Chicago

by Alaa Al Aswany

  He parked the car and locked it. I walked next to him, dazzled by the neon lights glittering on and off endlessly, making the whole street look more like a large nightclub. Suddenly we heard a voice behind us, “Just a moment, sir.”

  I stopped to look at the source of the sound, but Karam grabbed my arm and whispered in my ear, “Keep walking. Don’t look behind and don’t talk to anyone.”

  His tone was stern, so I acquiesced. He moved faster, with me in tow. Before long there appeared beside us a tall, thin young black man, his hair cascading down his shoulders in intersecting braids. He was wearing bracelets on his arms and chains on his chest that jangled as he moved. He said, “Hey, man. You want some pot?”

  “No, thank you,” Karam answered quickly, but the young man persisted,“I have some excellent stuff that’ll make you see the world as it is.”

  “Thank you. We don’t like pot.”

  Karam stopped and so did I. We remained standing on the sidewalk as we were. The young man walked in front of us, jangling until he disappeared down a side street. It was then that Karam started walking again, saying, “You have to be careful with those guys. They’re usually under the influence and one of them might fool you with this pot business until you take out the money from your pocket, which he would then snatch and maybe hurt you.”

  I remained silent and he asked me, “Are you tense because of what happened?”

  “Of course.”

  He laughed loudly and said, “What happened is quite ordinary. People face it here every day. You’re in Chicago, my friend. Here we are.”

  We entered an elegant two-story building with a lighted electric sign saying piano bar. The place had soft lights throughout and there were tall round tables scattered all over. At the end of the room there was a black man wearing a tuxedo and playing the piano. We sat at a nearby table and Karam said, “I hope you like this place. I prefer quiet bars. I can no longer stand noisy dance clubs. It’s a sign of old age.”

  A beautiful blond waitress came over, and when I ordered a glass of wine, he asked me in surprise, “You still want to drink? I haven’t recovered from last night’s drinking.”

  “Me too, but one or two glasses will make me okay. This is a well-known way of getting over a hangover — to drink a little the following day. Abu Nuwas said, ‘Treat me with that which made me sick.’”

  Dr. Karam picked up a piece of paper from the table and took out of his pocket a gold pen and said, “Wasn’t Abu Nuwas the poet famous for his poetry on wine during the Abbasid period?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Can you repeat that verse? I’d like to write it down.”

  He wrote it down quickly then said as he put the pen in his pocket, “I’ll have a drink like you to get rid of the headache.”

  We were avoiding looking at each other, as if we had suddenly remembered the quarrel. He took a large sip of whiskey and sighed, saying, “I am sorry, Nagi.”

  “It was I who wronged you.”

  “We were both drunk and we fought and it’s over. But I’ve come tonight for something else.” He was carrying a small valise in his hand. He placed it between us on the round marble table, then put on his gold-framed glasses and took out a sheaf of papers. “Here, please.”

  “What’s this?”

  “Something I want you to read.” The lights were dim and I had a headache, so I said, “With your permission, may I read it later?”

  “No, now, please.” I moved a little to the right so I could get closer to the light.

  The papers were written in Arabic. I began to read, “A proposal submitted by Dr. Karam Doss, professor of open heart surgery at Northwestern University, to the College of Medicine, Ain Shams University.”

  He didn’t let me finish reading. He leaned his elbows on the table and said, “I submitted this proposal last year to Ain Shams University.”

  He ordered another drink and continued enthusiastically, “I’m now a big name in heart surgery. My fees for each operation are very high. And yet I offered the officials at Ain Shams Medical School Hospital my services, to perform operations for free for a month every year. I wanted to help poor patients and transfer to Egypt advanced surgery techniques.”

  “That’s great.”

  “More than that. I submitted a proposal to establish a modern surgery unit that would have cost them next to nothing. I was going to secure funding for them through my connections with American universities and research centers.”

  “Excellent idea!” I exclaimed, my sense of guilt increasing. “Do you know what their answer was?”

