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ROOM 52-- A Story of the Spirit By MARIANNE LUBAN Copyright June 2005 |
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| There were too many sons and not enough land and so Sayeed el Kashef, twenty-two years of age, left his life as a peasant to seek work in Cairo in the days before the Second World War. Of the brothers, only Sayeed had done well in the village school. In fact, he had done very well, indeed. For Sayeed it was not an easy decision. He was not the man to take the beauty of the rural landscape for granted. Since he was a small boy, Sayeed el Kashef had loved each rose-colored dawn and every gold-washed sunset. He tended his lavender-hued doves and observed the habits of the wild-life along the river-bank. At night, Sayeed stared at the silvery waters of the Nile and shivered at the thought of what great and terrible things had occurred over the millennia while the river flowed silently and endlessly past. He treasured the two books he had about the history of his land, the ones the schoolmaster had given him prior to his abandoning his education. He knew these books by heart and yet could not discuss their contents with anyone. All some of the old people in his village knew about the ancient past were strange tales that resembled nothing he had read. Nobody in Sayeed’s acquaintance seemed to care much about this vanished past or the future, either, come to that. What mattered was the tasks of the present and the days followed one another, today much the same as yesterday, a cycle without end. In Sayeed’s Egypt of lush greens and fertile black, time seemed to have little meaning much less wrought much change. To Sayeed it often seemed change was something to be avoided at all costs in the lives of the fellahin, those who worked the soil. Sayeed, because of his books, sometimes longed for adventure, but mostly he was too busy or too tired to give it much thought. There was always something that needed to be done, but as the sons grew bigger, it soon became clear that the small house could no longer contain them all. So Sayeed was the first to decide to go elsewhere and try another path. Sayeed knew very well that the desert was not so very far away from the fecund Nile Valley but to him it was an alien place, not worth thinking about. His attitude toward the great city, Cairo, was no different. Sayeed knew something of Cairo from Egyptian films he had seen in his village. A traveling man came there with a machine that cast pictures on a large, white sheet. For a small sum, one could view a whole other way of life. Cairo appeared to Sayeed to be noisy and crowded, full of motor cars and foreigners. In one film, a suave Egyptian dressed like a European in a white coat with a bow around his neck and who appeared to have painted his lips, offered jewels to a belly dancer, who had even more paint on her own. At these immoral goings-on the village men whistled and shouted remarks and the women hissed and muttered. But when there was music and singing, all this was forgiven and the audience heaved sighs of joy. Sayeed, who had never even worn trousers, much less owned a white dinner jacket, found nothing about life in Cairo attractive, but there were jobs to be found there, especially if one was big and strong like himself. Sayeed el Kashef certainly was a well-built young man and handsome, too, although he was not very conscious of it. He had inherited his mother’s large, dark eyes and her thin nose with its almond-shaped nostrils. Girls in the village had found him pleasing and let him know this in NEXT PAGE |
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