on the battles of the Second World War, a third about Prince Omar Toussoun, an old photograph of himself with a little hat and pipe in his garden, and another picture of him with a German girl. He said it was from the days of Rommel’s advance on Alexandria, when he’d started to learn German. Then he showed me a third picture of him at the offices of an American company and another of him at the offices of an Egyptian importer. I wish I had a little young thing, he said. And he said he had never been in love. And he said that yesterday he had wanted to sleep with his wife but she wouldn’t let him because he had made her buy fruit with her own money, but when he gave her two guineas she opened up. He gathered the papers and photographs and put them back in their folders. I’m finished now, he said. I’m going to raise rabbits. They called us to eat. Afterward, I left and went to the magazine and met Sirri. He said he’d like to help me but that under the circumstances there was nothing he could do. Have you read my pieces? he said. I’m the only one who writes like that now. Fuad is a trifler, he said, and would you believe he claimed I was his disciple? I left him and went to Sami’s office at the end of the corridor. This time he was there. I have no idea what you’ve been writing lately, he said. I stood next to his desk while he wrote something. He look up at me, puzzled. I won’t keep you, he said. Come see me in a couple days. I went out to the street and walked to the metro. I saw an extremely pretty girl through the window of an airlines office. I rode the metro home. There were no empty seats, so I stood and looked at the people. In the women’s car I saw a woman in profile. She was staring from the window wearing a sleeveless white dress. She looked exceptionally clean. She must have taken a shower before heading out. Her hair was long and silky and there was no way she’d had it done at a hairdresser. I noticed a little girl next to her. When she turned her whole face toward me and I saw her wine-dark complexion, my chest clenched. Her face had no shadow, no paint. I found myself staring into her eyes, which were large and clear, and for a moment I lost myself.
Her eyes were stars in silent space where I was swimming and sinking. It was night. Our eyes met and hers glimmered in the light and I saw myself in their wide-open whites and I saw her in their black depths. Her bare arm was next to me. Its skin was dark with a little red mixed in. It seemed warm. I wanted to touch it at the plump joint just below the shoulder. Her white blouse was airy and she wasn’t wearing an undershirt. I could see the points of her nipples beneath the blouse where they brushed against the silk. The skin of her face was soft, her lips were full and parted, the lower one making a little arch, and they were dark-colored as though scorched by some fire. When she looked at me she smiled and let her look linger. I got dizzy. When I pulled her toward me she went still, then pushed me away. We were sitting in the dark. She reached out her hand and played with my hair. It crept to the collar of my shirt, then to my back. She caressed my back with her palm. I drew her toward me and buried my face in her neck, taking pleasure in the softness of her skin on my cheek. I breathed in her clean smell and raised my head and kissed her lips and was lost. When I returned to the attack, she pushed me away. I studied her moods. When she tightened her lips and would not speak, I went mad wanting to know why. When she looked vulnerable or pitiable, I adored her. When I sat in front of her, looking at her face, her hands, her legs, I almost wept with desire. It hurt to look at her bright eyes, her mouthwatering cheeks. It hurt when my fingers crept over her arm and my leg inched toward her leg and she refused me. I was finally on the point of madness. I had almost given up when she took me in her arms and let me touch her breasts and hands and kiss her cheek and lips. But she was cold.
She turned her eyes away and didn’t look at me again. I got off at my stop and bought some food and went upstairs. The light was on in the wood-paneled room used by Husaniyya’s uncle and the door was open. When I looked in I saw him with his head in his hands, looking at a picture of a girl in a gold frame on the small table in front of him. It was a picture of Husaniyya. In the picture, her eyes were big and beautiful. I moved away before he sensed I was there. I went up to my room and took my clothes off and turned on the transistor, but there were no songs or music and it started to crackle. I sat and tried to write. The traces of my pleasure looked like black spots on the floor. Hasan came in and I told him we needed to get a woman right away. He said he would do his best, and left. He came back in half an hour and said, My brother’s on the stairs with a girl. Make yourself scarce for a while. We told her there were only two of us. I went to the kitchen and made some tea. Hasan came in and said his brother and the girl were in my room now. I carried the tea into the living room and put it on the table, then sat at the table. Hasan lit a cigarette and drummed his fingers on the table. Soon the door to the room opened and Hasan’s brother came out and I shook his hand. I had never met him before. He was a big man in his forties. Hasan went into the room and I offered his brother some tea. He said, How are things? Very good, I said. I pointed to the room and said, How is she? He shrugged. Not bad, he said. We drove all over but it was so late she was the only one we found. Hasan came out and said to me, Your turn. I took him aside and said, I can’t. He looked at me, surprised. What do you mean? I don’t know, I said. I don’t feel like it. He shook me. You’ve got to go in there, he said. This is a big deal. I said that I knew it was but that I couldn’t. Come on, he said, and shoved me toward the door. I went in and locked the door behind me. Hasan’s brother said from behind the door that the rubber was on the desk. I lit a cigarette and offered her one. She was sitting on the bed in her underclothes, wearing a cheap pink shirt with holes in it, like a white rag that had been dipped in blood and washed over and over but still kept the faded color of the blood. Her legs were bare. Her skirt was carefully folded on the desk. She said, I don’t want to