I leave the apartment. I cross the alley. The entrance to the building is dark. The doorman indicates the door at the top of the first flight of steps. I knock on it. Hekmet opens the door. She is tall and heavy and wears a rose-colored light robe over a nightshirt. Her hair is long. Her face is smiling. She has smeared her mouth with lipstick. She gives me a hug and pulls me inside the apartment. Sound of a door slamming shut. Her brother, or her little sister? The cramped living area is cluttered with furniture. She sits me down in an armchair covered with white cloth. A medium-sized radio is on top of the sideboard. The voice of Ismahan sings: “I went once into a garden; I smelt the aroma of flowers.”
She sits across from me and asks me my name. She wants to know how old I am and how I like school. I answer all her questions. She asks about my mother. I don’t say anything. She asks if I have brothers or sisters. I say: “Two sisters and a brother.” She asks about the two sisters and I tell her the older one is married.
“And the younger one?”
“She died a long time ago.”
“And your brother?”
“He’s grown up.”
“Where is he?”
“At his house. See, he’s married.”
She offers me a sweet. She asks me if I would like something to eat. I shake my head. She brings me a cookie. She insists that I eat it. She watches me with a smile. I finish the cookie and I stand up. She asks me to stay for a while. I tell her I have homework. I head towards the door. She asks me how I’m going to spend Shem al-Naseem, the spring holiday. The house is full of lettuce and green chickpeas. My father hangs a bow tie made of a green onion stalk on the mantle of the bed. He wakes us in the morning with an onion that he uses to tickle our nose.
She invites me to come along with her and her brother and sister to the zoo. I say: “I don’t know. I have to ask papa.”
He tries to get me to eat another stuffed cabbage leaf. I don’t like it. I pull my mouth away from his hand as it holds the piece. He says: “There’s a roll left. Eat it so we can take the plate back.” We pay the constable’s wife to leave us part of what she cooks for him. I say no. He eats the remaining roll. Takes the tray back to the kitchen. He comes back after he has washed it, shaking the water off on to the floor. After drying it with a towel, he gives it to me and says: “Don’t you dare drop it.” I take it and go out to the living room. I knock on the constable’s door. The light of the electric lamp shines from underneath it. I knock on it again and call out: “It’s me, Mrs. Tahiya.”
She opens the door for me with a smile. She has a white silk robe on, fastened with a tasseled belt around the waist. The smell of cigarettes. My eyes sneak a glance behind her. No one is there. The covering of the narrow bed is unmade. Is it wide enough for both of them? To the right, a chiffonier made up of several drawers has a large mirror hung on the wall over it. There’s a crack near the top of it. She takes the plate from me. The blood rushes to my face.
I run back to our room. I sit at my desk and solve my math homework problems. I feel hot and have a hard time swallowing. Father touches my forehead. He brings me a cup of water. I try to turn away but firmly he orders me to open my mouth. I swallow the aspirin tablet. He wraps a handkerchief over my collar around my swollen tonsils. He goes with me to the toilet to pee. The door to the constable’s room is closed. The sound of the radio comes out from behind it. We go back to the room. He helps me lie down on the bed. He wraps the covers carefully around me and tells me not to worry because he will solve the math problems for me.
I doze off then wake up again. I see him facing me, resting his back against the headboard of the bed. His glasses are sliding down his nose and the math notebook is in his hand. On top of his head there’s a square white cap. I nod off again.
I wake up to a booming voice. It is Ali Safa, a friend of father’s. He carries in his hand a short, shiny-brown, wooden cane with a patch of leather on the end. He wears a brown suit. Tufts of snow-white hair appear from under the edge of his fez. He cries out: “Is that the same Khalil I used to know? Impossible! Get up old man, and let’s go out. There’s a hopping poker party tonight.” Father says: “Shush. The boy’s asleep with a fever.”
Ali Safa pulls the desk chair over in front of the bed. Father sits in front of him on the bed letting his legs hang down. Ali Safa sets his glasses in the corner of the room. He shakes his head in amazement. He starts to say something, but then remains quiet.
