by Ahmed Mourad
‘It’s Spiderman, you fool,’ corrected Omar, interrupting him.
‘Batman then, picky. The point is the guy waves at them and the girls go crazy. And these girls are on heat, not like the broomsticks that went to school with us: Shaimaa the sofa and one-boobed Inas who Omar used to drool over.’
‘That’s envy, pure and simple. For your information that was the sexiest thing about her. She was one of a kind, you ignoramus’.
Hussein looked at him in disgust.
‘Where were we? The fifteen-year-old girls can stop traffic. They grab the guy’s leg and pull his trousers while he’s singing his heart out and they’re screaming. With a single concert he makes enough to buy me, the school and all the kids in it. Imagine having to teach that lot. And then you have the boys: Egypt’s youth! Utterly ignorant. It’s all cigarettes, spliffs and porn. But wait, here’s a grown man! You still watch porn, don’t you?’ pointing for a third time at Omar, who was as thrilled with himself as one of the legendary poets of medieval Baghdad’s Ukaz Market. ‘And these boys are doing it at an age when we never went further than getting fade-cuts and a game of ping-pong.’
‘You’re carrying all that around inside you and yet you still give private lessons and make loads of money?’ asked Omar.
‘It’s you that’s jinxing me, my fat-thighed friend. Sure I give private lessons. What’s the problem? You want me to take the four hundred pounds the school gives me and make it stretch to my wife, my daughter, the monthly expenses and all those problems that pop up out of nowhere? How? Imagine if I had a kid like you as well. My life would be complete. I’d have to ask the UN to drop emergency aid into the flat.’
‘In your dreams. You’d never have a son like me.’
‘Well, if I did I’d bury him alive the moment he was born. Listen, my boy, the midwife who attended your mother got amoebic dysentery and the nurse got Ebola. Your father died because you ate his food. You look like a water cistern on the roof of a house in Zawiya el-Hamra. Had enough yet? Besides, you should show me some respect instead of all this nonsense.’
‘But I always do! I’ve thought very highly of you since our schooldays.’
‘Wait a second, you aircraft carrier. Ahmed, do you know what School of Troublemakers did?
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I’m talking about the Egyptian play. It was a foreign-language story originally, there was a film made out of it starring Sidney Poitier, then they picked it up here and turned it into a play. Now, the film had a purpose. By the end of it you don’t want to be a waster, you want to smarten up your act and learn something. Ultimately, the film has a positive message. Here, though, they’ve taken those scoundrels as their role models; they repeat the dialogue word for word. They all want to be like the characters in the play Bahgat el-Abasiri and Mursi el-Zanati, smoking shisha and chatting about chicks in the classroom. Something to boast about in front of the girls. They memorise the entire Ahly team sheet plus the reserves and have no clue who Theodor Bilharz is.’
‘So who is Theodor Bilharz?’ said Omar.
‘He’s the one who discovered bilharzia in your mother, chubby. That play has messed us up. It’s made teachers the butt of jokes. I just wish a student would imagine his father standing in the teacher’s shoes and all his little friends having a go at him like that.’
‘God help us!’ said Omar. ‘I can’t imagine! But you were a little delinquent at school yourself.’
‘That’s the problem. You only understand once you’ve grown up and become a father. Now I regret everything I did to teachers. I swear to you, I have the feeling that God’s punishing me. And the kids are so difficult, a useless generation. However badly behaved I was, I was never rude to a teacher. Sure, I cheated. Skived off school? Fine. Pestered girls? Guilty. Did I throw my rubber on the floor, get down for a couple of hours to retrieve it and take a closer look at Miss Shadia’s legs? I did, and I’m ashamed of it. If my father had found out there would have been trouble. You know, I don’t like my daughter to see me while I’m teaching. Some rotten little scumbag might say something that would make the whole class laugh at me. I might throw him out and swear at him, but what else can I do? I give him private lessons outside school and he gives me an envelope full of cash. I can’t even look the little bastard in the eye. Feed the mouth and the eye becomes shy, as they say. I can’t even drop him down a year. His father will think I’m doing it because I want more money and when that happens I’ll lose my private lessons and it’ll be back to four hundred pounds a month. Just between you and me, it’s Israel; they’re putting something in the water or spraying stuff in the air. This stupidity isn’t a new phenomenon. And by the way, these chemicals affect the women too; they’re getting uglier, especially my wife: she must have ingested the lot. All my mischief at school is nothing in comparison to these kids’ antics.
