by Ahmed Mourad
On the other hand, the piecemeal symptoms of change in Mahmoud struck Aya to the quick. Gradually she was won over. It is the easiest thing for a lover to win his sweetheart’s approval, particularly prior to marriage, before love’s clouded mirror has been wiped clean. And so Aya started edging down the path where ties with her old friends were cut, to be replaced by a bunch of sisters, most of them married. The hijab headscarf was supplanted by gloves and a khimar that descended over her neck, shoulders and breasts. Her eyebrows were left to sprout in obedience to some religious precept. When the owner of the company where she worked began to import make-up she left her job and its income of dubious rectitude. Books appeared beside her bed with colourful covers bearing depictions of the Antichrist, Gog and Magog, the Grave and the Fire and the bald serpents that will torment the tight-fisted on the Day of Judgment.
Her relationship with Mahmoud was affected in turn, like fire buried by ash or hunger following repletion, the pain only intensified by Mahmoud’s miserly refusal to pay the wedding costs, which had sentenced them to three years of incarceration, longing for freedom without even a wedding date to look forward to.
Then one day Aya opened the door wearing a niqab to let her brother in.
‘What are you doing with that thing on?’ he exclaimed.
‘Do you want me to open the door with my face exposed?’
Ahmed walked inside. He placed his bag on the nearest chair, removed his shoes and sat taking his socks off his feet.
‘So that’s it? You’re going to be wearing that thing from now on?’
Aya took it off her face. ‘I’m thinking about it.’
‘I don’t know how I’m going to recognise you if I meet you in the street. Give me a sign, or better still, whisper the secret word when you walk by. We’ll make it “Kuku Wawa”, OK?’
‘Our Lord guide you.’
‘Of course, it’s your holy warrior who gives the orders.’
‘Wearing the niqab isn’t a question of taking orders from anyone. Our Lord, praise and exalt His name, commanded us to wear it. You’d know that if you read up on your religion instead of all that rubbish you surround yourself with. Religion is more than just prayer and fasting, my dear Ahmed.’
Aya had grown used to Ahmed’s bitter mood. To start with he had only accepted Mahmoud Hasib because their mothers were friends. Then his mother had died, leaving a wound that would not heal, on top of which there was the incident at the bar almost a year ago in which his best friend Hossam Munir had passed away. He had fallen out with Salim, the man who hired photographers at the hotel, and left his job there, hanging around the house unemployed until an acquaintance had persuaded a friend to take him on as a photographer at Casino Paris in El-Haram Street. He worked from nine in the evening to seven in the morning, arriving home at eight to be greeted by his sister with her daily denunciations of his situation and his immoral earnings. Today, however, she had no desire to start with her criticisms.
‘Something to eat?’
‘Get me a glass of milk.’
Aya removed her headscarf and went to the kitchen as Ahmed turned the television to face him and leant his head against the sofa, staring unseeing at the screen until she reemerged. She sat next to him, watching him drink and waiting for her chance to broach a topic she had thought long and hard about.
‘Mahmoud says hi.’
She waited but got no answer.
‘He’s been wanting to see you but you’re never free at the same time.’
‘So let him drop in at the Paris when he gets off,’ said Ahmed sarcastically.
‘God forgive you.’ ‘You think I had other options and I turned them down? Or would you rather I go and sell bras and knickers in Moski?’
‘Why can’t you stand him?’
‘Because he isn’t a man, and he runs away from responsibility. He’s got money, so why has he had you dangling on a hook for three years?’
‘He doesn’t have enough for a flat and you know it.’
‘His father owns a share of the building. He could sell it and marry you.’
‘It isn’t as easy as that. The building has other heirs.’
‘Don’t kid yourself. If he wanted to marry you he’d do it.’
‘Well, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.’
Ahmed widened his eyes.
‘Mahmoud suggested that if you want us to get it over with then you could help us out.’
‘How’s that?’
‘We move into this flat after we get married.’
‘I had a feeling this was coming.’
