Friendly Fire

by Alaa Al Aswany

  My mother would protest laughingly and say, “You’re asking Isam? What can the child know about painting?”

  And my father would reply, picking me up in his arms and kissing me, “What do you mean? He will be a great artist. One day I’ll tell you, ‘I told you so!’”

  If it wasn’t laziness or lack of talent, then what was it? When I got older, I worked out the reason. What my father lacked was charisma—that halo that encircles great men and grants them influence over others.

  Charisma is not a quality that can be acquired but is given to some and not others. Those who have it are born with a place reserved for them at the top. All they have to do for admiration and appreciation to be showered upon them is to work with a certain proficiency. The efforts of those who don’t have it are a hopeless battle against nature that they are fated to lose, and no matter how much such people may wear themselves out over their work, the appreciation of others will come to them hesitantly, permeated with doubt and reserve.

  The person who discovered the New World wasn’t Christopher Columbus but an aged sailor called Pinzón who was his shipmate. Pinzón pointed out the right route to his captain and then his name fell into oblivion under the impact of the clamor of glory that erupted around the name of the immortal, charismatic Columbus.

  My father’s fate was Pinzón’s—to be created without luster, as ordinary as millions of others like him who have nothing to distinguish them. Of medium build, bald, and a little fat. You could sit with him for a whole hour, then he’d leave and you wouldn’t give him a second thought, and you’d probably get his name wrong if you met him again. His voice had a slight huskiness to it which people listening to him would assume was about to disappear, leaving a clear sound that would hold the attention of those who heard it. But the huskiness would not disappear and my father’s voice would emerge as though constricted, the words running into one another. He spoke fast, the words tumbling out of his mouth, and he was incapable of holding people’s interest if he spoke anything more than short phrases. If this happened people would turn their attention to other speakers, at which point my father would tug on their sleeves or grip their shoulders with his fingers to keep their interest, looking at such moments like a helpless child whose mother is getting ahead of him in the crowd, so that he has to cling onto her skirts in order not to get lost. At home, my father wasn’t one of those husbands who lay down the law; rather, he obeyed my mother in everything. I never felt any awe of him when I was young and sometimes when he scolded me a malign and delicious urge would push me to challenge his authority. When I reached the secondary school, my friends at the Ibrahimiya School were astonished when I told them that my father knew that I would play truant. I used to calmly tell my father that I wasn’t going to school the next day but was going to the movies, and he would listen to me and then fiddle with his mustache—a habit of his when agitated or surprised—then pretend for a moment to be thinking, and ask me with a sort of irritated laugh that passed for permission, “Aren’t you afraid you’ll miss something important if you play hooky?”

  And that would be it—a question, and the matter left to me. If I ignored the question, things ended there. If, however, I hesitated and seemed to be thinking it over, he’d be encouraged and would rush to talk to me enthusiastically about the importance for regular study. Then he’d say, in an uncertain voice, “I don’t know, you know. I don’t think there’s any call for this playing hooky thing. What do you think?”

  My father was weak and as a result his life ended in total defeat. But despite his failure and his weakness, I liked him. I liked him because he accepted his defeat with the silence of one who knows the rules. He didn’t fill the world with lament and he didn’t turn into a poisonous insect. On the occasion of a major competition, my father would await the result among the other competitors, and, when he found out that he’d lost and someone else had won, he wouldn’t express astonishment or anger but carefully gather his things together, smiling sadly, and then make haste to catch the last bus and, if he felt comfortable with the passenger sitting next to him, would tell him everything that had happened, in a neutral tone of voice. His neighbor would listen to him, at first with pity, but then some small thing—such as my father’s shoes or his shirt or even an expression that passed over his face—would cause him to understand why he had failed and the man would feel less, or even not at all, sorry.

