I love my uncle Mustafa because he used to take us—my brother Suleiman and me—to the movie theater twice a month as if we were his own children (because he had none). Or he’d take us to the municipal pool when it was there, before it was filled in with cement. We loved movies about gangs who would chase the police down wide boulevards because my uncle Mustafa loved them. And we loved movies about the Mafia, because they defended the poor, and killed the police and gendarmes. After two years of marriage, my uncle’s wife got into the car of a man who sold household goods and ran off with him to Italy. Mother cried because she hadn’t known about the marriage. Before going to the movies or the swimming pool, we would go with my uncle to eat a plate of fried sardines with fried eggplant and fried potatoes, and we’d carry the smell of frying oil with us to the cinema, its taste remaining with us all day, even staying with us when we got into bed at night. He was about to get married again, which is why we were seeing him in this white djellaba spotted with blood. Mother didn’t know what a bullet looked like, or what it smelled like. She brought in some bleach along with poultices and boiling water. The hole’s edges had turned black. My uncle clenched his teeth and didn’t look at the black hole. She also put some crushed herbs on top of the hole. And what would happen to the bullet when the hole closed? My uncle answered wryly that bullets were made to stay in the body. “Would this one behave any differently just because it’s in your uncle’s body? Your uncle’s bullet, my boy, will remain right where it is, like all the world’s bullets, like a shell your uncle found on the beach and forgot in his pants pocket.” Then mother bought a treatment that didn’t work because the bullet couldn’t be removed by ointments or pills. Drugs didn’t work either. “The only thing that’ll work is a doctor,” said Abdullah. Neither Mother nor my uncle wanted the doctor, whoever this doctor might be, to ask them where the bullet came from. So, either because of this or for some other reason, my uncle said that he could barely feel any pain. “Who says a bullet pierced my hip?” he’d say while touching his side. “Where’s the bullet then? Do any of you see a bullet?” Then he’d laugh, rub his hipbone, press on it, and continue to laugh. And what had been a laugh, all of a sudden, without him realizing it, without his face knowing what it now looked like, turned into a miserable, desperate wince. My uncle had memorized a lot of songs, having so many cassette tapes that he sold in the market. He knew the names of all the singers and their birthdates. This time Mother cried more loudly, but for no reason. My uncle, who thought she was crying because of his second marriage, said, “What marriage? The marriage never happened anyway because of the gendarmes and the mosque.” And right then, I didn’t understand the mosque’s connection to the marriage or the gendarmes or to anything they were talking about that was making my mother cry so hard.
I left the room again to watch the door.
In the late afternoon, Father came in, greeted my uncle, and took a look at the hole. He asked about the bullet. He scolded my uncle because his problems with the authorities were never-ending. He reprimanded him as if he were a child. He drank a glass of tea with us and told us about the mosque’s roof he was constructing and the types of wood he had bought. Then Mother suggested that it would be better to find another place for my uncle to hide out. In a way she was asking Father to take him to “the inn,” which was what they called our old house. Father went back to scolding my uncle. Why hadn’t he paid his share? Doesn’t the mosque belong to all of us? Then he proudly said that he wasn’t like my uncle since he was exempt from contributing because he was building the mosque’s ceiling. It was as if he hadn’t heard what Mother had said. She herself didn’t expect any more than this. She sat back down at her sewing machine. She put her head down on it and went to sleep, as if regretting the words that had come out of her mouth without having reached Father’s ears.
That night my uncle’s condition took a turn, from that of a man in hiding to one whose smell betrayed him—a smell that overwhelmed the room, a strong smell, the smell of a corpse that has started to rot, the smell of my uncle with a bullet in his hip. It seemed that now he was in serious pain. His fingers started to tremble lightly. The pain showed more in his hands than on his face. The pain was causing his senses to come undone, like someone starting to think with his eyes, or dream with his tongue, or sniff light rather than see it. My uncle no longer knew his own body. His eyes were open now, unblinking, fixed on the ceiling. They were looking at what was beyond the ceiling, open onto a world seen by his fingers like a man pursuing the echo of a dream that remains on the other side of sleep. The same look that said he didn’t want to annoy anyone, when he had been able to say that with nothing more than a finger’s movement. What if his leg had been amputated—would he have been able to forget about the bullet, because the pain would have been even greater? My uncle possessed but one form of pain, and for this reason he focused all of his attention on it, which wasn’t good for anyone. It would have been better for him to be able to choose between a number of different kinds of pain. The skin on his face began to dry and darken, and its surface started to look like dirty toenail clippings. Two red tears, like drops of blood, hardened and stuck in the corners of his dull eyes. His violent trembling prompted me to put my hand on his shoulder without even thinking about it, in order to calm him down and comfort him, but the trembling did not subside. His whole body was shaking now. I left the room so as not to cry.
