by Ahmed Mourad
Professionally speaking, Gouda was a truly gifted wedding photographer. He was totally shameless, impossible to embarrass and free of the delusion that afflicts inexperienced photographers and makes them imagine that all the guests are staring at them. He gave instructions to wedding guests as though they were soldiers in his unit. His expressive, cheerful pictures were taken with an old Eastern European retina and a flash the size of a pot lid that threatened to incinerate the bride, disfigure the groom and kill and maim a few guests in time for the buffet, which he personally regarded as paradise on earth. He would see off the happy couple with a shot of them waving to the camera through the car’s rear window, then go to develop and print the pictures at Youssef’s.
It was a settled and untroubled life until the morning of the fifth of June 1967 when Gouda heard the declaration of war on the radio. He was on leave, so he jumped into his uniform and set out to join his unit through the showered blessings of his neighbours.
He was gone five months. The war swallowed him up and people started asking where he could have got to. Some even began to refer to his mother as ‘the martyr’s mother’. Then the dusty truck arrived with its cargo of care and woe and soldiers, and among them sat Gouda, his head bowed. He sprinted into his flat and stayed there for three days, only to surface once more at the café to face the neighbours’ questions about his disappearance and his explanation for what had taken place on the battlefield.
But Gouda had never set foot on the battlefield, neither on the front line nor bringing up the rear. He was a sergeant in the Army Morale and Welfare Department.
No one knew this fact, and no one ever would. Sergeant Gouda was now a hero of the ’67 war. He had killed twenty-five Israeli soldiers with his bare hands and been captured and imprisoned for forty-five days before escaping and returning from the Sinai in his bare feet. President Gamal Abdel Nasser had given him an award for bravery, clapping him on the shoulder and saying, ‘Gouda, you’re a source of pride for us all,’ before ordering that he be assigned to military intelligence.
He had circled the globe three times, seen what no eye had seen before, made love to the loveliest women on earth and left a child in every port, including in Israel. There, a general’s daughter had fallen for him and passed him copies of her father’s papers. She had killed herself when she’d found out he was Egyptian, and that his name wasn’t Isaac. The burns from a clothes iron, the vaccination scars, the injuries sustained while cooking or peeling potatoes, and the fingers hammered instead of nails were transformed into bullet and bayonet wounds received in the line of duty. He was there at Sadat’s assassination, the only person to take out one of the assassins, and when the famous Egyptian secret agent Raafat el-Hagan started his rise through the ranks, it was Gouda he worked with. Even the German Goethe Institute was named after him in the hope it might bring it good fortune, a sign of the affection the German Chancellor had for him: ‘Goota!’ the Chancellor famously told him, ‘You are a zors uff pride fur uz all! Ich liebe dich!’ (The last three words, Gouda would explain, were German.)
Had he not missed his chance to fly into space, beaten to it by Neil Armstrong, he would have been the first man to set foot on the moon, and just the other night while he was having supper with President Abdel Nasser, the great man had offered him some pickles and sworn to him that …
In short, if James Bond had met Gouda he would have changed his name to 003 out of common decency and left Gouda to assume the mantle of 007 in his place.
In 1976, Gouda had finally got married to a neighbour’s spinster daughter and that same year the decision was taken to promote him to sergeant major and force him into early retirement. The major in charge of his unit had taken pity on him, concerned at what a medical examination had revealed about his ever-deteriorating health, his fantasies about events and escapades that never happened.
Suddenly Gouda had found himself on the scrapheap.
The days had passed and Gouda still left home each morning and returned in the evening, giving the impression to those who knew him that he was still in the army, while in fact he spent all of his time at Studio Hala with Youssef, relying on Thursday and Sunday weddings for his daily bread. At night he would come home to continue his tales about the dirty jokes he had told Abdel Nasser, and which had been met with a loud cackle from the president and a delighted, ‘You should be ashamed of yourself!’