smoke, let’s get on with it. Let’s have a cigarette first, I said. What’s your name? I want to get this over with, she said, and put her hand out to unbutton my pants. I turned her hand away gently and said, Just sleep with me tonight, then leave in the morning. Yeah, right, she laughed, and then pulled me toward her, trying to kiss me. I turned my mouth away from her face and stood up and took off my pants and underwear and picked up the rubber and began putting it on, but it ripped. I looked for another on the desk. There wasn’t one. The girl said, I’m clean. I opened the door and called to Hasan, I need one, and he gave me one from his pocket and I put it on and I threw myself on top of her. She tried to kiss me so I moved my face away and finally got up and put my clothes on. The other two took her out and I sat down and lit a cigarette. Ramsi came and I told him I hadn’t been able to sleep with the girl and he made fun of me. He had managed it. He met a girl in the street and went home with her and turned off the lights. It took ten minutes, then he gave her twenty-five piastres and looked at his face in the mirror. It was red. Nothing is worth anything, he said. Then he left. Soon the policeman came and then I turned off the light and slept. In the morning I went out and had breakfast in the street. I didn’t buy the papers. I went back to my room and my sister said my uncle was returning from Alexandria and that he was very sick and that I needed to go meet him. I went out and caught a metro, taking it to the station. I got off and crossed the square, passing through the entrance in the wall that surrounded the station. I found him standing on the platform. He looked just fine and his wife was standing next to him with an umbrella in her hand. His kids rushed to hail a taxi and they all got in and told me to meet them at home, so I got on the metro and went to meet them at their house and found him
sitting on the sofa in his pajamas. His body seemed small and suddenly shrunken. I looked at his shoulders, which were thin beneath his t-shirt, and his little eyes, which were almost lost behind his thick glasses. His pajama pants were stained with big yellow blotches above the pouch between his legs. He said it had come on all of a sudden with shaking and a fever. They called the doctor, who said there was absolutely nothing wrong. He said his temperature had gone up in the night and that he thought he was going to die and sent for the doctor right away. The doctor said, Eat boiled vegetables and get a urine test. My uncle said he followed the doctor’s orders for one day. The day after he said, I’m eating chicken. We got up to eat and he fell on the meat, devouring it with gusto. Give me some liver, he said. I left them and went out, catching a metro to my cousin’s house. I told myself I would know the house by its blue windows, but when I got there I discovered they weren’t blue as I’d imagined. They were just ordinary, uncolored glass. It was the sky that had sometimes made them seem blue. All the panes were cracked. The facade of the house was yellow and dirty. The gate to the garden was open, propped against the wall. The garden itself was untended and its paving stones were torn up here and there. I took the path leading to the front door. There was dog shit along the wall. I climbed the stairs with their crumbling steps and knocked at the door. My aunt’s daughter opened it. At first I didn’t recognize her. Her hair was unkempt and scraggly, with many strands of gray. Her eyes were dull and the skin of her face was brown. From the living room, I looked into the south-facing room. I went in and said, Where’s the sewing machine you used to have here? She said, Do you still remember?
Of course I did. It was wintertime, after lunch. My father sat in the north-facing room with my aunt, looking out at the palace through the veranda’s window. I went to him, wanting to sit on his lap, but he turned me away. He said I wasn’t a little boy anymore. I turned back to the living room and walked through it to my cousin’s room. She sat at the sewing machine and I watched as she worked the machine with her foot. Look at this, she said, the string broke at the first stitch. There’s a devil in this machine. She bent over the machine after a glance in my direction. I turned toward the window, ears burning. I could see her white face with red cheeks even as I looked toward the closed window. It was only the glass that was closed. Beyond it was the sky. Brilliant rays of sun shone through the glass and lit up the mouth of the well in the garden below. Soon the servant boys would come and I’d go down with them to pump the water. We would steal a few flowers and shake the mango tree to no purpose, then run through the bedrooms and the cellar. This time I would hide from them in a room that was tucked away and only used during Ramadan, when the sheikhs recited there at night. When we left that evening my aunt would say goodbye at the door and turn on the light for the stairs. We would walk down the broad white steps and over the colored paving stones, open the garden’s squeaky gate and go out into the wide and noiseless street. I would pick jasmine from the walls of the gardens. . . . My cousin’s friend said something. She was standing just in front of the wardrobe’s mirror, putting on lipstick. I wasn’t looking at her. She was tall with green eyes. She’d only said one thing to me. When she came into the room she said, Hey. Then she turned to my cousin. But my cousin was talking to me when she said, Look at this. The little wardrobe was behind me. Each of its wooden panels was fixed with a bright mirror. A small brass chime hung from the middle keyhole, so that whenever the wardrobe was opened it made a pretty ringing sound. Inside the wardrobe were closed drawers with my cousin’s things arranged in rows. I was happy because the wardrobe was closed. Without taking my eyes from the window, I could watch my cousin’s fingers lightly touching the machine’s handle, making the wheel spin noisily. She bent down, following the fabric as it moved beneath the needle. Her two braids fell over her chest. Her friend said to her, Will you ever finish? We’re late. My cousin lifted her head and our gazes met and then she looked at her friend and said, This is the last part. I blinked and heard the ring of the small brass chime.