  “Of course they welcomed it.” He laughed. “They didn’t reply and when I called the dean of Ain Shams Medical School, he said my idea was not feasible at this time.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He took another sip of his drink, and it seemed to me that he was having a hard time concentrating. I knew that drinking again after a hangover got rid of the headache, but it also made the liquor more potent.

  “I haven’t told this story to anyone, but you should know it because yesterday you accused me of fleeing from Egypt.”

  “I apologize again.”

  He bowed his head and said in a soft voice, as if talking to himself, “Please stop apologizing. I just want you to know me as I really am. For the last thirty years that I’ve lived in America, I haven’t forgotten Egypt for a single day.”

  “Aren’t you happy with your life here?”

  He looked at me as if trying to find the right words, and then he smiled and said, “Have you had any American fruits?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Here they use genetic engineering to make the fruit much larger and yet it doesn’t taste so good. Life in America, Nagi, is like American fruit: shiny and appetizing on the outside, but tasteless.”

  “You’re saying that after all you’ve achieved?”

  “All success outside one’s homeland is deficient.”

  “Why don’t you go back to Egypt?”

  “It’s difficult to erase thirty years of your life. It’s a difficult decision, but I’ve thought about it. The proposal I submitted was my first step toward going back, but they turned it down.”

  He said the last few words bitterly, and I said, “It’s really sad for Egypt to lose people like you.”

  “Perhaps you find this hard to understand because you’re still young. It’s like when a man loves a woman and gets very attached to her and then discovers that she is cheating on him: do you understand this kind of agony? To curse the woman and at the same time to love her and never be able to forget her — that’s how I feel toward Egypt. I love her and I wish to offer her all I’ve got, but she rejects me.”

  I saw that his eyes were welling up with tears, so I leaned over and put my arm around him and bent over to kiss his head, but he gently pushed me away, saying as he tried to smile, “How about ending this melodrama?”

  He began to change the subject and asked me about my studies. We spent about half an hour talking about various subjects, and suddenly we heard a woman’s voice close to us: “Hi, sorry to interrupt. I have a question.”

  “Go ahead,” I said quickly. She was a young woman in her twenties, blond and shapely. I had noticed her while we were talking, coming in from the bar and sitting at the table next to us.

  “What language are you speaking?”

  “Arabic.”

  “Are you Arabs?”

  “We’re from Egypt. Dr. Karam is a heart surgeon and I am study ing medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago.”

  “I’m Wendy Shore. I work at the Chicago Stock Exchange.”

  “You’re lucky, then. You have lots of money.” She laughed. “I only handle the money. I don’t own it, unfortu nately.”

  A jovial atmosphere filled the place. Suddenly Dr. Karam got up and patted me on the shoulder, saying, “I have to go now. I haven’t slept since yesterday and I have surgery at seven in the morning.”
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  Then he turned to Wendy, shook hands with her, and said, “Glad to meet you, Ms. Shore. I hope to see you again.”

  I kept following him with my eyes until he disappeared through the bar door. I felt that I loved him and said to myself that I should take my time before judging people so as not to jump to the wrong conclusions as I had done. I came to when I heard Wendy’s merry voice saying, “Okay, tell me about Egypt.”

  I carried my glass and moved to her table. She was beautiful; she had gathered her blond hair up and her gorgeous neck showed. There were light freckles on her cheeks that gave her a childlike appearance made all the more pronounced by her big blue eyes, which made her look as if she were in a state of constant astonishment. I remembered Graham’s advice, so I said, “I won’t tell you about Egypt until you let me buy you a drink.”

  “That’s nice of you.”

  “What would you like?”

  “A gin and tonic, please.”

