Читать книгу Friendly Fire - Humphrey Davies - Страница 6

1

If I weren’t Egyptian, I would want to be Egyptian.

—Mustafa Kamil^*

I HAVE CHOSEN THIS SAYING as the first words of these papers of mine because they are, in my opinion, the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. They represent (assuming that the one who said them really meant them) the sort of stupid tribal loyalty that makes my blood boil every time I think of it. What if the good Mustafa Kamil had been born Chinese, for example, or Indian? Would he not have repeated the same phrase out of pride in his Chinese or Indian nationality? And can such pride have any value if it’s the outcome of coincidence? And if Mustafa Kamil could choose—of his own conscious volition, as he would have us believe—to be Egyptian, there would have to be important reasons to make him so choose. He would have to find in the Egyptian people some virtues not to be found in any other. What, then, might such virtues be? Are the Egyptians distinguished by, for example, their seriousness and love of work, like the Germans or the Japanese? Do they love risk-taking and change, like the Americans? Do they honor history and the arts, like the French and the Italians? They have no such distinguishing characteristics. What then does distinguish the Egyptians? What are their virtues? I challenge anyone to cite me a single Egyptian virtue. Cowardice and hypocrisy, underhandedness and cunning, laziness and spite—these are our characteristics as Egyptians. And because we know the truth about ourselves, we cover it over with a lot of shouting and lies—empty, ringing slogans that we repeat day in day out about our ‘great’ Egyptian people. And the sad thing is that we’ve repeated these lies so often we’ve ended up believing them. Indeed—and this is truly amazing—we’ve arranged these lies about ourselves as songs and anthems. Have you heard of any other people in the world doing such a thing? Do the English, for example, sing, Ah England, O Land of Ours! Your earth is of marble made, your dust with musk and amber laid? Such banalities are an integral part of our makeup. Imagine, in the reader set for Second Year Elementary, I read the following words: “God loves Egypt very much and talked about her in His Noble Book. This is why He has blessed her with our lovely clement climate, summer and winter, and why He protects her from the wiles of her enemies.”

See the tissue of lies that they stuff into children’s heads? That “lovely clement climate” of ours is in fact hell. Seven months from March to October the searing heat roasts our skins until the beasts expire and the asphalt on the streets melts under the blazing sole of the sun—and still we thank God for our beautiful climate! And again, if God protects Egypt from the wiles of her enemies, as they claim, how come we’ve been occupied by every people on Earth? The history of Egypt is in reality nothing but a continuous series of defeats inflicted upon us by all the nations of the world, starting with the Romans and going all the way to the Jews.

All these stupidities get on my nerves, and what annoys me even more is that we—we pitiful Egyptians—like to bathe in the reflected glory of the pharaohs. Under the pharaohs, the Egyptians formed a truly great nation, but what have we to do with them? We are the corrupt, indeterminate outcome of the miscegenation of the conquerors’ troops with their captives from the defeated population. The Egyptian peasant whose land was violated and manhood dishonored at the hands of the conquerors for centuries on end lost everything that linked him to his great ancestors, and from his long acquaintance with humiliation he came to feel at ease with it, surrendered to it, and over time acquired the mentality of a servant. Try to recall the few truly courageous Egyptians you have met in your life. The Egyptian, no matter how high he has risen or how well educated he has become, will cringe before you if you are the stronger, smiling to your face and buttering you up while he hates you and tries to bring about your downfall by some foolproof covert means that will cost him neither confrontation nor danger. A mere servant, that’s your Egyptian. I hate the Egyptians and I hate Egypt. I hate it with all my heart and hope it gets even worse and more wretched. Even though I take care to hide this hatred (to avoid stupid problems), sometimes I can’t keep it in. Once, at the house of one of my colleagues, I was watching a soccer match between Egypt and an African country called Zaire, and when the African player scored the winning goal, I yelled out loud with joy while the others expressed their disapproval at my happiness at our defeat. I paid them no attention, though, and continued watching, with schadenfreude, the faces of the defeated Egyptians. Their expressions were flat and broken and their features exuded sorrow and impotence. This is the way the Egyptians have really looked for thousands of years.

2

My mind was freed of delusions at one go, a fact of which I am proud, for I have known many men, some of them intelligent and well educated, who wasted their lives on phantasms—beliefs and theories the dupes spent years chasing like a mirage. Nationalism, religion, Marxism—all those dazzling words revealed their spuriousness to me at an early age. Getting rid of religion was easy. Marxism lasted longer. I acknowledge that Marxism has a rational side that deserves respect, and at the same time it leaves a mark on the soul that outlasts the idea itself. I remained a committed Marxist for two years, but I always felt I’d change. I couldn’t understand why I should make sacrifices for vulgar creatures like workers and peasants. I used to observe the common people exchanging their banal jokes. I’d watch them on their feast days when they surged onto the streets like over-excited beasts, treading everything beautiful under their blind heavy feet, and Marx’s grand words about them would shrivel before my contempt and hatred. Was I going to struggle and die for the likes of those? They were animals who deserved nothing but derision and to be ruled by terror; that was the only language they understood. Try just once for yourself being weak in front of one of them and see what he does to you.

