That Smell and Notes From Prison

by Sonallah Ibrahim

  What could I say, what was the point of going into it after it was over, and who knows what goes on inside another person anyway? They say some people are made for love and some aren’t. Others say love doesn’t exist except in novels. As for him, he told me once about a woman whose family chased him away with clubs because he was from a different religion. There was another woman, but she died unexpectedly. He discovered that a third had agreed with her husband to have a child no matter what. The husband was more than forty-five, approaching fifty, and he wanted a child. One day we were out in the sun together and he was distracted by his thoughts. I chatted away while he sank into his thoughts, ignoring me. Maybe he was working it out in his mind. . . . But once I was walking next to him down some stairs and we reached the ground floor when we heard a sharp, quick, continuous sound on the stairs. Then a tall young woman appeared, standing in front of the elevator. Sunlight fell from the staircase windows onto her face. She looked at us and she was laughing for some reason and her hair was wild and her cheeks were red. She wouldn’t stand still. He stepped down next to me and his eyes were on her and I heard him give a hot sigh.

  She got up and went to her room and came back carrying a little wallet from which she removed a few sheets of paper and handed me a worn sheet of paper and said, He wrote this poem for me before we were married.

  She was always lost in thought and when he asked what she was thinking she said: About life and death. And he wrote:

  I am sad, child

  sad and alone

  I lie in my bed

  my cold dead bed

  with no one to speak with

  with all the books read

  with no one to laugh with

  with no tears to shed

  this is death

  but more terrible

  for the dead have no thoughts

  unless the worm has thoughts

  but the lonely man thinks

  and desires and gazes and chases

  without knowing what he chases

  it is life and death

  it is not life at all

  though I haven’t died yet

  quiet! here are steps

  human steps

  coming closer and closer

  are they real? yes! no! maybe!

  yes! they ring the bells

  I hear the human steps

  I hear the human voices

  alight with laughter

  a friend? more than one

  many friends, child

  I am not sad anymore, child

  but afraid

  they will go and leave me again

  to life and death!

  And the bell rang and Sakhr came in and he had shaved his mustache and combed his hair and carried all the morning papers under his arm. The bell rang again and a well-dressed young man came in. Mona’s mother said, pointing toward Sakhr, This is a friend of my husband. And the young man said, I know him. Sakhr leaped up and put on his glasses and began pacing the room. There were some English and French books on the shelves and he began leafing through them, then placed a hand on his hip and carried one of these books over to the window and began leafing through its pages while observing the well-dressed young man from time to time over his glasses.

  It must have been one of his happiest moments to discover there was someone who knew him for some reason. In the past he thought everyone knew him, then gradually he discovered the truth. The first time I saw him he was bare-chested, walking with slow steps and occasionally raising a finger to fiddle with his mustache. In those days, world leaders sported a variety of mustaches and it was no accident that each was distinct from the others. These mustaches turned out to be a trick. The men who wore them were gone and so was their fashion. They left nothing in the heart. They never had. And he began to beat his head against the steel door until it nearly split, crying.

  Through the window I saw a girl in the house opposite embrace another girl, kissing her on the lips. Then a girl who was blind in one eye came into the room and cried and while she cried, Sakhr stroked her hair with his hand. And Mona’s mother said that the girl was like that, that as soon as she saw a man, she cried. Finally, Mona came home from school. I said to her, I’m a friend of your father and she gave me a suspicious look. I took her to the club. There were other children there and I asked them to take her into the water with them, since I didn’t know how to swim, and they took her away. She ran and played and was happy. There was a piece of wood that helped with swimming and she grabbed onto it. But another little girl, a fat girl, took the piece of wood from her and floated on top of it. Mona held on to the piece of wood. The little fat girl grabbed her hair and pushed her away from the piece of wood, taking the piece of wood and swimming on top of it. Mona was a long way from the edge of the pool. I ran quickly toward her. She was bobbing up and down in the water and gasping for air and her eyes were wide with fear and I called out to her but she sank beneath the water and didn’t reappear. One of the swimmers swam to help her and dragged her up, carrying her to me, and I took her home. While we were climbing the stairs, she said, If someone is there, I’m going to say you’re my father. Don’t say you aren’t. We went into the house. Her mother was getting dressed, so I waited. Then my eyes fell on the wall clock. I jumped up and rushed for the door and rushed into the street. The policeman would arrive at any moment. I reached my room, gasping for air, and found a letter waiting for me. I checked to see who had sent it. It was from Nagwa. I read the letter slowly, then I lit a cigarette and stretched out on the bed and read the letter again. She was wondering if we might meet again after all these years. I closed my eyes to see what I could remember of how she looked: her affectionate eyes, her tender mouth. The bell rang and I got up to open the door. It was the policeman. I asked him to wait and came back to the room with the notebook for him to sign. He left and I kept the notebook in my pocket for next time. The bell rang again. When I opened the door Nagwa was there. I embraced her. She hugged me back violently, pressing her whole body against my body. But I didn’t press against her, I pushed her away to look at her. Then I led her into the room and turned off the light and sat on the bed and pulled her down next to me. Then I pulled her toward me and kissed her on her lips. She pulled her face away and said, Talk to me. I didn’t want to talk. I stroked her face. It was hot and soft. She pulled her face away, saying, Talk, say what happened. I put my hand over her mouth and pulled her head toward me and kissed her, gripping her lips between my lips. She bit me back in the same way, rough and unpracticed. Then she pulled away.