‘Sooner or later we wouldn’t be able to stay here anyway. The contract was in Mama’s name and now she’s dead. Mahmoud’s father will want the flat back, he’s been allowing us stay here out of the kindness of his heart. But Mahmoud and I could live here after we get married. And anyway, it’s not like it will be leaving the family: it’s mine as well, after all.’
‘So it’s me who’s holding you back, is that it?’
‘You can help us and get a load off your mind.’
Ahmed threw his head back and rubbed his eyes, then turned to her. ‘And me? Where will I go?’
‘You’re a man and you’ll cope. You can’t imagine how much pressure people are putting on me. I can’t cope, Ahmed. I’ve spent three years waiting to get married and the neighbours are chewing my face off. It’s not the same for a girl, Ahmed. Surely you understand.’
Ahmed got to his feet and patted his sister’s shoulder. ‘Enough, Aya. I get it.’
He went into his room and closed the door behind him.
At five, Ahmed dressed, picked up his camera and got ready to leave. Going into Aya’s room, he found her ironing clothes.
‘Next week I’ll have sorted out a place to stay.’ Aya could not hold back her tears as she looked at him, and she hugged him as he said, ‘But if that fatso upsets you I’ll chuck him out of the window. Come on, don’t cry, I’m going out.’
Much happened in the week that followed. Ahmed gathered up the fragments of his life from the house; a suitcase, a computer and some odds and ends. He had asked the manager of the Casino Paris for the use of a small locked room off the developing studio that had once functioned as a storeroom, and for a fee of a hundred pounds the manager had agreed. Moving what remained of his life and soul to the room he went to say goodbye to his sister, who had silently departed to a life with Mahmoud (or rather, Sheikh Mahmoud) after he had finally taken her hand in marriage at a hired hall divided into two by a large curtain, one side for men, the other for women.
Ahmed accompanied her to the door of their parents’ flat, now the property of her husband, and remembered to press two hundred and fifty pounds into her palm, nearly all the money he had in his pocket.
An embrace, a tear, a kiss on the forehead, a beautiful face, garish make-up beneath the niqab, women carrying trays of stuffed pigeons and the sound of the flat door slamming: these were the last impressions Ahmed carried in his mind as he walked across University Bridge on the way to his new bolt-hole.
It took two weeks for Ahmed to adjust to his new place. He bought an iron, a mattress and a new bedsheet, and hung his portrait with Amr Diab on the wall. Most of his time was spent at the computer playing around with Photoshop, which he mostly used to alter or correct flaws in his pictures but also to insert himself next to celebrities without having to go to the trouble of actually meeting them. For this last purpose he would sometimes call on the services of Omar, a childhood friend with great expertise in faking photographs. Omar had produced pictures of himself with Jennifer Lopez, Marilyn Monroe and Ahmed Zaki, though he still preferred his authentic shot with Amr Diab.
The cursor crawled over the screen to open a file concealed with the care of someone accustomed to safeguarding the secrets in his life.
He started to flip through the pictures. The first was a shot of a young man standing in front of a bar, joined in the next picture by a second man; there were picture
s of the Nile, a passing cruise boat appearing as a trembling spot of light, and young women dancing at a Nile-side wedding party. Ahmed sped through all these with weary familiarity, then stopped. He inspected a set of pictures showing two men talking on the other side of a pane of glass with close-up shots of mouths and hands. These were followed by shaky images showing the place in disarray, with some figures running in the background, while others lay face-up on the ground. Someone approaching the window. A figure in a yellow suit collapsing. A wide-angle shot of the bar looking like Zeinhom Mortuary might if the morticians decided to cut up the corpses on the floor, which was as red as the carpet at Cannes. In the right of the frame lay a body he knew all too well. Utterly lifeless, its motionless fingers were proof of the proverb that the piper’s fingers die with him.
