The Falcon by Ghassan Kanafani

OUR WORLD WAS ARRANGED WITH EXTREME CARE: each one according to his rank. And that is exactly what made our relationship with the guards of the building that we, the engineers of the New Construction Company, occupied a relationship of greeting and no more.

"Good evening, Jadaan."

The answer would come curtly from the wooden bench:

"Good evening, Abdallah."

This Abdallah was each of us; each one of us he called Abdallah. Jadaan did not bother to learn our names, each of us was Abdallah to him, and may God release the believers from the bother of remembering foreigners' names. .

The guards' room was at the end of the passage leading to the new building that was given up to us. It was indeed a splendid building, in contrast to the one we had lived in previously, which was filthy and intolerably crowded with mice and neighbors.

Here, in this new building, we lived entirely apart from everything, and with the passage of days we almost felt we were isolated, not only from the quarter in which we lived, but from the whole city. If the guards had not said good-bye to us and greeted us whenever we came in and out of the building, we would certainly have felt that we were in an elegant cage that we had assigned to ourselves.

These guards were bedouin who had come from the desert. Jadaan was the night watchman, but nevertheless he would spend part of the hours of daylight prowling round the place, because there was nothing else for him to do. The day watchman was called Mubarak, a stout man of about forty, of a dark brown complexion and with a bent back, who walked as though he had just got up from sitting a long time. He wore the official uniform allotted to guards, a dark blue one with big brass buttons, and he slept inside the neat guards' room and covered himself with white sheets that were changed every week.

We felt, despite our distance from the world of Mubarak and Jadaan, that there was a concealed enmity or dislike between the two men. And we soon noticed that Jadaan never wore the official uniform, but always a coarse abaya over a dirty robe that at some time in the past had been white. We noticed, too, that Jadaan refused to sleep inside the neat room, unlike Mubarak, and that he had made himself an extraordinary bed out of three wooden planks that he had pulled from a big box and set up on six legs, covering it with a piece of black goatskin. At the end of the night we would see him fold up his rough abaya, put it under his head as a pillow, and doze off without a covering. We never saw him inside the neat room or in the navy uniform with big brass buttons.

It was most likely that Jadaan despised his companion Mubarak in some way, or so we thought, and that Mubarak, in turn, inside that marvellous uniform, felt ashamed in front of Jadaan when he looked him up and down with his small sharp eyes.

This belief was confirmed when Mubarak stopped me one day and asked me to write a complaint for him to the head of the company.

"A complaint against whom, Mubarak? " I asked the question in the correct tone for an engineer addressing a guard six ranks below him, and he answered me:

"Against Jadaan. He refuses to clean the toilets when his turn comes."

"Why?"

"I don't know. He used to get your servant to do it and give him three rupees."

"What does it matter to you so long as the toilets are cleaned at the right time?"

He leaned against the wall. He was angry, and he explained excitedly:

"Listen, sir. For a week your servant has refused to do it. Do you know what he did? Well, he asked me to clean the toilets for five rupees."

"And why doesn't Jadaan do the job himself? Isn't it part of his duties?"

He shook his head and brushed the dust from his arms.