‘Very tasty, Mahfouz,’ Joe said.
Mahfouz looked up from his plate delightedly.
‘Tazty, no?’
Five times daily Mahfouz rolled out his rug on the sun porch of the house on Achterom to murmur prayers in the direction of Mecca. He was not overbearingly religious, and never bothered Joe and India with his beliefs. They considered his faith as harmless as another man’s habit of eating a fixed number of bananas each day, or automatically knocking on wood to ward off disaster. He took a correspondence course in Dutch, and after a few weeks he could ask the way to the train station or order a pound of beef and pork mince at the butcher’s. Not that this was of any use to him; the village had no station, and no self-respecting Muslim would touch pork mince. But he felt at ease in Lomark, walked around the village a great deal and always greeted us politely.
Regina showed him off in public and seemed to glow softly in his presence.
‘Nubians are a very handsome people,’ she said. ‘The handsomest in Egypt, they say. But as handsome as Mahfouz . . .’
‘Right, Mom,’ India said, ‘we got you. Take it easy.’
Regina took her husband to the city: he returned with a linen suit and handmade leather shoes. He moved as easily in them as he had in the Indian off-the-rack goods he’d arrived in. Because he was in the habit of waxing his moustache, and because Regina dressed him as a tropical dandy, he was something of an anachronism in Lomark, a man lost in some strange corner of the world.
The first time Mahfouz Husseini saw me he leaned over and looked me deep in the eye, to see if I had all my marbles. I didn’t try to stop him. When he’d had a good look, Husseini straightened up and laughed; apparently he’d seen something there. Then he said a few words in Arabic and moved around to the back of my cart. Hey, tenthead! Let go, I need to train that arm! I’m not your old auntie! But he seized the handles without asking and started pushing me around the village exactly like an old lady. I was embarrassed. It was all a bit too much. I sat in my chair glowering, with no idea where he was taking me. In one fell swoop he had shattered my carefully cultivated isolation. People were looking at us. At the dinner table that night they’d say, ‘Did you know Frankie Hermans has a nurse with a moustache?’ We looked like jerks together, Husseini and I.
But unless I was mistaken, we were heading for the Lange Nek. The Arab hummed little snatches of some tune and was really putting them down, his soles creaked on the asphalt. I could smell the river from a long way off, the water had a smell I couldn’t describe but that made me calm down. Maybe it was all the impressions he’d undergone on his way here.
‘There is Piet,’ Husseini said.
The water had gone down again, Piet Honing’s ferry service was running as usual. The boat was in midstream and coming our way. Piet was tearing off ticket stubs and handing them in through open car windows; the change he received in return went into the pouch around his waist. Then he went into the pilothouse and reversed the engines. Two cars and a cyclist came on shore. I didn’t look at them. Piet came over to us.
‘So, buddy, I haven’t seen you for a while.’
I grunted.
‘Lots has happened, nothing’s changed – you know what they say. Had some damage this winter, though, the river took a whole bunch with it. But we’re back in business, aren’t we, Mahfouz? Am I right?’
He gave Mahfouz a shy little slap on the shoulder and went back on board. Mahfouz pushed me to the edge of the quay, I pulled hard on the brakes. The Arab squatted down, the elbow of his left arm resting on his knee, the fingers of the other hand plucking at his moustache.
From that day on, Mahfouz and I sat together pretty often at the Ferry Head. I enjoyed having him around; he would talk and I would listen. Whenever Piet was having mechanical problems, Mahfouz jumped right in the thick of it. At his father’s shipyard in El-Biara, a little place just outside Kom Ombo, he had learned how to take apart an engine and put it back together again. He was the youngest of six brothers and three sisters. His father owned a yard on the banks of the Nile, and at a bend in that river Mahfouz had learned how to build a felucca, the characteristic ship of the Nile. His father had groomed him to work in the family business, but with so many siblings Mahfouz decided to seek his fortune in the tourist industry instead. Far from home, in the village of Nuweiba on the east coast of the Sinai, he had opened a little shop fifty metres from the beach. He sold rugs, Bedouin silver and pharaonic statuettes that could pass for antique if the buyer was blind and retarded; because so many tourists met those criteria, business was brisk. His shop was in a long row of others selling exactly the same items. Above the door was the print of a hand in dried goat’s blood: the hand of Fatima, devout daughter of the Prophet. Each morning Mahfouz hung the rugs and cotton clothing outside his shop, and flapped the dust off them each evening.