For a whole year these images had stayed with Ahmed, as had the knowledge that his only reaction had been to run off with his camera. What a coward he was! Wasn’t it possible that his friend was still alive when he left? Although Hossam’s appearance might have suggested otherwise, how could he have obeyed his instinct to photograph the scene yet never have thought to check his pulse? He thought of the look in Hossam’s eyes just before he closed them for ever; the sight of Hossam’s mother passed out against her sister’s shoulder, dead to the world. He could not forget that his friend had been about to get engaged. Nor that he still had not told anyone that he had been there and had seen everything through his lens. He felt cowardly. Shock had silenced him, rendering him as motionless as a piece of furniture.
To complete the irony, the speed of the attackers and the slow shutter speed meant the camera had been unable to capture a single face. The figures appeared like high-speed ghosts trailing a spectral blur in their wake, their features impossible to make out against the background.
His hopeless response, the next morning, had been to send a CD containing the second-rate snaps to the public prosecutor’s office, where they had vanished without a sound, as though dropped into a bottomless well. He had repeated the process three times, each time signing himself an anonymous well-wisher, a tactic he had decided to adopt in his dealings with the police ever since the time he had helped an old lady to hospital in a critical condition, stabbed by a youth who had stolen her handbag, following which Ahmed’s reward had been an interrogation and a night in the police station before his innocence could be established.
He had even taken the pictures to a government newspaper, handing them over in a closed envelope addressed to the editor, but to no avail. Finally, he dispatched them to Freedom, an eye-catchingly vulgar tabloid that provided its readers with the diversion they craved. Its articles were of the type favoured by scandal sheets: bedroom antics, ministers who sold the country out for fifteen pounds, and red-hot tittle-tattle. A newspaper that had recently reported some of the highest circulation figures in the country, it was the closest to Ahmed’s heart. It gave him what he wanted to hear. He could scream at it, and curse every last one of his fellow countrymen from great to small. He uncovered conspiracies from his armchair, caught an eyeful of some actress in her bedroom and was made to feel properly ingenious when he worked out the identity of the ‘HM’ she was sleeping with, just from clues in the text.
And he waited. In the days following the incident the government press was packed with pictures of the two titans and details of how they opened fire on one another. The broadsheets went into the disagreements between the two, disagreements which had led to a bloodbath in which one had died and the other, wounded and disabled, had travelled abroad for treatment. In a smaller font were the names of the victims, that of Hossam Munir among them.
Explanations for the incident began to proliferate: a dispute between bodyguards that led from confrontation to gunfire, a personal vendetta that had got out of hand in the heat of the moment or, let us not forget, the claims that a mentally unstable individual had opened fire in the bar in hope of divine reward.
The gutter press adopted their usual approach, with Freedom taking the lead: ‘Full details of the bar vertigo incident’, ‘Girl fans the flames of jealousy between the biggest tycoons in the land’, ‘Tale of red lipstick beside dead man’s body’, ‘The girl who vanished minutes before hotel massacre’, ‘The secret of the woman’s underwear in Hisham Fathi’s pocket’, ‘The actress who killed the two lovers’, and finally, ‘Screen star Leila Alwi behind the businessmen’s bloodbath’.
This last headline led to a report that Leila Alwi was currently reading a film script about the incident at the hotel.
Freedom ran Ahmed’s pictures as an exclusive under the headline: ‘Freedom publishes exclusive top-secret pictures from a trusted source showing the scene of the crime as photographed by the pathologist.’ Alongside the pictures was a box containing a provocative image of a famous German model in a swimsuit with a black strip across her eyes and beneath her in red the words: ‘Exclusive: The first picture of the accused in the case of the businessmen’s massacre.’ The paper made no mention of the anonymous individual who had sent the pictures.
As always, the incident gradually disappeared from the pages, replaced by other more titillating news items, until the story died altogether, and with it the truth. His pictures had ended up as little more than spicy tidbits with which the tabloids had boosted their weekly turnover.
The greatest irony was Kristina’s marriage two weeks later to Salim, the owner of the hotel’s photo studio, the man who would rape her with his eyes whenever she walked past. Salim had proposed to the events planner that he make an honest woman out of her to ensure she did not lose her residency, and not, God forbid, for any other reason. Kristina consented, in much the same way as a rose consents to be dried out; beautiful on the outside and hollow within. She had been desperately upset about Hossam, but she also wanted to carry on making a living.