With the passing of Marxism, I achieved full control over my mind and its liberation, and then I felt lonely. Delusions, much as they deceive you, also keep you company. The cold severe truth on the other hand casts you into a cruel wilderness. My success in taming my mind was directly paralleled by my failure to gain mastery over my feelings. The most complex mental problems pose no challenge to my thinking but any spontaneous simple interaction with people throws me into confusion and renders me powerless. There is a confirmed inverse relationship between awareness and action by which the people most apt to act are the most lethargic mentally and the dumbest, and vice versa. As awareness grows, so the ability to act is disturbed. My head—which never stops thinking and reviewing every single possibility and probability—this same head impedes my correct conduct in situations that most people consider quite ordinary and which they negotiate with complete ease. Before I go to visit a friend at his house for the first time, I am kept awake by the thought that the doorkeeper, whom I don’t know, will stop me and ask me which apartment I’m going to. Worrying over the doorkeeper’s question becomes such an obsession for me that I often insist to my friends that we meet in a public place rather than in their homes (without, of course, disclosing the reason to them), and when I’m forced in the end to face the moment when I have to cross the lobby of an apartment block in which my friend lives, I’m as ill at ease as a child, and I whistle, or look at the watch on my wrist, or fiddle with my shirt sleeve, to show that I am not concerned. On such occasions, the doorkeeper’s call quickly reaches me, for I will have passed him by, ignoring his enquiry and hurrying on without paying him any attention; but he will rush after me, catch up with me, and finally stop and question me; and, despite that fact that I am expecting the question, I feel each time an immense sense of affront at everything that has happened. When I respond, I sometimes do so roughly and harshly and at other times I am totally demolished before him, stammering and producing my words falteringly and agitatedly; and then the doorkeeper draws himself to his full height, his voice rises, and he stares in my face with wide-open, powerful eyes, for he has sensed my weakness. What I am never capable of in such circumstances is to give the impression of being a self-confident gentleman sure of his capabilities, of answering the doorkeeper in a calm voice and with a smile, and saying, “I’m going to see So-and-so Bey.” If I were to answer such a person just once in this fashion, he would back off immediately and be reduced right away to his natural size. This is the poise that I lack and I am incapable of determining if my unbalanced feelings are attributable to my overly developed awareness or to the circumstances of my upbringing. My memories of boyhood and adolescence are imprinted on my mind in a somewhat ‘historical’ way. When I review the events of my life, I feel as though I were a tragic hero accepting the blows of fate with a noble, courageous heart. Heroes, unlike common people, do not meet with ephemeral, ordinary events: everything that happens to them is, of necessity, significant and fateful. Similarly, events are not imprinted on my memory as separate, scattered flashes but as a continuous line of points that are joined in a way that can neither be predicted nor prepared for. I imagine it as being in the form of a cardboard box divided up by partitions into small, intersecting passageways.

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

This is what the box looks like from above (fig. 1). A small wooden doll whose movements are controlled by numerous strings (fig. 2) passes through the labyrinthine passageways of the box; the strings are so thin they can barely be seen, but they are too strong to be cut and they are gathered in a single large hand, outside the box. This hand controls the doll’s movements and the owner of the hand sees the box in its entirety, with all its passageways and turns. The doll, on the other hand, can see only the passage that it is going down and the moment it reaches the end of that passage the strings draw it toward a new one. I am that doll, the cardboard box is my life, and the big hand is the hand of fate.

Fate holds our destinies just as the large hand holds the doll—with implacable, inescapable control. It plays with our capabilities and our wishes and it plays with us, and its sole motive for doing so is its excessive love of play—not goodness or justice or truth or any of that stuff—and if it ever were to grasp the sorrows that it causes us, were ever to feel the pain that it inflicts on us, it would hide its face in shame at its doings.

3

Ever since he was a child, he’d loved to draw—people’s faces, trees, the cars in the streets. Everything his eyes saw was imprinted in detail on his young mind. Then the lines he made would run over the paper to re-shape things into the way he wanted to see them. When he reached fifteen, his love of drawing became a problem because he neglected his schoolwork altogether. Every morning, he’d escape from the school and use his pocket money to buy coloring pencils and a sketchbook. Then he’d go to the municipal garden in Zaqaziq, isolate himself on an empty seat, and draw.^* His father dealt with him harshly, often beat him, and often hid his pencils from him and tore up his drawings, but none of it was any use: his love of drawing was stronger. When he was twenty, his father died suddenly and that day his fate was decided. The last barrier was broken and he had soon left Zaqaziq, where he had been born, to live in a small room on the roof of an old house in the Bein el-Sarayat neighborhood of Cairo. Before two years had passed, he was drawing the main cartoon for three weekly magazines, and at age twenty-four he put on his first exhibition of oil paintings.

These beginnings were worthy, no doubt, of Ragheb, Bikar, or any other great painter, but I’m not talking about any of them.^* These were the beginnings of Abd el-Ati, and who has heard of him? Abd el-Ati was my father, and, despite the exciting, promise-packed start, he ended up far from what was expected. Abd el-Ati did not shine and his great hopes as a painter were never realized. He changed nothing in the development of painting, as he had dreamed of doing, and thirty years after his move to Cairo, my father was still an obscure artist earning his living doing drawings for a magazine called Life that nobody read and getting by on other small jobs, such as supervising the wall newspapers produced at certain schools and giving private art lessons to the children of the rich. This was where Abd el-Ati was at fifty, and I ask myself, why did my father fail? Was he lacking in talent? For sure he had more than many painters who succeeded and became famous. Was it laziness and love of pleasure that did for him? On the contrary, my father spent money on alcohol and drugs only during his last years. Before then, he used to produce prolifically and persistently and when I was little I’d often wake in the morning to find he hadn’t slept but spent the entire night on a new painting. I loved him then. His eyes would be exhausted, his face drawn, and his laugh low and satisfied. He’d dry his hands quickly on his paint-spattered smock and bend down to kiss me and his good, coarse smell would take possession of me. Then he’d take me by the hand, pull me back a little, point to the painting on its easel, and ask me, pretending to be very grave, “What think you, my dear sir, of the work? Do you like it?”

My mother would protest laughingly and say, “You’re asking Isam? What can the child know about painting?”

And my father would reply, picking me up in his arms and kissing me, “What do you mean? He will be a great artist. One day I’ll tell you, ‘I told you so!’”

If it wasn’t laziness or lack of talent, then what was it? When I got older, I worked out the reason. What my father lacked was charisma—that halo that encircles great men and grants them influence over others.

Charisma is not a quality that can be acquired but is given to some and not others. Those who have it are born with a place reserved for them at the top. All they have to do for admiration and appreciation to be showered upon them is to work with a certain proficiency. The efforts of those who don’t have it are a hopeless battle against nature that they are fated to lose, and no matter how much such people may wear themselves out over their work, the appreciation of others will come to them hesitantly, permeated with doubt and reserve.

The person who discovered the New World wasn’t Christopher Columbus but an aged sailor called Pinzón who was his shipmate. Pinzón pointed out the right route to his captain and then his name fell into oblivion under the impact of the clamor of glory that erupted around the name of the immortal, charismatic Columbus.

