The Automobile Club of Egypt

by Alaa Al Aswany

  “Do you have any whiskey, please?” he asked.

  Looking a little cross, she asked him, “Shall I pour you a glass?”

  “Just bring the bottle.”

  She was about to refuse, but something crossed her mind, and she got up and fetched a bottle of Red Label and a bowl of ice cubes.

  “Do you know, Mahmud”—she cleared her throat—“it’s not good to drink too much whiskey.”

  Mahmud nodded in agreement as he poured himself a large glass and slugged it down neat. He closed his eyes as he felt the burning sensation in his throat.

  “I’m sorry, Madame,” he said with a smile. “Please give me a little more time.”

  Dagmar made no response. She kept her gaze fixed on him, her heavy makeup giving her the look of a worn-out old actress in a touring troupe. Mahmud poured himself another large whiskey and drank it the same way. Then he sat back and breathed deeply. She made an attempt to cozy up to him, but he held out his hand to stop her from going any further. Dagmar muttered some words in German that he could not understand, and then she looked away sullenly. Mahmud just sat there with his legs stretched out on the sofa. A few minutes passed in silence. He could feel the whiskey taking effect and gave a sigh of relief as he realized that he was now up to the job in hand. He turned to Dagmar, holding his arms out, and she threw herself into them. Under normal circumstances, he could not have found her attractive, but the alcohol had taken him into the stratosphere. He held Dagmar in his strong arms and then started to kiss her long and slow as he had learned from Rosa, and as he ran his coarse lips up and down her body, his mind was empty. He went on kissing her slowly, moving from spot to spot, until he became aware of her body writhing at his touch. Dagmar was moaning loudly. Then Mahmud stood up, still holding her. She weighed nothing as he carried her over his shoulder into the bedroom, and she groaned as he laid her down on the bed. Mahmud helped her out of her nightdress, and then, when she was stark naked, he threw himself on top of her.

  His lovemaking with Dagmar was completely mechanical and consisted of a succession of movements, like the steps of a dance or calisthenics. There was no intimacy or affection, such as he felt with Rosa. What possible sort of relationship could he have with this miserable, raddled old German woman? A straightforward working relationship, according to Fawzy. Mahmud treated Dagmar’s body like a machine, but one that he knew how to operate efficiently. As Mahmud pounded away at Dagmar, she screamed and shouted in German, and her face took on varying expressions of utter joy and astonishment, wide-eyed disbelief and helplessness. Sex for the first time in years was driving her mad. Madame Dagmar arrived in seventh heaven quite a few times, then she lay back and closed her eyes, savoring the postcoital bliss. Mahmud got up and went to the bathroom. He stood under the hot water, scrubbing himself as if trying to wash off any trace of what had just happened. He got dressed and found Dagmar in the sitting room waiting for him in her blue silk robe. She looked calm and relaxed and gave him a hug.

  “Mahmud,” she whispered, “you’ve got to keep visiting me.”

  “I’d like my money.”

  He uttered the words with an ease that astounded him. That was what Fawzy had told him to do, but he had spent the day hesitating over it. Now he had just blurted it out, and he felt ashamed. Dagmar smiled at him gratefully, as if to say, “After everything you’ve done, you deserve it.” She went into the bedroom and came back with a pound, which Mahmud put into his pocket, thanking her quietly. She went with him to the front door, planted a kiss on his cheek, asking him matter-of-factly, “When can you come again?”

  “Saturday.”

  That was the day that Rosa met her friends at the Turf Club.

  He carried on visiting Dagmar. He could not bring himself to touch her until he was so drunk that everything became a blur. When he was done, he would ask himself how he could go to bed with such a scraggly old woman, but time after time he managed to give her a good servicing. Following Fawzy’s advice, he only sold love four days a week. Two nights with Dagmar and two with Rosa, and the remaining days he would get off work and either go home to eat and have a long sleep if he felt tired or sit up late smoking hashish with Fawzy on the roof.