Ahmed would never forget the awful conversation that had taken place between Kristina and himself.
‘That’s right: Salim, the photographer,’ she had said.
‘He’s no photographer, and besides, have you forgotten Hossam already?’
‘No, no, you don’t understand, Ahmed. Hossam is in here,’ she pointed to her heart, ‘but I have to get engaged for the residency permit. You know how it is with the procedures and passports.’
‘Salim after Hossam, Kristina?’ he said, incredulous.
‘Of course there’s nobody like Hossam, but my visa will run out in a month.’
‘He’s a swine!’
‘Ahmed, please! Mr Salim is a gentleman.’
‘Hossam bought you an engagement ring. Did you know that?’
‘I’m sorry … This is difficult for me, too, but life must go on.’
‘Sure,’ said Ahmed. ‘And screw you, bitch!’ he added to himself.
Thus did the princess hand herself to the old tyrant once her prince had been killed. The engagement marked the beginning of a month-long series of disagreements between Ahmed and Salim. Ahmed couldn’t stand the sight of either of them. When Salim found out about Kristina’s relationship with Hossam and his friendship with Ahmed, he set out to provoke Ahmed and make his life untenable. In the end Ahmed left, to face the world with empty pockets.
It was eleven in the evening when Ahmed was roused from these memories, as turbulent as a November storm in Alexandria. Gouda was knocking on the door.
Gouda was another story.
In April 1967 the wheel of history was still turning for Sergeant Gouda of the Egyptian Armed Forces. The ground had trembled beneath him as he returned home from his unit, dismounting from the military despatch truck like Julius Caesar arriving back in Rome following his conquest of Alexandria in 48 BC. At the Ibada Café behind the pharmaceutical company, the children of the neighbourhood of Amiriya clustered round him, ears pricked up, as he crossed his legs, resplendent in his uniform and military moustache. They hung on his every word, the torrent of stories and news punctuated by slow sips of tea as tedious as the advertisement breaks that in
terrupted their soap operas. Amiriya’s Minister of Information was how they thought of him. Tensions on the international stage threatened imminent war, a possibility supported by the pronouncements of the country’s political leaders, which had reached the point of promising school trips to Tel Aviv, yet a word from Sergeant Gouda carried as much weight as one from Israeli prime minister Levi Eshkol, perhaps more.
It had given him great pleasure to see their eyes fixed on his lips, eager for his every word and waiting for some shred of information to celebrate, but it had given him even more pleasure to suddenly halt his flow and explain to them that these were military secrets, not to be bandied about, and to observe the envy in their eyes that God should have blessed him with a job in the High Command. He would get to his feet, his bill taken care of, young and old alike wishing him good health and patting his shoulders to gain the blessing of his sergeant’s stripes, hoping to meet him again for the next instalment. Delighted with himself, he would set off for the block of flats where he lived on the ground floor, to eat a hot meal cooked by his mother, followed by two hours sunk in sleep. At seven he would wake and his day would begin in earnest. In the evenings, Gouda worked at Studio Hala, which belonged to his closest friend, Youssef.
Gouda liked nothing better in this life than food and photography. He was stout and bald save for that patch of hair they call a shousha, which clung to the front of his head as tenaciously as Egyptian actor Mahmoud el-Melgui’s peasant hero clung to his fields in the film The Land. He grew out the hair above his right ear so that it reached up to the centre of his bald spot, then combed it over to the other side. With the addition of Vaseline it resembled the fine lines in architectural drawings. He sported the same Coke-bottle glasses with black frames and wide arms that he had owned since the early sixties. In summer and winter he was drenched in sweat, and he considered the handkerchief, after electricity and halva paste, to be man’s greatest invention. His formidable belly was draped in a many-pocketed leather waistcoat that harboured a mobile pharmacy in which one could find something for headaches and diarrhoea alongside gauze, antiseptic solution, and even a scalpel for emergency surgery.