After a while, he says: “Have you heard about the king’s latest scandal? He had the hots for an officer’s wife. He told his commanding officer to assign him to barracks duty. The officer smelled a rat, so he snuck out and went back home and found his wife in bed with the king. The king raised his pistol and blew him away. The next day, he granted the victim’s father the status of Pasha. Who knows how much longer the people will put up with this?” Father says: “And what exactly are the people supposed to do? Leave it to God.” Ali Safa asks himself: “I wonder who the Muslim Brothers are planning to assassinate now that they’ve done the secretary for the appeals court.”
I struggle to stay awake. His voice begins to slip away. He seems to be talking now in a whisper. I listen carefully: “. . . she’s sixteen years old. Her father died and she lives with her mother by herself. They were standing on the stairs in front of our building haggling with the woman who sells butter. Her mother played shy and hid behind a doorway. The girl just stood there. She was wearing a nightshirt that showed lots of cleavage. She had put on a thin line of lipstick. That was the first time I realized that she had grown up. I’d always passed her on the stairway without even noticing her. When she bent over to get the basket of butter, I saw her tits. Pray on the prophet! I pretended I was thinking of buying some. I asked how much it cost. She gave me this shy smile, and I noticed that she was rubbing her lips together, maybe thinking it would make them redder.”
Father lights his cigarette and comments: “Girls grow up fast.” Ali Safa goes on: “After a few days, I heard her crying out in pain. I knocked on their door. She was limping as she opened for me and she said: ‘It’s my knee, uncle.’ ” Father broke in, laughing: “ ‘It’s my knee, uncle.’ ”
Ali Safa continues: “ ‘What’s wrong with your knee, sweetheart?’ She says that she hit it accidentally. I asked: ‘Are you alone?’ She answers: ‘Mama left.’ So I said: ‘Show me. Where exactly?’ She rested her leg on a chair and pulled up her nightshirt all the way to her knee. Magnificent grace of the Almighty! Don’t talk to me about alabaster. Plump and round and shaped like a sculpture! I wanted to bend over and put my lips on it right then and there. I told her: ‘Massage it and it’ll get better . . . or come to think of it, you could rub it with a balm.’ I left her standing with her leg on the chair and I went back in to get some of the balm for rheumatism that I rub on my joints. I gave her the tube and told her to rub it on. I was hoping she’d ask me to rub it for her, but instead she put her leg down, took the tube from me, and said: ‘Thanks, uncle.’ ”
As soon as I feel father suddenly turning towards me, I close my eyes. I prick up my ears: “A week later, I was riding the tram. I saw her heading home from school. The tram was crowded. She came close to me, and I stopped her right in front of me. I got a raging hard-on.” Father comments: “What luck!” Ali Safa says: “She has to have felt it.”
I cough once and then sink into a coughing fit. Father helps me sit up. He leaves the room for a second then comes back with a cup of water. I take a drink. He brings over the bottle of Belmonks with a small spoon. He fills it and brings it close to my mouth. I take a sip grudgingly. He tells me to wait a minute before I lie down again.
Ali Safa says: “Have you heard the latest Dr. Ibrahim Nagy story? He was walking down the street. He saw a high-class man. He thought it was one of his old patients. He said to him: ‘Hello. What’s with the long absence? You haven’t come around for a while, Muhammad Bey. Your health seems much better, praise God. But you look a bit different. You’re
fatter and you have a tan now.’ The man said: ‘But I’m not Muhammad Bey.’ Ibrahim Nagy comes right back at him: ‘My God! You mean you even changed your name, Muhammad Bey?’ ”
I lie down and father pulls the covers around me. I turn over and lie on my left side. I close my eyes pretending to sleep. I open them after a minute. Father raises up his legs and sits cross-legged on the bed.
Ali Safa starts telling the story of the Deir Yassin massacre in Palestine. The Zionist forces came in driving an armored car with a loudspeaker on its roof and demanded that the residents come out of their houses if they wanted to save themselves. Some of them believed what was said. They came out of their houses and were mowed down by machine-guns. After that, they threw bombs into the houses where there were women, children, and old people hiding and they killed them all, to the last one.
