by Ibrahim Essa
He often wondered if she was religious at the time. The same question could also be asked of him. It’s true he was a man of religion, a sheikh in a mosque and a preacher to the public, but did he practice what he preached? People very rarely practice what they preach, and Hatem was very busy preaching. He also read voraciously, till knowledge oozed out of him. He was ready and qualified to answer any question and expound on any subject, but in his rush to become learned he didn’t stop to ask himself if he was acting on what he said. As for Omayma, she was a typical young woman. It’s true that a typical young woman wouldn’t get engaged to a sheikh or dare to link arms with him in the Andalus garden on the Nile—where you were forced to buy drinks from the juice sellers who were more like highway robbers—because there was no such thing as a romance with a sheikh. She was undoubtedly religious, but in a sense that didn’t prevent her from memorizing Mohamed Munir’s songs, going to Adel Imam films during Eid with her brothers, buying cheap make-up downtown, or missing the afternoon or sunset prayers if she was visiting one of her friends in Bab el-Shaariya.
After twenty years of marriage it couldn’t be claimed that she and Hatem had been passionately in love. Apparently love was one thing and passion was something else. Passionate love was the Quranic expression that best reflected the sense of fusion through desire, but Hatem hadn’t come across anything of that kind in his life and he didn’t think Omayma was crazy about him in that way either. When they started living under the same roof and sleeping wrapped around each other in the same bed, their sexual encounters, and they were many in the beginning, would have been classified as intercourse—a precise term in Islamic law that required simply that penetration took place. But when you hear the term ‘intercourse’ it doesn’t evoke a passionate or intimate encounter, with sighs, grunting, losing control, ecstasy, and earth-shaking orgasms. The word always sounds official, detached, and dry. What happened between him and Omayma was a marriage that was in fact a matrimonial contract, and the word ‘matrimonial’ itself conveys the level of restraint, formality, pragmatism, and materialism that marked the relationship between them.
Hatem would ask himself: “Has there been any affection or solace or compassion in these twenty years of marriage?” His answer was definitely that there had been, and there still was. When God spoke in the Quran about the triad of married life—“And among His signs is this, that He has created for you mates from among yourselves, that you may find solace in them, and He has created affection and compassion between you. In this there are signs for those who reflect”—he was laying down the basic elements without which a marriage cannot begin or survive. But there are many different levels of affection, solace, and compassion, and the degrees come and go, rise and fall, grow hot or cold, depending on many factors. On a scale of one to ten, the relationship between Hatem and Omayma was a level four at the beginning of the marriage. After that it was a long time before she became pregnant and they went to doctors and laboratories and had tests and X-rays, and there was the anticipation, the waiting, the anxiety, the feelings of inadequacy, the nasty remarks people made, the stupid questions, the idiotic advice, the excruciating frustration when Omayma’s period came, the hopes that soared when her period was late and that then were dashed when it finally came. These painful experiences brought them closer together and took them up to a seven. After that the element of compassion outweighed the elements of solace and affection, and in many sermons in those days Hatem explained that he understood the elements in the Quran to be in ascending rather than descending order. In other words, solace was less important than affection, and affection was less important than compassion, while compassion was the broad, protective, and inclusive overarching element. On this same scale the relationship between him and Omayma now stood at about four and a half, because when God in His highest heavens said that these three elements are fundamental to marriage, He left it open to interpretation whether a marriage could be based on only one of these elements without the other two. Hatem was partial to the idea that it was compassion that kept his relationship with Omayma at four and a half.
What had happened was that Omayma no longer brought him solace. The peace of mind she had once given him, through her willingness to go along with his ideas and decisions and behavior, had diminished as his fame spread and his fortune accumulated. Circumstances had changed Hatem and made him more self-sufficient, but they had also changed Omayma and made her more acquisitive.
When Hatem earned a million pounds for his Ramadan program, all he cared about was being content and successful and continuing as he was. But it made Omayma ask why it couldn’t be two million pounds rather than one million, and she developed an obsession for acquiring things. When Hatem once chanced to look inside her jewelry box (which didn’t include the jewelry she wore ostentatiously on her hands and arms), he said, “If Abu Dhar al-Ghifari ever had a look in there, he’d give you a thrashing.”
“That’s why Othman bin Affan banished him from Medina,” Omayma replied firmly.
Hatem turned toward her. “You . . . ! Where did you hear that story? Are you still watching my programs?” he asked.
“Do you actually tell stories like that on your program, Sheikh Hatem?” she replied sarcastically, tightening her headscarf. “Now you wouldn’t want the censors to get upset and say you were slandering the Companions of the Prophet, would you!”
“You’ve cut me to the quick, Lady Omayma,” said Hatem, nodding his head in contrition and defeat. “But you haven’t told me how you heard the story of Othman banishing Abu Dhar for warning people who hoarded money and silver that they would face hellfire.”
“That was a long time ago, Sheikh Hatem. When we got engaged in the mosque in our street,” Omayma replied.
