21

“Like a fox stalking a bear, only to feed on its leftovers.”—Abbas Mahalawi

I could still hear his howls of laughter from decades ago when I told him about the pistol I kept beneath my pillow. I reached under the pillow. It hadn’t changed its place in thirty years. But my grip had changed. I’d grown so weak. I barely had the strength to rack the slide or squeeze the trigger. Anyway, nobody was likely to come and arrest me. They knew how much I’d aged.

I laid my head back on the pillow, closed my eyes, and let the film of my life unreel before my mind’s eye. It was the only form of entertainment I had to help me kill time. I saw myself sitting beneath the parliamentary dome while the debate over what would eventually become Law 95 of 1980, aka the Law of Shame, drifted around me. There was no vote on the agenda that day, and the chamber was practically empty, as usual. I needed a place to relax and stay clear of nettlesome political squabbles, so I decided to hang out in there for a while. I slid down in my seat to make myself more comfortable. Just as I was about to nod off, I heard a clearing of a throat and found the chief of protocol bent toward my ear. His Excellency the Chairman had arrived and wanted to see me immediately in the Pharaonic Hall. It would be the first time I had met the chairman of the ruling National Democratic Party outside of official ceremonies. He occupied a far corner of the hall. Several rows of seats and benches around him had been left vacant in order to give him privacy and to emphasize his stature. Some of his close associates stood a short distance away, with smiles programmed to broaden whenever he smiled. I ignored them as I went up to him and shook his hand. He invited me to take a seat near him, and studied my face as though this was the first time he’d met me. Then he praised my efforts for mustering the MPs at voting times.

“I’ve had my eye on you for some time, Abbas,” he said, measuring each syllable. “I’m pleased with your performance.”

A simple sentence with a nice dose of flattery. Uttered in his well-known stentorian voice, it was more than sufficient to increase my influence and ensure that those around us feared me. We spoke for over an hour, on politics, the state of the country, and the like. He terminated the conversation, saying, “God preserve us. All will be well, God willing.”

He signaled to an aide to summon the National Democratic Party secretary. When the official appeared, the chairman said, “Starting tomorrow, I want Abbas in charge of membership affairs, with a focus on youth in the provinces.”

My new role was to transmit my years of expertise to young people, induce as many as possible to join the party, and appoint the most promising ones to undertake certain crucial tasks and functions in advance of local and general elections. The party now had a youth base of over twenty thousand. I could proudly claim to be the one who built it up over the course of a decade. It wasn’t an easy job. But it wasn’t that hard either. The government has loose purse strings when need be, and as long as it’s kept under the table. There was tons of money that seemed to have no owner. Our country was sitting on an endless sea of it. So I dipped my cup and sprinkled judicious amounts on young recruits, and they obeyed every signal of my pinkie finger. I’d been given extensive powers. The chairman saw in me talents no one else had seen, including myself.

We met again frequently in his office. Each time, his face was lit with an expression of admiration and satisfaction with me. Each time, he had the party secretary relate some chapter of my life. He was particularly fond of the one set in the aftermath of the 1967 war: how I’d mobilized hundreds in the Socialist Union Party headquarters in the countryside to stage marches in the streets, shouting pro-Nasser chants and calling on him to retract his resignation.

The party secretary inflated my image even more. Why he did that was beyond me. It would no longer be necessary, however, after the NDP’s first national convention, when the original core of the party’s youth secretariat gave the chairman a standing ovation for ten full minutes. Afterward, he upbraided the party secretary.

“You have this treasure here called Abbas Mahalawi. Why are you letting him go to waste here beneath the dome, even if he is a maestro? This guy here can convince you a bull’s made for milking. You got to make him a minister in your next government.”

“Yes, Your Excellency. We’ll find him a ministry that suits him.”

Now I’m on the shelf. Yes, I’ve resigned from all my posts, and I’m treated as though I’d never held any at all. They forgot I even existed when someone cropped up who they thought was better at doing what I did. How could I tell them otherwise? I had no right to object. I owed them a debt of gratitude for all they had done for me over the years.

I squeezed my eyes shut in my effort to conjure up more memories of my last days in parliament. Life had grown boring now that I’d gotten everything I wanted out of it and more. I felt every morning was my last, and when I went to bed at night I prayed that if Death had to come, it would at least come to me in my sleep. I could fend him off with my mind, but if that went, he’d knock me out with the first punch. Illness laid me flat in successive rounds, but I was still in the ring. True, I was bound to a wheelchair, but I resisted. I had some health on my side, minimal pain, and a lot of brains.