  Chapter 17

  Since Chicago was settled, black migration to it has not stopped. Hundreds of thousands escaped slavery in the southern states and came to Chicago driven by the dream of becoming free citizens with dignity. The men worked in factories and their wives worked as domestics in homes or as nannies. They soon discovered that they had replaced slaves’ iron chains with other invisible but no less cruel shackles. In the early 1900s black people were allowed to live only on the South Side of the city, where the authorities built affordable housing for the poor. Many black people were unable to move to better neighborhoods because they were poor and were not able to leave the ghetto. For over a hundred years white people had an aversion, as deeply held as if it were a creed, to living together with black people. That aversion was sometimes referred to in American psychological literature as “Negrophobia.” All attempts, spontaneous and deliberate, to break the barrier failed. On July 27, 1919, it got very hot in Chicago and this made a seventeen-year-old black man, Eugene Williams, seek relief on the beach at Twenty-ninth Street. The beach, like everything else in the city, had its white and its black sections. Eugene felt wonderfully refreshed as he jumped into the cool water and kept swimming for about an hour. Then it occurred to him, unfortunately, to test his ability to stay underwater. So he held his breath and dived under the surface. And because a diver cannot precisely fix his location, Eugene bobbed up and opened his eyes only to discover that he had crossed the barrier and found himself in the white swimming area. He heard angry shouts and before he could hurry back to where he had come from, white swimmers grabbed him, blinded by anger at his sullying their territorial waters. They started calling him names and beating him; they punched him in the stomach and face as hard as they could. Some used wooden oars to beat him repeatedly on the head until he died. Then they discarded his body on the beach. What made matters worse was the fact that white policemen persistently refused to arrest the killers or interrogate them. During the six days that followed Chicago witnessed horrific racial clashes between white and black people, which left thirty-eight people dead and hundreds of others injured or homeless. The memory of Eugene Williams remained for a long time as a strong lesson for anyone who thought of breaking the barrier. In the year 1966, at the height of the civil rights movement against racism and the Vietnam War, the famous black American leader Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in Chicago and led a procession of tens of thousands of predominantly black marchers through white neighborhoods. King wanted to send a Christian message of love and brotherhood and to declare, at the same time, that the race situation was no longer tolerable. But the result was violent and frustrating. White people attacked the march viciously, throwing stones and rotten eggs and tomatoes on the marchers. They attacked them with clubs and gunfire, and many black people were injured. It wasn’t long afterward that King himself was shot by a white racist fanatic. In 1984, a black couple made a fortune and bought a house in a rich white neighborhood. The answer came right away: their white neighbors harassed them and threw stones at them, which resulted in serious injuries. Then the angry neighbors went further, burning first the garage and then the whole house. The couple fled. A similar thing happened to another black couple the same year, and the result was even more tragic.

  And thus, throughout Chicago’s history, the racial barrier remained as solid as a rock that could not be ignored or transcended: the north of the city and its suburbs were made up of upscale communities inhabited by a white elite in the highest income brackets in the country, while in the black South Side poverty reached levels hard to imagine in America. Unemployment there was rampant, as were drugs, murders, rapes, and robberies. Education and health services were substandard, and everything was distorted, even the concept of family. Many black children were raised by their mothers alone because the fathers left, were killed, or were in jail. It was this glaring contrast between those two worlds that made the famous sociologist Gregory Squires resort to the language of literature when he prefaced his research on Chicago with the following: “It’s not the many contradictions that Chicago embodies that distinguish it. What makes it a unique city is that it always takes its contradictions to the utmost.”

  AS SOON AS RA’FAT THABIT drove into Oakland, he was horrified: many of the redbrick homes were in ruins; backyards were filled with old junk and garbage; gang slogans were sprayed in black and red on the walls; groups of young black people were standing on street corners smoking marijuana; loud music and noise came from some open bars. Ra’fat’s anguish increased as he asked himself: How does my daughter live in such a dump? He was determined to see her by any means. He had not thought about what he would tell her when he knocked on her door and awakened her at two o’clock in the morning. He was going to see her now and let come what may. That was what he told himself as he slowed down and looked at the house numbers. He knew Jeff ’s address by heart. When he got close to the house he went into the parking lot across the street. He locked the car using his remote and hurried to get to the street. It was pitch-dark, and he was suddenly overcome by an uncomfortable feeling. As soon as he passed the first row of cars, he sensed that someone was following him. He tried to dispel the thought but heard, clearly this time, something moving in the dark next to him. He stopped and turned around and little by little was able to make out a large body approaching.

  “Why hasn’t the old man gone to bed yet?”

  The surprise paralyzed Ra’fat, so he fell silent. The man laughed loudly and it seemed from his soft, languorous voice that he was stoned.

