“It won’t affect me continuing my studies,” said Khalil.
“Praise God. The bride may be old but she has plenty of money,” said Labib, addressing Zayna and bringing the subject to a close.
Zayna wanted the marriage postponed until Khalil finished law school, but the bride was too keen to wait and it was only delayed for as long as it took for the woman to renovate and furnish her house. She married Khalil, and by the time he attained his law degree in 1965 he had a son, Uthman. He was appointed to the legal department. Many predicted the marriage would end in failure in due course, but Khayriya died undergoing surgery in al-Kulwa when she was fifty. She bore no other children after Uthman. Khalil never thought of marrying again.
Dal
Dawud Yazid al-Misri
HE WAS THE YOUNGER SON OF YAZID AL-MISRI and Farga al-Sayyad, born a year after his brother, Aziz, in the house in al-Ghuriya near Bab al-Mutawalli. Farga al-Sayyad was waiting for the right time to send the two boys to her mother at the market so they could learn to be fishmongers, but Yazid said, “I want them to attend Qur’an school first.”
“Why waste time fruitlessly?” she protested.
“If I hadn’t learned to read and write and mastered basic arithmetic I wouldn’t have got my job at the paper supplier,” said the man confidently.
The woman saw in selling fish advantages her husband could not get at the paper supplier, but she could not change his mind. Yazid found encouragement in his friend Shaykh al-Qalyubi, a teacher at al-Azhar. Indeed, he said, “Qur’an school then al-Azhar, Almighty God willing.”
But Yazid’s religion — like that of his other friend, Ata al-Murakibi, who lived in the same building — was satisfied by carrying out religious obligations, like prayer and fasting, and did not extend to deeper religious aspirations. Hence he conceived of Qur’an school for his two sons as a preface to working life.
One day, as the two brothers were wandering about between al-Ghuriya and the railway line they saw a band of policemen. Aziz instinctively ran and hid, but the men seized Dawud and drove him away into the unknown. People discussed what they saw and knew the leader, Muhammad Ali, was taking people’s sons off to secret locations to teach them new subjects and keeping them under guard so they could not escape education.
“If I hadn’t been careful they would have got me too,” Aziz said to his father.
Yazid complained of his “misfortune” to Shaykh al-Qalyubi.
“Don’t be sad,” the shaykh counseled. “Your son is safe and sound. Maybe it will protect him from harm.”
The family was terribly upset. Farga cursed the leader. They began to watch more closely over Aziz, who continued to attend Qur’an school. Years passed. Aziz found work as the watchman of Bayn al-Qasrayn’s public fountain and married Ata al-Murakibi’s daughter, Ni‘ma. Then, one day, Dawud returned to al-Ghuriya, his schooling complete. The family was overjoyed with his homecoming, but it was short-lived for he said, “They’re sending us on a delegation to France.”
“A land of infidels!” cried Yazid.
“To study medicine.”
“If God hadn’t been looking out for me I’d be going too!” exclaimed Aziz.
Dawud left to begin an experience he would never have dreamed of. During his absence, Yazid al-Misri and Farga al-Sayyad died, Aziz fathered Rashwana, Amr, and Surur, and Ata al-Murakibi leaped from the depths of poverty to the summits of wealth and moved from al-Ghuriya to the mansion on Khayrat Square. Dawud returned a doctor and headed to his old house in al-Ghuriya, where Aziz and his family lived alone. Affection united the two brothers once more. Aziz began observing his brother with interest and apprehension. He was happy to find him observing his prayers and still as fond as before of visiting al-Hussein, though his clothes had changed and, to a degree, so had the way he spoke. He seemed to be hiding another side of himself that he had obtained in the infidel land. “Didn’t they try to turn you away from your religion?” Aziz asked him.
“Not at all,” he answered laughing.
Aziz would have liked to talk to him more about “them” but didn’t want to upset the peace. He also asked, “Is it true you cut bodies open?”
“When necessary. For the good of the patient,” Dawud replied.
Aziz praised God in secret for conferring flight on him that day long ago.
“If things had been different you could be a father by now,” he said to his brother.
“That’s uppermost in my mind,” Dawud said.
There was a Turkish family in Darb Qirmiz, the Rafat family. He pointed them out and said, “Maybe they’d approve a doctor returned from France for their daughter.”
They decided that Ata al-Murakibi, in his new circumstances, was the right person to raise the matter. But Dawud was refused as a vulgar peasant. Neither his knowledge nor his suit or job could intercede on his behalf. The young man was hurt and looked to his brother, Aziz, for guidance. “There’s the Warraq family that owns the paper supplier where our father works,” said Aziz. They were a family with Syrio-Egyptian roots. The brothers found what they were looking for in the great al-Warraq’s granddaughter, Saniya. The family welcomed the groom. The wedding was held and Dawud took his bride to a new house in al-Sayyida. She gave him a son, Abd al-Azim, and three daughters whom death snatched away as infants. Dawud advanced in his profession until he earned the rank of pasha and his official and intellectual standing was firmly established. It was destined that he should successfully reconcile his two incongruous identities. In his medical profession he was a fine emissary for the new civilization, with a vision of the nation’s future driven by a painful awareness of what the country lacked in his field and with close friends among both his Egyptian and foreign colleagues. Yet he was also in tune with his wife who, despite her beauty, social rank, and basic education, was not really any different from his mother, Farga al-Sayyad, and older brother’s wife, Ni‘ma al-Murakibi. He never renounced the customs of his family and environment, and visited the house in al-Ghuriya out of love and duty. There he would completely forget his assumed identity, sit at the low round table, tuck into the fish, bean cakes, lentil broth, salted fish, and green onions, and observe the love and affection developing between Abd al-Azim and Rashwana, Amr, and Surur. He visited al-Hussein and wandered around Bab al-Akhdar and got to know his brother’s brother-in-law, Ata al-Murakibi, and two sons, Mahmud and Ahmad, and friend Shaykh al-Qalyubi, the father-in-law of Dawud’s nephew Amr. During these times, he would revert to being the old Dawud, son of Yazid al-Misri and Farga al-Sayyad, son of al-Ghuriya and its fragrant, penetrating smells, towering minarets, and mashrabiyas clothed in the past.
Dawud wanted to make a doctor of his son, Abd al-Azim, to follow in his footsteps. However, the youth headed for law school, a school of ministers and the elite, and pursued an eminent and successful career as a lawyer. When the doctor pasha was fifty, he fell in love with a Sudanese maid and married her, prompting astonishment in the family and sparking gossip. He selected a separate house for her in al-Sayyida and set aside a grave in the family enclosure that Yazid al-Misri had erected near the tomb of Sidi Nagm al-Din, having seen it in a dream. His life extended until the Occupation. He and his brother were alive for the Urabi Revolution and supported it with their hearts, then swallowed its bitter failure. The brothers died in consecutive years early in the Occupation and were buried side by side in the grave inaugurated by Yazid al-Misri. It was not long before its female wing was occupied by Farga al-Sayyad, Ni‘ma Ata al-Murakibi, Saniya al-Warraq, and the poor maid in her special grave.