  With Dagmar, he never developed the friendly feelings he had toward Rosa; he was just selling a commodity. Pleasure for money. And Dagmar treated him like a masseur or a tennis instructor. She told him what she wanted without a hint of shame. During sex, she would whisper an order to him to do this or that. When it was over and he went into the bathroom, she would often call out to him in an emotionless voice, “Take a shower and come back. I want you to do it again.”

  Her direct way of going about things freed him from having to pretend. At the same time, he felt a little demeaned by it. Not only that, but when he was not having sex with her, he found her off-putting. He could kiss Dagmar, stroke her all over, carry her in his arms, lay her down on the bed and drill her without mercy, but the moment the sex was over and he had taken a shower and got dressed, she became no more than an old woman with whom he did not feel comfortable. He kept wondering why he felt comfortable with Rosa, whereas whenever he asked Dagmar for anything, he was hesitant and apologetic. When asking her for dinner, for example, he would say, “Excuse me, Madame Dagmar. Sorry to trouble you, but I’m hungry.”

  Dagmar would give the knowing nod of someone who understands the terms of commerce. She would go into the kitchen and come back with a tray of food. The quantities were much smaller than at Rosa’s, where a broad spread was always on offer. Dagmar’s dinners were carefully rationed: half a chicken with a small plate of rice or a small portion of macaroni cheese, which in Mahmud’s terms was about two mouthfuls. Dagmar was stingy. She was mean with her food, and if Mahmud wanted more, he had to ask for it. She never refused, but she never looked happy about it. Mahmud came to learn that after sex she became gentler and more obliging. He put up with her frowning and her muttering in German during the act, and then, when she lay there in contentment afterward, he would make his requests. Mahmud followed his sex schedule almost religiously. He was now giving his whole salary from the Club to his mother and sharing what he earned from Rosa and Dagmar with Fawzy. The latter amount he considered ill-gotten money, which could sully his mother and sister if he gave it to them. He explained his concerns to Fawzy.

  “All right,” said Fawzy. “If that money is what you call ‘ill-gotten,’ we’ll have to spend it on hashish and women. Illicit things are what you spend illicit money on!”

  This exegesis seemed to calm Mahmud. If he forgot his religious worries, his life seemed quite acceptable, stable and even happy. But his sexual adventures had changed his opinion of women. He was no longer awed by their beauty. They had lost their mysterious seductiveness. He felt as if he had dissected a rose and could no longer see its beauty but only the constituent parts. He now looked at women the way a driver might check over a car for its good and bad parts, knowing that, whatever the model or make, he would be able to drive it. The paintwork and accessories were no longer of interest; he just wanted to know how the engine would purr. No matter how beautiful, elegant, refined, haughty or vain a woman might appear, Mahmud could not help wondering what she would be like in bed. He would think of himself stroking her to make her open like a flower and let the honey flow. In spite of his apparent good manners, Mahmud now treated all women, except for his mother, his sister and Rosa, with a sort of latent disdain. He talked to them condescendingly, with a look one might give to a child spouting nonsense. He had an inner dialogue: “Stop pretending to be preoccupied with this or that. All this glamorous flirting doesn’t fool me, because I know that at some point you will drop the pretense and beg to be pleasured, like all other women.”

  The previous day was his break from lovemaking. Mahmud had finished work at two in the morning and had gone to visit Fawzy, who was sitting up late on the roof. They drank some delicious mint tea as Fawzy busied himself rolling spliffs. He gave one to Mahmud and lit the other.
As he smoked, Mahmud leaned against the wall of the roof terrace and started thinking aloud.

  “I’m starting to feel sorry for women.”

  “What are you going on about?”

  “Well, it seems to me that women are just like men. If they don’t get sex, they start getting all ratty.”

  Fawzy nodded. “Of course, my boy,” he said as if an expert. “If they aren’t satisfied, they can cause no end of problems. If they’ve never had it, they can control themselves. But once they’ve tried it, they can’t stop thinking about it.”

  “Rosa and Dagmar should put up a statue of me.”

  Fawzy chuckled, and handing Mahmud another spliff, he said, “God is great! You’ve finally started getting some sense into that head of yours.”

  Mahmud smoked the second spliff, and the hashish made him taciturn.