I pushed myself out of bed and onto my wheelchair, and rolled myself toward my balcony. I watched the Nile in the distance. Small rounded waves in the vanguard raced to peak and break before the others caught up. In some parts, the water was smooth and still. That was what my life was like now. My only interest in life was to make money. I never gave a damn about politics. I had no political ambitions. The only reason I got involved in politics to begin with was to make money. My sole ambition was to become rich, like Cicurel: someone who had everything. That was all I ever wanted.

But had I fulfilled my wish? I wasn’t sure.

I had a cushy life in Zamalek. I stuck close to the rich and powerful, and that earned me important positions in the ruling party. After becoming a member of parliament, I kept myself snugly wrapped in its immunity. For twenty years I only had to raise my hand with a “yea” or “nay,” in accordance with the instructions handed down to me and those I controlled in the party and the House. I voted in favor of hundreds of bills, resolutions, and agreements that I’d never read in full and knew little about. But I kept close track of which way the wind blew, and if there was trouble brewing my nose could smell it a mile off.

Early on, I began to operate on the belief that the powers that be would do whatever they pleased and, in exchange for not getting in their way, they’d leave the rest of us a nice recreation area where we could play alongside them as long as we stayed in sight and made no noise. I was probably the only one who had grasped how the game worked as soon as the cards were dealt with every round. The rules might change here and there on the surface, and I’d figure them out before it was too late. But if I never suffered a major loss it was because I knew the main ground rule never changed: no matter how low I bowed, they wouldn’t hesitate to cut off my head if they had to. Perpetuating power always requires sacrifices.

I was absolutely sure I was right about this. It was why I never wasted energy planning and plotting against those more powerful and influential than I. I was content to live off their crumbs, which Zeinab sucked up like an insatiable tick burrowed in my hide.

Goddamn you, Cicurel! I’d been obsessed since the day I opened your safe, found your treasure, and tried to emulate you. I was never as clever, famous, or successful. But at least now I could die a rich man. I had enough money and property to keep a family of fifty in comfort for the next hundred years at least. Yet no one would remember me. They’d say, Abbas Mahalawi was a good and generous man. That was all. I wouldn’t make more of a mark than that.

I was like Cicurel in another way. Now that I’d lost Ibrahim, I’d also been left without a son to carry on my name after I was gone.

Ibrahim, my son, my only child from my flesh and blood, passed away a year ago. I could never have begun to imagine feeling so bereft. I did everything I could think of to save him. But despite the fortunes I spent on his treatment, fate was a step ahead.

Ibrahim Abbas Mahalawi: he was my secret. Not even Zeinab knew about this young man. I didn’t have the courage to tell her I’d had a son. Then God stole him from me. Why couldn’t He have taken some of my money? Why choose the person I love more than anyone in the world? Why punish me so cruelly in this world when He was going to punish me in the next along with all the others?

I pressed my eyes closed for, what, the third or fourth time? There was nothing left to do but to mull over my memories.

I flashed back to my flights to London at the beginning of June every year. There he is next to his mother in the arrivals hall in Heathrow. When he sees me, he toddles forward unsteadily, arms outstretched. He’s just learning how to walk. I crouch to swoop him up and hold him in my arms, his tiny hand gripping my index finger. He grew up so quickly! I step into the arrivals hall and stop. He bounds toward me with long, confident strides. He’s in his last year of university. I reach out to shake hands, one man to another. He clasps me in a warm, affectionate hug—his Middle Eastern genes getting the better of him. They’re all from me. He looks like me. So much so that I see my younger self in him. He wears the same size clothes I do. To hear his voice and watch his gestures, you’d think he was imitating me. The three of us climb into the car and head to my apartment. On the way there, he tells me about everything he did since my last visit, even though we’d have spoken on the phone once a week without fail. Not that I minded. I could hear it all over and over again. In London, I see his cheeks redden when one of his girlfriends phones him. I worry about his health, about whether he smokes behind my back. When I see his reflection in the mirror as he shaves with care and precision, I see myself. I’ve revisited these memories again and again. Every detail fills me with joy. Twenty years and nine months passed as fast as a few days, Ibrahim. I couldn’t get my fill of you before you left.

