‘Are there American military bases in Egypt? Did you ever work at any of them?’ She doesn’t respond to this, and he continues: ‘I used to translate for the Americans.’ He laughs and stubs out his cigarette with his shoe. ‘I translated for them, I brought them information and hashish and other stuff. We used to drink Russian vodka and smoke the best Afghan hash together.’ He reaches out to touch her hair. ‘Do you like Afghan hashish?’
She laughs in spite of herself because he is even more of a child than she thought at first. She imagines that he wishes he could just burst into tears, that he is terribly homesick because he still hasn’t found the paradise that he has desperately been looking for. Hend has smoked hash just once in her life, but she doesn’t tell him this. She only did it because all she wanted to do was write, so much so that she felt she would die if the bitter mountain of words stayed trapped inside her. She had to finish her first and only manuscript, ‘I Am Like No Other’, but writing is intractable, like a wounded woman, and at some point she realised that, after all was said and done, she was incapable of healing those wounds. She cried all the time and she desperately searched in every corner for that little girl who used to live inside her. She wanted to burrow deep inside the cocoon of her fears, and that’s why she tried smoking the pungent, sticky drug just once, so that she could pick up the pen and set it to paper again. But she still couldn’t write. She vomited, then she slept for a long time, and when she woke she found that her son, who was still crawling back then, had thrown his tiny body over her face. ‘Mama, Mamaaa!’ he bawled. He was hungry and wet from head to foot and the acrid smell of his urine burned her nostrils.
She doesn’t tell Abdul any of this because she knows he won’t understand. He, meanwhile, is making a superhuman effort to discover the effects of his manly powers on her. ‘Afghani hash is moist and soft,’ he whispers suggestively, tracing a circle in the shape of a woman’s backside with his hands. She ignores him.
The smell of hashish drifts from Abdul’s cigarette and it immediately reminds her of her old Arabic teacher. She used to worship her Arabic teachers for some mysterious reason. Maybe it had something to do with the smell of hashish that clung to their clothes, or their poise and style. They seemed to her to exude a kind of masculine magic. This Arabic teacher was always staring at her friend Hanan’s breasts, exactly at her breasts, two small, round, lovely protrusions that got bigger by the day. The man was tenacious and inscrutable and he would often reel off difficult and dazzling tongue twisters and make Hanan repeat them quickly, just for fun. Hanan always laughed out loud at the mistakes she made. Her small breasts would shake in hilarity, and this pleased him no end. The Arabic teacher was a very distinguished man, although everyone knew that he was the only son of Grandmother Zaynab, who insisted she wasn’t a servant even if she worked in people’s houses. She did it because ‘her hand was blessed when it came to cooking and baking and crushing the wheat or milking the cows’. Of course, this was the same hand that had raised a man whose shirts were always clean and elegant and whose coal-black, fragrant hair was always meticulously groomed. He was – as the whole school knew – a serious and respectable man, addicted to the cigarettes that Mahmud the grocer sold and particularly fond of Hanan and her mother the seamstress. People often saw him coming and going from Umm Hanan’s house and she had been heard serenading him with the popular song ‘So What if He’s Dark-Skinned, It’s the Secret of His Beauty’. He leaned on the table at which Hanan and her mother sat and grinned at the girl. Her plump cheeks flushed pink, a carbon copy of her mother. He had first noticed this resemblance when his class was suddenly emptied of girls and he started to miss their intoxicating perfume. More than once Mr Emile the principal had come into the classroom to warn him, ‘You’re going to bring catastrophe down on our heads, man!’ But he was too busy observing Hanan’s miraculous transformation from a child into a woman to pay any attention to the worried schoolmaster. As for Hend, he was mostly interested in her literary skills. She was now able to read and correct the other students’ exercises and write their names on the board and even conduct part of the lesson as he lounged on his chair at the front of the class and exchanged innocent pleasantries with his favourite student.
