Naguib Mahfouz - Midaq Alley (Chapter 5) lyrics

Late afternoon. Little by little, the alley had returned to the world of shadows. Hamida drew her black wrap around her and set off, listening to the slapping of her slippers on the stairs as she made her way to the outside, and paying, as she walked the length of the alley, special attention to her dress and how she walked, for she knew that two pairs of eyes were subjecting her progress to piercing scrutiny-those of Master Salim Elwan, the owner of the warehouse, and those of Abbas el-Helw, the barber. She was well aware of the shoddiness of her clothes-a calico dress, a rusty old wrap, slippers worn through at the sole-but had pulled the wrap around her body in such a way as to show off her neatly shaped figure and display her trim rump to its best advantage, while her rounded breasts jutted out and her well­ turned legs were half exposed. Above, the wrap was pulled back enough to show the part in her black hair and her bewitching bronze-complexioned face. Determined to let nothing distract her from her course, she descended via Boxrnakers Street to Ghouriya Street and from there to New Road and thence Mouski Street. The moment she was out of sight of prying eyes, a smile appeared on her lips and her beautiful eyes ranged over the bustling, crowded street. She was a girl with no family and no a**ets but had never lacked for self-a**urance. Much of the credit for the instillation of this strong spirit within her should perhaps go to her striking good looks, but not all. She was strong by nature, and her awareness of this strength had never forsaken her for an instant. The expression of it in her lovely eyes was on occasion enough, in the opinion of some, to put paid to, or, in the opinion of others, to enhance, her beauty. She was subject to a violent and unceasing drive to dominate others and bend them to her will, a drive that manifested itself in the attention she devoted to charming men, as well as in her attempts to get the better of her mother, and was exposed in its worst form in the foul-mouthed brawls that broke out between her and the other women of the alley, who had all come to detest her and accuse her of every conceivable evil, of which the strangest was, perhaps, that she hated children, from which it followed that she was a monster, bereft of the blessing of femininity. It was this that had made the wife of the cafe owner, Boss Kersha-the woman who had been her wet nurse-express the pious hope that she would see her one day nursing her own children under the wing of a tyrannical husband who beat her for dinner and for breakfast.**** When he turned onto Boxmakers Street, he ran into Sheikh Darwish coming from the direction of the shrine of el-Hussein. They met at the bottom of the alley and Abbas approached the sheikh intending to shake his hand for blessing. The sheikh, however, waved his forefinger at him warningly, peered into his face from behind his gold eyegla**es with his feeble eyes, and declared, "Walk not without a tarbush! Beware the baring of the head in weather such as this and in a world such as this! A young man's brain quickly evaporates and disappears, which is a business referred to in English as tragedy, spelled t-r-a-g-e-d-y."