  “Why’d you come to Oakland, old man? Are you looking for a woman or do you want a fix?”

  “I came to visit my daughter.”

  “What’s your daughter doing in Oakland?”

  “She’s living with her boyfriend.”

  “Her boyfriend must be a real man. Only men are born in Oakland. What do you want from your daughter, pops?”

  “I just came to check in on her.”

  “What a loving father! Listen, pops. I’m Max, a man from Oakland, and I need a fix now, pops.”

  There was silence for a moment, then Max’s voice changed into a deeper and more serious tone, “I want fifty bucks, pops, to buy some herb and get high.”

  Ra’fat did not reply; Max extended his big hand and placed it on his shoulders, saying, “Give me fifty bucks. Don’t be a coldhearted miser. Come on, come on.”

  With lightning speed, Max took out of his pocket a switchblade and snapped it open, revealing its long blade that shone in the dark. “Come on, pops. I don’t have time to waste. Are you going to pay or would you like me to save you from the cruelty of this world?”

  Ra’fat slowly reached into his pocket and took out his wallet then realized that he wouldn’t be able to see anything in the pitch-dark. It seemed Max had realized that too, so he shone a small flashlight.

  “There, see? I’m helping you see the money you have. I only want fifty bucks, pops. You’re lucky, man. You met good ol’ Max. If I was evil I would’ve took the whole wallet.
But I ain’t no thief, pops. I’m an honest man who can’t find a job in all of goddamn Chicago, a penniless honest man who needs to get high, that’s all.”

  Ra’fat took out a fifty-dollar bill. Max snatched it and backed off a step, still brandishing the switchblade, and said, “Okay, you can go to your daughter now. But a piece of advice, pops: don’t hang out in Oakland at night. Not everybody here is as good-hearted as Max.”

  Ra’fat, during his long residence in Chicago, had been through and told about similar incidents and knew the right way to deal with them: don’t ignore your assailant or resist him. The person mugging you most likely is not sober: he’s either drunk or high. He might kill you at any moment. Give him what he wants. Don’t argue. Don’t carry a lot of money with you because he will take it all and don’t walk without money, because if you disappoint him he might kill you.

  Ra’fat hurried away and heard Max behind him talking to someone else whom he guessed was hiding in the dark. Jeff ’s house was about a hundred yards away from the parking lot. Ra’fat walked quickly, getting angrier and thinking: Why did Sarah leave the upscale neighborhood where she grew up and come to live among criminals? Her life is in real danger because of her attachment to this bum. My duty as a father is to save her as fast as I can. And this is what I’m going to do right now. He kicked the gate in the iron fence and it made a dull squeaking sound. He crossed the small garden in the pitch-dark quickly and went up three stairs and stood in front of the door of the house. He was panting from effort and agitation. He reached out to ring the bell but let his arm drop to his side right away: What was he going to say to her? Would he wake her up at two o’clock in the morning to ask her to go back home with him? Would she agree so simply?

  He stood for a few moments reluctantly in front of the door then decided to give himself a chance to think. So he turned around and began to walk slowly around the house. The side walkway was narrow, and he saw at the end of it a small window through which some light came. So, they’re still awake, he said to himself. He was gripped by a strange desire, so he sneaked carefully until he reached the window. There was a faded curtain blocking the view inside, but he found a small gap between the edge of the curtain and the windowpane that made it possible for him to look in from a narrow side angle. He glued his face to the glass of the window, feeling its cold on his ear. He looked and saw a sofa on which Jeff was sitting in his jeans, his chest bare. He looked emaciated and pale, and there were black rings around his beautiful eyes. He was laughing and waving his hand, speaking to someone whom Ra’fat couldn’t see but guessed to be Sarah. The conversation lasted for several minutes and Ra’fat gave in to his voyeuristic desire, so he stuck to his place. Soon Sarah appeared. She was wearing a very short blue nightgown that completely revealed her breasts and thighs. She threw herself next to Jeff, who suddenly bent down and was out of sight. Ra’fat stood on tiptoe to follow the scene.