  “You know,” Fawzy said looking at Mahmud. “Next week is the Eid al-Kebir. I hope you’re going to make the most of it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s the big feast! Rosa and Dagmar should each be giving you a present.”

  “I can’t go asking for presents.”

  “Oh, Mahmud, my friend!” said Fawzy in exasperation. “No one is saying you should ask for presents. You drop a hint or two, and they’ll get the point.”

  “And what if they don’t?”

  “Then give them a stronger hint. For example, tell them that you are thinking of buying a leather jacket before the feast.”

  “I can’t say something like that!”

  “What a child!”

  Fawzy went on making fun of Mahmud, and they flung friendly curses at each other before changing the subject.

  Mahmud went home just before the dawn call to prayer, and as usual, the next day he found himself acting out Fawzy’s directions. Rosa fell for it immediately. She kissed him on the cheek, went into her bedroom and returned with two pounds.

  “Here’s some money for the feast, Mahmud,” she said.

  Dagmar, on the other hand, just gave him a suspicious look. “Are you asking for something?” she said.

  His resolve completely crumbled, and, embarrassed, he muttered, “No,” and then left her apartment.

  On the following visit, Dagmar had the same serious look on her face, but she gave him a new white shirt as a present. When Fawzy examined it later, he could not help thinking that it was a bit cheap of Dagmar.

  The boys were now rolling in money, and they started acquiring the appurtenances of luxury: smart new suits, Lucky Strike cigarettes, Ronson lighters and Persol sunglasses. They did not worry about how much they spent when they went out together, and they no longer loitered around the girls’ school trying to persuade this or that one to go and sit with them in the back row of the cinema. They had moved on from schoolboy distractions. They started frequenting a brothel that Fawzy had discovered in the Ataba district. He negotiated with the madame a price of twenty-five piastres for a girl. Fawzy would sit there chatting away with the corpulent madame before giving her the fifty piastres, and then the two men would go into the inner room to choose a girl. Fawzy would always choose a different one, unlike Mahmud, who was enamored of one called Nawal from Alexandria. She was pretty and thin with sad, dark eyes and shoulder-length hair. When Mahmud went off with her to a bedroom, she would take off her red robe and lie there naked. He would look at her for a little and then move over to her, whispering, “How are you, Nawal? I’ve missed you.”

  Each time he had sex with her, which was always forceful and passionate, it felt different, in contrast to how it was with the two older women. When he was done, he would keep his arms around her and feel her hot breath on his face. She would stroke his back and broad shoulders, kissing him gently on the neck.

  One time, he asked her, “You’re a nice girl, Nawal. How did you end up here?”

  “It’s my fate,” she whispered curtly, and he realized that she did not really want to discuss the matter.

  After Mahmud had been with Nawal a few times, Fawzy felt it was his duty to intervene, and as the two friends were sitting on the roof one evening, he said, “You seem to have become quite attached to that Nawal.”

  “She’s a nice girl.”

  “Nice or not, you’re paying to have a good time. You’ve got to try out another girl, and then when we’ve been through them all, we’ll go to another establishment.”

  Mahmud looked as if he had been found out.

  “Listen, Mahmud,” Fawzy told him in a fatherly voice, “don’t go getting soft on that girl Nawal. It would be a disaster. She’s just a tart who’ll sleep with any scumbag.”

  Mahmud winced at the description, but the following week Fawzy took him off to a different brothel in Abbasiya. Mahmud was hesitant, but Fawzy told him decisively, “Listen, Mahmud. The only way to get you to stop thinking about her is for you to find an even prettier one.”

  No matter what happened to the two boys and whatever adventures they went through, Mahmud was always grateful to Fawzy for looking out for him. As they were now flush with money, Fawzy suggested they start putting aside a bit every month for a Lambretta scooter.

  “What are we going to do with a Lambretta?” Mahmud asked innocently.

  “We’ll go places.”

  “Which one of us will drive it?”

  “You can use it to get around town, and when you’re done, I can use it. When we go out together, one of us will drive and the other will ride pillion.”

  “We can both go on it at the same time?”

