The Yacoubian Building

by Alaa Al Aswany

  He turned to look at her. She was walking silently next to him. Suddenly he heard himself saying in a hoarse voice, “Come on. Let’s have breakfast at the Excelsior. You must be hungry.”

  She didn’t say a word but followed him in silence into the large restaurant that faced the Yacoubian Building. It was totally empty at that time in the morning except for the cleaners, who were absorbed in washing the floor with soap and water, and a single elderly foreigner in the farthest part of the place, who was drinking coffee and reading a French newspaper. They sat facing each other at a table next to the window that looks out onto the intersection of Suleiman Basha and Adly streets. Zaki ordered two thés complets (with cake), and a heavy, painful silence hung over them until, having taken a sip from his cup of tea, he started speaking slowly, feeling his way: “Busayna, I beg you not to be upset. In life, one is subjected to many stupid situations and it would be wrong to dwell on them. Police officers in Egypt are like rabid dogs. Unfortunately, their powers are great because the Emergency Law….”

  What he was saying seemed ridiculous and inappropriate and Busayna continued to hang her head. The cup of tea and cake remained untouched in front of her and Zaki grasped just how downcast she was. He said, “I’d just like to know where Dawlat got a key to the office. She planned the whole filthy move to get me declared incompetent, but she’ll lose the case. The lawyer assures me she’ll lose.”

  He was using his chatter to hold his emotions at bay, trying to turn the painful situation into mere words, possibilities, and suppositions, in the hope that this would succeed in getting them out of the misery that oppressed them.

  “The lawyer explained to me the legal conditions for incompetence. It’s a complicated area and the courts don’t make decisions lightly. Dawlat in her ignorance thinks it’s easy.”

  His attempt failed and Busayna remained silent and didn’t utter a word, as though she’d lost her capacity to hear or speak. Zaki leaned toward her across the table and for the first time, in the light, noticed her drawn, pallid color, her reddened eyes, and some scattered scratch marks on her face and neck that were the result of her struggle with the police. He smiled lovingly, took her hands in his, and whispered, “Busayna, if you love me, forget the whole stupid affair.”

  His tenderness was more than she could bear, as though it were the last light touch that the mountain, cracked and barely holding together, was waiting for before crumbling. She began to cry and said in a low voice, “All my life I’ve had bad luck in everything.”

  Taha met with Radwa in the presence of the sisters. He saw her without her veil and talked to her at length. He learned that she was three years older than he, and her deep knowledge of religion and her mild, calm way of talking pleased him. She told him about herself and her former husband, Nur el Din, and how they had killed him. She said, “In the papers they wrote that he fired at the officers and they’d been obliged to kill him, but God knows that that night he didn’t fire a single shot. They knocked on the door and as soon as he opened it they fired several rounds with automatics. He was martyred immediately and three brothers with him. They killed them deliberately, and if they’d wanted they could have taken them alive.”

  Taha’s face registered sorrow and he commented bitterly, “The new instructions are for them to kill as many Islamists as they can. They call it the ‘blow to the heart’ policy. If this infidel regime had dealt with the Jews that brutally, Jerusalem would have been liberated long ago.”

  Radwa hung her head and a heavy silence prevailed. Then she went on, as though she wanted to narrate everything that had happened in her life, “After the martyrdom of my late husband, my family tried to marry me to someone else and I found out that the groom they had in mind was a rich engineer, but he’d given up praying. My family tried to convince me that he would become observant once we got married, but I refused. I explained to them that a man who has abandoned prayer is an unbeliever in the eyes of the Law and it is not permitted for him to marry a Muslim woman, but they pressured me so hard my life became hell. The problem is my family isn’t observant. They are good people, but unfortunately they are still in the Age of Ignorance. I feared I would face discord over my religion and I wanted my son Abd el Rahman to grow up in obedience to God, so I contacted Sheikh Bilal and begged him to allow me to live in the camp.”