Nuweiba consisted of three loosely connected districts: most tourists went to Tarabin, a burgeoning strip along the beach full of hotels, restaurants and shops. A few kilometres to the south lay Nuweiba Port, where the ferries left for Jordan. In Tarabin Mahfouz had led an uneventful life. He slept about ten hours a day and spent the rest of the time in his shop or with friends. They played backgammon beneath the fluorescent lights, a waiter from the nearby restaurant brought them countless trays of tea.
Husseini felt strong, and believed that his diet of fish and rice and the sea air he breathed improved his blood. In his opinion, a person’s soul was in the blood. Blood travelled all around the body and infused with spirit the framework of flesh and bones that called itself Mahfouz Husseini.
Sometimes he would fall asleep in a beach chair and wake the next morning just as the sun rose above the mountains on the far shore. He lived with his face to the sea and his back to the desert, free of the great desires that make life a living hell. After someone told him that the Sinai was sliding away from the Arab Peninsula across the way at the rate of a centimetre and a half each year, he thought he could see the distance widening.
The day a bus from Piramid Tours came rolling into Nuweiba, he was sitting in his armchair outside the shop. Later that afternoon the first tourists from this new bunch appeared in his street: three women. Dutch. Mahfouz could tell right away. It was possible at times to mistake Dutch people for Germans, but the latter tended to have a kind of belaboured modesty, as though they could be arrested any minute. Germans also did talk louder than the Dutch, it’s true, but they didn’t walk around as though the world belonged to them. Dutch people moved with a heavily self-confident tread, as though they knew their way everywhere.
Mahfouz’s colleague, Monsef Adel Aziz, shouted, ‘Lookie-lookie-no-obigation’ at the women, the sign for the others to approach them as well, rubbing their hands and preening their feathers. Mahfouz saw a tired smile cross the face of the youngest woman. One of the older women, he could tell, had come to his country in search of physical love; one developed an eye for such things. Women like that had something hungry in their gaze, something insatiable. More and more of them had started coming each year; sometimes you saw white grandmothers with amazing lavender hair walking hand in hand with young boys. The story had it that these women had been abandoned by their husbands in their own country, or that they had come to Egypt because their husband was ill and could no longer fulfil his conjugal obligations. Monsef Adel Aziz consorted with such women and was none the poorer for it. The young men of the village didn’t care whether the women were old, young, fat or pretty. Mahfouz himself had had an affair with an American woman; when her vacation was over she had asked him to go home with her, but in his eyes a house in Iowa was no better than a shop in Nuweiba. Catherine O’Day had therefore started spending a few weeks each year in Nuweiba. It had been a few years, however, since he’d seen her. He’d received a postcard from her once, with greetings from America. The postcard hung on the back wall of Husseini’s shop, half covering a photo of him with his arm around the popular actress Athar el-Hakim, who had once come to Nuweiba for
a day to shoot some scenes on the beach.
The women were coming toward his shop. Concerning the oldest, the one Mahfouz had recognized as sexually needy, he heard later that week that she had started a torrid affair with a bellboy at the Hotel Domina; an attractive young man who, in response to her elaborate praise for the ease with which he had carried her luggage, had immediately dropped his trousers to show his sizeable dong. Mahfouz took a good look at the youngest of the three – there was shadow around her. He felt the need to comfort her.
‘Hotchachaandoolalabathingbeautywithoutabra!’ Monsef Abdel Aziz shouted after them, knowing full well that he had lost the battle for their attention.
The women had almost reached Mahfouz’s shop. Stroking his moustache in one fluid motion with the back of his index finger, he said with his most winning smile, ‘Welcome, welcome . . .’
