by Waguih Ghali
I put my hand in my pocket and walked slowly towards the club-house. A beautiful open Mercedes drove past me and someone waved. I waved back. We all know each other. We know each other, all about each other, and how much land and money we possess. We also marry between us. The Moslem members marry Moslem members, and the Copts marry Copts.
‘Good morning, Ram.’
‘Good morning, sir.’ We didn’t shake hands. If we had carried sticks or umbrellas for support, we would both have stood at an inclined vertical, and anyone watching from a distance would have seen two tulips swaying slightly into a brief encounter. As it was, however, we had no sticks; so we stood, hand in pocket, smiling at each other.
The trouble with me is that I like that. I like to put my hand in my pocket with a bit of cuff showing; a suspicion of waistcoat under my coat, and a strip of handkerchief in my breast pocket. I like it. I am aware that I like it.
‘How are you?’
‘Very well, thank you, sir. How is Lady Tannely?’
‘Very happy indeed to be back here. She adores this country and considers it her home.’ I had lost my virginity to Lady Tannely, so had many of the young members. She took you home when you were sixteen or so, to teach her Arabic, she’d say; and while you were dying of excitement and love, she would be all vivacious and hysterical with anticipation. Then suddenly, you’d find yourself in bed with her and all at once she’d turn into a cold slab of marble who’d tell you, afterwards, ‘now wasn’t that nice?’ A terrible disillusionment.
I speak English without an accent, and yet, talking to him, slowly and involuntarily, an Oxfordish tinge began to colour my speech; and when I tried to erase that accent, I found it difficult to do so. Strange.
‘We spent a charming evening at your aunt’s residence,’ he said. You notice the word ‘residence’ of course. There it is; Residence.
‘Charming,’ he said.
My aunt considers it suitable for her son Mounir to have Lady Tannely as ‘mistress’. (I put the word ‘mistress’ in inverted commas because you can’t have Lady Tannely as mistress. You just f— her.) Hence the charming evenings at my aunt’s Pyramid Road villa. Of course Mounir has never so much as touched Lady Tannely. Dinner parties! Jesus, he is stupid, that boy. Lady Tannely picks you if she wants you and that’s that. I like her, though.
‘Do you vote Labour?’ I suddenly asked.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Do you vote Labour?’ I repeated.
‘My dear chap, I’ve never been interested in politics.’
‘Suez,’ I said.
‘Oh, that was a blunder.’
‘Twenty-five thousand Egyptians dead,’ I exaggerated.
‘So many? Oh, à la guerre comme à la guerre …’ and he laughed. I laughed too, and we parted.
The word ‘Egypt’ evokes in you, I suppose, a scene of a fellah trudging home in the twilight, a spade over his shoulder, and his son leading a cow behind him. Well, Egypt is a place where middle-aged people play croquet. I don’t know why this croquet thing suddenly impressed me. I have passed that lawn thousands of times without ever thinking about it. I turned round and sat on a bench to watch some people play. One of them was the same Mimi my mother had mentioned earlier on. All our young Mimis and Tatas and Sousous grow up and get married and have children, and their children have children, but they still remain young Mimis and Tatas and Sousous. This particular Mimi is a tall one with flat feet and a camelly walk. Any moment now, you’d think, she was going to pitch forward and kiss the ground. She has a bit of an Adam’s apple too. Together with the Tatas and the Sousous and my mother, she went to the French pensionnat. As a child I used to go and fetch my girl cousins from the same pensionnat, with the chauffeurs. It was a very severe place and you had to mention the girl’s secret number through a small hole before the door was, reluctantly you’d think, just hardly opened and a pale, black-dressed figure emerged and started putting on makeup before it even reached the car.
‘Coucou!’ Mimi called to me and waved.
‘Coucou!’ I called back. I tell you, I have been coucouing since I learnt to speak, but here I am, my coucou all self-conscious, and I am aware of sitting there calling ‘coucou’. It is because of reading an article the day before in the New Statesman about the problems of irrigation in India. How can you read an article in the New Statesman about the problems of irrigation in India, and then sit down and shout ‘coucou’?
