The Harafish Read Online Free PDF Page A

slippers, and was off like a tornado.
    19 .
    His frame filled the doorway. The eyes of drunken men reclining around the walls turned to focus on him. Darwish bounded toward him. “Your sons are going to wreck the place,” he shouted.
    He saw Hibatallah sprawled helplessly on the floor. Hasballah and Rizqallah were locked in a vicious struggle, while the other customers looked on indifferently.
    “Stop!” he roared in a dreadful voice.
    The two youths separated, looking toward the source of the voice in terror. With the flat of his hand he struck one, then the other, and they crashed down onto the bare earth floor. He stood looking defiantly around at his audience. Nobody said a word. He threw a withering glance at Darwish. “To hell with you and this foul hole of yours!” he shouted.
    Fulla suddenly materialized from nowhere. “I’m innocent,” she muttered.
    “She was just doing her job. But your sons were after her,” said Darwish.
    “Shut up, you pimp!” shouted Ashur.
    “God forgive you,” said Darwish, backing away.
    “I could bring this place down around your ears.”
    Fulla took a step forward and stood directly in front of him. “I’m innocent,” she persisted.
    “Get out of my way!” he said roughly, hardly able to keep his eyes off her.
    He sent his sons staggering through the door one after the other.
    “Don’t you believe I’m innocent?” Fulla asked again.
    Again he had to tear his eyes away from her. “You’re small fry.” Then he turned on his heel to go, without looking at her again.
    In the darkness outside he breathed deeply. He felt that he’d escaped the clutches of evil. The darkness was thick and unseeing. He squinted, trying to make out his sons’ shapes but they had vanished.
    “Hasballah!” he shouted.
    Nothing but silence and darkness. A glimmer of light from the café as he passed, and then nothing. In his heart he knew they would not be back. They would flee their birthplace and his authority. In future they would seem like strangers. Only the sons of eminent families stayed close to their roots in this alley.
    As he made his way in the darkness, he felt that he was bidding farewell to security and peace of mind. He was caught up in a whirlpool of troubled emotions, and fear overcame him, as hard to resist as deep sleep. He told himself the girl must have overwhelmed them with her beauty. He himself had been struck by it. Why hadn’t the idiots married? Wasn’t marriage a religious act, a safety device?
    20 .
    Zaynab was waiting for him at the door. Her lamp on the step guided him home.
    “Where are the children?” she asked anxiously.
    “Aren’t they back?”
    She sighed audibly.
    “Let’s hope it’s for the best,” he muttered.
    As he sank down on the sofa, she said angrily, “You should have let me go.”
    “To a bar awash with drunks!”
    “You hit them. They’re not children. They’ll never come home.”
    “They’ll wander around for a day or two, then they’ll be back.”
    “I know them better than you do.”
    He subsided into silence and she started off on another tack.
    “Who’s this Fulla Darwish keeps going on about?”
    He avoided her eyes and said carelessly, “What’s it to you? She’s a barmaid!”
    “Is she pretty?”
    “She’s a whore.”
    “Is she pretty?”
    He hesitated. “I didn’t look at her.”
    She let out a despairing breath. “They’ll never come back, Ashur,” she said.
    “Perhaps it’s for the best.”
    “Don’t you know how young men behave?”
    He said nothing.
    “We have to be tolerant of their mistakes.”
    “Really!” he returned incredulously.
    Suddenly she looked withered, faded, old like the wall by the path, and he mumbled in embarrassment, “I’m sorry for you, Zaynab.”
    “No doubt we’ll feel sorry for each other a lot in the years to come,” she said irritably.
    “In any case, they don’t really need us anymore.”
    “There’s no life in the house without them.”
    “Poor