The women had run his clothing through their hands, each of them had tried on a few rings bearing semiprecious gems and bought a few postcards. Then they walked on. But anyone travelling down the road in a southerly direction had to pass back that way again. When they reached the end of the shopping street the women turned, the woman with the shadow walking on the inside now. Mahfouz ran into his shop, grabbed a souvenir and flew back outside, where he was just in time to hand his present to the woman with ash-blond hair. She took it, confused, not knowing whether it was a present or whether he wanted money for it, and tried to give it back.
‘It’s a gift, for you,’ Mahfouz said.
It was a little model boat, a felucca with an alabaster hull and a sail with the Eye of Horus painted on it in blue and gold. The woman thanked him awkwardly and walked on.
Nuweiba was little more than a hamlet. It was certain that Mahfouz Husseini and Regina Ratzinger would meet again.
The next day they saw each other beside the swimming pool at the Hotel Domina. He had delivered a box of leather wallets to the hotel’s souvenir shop and was about to walk back down the beach to Tarabin when he saw her.
‘Ah, the beautiful lady,’ he said, bowing his head slightly.
‘Wait,’ she said. ‘I wanted to . . . a little something . . . for that lovely present.’
She went back to her recliner at the poolside, wrapped a sarong around her body and tied it with a knot between her breasts, bent over and took a couple of Egyptian pounds from her bag. She walked back to the man and said, ‘Here, for you.’
Mahfouz shook his head and smiled sadly.
‘I understand,’ he said. ‘You don’t want my gift. I am sorry.’
‘Of course I want it, but . . .’
But it was too late: the Egyptian raised his hand briefly to cover his heart, took two steps back and was gone.
Later that afternoon she took a taxi to his shop to apologize. He agreed to meet her that evening for a meal.
‘Oh,’ she said as she left the shop, ‘my name is Regina Ratzinger. What’s yours?’
‘Call me Mahfouz.’
They had fish on the beach in Tarabin. A Sudanese man, his skin black as ink, sat smoking in the shadow of a fishing boat; wagtails were hopping on the sand. The evening sky wrapped itself around them like the lightest of woven fabrics. A Bedouin came by leading a camel by a rope. The Bedouin tried to interest her in a ride along the beach; Mahfouz said something and the Bedouin left. After dinner they walked along the water to the Temple Disco at Hotel Domina. Regina danced with her eyes closed; around them the other members of her tour group swayed tipsily.
Later, back on the beach, Mahfouz built a little fire. He pulled a pack of Cleopatras from his shirt pocket and stuck a cigarette between his lips. His hands went to his pockets but found no lighter. Regina took a burning stick from the fire and held it up to him with shaking hands. He touched the tip of the cigarette to the wood and drew fire into it. Neither of them noticed the glowing ember that fell on Mahfouz’s Terlenka trousers. When the material began to smoke and he leapt up with a shriek to slap out the fire, Mahfouz realized that something had changed for all time.
Look,’ Joe said, ‘Mrs Eilander.’
The Peugeot station wagon belonging to P.J.’s mother was racing along the dyke in our direction. She was kicking up a lot of wind and we watched her go by in a flash, looking grim. She didn’t even respond when Joe and I raised our hands in greeting.
‘Pissed off,’ Joe said.
We had seen her car parked at the police station manned by Sergeant Eus Manting. Why she was there was not hard to guess: she was complaining about a strange airplane that sometimes flew frighteningly low over her garden; Joe had recently started carrying out reconnaissance missions over the White House.
Joe climbed down the dyke, into the washlands, with the words ‘Need to think a bit, Frankie.’ The little clouds of smoke rising up above the sea of stalks and overgrown poppies told me where he was lying. Swallows swooped over him, and insects went whining low across the land in the face of an approaching low-pressure zone.
Flagpoles with book bags on them had been hung out in front of some of the houses in the village. One more year and it would be our turn. And then? Then they would go – Joe, Christof and Engel – to some other place. To study or to work, in any case to do something that didn’t require me. I had, it seemed, become a deeply embedded anchor that would always remain in place. My horizon was blank and I tried not to desire much, like an animal or a Buddhist.
Or like Joe.
I saw Christof on his bike, cycling toward me like a madman.