A strange tension came over the house the next morning, as if our body temperatures had risen. Mother, who was aware that something was happening, was no longer able to control her movements. It was as if we needed nothing more than a cloudy morning like this one for her to be sure that Abdullah could inform the authorities without even getting up from where he was sitting. A sort of agitation afflicted her eyes and hands. Things fell from them, slipping out without any explanation, as if everything had lost its desire to be touched by her hands or seen by her eyes. Things would fall as soon as her shaking hands got close to them, as if they had suddenly malfunctioned, or an unseen shadow had wrapped itself around them. Her gaze would shift slightly, her head leaning to one side, as if she was no longer seeing the same things we were. Her eyes would be fixed on the lamp while she talked about the door, for example; or she would turn toward my uncle in the bedroom while watching Abdullah’s movements; or she would talk to Abdullah while shaking loose threads from her dress, as though people and objects no longer went by the same names. Even when she pricked herself with a needle on this cloudy morning, she didn’t notice, as if things were operating outside of her volition. Different sized and colored pieces of cloth were scattered all around her. She sucked on her pinkie and spit into a rag she wasn’t looking at, and still Abdullah hadn’t left the house. But she felt as if he had left and come back.
Then, as she unsheathed the razor, I heard Mother say, “Your uncle Mustafa wants to shave his beard.” My uncle’s condition must have improved if he was thinking now about shaving his beard. The way he thought about himself also improved. She had a red plastic basin in her hand, as well as a clean shirt and pants. I took the basin and filled it with water. I placed the towel, pants, and shirt over my shoulder. The towel wasn’t red. The shirt had big squares on it, which would make my uncle laugh. I asked him if he wanted to shave his beard, the razor blade at the ready between us. He opened his eyes and leaned his head toward me. This had become his way of speaking. The basin and towel didn’t concern him; it seemed that he didn’t see them. His gaze was fixed on the razor, which was nothing more than a blade with a metal handle, cold like any other razor blade. Maybe it reminded him of the bullet. He remained looking at it for a few moments, mesmerized by its shine, by its lethal edge. He reached out and touched it. He went back to how he looked before, the same empty look of surrender, but without any optimism now. Then he raised his eyes to the ceiling, saying that never in his life had he heard of a man stopped at his own door on the eve of his wedding day by gendarmes demanding money, even if it was money fo
r the mosque. My uncle doesn’t like gendarmes. He doesn’t know anyone who likes gendarmes, or if they do, they like them the same way they like thieves, in that they hope to be like them. That’s my uncle, and that’s what he says with regret stuck in his mouth and bitterness in his eyes. We—the razor, the basin, the soap, and I—walk toward him. I hold my father’s pants and shirt up in front of his eyes and wait for him to laugh. I hear a long, resounding sigh. Her name was Sabah. Twenty-two years old. He heard her voice before he saw her. “Do you have any Abdel-Halim Hafez?” It was as if her voice had blown in unexpectedly from somewhere. His wife deserting him had left an emptiness inside that Sabah filled. He handed her two cassette tapes that had a bunch of songs on them. Day after day, as was his habit, my uncle filled his car with cassette tapes and made the rounds of markets near and far. Then the markets were no more, remaining only on Tuesdays, so the Tuesday market came to mean something to the two of them. I set the basin aside, telling myself he was no longer in pain. The memory of Sabah had absorbed all of his pain. He lay on the bed in what seemed like a suddenly calm state, floating in an apprehensive silence that enveloped the room like a cloud of light. My uncle told us that he had started to wear cologne, groom himself, and wear the nicest clothes he had. He stood behind the counter pretending to sell, but in reality he wasn’t selling a thing. He would praise this or that singer in front of the customers, uninterested in any of them. That was because he was only waiting for Sabah to show up, preceded by her perfumed smile and Abdel-Halim’s song, which came to ring out in the shop before her arrival, and would play over and over in his head for the entire day. The car that he used to drive from market to market—the Thursday market or Friday market—didn’t run on gasoline, but rather on the music of Abdel-Halim. In the streets where he walked, he wore Abdel-Halim songs rather than clothes. At home, the singing didn’t stop until late at night. As if it was playing for her. And on the eve of his wedding, instead of opening the door for her, he opened it for three gendarmes. My uncle had started to stand in front of the mirror many times a day. He was thirty years old. Sabah had come at just the right time, neither too soon nor too late. Sometimes they would stand in front of the mirror together, comparing their faces, saying to one another that