He got up, shuffled his feet, and said: “It’s stuffy. Let’s open the balcony doors.” Father says: “I’m afraid of the cool breeze on the boy.”
Ali Safa sits down and starts talking again in a low voice: “Ever since that day on the tram I can’t get her out of my mind. I imagine that she’s by herself and knocks on my door at night. She says that she’s afraid. She’s heard the sound of a burglar . . . or she has seen a mouse . . . whatever. I invite her to spend the night at our place with my daughters. I make them a bed on the floor, and I sleep next to them to reassure them. She falls asleep. Maybe she throws an arm across me like she’s used to doing with her mother. She turns over and lies with her back to me. If it’s hot, she throws off the cover, and if it’s cold, even better. I turn over and press my chest to her back. She clings to me, and I’m as hard as iron. She starts to move and I move behind her. My heart pounds. Could she be awake? Could she be sensing what’s going on? She must! Maybe she imagines she’s dreaming. Her knickers are wet and she’s panting. She falls asleep. All of this is in my daydream, of course.”
He falls silent. His voice rises again after a second: “I can’t get her out of my mind. I thought about asking for her hand from her mother. What do you think, Oh wise one?”
“What would your daughters say?”
“What business is it of theirs? Soon, they’ll marry and leave me all alone.”
“Are you going to have more kids?”
“Look who’s talking?”
Father turns to me and I close my eyes. He says: “The first time I wasn’t paying attention.”
“What about the second time?”
“The condom broke.”
Ali Safa laughs in a loud voice. He stops all of a sudden. He says: “God rest her soul.” I turn over on to my back. Father says to him: “Her death left a huge mark on Rowhaya.”
“How old was she when you married her?”
“Rowhaya? She was sixteen too.”
Ali Safa says in a triumphant tone: “See?”
I open my eyes as wide as I can. Father answers in a muffled voice: “I loved her.” The lamp of the living room shines over the table top. It’s messier than usual. Smell of sautéed liver. Olives. Pistachios. A small bottle with a clear liquid. Her voice comes from the bedroom. She’s singing the Ismahan song over and over: “When will you know it’s true? That I love only you.” Laughter. Her voice again to a different beat: “Darling, don’t let me be. See what’s happening to me.” My father’s voice finishes the song: “Loving you is destroying me!”
“How did you meet her?”
Father is quiet. I hear him light his cigarette.
“The doctor brought her back when Um Nabila—God rest her soul—was bedridden. She was working for him at the clinic, cleaning and checking in patients. She had a primary school degree. She had the rosiest cheeks. Her father owned a workshop. He had taken a second wife behind her mother’s back. The mother was harsh and critical and never gave her a break. She was always beating her . . . Nabila and her brother had married and left the house. I suddenly found someone to talk to. She read the papers and even talked to me about politics. She paid attention to all kinds of things. I remember her telling me that Hitler would end in disaster and that Gandhi was going to be killed. She engaged my mind. It was the first time in my life that I fell in love. Can you imagine that? A fifty-five year old man falls in love. I said let’s get married and she agreed. Her father complained about the difference in age. She told him: ‘So what? I love him.’ I married her in secret.”
I listened like I was under a magic spell. Father kept talking: “I rented an apartment nearby, the one you know in front of the Jewish school. I followed God’s will in the whole thing. I’d sleep every night next to Um Nabila. In the morning, I’d go to the office. At the end of the day, I’d run to the second apartment.” He appears at the door of the apartment in his white three-piece suit with fez. He has a white umbrella in his right hand. A paper bag full of fruit rests on his left arm. His dark face is beaming. He bends over me and wraps his arms around me.
“As soon as night broke, I’d get dressed to go back to the old house. She hung on to me. She pleaded with me to stay until bedtime. She would say that she was afraid to be left alone. She closed all the shutters and lit up the lights of the apartment. She shrunk herself up in bed. She would lie down and read the Quran until she dozed off. She would wake up scared in the middle of the night. She would hear soft voices calling to her, so she’d cling hard to the bed and plug up her ears until the sun came up.”