‘Seen Joe?’ he asked as he pulled up.
I pointed to the field, where the little rings of smoke he produced faded into nothingness as soon as they rose above the grass. Christof leaned his bike against a post and took the barbed wire along the dyke road gingerly between thumb and forefinger. He pushed it down carefully and stepped over, first his right leg, then the left. As he walked down the slope he shouted, ‘Joe! Hey, Joe!’
A hand stuck up out of the grass.
Christof waded over to him and was soon up to his thighs in green, as though sinking slowly. A gust of wind rolled through the grass, behind me the dry leaves rustled as they blew across the road. Not so long ago they had skated down below us there and made an airplane take off, now you could occasionally see an oystercatcher disappear into the breathing sea of grass and flowers, above which swallows performed their daredevil dives. After a while Joe sat up, a little irritated maybe at being disturbed while he was thinking. He got up and walked in my direction. Christof had no more business staying down there, and followed him.
‘So what did you see, Joe?!’ he shouted. ‘Don’t be such an asshole, man, I have a right to know, I helped too, remember . . .’
Joe held down the barbed wire to let Christof step over. ‘I saw her,’ he then said slowly.
Christof almost exploded.
‘And what was she doing?’
He seemed to think that nudists did something, some kind of sexual rite or something.
‘There was nothing to see,’ Joe said. ‘There was hair all over it.’
It was like someone had turned down all the sound in the world without saying anything, that’s how quiet it was. You could see Joe thinking. I was disappointed by the announcement; I couldn’t imagine much of anything specific with all that hair, but the effort taken seemed way beyond the results achieved. I had been expecting more.
‘God damn it,’ Christof said. ‘I figured as much.’
Another long vacation was on its way. One of those that slowly melts you away and leaves you to baste in your own juices. The summer holidays were always a bad time for me. There wasn’t a whole lot to do if you weren’t messing around with mopeds and pimply girls. It’s true, I spent my summers in the short trousers and the loud Hawaiian shirts Ma bought for me, but that only drew even more attention. I would rather have bundled myself all up and pulled the gray leatherette plaid up around my neck, but in the summertime that gave me a terrible rash. So instead I sat there like a bump on a log and people looked at me
like I was an imbecile. That’s the first thing they think, of course, when they see someone in a wheelchair, that he’s not playing with a full deck. I stopped trying to prove the contrary long ago.
What I liked most was sitting by the river with Mahfouz, to whom I didn’t have to explain a thing. The sun glanced off the water; the light was so bright that it lit up the inside of your head and everyone could look right in.
We sat there like that often, the Egyptian and I, drifting off into the soothing narcosis of daydreams that comes over you when you stare for a long time at waves or a fire. Piet came and Piet went, a car honked as it passed, and from the willows on the shore white fluff blew out across the river, settling on the water or floating to the other side. Housewives complained when the willows gave off their fluff, sometimes there was so much that it piled up in their doorways and blew into the house as soon as it got the chance. Mahfouz’s mind was somewhere completely different, maybe he was thinking about where he came from and the strange wind that had carried him here, to these basalt blocks in the company of Frank the Arm.
Out on the river there were lots of private boats, those floating fridges that illustrate to us how general prosperity and bad taste go together like salt and pepper. Sometimes an old-fashioned saloon boat would come by too, with people on board in sporty clothes with blue or aubergine-coloured stripes. They came from another world and drifted past ours with conspicuous lightness. There was a kind of yearning in the way the people looked from their boats at the shore, just as there was a kind of yearning in the way I looked back. They often waved.
I knew that boating enthusiasts liked to wave to each other and to people on the shore. Drivers and cyclists never waved to each other, but motorcyclists did. Because of that waving, boaters and motorcyclists enjoyed some secret connection. Once in a while Mahfouz would wave back, without interrupting his musings. Sometimes he also made muffled sounds, as though agreeing with himself in some inner conversation, and when he did the plucking at his moustache grew more rigorous. I could see why Regina was in love with him – he had lustrous black hair and deep, dark eyes with lots of white around them, like the Tuaregs in National Geographic with their blue scarves that leave only their eyes uncovered.
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