In an Antique Land (16 page)

‘You have to put a stop to it,' she called out after me as I hurried away down the lane. ‘You should try to civilize your people. You should tell them to stop praying to cows and burning their dead.'

T
HE CARETAKER OF
the house I had moved into in Nashawy was called Taha. He was a familiar figure around the village, and was known to everyone as Uncle; I never heard anyone address him without adding an ‘Amm to his name. He was in his late fifties or thereabouts, excruciatingly thin, slack-mouthed because his lower jaw was not quite in line with the upper, and with one unmoving eye that looked away from the other at a sharp angle, in a fixed, unblinking glare.

Soon after I moved in, he and I reached an arrangement whereby he fetched me a meal from his house once a day: he did several different odd jobs and this was yet another in a long list. He usually came to my room at about midday with my meal, and one day, not long after I had missed Ustaz Sabry at his house, I told him about my abortive visit.

‘Amm Taha was not surprised in the least. ‘Of course he wasn't there,' he said. ‘Ustaz Sabry is a busy man, and if you want to find him at his house you have to go at the right time. What time was it when you went?'

‘A little before the sunset prayers,' I told him.

‘That's not the time to go,' he said, with a mournful shake of his head. ‘At that time he usually goes to one of his friends'
houses to watch TV or else he goes to visit people in the next village.'

Startled as I was by the comprehensiveness of his information, I did not need to ask him how he knew; I had learnt already that very little happened in Nashawy without ‘Amm Taha being aware of it. As a rule he collected his information in the evenings, when he went around from house to house to see if anyone had eggs or milk or anything else to sell. One of his many professions was that of vendor, and he regularly bought local products in Nashawy and took them elsewhere to sell. Eggs, milk and cheese were his staples, but he wasn't particular: he would just as willingly take a bunch of carrots, or a cauliflower that had escaped the pot the night before, or even a fattened chicken or a rabbit.

Every other day or so, he would gather his gleanings together, load them on his donkey-cart, and drive down the dirt road to Damanhour or to one of the weekly markets in the nearby villages. The profits were meagre and they depended largely on the quality of his information: on whether or not he knew whose cow was in milk and who needed ready cash for their daughter's wedding and would accept a punitive price for a chicken. In other words ‘Amm Taha's takings as a vendor hung upon his success in ferreting out some of the most jealously guarded of household secrets: in discovering exactly how matters stood behind the walls and talismans that guarded every house from the envy of neighbours and the Evil Eye. As it happened, ‘Amm Taha was unusually successful in his profession because it was mostly women who were the guardians of those secrets, and many amongst them talked to him as they would not have to any other man—in large part, I think, because he did everything he could to let it be known that he was a poor, harmless old
man, still childless despite many years of marriage, and too infirm to undertake the sort of exertion that results in procreation.

“Amm Taha keeps an eye on everything,' people would say, ‘because one of his eyes looks to the left, while the other watches the right.' ‘Amm Taha did nothing to contradict this, nor did he discourage those who claimed to detect an element of the supernatural in his prescience.

Once, ‘Amm Taha happened to be in my room when a hoopoe flew in through an open window. The sight of the bird seemed to work an instant transformation in him and he began to race around the room, slamming shut the doors and windows.

‘Stop that,' I shouted while the frightened bird flapped its wings against the walls, leaving a trail of droppings on my desk. ‘Stop, what are you doing, ya ‘Amm Taha?'

‘Amm Taha paid no attention; he was half in flight himself, leaping nimbly from the bed to my desk and back, with his hands hooked like talons and the sleeves of his jallabeyya flapping wildly, an albatross swooping on its prey. He knocked the bird to the floor with a wave of his jallabeyya, and after breaking its neck with an expert twist of his hands, he slipped it into his pocket, as matter-of-factly as though it were a ten-piastre note.

I was astonished by this performance for I had often heard people say that hoopoes were ‘friends of the fellaheen' and ought not to be harmed because they helped the crops by killing worms. He must have sensed my surprise for he explained hurriedly that it wasn't anything important, it was just that he particularly needed some hoopoe's blood that day.

‘Hoopoe's blood?' I said. It was clear that he would rather
have dropped the subject, but I decided to persist. ‘What will you do with it?'

‘I need it for a spell,' he said brusquely, ‘for women who can't bear children.' One of the hoopoe's wings had somehow emerged from his pocket and its tip was hanging out now, like the end of a handkerchief. He tucked it back carefully, and then, after a moment of silence, he cast his eyes down, like a shy schoolgirl, and declared that he didn't mind telling me that he was a kind of witch, a s
ir, and that he occasionally earned a bit of extra money by casting the odd spell.

It was a while before I could trust myself to speak, partly for fear of laughing, and partly because I knew better than to comment on the impressive range of his skills: I had discovered a while ago that he was very sensitive about what was said about the many little odd jobs he did to earn money—so much so that he had actually fallen ill a few days after we worked out our agreement.