I notice a bedbug coming toward my head. I don’t want to move, so father won’t see that I’m awake. I know it’s going to bite me once the lights are out and keep me from sleeping. I follow it with my eyes to see where it will hide.
“Finally, Um Nabila died. We had done with all the mourning, and Nabila says: ‘Come on, Papa, stay with me.’ I told her I was married and had a second house. She was angry and her brother went crazy and told me: ‘Now you’re going to mate like rabbits and have lots of little ones, aren’t you?’ But I went ahead and settled in the new house, and I had a taste of what it was like to be happy.”
He was quiet. He lit a cigarette again. “When I had Nabila and her brother, I was still a young man and I spent most of my time outside the house. This time I really enjoyed being a father. Especially after I retired.” He turned towards me and I closed my eyes. “I’ll never forget the sight of him coming into the room, opening up the drawers, and rifling through the books. Whenever he saw something new, he would point to it and say: ‘That?’ Then it became: ‘What’s that?’ He would try to show me that he understood. I won’t forget the sight of him the first time he ever stood up. He wobbled two steps toward me and clapped. He felt he had achieved something great.”
I drift off then wake up to the buzzing of a mosquito next to my ear. I call upon God to keep it from biting me. The voice of Ali Safa: “I’ll go crazy. At night I toss and turn, wanting a soft body in my embrace. We wouldn’t even have to do anything.”
Father says: “So what are you going to do, my friend? Your only option is to stare.”
“You said it. When I was coming over I saw a girl running in the street. Her tits were bouncing around. I thought I could hear the sound of her buttocks bouncing against each other. Now everything reminds me of what used to be. A shawl wrapped snugly around a tight ass. Two lips slipping through the covering of a burka. A plump arm in short sleeves or a bare shoulder under a sleeveless blouse.”
Quiet settles over them both. The radio plays in the constable’s room. Fareed al-Atrash. I notice the bedbug scooting across the wall. It wants to get away from the light. I reach out my finger and crush it, then I hold my breath, so I won’t have to smell its stink.
Father’s voice: “It was the first month that I went to get my pension. There was an old man wearing a checkered coat, a dark-colored shirt, and a tattered necktie. The edge of his fez had a sweat stain. He was leaning on a cane. He wore Coke-bottle glasses. You had no idea where he was looking. When his turn came, he didn’t move. He kept standing quietly as though he was daydreaming and he was ready to
just wait there until the next day. The clerk at the cashier’s window knew me. He made my payments. He stretched out his hand to get my claim certificate. I got up and waved at the old man to go ahead of me. He said something I couldn’t hear. The clerk motioned him over to the next window. He started to move with a great effort, so I helped him make it to the next window. Not only did he not thank me, he didn’t even look at me. It was like I wasn’t there. When I went out, I saw him standing there, leaning against a lamp post. He kept standing there for a long time, looking straight ahead. It was like he had forgotten where he was. I couldn’t go near him. Give me another two or three years and I’ll be just like him.”
Ali Safa says: “Don’t even think that way, friend. It’s still too soon for that.” I feel father shaking his head. “I’ve started to trip when I’m walking along. My eyes glaze over. I don’t hear well. My molars hurt, but when I go to the dentist, he says my gums are shrinking.” Safa says: “The important thing is your virility.” Father’s voice comes to me as though he is far away: “What virility? It’s just a couple of drops now. The old power hose isn’t there anymore.”
The older students in the back rows stand up. Shouting in the courtyard. We pick up our satchels and leave the classroom. We join the students from the other classes. Everyone’s chanting: “Today, today, for study no way!” We gather in the school playground. The principal is standing by the closed school door. Sounds of a demonstration come from outside. Bricks rain down on the door of the school. The principal pulls back and the doorman opens the front door. We push out into the street and join with the students from the schools around us. The demonstration shoots out in the direction of the main street. We repeat after the students riding on the shoulders of classmates: “God is supreme; to Him be the glory.” “Long live the common struggle of the peoples of the Nile Valley.” “No to foreign occupation.” “Nahas Pasha, leader of the people.” The police are waiting for us at the end of the street. They block the way with a row of mounted officers. They move towards us and we run.
Stealth (New Directions Paperbook) Page 7