  This is how it always was. The first time I kissed her, she acted shy. I was sitting next to her and the light was falling on her cheek and we had stopped talking. I rested my head on her shoulder and she didn’t object. I kissed her on the cheek, then on the lips. When we’d gathered a little more courage, she gripped my lower lip and bit down on it hard. It hurt. I wanted to feel her soft lip in my mouth. I couldn’t get enough of it. If I could have held her in my arms all day, I would have. I felt the heat in her face, in her thighs. Every time after that I would make her stand up naked and contemplate her thighs. They were beautiful and soft and dark. I would ask her to bare her forearms so I could kiss them and feel them against my body. But she hesitated. We would lie pressed together in the dark to forget the world, to forget everything. We thought of nothing, feared nothing, and when my cheek brushed her cheek, when our noses touched, when our heads rested against each other, when our eyes stared at the same place on the ceiling, then noth
ing else had any importance. Soon I would move my head and my lips would sneak over to her lips. We shared delicate kisses and rough kisses and then she would pull her head back and sigh. The first time she held me violently and said, Where were you all this time? Another time she said, Lover. I was quiet. The word echoed in my ear for the first time. I didn’t trust myself. But soon she turned away and said, I want to sleep. I lay on my back, eyes up on the ceiling, hoping she would turn and embrace me but soon I felt her regular breathing, the contented and peaceful breathing of someone sleeping. So I turned and raised myself up to look at her. Her head rested on her arm while she slept. Her hair was spread across her neck and her other arm rested on her side. I let my look linger all over her body, then dropped back on the bed.

  She stretched out next to me and laid her cheek on my hand, offering me her face lit by a little moonlight. She said, I’ll do the talking. She talked for a long time, then stopped. I told her I was worn out, that I had always wanted her. I pulled her toward me but she pulled away. I asked her to bare her forearm and she did. I kissed her forearm and her shoulder in the moonlight but soon she said, It’s cold, and she covered them. Then she stretched out on her back. She must have been thinking the same thing I was thinking. Something was missing, something was broken. She said, I want to sleep. I pulled her toward me and kissed her. My lips wandered from cheek to ear, kissing her there until she shivered and raised her eyes to mine and smiled and said, And this, where did you learn this?

  How could she remember while I had forgotten? When my lips climbed up her thigh and I kissed her there for the first time and she looked at me with a mixture of pleasure and surprise and shyness, she said, Where did you learn this?

  I reached my hand toward her chest but she pushed it away and said, No. I rolled away, then stretched out beside her. I waited for her to turn and embrace me but she didn’t. I was awake. I felt the pain between my legs. I got up and went to the bathroom. I got rid of my desire, then came back and stretched out beside her. I slept and woke and slept again and when I opened my eyes it was morning and she had already put her clothes on. I’m leaving now, she said. When will I see you? I asked. I’ll come by, she said. I stayed there stretched out on the bed, then finally got up and washed. I put some powdered soap in a basin of water and stirred it until the foam rose, then put my dirty clothes in. My sister and her fiancé came by. I put my clothes on and we went out and I bought the morning papers. In the entrance to the building we met a friend of my sister and her uncle and we went to a café. My sister’s fiancé said, We want to be happy for you. That will take time, I said. Why? he asked. Love isn’t easy, I said. He shrugged and said, Here’s my advice, love comes after marriage. The uncle said, I’ve been married five times. I left them and went to see Sami at his place. I was brought into the living room and waited for him a long time. A little girl came in whom I recognized as his daughter. She walked up to me. I felt uncomfortable. I needed to use the toilet and I broke wind and the little girl smelled it. Caca smell, she said. I pretended not to smell it. But again she said, Caca smell. So I started sniffing all around, saying, Where? until the smell went away. Finally I gave up on Sami and got up and left. The traffic was terrible. I went to the offices of the magazine but no one was there. A radio was playing loudly in the street — it was a song in English about children and I realized that Muhammed Fawzi’s new song was the same song. I got on the metro and the crowds were horrendous and I almost suffocated. I looked at the faces of tired women with eyeliner running down their faces. I went to Samia’s house and found them eating. Samia smiled when she saw me and said she had waited for me for a long time before starting to eat. Really? I almost said. I asked about her boy and she said he was sleeping. I felt myself smiling. Her smile was simple and sincere. I hadn’t thought that she was so simple and so graceful.

