5

I soon grew used to Grandfather’s absence and looked to my father to provide me with an alternative or a substitute. Some days he would forget me and then suddenly notice I was there, as if I were the child from next door who just happened to be in his house, and he would invite me to go with him to the coffee shop or to work. I loved going back to Grandfather’s workshop. I loved the tension that ran through the place, with the girls behind their sewing machines or busy finishing off pieces with needle and thread. People never stopped visiting my father, especially when evening fell and the women workers were gone.

The place changed with time. The movie stars in high heels and with bare knees stopped coming, and gradually the business started to attract civil servants and mothers preparing trousseaus for their daughters’ weddings. My father also worked with television celebrities and producers of low-budget movies. He had met many of them in his tumultuous youth when he had delusions of a career in show business. He would reach an agreement with one of the production assistants on what was needed, make some preliminary sketches, then give instructions to the seamstresses and leave them to do all the work, freeing himself to manage the business and party at night with his show-business and bohemian friends. I don’t think he had inherited Grandfather’s flair for cutting cloth, sensitivity for the female form, his artist’s wandering gaze, or fine voice. Even so, behind his immersion in the world of show business there maybe lay an enthusiasm inherited from his father or an envy that he harbored toward him.

In his early youth some of his low-life friends in the artistic world convinced him he could become the new screen idol if he were given the right opportunity. He did make some efforts, but his sense of dignity prevented him from accepting any minor roles. In those circles he saw a young woman who pleased him and he thought of marrying her, although she was only a small-time actress. She was my mother, Badriya—or Badridar or Badara, as I sometimes called her—who had been brought up in Old Cairo. She and her elder sister Husniya, or Husna as she was known to her fans, had run away from a troubled background that was not very different from the plots in the movies that drew them to the bright lights. The younger sister was prettier and more congenial. My father saw her in Studio Galal and made overtures to her but she rebuffed him emphatically. “I came here to make a living, not to have romances. Is that clear?” she said.

He went back to his father in a rage the same day and asked him to come with him at once to Studio Galal. Grandfather made fun of him, saying, “Good news? Are they going to sign an exclusive contract with you? And they want your guardian?”

Upset, my father told him he wanted to marry a small-time actress who was acting in a film there. He persuaded Grandfather only after Grandmother Sakina had pestered him for days and nights. In the end he gave in to them, in the hope that the marriage would put his wayward only son on the right track. Father was already over twenty but he had no job or qualifications and spent most of his time chasing women or in bad company.

Badriya and her sister had left their home in Old Cairo a long time ago and moved into a cheap hotel in the city center—two branches cut off a tree, with only an elderly uncle who was already descending into senile dementia. So Grandfather couldn’t find anyone he could ask for approval of the marriage, other than the director Fatin Abdel Wahhab. He went to see the director with my father in the place where he was filming his last movie, City Lights, and Shadya and Ahmad Mazhar are said to have congratulated the couple on their engagement, or so the family story goes.

My father stipulated that his bride must cut off all relations with acting and the world of show business, and she agreed without hesitation. I think Badriya said to herself, “Better to marry than to live alone,” or maybe she had taken a liking to Ahmad, who was dark, adventurous, and amusing. She had always seen acting as just a way to make a living. But she knew that people saw it as suspect, so maybe marriage was an alternative that would protect her reputation. Maybe she hoped her elder sister would also find her own Mr. Right, and she started praying that would happen once she had tasted the benefits of security.

When Aunt Husna visited us in the apartment in Abdin, all my father’s family would suddenly disappear on urgent errands or shut themselves into various rooms. No one welcomed her except her embarrassed sister and her beautiful boy. Maybe that was because she wore short skirts and dresses, laughed loudly, smoked like a man, and raised her voice when she joked with me. “If it wasn’t for you, sweetie, I would never have set foot in this house,” she would say.