  “And what did your family do?”

  “I sent someone to tell them I was all right and I’ll go and visit them as soon as possible, God willing. I pray God to forgive me if I’ve done them harm.”

  Listening to her, he felt she was truthful and he liked a certain serious, sincere expression that appeared on her beautiful face while she was talking, as though she were a guilty child confessing frankly. He noted too that her body was full and well proportioned and her breasts swelling and firm (after which he reproached himself for the thought and asked God’s forgiveness).

  Afew days later, Sheikh Bilal summoned him to his office and shook his hand in welcome. Then he looked at him for a moment with a mysterious smile on his face and said in a deep voice, as though resuming a conversation in which they had been engaged, “So…what do you think?”

  “About what?”

  The sheikh let out a loud laugh and said, “You don’t know what I’m talking about, Sheikh Taha? I’m talking about Radwa, man.”

  Taha said nothing and smiled in embarrassment. The sheikh patted him on his shoulder and said, “Congratulations, my boy.”

  As soon as the evening prayer was over on Thursday, the brothers hovered around Taha congratulating him, while joyful ululations rang out from the room set aside for the women. For two days the women had exhausted themselves getting the bride ready and putting together her trousseau. After a quarter of an hour of ululations and congratulations, Sheikh Bilal sat down to perform the marriage ceremony. Radwa deputized Brother Hamza (like her, from Asyut) to conclude the marriage contract and other brothers volunteered themselves as witnesses. Sheikh Bilal made the normal short speech about marriage in God’s Law, then placed Taha’s hand in Hamza’s and pronounced the words of the contract, which they repeated after him. When they had finished, Sheikh Bilal murmured “O God, make their union blessed, guide them in obedience to You, and provide them with righteous offspring!” Then he placed his hand on Taha’s head, saying, “God bless you and your marriage and join you and your wife in good fortune!”

  The brothers then all rushed to embrace the groom and congratulate him and the ululations rang out loud and the sisters started singing, while beating on tambourines,

  We’ve come to you, we’ve come to you

  So you greet us and we’ll greet you.

  If it weren’t for the red red gold

  She’d have stopped at some other wold.

  If it weren’t for the brown brown wheat

  Your girls wouldn’t be nice and sleek.

  Taha was seeing the Islamic style of wedding celebration for the first time and was much affected by the joy of the sisters and their songs and by the enthusiasm of the brothers in their congratulations. Next the sisters accompanied the bride to her new home—a single spacious room leading to a small separate bathroom in the large building set aside for married couples (and which originally, in the days of the Swiss, had been a dwelling for the cement company’s quarry workers; it had been left abandoned and completely forgotten about until some of the Islamist workers in the company took it and made it into a secret camp for the Gamaa). The women left and the mosque was quiet. The brothers sat with the groom and there was merry conversation interspersed with loud laughter. Then Sheikh Bilal stood up, saying, “Off with us then, brothers.”

  Taha tried to detain him, but the sheikh laughed and said, “On your wedding night you mustn’t dissipate your energy in conversation!”

  Laughing comments showered down from the brothers as they left the mosque. Taha bade them farewell and they departed. Left on his own, he began to feel terrified. He had imagined what he would do on the wed
ding night in numerous ways, then in the end he’d gone ahead and decided to let things proceed as God ordained, though the idea that he had no experience of women while his wife did have previous experience, perhaps making her hard to please, continued to make him anxious. As though reading his thoughts, Sheikh Bilal had taken him aside the day before the wedding and spoken to him of marriage and his wife’s rights in the Law, stressing to him that there was nothing for a Muslim to feel shy about in marrying a woman who was not a virgin and that a Muslim woman’s previous marriage ought not to be a weak point that her new husband could exploit against her. He said sarcastically, “The secularists accuse us of puritanism and rigidity, even while they suffer from innumerable neuroses. You’ll find that if one of them marries a woman who was previously married, the thought of her first husband will haunt him and he may treat her badly, as though punishing her for her legitimate marriage. Islam has no such complexes.”