My father’s fate was Pinzón’s—to be created without luster, as ordinary as millions of others like him who have nothing to distinguish them. Of medium build, bald, and a little fat. You could sit with him for a whole hour, then he’d leave and you wouldn’t give him a second thought, and you’d probably get his name wrong if you met him again. His voice had a slight huskiness to it which people listening to him would assume was about to disappear, leaving a clear sound that would hold the attention of those who heard it. But the huskiness would not disappear and my father’s voice would emerge as though constricted, the words running into one another. He spoke fast, the words tumbling out of his mouth, and he was incapable of holding people’s interest if he spoke anything more than short phrases. If this happened people would turn their attention to other speakers, at which point my father would tug on their sleeves or grip their shoulders with his fingers to keep their interest, looking at such moments like a helpless child whose mother is getting ahead of him in the crowd, so that he has to cling onto her skirts in order not to get lost. At home, my father wasn’t one of those husbands who lay down the law; rather, he obeyed my mother in everything. I never felt any awe of him when I was young and sometimes when he scolded me a malign and delicious urge would push me to challenge his authority. When I reached the secondary school, my friends at the Ibrahimiya School were astonished when I told them that my father knew that I would play truant. I used to calmly tell my father that I wasn’t going to school the next day but was going to the movies, and he would listen to me and then fiddle with his mustache—a habit of his when agitated or surprised—then pretend for a moment to be thinking, and ask me with a sort of irritated laugh that passed for permission, “Aren’t you afraid you’ll miss something important if you play hooky?”

And that would be it—a question, and the matter left to me. If I ignored the question, things ended there. If, however, I hesitated and seemed to be thinking it over, he’d be encouraged and would rush to talk to me enthusiastically about the importance for regular study. Then he’d say, in an uncertain voice, “I don’t know, you know. I don’t think there’s any call for this playing hooky thing. What do you think?”

My father was weak and as a result his life ended in total defeat. But despite his failure and his weakness, I liked him. I liked him because he accepted his defeat with the silence of one who knows the rules. He didn’t fill the world with lament and he didn’t turn into a poisonous insect. On the occasion of a major competition, my father would await the result among the other competitors, and, when he found out that he’d lost and someone else had won, he wouldn’t express astonishment or anger but carefully gather his things together, smiling sadly, and then make haste to catch the last bus and, if he felt comfortable with the passenger sitting next to him, would tell him everything that had happened, in a neutral tone of voice. His neighbor would listen to him, at first with pity, but then some small thing—such as my father’s shoes or his shirt or even an expression that passed over his face—would cause him to understand why he had failed and the man would feel less, or even not at all, sorry.

Lots of people spent their evenings at our house. There were many names belonging to people of differing professions and ages. As some disappeared through travel, or death, new faces appeared. Despite their differences, they were joined by a common thread: all were major unfinished works. El-Ghamdi was a teacher of Arabic language who had once hoped to be a poet. Muhammad Irfan was a former Marxist who had abandoned his dream of changing the world and made do with arts journalism; he made up news items about dancers and singers and blackmailed them. Even ‘Uncle’ Anwar I discovered from my father, had dreamed of being a great songwriter and had ended up playing backing zither to the dancer called Sugar. And there were many others. A band of people with shattered dreams, like old people carping at a wedding, who met every evening to curse blind luck and the lousy times: “We knew So-and-so when he used to pray God for the price of a cigarette, and now he’s got more money than he knows what to do with, with a villa in el-Maadi, a chalet in el-Agami, and three luxury cars. And So-and-so, the famous singer—didn’t he fail the radio test in the fifties? You can believe that story because I was a member of the committee!” When I sat with my father’s friends, I never felt for an instant that they loved one another. They feuded all the time and violent quarrels were always breaking out among them. Nevertheless, they took care to come and never broke with one another because what joined them was stronger than their enmity. They needed these gatherings, because at them their sense of inadequacy was dissolved in their awareness of their common fate, and when they met none of them was embarrassed by his failure.

I would use any excuse to escape from sitting with them and only stay up late with them if Uncle Anwar was present. Uncle Anwar was different. He was my father’s closest friend, the two of them joined by thirty years of friendship. Once they had lived together in a single room on Bein el-Sarayat, my father dreaming of painting, Anwar of music. Anwar earned a lot from his work with Sugar and spent lavishly on himself and his friends. He had never married because marriage, in his opinion, gave you the blues and the blues shortened your life. Uncle Anwar was nice. He never stopped making fun of things and stirring those around him to laughter. On what he called ‘nights of joy,’ which were those following the wedding of some rich person, Uncle Anwar would appear in the circle bearing ‘goodies’—a big bottle of brandy, an ounce of goodquality hashish, and a kilo of kebab and sweetbreads, and when his friends received him with cheers, Uncle Anwar would affect a grave face, throw down in front of them the things that he had brought, and pronounce, in the tones of a strict father, “Eat and drink until a white thread can be distinguished against the black hides of your miserable fathers!”^*

Uncle Anwar hated nobody so much as he hated Sugar, the dancer, against whom he directed the greater part of his jokes and calumniations. Sometimes, even, when conversation had dried up and silence reigned, one of those present would ask Anwar for news of his mistress and Anwar would launch into a virtuoso display of sarcasm at the expense of Sugar’s ignorance, arrogance, rich lovers, and general awfulness, and the place would ring with laughter once more. Despite Anwar’s imperious love of music, he would go whole nights without playing, refusing immediately and roughly if anyone asked him to do so, and if anyone insisted, a fight would sometimes break out. Anwar’s friends knew how he was and so didn’t ask him, knowing that, at a given moment, which no one could predict, Anwar would suddenly stretch out his hand, take the zither, put on the plectra, and start to play. If one contemplated his face after a few minutes of playing, it would seem that he could no longer see the audience or make out his surroundings. When Anwar finished, he would receive the shouts of admiration and the applause with a face drawn and pale and he’d remain like that for a while before resuming his unruliness and sarcasm, at which point we’d know that he’d returned.

There are no weddings on Tuesdays. Uncle Anwar would show up early, the first to arrive, his face still bearing the traces of sleep and battered by the din of the previous night’s show. He would greet my mother politely and make his way to the studio. There, he would remove his suit, hang it up carefully, and put on his gallabiya (Uncle Anwar always kept one of his gallabiyas at our house). After a little while my father would come. They would drink tea together and then sit on the floor and busy themselves preparing the equipment for the evening. They began with the goza, or hand-held waterpipe, the cleaning and readying of which were important tasks that kept both Anwar and my father busy and often gave rise to arguments. My father might be of the opinion that it was the pieces of thick paper used to tighten the joints that were impeding the flow of the smoke, while Anwar might claim that it was the reed stem that was blocked. I used to watch them—Anwar in his striped gallabiya, seated cross-legged and tearing up little pieces of paper that he would stuff between the stem of the waterpipe and the tobacco bowl and my father next to him, repeatedly puffing into the mouthpiece of the reed and listening to how the water gurgled. When they came to Cairo thirty years before, two young artists full of determination and ambition, had it ever occurred to them that things would turn out like this? How distant the beginning seemed now and how strange the end! Usually it was Anwar who was the cleverer at diagnosing the goza’s problems and when he’d finished placing the tightening wads, he’d light a bowl of tobacco to test it and draw a long breath, which would be followed by a fierce fit of coughing that turned his eyes red. Then he’d pass the pipe over to my father, saying, “I told you it was the wads. They’re dandy now. Take a drag and ask the Lord to bless me,” and my father would look in my direction and say laughingly, before thrusting the mouthpiece into his mouth, “Your Uncle Anwar, see, before the music, used to work as a goza mechanic on Bein el-Sarayat,” and Anwar would burst out with, “Don’t say such things, you son of a bitch! You want Isam to get funny ideas about me?”^* Then he’d turn to me, an injured expression on his face, and say, “Don’t you believe a word your father says, Master Isam! I’ve been an honest man all my life. It was your father who taught me to smoke hashish and at the beginning I thought it was chocolate.”