At the same time that Umm Hanan was borrowing the talcum powder from the neighbours in an attempt to ascertain the onslaught of her daughter’s early puberty, the Arabic teacher was busy sending Hanan letters warning her that she would be expelled from school if she didn’t come back. Neither Hanan nor her mother bothered to read these letters and Hanan stayed put at home. The Arabic teacher, anxious and distracted, was now obliged to focus his attention on Hend, who realised that she would have to face him alone. She explained the rules of grammar and rhetoric to her classmates while he emptied cigarettes with the cartridge of his pen and stuffed them again with hashish. He started to carry a thin cane around and would get angry for no reason and shout insults (‘you cattle!’) at his students because, as he said, they came to school without cleaning the dung off their plastic shoes and never washed their rough hands, stained green from cutting clover in the fields. Most of Hend’s classmates generally considered school to be a kind of rest period or napping time from their heavy work in the fields and they sat in class with stupid expressions on their faces and fought amongst each other rancorously – which only proved the teacher’s point. He took to beating them with his cane. He would stretch them out over his chair and give the backs of their legs a good thrashing. The children would get down off the chair, their mouths set in stony silence, trying to hold back their tears. When he finally got tired of giving out beatings he produced his rolling papers and prepared the tobacco-and-hash mixture while throwing out casual remarks about how cattle never get tired of a good whipping.
Meanwhile, Hend continued to read the lessons out loud in class. Once, when she said to him, ‘I’m tired, can’t someone else do it?’ he yanked her brown school apron and said in that high-pitched voice of his that terrified her, ‘Who do you think you are? A king’s daughter? Go on and run back to your papa’s house. The girl thinks she’s a princess! You Bedouins can go to hell.’ Hend ran out of the classroom and Mr Emile the principal ran after her, but she didn’t stop. She left the Muqawi Primary School behind and walked past the threshing machine and the agricultural cooperative all the way home. From that day on her stomach began to hurt her every time she saw the Arabic teacher. He never called on her in class again and she just sat there staring at the wall and waiting patiently for the interminable lesson to end. Then the Arabic teacher began to wear a white cap and pray a lot. He even started taking the boys to the school mosque to pray as a group every Friday. A few months later he took the boat to a faraway country called Yemen. He wasn’t the only one. In those days, a lot of teachers packed their bags and went there.
Grandmother Zaynab wept copious tears and said, ‘Son of a bitch, that son of my womb. Son of a bitch, just like his father. He didn’t even say, “Mother, I’m leaving.” He didn’t say goodbye to the mother who slaved over him all his life. Never mind, I hope God goes easy on him and puts the wind in his sails with the sea beneath him and his ships full to the brim.’ God seemed to have answered Grandmother Zaynab’s prayers, just as He seemed to have blessed her hands. The teacher came back from Yemen with a prayer mark on his forehead, a handful of Meccan musk in his pocket, and a pure white jilbab. He began to spend all his time in the Nur Mosque. He preached to the people and led the Friday prayers and called out from the minaret. The congregation would listen intently to his loud voice as he said things like, ‘Oh Prophet of God, your people are overrun by wolves,’ and his words brought tears to their eyes. He became famous for his eloquence and zeal. He opened a store selling plastic household goods, the first of its kind in town. He called it ‘Al-Baraka’. Then he opened a ceramics and tile shop to cater to the owners of all the new brick houses that were springing up in town. He called it ‘Al-Quds’. Then he opened a number of franchises specialising
in electrical products and called them ‘Al-Furqan’. Pharaoh’s Hills had become a different place by then, and Hend would often grow disoriented as she led her father on their walks from the reception house to the Heights.
Abdul playfully tugs on a strand of her hair, bringing her back to him from the maze of her memories. A feeling of anger and humiliation washes over her. She tells him sharply that she doesn’t like hashish, or children who play at being grown-ups, or translators and spies – that, in fact, she doesn’t like anything about him. She tells him that she doesn’t believe in anything any more and that as far as she is concerned, he, Abdul, is nothing but a stupid kid.
Abdul just laughs at this harangue and asks her with the cunning of a mountain wolf, ‘So you’re the ambassadress of good intentions. They’re giving you legal residency and food stamps and sympathy for free. Or maybe you’re the ghost of Mother Teresa come from the high seas to strike the fear of God into me . . .’
