Beer in the Snooker Club

by Waguih Ghali

  ‘I’ve told you before, Egyptians are not found in Cairo or in Alexandria,’ she said. ‘You’ve never really known Egyptians. I hate Egyptians of your class as much as I do my parents.’

  ‘What am I, then, if I am not Egyptian?’

  ‘You are what you are; and that is a human being who was born in Egypt, who went to an English public school, who has read a lot of books, and who has an imagination. But to say that you are this or that or Egyptian, is nonsense.’

  ‘What are you, Edna?’

  ‘I can’t be generalized about either, except that I was born Jewish. But the difference between you and me is that I know Egyptians and love them.’

  ‘Edna,’ I said, ‘you said I was well read and had an imagination. I’m also intelligent. Intelligent enough to know you are not in love with me …’

  ‘That’s the second time you’ve said I don’t love you.’

  ‘… and to wonder,’ I went on, ‘why you befriended Font and me and why you are being so generous to both of us. Let me be frank. Font is a lovable person and I can understand you may have genuine affection for him. But as for myself, since I set foot in London, my character has changed, or perhaps my real character has suddenly emerged. I am neither “lovable” nor “sweet” nor “nice”; on the contrary, I’m a conceited, arrogant, all-knowing, unlikeable creature. So I wonder why you don’t tell me that to my face. Perhaps you feel responsible because you brought me here. But here and now I absolve you of all responsibility. Edna, please, let us shed all vestige of sophistication and “double-talk” this instant and let us tell each other the truth. Tell me about yourself, Edna.’

  She closed her eyes and lay still for a moment. I took my shoes off and curled into an armchair.

  ‘My family has been in Egypt for more than five generations,’ she started. ‘I am the first person in the family to speak Arabic. I had a Greek nurse called Rosa who was married to an Egyptian policeman. My parents used to go on long trips and leave me in Rosa’s care. She used to take me secretly to live with her husband and his family in a small village. At first I was disgusted with the dirt and the lack of comfort; the cows and chicken as much inmates of the house as we. But I went more often to the village and loved every person in it. They would never accept a gift without returning it ten times over, no matter how poor they were. I loved the way they woke up at dawn and worked till sunset then lay to sleep either in their mud-huts or in the field. I loved the dignity the fellah possesses and which no one who hasn’t lived with him knows anything about. I loved the way they helped each other naturally and all took responsibility for the many orphans there. At home my parents and their Egyptian friends used to say “he is nothing but a fellah” about someone they considered ill-mannered and vulgar. I was very lonely as I grew up. I found nothing attractive about my friends, whether they were Jews, Europeans, or Egyptians.

  ‘Rosa’s husband had a young brother of my age. His name was Adle. He had very large brown eyes with long eyelashes. He would never have anything to do with me. He never accepted a gift from me and never spoke to me. His brother bought him a pair of trousers and a shirt once, but he never wore them in my presence. He insisted on remaining barefoot whenever I was there. I used to watch him from my window each morning, washing under the village pump. I was very much in love with him. From the age of fourteen I loved him with every fibre in my body.

  ‘When I was eighteen, we were living in Alexandria. Rosa’s husband had also been transferred to Alexandria and managed to bring Adle with him and to put him in the police force. Rose told me Adle never accepted a bribe in his life, although all the other policemen did – they had to. I gave myself to Adle that summer. I wanted to marry him and give him everything he lacked in his life. But he refused. Rosa gave me hope; she told me he whispered my name in his sleep.’

  She was speaking her sentences slowly and one at a time, with pauses in between.

  ‘Suddenly I was taken to Europe by my parents. I was supposed to return in two months, but they enrolled me in a university and returned without me. I wrote hundreds of letters to Adle in Arabic, but he never answered. I realized the only thing I could do was to try and forget him.’ She paused.

  ‘I returned at the end of two years. A few months after the end of the war between Israel and Egypt in ’forty-eight.’ She paused again and took a deep breath.

  ‘With the help of their Egyptian friends, my parents had bribed the necessary people and brought an action against Adle for “inciting” me. He refused to utter one word in his defence. He was put in prison for four months. All this took place while I was in Europe. I had no idea my father knew anything about Adle. Rosa, of course, was not with us any more when I returned to Egypt. It was she who told me all about it, when I finally found her. She also told me Adle had died in the war between Israel and Egypt.’

  ‘Enough,’ I wanted to tell her. ‘Enough. I don’t want to hear about such things. I’ll take an academic interest in politics and injustice, if you wish, but keep these real things away from me. I don’t mind reading about them, but keep your story away from me.’

  ‘What did you do, Edna,’ I whispered.

  ‘I joined the Communist Party. I worked like a slave for it. I wanted to kill my own personal life and only be an organ of the Party. The Party has always had to be clandestine in Egypt. I met the cream of humanity in it; Egyptians, Jews, Greeks. Inevitably, we were discovered. My father once again used his money and I was rushed to England. Then the revolution in Egypt took place and I rushed back to fight for it and with it and support it. But who could use me? I am a Jewess.’

  I didn’t move or say anything for a long time.