A hail of jokes and quips would then be released, after which Anwar’s face would suddenly resume its serious expression and he’d stand up and thrust his hand into the pocket of his jacket where it hung on the wall and take out a piece of hashish wrapped in cellophane and hand it to my father who would sniff it, try it with his teeth, squeeze it between his fingers, and proclaim it to be, “Sweet, Anwar! Mustafa’s? What do you say? Should we wait for the rest or start with a solo?”

Anwar would sit down cross-legged again and say in tones of the utmost seriousness, “Let’s start with a solo in the mode Sika.”^*

He would bite the hashish into little pieces which he would distribute among the pipe bowls of molasses-soaked tobacco, then light the charcoal, and set to smoking right away. They’d ask me to stay with them and I’d sit and smoke with them, and after a few pipes the drug would go to Anwar’s head, his puffy eyelids would droop, a grave expression would appear in his eyes, and he’d nod his head as though following an inner dialogue that none but he could hear. Then he’d turn to my father, smile, pat him on his thick leg, and say, “Honestly, my dear Mr. Abduh, don’t you think you should have given up all this painting business? You could have learned to be a belly dancer. What’s wrong with belly dancing? By now you’d be something of a different order entirely. Old Woman Sugar does this (here Anwar would twitch his waist, holding his arms up as though dancing) and gets five hundred pounds a night, the bitch.”

My father would be on the verge of responding when Uncle Anwar, all taken with zeal, would suddenly leap up, halfway through the pipe, and cry, “What do say, Abduh? It’s really too bad of you! I’m telling you, all you have to do is this and you get five hundred pounds,” and Anwar and my father would dissolve into a long bout of laughter.

At lunch my father would drink a glass of rum, a habit that helped him to sleep well during his siesta, or so he said. The rum would send its warmth through my father’s body and he’d talk to us—me and my mother—and laugh, and sometimes a mysterious melancholy would seep into him, but on this one day he seemed more than usually upset. He kept fiddling with his mustache in silence, his eyes staring into space, and when my mother asked him, “What’s wrong with you?” my father (who seemed to have been waiting for the question) sighed deeply, took a gulp from his glass of rum, and said, playing with a matchstick between his teeth, “Would you believe, I got a letter today from someone who admires my work.”

My father seemed embarrassed and went on in a louder voice as though saying something he’d prepared ahead of time, “Naturally, I’m happy, as any artist would be, to get a letter from an admirer. But what makes me happier is that there’s someone out there who actually follows the figurative arts in Egypt in these days of ours.”

There was silence for a moment and my father took a sip from his glass. I looked at my mother and got the impression that she wanted to say something but hadn’t yet worked out what, so I jumped in with, “So where’s the letter?”

“Over there by you, in the pocket of my jacket.”

I got up and inserted my hand into the pocket of the jacket hanging on the coat rack in the corner of the parlor, and pulled out the letter. The envelope was written in an elegant black hand “Abd el-Ati, Life, 6 Qasr el-Aini Street.” I opened the envelope and pulled out the letter, and as I started reading my mother exclaimed, “Read it out loud, Isam.”

I haven’t mentioned the sender’s name, which was Mahmoud Ali Farghal, from Minyet el-Nasr, Governorate of el-Daqahliya. He said that he worked as a school art teacher and did oil paintings and dreamed of becoming a great artist like my father. He asserted that he followed my father’s work in Life every Wednesday and had seen one exhibition that my father had put on in Cairo some years ago and that though he’d come to Cairo especially to see the exhibition, and had wanted to talk with my father, his great shyness had prevented him from introducing himself. All the same, he averred again that he would be visiting my father soon at his Life office so as to make his acquaintance and show him his work. He ended the letter with the words, “Kindly accept the salutations of your pupil and disciple, Mahmoud Ali Farghal.”

That Farghal was a genuine admirer of my father’s work was a possibility not to be dismissed, for one is always coming across a certain type of person who interests himself in matters no one but he knows anything about and gets very enthusiastic about them, such as the people who support the Tirsana soccer club or devotees of the voice of Abd el-Latif el-Tilbani, for example.^* Equally possible was that Farghal was a hypocrite who wanted to get close to my father so that the latter could help him in some way or give him an introduction to someone.

When I finished reading the letter, my father was blushing with ecstatic joy. He started fiddling with the fork on his empty plate, a happy look in his eyes, and he pursed his lips like a child trying not to smile. My mother, who only now seemed to have taken in what was happening, burst out with, “Wonderful, Abduh! Congratulations! I think we ought to frame the letter and hang it in the sitting room.”

I laughed out loud and my father shouted in protest, “What’s all this nonsense about framing and hanging? You really are a dumb cow.”

My mother turned pale for a moment but then burst out laughing and mumbled, “Never mind, never mind. No framing. Don’t get mad.”

My father lit a cigarette and explained to her, this time in a calm, restrained voice, that his happiness was not because he had an admirer but on behalf of the figurative arts, an idea that he then expatiated on at length and in various formulations. Then he moved on to a lot of stuff about the great artist’s duty toward the talent of the rising generation and spoke about his professors of painting and how they’d encouraged him. I felt that my father was looking forward to the day when he would meet Farghal and that he would make every effort to help him.