The more Omayma took advantage of his wealth, the more hostile she was toward him. Something had snapped in this former admirer who used to memorize his sermons. She had grown older and was fed up and maybe bored, but she was also frustrated with this man who was and wasn’t a sheikh. He tried to escape her by seeking renown. He distracted himself by making recordings, signing agreements, sitting with television producers, directors, and station owners, visits to foreign countries, conferences at home and abroad, press attacks, attacks from his rivals, expanding his other activities (such as sermons, soirees, invitations to mansions, private fatwas in the women’s quarters of princes and millionaires), and giving his blessing at openings for new shops and companies, with his photograph under their names lit up in neon lights. Even at home he wasn’t without his office staff, his program assistants, his producers, or uninvited delegations that would turn up, hang around, eat, drink, talk, and pass on whatever was said at his house. At first Omayma was involved in discussing everything, then she quietly withdrew from the scene. She saw him negotiating, getting angry, cursing and swearing because of some shortcoming or negligence or some other problem. She saw him making peace and on the attack. She saw him talking on the telephone and when the conversation was over he would say what he hadn’t said on the phone, or the opposite of what he had said.
Once, standing behind the bedroom door when there were people in the sitting room, she said, “Hatem, I want to have my own bank account or a joint bank account with you, so that I can withdraw money like you.”
He was surprised by the request and the timing, but he didn’t discuss it for long. There was plenty of money and she was fed up with having to ask for money or having to remind him of the money needed for household expenses or for Omar, so he agreed. After that she surprised him by buying stock and managing her own tax affairs. He went along with these changes as part of the nature of things and as signs of God’s bounty. Then she bought a farm and decided to move them into a larger house and send her son to a new school that was more expensive and classier. He found out by chance that she owned a store that sold clothes for women who wore the hijab and he scolded her gently.
“Why didn’t you invite me to open the store, as I do for people
that I don’t even know?” he asked.
She said she hadn’t wanted to draw attention to it, and he agreed and kept quiet. She bought another house on the north coast, then sold it and bought another one—he had hardly got used to sitting by the sea in the first house when she made him move to the next. She mixed with new friends that suddenly appeared in their lives, and took an obsessive interest in losing weight and radically changing the style of her hijab, from the traditional to the more modern. She didn’t ask him what he thought, and although he was in favor and thought the new hijab was more stylish and more attractive, he didn’t tell her so. The pace of the changes accelerated a few months after Omar fell ill. Omayma took Hatem to the weddings of her friends’ children, and persuaded Hatem to employ some of her new acquaintances. A circle of helpers took shape around her and began to show up at the house. She remained religiously conservative, but her conservatism was now focused on formalities and superficial aspects of religion. It was remarkable the way she objected to any tolerant ideas that he had. Her life broadened and she became more narrow-minded. She wore the latest fashions but adopted ideas from the remote past. However, if he took a hard-line position on anything, she would take the opposite position, as if she had been born a secularist. She burned the bridges between them and took full control of Omar. Hatem had no right to decide anything as far as Omar was concerned. The boy was growing up in the home of a sheikh where there was no room for a sheikh’s authority, at the hands of a mother who forced him to memorize the Quran one month, then banned the Quran teacher from the house the next month and decided that learning the short chapters of the Quran in school was quite enough. She would listen to Quran readers on television day and night and a few weeks later switch all the televisions to channels playing music videos.
There was a struggle between the young girl who fell in love with a sheikh’s sermons and married him and the woman who got involved in business to fill the time, until the business filled her life and make her cold and unfriendly toward Hatem. He could hardly remember them sleeping together three times a year. He wasn’t sure if she had lost interest in him or in sex. Maybe she had lost the ability to arouse him, or else he had lost the desire to be aroused. How could they go on living without sex? Fame took the place of sex, and the pleasures of wealth replaced sensual pleasures. But affluence created a demand for more affluence, a vicious circle. She didn’t avoid him if he wanted her but she would be like a sack of potatoes lying passively beneath him. She might even look grumpy and what’s worse, he once caught her looking at her watch when he was on top of her. Perhaps once in every twenty times he saw her take her bra off in front of him, he might be interested and get aroused. He thought to himself that that was a very reasonable average because sex was no longer on his list of priorities. Maybe his sadness arose because he had suppressed his sexual impulses.
They didn’t complain about the situation but the gap was growing wider, and the fact that they increasingly ignored the gap made it worse. She never asked whether maybe he had taken a second wife in secret and he never suspected for a moment that she might leave him and ask for a divorce. So they didn’t seek either to be far apart or close together. Managing their lives became more important than their lives themselves. How many other couples were like them, Hatem wondered.
