Friendly Fire

by Alaa Al Aswany

  Their response to this uncomfortable fact was to ignore her. Their ignoring of her was a punishment they imposed on my grandmother for still being there. My Uncle Abbas would sit with my mother for ages, talking, laughing, and drinking tea, and never once turn to where my grandmother lay in the same room. He had completely lost his awareness of her presence and my grandmother would remain in the middle of the laughter and talk, lying on her bed, silent, staring at the ceiling through her crooked glasses and with eyes over which the cataracts of age had crept. She might lie there for hours and then suddenly do something, like ask the others a question attributable to her weak powers of concentration and her scattered thoughts. It might be the hottest part of the summer and my grandmother would ask my mother to cover her with a blanket because she felt cold. Sometimes she would address my Uncle Abbas as though he were Huda, and sometimes she would try to get out of bed and fail and keep trying until she almost fell over. Then someone would have to jump up and help her, my aged grandmother’s aim being to spread anxiety and spoil the atmosphere that had been created without her, to remind those present that she was old and weak and in need of a care that was not forthcoming because they were shirking their duties. Some months previously, my grandmother had started to wet herself, and my uncle had brought a doctor to solve this new problem. After examining my grandmother, the doctor came out, and I could tell from his face that he understood nothing. “Old age,” he said. “There is no treatment.” Then he prescribed her a medication of which seven drops were to be given her every night with a dropper. Before Huda gave it to my grandmother, my mother yelled at her vehemently, “Don’t put seven. Give her ten, or twelve. Make her stop all that nastiness of hers.”

  The times that my grandmother chose to wet herself were carefully timed—such as in front of visitors, whether relatives or strangers. Right at the moment when the conversation was getting enjoyable and the visitors had settled themselves into their seats, my grandmother would suddenly urinate and discomfort and depression would reign. Once a young woman relative of ours called Nadia was visiting when she saw my grandmother get up, an expression of tranquility clothing her ancient features, and then bend her head like a guilty child while the urine poured down, soaking her clothes and streaming over the floor.

  When Nadia beheld this, she stared for a moment as though she didn’t understand, then burst into hot, vehement tears, and my mother and Huda got furious with my grandmother. Their cries mixed but my mother’s voice was louder and she could be heard saying, “Shame on you, woman! We’ve been telling you to go to the damned bathroom since the morning.”

  Between my mother with her cancer, drawn and terrified of death, and my aged grandmother there existed a bitter animosity that may have been an indicator of ancient love and deep sorrow—a hopeless, vicious conflict of tooth and claw between two people imprisoned in the same narrow cell for too long after having lost all hope of release. When my mother rained insults and curses on her, I would think I caught sight of a slight tremor affecting my grandmother’s tranquil face. There can be no doubt that she was angered by the lack of respect with which she was treated and she knew how to pay my mother back for her cruelty with skill. Once my mother and my grandmother were alone together in the house and my grandmother seized her opportunity. By this time all my mother’s hair had fallen out because of the cancer medication and she covered her bald head with a headscarf, which slipped off easily, revealing the surface of her smooth dark pate with its flaking skin. My grandmother got out of bed, without assistance from anyone, and crossed the corridor to my mother’s room with slow heavy footsteps that could easily be heard. When she entered the room, my mother screamed at her, “What do you want?”

  My grandmother didn’t reply but went up to my mother, on her face a deeply engrossed smile of the sort that appears on that of a child as it approaches an exciting toy that inspires feelings of both danger and pleasure. She came closer until she was next to my prone mother, ignoring her ever-louder cries, bent over her, stretched out her hand, and pulled the headscarf off her head, leaving it naked. Then she looked at my mother and said in clear tones, “Heavens! Where did all your hair go?”

  When I went in to her a few moments later, my mother was howling with tears and screaming, “What’s kept you alive so long? Just die! Just die and give us some peace!”