My father went into his room to sleep, my mother took the dishes into the kitchen, and I sat on my own. The letter still lay before me on the table. I looked at it. Farghal’s writing was beautiful and polished. I stretched out my hand and took the letter and the feel of the paper on my fingers was smooth and uniform. I looked at the picture of my father and mother in their wedding clothes that hung on the wall. At first I thought about the style of my father’s suit in the picture. Then I lost my concentration for a moment and found myself grasping the piece of the paper in my hands. I was tearing it in half. The tearing made a quietly rough sound. An obscure anxiety gnawed at me when I finished but I dismissed it and hurried—as though to reassure myself—to rip it into small pieces, and then even smaller ones. Each time it got harder to tear the paper but I continued until the paper had been turned into little bits, scattered everywhere, which I gathered carefully in my hand. I then went into the kitchen and threw these out of the window that gave onto the light shaft in the center of the building and watched the breeze scatter them everywhere. Afterward, I exchanged a few ordinary words with my mother, left her, went to my room, and slept.

That evening, my mother woke me up and said, as she offered me a glass of tea, “You father wants to see you.” I wasn’t thinking about anything specific and said to myself I’d drink my tea, smoke a cigarette, and then wash my face and go see him.

The evening session was in full swing as usual and I was greeted by a thick cloud of smoke and the piercing smell of hashish. My father’s bloodshot eyes showed me that he’d been smoking for a while. Uncle Anwar sang out his welcome.

“Hello, Isam! Where’ve you been?”

My father invited me to sit down, so I sat, and Uncle Anwar held out the goza to me, but I declined because I had to study, to which Uncle Anwar responded, as he put the mouthpiece into his mouth, “What of it? Is that any reason not to? You can do your best studying when you’re stoned. Did you know that when I was in Secondary I’d roll my usual couple of cigarettes, settle back, and then the biggest bitch of a math problem wouldn’t take me a second?”

“Which would explain why you made such a mess of school, you loser!”

So cried Muhammad Irfan before bursting into laughter, and other low laughs issued from those present. I sensed that the atmosphere was strained for some reason and it wasn’t long before I realized that my entrance had interrupted a heated discussion between my father and el-Ghamdi.

El-Ghamdi was over fifty but seemed younger. He was good-looking, with wide green eyes and well-defined strong clear features. His chestnut hair was combed carefully back and he had a light rosy complexion. I found something off-putting about the man, the same thing I often find in Arabic language teachers—a meekness of spirit and a hateful clinging nature. El-Ghamdi smiled and said in a clear voice and measured tones, as though he were a professor delivering the lesson of the day to his students, “Your problem, Abduh, is that you’re an optimist. Too much so. You have to be aware that art and literature in Egypt are completely dead. We need at least half a century before the Egyptians can recover their interest in the arts, before a real public for the arts can be formed—with all due respect to the colleague who sent you the letter.”

He smiled as he spoke and stared with his trusting green eyes into the faces of those around him. It was clear that he was having an effect on them and that they were convinced by what he was saying. My father seemed agitated and bursting to express his disagreement. He squirmed in his seat and sighed. Then he said, his words rapid and staccato, “All the same, Ghamdi, you have to make allowances. A few individuals are enough to make a start.”

El-Ghamdi cried out in tones of histrionic disagreement and it became clear that he was determined to carry my father’s defeat to the bitter end.

“What start, my dear sir? Wake up! All this fuss because one admirer wrote you a letter, and you want to convince us that there’s a public for art in Egypt? Go down into the street and then you’ll get it! Make a tour of the bus stops! Look at the people’s faces! You think those people could give a damn about art? Those people? When people like that go to sleep all they dream about is finding chickens at the co-op!”

El-Ghamdi laughed and so did everyone else. I didn’t, though, and nor did Uncle Anwar, who busied himself cleaning the goza, though he did seem to be following the conversation with interest. El-Ghamdi bent forward where he was sitting and said with the air of one putting an end to the discussion of a trivial subject that has gone on too long, “Listen, Abduh. Let me set your mind at rest. What did you tell me the writer does for a living?”

“He’s a teacher,” mumbled my father in a low voice.

“I know, but what does he teach?”

My father said nothing for a moment and then he answered, “An art teacher, but…”

“But what? An art teacher and he’s not supposed to understand art? At least he’d have the basics that he studied. An art teacher, who interests himself in the progress of art? My dear fellow, that’s you! And you think that that’s a sign of artistic awareness? Give me a break!”

El-Ghamdi made a dismissive gesture with his hand, laughed, and looked at the others, like a chess champion who makes a final masterful move that brings the match to an end in his favor. Then he turned back to my father and said in dismissive tones oozing sarcasm, “My dear Professor Abd el-Ati, you’re giving this business of the letter more importance than it deserves.”

My father cried out to interrupt him, appearing for the first time to be starting to doubt his own opinion, “No! It’s got nothing to do with his being an art teacher! I sensed from what he said that he’s someone who understands.”

“Understands? Someone like that understands?”

El-Ghamdi posed these questions and let out a sarcastic laugh, the malign intent of his words clear to all, since how could anyone who liked Abd el-Ati’s work understand anything. My father’s face clouded with real anger and he muttered fervently, “Yes, Ghamdi, he understands. I’m certain he understands.”

My father looked around him as though he was searching for something. Then he saw me and said, “Isam, go get the letter from inside.”

I looked at him and found myself rising slowly and turning toward the door. Perhaps interpreting my hesitation as due to forgetfulness, he said, “You’ll find the letter in the parlor. On the table, as I remember.”

I turned back once more, looked at my father, and said in hollow tones, “I tore it up.”

“What?” shouted my father, his eyes dilating. I felt I was sliding toward the end, so I said, deliberately and slowly, “I tore the letter up.”

It was more than he could take. He leaped up and came toward me. He came so close that I could feel the heat of his panting breath on my face. I was expecting him to slap me but he suddenly turned around and shouted, “You’re insane! Totally insane! You tore up the letter, you madman?”

He seemed to have nothing more to say, and he started moving, turning, and shouting out the same words, while Uncle Anwar went to him and took hold of him to calm him down and I stood and watched what was happening. I didn’t feel fear or regret. My consciousness had been disconnected. I could see my father and Anwar and the people sitting there and they looked to me like undefined, floating shapes. When I came to, I heard my father saying, “Do you hear what I say? Get out of my sight, God damn you!”

Silence reigned for a moment and I heard Uncle Anwar whisper to my father, “That’s not the way, Abduh. You’re making too much of it.”

The voice of my mother, low and insistent, buzzed in my ears as I crossed the hallway: “What a thing to do, Isam! Tear up the letter? Couldn’t you see how happy it made your father? And you go and tear it up?”