  Fawzy sighed and assured Mahmud, “Of course we can. Listen, Mahmud, as you sit riding the Lambretta, you’ll see a whole different world.”

  The two friends started saving, and within two months, they had enough for a deposit. They went to the scooter dealer in Fuad Street, and Fawzy talked Mahmud into signing a hire purchase agreement for a year at fifty piastres a week. Then they registered the Lambretta in Fawzy’s name. The boys left the motor vehicle registry with the Lambretta, now bearing a white license plate. Mahmud was quite content to sit behind Fawzy, but his greatest pleasure was driving himself and feeling the breeze against his face and body. Then he felt himself on a higher plane, a life of hitherto unimagined fine living. He was on top of the world, but events soon hurled him in an unexpected direction.

  One night, Mahmud went off to see Rosa on schedule, but the moment he got there he felt something was wrong. Rosa’s face did not light up to see him; neither did she hug or kiss him but kept her distance, with a strange smile on her face.

  “Sit down,” she said seriously. “I want to talk to you about something.”

  Mahmud was nonplussed and sat down on the sofa.

  “You do love me, don’t you?” Rosa asked him.

  This question usually made him uneasy, and he would typically lie, but this time he nodded affirmatively.

  Suddenly, Rosa screwed up her face and screamed at him, “You’re a liar, Mahmud!”

  He was shocked into silence, but Rosa continued shouting.

  “How can you love me and be seeing someone else?”

  “I’m not,” Mahmud retorted. Then he bit his lips and knitted his brows like an accused child trying to prove his innocence. Rosa got up and took a few steps toward him.

  “You’re seeing Dagmar,” she said. “I know everything.”

  As she uttered the name “Dagmar,” she lost control and grabbed Mahmud by the shirt, screaming at him, “If you love her, why do you come and see me? Tell me!”

  It took Mahmud a few moments to take in what was happening, but then his anger got the better of him, and he brushed Rosa’s hand from his shirt with such force that she groaned. He got up and checked his shirt to see if she had torn it. At that moment, only one thought was going through his mind: he was the great Mahmud Gaafar, a bodybuilding champion, renowned throughout the Sayyida Zeinab for his courage and manliness. How dare this woman scream and lay a hand on him?

  Rosa was about to say something else, but Mahmud bar
ked at her, “That’s enough, Rosa. Don’t keep on at me or grab me by my shirt. Understand?”

  “You’re seeing someone else, Mahmud,” she said softly, trying to be affectionate again, but Mahmud was unmoved.

  “I can do what I like.”

  She looked at him and started crying silently.

  Mahmud got up and went over to the front door, but as he grabbed the handle, he heard Rosa pleading, “Mahmud. Please don’t go.”

  He did not turn around. He just walked out, slamming the door behind him.

  32

  News of the meeting spread quickly among the staff, who whispered in tones of disbelief and confusion, unwilling to celebrate until they received confirmation from the triumvirate of Abdoun, Samahy and Bahr.

  “Has Alku really ordered the beatings to stop?” they asked.

  “Alku has promised us,” they answered, “that henceforth no one will be beaten. If anyone falls out of line, his pay will be docked instead.”

  The staff stood there as their bafflement turned into a stream of questions: “How come Alku agreed so easily? What exactly did you say to Alku, and what did he say to you?”

  Abdoun and his two colleagues could give no clearer answer than to say that they were just as astonished at Alku’s easy assent. Their meeting had lasted only a few minutes. At first they had panicked and could hardly get their words out, but then they had asked him to stop the beatings and, to their surprise, he agreed. There was not a great deal more that they could tell their colleagues, who kept prodding them for additional details, until some of the staff came up with apocryphal details, which they repeated enthusiastically to one another: “Alku told Abdoun, ‘You are all my children, and if the beatings are upsetting you, I’ll stop them.’ ”

  The image of a kindly Alku, by which some tried to explain what had happened, gave them a sense of security and self-worth. For the first time, they no longer felt like tools to be used and then discarded willy-nilly but like respected employees of the Club. They had duties and they had rights. No one could beat or humiliate them. If they did something wrong, there would be an investigation and administrative sanctions.