  I watched my grandmother quit the room with the same heavy steps, leaving the storm behind her, and I noticed at that moment, on her aged face, the signs of satisfaction and contentment.

  9

  I have drawn close and seen, and I am neither sad nor happy. How do you feel when you examine your features closely in the mirror? A certain astonishment at the details of your face that you are seeing for the first time in close up. But your face, nose, eyes, eyebrows, and mouth confirm to you that your face is different from those of others.

  That is how I feel about myself now. I have grasped the truth. I have taken it in my hand and it has sentenced me to loneliness. Isolation has become my fate because I have understood. It is not easy to achieve isolation and it does not come quickly. I have tried hard. I made many attempts and failed before I finally triumphed. A forbidding transparent wall that permits only seeing has been erected and I have withdrawn within my borders. I am possessed by the calm of the scientist who mixes solutions in test tubes and waits to record the reaction with precision and objectivity in his little notebook.

  I am not now for or against anything. I am totally alone and being alone fills me with satisfaction and comfort. I am no longer concerned to prove my superiority or to make others aware of their inferiority. The days of quarrels and problems are past. I wake up every morning, pick up my books, go to the department, and sign in for the day as though I were in my own private office. I make tables for the readings and carry them out, starting with the newspapers, then a magazine, then a chapter from Nietzsche or Spengler. I may finish off the day with Shakespeare or an Arabic novel. The employees rarely speak to me. After my quarrel with Dr. Sa‘id, they realized that I was special and too much for them to deal with for, were they to do so, it would push them toward unfamiliar and painful patterns of thought. It followed that they took a silent collective decision with regard to me—to resume the life that they knew and leave me alone in my dark obscure corner. They remember me sometimes when one of the women employees gives birth or a man marries and their colleagues subscribe to buy a present, sending me the messenger Abd el-Alim, who now speaks to me entirely politely. Sometimes it seems to me when I direct a look at him that a slight quiver afflicts his face and that he expects me to erupt at any moment and throw something at him. I suppress my smile at this thought and pay the amount requested without a word and go back to my reading. Isolation is my blessing, and I insist on preserving it. When night comes, I make my way to my father’s studio and lock myself in.

  Sometimes I go days without seeing my mother and I pay no attention to what goes on in the house. Even Huda I only rarely desire, passion being a part of the life from which I have withdrawn. In my father’s studio I have fashioned for myself my own alternate world, a just and beautiful world to which I flee each night like a terrified child taking refuge in his mother’s bosom, eagerly breathing in her good smell and complaining and crying until, calmed and reassured, he goes to sleep—my own beautiful world, enveloped in a cloud of hashish like a rose enveloped in its calyx. Hashish is a just ruler. He grants you whatever you deserve and gives to each his rights. On the simple, hashish bestows hilarious joy. As for the thinker, the one whose love of the truth is known to Sultan Hashish, he takes him by the hand, draws him close, and reveals secrets. As its acrid taste burns my throat and the effect begins to spread, I roam beyond new horizons and I learn. The truth is one and sempiternal and from it different scattered forms are born that are linked by fragile threads that cannot be seen from afar. I read about Hamlet, Ali ibn Abi Talib, Socrates, Eva Peron, Jehan Sadat, Aisha bint Abi Bakr, ancient Rome, Baghdad, and New York.* Rea
d what you want, draw close and gaze, and the connecting threads become visible to you and the reality of a wonderful unity is revealed to you. From time to time, I have breakfast with my mother. I look on as, with bestial greed, she devours four spoons of honey, then drinks a glass of milk and eats a plate of eggs. My mother talks to me about the mistakes doctors make in diagnosis and asserts that our forefathers didn’t know disease because they used to feed themselves well. She smiles imploringly and says, “You know, Isam, I don’t believe a word of what the doctor says! I don’t have cancer and I’ll live to see him buried, the bastard.”

