Hamdy el-Gazzar | Black Magic

What cannot be understood cannot be understood, and that's all there is to it.

Those savages who are said to be like the horses that try to cut their own veins with their teeth in order to breathe more freely, or the elephants that separate themselves from the herd when they feel the approach of death and silently remove themselves to await the end—those savages who seek only death or, more correctly, no longer desire even death, for it is death that desires them and they simply sur­render to it without noise or disturbance to others—are said to fall upon the sands of the seashore and never again rise, leaving behind a corpse as the sole sign that there was once something there. To think of suicide is a form of sav­agery. From this perspective, I sometimes view myself as a human savage living at the start of the third millennium, a savage who resembles Rihan.

On first seeing Rihan sewing away at the shrouds every day, I made a simple calculation to the effect that if sewing up the two sides of a cloth the size of an ordinary human being by the normal manual method and using a needle and thread took, at the most, a whole workday, then this old man was sewing about twenty-six shrouds a month (since he was meticulous in taking his weekly holiday on Fridays, so long as there was no emergency).

And given that the dead were few these days, with not more than three or four groups at the most seeking out his services each month over the past few months, then Rihan must have in stock in excess of twenty-three extra shrouds that had not gone with the deceased to their graves. And if this were so, did he keep sewing every day so that he could amass a stock of several thousands of unwanted shrouds on the wooden shelves of his small shop or in a secret store of which I was unaware?

This riddle kept me awake for many long days and months.

I had thought that the shroud, like the sacred dress in which pilgrims go to Mecca, was not sewn, but was a sin­gle piece of white cloth to wrap the body and cover the private parts, leaving the rest bare—a simple white robe, pure as a swaddling cloth. The pilgrim, the newborn baby, and the corpse were three pure entities deserving of this merciful garment. But what I had thought was wrong, for Rihan sewed up the edges of the shroud with white thread, albeit it didn't take the form of a robe, for what use would a dead body have for a sewn robe if, whatever happened, it could only disintegrate?

I knew so much about Rihan that I was lost inside him, within him—so much so that I had almost forgotten every­thing about him. He existed in a dark corner of my body, like my spinal cord, which, though I knew it to be there, I rarely saw or touched so that I could be sure of its contin­ued presence in its proper place. Rihan was like a segment in this forgotten cord which existed in near oblivion in my back but without which I could neither stand nor move nor bend: he was always there, on his wooden bench.

His face, rigid with its usual smile, would come to me sometimes, and no sooner would I forget it again than it would break in on my loneliness in my room. It would jostle me in my abstractedness and my thoughts and when leaving for work. When I was taking a shot crowded with people, traders, and goods in el-Ghuriya Street, his good-natured, beautiful face would leap out at me inside my head and I would stop what I was doing and his mystery would claim my full attention once again. When I had almost despaired of solving it, I would decide to put the whole matter out of my head.

"Rihan. Ah hah! What are you up to, old man?"

That particular night, I saw him undoing what he had spent the whole day doing.

Every evening, just when he was about to close this shop, he would take the shroud that he had spent the day sewing in his skilled, veined hands and slowly start unpicking the thread, taking care not to tear the cloth. He would unpick what he had done until the shroud was back to its original state, a piece of coarse cotton about two meters in length and one in width, which he would carefully fold and place on the wooden shelf next to the rest of the shroud cloth.

In the morning, he would himself fetch this cloth and begin to sew it over again. So it was every day: he would sew the cloth during the day and undo it in the evening, leaving me in greater confusion than before.

Translated by Humphrey Davies