Hatem dozed off a little and then woke up, thinking it was late. Omayma hadn’t come home. He got up heavily, but not reluctantly because tonight he was filming an episode of his new program, in the middle of all the angst and hassle he had had to face since Hassan had appeared in his life. Under the jet of water in the shower he washed off the filth of the detention cell and his fatigue. He could almost feel his bones going back to their normal places. He had surprised himself and at the same time was pleased with how stoically he had endured the hardship. Nothing had broken his heart except Omar—worrying about him and the dark thoughts he had from time to time that undermined his peace of mind. He tried to dispel the images that came to him—Omar drowning in the swimming pool or swimming in his own blood, or bald from the effects of chemotherapy. He chased the images away by shaking his head rapidly. He hit his head with the hand that was holding the loufa, and the soapy froth became part of the images in his mind. He thought he might have heard footsteps or a knock on the door, so he turned off the water and cleaned the rest of the soap off his ears. It was Omayma and he had no idea how she would react to him bringing Hassan to the house, especially when she found out that he was now a Boutros. Omayma could surprise him with strange reactions to very ordinary events and with calm reactions to events that were very strange, so she might shout in his face now or slap him when she saw the boy, or maybe the complete opposite: she might react very casually, as if he hadn’t done anything that deserved any comment or attention.
He was also interested in seeing whether Omayma was obsessed with her weight and different diets these days, or whether she was in an easygoing phase where she hated strict diets and went back to being plump. Then she would hate herself for that and the wheel would turn full circle. Her weight fluctuated so much that he couldn’t remember what she looked like when he last saw her.
But when he came out of the shower this time, she went straight to the point.
“Who is this person?” she asked.
“Oh, the mercies of God!” he exclaimed, parrying her attack. “Which person?” he added quickly, before she could get upset about his initial response.
“Ali el-Kaaki,” she replied stridently.
He was taken aback. “Kaaki!” he exclaimed.
She sat down, stood up, turned, then came up to him and looked him straight in the face.
“On my way back I found the streets suddenly full of adverts for a new program of yours,” she said.
“Since when did you take an interest in a new program or adverts all over the place?” he asked quickly.
She ignored what he said and continued. “I found out you’ve been working with Kaaki, Sheikh Hatem,” she scoffed.
“I don’t understand why you’re upset that I work with this person,” he replied, taken aback by the reason for her scoffing, not by the scoffing itself.
“He’s a charlatan,” she said.
Hatem roared with laughter as he looked for his clothes. “The problem is that Ali el-Kaaki wouldn’t even know what that word means,” he said.
Standing in front of the wardrobe, Hatem mumbled to himself, trying to remember. “Now is this the program where I wear my turban and caftan, or is it the Italian suit job?” he said.
“Can you remember how I was dressed in the adverts?” he asked, turning to Omayma.
“Italian, Mawlana.”
“So it’s the suit then.”
Omayma was in one of her featherweight, shapely phases so she was nimble enough to outsmart him with jittery movements to accompany the words she spat out.
“Kaaki, Hatem, is a dubious character,” she said. “He suddenly appeared from a job in Saudi Arabia as the partner of a police general in a company that does television ads. Then suddenly he started throwing millions around here and there and no one knows where his money comes from, so everyone says he’s laundering drug money.”
“How do you know all that?” asked Hatem, as he fastened the rest of the buttons on his shirt. “Since when were you interested in people who own advertising agencies in Egypt?”
“For a start, many of my friends know him well,” she said.
“Friends!” he said, emphasizing the word by drawing it out slowly.
“Women friends, and I’d rather not tell you what women say about him being not just a charlatan.”
“God forbid, Omayma. It’s wrong to make false accusations against people.”
“I tell you, this man runs his agency from the offices of the State Security Investigations department and he’s so close to the Interior Ministry he might as well be a senior police officer.”
Hatem sat down in silence and rested his arms on his lap until he had his b
reath back and his anger had subsided.
Then, deliberately calm although he doubted she would reciprocate, he asked, “Might I know right now what your relationship is with this man?”
She hit back with the violence of a cat when someone has stepped on its tail.
“Have you gone crazy, Sheikh Hatem?” she said.
“Choose your words carefully, Omayma.”
“I will choose my words. What do you mean—relationship? How could I have a relationship with that lowlife?”
“Very well, let me rephrase the question and apologize for the way I phrased it the first time. Why so much interest in this man firstly, and second why so much anger?” Hatem asked.
“Because the woman he divorced is a friend of mine.”
“Omayma, the last place to find accurate information about anyone is from the woman he divorced.”
“On the contrary, they have accurate information, simply because they’re divorced. Women who have accurate information about their husbands are bound to end up divorced.” Omayma paused a moment, seated on a chair by the bed. “A happy marriage can’t survive accurate information,” she added.
“That’s a new theory. But I’m not interested. Ali el-Kaaki might be the most disgusting man in Egypt, and I suspect that might be the case, but he has a monopoly on advertising across the country and he’s the person who produces and finances my program and he’s going to sell it to the stations and the program has cost him a good deal. He’s a crook and I can’t dispute that, but he’s paid me three million pounds in fees for thirty programs, up front and in cash in a bag that I took from his office straight to the bank, so what’s the problem? And besides, is he going to talk in the program, or am I? Is this about what I say or what he says? He may be a big-time son of a bitch, a thief, and a cheat but in my program I’m going to say things that are beneficial to people in their lives and that are good for me financially. Besides, since when have I refused to deal with people like Kaaki who work with the security services? For your information, the whole country works for them, and everyone I work with at the television stations gets permission from them before they even breathe, and they obey them like the guards who stand outside their office doors. And thank the good Lord and there’s no need for you to have accurate information about your husband!”