  Lots of people spent their evenings at our house. There were many names belonging to people of differing professions and ages. As some disappeared through travel, or death, new faces appeared. Despite their differences, they were joined by a common thread: all were major unfinished works. El-Ghamdi was a teacher of Arabic language who had once hoped to be a poet. Muhammad Irfan was a former Marxist who had abandoned his dream of changing the world and made do with arts journalism; he made up news items about dancers and singers and blackmailed them. Even ‘Uncle’ Anwar I discovered from my father, had dreamed of being a great songwriter and had ended up playing backing zither to the dancer called Sugar. And there were many others. A band of people with shattered dreams, like old people carping at a wedding, who met every evening to curse blind luck and the lousy times: “We knew So-and-so when he used to pray God for the price of a cigarette, and now he’s got more money than he knows what to do with, with a villa in el-Maadi, a chalet in el-Agami, and three luxury cars. And So-and-so, the famous singer—didn’t he fail the radio test in the fifties? You can believe that story because I was a member of the committee!” When I sat with my father’s friends, I never felt for an instant that they loved one another. They feuded all the time and violent quarrels were always breaking out among them. Nevertheless, they took care to come and never broke with one another because what joined them was stronger than their enmity. They needed these gatherings, because at them their sense of inadequacy was dissolved in their awareness of their common fate, and when they met none of them was embarrassed by his failure.

  I would use any excuse to escape from sitting with them and only stay up late with them if Uncle Anwar was present. Uncle Anwar was different. He was my father’s closest friend, the two of them joined by thirty years of friendship. Once they had lived together in a single room on Bein el-Sarayat, my father dreaming of painting, Anwar of music. Anwar earned a lot from his work with Sugar and spent lavishly on himself and his friends. He had never married because marriage, in his opinion, gave you the blues and the blues shortened your life. Uncle Anwar was nice. He never stopped making fun of things and stirring those around him to laughter. On what he called ‘nights of joy,’ which were those following the wedding of some rich person, Uncle Anwar would appear in the circle bearing ‘goodies’—a big bottle of brandy, an ounce of good-quality hashish, and a kilo of kebab and sweetbreads, and when his friends received him with cheers, Uncle Anwar would affect a grave face, throw down in front of them the things that he had brought, and pronounce, in the tones of a strict father, “Eat and drink until a white thread can be distinguished against the black hides of your miserable fathers!”*

  Uncle Anwar hated nobody so much as he hated Sugar, the dancer, against whom he directed the greater part of his jokes and calumniations. Sometimes, even, when conversation had dried up and silence reigned, one of those present would ask Anwar for news of his mistress and Anwar would launch into a virtuoso display of sarcasm at the expense of Sugar’s ignorance, arrogance, rich lovers, and general awfulness, and the place would ring with laughter once more. Despite Anwar’s imperious love of music, he would go whole nights without playing, refusing immediately and roughly if anyone asked him to do so, and if anyone insisted, a fight would sometimes break out. Anwar’s friends knew how he was and so didn’t ask him, knowing that, at a given moment, which no one could predict, Anwar would suddenly stretch out his hand, take the zither, put on the plectra, and start to play. If one contemplated his face after a few minutes of playing, it would seem that he could no longer see the audience or make out his surrou
ndings. When Anwar finished, he would receive the shouts of admiration and the applause with a face drawn and pale and he’d remain like that for a while before resuming his unruliness and sarcasm, at which point we’d know that he’d returned.