‘I’ve been telling you it was Israel for ages. Finally, you admit it,’ said Omar, and the two began to scrap like bantams, a ritual from their schooldays that they renewed every time they met. All was affection, camaraderie and fierce friendship; laughter from the heart and eyes damp with tears of hysteria from their slanging match.
Ahmed’s attention wandered to an old shoe-shiner walking along the pavement on the other side of the street from the café. He was over seventy years of age and wore a faded striped gallabiya. Weak and exhausted and weighed down by the shoe-shine box, his back curved like a bow as he bent forward, his head almost touching his knees. His body was skinny and his legs delicate as matchsticks. He only looked downwards to his feet, taking a step or two forwards then stopping for a rest.
In Ahmed’s mind a single question repeated itself like a stuck record: what was forcing that man to work at such an age?
He slipped away from the gathering. The fighting cocks noticed nothing. He crossed the street, balling a five-pound note in his hand.
‘Take this, Granddad.’ He handed it to the man who slowly raised his head, muttering thanks and benedictions, and Ahmed felt a great inner peace.
Then he went back, interrupting the Hundred Year War that broke out between Hussein and Omar every time they met.
‘Now what, Hussein?’ he said.
‘Good luck.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning you’ll need it for the days ahead, what with all these brains rinsed in bleach and whitened up with laundry bluing. Our children will become something completely different to us and us to them. This country won’t be the same any more. These kids’ dreams aren’t our dreams.’
Then he looked at Omar and, scrutinising his belly, which had started to wobble like a sack of rice pudding, he made a fourth reference to his friend. ‘And nothing like the dreams of this ruminant here who can’t digest what he eats.’
The Third World War rumbled on in the café until the time came to return to real life. The gathering broke up. Warm farewells, a promise to meet again soon, an affectionate insult or two, and they parted ways.
Ahmed and Omar returned to the modest flat. They had a long night ahead of them.
‘Listen, Omar, let’s get the scanner working. There’s some negatives I want to look at.’
‘Now?’
‘Set it up and go to sleep. Just tell me know how to work it.’
‘Tiresome, tiresome.’
Omar hitched up his sagging trousers, yawning as he told Ahmed how to operate the device.
‘God go with you, boss.’
He made himself at home on the mattress as was his habit and in minutes the place was shaking to Omar’s nasal rendition of Beethoven’s Lost Symphony. Ahmed spent ten minutes getting used to the noise his friend was making, then opened the cabinet’s second drawer and took out a film container marked ‘Galal’. He positioned the negatives in the scanner and the pictures began to appear.
11
At that very moment Ghada was getting ready to go to bed in the room she shared with her sister. There were two beds and a bedside table on whi
ch stood a picture of a father embracing two little girls in a garden. Ghada was alone in the room, for while Miyada never said farewell to the television before four in the morning, she rose at quarter to eight to go to the gallery.
Reaching behind her ear she removed the earpiece and put it down beside her. That familiar silence; she had known it for as long as she could remember. It gave her a sense of inner serenity, a feeling that she had come home. She had no love of life’s din and clamour, or its rapid rhythm. Whenever she became stressed or encountered something that shook her, her hand would go to her earpiece to remove it, letting the stillness, that caring friend, return to her once more.
