Dahroug turned toward him. “For a long time they’ve been predicting it will bring the world to ruin. But what’s it to us?”
“We’re far away,” answered the bearded man, smiling. “Let them devour one another.”
Dahroug crossed his legs as he sat on an upturned can and cast a dreamy look far afield. “We heard fantastic things about the last war,” he said.
“The fact is you’re old,” said Amna, laughing.
Dahroug gave a laugh through his blackened teeth, saying scornfully, “All you care about is your stomach.”
Salama, who though no longer young was a good ten years younger than his companion, said, “Yes, we certainly heard some fantastic things.”
“Look at al-Asyouti for instance, who was he? Before the war he was nothing but a porter.”
The children, having forgotten the threats, returned and brought with them their rowdiness. Mahmoud, a boy of seven and the eldest, was running about with the young girls trailing after him. His father glanced at him admiringly and called out, “Mahmoud, my boy, take courage — war’s broken out.”
In the late afternoon Dahroug and Salama sat together on a piece of sacking outside the fence around the ruins. Before them stretched the desert right up to the foot of the Muqattam Hills, the sands extinguished under their shadow. A faded yellowness, the remnants of choked breaths of high summer, was diffused into the limpid sky. Feeble rays from the inclining sun were quickly scaling the mountain summit, though the desert was puffing out a refreshing breeze with the approach of evening.
Dahroug began counting out piasters, while Salama, his head resting against the fence, gazed distractedly toward the horizon. Amna brought tea, and the children, barefoot and half naked, ran to the wasteland. Dahroug sipped a little of the hot tea.
“My heart tells me, Salama, that the work’s going to really take off.”
“May your heart be right, Abu Mahmoud.”*
“I wish I could rely on you.”
“I’m your friend and indebted to you for your generous kindness, but I can’t leave the ruins.”
Dahroug thought for a while, then asked, “Does anyone in the big city know you behind that beard?”
“They know the very djinn themselves.”
“And will you spend your life in the ruins?”
“Better than the hangman’s noose, Abu Mahmoud.”
Dahroug laughed loud and said, “I have to laugh whenever I remember the story of your escape from between two guards.”
“The best way of escaping is when it’s not expected.”
Amna was standing facing the wasteland, her shawl drawn back over half of her jet black hair. “And the man got bumped off without any blood money.”
“He was a murderer, the son of a murderer,” said Salama angrily. “He was so old I was afraid death would get to him before I did. My family went on demanding I that take revenge.”
Dahroug guffawed loudly. “And you made your escape when the papers were on their way to the Mufti to endorse the death sentence.”
Salama tugged at his arm in gratitude. “And I found myself desperate and said, ‘I’ve got no one but Dahroug, my childhood friend,’ and you gave me shelter, you noblest of men.”
“We’re men of honor, Salama.”
“In any case the storehouse here is in need of a man — and I’m that man.”
Their conversation was interrupted by the appearance of a funeral procession on the horizon. It was coming from where the buildings stood and it continued toward the road opposite the western fence of the ruins that led to the Khafeer cemetery. The coffin, shrouded with a white silk covering, came into view. “A young girl,” muttered Amna. “How sad!”
“This place is beautiful and safe,” said Salama. “The only thing wrong with it is it’s on the road to the cemetery.”
“Isn’t it the road we all take?” said Dahroug, laughing.
—
The wasteland had remained substantially unchanged since war was declared. It was a playground for the sun from its rising to its setting, a place of passage for coffins, and an encampment for silence. The sirens were sounded in exercise for imaginary air raids. The old battered radio achieved the height of importance when it allowed Dahroug to calculate the shells exchanged between the Siegfried and Maginot Lines.
Whenever Salama’s senses registered the tones of Amna’s melodious voice, or a playful movement or glance, even if not intentional, he became aflame with a voracious fire and at the same time with a merciless anger against himself.
“Things haven’t changed,” said Dahroug morosely. “Where’s all we heard about the war?”
“Be patient. Don’t you remember what your Jewish commission agent said?”
Dahroug looked toward the piles of iron with which, acting on the advice of his agent, he had filled up the place. “Let the days pass quickly.”
“Let them pass quickly — and let them swallow up fifteen years.”
“Fifteen years?”
“Then my sentence becomes null and void.”
“What a lifetime! By then we’ll be on the brink of a third war.”
Salama began singing in a strange, hoarse voice, “Come tell me, Bahiyya.” Then he called out, “Master Dahroug, none of my family will be left but the women.”
He told himself that Amna, without knowing it — or perhaps knowing it — was turning his head and that he would be going through hell before death took him. The war did not concern him in the least, but in between musical intervals on the radio he heard the news of Holland and of Belgium being overrun, and of the fall of Paris. In front of his eyes there passed the successive columns of refugees, and the void was filled with sighs and tears. Then Italy declared war. “It’s knocking at the gates,” said Dahroug uneasily.
But Salama was indifferent. “For us it’s neither here nor there.”
“The good Lord will look after us,” muttered Amna as her gaze followed the naked children playing around a barrel filled with water.
—
For the first time the siren sounded for a real air raid. Dahroug and his family awoke, as did Salama, bedded down in the truck. Amna was frightened for the children and said that the shelter was too far away.
“Stay in the room,” said Dahroug. “They won’t bomb the wasteland or the cemetery.”
Salama raised his head toward the full moon which stared down at them, eternally calm. “I see nothing but crazy lights,” he said.
From the truck window he directed his gaze at the closed room. It stood against the fence to the left of the entrance, with a roof that sloped toward the door, and a colorless wall. The wall was daubed with moonlight; the room enclosed within itself hearts filled with apprehension. It was like some abandoned hut, and he imagined it veiled the night and the ruins.
The raid plunges down at the city and destroys all that exists in it: it topples the law, the Mufti, the judge, the warder, and the hangman’s noose. The innermost parts of the earth hurst open, and it sweeps everything aside. Even noble-mindedness has its breathing choked. From out of the debris there rises a naked man and a woman with clothes tipped apart; the wardens have been killed.
Night after night the raids followed in close succession, raids that were either as silent as the wasteland or interspersed with antiaircraft fire. Dahrough would go to Salama in the truck to look up at the sky and talk.
“The raids aren’t as we heard.”
“The Italians aren’t like the Germans.”
Dahroug laughed and clamped his hand on Salama’s beard. “You’re cheating the angel of death by going on living.”
“Yes, I should have been in the grave at least a year and a half ago.”