How I’d dreamed of a son like him to inherit my wealth and my name. He’d manage factories that produced products bearing my logo, but designed by him. People would remember me whenever they bought them. But that would never happen. I’d emulated Cicurel’s cleverness in building up a hidden treasure and his restraint in not tapping it. My fortune entered the Heart of Palm and grew. But now that it could never pass to Ibrahim, I would never let it pass to anyone else. Let them say that Abbas Mahalawi was a thief. Not many would believe them. The country was crawling with thieves, and everyone bowed and scraped to them.

I shook my head sadly. I’d made such careful plans for Ibrahim. He would come to Cairo to live by my side and fulfill my dreams and his. Fahim had already helped me work out a plan for how to reveal his existence so I could openly claim him as my true son and heir, who would carry on the name of the family. But fickle fate claimed him first, in a traffic accident one stormy night. Everyone in the car came out with scratches, except for him. His spine was crushed. He was paralyzed and fell into a coma for two months. I brought in every specialist I could find in London and Paris, but to no avail. They were all as helpless as I.

I stood near the foot of his bed when the machine with all those wires stuck into his motionless body stopped beeping. He seemed the same, lying there on that hospital bed with his eyes closed. I touched his body in disbelief. I kissed his forehead. I soaked his cheeks with my tears. I pleaded with him softly. I called out his name. I begged him. I howled.

They had to drag me out of the room and sedate me. I came to the following day in a neighboring room in the same hospital. I lay there for a week until they discharged me. Illness invaded every corner of my frail body when my only son died, and all my hopes died with him. I only had his picture left to kiss every morning after his scent evaporated and his soul left.

I buried Ibrahim in England, near our home in Brighton. My wife stayed with him there, alone, as bereft and dispirited as I was. I kept his death a secret from everyone. I didn’t even tell my personal lawyer there. If anyone asked after him, I’d say he’d gone to a grad school in the US. I hadn’t given up yet. I continued to make plans because I wasn’t going to die without a fight, even after losing Ibrahim in a wager in which I’d thought all the odds were on my side. I’d forgotten that the player on the other side of the table was fate.

“Al-Khouli’s downstairs with the rent for the farm,” said my servant, breaking into my reverie. I dismissed him with an impatient flick of the hand. There was no need for me to go downstairs. Fahim would take care of it. I wanted to return to my memories.

How could I have forgotten to recall my land? Didn’t it hold the dearest thing I owned: my roots? Had I not watered it, nurtured it, and watched it grow? Had I lost all sense of belonging to it? Who do I think I’m fooling! I bought the land; I didn’t farm it. I had a sprawling ranch in Mahalla Marhoum. It was more than eighty acres. But the land was worked by tenant farmers. I rarely went there.

After my mother died, I bought all the land around our house. Our village was now officially called Mahalawi Farms. This time, I was the one who changed the name, after I got into parliament. Its fame soared. Stories about it and me appeared in all the newspapers. Just a few months ago, al-Wafd published a long feature story, so long it had to be serialized over several days. Mahalla Marhoum, now Mahalawi Farms, had produced eminent figures since the monarchic era, and the distinguished family of Mahalawi Pasha had forged part of Egyptian history, the newspaper wrote. I was a “self-made entrepreneur and financier” who “championed the peasant” and served as “the voice of the people in parliament.” People believed what they read about the famous MP, a member of the general secretariat of the National Democratic Party and the second-oldest parliamentarian in Egypt. According to the article, my father was a Wafdist and I followed in his footsteps. We resisted the British occupation, supported the 1919 Revolution, and put our money at the service of national independence leader Saad Zaghloul, the Wafd Party, and, later, Mustafa al-Nahhas. Although we fell on hard times in the Nasser era, we never complained. Then we pulled ourselves up again while helping the ship of reform reach the shores of safety.

I pictured my drunkard father, teetering in his tattered shoes and threadbare gallabiya. I muttered, “You see? I’ve created a history for you. I erased the taint of prison around you. You are now officially an anti-colonial resistance fighter.”

I’ve lost count of the number of newspaper interviews I’ve done. The journalists would send me the questions and answers at the same time so that I could check them over before publication. The Al-Ahram publishing house produced an important book called National Figures from the Heart of Rural Egypt. A whole chapter was dedicated to my family. Thanks to some lazy historians who cited the text without double-checking, the fiction spread far and wide, and was reiterated so often that it became fact. Before the revolution I was “One-Eyed Abbas.” After the revolution I evolved into “Abbas Bey” by dint of Abdel-Naim’s money, the influence of the Committee for the Liquidation of Feudalism and, above all and before all, Fahim’s noble services as a procurer of forged certificates and powers of attorney. Then, after Nasser died and was followed by Sadat, no one called me anything but Abbas Mahalawi Pasha.