‘Coucou,’ I repeated.
‘He’s the nephew of …’ I heard her translate me to a man with a croquet mallet. I watched him, his mallet almost horizontal because of his belly, finally discovering he had to hang it sideways if it were ever to reach the ball. No, but this complete detachment from the game. Later on Mimi would phone my mother and say: ‘I played croquet today … what fun.’
Mimi swung her neck in my direction and humptily followed it.
‘Cochon,’ she said, playfully brandishing her mallet at me, ‘you are causing your mother endless worry with your political nonsense.’
‘You look beautiful in those slacks, Mimi,’ I said.
‘So you don’t call me Tante Mimi any more? Cochon, if I were a few years younger, I’d have an affair with you. I bought them at Kirka. You should see the beautiful things that are starting to come from Italy, Ram; makes all the stuff we’ve been wearing up to now seem rags. Come and play with us. Do you know who that is?’ she whispered. She told me who he was as he came towards us.
‘Ha ha ha ha ha ha,’ he said very quietly, putting his hand on my shoulder and shaking me slightly. Then he caught the lobe of my ear and pulled it. ‘I am a very great friend of your aunt,’ he said, ‘ha ha ha ha ha.’
‘C’est un homme charmant,’ Mimi told me.
I went up the steps and into the club-house. This solid spaciousness enveloped me in its ease. I could go straight across the entrance hall to the swimming-pool, in the grand veranda, and on down the steps to the playing fields and the foreign governesses, or I could turn right to the bridge room and the lounges. I stood undecided. From where I was, I could see a game of polo was due to start. It is a point of honour with polo players to keep their backs straight. I watched one examining the knee of a horse. He knelt, one knee to the ground in a worshipping posture, and extended his arms in royal elegance. Talk about the son leading the cow behind his father. Dukes of Edinburgh, all.
I felt like having a cold beer and eating salted peanuts by the pool; then a cigarette and another beer and more peanuts. I could do it, of course, even though I had no money. But I knew the pattern too well; the depression afterwards and the self-disgust.
I watched the swimmers. The club has no uniform, but there is a tiny, never-mentioned badge you wear when you are swimming. It doesn’t matter how expensive your bathing costume is, if it doesn’t bear the sign of Jantzen – a woman diving – you are not a genuine member. I remember one of my girl-cousins having a costume specially knit for her, and the matter-of-fact way she sewed an old Jantzen badge to it. That’s the trouble with me, you see. I stand there being bloody superior, and then I remember that my bathing costume also bears the sign of the élite. I remember that I have played croquet, and that if I played polo, I also would keep my back straight. No, I thought, definitely no drinking today.
‘Ram Bey. They are looking for a fourth in the bridge room.’ The servants in the club have seen us grow up and call us by our Christian names, adding such honorific titles as ‘Bey’ and ‘Pasha’.
‘Who are they, Hassan?’
‘Your cousin Mounir,’ he said, ‘and two American ladies.’
‘Which ones, Hassan?’
‘They are new, Ram Bey.’ Then he told me they were very pretty. I had to be careful, since if I lost, I wouldn’t be able to pay.
‘Who is behind the bar this morning?’
‘Ali.’ That was bad. He refuses to lend money out of the till.
‘Half-half,’ Hassan said in English, and slipped me a five-pound note. �
��But please, Ram Bey, do not partner Mounir Effendi.’ There you are – Effendi being the least of the honorific titles.
The last time I had seen Mounir had been in a night-club, and then we had just ignored each other. Hassan vanished and I walked slowly towards the bridge room.
‘Hi there, Ram, how are things?’ my cousin Mounir shouted. ‘Sure am glad to see you. We’re looking for a fourth; inclined?’
‘Inclined,’ I said, ‘in a horizontal way.’ Which was stupid, but there is something about Mounir which drives me to say and do things alien to my nature. His American accent irritated me as usual, although only a short while earlier I myself had put on an accent with Lady Tannely’s husband. I pretended I wasn’t particularly noticing the two women he was with. They were both pretty in that neat and smart American way; the type you imagine to be of Scandinavian origin; a bit hard. Women, you feel, who can look after themselves and so have sacrificed a bit of their femininity. Intelligent to a certain limit, although they would never recognize that limit. But very attractive.
