Читать книгу The Girl with Braided Hair - Rasha Adly - Страница 13

8

Cairo: Autumn 2012

When he left her that day, he was heavy with sorrow and consumed by a terrible sense of guilt. How could he have remained so ignorant all the time they had been together? How had he not understood that a terrible secret lay behind the sorrow on her face, her sudden silences and preoccupied air?

He tried to fall asleep, but ever since he’d given up drinking and sleeping pills, sleep had been slow in coming. It was always the same: no sooner did he lie down in bed than he was flooded with everything that had happened that day and the days before that, if not even further back in time. Sometimes the memories were pleasant, but most of the time they were unhappy, and if he did manage to fall asleep, a sensation of falling would take hold of him. But that night, his insomnia did not bother him: he was happy to stay awake because it allowed him the opportunity to think about her. It was time to rethink their relationship. He had always blamed her for breaking it off in such a humiliating manner, laboring under the delusion that he had been the perfect lover; but how could he have been, without ever realizing that his beloved held a terrible secret of such magnitude?

Throwing off the bedclothes, he climbed out of bed and went to the window. The weather had changed again, and a light rain was falling. The leaves on the trees shone wetly in the moonlight.

“I’ve been selfish,” he muttered. “Yes, I have. I’ve been selfish.”

He padded to the kitchen and began to make coffee: it was no more use trying to sleep anyway. When she had come into his life, he had been in the iron grip of a new phase, which he had dubbed his ‘Purification Phase.’ He had decided to reinvent himself as a new man, a different person. If she had known him when he was younger, she would certainly never have left him. He would have given her everything she could possibly need or want.

He had been twenty-four when he had gone abroad to do his postgraduate studies, not out of a love of learning but a desire to escape his surroundings: his society, his friends, his family, his relatives, his country’s problems. In short, his whole life. His joy had been indescribable when he got accepted into a Swedish university, one he had applied to some time before in an endless search for architecture scholarships in Europe. The acceptance letter arrived along with a class schedule and a notification that the scholarship would cover half his tuition and provide housing, the rest falling to him. He did not waste time thinking about how he was going to cover the rest of the tuition or come up with living expenses. His father was a simple government clerk who would barely be able to come up with the money for the air ticket.

He had known that the cost living in Europe was high, but he had not realized that it would be that expensive. From the very first day, therefore, he decided to look for work. He had a BA in architecture and was a postgraduate student at the foremost university in Sweden, so no doubt some important job awaited him, or so he thought. His dreams were shattered, however: all his interviews ended in failure, and when he finally lost hope of getting a job commensurate with his abilities, he was obliged to take several jobs in his first year: a supermarket checkout clerk, a salesperson at a store selling athletic shoes, a room-service waiter at a hotel. One day, the hotel posted a job for a waiter at the hotel bar. The pay was excellent, so he applied and was accepted, having already proved himself in room service. Times were tight, so he never spared a thought whether it might be a sin to work in a bar and serve alcohol. Even the unpleasantness of the drunken customers he managed to put up with without a murmur. The drunker they got, the better they tipped.

The day he saw her, his life changed. She was older, dark-skinned with long black hair and a voluptuous figure. Their eyes met and he could tell from the way she flirted that she was taken with him as well. Her nationality was a mystery to him: if he had had to guess, he would have said Italy or Mexico—she was certainly not Swedish. When he approached her to set down a few glasses of vodka at her table, she was talking on her cell phone in Arabic, her accent that of the countries of the Arabian Gulf. At first, he couldn’t believe his ears. She kept talking, and loudly too. When he became certain she was Arab, he said, “Welcome,” to her in Arabic.

“And to you,” she said in the same language. “Are you Arab?”

“Yes,” he said, “Egyptian.”

She gave a coy laugh. “I guessed as much.” She asked his name and what brought him to Sweden; he missed speaking in Arabic, which made him chatty, and in a very short time had told her his entire life story. He talked about his hometown, his family, his career, and the circumstances that brought him there. Finally, he left her and went back to work. When she asked for the check for herself and her friends, he brought it in the little leather folder, and she put in two cards: her credit card and her business card. The former he gave to the cashier; the latter he kept.

He could hardly wait for the end of class the next day. He dialed her number, afraid she might be sleeping—he assumed that the types who spend their nights at the bars slept all day. However, she sounded bright and lively, contrary to his apprehensive expectations. “I’m on the way to an important meeting,” she said, “but I’ll expect you in the lobby of the Hilton at two o’clock.”

On their first date, she told him everything about herself. Her father was Arab and her mother Swedish; she had spent most of her life moving back and forth between the two countries. After university she had opened her own business, a real estate development and construction company that specialized in building resorts and buying and restoring old mansions to convert into hotels while preserving their appearance and architectural character. She made him an offer to join her company. As it happened, he had only a few days left until graduation, after which he would be free to accept.