I paid no attention to her. I went on to my room and closed the door behind me. Then I sat down calmly at the desk, lit the lamp, took out a book, and started reviewing. I can still remember that the chapter that I read that night was “Osmotic Pressure”: fluids move through the semi-permeable membrane and the exchange of fluids in either direction comes to an end when the pressure around the membrane is equalized. My father, Uncle Anwar, el-Ghamdi, the letter, and Farghal’s beautiful handwriting—all these came into my mind from time to time as I read, like disconnected images that shone and then died out, but they didn’t upset me. When I’m taken by surprise by something, my mind records its details precisely and it takes a little while before my rational faculties put everything in order again; that’s when I react strongly. My reaction may be powerful, but it’s delayed. I stopped reviewing at about three in the morning, and I could hear a distant din coming from the studio—voices, laughter, and music. I had undressed, put on my pajamas, and was ready to go to sleep when I heard heavy footsteps in the corridor, my father’s footsteps. He drummed with his fingers on the door. I didn’t answer. He opened the door slowly, peered in, smiled, and entered. I remained where I was, standing in front of the bed, and he approached and threw himself into the chair, stretching his legs out in front of him; from his face, whose details were illumined by the light of the desk lamp, he appeared to be both completely intoxicated and tired. A moment passed, and I sat down slowly on the bed. Suddenly my father said, “What time do you have lectures tomorrow?”

I replied, “Twelve o’clock.”

Then he said, as though the times of the lectures were what really concerned him, “Excellent. You have a little time to sleep so that tomorrow you can go off refreshed.”

Silence returned and I felt a sudden irritation and wished that my father would go and leave me alone, but he yawned and said, “You know, Isam, I’m very optimistic about your future. I’m sure you’ll be a great scientist. I sense that you love your studies. Don’t you love chemistry?”

There was a tone to his voice that increased my irritation but he continued, “I’m sure you love chemistry. How else could you be doing so well? The important thing, though, champ, is just to see it through. Right! Not just get your baccalaureate and take it easy. You have to get your PhD. In my day, the baccalaureate was a big deal, but now! You have to have at least a PhD before you can say you really did something. And anyway, what else do you have to do? You’re not in a relationship with a girl and you’re not in a hurry to get married. Aren’t I right? Tell me. Tell me and don’t be shy.”

My father let out a laugh, and his playfulness seemed embarrassing and heavy. He resumed, apparently determined to be jolly, “Even if there is a girl on your mind, you can still go on with your studies. In fact, an early marriage might even motivate you to work harder. The important thing is that you shouldn’t have any ambitions in the arts field. Art is the only thing I’m afraid of. You know, Isam, when I abandoned my studies, I didn’t think for a minute. I felt I was doing something very natural. I have no regrets, of course. I’ve never regretted giving my life to art. I was incapable of imagining myself as anything else. True, things were often against me but I did what I had to. Before the Revolution I used to work at three newspapers, and people used to read and understand and compare. Any new artist who came up, people would see him and judge his talent. After nationalization, it became just a matter of earning a living. Sometimes it seems to me that neither people have the desire to laugh nor artists the desire to produce. The whole thing’s turned into just a matter of doing what you have to. You draw a joke and you know it’s stupid and people read it and know it’s stupid, but they read it.”

I prepared myself to ask my father to leave but couldn’t.

“Did you see Shakir’s cartoon in al-Ahram today?”^*

“No.”

“You have to see it. It’s very strange. I don’t what’s happened to Shakir—has he gone nuts or what? Do you know what he drew today? A sun’s disc with two lines coming out of it that he’d twisted round each other and underneath he’d written ‘Knitting.’ Get how dumb that is? It’s supposed to be a joke and people expect to laugh when they read it. Laugh at what? At the artist’s stupidity, of course. But Mr. Shakir is of course a well-known artist and al-Ahram pays him eight hundred pounds a month. Even if he turned in a few scribbles, no one could say anything. No, what matters is that Shakir thinks he’s a great artist and if you run into him at the Journalists’ Syndicate he pretends not to know you, or he’ll remember you after a while and say, ‘My dear friend! Please excuse me, but you’ve changed a lot and you know what my mind’s like!’ Of course, he doesn’t try that stuff with me, of all people. He comes right over to me and minds his manners.”

I couldn’t stand it any more so I jumped up. My father seemed taken aback. There was a moment of silence. Then he got up from his chair and said as he turned to go out, just as though we’d just come to the end of an ordinary conversation on an ordinary night,

“Right. Well, I’ll leave you to get some sleep. Good night.”

He took some steps toward the door. I hung my head and looked at the interwoven colors of the design on the carpet and for a moment was overcome by an obscure feeling that my father hadn’t left the room and that he’d come over to me—and when I raised my eyes, there he was standing in front of me, and he stretched out his hand without speaking, put it on my shoulder, looked at me for a moment, and then said, “I’m sorry, Isam.”

When your father is a weak sick old man who clings onto your hand as you walk down the street next to him, leaning his weight on you for fear of falling over, and the passersby stare at your father’s infirmity and examine you with curious glances that come to rest on your face, how are you likely to feel? You may feel embarrassed at your father’s weakness and you may exaggerate your display of concern so as to garner appreciative looks, or you may talk nastily and cruelly to him because you love him and are sad for his sake and you want him to go back to being the way he was, strong and capable.

Life comes out on Wednesdays and I went to the news vendor in front of the mosque to buy it but he didn’t know of it, and I went to another vendor, in Giza Square, and to a third, and a fourth, and I took a bus to Suleiman Pasha Square and went to the big newsstand there and when the vendor approached me I asked him with a show of indifference, “Have you ever heard of a magazine called Life?”

I spoke to him like this because every time a vendor denied the existence of the magazine for which my father drew, I felt embarrassed and sad. I was expecting that this one wouldn’t know it either and my seemingly indifferent question reduced my embarrassment and placed me and the vendor on the same side—as though I too, in spite of my question, was denying that any such magazine existed. The vendor, however, and to my surprise, knew it and said, “Fifteen piasters.”

I felt relieved and paid the price, and I took the magazine and searched on the last page until I found my father’s name. There was a small square with, at the bottom, the signature “Abd el-Ati.” On the way home, I studied the cartoon. When I got to the house it was two o’clock in the afternoon and my father was still asleep, so I opened the door to his room and entered quietly. Then I swept aside the heavy black curtains and light flooded the space. My father opened his eyes and noticed me, and I said, smiling, “Good morning.”

“Good morning, Isam. What time is it?”

