Fourth: the events and ideas of the story

04Fourth: the events and ideas of the story

Scene one: Ramadan memories in Imbaba

• The narrator begins with the word "zman (of old)": the river lay open to the eye, and the people of Imbaba spent their Ramadan nights along the stretching bank.
• They left the alleys carrying their mats and their vessels, the children played, they sat in conversation and drank tea, then gathered their things at sahur time and went back.

Scene two: the neighbours and national unity

• The family of Uncle Mansour the Christian lived next to them, in the house and in the sitting-place on the bank.
• He contributed the few coins the children collected to decorate the alley.
• They broke the fast only with the call to prayer; they exchanged the metal sheets on which Kahk, biscuits and ghorayeba were arranged, carried them to the nearby oven, and stayed until morning.
• They exchanged visits on the day of the feast.

Scene three: waiting for the breaking-the-fast cannon

• The memory most closely attached to those days: waiting for the cannon on the river bank — dozens of children on the edge.
• The bank ends in a bend under the great Imbaba bridge where the crouching cannon sits, nothing of it visible; so they did not look at it but at a building half-hidden behind the trees in the Zamalek district.
• The season was summer: the river brim-full, the water heavy with its silt, and the red dates had come out.
• All at once its slender windows lit up through the branches, and they shouted: "The church has lit up… the church has lit up".
• With the reddish light and the singing, the cannon fired its strong shot, and its thick white smoke left its hiding place and roved over the surface of the water.

The last scene: the irony in the present

• The friend Edwar Al-Kharrat calls to congratulate on the feast, and the narrator asks him the name of that church which used to be seen from Imbaba.
• He answers that in Zamalek there is no church except the Church of the Virgin at al-Mar'ashli.
• The narrator says he can no longer see it, and Al-Kharrat replies: perhaps the buildings have hidden it.
• Here the irony: between a noble, shining past and a present crowded with tall buildings that screen the scene.