  These were all indirect messages, as Taha understood, about how he should treat Radwa. The sheikh reviewed with him what takes places between a man and a woman and explained to him the verse from The Cow chapter, Your women are a tillage for you; so come unto your tillage as you wish, and forward for your souls, expounding at length on the Qur’anic expression “and forward for your souls” through which the Lord, Sublime and Glorious, teaches us how to have intercourse with women in a gentle and humane fashion. The sheikh had an ability to talk about even the most precise details of sex in a serious and respectable way that did not offend one’s modesty. Taha benefited from what he said and learned many things that he had not known before, which made him love the man even more, so that he thought to himself, “Even if my father himself were with me, he would not have done more for me than Sheikh Bilal has.”

  Now the wedding ceremonies were over and the brothers had left him on his own to face the critical moment. He climbed the stairs and knocked on the door and then entered the bride’s room, where he found her sitting on the edge of the bed. She had taken her headscarf off. Her hair was black and smooth and reached her shoulders, and its blackness, next to the rosy whiteness of her skin, was fascinating. For the first time, Taha noticed her beautiful neck, her small hands, and her delicate fingertips. With his heart beating hard, he cleared his throat and said in an embarrassed voice, “Peace be upon you.”

  Radwa smiled, bowed her head, and whispered gently, blushing, “And upon you be peace and the mercy of God and His blessings.”

  Hatim Rasheed heard the news the next day. He had stayed late at the paper until the first edition was out and returned exhausted to the house about 4 A.M., telling himself, “I’ll sleep, then check on Abduh in the morning.” He woke late, showered, put on his clothes, and left to go to the hospital. In the lobby of the building he met El Shazli the doorkeeper, who said to him tersely, “Abduh’s left you the keys of the room and the kiosk.”

  “What?” exclaimed Hatim, taken aback. The doorkeeper informed him of the death of the child and what had happened afterward. Hatim lit a cigarette and asked, making an effort to appear calm, “Did he tell you where he was going?”

  “He said he was going to live in Imbaba and he refused to leave a new address.”

  Hatim went back, climbed up to the roof, and started asking the residents for Abduh’s new address. He put up with their insolent looks and hostile responses (whose hidden message was “Leave Abduh alone. You’ve done enough to him.”) but in the end got nowhere. In the evening he sat in his car in front of the locked kiosk on the off chance that Abduh might have forgotten something and come back to get it with the spare key that he kept. He went to the kiosk three days running but Abduh never showed up.

  Hatim did not give up. He went on searching for him everywhere and with everyone who knew him but in vain. After a long week of searching, it became clear to him that Abduh had gone forever and a raging wave of sorrow and despair swept over him. Painful and conflicting feelings engulfed him: he missed Abduh—his ardor, his strong hard body, his good nature and purity, his husky voice and Sa’idi accent. He brimmed with compassion for him too because he knew how much he had loved his son and how much his death would grieve him. He felt regret that he had left him that day at the hospital and gone to the paper, telling himself, “I could have postponed the work to be with him at that difficult time. He needed me beside him but was ashamed to ask.”

  Day by day Hatim’s agony increased. A sense of being truly unlucky possessed him. He had spent many years in misery and suffering before finding a biddable and sensitive companion who didn’t cause problems, and as soon as his life had begun to settle down, the child had died and Abd Rabbuh had disappeared, leaving Hatim to start his wretched journey over again. He would have to cruise the streets of Downtown every night to pick up a Central Security recruit who might turn out to be a thief or a criminal who would beat him up or rob him, as had happened many times before. He would have to return to the Chez Nous in search of a barghal and to the Gebelawi baths in El Hussein to pick up some adolescent with whom to satisfy his lust, only to have to put up in return with his vulgarity and greediness. Why had he lost Abduh after he had loved him, and grown to feel at ease with him and planned their life together? Was it really so difficult for him to enjoy happiness with a lover over time? If he were religious, he might have believed that his tribulations were a punishment for his homosexuality, but he knew at least ten homosexuals who lived quiet, carefree lives with their lovers. Why should he, specifically, lose Abduh?

