8

Even before ra’fat, and before I started peeping at the penises of urinating men, I often imagined some man, a man I made up out of my fantasies. I tried to bury myself inside him. I curled up into a ball on my bed, as tightly as possible. I wanted to make myself so small that I could slip inside my imaginary man, settle down there, and live the rest of my life inside his skin, pretending I was him. On a few occasions this man was my father.

At the beach in Alexandria one summer my father and I went to take showers at the end of the day. He took off his tight striped swimming trunks and I, aged seven at the time, had a clear view of the shriveled brown bulge lurking among his pubic hairs, which were growing again after a recent trim. With a surprised smile I had a close look at his penis while he was aiming a powerful stream of urine into the round hole in the corner of the shower cubicle. His penis had extended a little with the flow of urine. I took hold of my own little hamama and tried to imitate him, but only a few feeble drops came out and fell right between my feet. He noticed that I was looking back and forth between my hamama and his elongated penis. He gave a little laugh. “Don’t worry, Hannoun, when you grow up it’ll get bigger,” he said with confidence.

There is still something vivid about this old memory that I can’t dismiss, however hard I try. Even now I enjoy the sight of a man urinating, not in the sense that it excites or arouses me, but as a game that we enjoyed in our childhood, that we look back on momentarily as adults with a smile of sympathy, nothing more. I may have been a little confused by the difference between my appearance and my father’s appearance. My white complexion was different from his deep brown. He had thick body hair while I was soft and smooth. Maybe all this sent me a message that I wasn’t associated with him, didn’t look like him, and would never be a man like him. But before he could help dispel these delusions, he died.

I remember we were sitting in front of the television on one of the rare occasions Father spent the evening with us at home. In a variety program they showed a dance performance by Gene Kelly, whose name I discovered later. He was wearing a sailor’s uniform and singing and dancing with two other men also in sailor suits as they roamed freely around town, singing “New York, New York.” I no longer know what it was that enchanted me about this number, which only lasted a few minutes. Was it their dancing, their perfect timing, or their trim bodies in uniform? I went up to my father and told him straight out, “I want a suit exactly like that one for Eid.”

A few weeks later, on the first day of the Eid al-Adha holiday, he stayed out till morning at an Eid party and came back in very high spirits. He woke me up himself, though I had slept only two or three hours because I’d stayed up in the hope that I might last till the morning. He waited while I got up and had a shower so that he could dress me himself in the white sailor suit, the only piece of clothing he ever made for me in his life. I put it on and started dancing in imitation of the foreign singer: “New York, New York.”

Then he went into his room to sleep after the long night out. He kept Mama with him for some time before releasing her, and I noticed that Grandmother Sakina was going “tsk, tsk” and mumbling something incomprehensible when Mother came out. He slept until a little after the call to noon prayers, and in the meantime I had gone out in the street and back dozens of times. I was out with one of the neighbors’ daughters, who was a few years younger than me and followed me all the time like a frightened kitten. Sometimes I amused myself by styling her hair as if she were a doll.

Then we heard Mama screaming from the bedroom, and she came staggering toward Grandmother, who was sitting with me watching a play called Minus Five. “Ahmad’s not answering me! Ahmad’s dead! Your son’s dead!” she shouted.

I felt she was accusing her of something, as if Grandmother had taken my father’s soul. At the sound of the scream a red balloon slipped out from between the fingers of the neighbors’ daughter and made an unpleasant screeching sound as it suddenly deflated, bouncing left and right until it was empty and collapsed into a lifeless blob on the carpet. Grandmother had spilled a bowl of lupin beans she had been holding. She jumped to her feet with her long stick and began to call out in a voice that was completely new to her: “Ahmad, Ahmad, Hamada, the stew’s ready, up you get, Hamada, come and have lunch with us.”

The neighbors’ daughter fled in tears. I wished I could go with her, but I was frozen to my spot on the sofa. I could hear their screams growing louder, but I didn’t dare go near my father’s room. I just stared at the television screen as Marie Munib asked Adel Khairy, “What have you come to work as?"—just as she had been asking him before the screaming started. And he repeated his same answer time and again: “A driver, madam, a driver.”

For years to come, the terrifying face of Chamardel Hanem in that play would remain the image of death as far as I was concerned, and for even longer Mama refused to celebrate Eid al-Adha in any way. Whenever someone gave her Eid greetings, she would say, “No one’s to congratulate me on the anniversary of Ahmad’s death. Understood?”