  So what? She has her husband and her child and there’s no place for anyone else in her life and soon I’ll leave and that will be the end of everything.

  Every now and then she sighed hotly and said, O Lord. I said to her, If Freud heard you, he would have something to say about that. Lots of things, she said. We finished eating and she stood up. She was wearing a light shirt with nothing under it and just beneath her armpit I saw the side of her breast where it bulged out from her chest. I was surprised it didn’t droop. It was milky white. I looked away and into her eyes, so frank and so straightforward. She went in to sleep and I slept too and when I woke up I looked for her in her room. Her bed was on the far side of the room and she was lying on her back with her head turned away from me, gazing at the wall opposite, with her son at her chest, still sleepy and looking around in confusion. Her leg was bare — it was milky white — and she quickly covered it. She got up and put on an orange skirt and we sat on the balcony and she said that her little boy liked me. I loved her easy, honest voice, her simple gestures. I told her that I felt like an old man. I hardly smiled or laughed. All the people I saw on the street or on the metro were unhappy, unsmiling. What was there to be happy about? We talked about books. She said she’d stopped reading a while ago, when her boy was born. I asked if she had read The Plague. I felt as though a lot rode on her answer but she said, No. I was about to tell her that I envied her simplicity and her grace. I told myself that I would say so when we said goodbye. I looked at my watch. I had to go. I stood up and so did she and I said to her in a low voice, You know, you’re really strange. She looked at me in surprise. Today, I finally figured you out, I said. She bent over her little boy and busied herself straightening his clothes and I couldn’t see her eyes very well. Her husband came home and I said goodbye to both of them. They accompanied me to the stairs. At the garden gate, I turned around. She was going back into her nice cool home and I watched her orange skirt disappear behind the door. I walked back to the apartment and saw a nice-looking girl walking next to the train rails as if she was having trouble with her shoes. I went into the building. The light was on in the wood-paneled room by the entrance and the door was open. I peeked in and saw my sister’s friend Husniyya. I went up to my room and my sister came. I said to her, Samia’s nice. Then I said, Is she happy with her husband? Of course, she said. I bet she doesn’t love him, I said. Impossible, she said. Where else will she find a man like that, as far as personality and position? And she said they had met before getting married.

  So what if they had met before getting married. . . . She was twenty-seven, she’d waited for her prince a long time with no luck. . . . She had no privacy at home, she slept in a room that was like a living room. She could never close the door and be alone and take off her clothes, for example. She couldn’t look at her body in a mirror. She couldn’t stand the meaningful looks of her father and her mother every night. There was nothing to talk about except the husband that kept not coming. She was blamed for not being able to catch one herself. Then one night she met him at a girlfriend’s house. The next day her friend told her that he wanted to marry her and after a ten-minute walk home, at the door to that house with its peeling paint, she said to her friend, Why not? Maybe he was the lover she was waiting for. Maybe all this talk about love and making eyes at each other and heaving sighs was only for books. Maybe she had found happiness with him. Maybe. . . . The word that hangs over every new marriage. Maybe he was the man she was waiting for. Maybe this was love. One year later the child came and now she was stuck forever. There was nothing to do but submit. . . . And that time when the radio was playing, when I noticed her eyes go thoughtful an
d her face become full of sadness. . . . What happened after the marriage? I imagined them next to each other on the bed, one of them bored and resentful, always feeling that something inside her was unmoved, that her flesh no longer quivered, that some deep well went unplumbed.