My sister came in and said, The city sewers are overflowing. Then an old relative of my cousin came in, panting. He could hardly see from behind his thick glasses. My cousin’s face darkened. The old man said, Give me a shilling after I have some coffee. He took off his tarboosh and placed it beside him on the sofa and drank his coffee and then just sat there. My cousin went into her room and came back and asked if I had any change on me. I didn’t have any change. They sent the cook to get two shillings for ten piastres. We sat and waited for him to come back without speaking. Then my cousin gave the old man his shilling and he got up and put his hat back on and said goodbye and left. My cousin said, He’s a crafty old man. He only wheezes like that when he comes to see us. My sister said that he lived with his married son and that the son’s wife encouraged her children to rip his clothes and hide his shoes and make a mess in his room. My cousin said, He’ll drink up the shilling. My sister said, When he visits his daughter she leaves him in the living room and shuts her bedroom door on him. My cousin said, He’ll spend the day drinking and begging from all his relatives.
Many years ago in that same room, my aunt sat in her white veil on the sofa, smoking, and next to her my father was still panting from the stairs and the heat. He used a handkerchief to wipe his bald head, fringed with white hairs. The cook came in and my aunt took out her purse and gave him a guinea and the cook left. My father said something and she shook her head. My father got up and walked toward the north-facing room out onto the veranda and lit his black cigarette and leaned his elbows on the veranda’s ledge and smoked.
My sister said that Nihad was engaged to a director in the public sector. She told my cousin about the relative of Nihad who’d asked me if I was the son of the man with the pointed mustache and we laughed and my sister said Nihad’s grandmother was sick and that her family couldn’t stand her. Before my mother died she went months without leaving her bed and she would pee in it, my cousin said. And my sister said that the wife of another cousin had had a miscarriage in her sixth month. Lucky her, I said. My sister got mad at me and told me I had no feelings. She said I was the only one who wouldn’t be able to come to her wedding because it would be after sunset. And she said that her friend Husniyya would get married a week after her and then Husniyya’s uncle would go back home. And she said that Husniyya’s uncle had lived with Husniyya since he left his wife. And she said that his wife never took off her mourning clothes, that according to him even her underclothes were black. My cousin’s dog approached me, wagging his head. I put my hand down to pet him and he immediately went to sleep on his back and peed all over the floor. They said that was how he was these days, as soon as he slept on his back, he peed. I went home and undressed and prepared a cup of tea and sat down and read a book about Van Gogh. I must have dozed off, because I imagined that I met my father. He seemed tired. He sat cross-legged on his bed, frowning. I didn’t know what to say to him. It had been a long time since I tried to see him. He had been there the whole time, but I didn’t think to visit. I woke up suddenly at the sound of the doorbell. I got up and opened it. It was the policeman. I went and got my notebook and he signed it and left and I went back to my room and turned off the light and lit a cigarette and stretched out on the bed, thinking of my father.
It was night and my father was screaming with pain. I wanted to sleep and so when they took him to the hospital I stayed at home by myself and was happy. When I went to see him,
I was shocked by the look in his eyes. They were wide and anxious and he asked why I’d taken so long. That was as much as he had to say to me. Read to me, he said. I sat on the chair next to him and he rolled over and I picked up a magazine and read to him. After a little while, I leaned over to see his eyes. They were shut. I stopped reading. But then he opened them and said, I’m not done yet, and I read some more. I felt a headache coming on and soon I stopped. He opened his eyes. I went on reading. Finally he said, That’s enough, you can go. I left quickly, with a sigh of relief. He didn’t ask anything from me after that and I didn’t have to see the fear in his eyes. When they brought him home, they carried him from the car to the bed. My brother changed all the seat covers in his place for a darker color, which I didn’t understand. When the blood ran out of my father’s mouth my brother went downstairs to look for a jar, then returned breathing heavily and said, I looked everywhere. Then he threw himself on the sofa, panting and looking at us. Finally my father lay stiff on his back and they covered his whole body and his face with a white sheet and arranged his limbs in place. They said he didn’t ask for me. I lifted the sheet from his face but his eyes were closed.
That Smell and Notes From Prison Page 5