they had met at the right time. If only it hadn’t been for the gendarmes. If only they hadn’t knocked on his door at just the wrong time. My uncle took the shirt I handed to him and sniffed it. Was he smelling it or concealing his pain? Bullets hold a pain like nothing else. I was deeply affected by my uncle’s condition. I resented the gendarmes and the mosque. I had never seen anyone with a bullet lodged in their hip for fourteen days, with or without pain. I went to the window and saw that there was no one there. I watched my uncle from above, imagining that he was sleeping peacefully. I held the razor in front of his eyes above his beard, which had grown thick, so he could see it and know what it was about to do. “What do you want, Uncle? Do you want to shave your beard or your head, Uncle?” He didn’t hear me. He was still floating up above in his cloud. Once, they had gone down to the beach. She said to him, “Come on, let’s go swimming.” The sand took on a green color around him. Instead of swimming, he took out a small tape player and placed it on a rock, whereupon they let Abdel-Halim finish what they had started. I put my hand on his head. His bristly hair stuck up like barbed wire. I placed the towel on his chest. I rubbed his beard with shaving cream and his misery disappeared. He became a person ready to have his beard shaved. He dreamed of a wedding that never happened. The corpse smell that rose to my nostrils filled my eyes with tears. It was not so much a smell as something intangible, resembling thin spikes that pierced the corners of my eyes. I removed the covering, and other things that hadn’t been clearly visible enough to me before made me turn away. As if, one way or another, I had known and expected what was waiting for me, even before thinking about removing the covering. The hole had gotten bigger and maggots were moving around inside it. In the middle of the sticky hole there were small maggots, white and yellow, a world of maggots moving around amid green and brown fibers, as if playing in a small pool. Millions of maggots, full of energy and life. My uncle showed no sign of pain on his face. He had transcended it. His eyes were watching a world we weren’t a part of, attentive in a particular way, in a piercing way that allowed for no interpretation, paying special attention, alert with a bitterness that would not have been possible were it not for the gendarmes. I could not continue because the tears were choking me and pressing down on my head. My resentment grew and I said to him, “No worries, Uncle. Even we didn’t pay our share for the mosque . . .” The words emerged out of my resentment. I ran out of the room before I could see his tears.
I went out into the foyer with the basin still in my hand, along with the towel, soap, and shaving foam. She was standing there at the open door. The car had finally shown up, as if Mother had been seeing it since yesterday on Abdullah’s face, in his eyes, and in every movement of his face, especially when she woke and found the door open. “Once a snitch, always a snitch,” Mother said. Then she went back to sit down at her sewing machine—tak tak tak—as if there were no car in front of the door and there weren’t two men in gray coats standing there calmly; as if the two men were waiting for Mother to invite them to lunch. As the men opened one door after another, Abdullah grabbed his sheepskin and began to pray in his usual corner. The two men came back out of the bedroom with my uncle. One of the men lit a cigarette while the other leaned up against my uncle to keep him from falling over. Neither Mother nor I had a chance to say that we didn’t know a man named Mustafa, and that perhaps there was someone in the family who went by that name, but he was in the countryside, and other things like that. The calmness that accompanied the two men as they entered was now gone. They grabbed my uncle, one on each arm, and dragged him toward the car as they cursed, perhaps because of the smell. And instead of looking toward the door this time, Mother was looking at the hole in her sock. She didn’t appear to be angry. “Where did that come from?” she said. I wasn’t sure whether she meant Abdullah or the hole in her sock. I told myself that my uncle was a parrot, and that he had flown away.
4
A child ran along the beach. The employee standing on the raised path craned his neck in that direction. Kika was hiding behind the rocks singing. And I was there with the small stone in my hand that I had picked up without even realizing it. It was the beginning of a cloudy afternoon on the beach, close to the stone jetty that supported the mosque’s foundations. Between the rocks and the sand, the horizon line was invisible because the water and sky were the same color. I realized that there was a small stone in my hands and that my fingers were playing with it. My hands were thinking about the dog in their own way. A smooth green stone. Should I throw it at the dog if he showed up again? My fingers closed around the stone and it disappeared. I stood there for a bit in order to examine the situation from different angles, telling myself that it was time for me to grow up. It was time to overcome my fears. I wouldn’t find a better way than contributing to the cost of building of the mosque.
A Shimmering Red Fish Page 3