Then a colleague offered him the chance to work at Casino Paris, and so he did.
Two months later, Gouda had left home on his way to the casino, which had become his refuge from the world. He had tried to catch a taxi. ‘Forget it!’ was the response of one driver, who stopped to tell him that El-Haram Street was at the epicentre of a small war. It was February 1986, the day the Central Security troops had rioted, when the employees of Casino Paris fashioned Molotov cocktails from whiskey bottles to defend livelihood and limb, which subsequently led to the resignation of the Minister of the Interior, Ahmed Rushdi. The closure of El-Haram Street was hard on Gouda. Even his stories were affected by his reduced financial and psychological well-being and he was forced to sell three bracelets that had belonged to his wife, who had passed away the year before. In less than three months the stores had returned to business and Gouda to his usual happy state, while his tales and adventures, famous among the casino’s patrons and employees, re-emerged hotter than ever.
Ahmed was aware of none of this: all he knew was normal old Gouda. Although he had suspected the veracity of Gouda’s stories from the other employees’ winks and sniggers, he listened to Gouda with an open heart, out of respect for his dignity and his own desire for amusement. From time to time he liked to set Gouda off by asking him about some famous event or other, only to be taken aback to learn of his fictional involvement. On one occasion he even told Gouda about the Bar Vertigo incident and how he had lost his best friend in the slaughter, but without mentioning that he had been present at the scene. He was astonished when Gouda assured him that, quite by chance, he had been on the balcony of one of the hotels overlooking the Nile photographing a wedding and had taken pictures of the incident with a 500mm zoom lens and kept the negatives. Ahmed had asked for these more than once but Gouda had pleaded the studio’s disarray, that he had mislaid the film through carelessness or out of concern for Ahmed due to the pictures’ content – not to mention the fact that one of the businessmen had been a customer at the casino and so Gouda hadn’t revealed that he had the pictures, for fear he might be implicated.
Despite this, Ahmed was extremely fond of Gouda. Overlooking his exaggerations, he saw that he had a big heart. The same was true of Gouda, who soon came to see Ahmed as the son he had never had.
Ahmed had grown used to waiting for Gouda in the evenings, passing by his house so they could go to the nightclub together, just as he had grown used to Gouda acting as his guide, bringing him up to speed on the secret life of this world, its patrons and protocols.
Cabaret: a word heard only in old Arabic films from the era of Youssef bey Wahbi, Naeema Akif and their like, a time when such establishments played a pivotal role in the plot. They were the refuge of the lover – forsaken, betrayed, devastated – where he would crawl off to forget the woman that had cheated him or died, a place where he could cut loose, befriend the dancing girl or the prostitute with a heart of gold and drain the cups of oblivion. Occasionally the hero would get into a fight, his gleaming black hair flopping wildly across his brow, and smash stunt chairs made of straw that broke before they touched anything over the heads of drunkards, who only ever seemed to say, ‘I’m the man!’ as though every extra in cabaret scenes was required by law to utter these words when they drank. All Egyptian films seemed to use an identical group of extras, especially the fierce-featured baldie who would always get punched by the hero at the end, or that dark-skinned fellow with the classic Egyptian face that everyone in the audience recognised, but whose name no one knew.
Another major benefit of the cabaret was that i
t offered the director and the producer a way to satisfy the ticket office’s insatiable appetite. Most old Egyptian films were stuffed to the gills with song and dance numbers that would start up the moment the hero took his first sip, and they found their fullest expression in the cabaret, which was inevitably called either The White Rose or Stars.
That was the cabaret of cinema.
In the real world, the cabaret was very different, home to the higher classes capable of footing the bill. Prostitution was legal and regulated by the police and the department of health, through a system of professional licences and regular check-ups at the El-Houd el-Marsoud Hospital of Dermatology to ensure they were clean.
