place was quickly getting dark. This is really winter, and this is what traveling is like. I put my tired head between my hands and stretched my legs, surrendering to terrible exhaustion and fierce hunger, waiting for a train that might never come. Then I broke into tears, weeping with a sound that resembled a roar.

5
    A teacher who had been sent to work in Sharjah returned home. His telegram to his family had not yet arrived. He opened the door of his apartment at night, and stepped in quietly to surprise his wife and two children. He opened his bedroom door to find his wife under a man. She looked at him, and he looked at her. He quietly retreated. His feet found the door to the apartment as he walked backward. He went out and down the stairs backward as well. He went backward into the street, and walked backward down the road. Everyone who saw him confusedly made room for him to pass. His children, who had appeared out of one of the alleys, followed him. They looked at him, and he looked at them. He stretched his hands out to them. They stretched their hands out to him. He could neither stop nor walk in their direction, and every time they caught his hands, they slipped away again, the children crying incessantly. All of Alexandria came to know him. People stepped out of his way, traffic lights and vehicles yielded to him. The man and his children disappeared and people almost forgot about them, but I had a dream about him: he was in space, orbiting around the earth, his children orbiting around the moon.
    In winter, when raucous air flows down the roads, blowing paper scraps and screaming through the alleys, when the lights are turned off and you cannot tell the land from the sea, and the café becomes cold and wet, we all, without any prior agreement, refrain from going out. On the warmer nights we meet, also without any prior agreement. We go out at around the same time, and slowly walk down the side streets by the old walls, whose colors have faded. One of us may run into another, and we both smile, shake hands, and walk to the café together. Didn’t Hassanayn say that we all functioned according to a secret clock? This has become an established rule, and sometimes we manage to meet by chance at other times, too.
    This evening, we weren’t playing backgammon. We had met early and sat close to each other, our eyes fixed on the television set, which was placed on a high shelf on the wall.
    â€œThe official rallies will start again, Shagara,” Hassanayn said.
    â€œI’ll find an excuse for staying out of them,” I answered.
    â€œBut why don’t you participate. Do you think that what happened to you at the beginning of the year will happen again?” ‘Abd al-Salam said, referring to the fact that I’d been arrested after the workers’ demonstrations last January, an incident which had really rattled me. I had only been released because of the testimony of the chairman of the shipyard’s board of directors who had said, “Yes, Shagara is usually assigned to lead demonstrations, as I told you, but they are official government rallies that the