A few days later, Nirvan, for that was her name, told him she did not want to spend the night alone, and led him to her room in the villa where she lived. He was inexperienced and his shyness and apprehension only made matters worse. She took the lead and laughed when they were done, kissing him on both cheeks: “You’re going to need some training, that’s for sure!”

That might have been true at first, but in a few weeks, he became an expert in the rules of the game, and excelled, not just in bed, but in his new job. He learned quickly that with enough money, anything is possible: commissions over and under the table—and from the side and round the back as well—paved the way to buying government-owned plots of land. Old historic houses were assessed at a fraction of their real value, and every tender the company took part in, they won.

He was to spend half his life country-hopping from airport to airport all over the world: he met with Wall Street brokers in the morning, and agents in Milan in the evening. The morning after would find him in a new town with new people to broker a new deal. With the slew of titles and positions that introduced him to clients, no one suspected his veracity or cast doubt on his integrity: he was, after all, an expert in architecture and construction, a consultant and assessor with a postgraduate degree from one of the world’s foremost universities.

In a short while, thanks to Nirvan and to his own acumen, he went far. The fame and fortune he achieved came at a cost, however. The greatest sacrifice was his own peace of mind. He could not sleep without being plagued by nightmares; he could not eat without indigestion. After a checkup, he was diagnosed with an ulcer, brought on by stress, exhaustion, and constant anxiety. Meanwhile, his relationship with Nirvan only grew stronger, helped along by the fact that there was no possessiveness on either side, except for the moments when their bodies became one, leaving each free to go their own way when they weren’t together. She never asked him whom he had been with, and he never asked her whom she had known. Although he had slept with many women much more beautiful and many years younger, the blond cover girls offered to him by his clients by way of a thank you never satisfied him the way she did. There was a certain affection between them that he could not name: it did not deserve the name love, but perhaps admiration or gratitude for the immense opportunity she had offered him. His whole life, he had never dreamed of being half as rich as he had become.

He could not deny that he had been drawn to the jet-set world at first: its parties and soirées, its trips and jaunts, were all like dunes of soft sand pulling him deeper and deeper down. As time passed, he realized that money in and of itself was these people’s ultimate goal, and money was all they believed in. Money could buy anything: happiness, ambition, security, love, and marriage. It was a world he had regarded with curious interest while still on the outside, looking in: he remembered wondering what life meant to these people. He had wondered, more mundanely, what paths they traveled, which countries they visited, which doctors they went to, and on and on; now that he had come into this world and become one of them, he knew for a fact that it was empty. Oddly, their lives, like their thinking and even their appearance, were all the same. It was hard to tell their women apart, for they went to the same plastic surgeons to remake them all in the same mold: the same nose, the same perfectly pouty lips, even the same shape to their eyes. They had the same bleached blond hair, fake tans, acrylic nails, and augmented breasts and hips. Their men were not much different, similarly stripped of any individuality: they wore clothing in the latest style, owned the most expensive top-brand watches, smartphones, and other electronics, and sported tattoos over their gym-built, toned bodies while their hair gleamed with product. They all spoke in the same fake, polished tones, their body language languid and mechanical. This was how they chose to present themselves: they saw and heard nothing of the world’s sufferings unless it was through their own blinkered view. As for their romantic lives, they were something of an incestuous clique, one within a very large family: this woman was X’s girlfriend today, Y’s girlfriend tomorrow, and the same with the men, all traveling within the same circles.

Sooner or later, one must tire of such a life, devoid of all feeling. Five-star hotels and restaurants, fortunes in every currency accumulating in numbered accounts, the latest model of luxury automobile, beautiful plastic dolled-up women: one must tire of all this, and of one’s own self. At the same time, there is no outlet for one’s anger, and no way out of this fake world.

But Sherif, unlike the other members of that crowd, managed to make the decision to shake off its anxiety, anger, and tedium. To leave such a world was like stepping out of a dream to fall headlong into cruel reality. The first step to leaving it was dissolving his business interests with his partners. The financial loss was devastating, but he had made a decision and there was no going back.

A few months before his decision, something had happened that had affected him deeply, and fueled the fires of his unease. He traveled a great deal for the company in order to assess the worth of historical and ancient sites for purchase and refurbishment as hotels. The company had recently put in bids for various properties in Britain, France, and Greece, as well as in Istanbul, Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad. His current trip, to a place called Konya, was not the first time he had visited Turkey, for he had been there several times and was very fond of it. He loved everything about the country: the climate, the geography, the history, the streets, the architecture, and the friendly people. Whenever he felt he needed a change of scene, it was the first place he would go. Although he was a regular at the Bosporus Hilton, which commanded a breathtaking view of the river it was named after, in Turkey he felt he could escape the pressure of social status and walk through the narrow streets and alleyways, his mind at ease at last.