Looking at him you wouldn’t know if he was full of hate or pain. Is there anyone who doesn’t hate, doesn’t suffer? From a desire for power and from cowardice? From the loss of love and the failure to love? From contempt for others and a need for company? From being brutalized and behaving brutally? From suffering pain and the joy of causing it? From complete self-confidence and the conviction one is a failure? From lovelessness and the exploitation of love (which you use like bricks to build your own house)? From the belief that everyone admires you and has faith in you and from abandonment? At the beginning it was a noble cause. Now it’s a curse. No more sympathy for others. . . . When he stood there with his back dripping blood he was resolute, unbreakable. He took pleasure in standing firm. But no one cares about all that anymore. The world has changed. It’s no accident the words on his lips don’t mean what they used to. Some of them are practically meaningless. . . . He was in on the game, he understood its rules, he played by them. But they turned the rules against him and now he’s the one weeping. The worst thing is to begin searching for yourself when it’s too late. . . . He said that he’d never fallen in love and that he always believed he was better than the rest — maybe he was, there’s nothing to prove otherwise, and he gave all he had — but he lost. It was a game without mercy and in fact without rules, where you couldn’t distinguish right from wrong, where the winner wasn’t always the one in the right, but the cleverest, the trickiest, the luckiest.
I left him and went to the offices of the magazine. I walked down a long hallway, looking in all the rooms, but no one was there. As I approached the last room at the end of the hallway I saw a woman seated at a desk with her cheek in her hand. There were tears in her eyes. I turned around and went back the way I had come. I walked toward the metro and got on, taking a seat next to the window, and as we pulled away from Midan Ramses another train pulled alongside us heading in the same direction. It was full of soldiers returning from Yemen. They were shouting from the windows and calling out and waving their hands. When our train pulled up across from them and they saw the passengers they grew more excited. The passengers looked at them coldly, without interest, and slowly the soldiers became less and less excited. Our train had pulled ahead of theirs by now and I turned around to look. The soldiers’ hands hung from the windows of the train and I saw one throw his cap on the ground. I got off at my house and saw the pretty girl who walked next to the train rails every day. Now I saw that she was a cripple. I bought some food and went upstairs and found the door of the apartment open and my neighbor inside, fixing the lock to his room. I went in and ate, then smoked and slept. I woke up to find that my sister had come in. I went into the bathroom and undressed and released the water onto my body. I heard the sound of a doorknob falling onto the floor tiles. I turned off the water, dried myself, dressed, then came out of the bathroom. There was a constant knocking sound. I talked to my sister and combed my hair. I heard the knocking again. I realized that the sound was coming from the other side of the wall. I said to my sister that we always did that when we wanted to speak to each other, or to warn each other.
It happened every morning. We opened our eyes to the sound of regular knocks coming from the other side of the wall. We jumped out of bed, still half asleep, and tidied up, trying to remember not to forget anything. Then we squatted on our heels next to the wall, shivering with cold. The knocking would stop and we would wait. Then we heard the sound of their steps on the floor tiles, the jangling of chains and keys. When the key slammed into the lock, we flinched. Then they came in. Our eyes flew to their eyes, hard beyond description. Quick, sharp, frightening sounds attacked our ears. Their hands — fat and coarse and cruel — squeezed our hearts. The walls made four corners. The door was shut. The ceiling was near. No help.
I went out to the living room and glanced toward my neighbor’s apartment. The glass door was shut and I made out his shadow behind the glass. He was pounding it with his hand. I saw the key on the ground and picked it up and put it in the door and opened it. He told me through his tears that he’d forgotten to take the key when he went in and had been knocking for an hour. My sister said she had to visit Husniyya and see her fiancé. We left. Husniyya’s mother welcomed me, saying: You have to get settled. And to my sister she said, Make him get married and he’ll calm down. Husniyya’s fiancé came in and said that he had arranged his desk at the ministry in the most wonderful way. A thick pane of glass covered the top, a foreign notepad was on the right, an ivory inkwell — the kind you can’t get anymore — was in the middle, on the left were his urgent files, and over his head was a plaque with a Quranic verse. I said the sun was almost down and I had to go. I rushed home but the policeman was already on the stairs. You’re late, he said. I pulled out a pack of cigarettes but he shook his head. You could spend tonight in prison, he said. So I took out ten piastres and he walked with me up to the apartment. I brought him the notebook and he signed it and left. I slowly took off my clothes, washed my face, then prepared a cup of coffee and tidied up my desk, wiping away the dust that had gathered on it. I grabbed the pen. But I couldn’t write. I picked up a magazine and there was an article in it about literature and how it should be written. The writer said that Maupassant said that the artist must create a world that is more beautiful and more simple than our world. He said that literature must be optimistic and alive with the most beautiful sentiments. I stood and went to the window, looking over at yesterday’s window. It was closed. I went back to the desk and picked up the pen but couldn’t write. I shut my eyes and imagined the girl from yesterday, her plump white body on the bed in front of me, freshly washed hair, me kissing every part of her. I rubbed my cheek along her leg and rested it on her breast. I put my hand between my legs. I began playing with myself and at last I sighed. Then I threw myself back in the chair, exhausted, staring at the page with a blank look. A little while later I got up and stepped carefully over the traces I’d left on the floor under the chair and went into the bathroom to wash my socks and shirt and hang them by the window. Then I turned off the light, leaving the door open so I could hear the policeman when he came. I lit a cigarette and stretched out on the bed and slept. In the morning I went to my brother’s house. Wrinkles marched over his face and his skin was splotched with white. Everything’s ruined since the workers joined the Administrative Committees, he said, and suggested we go upstairs to see his older daughter.
My brother built the villa fifteen years ago and he said it was his wife who bought the land, which was when he realized she had money. My father was alive at the time. He would come every day to supervise the construction. We lived in a little room. My brother finished the construction and rented out the first floor and lived on the second, then married off his older daughter and rented the third floor to her. When his younger daughter married he emptied the first floor and rented it to her and stayed on the middle floor with his wife. In the beginning, he spent an hour each day pruning the hedges in his garden and smoking his pipe.
She asked if I would read to her husband. Her husband said that Sheikh Abdel Basit said that one prayer at al-Aqsa Mosque was worth a thousand piety points. They suggested we go downstairs to see the younger daughter. She met us at the door with her child in her arms. His eyes were close together. Isn’t my son beautiful? she said. She laughed, then laughed a little more to prompt her husband. He was standing next to her, fingering the stars of his uniform. He said that if a private so much as opened his mouth, he’d crack him across the face and shut
him up. Then he said, It’s time for you to get married. Do as I did, he said. The most important thing about a girl is where she comes from. They turned on the television. My brother straightened his robe and smiled and said, Just watch this film. It was a story about a young woman who left a man her age and fell in love with an older man. When the film was over, my brother gave us a superior look. He took me to his room and shut the door and took out some old folders, then sat at his desk and lit a pipe. He showed me some stories he’d written and others he’d translated, a bunch of articles entitled “Dear Sir,” a book on body building, another
That Smell and Notes From Prison Page 4