The more my mother advised her to be sensible, the more outrageously she behaved, especially after she started singing in third-rate vaudeville theaters. Apparently my father would hear reports of her behavior when he was partying with his friends—the reports were exaggerated for effect, and he would annoy Mother by passing them on. Maybe this was what encouraged him to make advances on Husna one day when she was visiting us and Mother was in the kitchen. My aunt raised her voice and insulted him in front of his wife and his mother. He didn’t take that lying down and they swore at each other. She stormed out, leaving the house in turmoil, and came back to visit us only after my father had died.

The flame of love between Ahmad and Badriya died down as fast as it had flared up, and he went back to his old ways, with endless partying and making merry, some of which I witnessed whenever I managed to tag along with him when he went out. Once I saw him arranging sticks of hashish in an elegant wooden box inlaid with mother-of-pearl. He looked at me out of the corner of his eye and said with a wink, “This is what the pashas smoke for pleasure, Hannoun. When you grow up, you’ll try it and discover why.”

How I longed to grow up and try it and discover why. Another time I saw him going into the bathroom after one of the girls in the workshop, and come out a little later wiping his mouth. I was sure they had been doing what actors did in the movies, and for that reason too I was impatient to grow up and try it. Probably because of the hashish, my father shared the workshop with the owners of other workshops, and it became as public as a market.

I can see myself, aged about ten or so, sitting by the small window with thin metal bars to breathe some fresh air rather than the air in the room, which was thick with whatever the pashas smoked, my head spinning slightly. That window allowed me to play my secret game, because it looked out on a small corridor and in the corner there was a urinal that some of the workshop owners had installed because most of them worked in one or two rooms without a bathroom. I loved to sit in this corner, because there I was invisible to my father and his friends, and also because I could snoop on the men who were urinating. No one would notice the boy slouched indolently behind the window. I would have a peek when I caught sight of a man standing at the urinal and taking his penis out from under his clothes. Furtively I looked at all these hamamas, doves, as they called them, and wondered what lay behind the name. Did they fly like doves?

No one noticed me spying except Ra’fat. Ra’fat worked as a cutter. He was a young man with a thin, straight mustache who parted his thick black hair to the side. I remember that he always wore a red sweatshirt of some shiny material, with a high neck. He must have liked it very much. I never saw him in the kind of dirty or ragged clothes most of the men in the other workshops in the building wore, and the sound of his clear laugh would ring out on the stairs. He was the only one who noticed me snooping. In fact, he liked me looking at his penis but he pretended that he couldn’t see me. Over time he began to go a step further and play with his soft white penis until it stiffened and I saw for the first time the miracle that took place. His hamama inflated as though it were going to take off. Would it coo like the doves in the light well at home? On one occasion, he unexpectedly looked at me and caught my eyes feasting on the sight of his penis. I had been discovered. I anxiously expected he would complain to my father, but he never did.

The next time he stood there, as soon as I could control myself and look at him, he gave me a slight smile and made a little nod as if inviting me to carry on playing with him, but I looked away, my heart beating violently. I could feel my heartbeats in my arms and legs and the pictures in the magazine I was holding dissolved into meaningless blotches of color. Then I noticed my father chuckling because someone was making ribald fun of one of his friends, who was stoned and talking incoherently. Father might suddenly notice I was there and ask me to imitate Farid al-Atrash for them. When he did that I put my magazine aside, jumped up off the armchair, and stood among them in the middle of the room, my face and mouth in contortions, reproducing the sighs and laments in Atrash’s performances. Then I would sing comically, inspired by Lebleba when she was a child, because I had seen her on television imitating singers:

 

That’s not enough, my love, not enough.

I want you, I want your heart.

 

Bursts of laughter broke out around me, like the firecrackers people throw on feast days, and sometimes Father would say, both proudly and in jest, “Acting runs in his blood on both sides of the family.”

On those occasions Hani turned into something else—the court jester and the center of attention, something for the men to laugh at and gaze at from under drooping eyelids. For ages I loved playing this role and identified with it. From time to time, when I was wrapped up in playing my game with my father’s friends, I caught sight of Ra’fat’s face behind the little window, standing there, following the free show, and smiling like someone who keeps a secret.