Her hand went to her bag, took out the scrawled letter and opened it. She began to read it for the eighth or ninth time. Despite its hackneyed approach, the thought of the letter left a delicious sensation in Ghada’s soul. Some effervescent substance between her lungs bubbled against them whenever she remembered that she had received the offer, even though she had not yet accepted. Despite his frankness, he was mysterious to her and she did not know him. Her friend Abeer’s analysis had been that he was a timid young man, notwithstanding the letter’s jocular tone, and she encouraged Ghada to meet him anyway.
She clung on to the memory of his features, which were gradually vanishing from her mind, trying not to forget his face the way a taxi driver’s is forgotten. Ahmed Kamal had taken her by surprise. He hadn’t given her the chance to decide whether to decline or accept.
She finished reading the letter, then got up and performed two rak‘as to God, praying for guidance and help. Folding the letter, she put it in her bag and turned off the bedside light, lying back and staring at the ceiling. She heard nothing save the sound of silence until sleep overcame her.
The state of affairs in Ahmed’s flat was somewhat different.
A whirlwind of wakefulness spun relentlessly inside him. Two hours went by with him saving one picture after another in high resolution, and in order that he might have space for them all he erased a large proportion of the data on the hard drive. He even deleted some of the raunchy material that occupied more than three quarters of the space on Omar’s machine, knowing that Omar would certainly kill him, but the photographs held all his attention. He no longer heard the noise made by the giant digger that lay on the mattress behind him puffing a cloud of humidity up into the heavens of their room. In Ahmed’s mind all sounds dwindled to nothing and silence reigned.
It was a complete record of Galal Mursi’s various visits to the casino, and every time the same story: young girls no older than twenty, the same girl scarcely ever appearing with him more than once, and all caked in make-up, their faces and bodies riper than their years. Galal embraced them, or, to be more accurate, he squeezed them, in his eyes a look of triumph befitting the liberator of Jerusalem. One or two of the girls now moved in acting circles. One of these was Qamar, whom he had seen with Galal. She looked young in the pictures, her fruits yet to mature. She was his pet project and he seemed pleased with her progress. Galal appeared younger in a considerable number of the pictures.
So he used to like photographs then? Until, that is, his life entered the spotlight and he no longer wanted anyone to see behind the scenes and exhume his scandalous past. So he abstained from photography, though he continued to compensate Gouda every time he saw him. ‘If you feed the mouth the eye will look away from what it has seen and remembered,’ to quote loosely.
Ahmed created a file and named it ‘Galal’, then arranged the pictures inside it with the care of a make-up artist. He took out a container marked ‘Sally’.
He opened another file in her name and started gathering the pictures together. There were lots of pictures of her dancing and wearing racy costumes, and a substantial number of her with drunken, anonymous admirers, as well as a few famous businessmen and wealthy Arabs crowning her efforts with vine wreaths of hundreds. There were some strange shots of her with Karim Abbas that appeared to have been taken without their knowledge or the use of a flash, exchanging money and arguing violently. Finally, there were pictures of her with Hisham Fathi. He looked in good health, circling her waist with his hands and holding a cigarette.
Ahmed closed Sally’s file and opened another in the name of Karim Abbas. His file was disreputable: all deals with men renting the right to exploit Sally or some other girl. Ahmed knew he ran a private network: a network that never understood the message, ‘This number is currently unavailable’.
Three more files of nearly identical content were of Fathi el-Assal, Hisham Fathi and Habib Amin, the nail that had broken off in Ahmed’s heart. Like stallions in the heart of the harem they competed over the same faces and bodies and were part of Sally’s inner circle of companions.
Ahmed spent the night collecting and sorting his spoils. They were rich spoils too. Never would he have imagined that one day he would possess the like. He created a separate section for politicians and members of parliament, which contained, among others, two pictures of a famous political advisor with a major screen actress looking far too comfortable with each other.
