He came reeling, tumbling down the stairs, almost collapsing from fatigue and drunkenness. Then he spotted me. “Some eau de cologne!” he shouted. “I’ve had it!”
I went into my room to get the eau de cologne for him, and he followed me.
“Here you are.”
“Thanks. I drank more than I should have.”
“And you’ve had bad luck from the beginning of the evening.”
After a while, he pulled himself together, looked up at me, then went to the door and bolted it. I prepared to resist.
“Halima, you’re magnificent!” he said.
“Let’s go back upstairs.” He came close to me and I drew back scowling.
“Are you going to be faithful to that lout?”
“I’m a respectable woman and a mother.”
I made a rush for the door and got it open. For a moment he hung back, then he stepped outside and left the house.
All of them tried to seduce me, but I refused them. A whore?! It’s true that I was raped once, and that I slept with your father, though not for long, before I turned celibate. I am a nun, my son, not a whore. Was it your father who painted this false picture for you? Desolate woman that I am, with wretched luck—I have no other hope but you. How could you picture me like that? I’ll tell you everything! But when are you going to come back?
At night those carousers would slink into our old house, their shamelessness polluting the street that led to Sidi al-Sharany. My heart sank as I read their debauched looks and I worried about Abbas in his room. But you are a jewel, son. You must not be stifled in the mire of poverty. I’d put on a cheerful front as a welcome mat and take them to the room on the upper floor that we’d furnished with borrowed money. I was supposed to be the barmaid and serve them food and drinks; little did I understand that we were at the beginning of a slippery path downward.
“Don’t be alarmed, dear. They’re your father’s friends. All men do that.”
“But, Mother, what have you got to do with it?”
“They’re my colleagues from the theater and it wouldn’t be right for me to neglect them.”
“A good, safe place,” Sirhan al-Hilaly said, beaming as he took his seat at the table, where Ismail was shuffling the cards.
“Tahiya isn’t allowed to sit next to Tariq,” Fuad Shalaby said with a chuckle.
Karam stood behind the cash box at the edge of the table and there was a laughing remark from Tariq: “A votive offering box, Mr. Karam Younis?”
“No voice should be raised above the sound of battle!”*3
Karam was dissolving some opium in black tea. What a beginning that knew no end!
I have returned myself to my prison cell, just as I have returned the clothes I wore to the theater to their owner. He sits here, his face morose and blank; sells peanuts and melon seeds and joins the customers in complaining about the times. Almost to myself, I murmur, “The play’s a success, that’s one consolation.”
“One can’t judge before a week has passed.”
“What counts is the audience, their excitement, the effect it has on them.”
“I wonder how much al-Hilaly paid him for it.”
“The first work always brings in the lowest price. Abbas doesn’t care about money.” He bursts into that boisterous laugh of his, for which I curse him with all my heart.
In the vastness of his throne room, the evil deity gazed upon us smiling, “Welcome, Halima. I suppose your son is offering us a new play?”
“That’s right.”
“The last one was worthless,” he said, addressing Abbas.
“I always profit from your comments,” replied Abbas.
“I’d like to encourage you, at least for your mother’s sake.”
As the weeks roll by, it becomes apparent how successful the play is. Never has there been such a sellout at the theater. And the weeks turn into months. When will the playwright appear? He can think what he likes and let me suffer—but where is he? “I should think the people at the theater might have heard by this time from our absent one,” I remark, loudly enough so that he has to hear.
“The last time I went there was ten days ago.”
Tired of defending myself against his tongue, I make no demands of him. He has trotted off to the theater from time to time, whereas I haven’t ventured to go since the opening night. On the next morning he goes again. A warm day, with the sun shining, and my heart flutters with consuming hope.
I could imagine miracles and strange happenings, but never that Abbas would marry Tahiya. Now Abbas was going to leave and Tariq Ramadan would be staying. Where was heavenly justice?
“Abbas, she’s at least ten years older than you! She has a certain reputation and a history. Don’t you understand what that means?”
He smiled. “Unfortunately you don’t understand what love is,” he said smugly. Bitterness welled in my soul, bringing back my buried sadness. “We’re going to start a new life,” he added.
“No one can escape his past.”
“In spite of everything Tahiya is virtuous.”
I wasn’t being fair, I had forgotten about myself, but I wanted him to have a better lot in life. That’s all there was to it.
Tahiya visited me, looking subdued, but determined. “Don’t stand in the way of my happiness,” she entreated me.
“You are stealing innocence.”
“I’ll be a devoted wife to him.”
“You!”
The sharpness of my voice made her turn pale with anger. “Every woman in the theater began with Sirhan al-Hilaly!” she retorted.
My heart shrank. So they all knew or inferred what they didn’t know. It was as if she were threatening me! I detested her. But he would remain my son, in spite of everything.