  There are no weddings on Tuesdays. Uncle Anwar would show up early, the first to arrive, his face still bearing the traces of sleep and battered by the din of the previous night’s show. He would greet my mother politely and make his way to the studio. There, he would remove his suit, hang it up carefully, and put on his gallabiya (Uncle Anwar always kept one of his gallabiyas at our house). After a little while my father would come. They would drink tea together and then sit on the floor and busy themselves preparing the equipment for the evening. They began with the goza, or hand-held waterpipe, the cleaning and readying of which were important tasks that kept both Anwar and my father busy and often gave rise to arguments. My father might be of the opinion that it was the pieces of thick paper used to tighten the joints that were impeding the flow of the smoke, while Anwar might claim that it was the reed stem that was blocked. I used to watch them—Anwar in his striped gallabiya, seated cross-legged and tearing up little pieces of paper that he would stuff between the stem of the waterpipe and the tobacco bowl and my father next to him, repeatedly puffing into the mouthpiece of the reed and listening to how the water gurgled. When they came to Cairo thirty years before, two young artists full of determination and ambition, had it ever occurred to them that things would turn out like this? How distant the beginning seemed now and how strange the end! Usually it was Anwar who was the cleverer at diagnosing the goza’s problems and when he’d finished placing the tightening wads, he’d light a bowl of tobacco to test it and draw a long breath, which would be followed by a fierce fit of coughing that turned his eyes red. Then he’d pass the pipe over to my father, saying, “I told you it was the wads. They’re dandy now. Take a drag and ask the Lord to bless me,” and my father would look in my direction and say laughingly, before thrusting the mouthpiece into his mouth, “Your Uncle Anwar, see, before the music, used to work as a goza mechanic on Bein el-Sarayat,” and Anwar would burst out with, “Don’t say such things, you son of a bitch! You want Isam to get funny ideas about me?”* Then he’d turn to me, an injured expression on his face, and say, “Don’t you believe a word your father says, Master Isam! I’ve been an honest man all my life. It was your father who taught me to smoke hashish and at the beginning I thought it was chocolate.”

  A hail of jokes and quips would then be released, after which Anwar’s face would suddenly resume its serious expression and he’d stand up and thrust his hand into the pocket of his jacket where it hung on the wall and take out a piece of hashish wrapped in cellophane and hand it to my father who would sniff it, try it with his teeth, squeeze it between his fingers, and proclaim it to be, “Sweet, Anwar! Mustafa’s? What do you say? Should we wait for the rest or start with a solo?”

  Anwar would sit down cross-legged again and say in tones of the utmost seriousness, “Let’s start with a solo in the mode Sika.”*

  He would bite the hashish into little pieces which he would distribute among the pipe bowls of molasses-soaked tobacco, then light the charcoal, and set to smoking right away. They’d ask me to stay with them and I’d sit and smoke with them, and after a few pipes the drug would go to Anwar’s head, his puffy eyelids would droop, a grave expression would appear in his eyes, and he’d nod his head as though following an inner dialogue that none but he could hear. Then he’d turn to my father, smile, pat him on his thick leg, and say, “Honestly, my dear Mr. Abduh, don’t you think you should have given up all this painting business? You could have learned to be a belly dancer. What’s wrong with belly dancing? By now you’d be something of a different order entirely. Old Woman Sugar does this (here Anwar would twitch his waist, holding his arms up as though dancing) and gets five hundred pounds a night, the bitch.”

  My father would be on the verge of responding when Uncle Anwar, all taken with zeal, would suddenly leap up, halfway through the pipe, and cry, “What do you say, Abduh? It’s really too bad of you! I’m telling you, all you have to do is this and you get five hundred pounds,” and Anwar and my father would dissolve into a long bout of laughter.

  At lunch my father would drink a glass of rum, a habit that helped him to sleep well during his siesta, or so he said. The rum would send its warmth through my father’s body and he’d talk to us—me and my mother—and laugh, and sometimes a mysterious melancholy would seep into him, but on this one day he seemed more than usually upset. He kept fiddling with his mustache in silence, his eyes staring into space, and when my mother asked him, “What’s wrong with you?” my father (who seemed to have been waiting for the question) sighed deeply, took a gulp from his glass of rum, and said, playing with a matchstick between his teeth, “Would you believe, I got a letter today from someone who admires my work.”

  My father seemed embarrassed and went on in a louder voice as though saying something he’d prepared ahead of time, “Naturally, I’m happy, as any artist would be, to get a letter from an admirer. But what makes me happier is that there’s someone out there who actually follows the figurative arts in Egypt in these days of ours.”