I told him the time and he yawned, stretched his hand out to the bedside table, picked up a pack of cigarettes, lit one, and took a drag that turned into a fit of coughing. I took up a chair, came close, and sat myself in front of him, the magazine in my hand. Tapping it, I said, laughing, “Happy now, my dear sir? That cartoon you did today almost got me sent to the police station!”

Taken aback, my father asked what I meant, so I told him, “No big deal. I got into a fight with a friend of mine over what the cartoon meant.” As I said this I straightened the edge of the carpet with my foot so that I seemed to be speaking about something quite incidental and ordinary that happened all the time.

“Good heavens! You got into a fight?” my father asked me in amazement.

“I want to ask you first. The man in the cartoon today, isn’t he supposed to be Anwar Sadat?”

My father responded, “Yes. Absolutely.”

I let out my breath as though relieved and said, “So I was right.”

My father pulled himself up, rested his back against the head of the bed, and said, worry starting to appear in his eyes, “What’s the story?”

“No big deal. As you know, they read Life at the university, so every Wednesday I have to have this quarrel with my friends. They all look at your cartoon and then they keep pestering me with questions about ‘Does your father mean So-and-so or So-and-so?’ Today, especially, if the drawing hadn’t been Anwar Sadat, the meaning would have changed completely.”

My father asked me, as he put on his glasses and looked anxiously at the drawing, “Aren’t the features clear?”

I answered emphatically, “Of course. They’re very clear. But this friend of mine, he’s a communist and you know what adolescents the communists are. He insists you’re a rightist and would never attack Sadat in your cartoons.”

Thus I initiated a long discussion with my father on a topic over which we always disagreed, and which I knew well, even though he sometimes got angry with me and attacked me, made him happy. And in the evening, my father would complain about me to his friends, telling them about his discussion with me and describing me as being—like all my generation—irritable and conceited, and then insert rapidly into the middle of what he was saying, “Just imagine, everyone! Isam tells me that they read Life at the university and that his colleagues got into a fight with him over today’s cartoon.”

Having slipped this sentence in, my father would quickly finish what he was saying, and I could almost feel his anxiety lest anyone disagree with him or call him a liar.

It was summer and Ramadan, and the university was on vacation. Neither I nor my father fasted but we respected my mother’s feelings and observed the Ramadan regime—breaking fast at sunset, eating again before sunrise. I had spent the night with my friends at el-Fishawi’s café, which was crowded and noisy, and returned to the house at three in the morning. My father and mother were seated at the table. My mother was eating her predawn meal and my father was busy devouring a plate of cookies, with tea. I divined, from the looseness of his lips, his vacant look, and the way the crumbs dribbled onto his gallabiya, that he had been smoking hashish. I exchanged a few words with them in passing, then went into my room, and leafed through the newspapers for the coming day, which I had bought in el-Hussein. Then I slept and woke up in the morning to find someone frantically shaking my body. I opened my eyes and found my mother beating her cheeks and pulling at me to get up. I ran after her to my father’s room. He lay naked on the bed and looked as though he was asleep, except that a mumbling sound was coming from his mouth and a feeble movement made his huge body tremble. There was an expression on his face that looked as though he was being pursued by a nightmare from which he was trying, unsuccessfully, to awake. My mother wailed out, “See your father, Isam!”

She bent over him, took him in her arms, and started calling to him. Then she buried her face in his chest and burst into tears. In an hour, the doctor came and, after examining my father carefully, bent down to me and informed me in a whisper that he had suffered an aneurysm. He advised me to take him immediately to the hospital, asked for twenty pounds, which he thrust into his pocket with thanks, and left. The ambulance workers exerted huge efforts with my mother before managing to get my father dressed in a white gallabiya and then they placed him on the stretcher and took him down the stairs, my mother and I behind them. As they took my father through the entryway of the building, Huda, our young maid, suddenly appeared and, with her skinny, nervy body and flying pigtail, started running after the stretcher and leaping round it and screaming.

In the light of the lamp suspended over the bed in the hospital, my father’s face seemed to me to be divided into two halves, one with a bulging eye, opened as far as it could go and blood-shot, and the other defeated and sagging. My father was trying to speak and a vague, suppressed, rattling sound emerged from within him. My mother left me with him and went to ask the hospital administration about something. In the afternoon, friends, relatives, colleagues from work, and others I didn’t know appeared. They spoke to us—my mother and me—of God’s mercy, treatment overseas, and friends of theirs (people they knew very well) who had suffered exactly the same symptoms as my father’s and who had recovered, with God’s help, and now enjoyed the most robust health and happiness. Then the visitors went away, one by one, leaving behind bunches of roses and colored boxes of chocolates, and my mother and I remained seated in front of my father; and when he closed his bulging eye and his breathing became regular, I realized that he had gone to sleep. It was late, perhaps after midnight, when we heard a faint knocking on the door, which opened a little to reveal the face of Uncle Anwar. He was wearing his black working tuxedo with the shiny lapels and under it a white shirt and sagging black bowtie. Uncle Anwar’s eyes roamed the room and then he signaled to me with his hand, so I went outside, followed by my mother, and he heard from us what had happened and asked us in detail about the opinions and prognoses of the doctors. His face was dark and the way he interrupted us as we spoke indicated that he was angry. Soon he put out his cigarette with his shoe and asked my mother if he could see him. He went forward, pushed open the door, and entered, and when he got close to my father I thought I saw a flash of consciousness pass quickly over my father’s eyes, and that he recognized Anwar. This, however, was quickly extinguished and the eye resumed its vacant look. Uncle Anwar laughed loudly and said, “What’s going on, my dear Mr. Abduh? What kind of a stunt is this you’re trying to pull? Do you get a kick out of making us worry or what? Look at you—as strong as a bull! These guys sent people to look for me at a wedding and they told me, ‘Come to Abduh at once!’ So I thought something bad must have happened!”

He turned to my mother and went on, “What kind of way to behave is that, Madam? You gave me a nasty shock. There’s nothing wrong with Abduh. Look at him! He’s as strong as a horse.”

Then he turned back to my father, seemingly wanting to empty out everything he had to say at one go, or having decided not to stay silent for a second.

“That’s enough now, Abduh! As a punishment for having got me worried, I’m going to come see you on Tuesday and the bill’s on you—you’re going to pay for a bottle of Fortyeight brandy and a kilo of kebab. Isam and the madam are my witnesses.”