  ‘Are you asleep, Edna?’

  ‘No, Ram.’

  I was miserable. I remembered my cheap facetiousness – ‘weep’ and ‘lament’ and I wanted to bleed to death at her feet in repentance. I learnt at that moment that when a situation is very real and true, all this business of splitting into two and watching oneself act, is far away and dead and non-existent.

  ‘I first saw you and Font about twelve years ago,’ she said, ‘you were about eleven then. It was your cousin Mounir’s birthday. I was with the grown-ups and saw you and Font leave all the other children and play with the gardener’s son and give him the enormous amount of cakes and crackers you were hoarding in your pockets. I had been wondering why you kept filling your pockets with everything on the table. I always remembered that scene whenever I went to the village with Rosa. Then I saw you again at your aunt’s that day you made a mess of her party. Do you understand, now, it was natural for me not to want to lose you and Font? I was very happy that year we spent in Cairo together. You were so honest and sincere, both of you.’

  Another period of silence.

  ‘I, too, was very happy that year before we came here,’ I said. ‘It is natural for me to be wholly and completely in love with you. You are, to me, an unearthly creature which, for some reason or another, bestows some of its exquisiteness upon me. I have so much respect for you, and I am so awed by the fact that you allow me to love you …’

  ‘Ram,’ she said.

  ‘Yes?’

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘What is it, Edna?’

  ‘I am not as good as you think I am.’

  I smiled.

  That was the only time Edna used the cliché language of lovers, and I ignored it.

  ‘Tell me what you are thinking,’ she said after a while.

  ‘You know how much I have always read? Well, somehow, although I read and read, it was only reading. I mean I never thought what I read had anything to do with life. No, what I mean is, I never imagined that I could be “a character” … I’m not explaining myself properly. What I mean is, what I read were just stories, and …’

  ‘I understand what you mean, Ram.’

  ‘Well, and then somehow, when I came here, or perhaps just before I came here, I unconsciously realized that I, also, could “live”. Perhaps what
I am saying is not true. I mean, perhaps there is no reason or excuse for the way I am beginning to behave; perhaps it’s just my character and that’s all there is to it. But I’ve said that already.’

  ‘No, it isn’t your character,’ she said.

  ‘Anyway, Edna; I have decided to …’ I had decided nothing at all, it just came to me as I spoke to her, ‘… leave the hotel today.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. But I am going to try and find a cheap room somewhere or other, perhaps in the East End, and I am going to follow that course at the polytechnic, whatever it is. I think it is mathematics or chemistry or something like that. That is the best thing for me to do now, to – excuse the expression – “find myself”.’

  ‘Ram, dear, are you sure a room in the East End is not a part of the books you have read?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I replied.

  She smiled, but there was no sarcasm in her smile.

  ‘Come here,’ she said.

  I went and sat facing her on the edge of the bed. She pulled me towards her and held me tight against her breast.

  ‘I do love you, Ram,’ she said.

  ‘I love you too,’ I said, ‘very much.’

  She took her arms away from me and asked me if I had enough money.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  I was glad to find that Font was not in our rooms. I packed my things and left them with the hotel porter. Edna was paying the hotel. Of the fifty pounds I had when I arrived in London, eleven were left.

  ‘Are you coloured?’ she asked. I looked at my hands to see whether I was coloured. Although I had read so much about this in Egypt, I had never encountered it in actual life. I had never wondered whether I was coloured or not (later I went to a library and learnt that I was white).

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  She was a fat woman with a mop in her hand.

  ‘It’s nothing to do with me, dear. They’ve told me if you were coloured I was to say the room was already let. You look white enough to me, but you never know.’

  ‘I am Egyptian,’ I said.

  She told me to wait for a moment and closed the door.

  ‘Egyptian, ma’am, is that all right?’ I heard her shout.

  She opened the door a moment later and told me to come in. This was in South Kensington. I had obtained the address from a notice board outside the Underground station.

  A thin-lipped, long-nosed woman said ‘how-d’you-do’ through her nose and asked me to sit down.

  ‘You are a student, I suppose,’ she said. ‘My husband, Captain Treford, and I were in Egypt, you know. We met a surprising number of very intelligent Egyptians there at the Gezira Sporting Club.’

  I was well-dressed, with a snow-white handkerchief sticking out of my breast pocket, and a pair of light brown leather gloves in my hand.

  ‘I wonder if you know the Kamals,’ she said, ‘Mrs Kamal – Sophie – was a very dear friend of mine.’

  ‘I know her,’ I said. ‘She’s my cousin.’

  ‘How lovely!’ Captain Treford’s wife clapped her hands. ‘Sophie is such a wonderful person.’

  ‘She’s a pig,’ I said.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I said my cousin Sophie is nothing but a pig.’

  ‘Really?’ she drawled. ‘Perhaps we are not talking of the same person.’

  ‘Do you know Dr Khairy and his wife?’ I asked.

  ‘Why yes, we often played bridge with them and went to their charming villa in …’

  ‘Well, they’re also pigs,’ I said.