Recently, a major publishing house made me a generous offer to publish my memoirs. I was reluctant to accept. In Egypt, if your tongue outpaces your mind, your head flies.

But was this the life I’d wished for? Was this how the journey ended? A rich old man getting sick and dying a slow death. Everyone who least deserved it got a chunk of his wealth, while his son, his true heir, got nothing, for the simple reason that he was dead.

I refused to accept such a conventional ending; I hadn’t left the poker table yet. I still had chips to play, and in my pocket I had a last card that no one even suspected. This card would be the game changer and make for an exciting ending. Zeinab I’d cut out of my will completely. I’d leave a bit to Nadia, because at least she was obedient and loved me selflessly. I’d give her ten thousand pounds for every year she lived with us . . . No, make that twenty thousand, plus the apartment in Paris. Nobody knew about that little getaway apart from the senior officials who used it as a garçonnière, and they weren’t going to talk. I’d already put the Heart of Palm and the ranch in the village in Nadia’s name, in order to keep Zeinab from getting her hands on them. Being an orphan, Nadia was more deserving of charity than others. I’d settled my affairs in the UK with my lawyer there. Some of the proceeds would go to my wife and to Nadia. I’d arranged everything with Fahim. Tonight I’d take the last remaining steps. I’d show him the duplicates of the documents that cut Zeinab out of my will entirely. I’d sent the originals to my overseas banks abroad a couple of weeks ago. The second thing I’d do tonight was put a copy of the map in the safe. That would increase the number of players. Tonight, Nadia and Yasmine would be out of the house for several hours, so I’d take advantage of that. Tomorrow was a new year and a new decade—the 1990s—and a new beginning. Who knew how many more years I had left to live.

I’d already sold most of my properties, and I donated my remaining liquid assets to the home for the elderly that I opened the year before last. I had it built at the insistence of that Sheikh Bahrawi who wormed his way into Zeinab’s mind and his hand into my pocket. Zeinab refused to attend the inauguration because it would “bring bad luck.” At least the home would immortalize my name and stand as a monument to my achievements.

I smiled when it occurred to me that Fahim might become one of its first patients. He’d been getting more and more absentminded lately. For his part, he imagined I was unaware he’d been ripping me off regularly for some time. Whenever he forged a document I needed, he padded the bill, rewarding himself with a generous commission. But there was nothing I could do about that. I was too old and ailing to start looking around for a new secretary. At least he wouldn’t turn against me like Cicurel’s driver, Ernesti, turned against him. Also, he was as clueless as everyone else as to where I hid my diamonds—in empty car tires! He, like the others, was going to have a really hard time finding them, if they found them at all. If they only knew what those tires contained. All my money! Converted into diamonds, carefully wrapped and sealed inside small leather tubes, and inserted in the space between the rubber and the rim. Five diamonds per tire, and there were a lot of tires. They were stacked in the basement of my ranch house in Mahalla Marhoum, the last place anybody would imagine I’d hid my wealth. I only went there twice a year. The basement was unguarded so as not to draw attention. Like Cicurel, I made a map. I put one copy in the safe in my bedroom; and the other copy I’d put in the basement safe. My map was more complicated than Cicurel’s. I wasn’t going to make it easy for some layabouts to wallow in my wealth after I was gone. Anybody who wanted it was going to have to work for it. They were going to have to use their brains and sweat like I did. Only the smartest would win the lion’s share of my wealth after solving the riddle I made. Matching wits was the only game I’d ever liked in this world. I didn’t think I was very good at any other.

I heaved a contented sigh. I was pleased with the decisions I’d made. I’d rest easy in my grave with a smile on my face while others ferreted for my hidden wealth. I wasn’t going to die a nobody. I was certainly not going to die a mere shadow of the old and bloated Zeinab. I was the one who made her. I was the one who pulled her out of the muck and brushed off the village dust and rust, only for the bitch to turn around and sink her talons into me. She was insatiable. She’d sucked up my blood and half my wealth, then tried to shut me out of the picture. I’d become the man in the shadows of the “Lady of Zamalek,” as her circle of crones called her. For years she’d basked in the limelight and forgotten where she came from. I was standing in the wings now. But I still had the power to cut the lights and stop the show at any moment.