I could almost have sworn that my father’s face jerked into something like a smile. Uncle Anwar went on talking and laughing and then said goodbye to my father and us and went out. I followed him but when he passed through the door that led to the hospital’s lobby, he didn’t look at me but turned to the right where the elevator was. Soon, however, he slowed his steps, then stood and bent forward, putting his hands over his face as gasps of violent weeping escaped.

The morning of the following day, one of the nurses at the hospital got into a resounding fight with the cleaner, accusing him openly of stealing the patients’ food. The cleaner shouted filthy insults and leaped forward in an attempt to strike the nurse, but colleagues gathered around and prevented him, and at the moment they were sitting him down on a chair and starting to calm him down, my father died.

4

I got my baccalaureate in science and was appointed as a researcher in the government’s Chemistry Authority. The appointment suited my circumstances: at that time I was making continuous and exhausting efforts to realize my withdrawal from society, in which context it was enough for me to become acquainted with one intelligent individual for my mission to be aborted, since, when this happened, I would ask myself, “Why am I putting up with all this pain in the cause of cutting myself off from people when there is among them at least one person intelligent enough to understand me?” From this perspective, my presence in the Chemistry Authority served to hasten my withdrawal. The building was ancient, shabby, and covered in dust. It had been erected in a forgotten corner of Ramses Street where, for the length of its fifty years, a clamorous life had swirled around it while it crouched in the silence of death.

You may use your bathroom at home for many a year without it occurring to you that there is a kind of life that goes on inside the drain. If, however, at some point, you were to perform an experiment and raise the cover, a whole world would appear to your eyes—dozens of maggots, and insects of different kinds, eating, multiplying, fighting, and killing one another. You would then be struck with amazement by the notion that these creatures had been living with you for years without your knowledge. This was the image that haunted me every morning as I walked among the crowds on Ramses Street, with all its bustle and noise, then turned to the left and abandoned it to enter the Chemistry Authority—a drain in whose darkness and damp were enclosed a group of filthy cockroaches of the sort that when stepped on and crushed extrude a sticky white liquid. ‘Cockroaches’—that was the scientific term for my colleagues in the Authority. My boss, Dr. Sa’id, didn’t, in fact, have a doctorate, though he had taken the exams three times in succession and failed, leading the Authority employees to award him the title (either as a compliment or sarcastically) and he had immediately grabbed on to it and would get angry if he were not so addressed. The worst troubles to disturb the tranquility of this man who occupied the post of Head of the Research Department (a post, that is to say, of some moment) were those that afflicted him after a meal. At midmorning, Dr. Sa’id would sit himself down at his desk and devour a large dish overflowing with stewed broad beans, bean patties, and fried eggs, accompanied by sweet red onions and pickled eggplant, after finishing which he would be compelled to loosened the belt of his pants to alleviate the pressure on his great belly. Then he would gulp down a glass of imported Epsom salts and send someone off for tea. His head was bald, without a single hair, and this made him look as though he were sick or wearing a disguise, and one’s first glance at him, with his bulging eyes, sparse eyebrows, sagging dewlaps, and vulgar voice, left a bestial impression. Sometimes, as I observed him, a strange idea would occur to me: in some mysterious way, I expected that Dr. Sa’id would suddenly interrupt what he was saying and reveal his true nature, i.e., bellow and pull his tail out for all of us to see and place it on the desk in front of him. I knew very well of course that such a thing would never happen but if it had I wouldn’t have been that surprised. During the tea break, all the employees of the department would come to Dr. Sa’id’s office to pay their respects and hover around him, passing the time in conversation until they had to go. Three topics were dear to the doctor’s heart—the national soccer championships since he was a loyal Ahli Club fan, the automobile market since he made money dealing in cars on the side, and, most importantly, sex, its secrets and its arts, since he was an outrageous skirt-chaser.^* Some said that the reason for this was that his wife was frigid but he didn’t have the guts to divorce her or take another wife because she was rich and supported him. This, supposedly, was why he satisfied his lusts far from home, in his office at the Chemistry Authority. Dr. Sa’id was particularly smitten with the department’s cleaning women and female workers—a taste no doubt attributable to his early experiences. When one of these women pleased him, he would keep calling her to his office, where he would treat her quite informally and press gifts on her until, little by little, he’d start coming on to her by making jokes of a sexual nature, which he’d toss out to her quite confidently, roaring with laughter. When the day came for him to make his move, Dr. Sa’id would invite the woman to his office and order her to close the door (which had a special lock that could not be opened from the outside). After she’d closed the door, he’d ask her to get something from the cupboard, and then he’d get up and place himself behind her and stick his huge body against her back, hugging her and having his way her. When this was going on in the office, the workers in the unit would know and would whisper and gossip and laugh about it, or express their disapproval. Under no circumstances, however, would they express their opposition openly.

Years passed and Dr. Sa’id practiced his private life at the research unit in peace. Only once did something happen to disturb its even tenor, which was when Umm Imad appeared in the department—a beautiful young woman with green eyes who’d moved from Tanta after her husband died and joined the department as a worker on a temporary contract. Dr. Sa’id fancied Umm Imad from the first day. He promised her he’d do his best to get her appointed on a permanent contract and started arriving every morning at the department with his pockets full of different kinds of chewing gum and candies that he gave to Umm Imad for her children. Did Dr. Sa’id make his move too early or had he misjudged her from the beginning? He called for her and ordered her to close the door and she closed it. As usual he got up and tried to stick himself against her but she put up serious resistance. He didn’t care and tried to get closer and she growled warningly, in a voice that was clear but still not loud, “Shame on you!” Wisdom required that he desist, but he kept on going, either because he was so aroused or because all he saw in her refusal was a crass kind of coquetry. He threw himself on her with his whole body and put his arms around her, but she screamed and went on screaming, her cries resounding through the Research Unit. In a second, the employees had gathered outside the office and when the screaming went on, one of them plucked up his courage and knocked on the glass pane in the door. Minutes of silence passed. Then Dr. Sa’id’s heavy footsteps were heard and he himself opened the door to them and they burst inside, hoping for the scene of a lifetime. Umm Imad stood in front of the cupboard, struggling to catch her breath, her hair disheveled and her gallabiya pulled tight and torn in more than one place. Everything about her indicated that a violent struggle had just taken place and she started repeating in a tearful voice, clasping her head with her hands as though lamenting at a funeral, “Shame on you! I’ll make you pay for this, you’ll see. Do you think if I was that kind of woman I’d be living the way I do? But the Lord knows all. I work to take care of my children. Shame on you!”