The House of Jasmine Read Online Free PDF Page B

next week, my father bought a one-hundred
meter-square plot of land. He talked about Dikhayla and the hills where people bought cheap land. “If I die, you will have to leave this apartment,” he said one day as a final statement on the matter. I had heard about Dikhayla before then, but had never seen it. I used to go halfway there, to the youth camp where high-school students went every year to practice shooting firearms.
    The day after my father bought the land, exams were postponed, and a heat wave swept over the city together with strong Khamasin winds. Our neighborhood had already changed. Small piles of garbage had appeared everywhere, the garden seats were broken, and many of them disappeared. The trees around the hospital had lost most of their leaves and many of their branches, so that we could now see its windows and the patients who gazed out of them with lost expressions.
    It seemed as though a gigantic black fist were gripping our world by the neck. Screams were heard on the streets. Women slapped their faces until they broke their teeth, and children huddled in corners to cry. President Gamal ‘Abd al-Nassir had resigned, and the Israelis had entered the country.
    We listened sadly to the stories of soldiers in ragged uniforms and bare feet who had taken to the streets, running away from death, from the Canal cities, where death was everywhere. We heard stories about the bodies being buried at ‘Amud al-Sawari, coming from faraway hospitals. It seemed as if people had come to hate each other. They closed their doors at sunset, and darkness ruled the earth and skies.
    I actually passed my high-school exams that year, but my grades were not good enough for me to go to college. I wasn’t upset. I had no desire to learn anymore. I found a job in a new shipyard. I told my father that I would finish building our new house. He must have hated the hills after we moved there, because he didn’t stay long. I hated the whole area, but where could I go? I learned that time was the best cure. The days passed meaninglessly. The area became more crowded, and children started playing in the dirty alleys around us. I learned that our desire for beauty is an acquired habit, and that we can become completely indifferent to our surroundings. I no longer hated the hills but came to feel indifferent toward them. I was even indifferent to the youth camp, which I used to notice on my way to work every day and remember how I had first learned to shoot, and how I used to stick a kerchief under my shirt to absorb the recoil of the Mauser gun. Even this camp lost its ability to attract my attention. I stopped looking at it. Only yesterday, I looked at it again to discover that the sign on its entrance had been replaced by another that said “Central Police Camp.”
    I thought that my mother had become as indifferent as I was, and it wasn’t until it was too late that I realized she was more like my father. I took care of her faithfully, but it was useless. Those who say that children can make a woman forget about her deceased husband are liars. She never forgot Muhammad ‘Ali Shagara, who disappointed me when I wanted to put some joy into his bleeding chest. Now she was doing it again, leaving me alone and going away with the white ships. . . I must be the one who killed her. I took her from the grim hills to the wide-open universe, and when she couldn’t find other neighbors in the building, and couldn’t go out because this damned apartment is on such a high floor, she took off into the universe. She shouldn’t have done that. She was my mother. How could she leave me alone in this apartment with the bare walls? What woman would brighten up this dismal place? And how could I find her?

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    Fayyad, who worked in the oxygen preparation station at the shipyard, has now become famous all over Alexandria. He climbed a light tower, thirty meters high, and didn’t come down. During the day