A Dream to Remember, and: Face-to-Face

With a long, exhausted yawn, Hindis threw the blanket off his body. His arms resting on his legs, he sat on his bed, bowed under the weight of anxiety that showed on his wide, full face. He caught sight of his wife standing in the middle of the room, gathering her untidy hair under a coffee-colored headscarf.

“A strange dream,” he said to her sleepily.

“A good one, God willing,” she replied, turning toward him with interest.

“All night long with Hasuna al-Tarabishi.”

A vacant look showed in the woman’s eye. He regarded her with the eyes of a falcon bursting out of a visage engraved with the traces of old knife wounds and other ancient scars.

“Hasuna al-Tarabishi!” he exclaimed. “Have you forgotten the man who one day aspired to be a charmer?”

A sigh escaped her.

“Yes . . . what a long time ago.”

“About fifteen years,” he affirmed.

“What did you dream?”

“I saw him,” he answered, “that last night on the Street of the Tentmakers. He was stretched out at my feet, blood all over his mouth, his beard and his robe.”

“I seek refuge in God,” she blurted.

“And he uttered his last words: ‘I will kill you, Hindis, while I’m in the grave.’”

“I seek refuge in God,” she repeated.

“After that, I saw myself sitting with him in a place without any landmarks. We laughed out loud the way we used to before hatred split us apart. ‘You killed me,’ he scolded. And I said to him, ‘You swore to take vengeance upon me.’ He laughed for a long time, then he said, ‘Forget everything — I have forgotten it. Yesterday I visited my son and I told him, “Don’t think of anything but life: leave Death and the dead to our maker.”’ And we kept on laughing until I woke up.”

The woman’s features froze, an oppressive cloud of memory descending upon her.

“You’re afraid,” Hindis reproached her, his chest pounding.

“Never,” she said. “But I wonder what the dream means.”

“What’s important, it has reminded me of things I’d forgotten,” he declared.

She asked him about those “things” with a shake of her head, absorbed in interpreting the dream.

“It reminded me that on the day of Hasuna’s burial, people said his wife lifted her baby son over the tomb and warned that my killing would be at his hands.”

“And yet his wife hasn’t been seen since his burial.”

“That’s right,” reflected Hindis, “and perhaps her baby would be a strapping youth today.”

Seeking to reassure him and herself, the woman said, “You are master of the quarter, its men are your men — and God is the preserver.”

“I don’t worry about any enemy, so long as I know him.” He added gloomily, “But those I don’t know and haven’t seen . . .”

The woman sat down dejectedly on the sofa.

“The dream means the opposite of what it seems,” said Hindis. “He is inciting his son to seek revenge.”

“How can that be, when he’s been dead for fifteen years?”

“The same way he lectured me last night!”

His wife conquered her worry with a smile.

“Our quarter is known as a place where a stranger cannot hide. You are its master, and God the preserver,” she repeated.

Boss Hindis went out of his house, walking amidst a ring of his followers, at their forefront the driver of his wagon. He turned from the Lane of the One-Eyed Man toward the Café Halambuha, to recline on the couch that no one touched but him. There he recounted his dream to his minions.

“Why would she sic her son on you?” Tamboura asked with a contemptuous laugh.

But Samaka tended toward caution.

“In our quarter, people have killed each other since God made the earth and all that is on it.”

“But no one has heard anything about Hasuna’s son, or the boy’s mother,” objected Hindis.

“That means he could turn up at any time or any...