  Then she laughs hard and looks at my face from under her eyelids and I realize that were I to disagree with her or appear sad or even smile in pity, I would be cutting a fine thread that still connects her to some vague hope. I watch her laugh in silence and register in my brain in large letters, “Our abject greed for life is a truly contemptible thing.” Imagine an efficient, energetic employee who loves his work. He makes a salary of a hundred pounds. He has never neglected his work for a single day and he has never been guilty of a lapse. One morning, however, he is surprised to find that his boss, for no reason other than his desire to do so, has reduced his salary to just ten pounds. What would you call such an employee if he didn’t leave the job? Wouldn’t he be contemptible if he continued to work for ten pounds and pretended to his boss that he was content and happy?

  If my mother were to take her headscarf off in front of the mirror and look at her head and her drawn, exhausted face, then place in front of herself an old photo from the days when her hair was beautiful and combed out and her smile brilliant, the days of her happiness—were my mother ever to compare the two images and ask, Why? Would she not then refuse and protest? Her weakness is no excuse, because despite it she can always put an end to what is an oppressive and insane injustice. Just a smidgen of courage—just a smidgen and the employee refuses to work for a lower salary. The elephant awaits its end. Muhammad Kurayim refuses to save his life by paying a poll tax to his enemies the French and goes to his death calmly, nobly, triumphantly.* The Athenian know-nothings sentence Socrates to death and when on the night of the execution Plato sneaks in to see him, bringing a plan of escape, the teacher hears his enthusiastic pupil out and refuses to flee and in amazement Plato asks why and Socrates smiles and answers, “Because I have turned my back on this contemptible world.”

  10

  The end. I was sitting in the hairdresser’s chair. The hairdresser was, as is usually the case, servile, inquisitive, and loquacious. He hated me because I had been visiting his shop for two whole years and he had not yet been able to find out one thing about me. Just my first name. No matter how hard he tried and persisted in trying to drag me into a conversation, I would resist until he gave up in despair and took to cutting my hair in silence. This silence would sometimes be too much for him and he’d talk to the other customers, while I looked down and read. On that particular day, I’d forgotten to bring a book with me to read. I had to read something, so I turned to the magazines arranged on the shelf of the mirror in front of me—back issues of a French magazine called L’Art du Décor. I have no interest in decoration, but I picked up an issue and began to leaf through some of the articles dealing with that subject. There were lots of photos of furniture in various styles. I went through the pages fast and exchanged that issue for another. On the first page of the second magazine I saw it—a picture that I stopped at and which attracted me so much that I still remember it clearly. It was a photo of a bedroom in the modern style—a wide low bed close to the ground covered with a black silk sheet. On the wall there was a large painting representing a large solid nose surrounded by numerous intersecting shadows colored in shades that ranged from white to black. The floor of the room was completely covered with white fur and the intersection of the white and the black seemed wonderful. I contemplated the photo and a beautiful and surprising feeling was released inside me that quickly turned into an overwhelming love. Minutes passed as I savored the beauty in the picture. I tried to turn the page and look at another but I couldn’t; after a moment I’d go back to my first picture. When I had finished getting my hair cut and was paying, I asked, “Can I keep the magazine?”

  He agreed at once and with delight as this presented an opportunity to interfere in my life, bursting into a long prattle about French décor and how elegant it was. It wasn’t long before he asked, “Do you want the magazine for the new house, sir? A thousand congratulations, Mr. Isam!”

  I freed myself from the hairdresser, tucked the magazine under my arm, and took a taxi home. I was breathless, an adolescent with a photo of a naked woman in his pocket who dashes to his room, locks the door, pulls out the photo panting with desire, and then disappears for hours into a pleasure as overwhelming as if the woman were real. I spent the night smoking hashish and looking at the photo. Every part of it aroused within me a different feeling of beauty—the nose in the middle of the picture, the wrinkled bed covering, the white floor. I drank of beauty until my thirst was quenched and when I lay down on the bed to sleep the light of dawn was filtering in through the openings in the shutters and I knew that I had embarked on a strange, rich experience.