—
Surely, the man is later than usual? The last beams of sunlight are just leaving the walls along this narrow street. What’s keeping him? Has he at last discovered the hiding place and gone there straightway? Will they come home together? I can see his fine-featured face smiling as he apologizes. I will not believe that this torture can go on forever. The play may well have pointed out the sources of my weakness, but I’ve always kept my heart clean. Haven’t I atoned, then, sufficiently for that weakness? Who could have imagined that this kind of life would become the lot of the beautiful, chaste Halima? My heart holds nothing now but tolerance and love. Oh God, I accept your judgment. I have such compassion in my heart that it even pities Karam in his misery. I’ll even forgive his brutality to me. When he returns with my beloved absent one’s arm tucked under his, I’ll forgive him everything.
Elation floods my being, but the feeling diminishes with the passing of time. A customer remarks as he leaves with his package, “You’re in another world, Umm Abbas.”
From the mosque the call to evening prayer reaches my ears as darkness creeps over the short winter day. There must be a reason for his delay. He isn’t worth all this anxious waiting. What’s keeping him? The candle splutters in the winter wind; I stand up, not intending to sit down again. My mood has altered; he has deceived me unmercifully. My patience is worn out, and I’ll have to go and look for him.
The first person I meet at the theater door is Fuad Shalaby, who approaches me with unaccustomed tenderness, holding out his hands to me.
“I hope it’s false news,” he says.
“What news?” I say as my last glimmer of hope disappears. The man doesn’t seem to know what to say, so he remains silent. “Is it about Abbas?”
He nods his head, saying nothing more, and I lose consciousness.
When I come to, I find myself on the couch in the cafeteria and Amm Ahmad is taking care of me. Fuad Shalaby and Tariq Ramadan are also there. Amm Ahmad breaks the news to me in a funereal voice and ends by saying, “No one believes it.”
Fuad Shalaby takes me home is his car. On the way he wonders aloud, “If he’s committed suicide, where is his body?”
“Then why did he write the note?”
; “That’s his secret,” he answers. “We’ll find out in good time.”
—
But I know his secret as I know my own heart and I know my luck; he has killed himself. Evil is playing flute music for Abbas.
* * *
*1A holy man to whom a small local mosque was dedicated.
*2Al-Kabsh—the ram.
*3This was a sentence used during the wars with Israel, and it has a special connotation.
Abbas Karam Younis
Loneliness and the old house were the two companions of my childhood. I knew it inside out: the big, arched portals, the door with its small hinged panes of red, blue, and brown stained glass, the reception-room window with its iron bars, the upstairs and downstairs rooms with their high ceilings and painted wooden rafters, their floors covered with Masarany tiles, the old, shabby couches, mattresses, mats, and carpets, the undaunted tribes of mice, cockroaches, and wall geckos, the roof, crisscrossed with clotheslines like streetcar and trolley-bus wires, overlooking other roofs that on summer evenings were crowded with women and children. I roamed around the house alone, my voice echoing from its corners as I repeated my lessons, recited a poem, did a part from some play, or sang. Looking down on the narrow street for what might have been hours at a time, following the flow of people, I’d yearn for a friend to play with. A boy would call to me, “Come on down!”
“The door is locked, and my father has the key!”
I got used to being alone night and day; I wasn’t afraid of anything, not even evil spirits.
“The sons of Adam are the only devils there are,” my father would say.
“Be an angel,” my mother would hasten to add.
When I had nothing to do, I would amuse myself by chasing the mice, the geckos, or the cockroaches.
My mother told me once that when I was a baby she used to take me in a leather cot to the theater and set me on a bench in the ticket booth. “I often nursed you in the theater,” she said. I don’t remember those times, of course, but I do recall events from a stretch of time when I must have been four years old. I used to wander around the theater in front or backstage, where, among other things, I’d listen to the actors memorizing their parts. My ears were filled with lovely songs and speeches—and with wicked oaths and blasphemies giving me an education I’d never have acquired from my parents, who were always either sleeping or working. On the opening night of every new play I was there with my father, half the time bedazzled, the other half asleep. It was about that time that I was given my first picture book, called Ibn al-Sultan and the Witch, a present from Fuad Shalaby.
That was how I came to understand heroes and villains in plays. Neither of my parents had time to give me any guidance; my father took no interest in education in any case, while my mother was content to repeat her only piece of advice—“Be an angel”—explaining that to be an angel was to love good, not to harm other people, and to have a clean body and clean clothes. My real tutors were, first, the theater, then books, when their time came, and finally people who had no relation to my parents.
As soon as I started school I loved it: giving me so many companions, it rescued me from my loneliness. I had to be self-reliant, though, at every step. I’d wake up early in the morning, eat my cold breakfast of cheese and boiled eggs from a plate that had been covered with a napkin the night before, dress, and leave the house quietly so I wouldn’t arouse my sleeping parents. I’d return in the afternoon to find them getting ready to leave for the theater. I’d stay alone doing my homework, then amuse myself with games or books, at first only looking at the pictures, then reading the printed words—I’ll never forget the generosity of Amm Abdu, the secondhand bookseller, who crouched on the sidewalk beside Sidi al-Sharany Mosque—and finally, after a supper of cheese and halva, I’d go to bed.