Eventually she went back to celebrating the feast like everyone else and gave up the trips to the grave on the morning of every Eid, and I realized then that she had forgotten him and was trying to make me forget him too. She had put her memories of him with his remaining clothes in a small cardboard box on the balcony. Until then she had put a piece of his clothing in front of the Quran reader she summoned on every anniversary of her husband’s death. The man would read two long sections of the Quran for my father’s soul, which in some sense was still clinging to these clothes. As soon as the sheikh left the house, the sadness ritual was over and she went back to the Eid: she might put some lipstick on, hurry to turn on the television, or suggest some place we could go together to pretend we were enjoying the holiday.

After my father died, Mama rented out the workshop and I would visit every month to collect the rent. The place was slightly changed on every visit, as if reflecting the changes that were happening in my life and to my body. The workshop merged with the men’s suits workshop where Ra’fat was a cutter, and he always seemed to be waiting for me. We started standing together and chatting on the landing or outside the building. He gave me my first puff of a cigarette. I took two puffs and handed it back, trying not to cough and annoyed that he was laughing. He spoke to me about masturbation and how pleasurable it was, and once he took my hand when the others couldn’t see and put it on his hard penis. I pulled my hand back and looked away. Just touching that hot thing between his thighs unnerved me and made me feel limp. He said he had the key to the small fabric storeroom behind the elevator on the ground floor and that we could go in there alone for minutes at a time. I refused and hurried away. In the street I took deep gulps of air to get my breath back and I checked the rent money in my pocket every two minutes for fear I might have dropped it.

Ra’fat seemed to be the only person I had left from the world of my father and my grandfather; the only person who took an interest in me or spoke to me. At home my mother was completely self-absorbed, consumed by the necessities of living. Even Grandmother changed; she started to swing rapidly between her old imperiousness and a new attitude of meekness and weakness that was alien to her. All her ailments ganged up on her suddenly, and she was completely senile within a few years. She stayed in bed, gave up all her weapons, and began to act friendly toward Mama, addressing her as “my girl” and giving her one piece of jewelry after another for her to sell and spend the money on household expenses, so that she wouldn’t leave us and go out looking for work. She spent years either in bed or on an old Turkish sofa next to the window, twiddling the dial on the radio, moving from one station to another. She hardly ever left her room and seemed to be waiting to join her son as soon as possible. In the end she obtained what she desired. When the ugly face of Chamardel Hanem made its next appearance, I no longer saw it as an unwelcome guest that had arrived without an appointment, but rather as an old friend. Mama and I tried to pretend to be sad for only the first two days, and when she had sold off the last of Grandmother Sakina’s jewelry she had no other option but to go back to her old line of work, and in that Aunt Husniya was willing to help her.

I started staying away from the dreary house, and unconsciously my legs took me to the workshop where Ra’fat worked, even when it wasn’t time to collect the rent. One time Ra’fat came out to meet me, rattling the keys to the storeroom. We made sure no one saw us as we sneaked in. I went in first, my arms crossed on my chest, and he joined me a few minutes later. He took my head in his hands and smothered me with kisses, planting them everywhere, hungrily, like someone gobbling down food without chewing. We didn’t do much, but at any rate I finally discovered kissing, at the age of thirteen or maybe a little more. Ra’fat’s mouth tasted nice despite the strong smell of cigarettes. I dared to fondle his penis, which was coiled up between his thighs, and he soon took it out. It was softer and warmer than I had imagined, and whenever I played with it, my own erection hurt me. I couldn’t tell where his body ended and mine began.

Every time after that he pressed me to do more. I would resist and hurry off, and fear held me back however much I shared his urge to play. I felt as if we were prisoners in that cramped space of no more than three square meters, surrounded by troubling voices outside. My breathing was irregular, and I begged him to finish so that we could leave, although I enjoyed him holding me. I often imagined that my father had not died and was still working in the workshop upstairs, and that he would suddenly break down the door and discover that I was sullying myself with this young man who looked like a handsome devil.

Ra’fat ejaculated and tried to restrain his panting. Then he rubbed his shoe into the semen to smear it into the dust on the tiles and hide any trace of it. Adjusting his clothes, he listened awhile till there were no footsteps to be heard, then slipped out first through the half-open door. He waited again before gesturing to me through the gap in the door, and I would hurry out without looking behind me. In the light of the hallway I checked that my clothes had no stains, and along the way I kept wiping my mouth and face as if his kisses and his saliva had left some faint trace that might expose my secret to the world.