  The next day, I left the department and didn’t go back to the house. I went to Suleiman Pasha Square, to the big newspaper shop. The vendor smiled showing his gold teeth, pointed to a corner of the shop, and said, “The new foreign magazines are on the right and on the left are the old ones at quarter price.”

  I paid no attention to the old magazines: the thought of a dust-covered or dog-eared foreign magazine upset me. I stood there for a long time. I leafed through magazines and looked and compared and in the end left after buying two—one French (even though I didn’t know French), the other American.

  11

  I spent that night like the one before. Silence, hashish, and dreams. I tried to read a political article in the American magazine but got bored and stopped. It was the pictures alone that attracted me. Everything in the pictures seemed marvelous; even the smallest things had a quiet glamour. A life of exuberance, variety, and resplendence. The streets and the buildings and the people, even the rain and the ice and the beaches. Artists with long beards standing in front of their paintings, musicians dressed all in black sitting at their instruments and sheet music. Even the demonstrations were marvelous—hundreds of people marching in a broad, clean square, their faces white and their hair blond, carrying placards of protest and moving forward in silence; policemen with their strong bodies, elegant uniforms, and shining badges surrounding the demonstration and protecting it. Sometimes a politician would address the demonstrators, in which case he would look dignified and usually be wearing glasses with elegant gold or silver frames. I finished the two magazines and the next day bought more. Day after day, I was totally bewitched. I went overboard, and even though I was so happy with my daily purchases, more than once I caught the newspaper vendor looking at me with doubt and anxiety as I paged through them. It seems he’d noticed that I looked mainly at the pictures, because one day he came up to me and said, “We have a poster inside that you’ll like. Want to see it?”

  I didn’t know what poster meant, but when I followed him inside I discovered that it was a large colored photo that covered the wall. I counted the money I had with me and it wasn’t enough. I didn’t buy it but went and borrowed some from my mother and returned and came back to the house bearing four large posters. Huda helped me to cover the four walls of my room with them. I had to pile all my father’s paintings in the corner to make space for the posters, and I felt no sorrow or regret. My gloomy room now scintillated with shiny newness. Lying on my bed I could see on the wall a house in the countryside with a pitched roof surrounded by a small garden bordered with a white picket fence and in the far distance a thick forest of tall sesban trees. It was winter; ice covered the ground and on the trees and the roof of the house fragile little snowflakes had fallen.

  What was happening to me?
I wasn’t an adolescent. I was thirty-five. The days of sudden enthusiasms and feverish feelings were gone. My attachment to the foreign pictures was traceable to some idea that I had to sort through and understand. What was it about a picture of a chair or a bed that would send all this joy through me? Was it madness? The insane must have their own logic but we don’t know what it is because our contact with them ceases the moment they start behaving in a way different to us. Could insanity be a furious desire like that which had taken hold of me? I pummeled my brains for nights on end until I reached a conclusion, which emerged suddenly and with complete clarity. It wasn’t the pictures I liked. What I liked was what the pictures evoked in me. At weddings and on feast days, Egyptian peasant women put on decorated dresses of clashing, garish colors, they dye their hands and feet with henna, and then they hire a cart drawn by a donkey wearing blinkers and spend the day on the cart clapping, ululating, and singing songs. The sight of the women on the cart evokes in me a certain specific, distinctively ‘Egyptian’ feeling. Equally, the picture of the thick forest covered with snow or the picture of the artist with the pipe and beard evokes in me a feeling of ‘the West.’ It was the spirit of the West in the pictures that captivated me. That was it exactly. The western spirit surrounds us, we see it in everything, but rarely do we strip it of its outward manifestations. Everything that’s elegant about our lives is necessarily western! Examples? The physician’s white coat, scientific and even household devices and appliances, a movie star’s necktie, a luxury, recent-model car. Everything. Everything we like goes back to them.