Wedding Song by Naguib Mahfouz

Author:Naguib Mahfouz [Mahfouz, Naguib]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

*1A holy man to whom a small local mosque was dedicated.

*2 Al-Kabsh—the ram.

*3This was a sentence used during the wars with Israel, and it has a special connotation.

ABBAS KARAM YOUNIS

Loneliness and the old house were the two companions of my childhood. I knew it inside out: the big, arched portals, the door with its small hinged panes of red, blue, and brown stained glass, the reception-room window with its iron bars, the upstairs and downstairs rooms with their high ceilings and painted wooden rafters, their floors covered with Masarany tiles; the old, shabby couches, mattresses, mats, and carpets, the undaunted tribes of mice, cockroaches, and wall geckos, the roof, crisscrossed with clotheslines like streetcar and trolley-bus wires, overlooking other roofs that on summer evenings were crowded with women and children. I roamed around the house alone, my voice echoing from its corners as I repeated my lessons, recited a poem, did a part from some play, or sang. Looking down on the narrow street for what might have been hours at a time, following the flow of people, I’d yearn for a friend to play with. A boy would call to me, “Come on down!”

“The door is locked, and my father has the key!”

I got used to being alone night and day; I wasn’t afraid of anything, not even evil spirits.

“The sons of Adam are the only devils there are,” my father would say.

“Be an angel,” my mother would hasten to add.

When I had nothing to do, I would amuse myself by chasing the mice, the geckos, or the cockroaches.

My mother told me once that when I was a baby she used to take me in a leather cot to the theater and set me on a bench in the ticket booth. “I often nursed you in the theater,” she said. I don’t remember those times, of course, but I do recall events from a stretch of time when I must have been four years old. I used to wander around the theater in front or backstage, where, among other things, I’d listen to the actors memorizing their parts. My ears were filled with lovely songs and speeches—and with wicked oaths and blasphemies giving me an education I’d never have acquired from my parents, who were always either sleeping or working. On the opening night of every new play I was there with my father, half the time bedazzled, the other half asleep. It was about that time that I was given my first picture book, called Ibn al-Sultan and the Witch, a present from Fuad Shalaby.

That was how I came to understand heroes and villains in plays. Neither of my parents had time to give me any guidance; my father took no interest in education in any case, while my mother was content to repeat her only piece of advice—“Be an angel”—explaining that to be an angel was to love good, not to harm other people, and to have a clean body and clean clothes. My real tutors were,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.