So I never saw my parents except for a while before sunset, and even part of this brief period was lost as they got ready to go out. Perhaps because there was so little intimacy or attention given to me, I was all the more attached to them. I yearned for them. My mother’s beauty, sweetness, and tenderness bewitched me and I was enthralled by a vision of that angelic nature she urged me to acquire. His gentle way of playing with me and his hearty laughter likewise made my father seem wonderful. He was full of jokes, full of fun, and the limited time we had together was never spoiled by instructions, threats, or warnings. There was only an occasional reminder. “Enjoy being alone,” he used to say. “You’re the king of the castle. What do you want more than that? The only son, independent of everyone. That’s what your father was like, and you’ll be even more wonderful.”
“He’s an angel,” Mother would hasten to add. “Be an angel, dear.”
“Did Grandfather and Grandmother leave you alone, too?” I asked him once.
“Your grandfather?” he replied. “He left me before I ever knew him. And your grandmother—she worked at home.”
Mother glowered, and I sensed that these words carried a secret meaning. “Your grandfather died young and your grandmother joined him, so your father was left alone,” she explained.
“In this same house?”
“Yes.”
“If these walls could speak, they would tell you the most fantastic tales,” Father said.
It was a lonely house, but a harmonious one. At that time Father and Mother were an agreeable couple, or so, as I saw them in the gathering twilight, they always appeared to me. They shared conversation, jokes, and a deep affection for me. My father had a tendency to express himself a little freely, but Mother would stop him with a warning look, which I noticed sometimes and wondered about. The moment of leave-taking was painful and I would await Thursday with dwindling patience, for that was the night I could go with them to see a play.
As my learning increased, enabling me to read more, I asked for more pocket money to buy books, until I had accumulated a library of secondhand children’s books. “Aren’t you satisfied with going to the theater every week?” Father asked.
But I wasn’t satisfied. My dreams took me far away to new horizons. One day I went so far as to tell him that I wanted to write plays!
He guffawed. “Dream about being an actor! It’s preferable and more profitable.”
“I have an idea, too.”
“Really?”
I went on to outline the story of Faust, which was the last thing I had seen in the theater. I’d added nothing new except that I made the hero a boy of my age.
“How did the boy triumph over the devil?” asked Mother.
“You beat the devil by using the same tricks he does!” answered Father.
“Keep your thoughts to yourself!” shouted Mother. “Can’t you see that you’re talking to an angel?”
From an early age I was saturated with the love of art and virtue. I used to make lengthy speeches about these things to myself, in my solitariness, and I also learned about them from my schoolmates, among whom I was pretty conspicuous. Most of them were mean little devils, to be sure: whenever the teacher got fed up with them he’d shout, “You whorehouse brats!” There was a select little group, however, who were known for their innocence and good behavior, and I gravitated to them. We formed a Morality Squad, to battle against obscene language, and used to strike up the anthems of the New Egyptian Revolution, in which we believed implicitly. When a few of us pledged ourselves to unprecedented bravery, military or political, I pledged myself to the theater, seeing it as a platform for heroism, too, and one that would suit me, with my weak eyesight, which had obliged me to wear prescription glasses while I was still at primary school. Whatever differences there may have been among us, we all dreamed of an ideal world in which we made ourselves its most exemplary citizens. Even defeat failed to shake our basic ideals. As long as the slogans did not change and the leader remained the same, what did defeat mean?
Mother’s face had grown haggard, though, and she muttered words I could not understand while Father would shrug his shoulders, as if things didn’t matter
, then burst out singing the national anthem in a raucous, mocking voice: “My country, my country, I have shed my blood for you.”
The theater was shut down for some days, and for the first time I was able to enjoy having my parents at home all day long. Father even took me with him to the coffeehouse on Sharia al-Gaysh, a new experience. Defeat that time was not without pleasant side effects, but they were short-lived.
Mother was pouring tea. “Abbas,” she said, “we are going to have a stranger living with us!” I stared at her in disbelief. “He’s a friend of your father’s. You know him, too. It’s Tariq Ramadan.”
“The actor?”
“Yes, he had to leave the place where he was living, and what with the housing shortage he hasn’t been able to find a good place to go.”
“He’s a rotten actor. He doesn’t look nice.”
“People should help each other. And you’re an angel, my dear.”
“He’ll come at dawn,” said Father, “and sleep until the afternoon. So except for his room, the house will still be your own special domain.”
I was never aware of his arrival, but he usually left with my parents or immediately after them. He was insolent-looking and rough-spoken. He took a sham interest in me to flatter my parents, but I had no respect for him. One day, having spotted my library from where he was sitting in the hall, he asked me, “Schoolbooks?”
“Literary books and plays,” Mother answered proudly. “You’re speaking to a playwright!”
“Damn the theater! I wish I were a junk peddler. Or a hawker of meat from animal heads.”
At that I asked, “Why do you only play small parts?”
He coughed abruptly. “My fate! I’m stalked by such crippling luck that if it weren’t for your father’s decency I’d have to sleep in public toilets.”
“Don’t scare the professor with such talk, Tariq,” cautioned Mother.
He laughed. “A playwright must learn about everything, the good and the bad. Especially the bad. The theater has its fountainhead in wickedness.”
“But good always triumphs,” I declared with naive fervor.