One of them, slightly older than the other, said: ‘I’m Caroline, and that’s Sue. Now let’s get this straight; do you play Culbertson and the Blackwood-four-no-trumps, or are you Acol?’ I didn’t like her.
‘I’m Ram,’ I said, and shook hands with them, which seemed rather a strange thing to do.
‘Sure is nice to play with you again, Ram. What …’
‘Whisky,’ I said.
‘This guy’s my cousin,’ he said.
‘We’ll cut for partners,’ I said, ignoring Mounir, ‘and not change.’
‘Why not?’ Caroline asked.
‘You get to know your partner’s game.’
‘Sue and I will play together,’ she said.
‘We’ll cut,’ I insisted. There was a war going on between this Caroline and myself already. It seems difficult to imagine that there was an age when man was gallant to woman and kissed her hand and her desire was a command. To me, it is a little bit possible to imagine such a time, because gallantries, in Egypt, are still practised after a fashion and welcomed by the women. But I know that to be conspicuously gallant to the average European or American woman, makes her despise you. I don’t know why I think of that, except that this very hostility at the beginning with women I find attractive always seems to lead to something more than a passing acquaintance.
‘How much are we playing for?’ I asked.
‘A pound a hundred,’ Caroline said. A pound a hundred. I have played a pound a hundred before, but then it was gambling, real gambling with my sleeves rolled, and drinking coffee, and a dozen people watching. An event, what. The five pounds in my pocket suddenly became worth a shilling.
‘Sure thing,’ Mounir said, ‘it’s the usual.’ The liar; but then he loves to take his cheque book out and sign a cheque. He looked at me. He knew he’d have to pay my losses if I didn’t win.
‘All right,’ I said.
We decided to cut for partners after all and I found myself stuck with Mounir, when he suddenly shouted: ‘For cryin’ out loud, this deck’s been used before!’ This is typical Mounir. He ordered a new pack of cards, and I seized the opportunity to cut again, and partnered Sue. She played with automatic dexterity probably born of long practice, but which left you wondering whether she possessed any imagination. We won the first three rubbers.
‘Moony!’ Caroline screamed for the third time, ‘I’ve passed twice.’ I doubled and they went down again.
Mounir revoked.
‘Moony! You are the limit!’
‘Sure am not concentrating.’
The four of us were drinking quite a bit. When you sit with Mounir and accept a whisky, the waiter automatically serves you a new glass as soon as the one you have is empty. The noise from the swimming-pool – you can always detect swimming-pools from a distance, children seem to have a cry peculiar to them – was barely audible in the bridge room. The strong sun outside and the comparative darkness of the room, the coolness, the sort of hush you can hear, and the whisky – everything mingled with beautiful Sue and Caroline – would have been nice and even briefly perfect, if it hadn’t been for Caroline giving Mounir hell:
‘Moony, you’ve seen me discard spades twice …’
‘I sure did …’
‘And then,’ she continued, ‘you have the cheek, the darned cheek, to lead hearts.’
‘I sure …’ he started, and I burst out laughing.
‘I’m glad you are enjoying yourself,’ she said coldly.
‘I am,’ I said.
‘That’s fine.’
‘It is.’
There was silence. Even Mounir, intoxicated because he doesn’t drink much as a rule, sensed danger. But quite unexpectedly, Caroline smiled and I smiled back and we became friends. I tell you, it’s strange with American or European women.
‘I’ll partner Mounir in the next rubber,’ I said.
‘I hope you can afford it.’
‘Fact is, I can’t.’ Suddenly it pleased me to be poor in that room; I even wished I were genuinely poor and unable to eat enough. But then I wouldn’t be in the club, and anywhere else but in the club it is very unattractive to be poor.
‘I don’t believe you,’ Caroline said. I insisted on it.