At a table, one could order a prostitute as easily as a bottle of whiskey. The girls had a room set aside for their own use, known as the engagé, which was supervised by the hotel manager. The ‘guest’ would pay and take the girl with him; the establishment would make some money and the girl would get a cut.
Scions of the royal family, merchants and politicians, actors and pimps, drunkards, thieves and celebrities, these were the cabaret’s customers, gathered together in one place for any number of reasons: women, booze, competitiveness, the desire to get one up on their adversaries and show off their abundant wealth.
Time passed and the names changed but the essence of the business remained the same. Prostitution was made illegal in 1949, so the cabarets found a way around the law: prostitutes sat at a special table like regular citizens, swapping jokes and home addresses with the customers. Later, these working girls were joined by gay men and lesbians (a natural extension of the law of supply and demand), especially in the sweltering summer months, the season for parties of Arab tourists. Everyone, prostitutes and clients, would meet up outside later and things would take their natural course, but nothing was to take place inside the establishment.
More years slipped by and the cabaret became first a variety show and then a nightclub, before the popular name changed to casino, as in Casino Paris.
Professor Gouda’s first lecture centred around an overview of the various departments of Casino University and the subjects taught there.
‘If you want to earn a living you have to be brave and smart and never take offence.’
‘If you want to earn a living you must learn to listen and not speak.’
‘If you want to earn a living you must learn to read people’s eyes.’
‘If you want to earn a living you have to know when to take a picture and when not to.’
Gouda sat in the studio sipping a bucket of tea, doling out his lessons to Ahmed in a soft voice like someone force-feeding a goose. When he came closer his face gave off the stench of the cheap cigarettes, mixed with grass and straw, which he not so much smoked as devoured whole. Gouda and cigarettes enjoyed a passionate relationship, and getting too close to him during conversation was like standing next to the chimney of a steam train as he puffed out the cloud of smoke that hovered over his head wherever he went.
Everything he said was prefaced with the phrase, ‘Between you and me,’ which lent even mundane topics an air of intrigue (‘Between you and me, it’s hot today.’). Bringing his face right up to Ahmed’s, he would whisper like a Buddhist sage divulging the secret of walking on water as he told the tale of every person they met in intimate detail, shedding light like a cinema usher guiding the audience to their seats with a torch.
From within, the casino was spacious. Four ascending steps separated it from the clamour of El-Haram Street, that cholesterol-clogged artery so badly in need of widening, with its constant din and small white microbuses vying with one another like sperm racing for the egg. Heading inside, one passed Hassan Abdo and Sayyid Qadari, whales without blowholes or fins, lurking in front of the casino with their pumped up arms and puffed out chests, clad in black T-shirts that fitted as tightly as paint to a wall and only increased their swollen appearance. With their bellies constricted by broad leather belts, they looked almost identical to heavies from the fifties, lacking only the studded leather bracelets.
The two men tried to adhere to the basic principles of their profession, which were as follows: to propagate a healthy dread of themselves as hostile beings and to encourage the customer to consider the consequences of crossing them while simultaneously taking great care to befriend the clientele, the source of their tips. They would meet patrons with bear hugs, deluging them with an exaggerated camaraderie in order to make them feel at home. Their wages were no higher than a typical 170 to 200 pound-per-month government salary and the owner of the casino was well aware that they made many times more from soliciting tips. They would pass their feelers over newcomers, using their experience in detecting troublemakers to weed out undesirables. They gave most of their attention to breaking up disputes, handing out complimentary one-on-one tutorials when one of the customers crossed the line, only to vanish suddenly when the police arrived and leave everything to the ‘prison manager’: the bulletproof vest who shielded the owner from the courts, the sacrificial lamb for when the roof caved in or the blood flowed.
For a fee the guest could order up anything in an instant, from drugs to weapons. Most of the establishment’s regular customers had need of protection or sought to flaunt their powers, and arrived in the company of armed bodyguards who would keep them from harm if the need arose. Just drop fifty or a hundred pounds into the palm of Hassan or Sayyid and you could carry an RPG in with you. An Apache helicopter might not be completely out of the question.