  Do you know what love is? I said. She looked at me in surprise. My question was silly and naïve. Of course, she said. Do you love your fiancé? I said. I do, she said. When we got engaged I couldn’t stand him, but later on I loved him. Her voice was raised. Why are you upset? I said. That’s just how I talk, she said. Then she said she wanted to shower but that if she did her hair would be a mess and she’d have to go to the hairdresser again. The bell rang. I got my notebook and went to open the door but it was my sister’s fiancé. Standing behind him was his friend, Husniyya. Husniyya said to my sister, Can you believe it, my fiancé is jealous of my uncle. He says I spend all my time with my uncle. My sister’s fiancé said he had spent all day looking for a water heater and bought a refrigerator. Does anyone know someone traveling abroad who could bring me back a tape recorder? he said. Husniyya’s uncle came and took them all to the cinema and I was left on my own at my desk. I tried to write. The bell rang and I rushed to the door hoping that something would happen, that someone would come. It was the clothes presser. The bell rang again. Opening the door, I was surprised to see Nihad and her father. They swept into the room and said, You must come to our house tomorrow. I said to Nihad, You’ve really changed. She smiled nicely and said, The last time you saw me, I was very young. They refused to sit down and said that Nihad’s mother was waiting in the car and I said goodbye to them outside and then went back to my room. I smoked greedily, thinking, unable to write. She had looked at me very closely. I supposed she had heard a lot about me and must have been impressed. The bell rang a third time, a long and powerful ring. I got my notebook and went to the door and opened it and gave the notebook to the policeman, then went back to my room and turned the light off and lay down on the bed and went to sleep. I woke up startled by the sound of the bell. When I opened the door no one was there. I went back to my room and left its door open and went back to sleep. I got up early in the morning and shaved and dressed and took a clean shirt to the clothes presser and went back and changed, then went downstairs and looked for a place to have my shoes shined. I bought the papers and finally got on the metro. The conductor stopped to put a lump of opium in his mouth and sip some tea. Lucky man, I thought. He’d found a way to live that let him put on a brave face. He resumed driving very slowly. I wished he would speed up so that I wouldn’t be late and the dust wouldn’t ruin my elegant get-up. I got off a long way away from the house and caught a taxi and stopped it in front of the house. I looked up at the balconies and saw no one. So I climbed up to the top floor and found Nihad with her mother at the table. They hadn’t seen the taxi. I sat down with them. Nihad was studying. I looked at her hard. Her lips were as I’d hoped. The lower one was curved and her teeth showed a little. Her voice was calm and graceful. Her mother asked what I was doing now. Her voice was rather loud. I told her I was writing. Are you writing stories? she said. Yes, I said. Out of books? No, I said, from my head. And Nihad said, You must be a big shot. I lit a cigarette. You should settle down, her mother said. America is wonderful, Nihad said. What do you think? I like some things and not others, I said. Forget all this and look out for yourself, she said. Then she said, Help me study. Her voice was very soft. I had had enough of loud voices. Can you believe what they did to my father? she said. They threw him out of his company after they took it away from him. She said they had conspired against him and accused him of fraud. Let’s eat, they said, and we went down to the ground floor. We sat at the table and I took some salad and rice on my plate and Nihad asked me, Thigh or breast? My sister had warned me. Don’t take a thigh, she said, you won’t know how to eat it with a knife and fork. I don’t know what got into me but I said to her, Give me the thigh. She put it in front of me and I grabbed the knife and fork and when I stuck the fork in the thigh flew up from my plate and landed in the salad bowl. That’s not how chicken is eaten, Nihad said calmly. Eat it with your fingers. I said that my sister had warned me but I didn’t pay attention to her warning. Her father ate his thigh with a knife and fork. The mother said that in Europe they didn’t eat the thigh with a knife and fork and after that I didn’t know how to eat. I made a mess of the macaroni and watermelon. What do you think of the situation? they said. The father said that he’d met people coming from Russia and that the poverty there was terrible. He said capitalism was better. Who can argue with that? Nihad said forcefully. Then she said, Do you believe in our Lord? I got up and washed my hands and dried them on a towel and we went upstairs. They offered cigarettes but I didn’t feel like smoking. The father spoke on the telephone. He wanted to buy the land next door. The mother put her hand to her cheek and faded out. The father came in to sleep and Nihad said, Are you tired? No, I said, and we went back to studying. The father woke up and unrolled the prayer mat in front of us and made his prayers, then sat down next to us and they brought tea. How’s Nihad doing? he said. Very well, I said. Behind us they turned the television on to a very high volume. The maid and the cook and the nanny came in and sat on the floor to watch. Nihad was ignoring me and watching the film. She said, Ahmad Ramzi is amazing. I started to get tired. She got up and sat beside me. Her bare forearm was next to me. She was careful not to touch. The mother heard me explain a word in English and said, No, that’s not what it means. Then the father broke in, though he only knew French. He said the word in French had a different meaning. I