‘I’ll ask Moony,’ she said. ‘Moony, is your cousin poor?’
‘He sure knows if he needs anything, all he has to do is to ask me.’
We stopped playing while we were speaking and were just about to resume, when a tall, plumpish man in his forties came and put his hands on Caroline’s shoulders. He wore spectacles and was bald on top.
‘Hiya,’ she said, ‘working this afternoon?’
‘I guess so,’ he said. ‘We’re having trouble with a man called … let me see, Abracadabra or something like that.’ He looked in his wallet and took a card out. ‘I guess we’ll have to ask you for help, Moony.’ He gave Mounir the card.
‘Abdelkerim,’ Mounir read. He pronounced it as though to him, too, it was difficult to pronounce. ‘I’ll fix him.’
‘Jack,’ Caroline said, ‘this is Ram, Moony’s cousin.’ Jack powerfully shook hands with me and said he was very glad to meet me, and, because I liked him (he looked gentle) I said: ‘Glad to meet you too, sir.’ Call an American ‘sir’ and he’s half in love with you.
‘Are you in the same department as Moony?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Jack is my husband,’ Caroline said.
‘Are you working here?’ I asked, disappointed because I didn’t know the girls were married. Neither wore a ring. ‘I thought you were tourists.’
‘Jack is on a “fact-finding” mission,’ Caroline said.
‘Your husband on the same mission too?’ I asked Sue. She shook her head. After a while she said: ‘I am not married.’
‘Sue’s my sister,’ Jack said. ‘Ever since these two girls read Sinuhe the Egyptian, they’ve wanted to come here.’
Mounir called the waiter and Jack ordered a Coca Cola. The score sheets lay neglected on the table, mingled with the playing cards, and any moment now the servant would come and clear the table, throwing the score sheets away.
‘What facts,’ I asked, absent-mindedly making a neat pack of the cards and retrieving the score sheets, ‘are you trying to find, sir?’
‘Just call him Jack,’ Caroline said.
‘Jack,’ I said.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘we are a team of people going from one country to another, living with the people, the same way the people are living, sharing their everyday lives, and finding out what they truly think of the States, and finding out how we can foster and encourage friendship between us and you.’ He pulled up a chair and sat, his face near mine, his hand on the back of my chair; every sentence emphasized neatly and concisely. I remember a pair of American young men belonging to the Mormon sect, who rang at my door in London one day. In the same neat and earnest way, they recited the fact that God is divided into three distinct entities … o
r is it the other way round, I forget which.
‘That’s very nice,’ I said. ‘Is this mission government sponsored?’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘indirectly; but we have ourselves formed a committee and have ourselves financed the project.’
‘I hope you find it pleasant here,’ I said.
‘I guess we met with much more hospitality than we reckoned with, and the folks back in the States will be very happy to know we have a large … a very large number of friends in this country, Egypt.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ I said.
‘Sure met with great kindness,’ he said.
I didn’t want the conversation to carry away the table; there was this matter of the money I had good on the score sheet.
‘Do you play bridge, Jack?’ I asked.
‘I do,’ he said, then: ‘That’s another bond between our people and you. We have common hobbies, we play the same cards, we speak the same language.’
‘Do you play croquet in the States?’ I asked.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I can’t say that we do. But there is no reason why we should not.’
‘Would be something more in common,’ I said.
‘Sure would.’
I folded the score sheets, unfolded them, and folded them again. There was this long pause which meant we might all leave the bridge room.
‘What’s the trouble with this man you just mentioned?’ I asked.
‘Well, this man Abracadabra,’ he smiled broadly at his joke, then suddenly pulled a very straight face, ‘… now don’t get me wrong. If I can’t pronounce his name it’s my own darned fault and I don’t mean any disrespect.’
‘Of course not,’ I said.
‘Well, this man is in charge of public relations concerning the President of Egypt; and I would like a photograph of myself shaking the hand of your President.’
I could see the picture, probably the frontispiece of one of the thousands of books in American libraries all over the world, with the caption: The author shaking hands with the President.
‘Just leave it to me,’ Mounir said.