Abdul’s comment hurts her. He doesn’t understand why she is here – not that she does, either. It hurts her because she knows that she is more decent and principled than that. He just doesn’t understand. She turns her back on him, and he adds a parting shot: ‘And on top of everything you have a big ass, and I don’t like women whose rear ends are as big as Mount Sinai.’
He laughs at his own joke, pleased to show off his command of American slang and his ability to humiliate people coldly, with a smile and not a trace of anger. She pictures him as a mountain-wolf cub raised at the teat of an American commando unit, an expert on vodka and hashish and blasphemy, with nothing better to do than to taunt a solitary and wretched woman like herself.
9
Pluto in Capricorn
Slow, persistent, and cautious. Winterish and loves routine. Idealistic and ambitious. Conservative; prepared to scale mountains to attain his goals. Kind, ethical, and noble. A careful and tireless striver, like all Capricorn men who know how to plan each step calmly, with confidence and great patience, but who jealously hide their disappointment in failure. They meet adversity with stubborn and solitary persistence, bouncing back and starting all over again. The description fit him perfectly, her friend who died.
The winter rain pounded the windows of Cairo’s downtown shops as Hend sat next to her friend in the Tak’iba Café. They always went to the same cafés together. Her friend knew all the waiters by name. He exchanged greetings with them, asked them how they were doing, and which villages they came from. They sat by the window and watched the rivulets of water streaming down the sidewalks. The glass reflected his tense face as he asked her the same old questions; questions she’d grown tired of.
‘How’s life?’
‘Well, it’s over now.’
‘You’ve still got a lot ahead of you. You’re not going to die.’
He reminded her of her son when he said things like that. She replied with the same listless, resigned tone. ‘Where will I go in the end?’
‘I don’t know.’ He frowned. ‘I wish we all knew where we’ll end up. Things would be much easier.’
They fell into a gloomy silence and drew long and hard on their water pipes. Again, he picked up the thread of the conversation and asked her about things that she preferred not to talk about.
‘And what about him?’
She didn’t answer. In fact, she didn’t have any news of her husband. No one knew where he had disappeared to, or why. She was tired of people asking her about him. As far as she was concerned, he was just someone who had vanished from her life without a trace.
They avoided each other’s eyes and her friend the Capricorn tried to change the subject. She liked wandering the city streets with him because he was easygoing and respected her long silences. As he walked by her side she was suddenly overcome by the feeling that still haunts her now: a feeling of emptiness and futility and a yearning to share her loneliness with another human being. Her Capricorn friend could talk endlessly. He told her all kinds of stories about the city’s many squares and alleys and buildings. Sometimes he talked just to avoid the subjects that upset her. ‘This is Bab al-Luq Square. Do you know why they call it that? People from across the city used to meet here. First it was called Bab al-Liqa – the Meeting Gate – then later Bab al-Luq.’ She nodded her head for lack of anything to say. He narrated the history of the small, obscure cafés that they passed on their walk: ‘This is the Sphinx Café. We used to come here after going to see a movie at Cinema Radio. Cinema Radio was something else in those days.’ A few streets further on, he stopped and pointed. ‘The Indian Cultural Centre is here, in this passageway. The Indian Teahouse is right next door. It used to be one of the loveliest cafés in the city. The intellectual crowd used to come here, but the artists mostly preferred the Rex Café on the corner of Imad al-Din Street.’
She had no idea where Imad al-Din Street was. The endless spider web of streets confused her, but she kept nodding her head encouragingly. ‘Naguib al-Rihani and Stéphane Rosti and Anwar Wagdi used to go to the Rex. All the big film contracts were signed here – right here, on these very tables.’ He swore to her that he once saw the actor Ahmad Mazhar sitting at the Rex. He was obviously very proud of the fact.
‘My friend Yahya used to come here. His dream was to write a screenplay especially for Nadia Lutfi. Do you know what the café was originally?’
‘What?’
‘A barber shop,’ he replied, grinning broadly.