said nothing while the mother and father fought. The mother asked me to support her version. Usually that’s the meaning, I said. No, the father said, giving me a look. More or less, I said. Then the noise from the television got very loud. Nihad said that a director had seen her that morning and said that she looked like Lubna Abdel Aziz. Some visitors arrived and Nihad got up to welcome them and sat with them at the other end of the room. She talked with them very animatedly, then ignored them to watch Ahmad Ramzi. I had a splitting headache and got up to leave. One of the visitors looked at me inquiringly. I’m the son of so-and-so, I said. She laughed and pointed to her nose, then twirled an imaginary mustache, lifting its tips. The one with the big mustache? she said. Yes, I said. The mother shouted, Come here. I wondered if she was feeling bad for me and would give me five guineas. She signaled for me to follow her to her room. Her maid was sitting on a chair, a plump dark girl. My class of woman, I said to myself. I thought that if I spoke with the mother I could marry her. Then they could say they had helped me find a good wife, just the right kind for me. The mother handed me some rolled-up papers and said it was a bolt of fabric. I didn’t know what to say. I had decided to say no if she offered me money, but I hadn’t counted on an offer of fabric. I got annoyed and said no, but she insisted. You’re like my son, she said. I didn’t know what to do. I took it and told myself that anyway I had gotten a suit out of it. I went back to the living room and Nihad went with me to the stairs and I left the house, not looking up. I walked and my shoes filled with dust and I didn’t care. I got on the metro. It was terrifyingly crowded. My clothes were crumpled. I didn’t protest. At one stop the train was assaulted by tens of workers on their way home. They forced their way through the crowd and one of them stood in front of me. His eyes were bloodshot. Another leaned against a row of seats and stared from the window and began to fall asleep. When I looked at him again his head was bouncing along with the movement of the t
rain and knocking into the seats while he fell deeper and deeper into sleep. When I got off I saw the same girl I had seen before, walking slowly next to the train rails. I went up to my room and put the key in the lock. It was the same door and the same key for all families of our class. I went in and took my clothes off and put my trousers on a hanger and hung them from the wall. Then I showered. Then I sat down at my desk and turned on the transistor. The roll of fabric was in front of me. I opened it. It was pajama fabric, not suit fabric. I lit a cigarette. My sister appeared and said, How much is left of the fifty piastres? I counted up my transportation costs, but didn’t dare tell her about the ten piastres the taxi had cost. Her fiancé appeared and said he had stood for two hours outside the cooperative to buy meat. He said the situation was unbearable. You guys want to spread poverty, he said. There’s no way for me to make money. If I build something, the government would take it away. Adel and his wife came and I offered him a cigarette and he said, I don’t smoke and I don’t drink coffee. He said that he only had a cup of tea in the morning, but that his bill at the office was thirty piastres a day because of the demands of his co-workers. Unlike them, he didn’t take bribes. Too bad, his wife said. No one can talk to workers anymore, she said. Adel said that the chauffer of his uncle, Fahmy Bey, didn’t get up until ten in the morning, although Fahmy Bey was up at dawn. He said to my sister’s fiancé, I’ll show you the best place to buy a soap dish. My sister said she needed a maid, but where could she find one? Her fiancé said that he had ordered a Ronson lighter, which was on its way from Beirut. We have to go now, they all said. They went and I was left at my desk, smoking. Then I got up and turned the light off and stood by the window, breathing in the air. My window looked out on the backs of several apartments. I could see only a little stretch of the street. I stuck my head out and twisted my neck so I could see the lit-up shops and the people coming and going. Then I tired of this and pulled my head back in and rested my arm on the window ledge. Across from me there was a darkened window. It lit up suddenly, showing a young woman slowly removing her clothes. Eventually she was completely naked. She threw herself on a bed in the corner of the room and lay face down, her back turned to the light. I stared at her shapely body and the dark shadows the light left along her curves. Then the bell rang. I got my notebook and stalled for a moment, lighting a cigarette and picking up the pack to take with me. The bell rang again and I went quickly to the door. I opened it and gave the policeman the notebook while taking out the pack of cigarettes. I gave him a cigarette, then he left and I went back to my room and tossed the notebook on the desk. I glanced over at the window opposite. It had gone dark. I stretched out on the bed and smoked the cigarette all the way down, then flicked it out the window and slept. In the morning I bought a magazine and a small glass of milk and some bread. I went home and boiled the milk and put some sugar in it, then dunked the bread in the milk while reading the magazine. Then I went out and caught the metro. It stopped just before Emergency Station and all the passengers got off. Several cars were turned over on their sides next to the rails. Their blackened innards stuck out. I walked to the café where Magdi liked to sit. He was there by himself in a corner. He said, We must affirm our existence. I examined the wrinkles that had dug themselves all over his face. He said, They’re all sons of bitches. Then he said, With the people, you’re strong, on your own, you’re weak. His face crumpled.