Our paths had first crossed when I was negotiating to rent a set of rooms in an abandoned house, soon after moving to Nashawy. The rooms were part of a house that had been built by the old ‘omda, the headman or chief official of the village, a decade or so before the Revolution of 1952. The ‘omda was then the largest landowner in the village and the house he built was palatial by local standards, a villa of the kind one might expect to see in the seafront suburbs of Alexandria, with running water, electric lights and toilets. But he died soon after it was completed and the house was locked up and abandoned; his children were successful professionals in Alexandria and Cairo, and they had no interest whatever in their ancestral village. Only one of them even bothered to visit Nashawy any more, a chain-smoking middle-aged woman who occasionally
drove down from Alexandria to collect the rent from the few acres that remained with the family after the Revolution. It was she who agreed to let me rent the rooms her father had built for his guests, on the outer side of the main house—a large bedroom with an attached toilet and a little kitchen. The floorboards in the room had long since buckled and warped and the plaster had fallen off the walls, yet the room was comfortable and there was a cheerful feel to it, despite the gloomy shadows of the abandoned house and the eerie rattles it produced at night, when the wind whistled through its unboarded windows and flapping doors.

It was the same woman who had led me to ‘Amm Taha: one of his many jobs was that of caretaker. She had suggested that I pay a part of his wages and make an arrangement with him so that he could bring me food cooked by his wife—the kitchen attached to the guest-room was too small for daily use. The matter had been quickly settled and for the first few days after I moved in he arrived at midday, as we had agreed, bringing a few dishes of food with him. But then one afternoon he sent word that he wasn't well, and when he didn't turn up the next day either I decided to go and see what had happened.

His house was in the most crowded part of the village, near the square, where the dwellings were packed so close together that the ricks of straw piled on their roofs almost came together above the narrow, twisting lanes. It was a very small house, a couple of mud-walled rooms with a low, tunnel-like door. ‘Amm Taha called out to me to enter when I knocked, but so little light penetrated into the house that it took a while before I could tell where he was.

He was lying on a mat, his thin, crooked face rigid with annoyance, and he began to complain the moment I stepped in:
he was ill, too ill to go anywhere, he didn't know what was going to happen to all his eggs, he had had to send his wife to the market because he hadn't been able to go out for two days.

‘But what's happened, ya ‘Amm Taha?' I asked. ‘Do you know what's wrong?'

His good eye glared angrily at me for a moment, and then he said: ‘What do you think has happened? It's the Evil Eye of course—somebody's envied me, what else?'

I looked slowly around the room at the ragged mats and the sooty cooking utensils lying in the corners.

‘What did they envy?' I said.

‘Can't you see?' he said irritably. ‘Everyone's envious of me nowadays. My neighbours see me going to the market every other day, and they say to themselves—that Taha, he has his business in eggs and then he sells milk too, sometimes, as well as vegetables; why, he even has a donkey-cart now, that Taha, and on top of all that, he has so many other little jobs, he's ever so busy all day long, running around making money. What's he going to do with it all? He doesn't even have any children, he doesn't need it.'

He sat up straight and fixed his unmoving eye on me. ‘Their envy is burning them up,' he said. ‘They're all well-off, but they can't bear to see me working hard and bettering my lot. Over the last few days they've seen me going off to your house, carrying food, and it was just too much for them. They couldn't bear it.'

I began to feel uncomfortable with the part I had been assigned in this narrative: I was not sure whether I was being included amongst the guilty. ‘But ya ‘Amm Taha,' I said, ‘isn't there anything you can do?'

He nodded impatiently; yes, of course, he said, he had already
been to the government clinic that morning and they'd given him an injection and some tablets; and now a woman who lived a few doors away was going to come and break the spell—I could stay and watch if I wanted.

The woman arrived a short while later, a plump, talkative matron who seemed more disposed to chatter about the wickedness of their neighbours than to perform her duties. But ‘Amm Taha was in a bad temper and he quickly cut her short and handed her a slip of paper, telling her to hurry up if she wanted her fee. She flashed me a smile, and then shutting her eyes she began to stroke his back with the slip of paper, murmuring softly. At times when her voice rose I thought I heard a few phrases of the Fâti
a, the opening prayer of the Quran, but for the most part her lips moved soundlessly, without interruption.

After a few minutes of this she opened her eyes and declared plaintively: ‘You haven't yawned once, ya ‘Amm Taha. You're fine, nobody's envied you.'

This excited a squall of indignation from ‘Amm Taha. ‘I haven't yawned, did you say?' he snapped. ‘How would you know, with your eyes shut?'

‘I know you didn't yawn,' she insisted. ‘And if you didn't yawn while I was reciting the spell, it means you haven't been envied.'

‘Oh is that so? Then look at this,' said ‘Amm Taha. Opening his mouth he leaned forward, and when his nose was a bare inch away from hers he produced a gigantic yawn.

She fell back, startled, and began to protest: ‘I don't know, ya ‘Amm Taha, if you'd really been envied I'd be yawning too. And I haven't yawned at all—can you see me yawning?'

‘You're not doing it properly,' he said. ‘That's all. Now go on, yalla, try once more.'

She shut her eyes and began to run the slip of paper over his back again, and this time within a few minutes they were both yawning mightily. Soon it was over, and she leant back against the wall, swelling with pride at her success, while ‘Amm Taha began to pump his kerosene stove so he could brew us some tea.