He told the same stories every time but she didn’t mind because, of all the people she knew, he alone still saw her as she imagined herself to be. To him, she never grew older and more abject with the passing days. He didn’t notice the slight stoop she had acquired thanks to the painful stitches under her belly from the operation that followed her miscarriage. To him she didn’t appear ashen and overweight and pitiful – quite the contrary. He said that she looked like Zubaida Tharwat, Soad Hosni, and Nancy Ajram all rolled into one. His presence was a source of delight to her. He made her feel beautiful in spite of everything. She was in the habit of wearing a black, mannish blazer that she referred to a little sheepishly as ‘sporty’, but she really only wore it to hide things she would rather not think about, like her rear end, which kept getting bigger by the day. Her simple ‘sporty’ clothes screened off her fear of other telltale markers of her age, like her absent-mindedness, her impatience, her constant fatigue, her numerous delusions, and her insatiable need to walk and walk with no particular goal in mind. She tried to explain all this to him but couldn’t make him understand.
She used to smoke her cigarettes slowly because she dreaded coming to the end of them. She would smoke them down to the filter, then stretch out on the bed, and the traces of chalk on her fingers and under her nails would fill her with a feeling of exhaustion. Sometimes, she prayed at night to ward off her loneliness.
She talked to him enthusiastically about the planets whenever she got bored of the story of the twin lions guarding Qasr al-Nil Bridge, or Princess Nazli’s palace and Imad al-Din Street, or the Café of the Dumb. She said to him, ‘I’ve cast your horoscope. Congratulations.’
‘What does it say? Tell me.’
‘It says that Jupiter is in the House of Capricorn this year. Jupiter is the planet of great fortune. It will be an exceptional year for you, my dear goat. Dust will turn to gold in your hands. All the planets are lined up behind you and every single month of the coming year will bring you good things. New horizons will open up before you, and many promises will be fulfilled. Now is the time to harvest fame and love and to exercise that masterful charm of yours to conquer the hearts of one and all.’
He laughed happily. He laughed so hard that his face became an indistinct blur.
‘Do you really believe that stuff?’
‘Sometimes I need to believe it.’
‘And you? What does your horoscope say?’
‘My friend the Cancer, you’re at rock bottom!’
‘You’re always at rock bottom! Always hugging that b
ag of yours to your chest even when you’re sitting down, as if you’ve got to hurry off for an appointment at any moment. You’re always anxious. You never stay in one place for more than a few minutes. Do you know that Yahya never travelled in his whole life? The only time he set foot outside Cairo and went to Alexandria, he got into an accident and died.’
‘Maybe. Who’s Yahya?’
‘Yahya, my friend. If he’d met you he would have really liked you.’
‘Maybe.’
‘And maybe then you would have stayed here forever and not thought about going away.’
‘Maybe.’
They drew deeply on their water pipes when the silence fell between them and the smoky haze settled around their shared melancholy and wrapped it in a close veil. Then she picked up her bag, which was full of papers and chalk and desolation, and left.
Hend thinks about how she had never owned a suitcase in her whole life, how there were never any suitcases in their house, only huge wooden chests, left over from the days of the caravans that she had heard tell of and that her mother used for storing grain and other things. ‘It’s in the Nabulsi soap chest,’ her mother would say with a hint of pride in her voice, or, ‘It’s on top of the trellis chest.’ The chests grew old and tatty like everything else in their house. Rats scurried around merrily underneath them and the long years of neglect swathed them in an envelope of grease and enigmatic odours.
Her mother never owned a suitcase either. Hend wonders how she made the trip from her father’s house to her husband’s without any suitcases. It seemed that her mother had never travelled anywhere before her marriage. Even on those occasions when she got angry and put on her black dress, determined to leave the house forever, it never occurred to her to take anything with her. She would dry her eyes with a handkerchief as the children clung to the hem of her dress (‘Mama, take me with you!’), but she never took anyone with her, for the simple reason that she never ended up leaving the house. She would go back into her room and shut the door fast behind her, and Hend’s own girlish dreams of escape slowly collapsed under the weight of her mother’s muffled sobs.
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