  ‘You must understand, Mr … Mr …’

  ‘Font,’ I said.

  ‘You must understand, Mr Font, that the Captain and myself have decided to let the room purely out of a sense of social duty …’

  ‘Excellent,’ I interrupted in a rich and easy manner, ‘you should give it free of rent.’

  ‘Ooha ooha ooha,’ she laughed through her nostrils; ‘we can hardly do that … ooha ooha. And so, Mr Flint,’ she continued from where I had interrupted, ‘you will have to keep your little jokes to yourself.’

  ‘Yes indeed, Mrs Trickleford,’ I said, and uttered three oohas. ‘Do you think ten guineas … a week of course … would be suitable?’

  She jumped up and said certainly, certainly, and anyhow it wasn’t a matter of money at all. In fact she was very pleased to do Sophie a good turn, even though, between her and me, Sophie could be a bit of a … of a …

  ‘Pig,’ I said. ‘I won’t bother to see the room now, but I shall send my chauffeur over with my bags. You don’t happen to have a garage? … It’s a Bentley,’ I added.

  I left, but somehow didn’t feel as victorious as I might have been. After walking in the East End for a whole day, I decided I wouldn’t like to live there after all. On the third day I took a room in Battersea with a mechanic’s family: a small room with a hospital bed, a sink, a table and chair and nothing else. But I had an independent entrance and it was cheap and, anyhow, it had ‘colour’, and, strangely enough, I began to ‘live’. Of course no one who ‘lives’ in the sense I mean knows he is living; it is only when he ceases to ‘live’ that he realizes it.

  I hadn’t seen or telephoned Font or Edna until I found that room in Battersea. Then I went to see them. I had five pounds left.

  I found Font packing. He was disgusted with me, he said. I could at least have told him I was leaving the hotel, and as for flirting with Steve’s girl friend and sleeping out that night, it was filthy. To think we had gone to Steve’s house and accepted his hospitality, and then I’d tried to take his girl away; it made Font want to vomit. I was no better than all these fils-à-papa Egyptians who had nothing else to do but to run after every skirt and no scruples about whose skirt it was either. Font had never expressed an opinion about rich Egyptians before. I told him Steve had probably murdered hundreds and hundreds of women and children … poor, miserable, innocent children in Aden and all over Africa and Cyprus, and if he thought I was going to have any scruples about Steve, he was wrong. He didn’t quite believe me, but put it at the back of his mind for consideration some other time.

  ‘Is Edna in her room?’

  ‘Edna left England yesterday.’

  One only realizes the extent of his love when he thinks he has lost the one he loves; and unhappily, very often only begins to love when he feels his love is not returned.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Font said, ‘she’s coming back.’

  ‘Why did she leave, Font?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Was she angry?’

  ‘No. But she said not to forget we are Egyptian and must return.’

  ‘Jesus, I love her,’ I said.

  He gave me a typical Font look and told me I possessed a very unorthodox way of showing my love.

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Font. What I did with Shirley had nothing to do with being in love with Edna.’

  ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘I haven’t quite reached your standard of sophistication.’

  ‘Oh, shut up, Font.’

  After a while he showed me two letters. One was from the Home Office.

  Dear Sir,

  The Under Secretary of State directs me to inform you that your application for an extension of stay in the United Kingdom may not be considered unless proof of adequate means of support is forwarded to him within a week.

  Your obedient servant …

  (I have a number of letters from this obedient servant, the last of which is an answer to a private letter I sent him, telling him he was not an obedient servant at all.)

  The other letter was from Didi Nackla in Paris saying she intended coming next summer and would we find her a reasonably priced flat. ‘A reasonably priced flat’. Didi Nackla could have bought a castle for the summer if she had wanted to.

  ‘How much money have you got, Font?’

  ‘Fifteen pounds.’

  ‘Between us we have eighteen pounds. The Under Secretary won’t consi
der that adequate for anything.’

  ‘Edna has left us two tickets for Egypt.’

  ‘I am not going to use mine,’ I said.

  ‘Neither am I,’ he said.

  I lay down on the bed while he continued packing. His eyebrows went up and up, then down. Then up again.

  ‘Where are you going, Font?’

  ‘I have to look for a room.’ But his eyebrows still ascended and descended.

  ‘What is it, Font?’

  ‘Look, Ram. Edna has left three hundred pounds with me in case we needed them. She has spent enough money on us as it is. I am not going to touch any of that money. But you do what you want.’

  ‘What I want is to touch every bit of this money,’ I told him. ‘Money? What’s money to Edna? She’s got tons and tons of it. Why shouldn’t we touch it?’

  ‘Do what you want,’ he said, and turned his back to me pretending he was very busy packing.

  ‘What’s the matter with you, Font?’

  ‘The matter with me?’

  ‘I mean what’s the matter with you, thinking I am serious when I say I want that money. Of course I am not going to touch it either.’

  ‘Look, Ram. You’ve changed since we’ve come here. I don’t know you any more.’

  ‘All right,’ I sighed. ‘Anyway, I’ve got a good plan. We can use that money indirectly.’