  Bit by bit his mood deteriorated. He lost his appetite for food, started drinking a lot, and kept to the house. He stopped going to the paper except for the most pressing of emergencies, which he would resolve and then hurry back home, where everything was silence, sorrow, and memories: Abduh used to sit here, and eat here, and put out his cigarette here, and…here he used to lie next to him, while Hatim stroked his black body, kissing every part of it and whispering in a voice trembling with the heat of desire, “You’re mine, only mine, Abduh. You’re my beautiful black stallion.”

  Hatim spent entire nights wallowing in his memories and going over his relationship with Abduh minute by minute till one night from amid the clouds of drunkenness and despair, an idea emerged that flashed in his mind like lightning. He recalled that Abduh had said once jokingly, “A Sa’idi can’t live without other Sa’idis. You know, if I go any place I have to ask where’s the café that the Sa’idis hang out.”

  Hatim pulled himself together and looked impatiently at his watch. It was past 1 A.M. He dressed hurriedly and in half an hour he was asking people on the street in Imbaba where the Sa’idi café was. In another half hour, he’d found it. In the short distance he traversed between the car and the entrance to the café, he felt the sweat pouring off his brow, and his heart was beating so hard it almost stopped.

  The café was cramped and filthy. Hatim hurried in and looked around him impatiently. Later he would ponder the relation between our extreme desire for something and our ability to realize it—was what we wanted inevitably brought about if we wanted it enough? He longed so much to find Abduh that he did in fact find him. He was sitting in the farthest part of the café smoking a waterpipe, wearing a capacious, dark-colored gallabiya and had a large Sa’idi turban on his head. At that moment he looked enormous and imposing, like a magic dark-skinned jinni that had materialized from the world of the imagination. He looked too as though he had returned to his true self, to his origin and his roots; as though he had taken off along with his Western clothes his whole contingent and exceptional history with Hatim Rasheed. The latter stood before him for a moment in silence, looking at him closely as though confirming, verifying, laying hold of, his presence, lest he disappear again. An instant later he rushed toward him and exclaimed in a gasping voice that made the customers turn their heads in his direction, “Abduh. At last.”

  Their intercourse on the first night was simple and spontaneous, as though she had been his wife for years. The rose opened to the touch of his fi
ngers and he watered it more than once till it was quenched. This amazed him and he took to asking himself as he recalled the details of their wedding night how was it that he had succeeded easily with Radwa when he had never touched a woman before? Where had his apprehension, hesitation, and fear of failure gone? Perhaps it was because he felt at ease emotionally with Radwa, or because he had applied all Sheikh Bilal’s advice, or because his wife had encouraged him with her experience and shown him the secret sources of pleasure. This she had done skillfully and adeptly, though without abandoning her natural modesty as a Muslim woman.

  Taha thought about all this and came to the conclusion that his marriage to this woman was a great benison from Our Lord, Glorious and Mighty, because she was a woman who was refined, honest, and sincere in her Islam. He loved her and felt at ease with their daily routine. He would leave her in the morning and spend the whole day at the camp. Then he would return after the last prayer of the day to find the room tidy and clean and delicious hot food waiting for him. How he loved to sit with her at the low round table to eat their dinner! He would tell her what had happened during the day and she would recount to him her conversations with her sister Muslims and give him a summary of what she had read in the newspapers (which he didn’t have time to read). They would laugh together at the antics of little Abd el Rahman and his mischief, which would only be put to a stop when he fell all of a sudden into the clutches of sleepiness, at which point Radwa would carry him to the bed she had prepared for him on the floor, returning to remove the remains of the food and carefully wash the dishes.