It was past one thirty in the morning when the main room within erupted in applause at the end of Rabei el-Badri’s set. As he waved his hands at those seated before him, blowing kisses like a bona fide chanteur, one of the audience came up and whispered in his ear.
Rabei chuckled and nodded his head. ‘My dear man, go ahead.’
He grinned like a rhinoceros, showing gleaming white teeth edged with black (evidence that they had undergone a cleaning operation at the dentist), and placed his hand on the admirer’s shoulder, turning his face to the camera phone and radiating a hyperbolic joy that nearly cracked his face in two. The first admirer was followed by two or three more, all wanting their picture taken alongside him.
Since Rabei was given to shouting and convulsions of vein-popping rage if anyone interrupted the flow of his mournful ballads, he had decreed that the pistachio and rose vendors and the men renting out shisha were forbidden to wander the floor during his set. He even prevented the photographers from taking pictures lest they distract from his performance, which he considered utterly exceptional. This had become the norm if Rabei or one of the other performers were on stage. Sally the dancer had imposed an almost total ban on movement in the main room during her set, and her predecessor Dunya had once slapped a rose vendor because he took too long to charge a customer and find his change while she was engaged in the performance of her official duties. As a result these parasites would rush to the main room between sets to snatch a living. From the pistachio vendors and the shisha boys to the freelance photographers, they were eager to make a profit to pay the exorbitant fees they were charged. No one took a cut from them and so they were hassled by everyone whose interests conflicted with their own. Considered to be robbing others of their share of the customer’s pocket, no one would think twice about murdering these salesmen if the need arose. The customer was always right, and should an argument break out with a customer, behold the maître d’ or floor manager turn into a superman: rescuing the patron from their clutches, selecting a scapegoat and dressing him down in front of all present.
The only relationship not characterised by mutual hatred was that between the photographers, on one side, and the dancers and singers who were careful to have their pictures taken with customers both to satisfy their need for publicity and love of the limelight and to market their time-worn goods. The performing artists of El-Haram Street were, by any standards, second- or third-class acts waiting for the sudden popularity that would secure their future, allo
wing them to look back at El-Haram Street like Mohammed Ali Street in the old movies, whose heroes had treated their old band members with disdain, pretending not to know them once they had become famous, telling them, ‘Later, later, I’m not free at the moment.’ Many are those who have achieved celebrity and turned their backs on the casinos, unwilling to dwell on a single night spent there. El-Haram Street and its casinos are the first station on the railroad to fame, the track that runs through weddings and private parties, then on to the video clips where ripe beauties jiggle their low-price cuts of meat, guaranteeing a market for whatever pop product they’re selling.
But that’s not to say that El-Haram Street only offers limited money-making opportunities. There were a few nuqtas, where the customer peels off notes and throws them at the dancer’s feet, and where every toss of a thousand pounds or more assures a comfortable life for the dancer, the casino and all its employees. On one occasion in the early nineties, the sum beneath one dancer had totalled some 60,000 pounds, cast down by a wealthy Arab, a thousand at a time, to be stamped by soft feet, their toenails painted a garish red. It was a token of appreciation, a down payment on love and the price of a night where she would render all she had to a man who had it all. But it was a rise in class and classiness that the casino artists needed in order to become truly fashionable: for the male singer to have young girls chase him wherever he went and plaster his picture on their bedroom walls, or the female dancer to be violated by every eye that saw her, sought after by all who desired her.
The casinos and nightclubs also functioned as a knacker’s yard for the performers who had been effaced by time and were now old news. With the enthusiasm of sterile men standing at the door of Hussein’s shrine, those performers returned to El-Haram Street hoping that it might restore them to life and fame, or at least provide them with the wherewithal for a decent funeral.