They Passed Through Here
The soul has its paths and its unveilings;
and I have my passion and my longing.
Night is an open expanse for those displaced from day,
when they dwell in the ballads of the beloved,
recite the litanies of the poor, and fade out.
At the break of dawn I have a confession to the horizon;
and lovers are mirrors of the soul,
stars guiding passersby between my heart and innocence,
waves for those who wish to sail toward worlds of ebb and tide,
icons of violet passion, the glow of fields, and the taste of wild amber,
a language searching for its wound and mine among the seasons,
church hymns in the stillness of night,
the resonant call of the muezzin at dawn,
the spirits of birds migrating to distant days—and suns.
I knew them in the years of boyhood and youth.
I lived their dreams while young.
So why, when I return,
does their innocence sting me with the question:
Who are you?
I am me.
Nothing in me has changed—
only you crossed alone to the other shore
and left me!
Ahmed Abdel Aziz…
And the loved ones pass on;
you remain searching among the photographs
for two flowers
and a face that shares your coming joy.
You stare at me
and read every detail,
every appointment between us.
I greet you;
I enter the dream—yet a face of a lifetime passes,
wrapping sorrowful eyes.
A thread of joy,
a thread of sorrow,
a thread of blood…
…………….. Ahmed!
And the poem remains.
Uncle Ahmed Abdel Aziz was one of the workers in the spinning and weaving factories in Minya, a communist belonging to a different generation—the generation of 1965. He spent more than five years in Nasser’s prisons.
Kind-hearted, he owned nothing in life but an innocent laugh, a distinctive mustache, a slender body, and a beloved.
He left prison to find awaiting him a wife deprived of childbirth; life granted them a wooden kiosk in which Uncle Ahmed practiced his craft of carpet-making, sharing bread, rice, and life with his beloved.
In 1977, Ahmed Abdel Aziz went out at the head of the bread and freedom demonstrations, standing against some anarchists who tried to burn institutions and loot them. Yet he did not escape harm: Ahmed Abdel Aziz was accused of leading the demonstrations and damaging facilities, sentenced to three years in prison, and emerged to complete the journey with the same goodness and the same loyalty to his ideas and to the poor and workers—his eye still on the kiosk and the woman—adding to that his membership in the Tagammu Party.
We met; I was then sixteen years old, owning nothing but a dream, and a father belonging to the generation of the great leftists, who loved Nasser and cursed his critics. I spent nights sitting between the two men, where the sharpness of debate around the tea kettle on bitter winter nights in the south fashioned another world in my imagination.
When the court awarded Ahmed Abdel Aziz compensation of three thousand pounds for his imprisonment, he rejoiced greatly; the sum was enough to grant the man and his beloved—as he called her—a small, warm home. But he hurried off to buy complete furnishings for the party headquarters in Minya, to everyone’s astonishment.
Suddenly he died; his heart could not bear the anesthetic’s flow, and he left in the heart what he left.
Did he know he was opening a door of sorrow that life would close?
He speaks words about the wound and human pain,
then wakes from the dream little by little
and I cannot discern him.
Or did he know the road is long,
and that the taste of violet is bitter like the taste of fetid air,
so he chose alone the journey of departure,
so that all the appointments between us might learn
the limits of passion?
Dr. Nasr Al-Dawwi…
I do not know why I spent a long time gathering the fragments of myself, grasping the end of the thread, and telling his story—the dark-skinned youth with the broad smile, the kind heart, and the living conscience; the lover of the poor, the humane physician: Nasr Al-Dawwi.
I was a high-school student when I met him. We used to study together on the balcony of the mosque of the knower of God, Ahmed Al-Fouli, overlooking the Nile Corniche in the city of Minya, the Bride of Upper Egypt. We would perform the obligatory prayer, study our lessons, then head to our adjacent homes in the Ard Al-Mawlid neighborhood and Helmiya Square in Minya—where the poor and the middle class live; we were among them, and still are, no matter how roads and distances separate us.