  There was silence for a moment and my father took a sip from his glass. I looked at my mother and got the impression that she wanted to say something but hadn’t yet worked out what, so I jumped in with, “So where’s the letter?”

  “Over there by you, in the pocket of my jacket.”

  I got up and inserted my hand into the pocket of the jacket hanging on the coat rack in the corner of the parlor, and pulled out the letter. The envelope was written in an elegant black hand “Abd el-Ati, Life, 6 Qasr el-Aini Street.” I opened the envelope and pulled out the letter, and as I started reading my mother exclaimed, “Read it out loud, Isam.”

  I haven’t mentioned the sender’s name, which was Mahmoud Ali Farghal, from Minyet el-Nasr, Governorate of el-Daqahliya. He said that he worked as a school art teacher and did oil paintings and dreamed of becoming a great artist like my father. He asserted that he followed my father’s work in Life every Wednesday and had seen one exhibition that my father had put on in Cairo some years ago and that though he’d come to Cairo especially to see the exhibition, and had wanted to talk with my father, his great shyness had prevented him from introducing himself. All the same, he averred again that he would be visiting my father soon at his Life office so as to make his acquaintance and show him his work. He ended the letter with the words, “Kindly accept the salutations of your pupil and disciple, Mahmoud Ali Farghal.”

  That Farghal was a genuine admirer of my father’s work was a possibility not to be dismissed, for one is always coming across a certain type of person who interests himself in matters no one but he knows anything about and gets very enthusiastic about them, such as the people who support the Tirsana soccer club or devotees of the voice of Abd el-Latif el-Tilbani, for example.* Equally possible was that Farghal was a hypocrite who wanted to get close to my father so that the latter could help him in some way or give him an introduction to someone.

  When I finished reading the letter, my father was blushing with ecstatic joy. He started fiddling with the fork on his empty plate, a happy look in his eyes, and he pursed his lips like a child trying not to smile. My mother, who only now seemed to have taken in what was happening, burst out with, “Wonderful, Abduh! Congratulations! I think we ought to frame the letter and hang it in the sitting room.”

  I laughed out loud and my father shouted in protest, “What’s all this nonsense about framing and hanging? You really are a dumb cow.”

  My mother turned pale for a moment but then burst out laughing and mumbled, “Never mind, never mind. No framing. Don’t get mad.”

  My father lit a cigarette and explained to her, this time in a calm, restrained voice, that his happiness was not because he had an admirer but on behalf of the figurative arts, an idea that he then expatiated on at length
and in various formulations. Then he moved on to a lot of stuff about the great artist’s duty toward the talent of the rising generation and spoke about his professors of painting and how they’d encouraged him. I felt that my father was looking forward to the day when he would meet Farghal and that he would make every effort to help him.

  My father went into his room to sleep, my mother took the dishes into the kitchen, and I sat on my own. The letter still lay before me on the table. I looked at it. Farghal’s writing was beautiful and polished. I stretched out my hand and took the letter and the feel of the paper on my fingers was smooth and uniform. I looked at the picture of my father and mother in their wedding clothes that hung on the wall. At first I thought about the style of my father’s suit in the picture. Then I lost my concentration for a moment and found myself grasping the piece of the paper in my hands. I was tearing it in half. The tearing made a quietly rough sound. An obscure anxiety gnawed at me when I finished but I dismissed it and hurried—as though to reassure myself—to rip it into small pieces, and then even smaller ones. Each time it got harder to tear the paper but I continued until the paper had been turned into little bits, scattered everywhere, which I gathered carefully in my hand. I then went into the kitchen and threw these out of the window that gave onto the light shaft in the center of the building and watched the breeze scatter them everywhere. Afterward, I exchanged a few ordinary words with my mother, left her, went to my room, and slept.