Finally, he created a file, which he named ‘X’, into which he put all the faces he either didn’t know or recognised without knowing their names. As time passed, picture following picture, he became conscious that there had been much within Gouda, much that he had never expressed, content to hide behind a veil of fabulous tales containing everything he lacked the courage to carry out in reality. He hadn’t been as blind as he pretended; he had understood the reality of his surroundings. So he was perceptive, but something had induced him to stay silent, to surrender. It wasn’t his livelihood that turned him into a silent witness. There had been some reason, something that had made the man take the pictures and hold onto them, like a mortician who does not dare to work directly with the bodies in his care but instead spies on them, even pulling back their shrouds to expose their nakedness. The thoughts in his head began to collide like squash balls until the call to prayer sounded.
He rose to carry out his ablutions and perform the dawn prayer.
Returning to the computer, he was on the point of shutting down so that he could get some sleep before going to work when a film container, wedged among all the others in the drawer, called out to him. It was the only container wrapped in white paper; the one labelled ‘The Wedding’.
Ahmed split open the paper wrapping. On its inner surface was written ‘The Gezira Sheraton – 21/4/2005’.
It looked like a standard wedding reel when he held it up in front of the computer. By the screen’s light he made out a wedding procession with the bride and groom at its centre and shots of guests. Nothing out of the ordinary. But, unlike all the other negatives, it seemed out of place among the drawer’s contents. Something inside Ahmed impelled him to unroll the film. It had been divided in half, and he placed the first strip on the scanner.
The pictures started to appear one after the other: a wedding procession; a father holding his daughter’s hand as they walked down a flight of stairs, then handing her to the groom; women ululating; the bride’s fat relative performing the Dance of the Seven Veils for the benefit of the groom; happy old people and two tall glasses of sharbat to toast the procession; a gold ring moving from right hand to left. Pop star Mohammed Fouad suddenly made an appearance and the pictures became more crowded, filled with clapping hands.
The first half of the film came to an end. There was nothing untoward in these pictures, which Ahmed searched through carefully for anything suspicious. He took out the second strip and placed it on the scanner.
Mohammed Fouad disappeared, his place taken by a plump, nondescript dancer. Ahmed scrutinised her face. It could almost have belonged to a government clerk it was that conventional. There was a picture of the couple cutting a ten-tiered wedding cake, and others of them inspecting the buffet, followed by six murky shots that grew gradually brighter from first to last to reveal the silhouette of an illuminated building by the Nile; the silhouette of the
Grand Hyatt Hotel.
Ahmed held his breath for a full minute, the length of time he watched the next picture appear on the scanner, which was as slow as a lizard crawling across ice. The camera’s long zoom lens zeroed in on the bar on the fortieth floor.
Bar Vertigo.
Seventeen shots that paralysed his thoughts and brought his mind to a standstill, obliterating whatever composure he still possessed. His forehead grew damp, his skin crawled and he clenched his jaw. Gouda hadn’t been lying; not when it came to this particular story. It had been delivered amid his other fantastical tales, which had left it tainted by association, as with the boy who cried wolf.
The pictures were a record of the last moments of the massacre at the bar: part of Ahmed’s head protruding over the balcony wall as he photographed the bloodbath through the window; Hisham Fathi aiming his gun and falling; a figure standing in the shadows with his back to the wall, his face concealed; an attacker walking up to Muhi Zanoun, shooting him and bending over him; a couple of blank frames; then a picture of the attackers heading for the emergency exit.
If all the world’s a stage, then where was the audience sitting?
Ahmed closed his eyes and buried his face in his hands. He had no idea how long he spent in that position. An entire movie reel played back before him, its every detail as fresh as though it were taking place now. He remembered everything like a copper etching wiped clean of dust. His eyes glittered a little. He laughed and stifled his laugh so as not to wake his friend. He started looking through the pictures in front of him like a man possessed, opening them with Photoshop and adjusting the brightness. He zoomed in on faces he had already forgotten. The killer’s face: that face that haunted his mind like a phantom was now before him! He created a separate close-up of the man. The body appeared muscular but his features were unclear: obscured by light reflecting off the window. What luck! If he had planned to commit his crime unobserved he had failed, but fortune had favoured him.