I was in the Mathematics Department and he in the Sciences Department. He went to the Faculty of Medicine in Assiut, and I went to the Faculty of Commerce, transferred to it from the Faculty of Science, Mathematics Department. Yet our friendship never dimmed for a moment; it extended to his elder brother, Adel Al-Dawwi, a graduate of the Faculty of Arts and then a master’s researcher. During holidays Nasr would come from Assiut University to Minya, and we would meet; he would joke with his favorite phrases: “You sold me out, Abad, and chose Adel? Politics, poetry, and literature brought you together, imagining that medicine kept me away from that space between you—never! I’m there, racing my steps to the public library, reading whatever I can amid the crush of lectures.”
In the last decade his voice would call reproachfully: “Why didn’t you send me my copy of your new book?” I would reply with excuses, saying I had given it to Adel to deliver to you. Adel always bore my burdens before Nasr—that loving child whose conscience was shaped from the depth of Nile silt, and from his love of the poor he wove threads of affection between himself and people.
At Deirout General Hospital, you know him before you reach the doctors’ room. The nurses ask you, “Do you want Dr. Nasr?” and point with their fingers toward the wards where he moves among patients, wiping away tears, setting fractures, and smiling at the sad and the poor sick. In the evening he sits among his colleagues in the hospital courtyard, where conversation branches into every kind of storytelling—from politics to medicine, passing through literature and culture. Nasr was a master storyteller in all these subjects.
He did not hide his clear hostility toward religious extremist groups in a country dominated by such groups, nearly ruled by iron and fire.
I went to him in 1991. I was investigating the killing of thirteen Copts by terrorists’ gunfire. Nasr told me what was hidden from me and from many who visited the small town deep in Upper Egypt at that time, and he took me by the hand to where facts unfolded before my eyes. The doctor who was killed in his home before his family had previously been threatened to force him to pay protection money to those groups to finance weapons purchases against the police. When he took the threat to the police station, the head of investigations sent him to Sheikh “Arafa” to verify and investigate the complaint—and this Sheikh Arafa was the emir of the Islamic Group in Deirout in that era. What followed was the killing of the doctor in the midst of his family, amid a disturbing silence from the security services then.
And this is Gamal Farghali Hreidi, the professional marksman and deliberate killer of those innocents—some doctors fabricated for him a medical report proving that he was blind and could not see, so he would escape punishment. The next day the newspaper Al-Ahali came out with the front-page banner reading “Four New Surprises in the Sanbou Massacre,” with my name in bold type. No one knew— including the editor-in-chief at the time, the great Philip Gallab, who ordered a special bonus for me for this piece and wrote about me and my talent in his column “Dabbous” on the last page—no one knew that the source of the scoop was the young doctor Nasr Al-Dawwi, my brother whom my mother did not give birth to.
When his ordeal with hepatitis C began, his brother Adel called me. The shock to me and to his family was severe. When the situation worsened, there was no solution but transplantation. The journey began: searching for a liver donor, then surgery, then recovery. On the road to recovery, the accursed disease attacked him again, as if life refused to leave him to struggle with his own epic of helping the poor and the sick and drawing smiles on weary faces. Perhaps it wanted him to rest a little from the daily toil of going every morning to Deirout Central Hospital and, in the evening, directly helping poor patients in his clinic for free—so Nasr departed in silence, without being able to save a few thousand pounds that might have helped him defeat the accursed disease by obtaining the medicine he needed. At the journey’s end, the doctor dies of illness while desperately searching for medicine—he who, “if a poor man came to him, his tender heart would burn, and he would put it for him in a loaf of bread.”
Nasr left without knowing that I loved him more than Adel, his elder brother; that his constant teasing about my replacing his friendship with Adel’s was misplaced. If only he knew now that he took a piece of my heart and left—that he was always the dearest and closest to my heart, despite the distances that separated us for long years. Go in peace, my friend. Greet our people among the poor there, and wait for me.
Paris: five o’clock in the evening, Cairo time.
