10

One day i went to win Ra’fat back, after lectures in the Faculty of Applied Arts, where I had recently enrolled. I hadn’t imagined we would be separated all this time just because he had suddenly gotten married. I couldn’t believe he would disappear so casually, without saying a word, after all the years we had been together, even if we had met up only sporadically during that time. The building in Adli Street seemed smaller and more cramped than I remembered it, and of course less stylish and less clean. Only a few years had passed since I had last visited Ra’fat here. The place retained its old sway over me. I thought I could hear my father and his friends laughing behind the workshop door, and I felt a pang of fear that he might appear at any moment.

The bridegroom came out of the workshop with an embarrassed smile, but his smile soon disappeared after he shook hands with me. Flustered and impatient, he said it was no longer appropriate for me to come to the workshop because everyone there knew that my mother had sold it to her old tenant long ago, and some of them had suspicions about his relationship with me, and now he was a married man. I said I had had to come because he had mysteriously disappeared for months and I just wanted to make sure he was well. Staring at the floor, he again told me in a whisper that, as I knew, he had married his brother’s widow and he wanted to bring up his brother’s orphaned children and go straight. I almost laughed when he reminded me of what I had said about true repentance. I didn’t know what to say, and when I finally spoke I had to suppress my emotion. “So you don’t want to know me any longer?” I asked.

He was about to say something, but held back. He looked at me as if he had remembered something trivial that he was about to forget completely because of my unexpected visit. He asked me to wait a minute and went back into the workshop. I stayed on the landing, avoiding the looks of curious passersby and asking myself what I was doing there.

Only a few months after his elder brother was killed in a brawl in their neighborhood, along with three other people, Ra’fat’s father had decided that Ra’fat should marry his brother’s widow so that the children wouldn’t be brought up by a stranger. It was clear that Ra’fat welcomed this convenient marriage, which didn’t cost him a cent. He moved out of his parents’ apartment on the ground floor into his late brother’s apartment on the second floor. It was a profitable arrangement, but I often wondered how anyone, however hard-hearted he might be, could replace his brother and move into his bed and home so easily. But then I said that maybe he felt they were one person and that this was what his dead brother would have wanted if he had been asked. This is something I will never understand, not just because it belongs to the world of men, with rules that are obscure to me, but also because I’ve never been lucky enough to have a brother.

Ra’fat came out a few minutes later with his arm around the shoulders of a short, plumpish young man with pimples on his face and thick coarse hair that looked like an enormous helmet on his round head. The young man was smiling in embarrassment, like someone who suddenly discovers that people are furtively taking photographs of him. Ra’fat introduced him to me by a name that I forgot as soon as he said it, a name with the letter h in it, maybe Yahya, Muhyi, or Hamouda. Ra’fat said this was his colleague and friend and that he had wanted him to meet me for some time. Then he leaned over toward me and added in a whisper that the young man would be at my disposal at any time.

The familiar smell of tobacco in his mouth hit me, and my tongue was in knots. I buried my eyes in the floor tiles, unable to take in what he was saying. An autumn breeze blew, bringing with it a whiff from the urinal not far off, the same urinal at which Ra’fat had stood playing with his penis years ago, while I sneaked peeks at him when my father and his friends weren’t looking.

He must have been boasting about me to this colleague of his and maybe to other people for ages. He must have told them how highly I esteemed him, and that I never denied him anything he asked for. Maybe he complained about me in exasperation, saying he had become bored with me and tired of my insatiable appetite and the way I was pursuing him. Who knows? His colleague, Mahmoud, Hammad, Hamed, or whatever, must have long hoped to have a relationship like this one, and maybe he had begged Ra’fat to take him along with him when we met, and to sit alone with me, if only once. This was finally his chance to make the most of the used goods, as if I were just an undergarment that an elder brother handed down to a younger brother when it was too small for him or when he had bought a new one. I was reminded of Ra’fat accepting his brother’s widow without hesitation; she might be more precious or more important than an old piece of clothing, but in the end she was just something that the males inherited or passed on for free to their work colleagues, as he was now doing with me.

I came round from my daydreaming to the rough voice of the rotund young man, who was repeating what Ra’fat had said about how he would be my very best brother and friend, and how I only had to try him once and I would never forget him. As he spoke he rubbed his hand rapidly between his thighs. I turned around, braced to make a move, then dashed down the old wide stairway. Outside, the sharp autumn air took me by surprise and my eyes stung a little. The street looked blurred, like a thin screen dappled by shifting light and shade.

I started walking quickly and aimlessly. I hardly saw anything around me. I cursed myself, mocked myself, and wondered what exactly Ra’fat had done wrong to make me seethe with so much rage. What exactly was my problem with the offer he had made? Hadn’t he behaved generously and with good intentions? He wanted me to carry on playing the same game, though with a new partner, another man, just a male who was willing to play, so what was my problem? What difference does it make whether your partner is called Ra’fat or Hamatto? Whether he’s tall and thin or short and fat? What’s the difference between us and stray dogs? They might be better off, because they don’t lie and they don’t have to make up false names for things.

I started looking around me, as if I were looking for someone who might suddenly notice me among the crowds and the bustle, and who could answer my questions; someone like that venerable old man with the white beard who appeared to the hero in old films whenever he was in dire straits. The old man would give the hero hope and good tidings and help him solve the riddle. Sometimes I could imagine such an old man when I came out of the Jumblatt Mosque after dawn prayers, but for now I knew it was a lie no different from the lies I inscribed in my notebooks about the unity of the universe and the music of heaven.

As always the streets of central Cairo were packed with cars and people of every color and variety. There were men all around me, in the crowded buses, on the sidewalks, in the restaurants and coffee shops, gathered together at bus stations, hurrying eagerly to work, or just loitering to kill time. It struck me that endless possibilities lay ahead of me. Why should I cry over a man who had come and gone? I could find thousands of alternatives, and each one of them was bound to have his own smell and taste and touch. Each one of them would have his own tone of voice, his own way of laughing, his own story, however inconsequential it might be, and his own unique facial expression when he reached orgasm. So why should I imprison myself in adolescent fantasies? At that moment I felt I was coming out of a long coma, and I wanted to try out all the men in the world, almost without exception. What was to stop me? A door inside me opened to reveal a monster that had been trapped. It was hungry and started to howl for food.

That same day I picked up a man from the street for the first time. He was middle-aged, bald, and thin, and his suit looked too big for him, as if he had lost half his weight since leaving home in the morning. We exchanged glances at the bus station close to Ramses Square and understood each other’s intentions. I soon found myself in the offices of the law firm where he worked and to which he had the key. There was no one else there at the time. I gave myself to him on a threadbare carpet that scraped against my body and my knees, which were pressed against the floor. His firm hands held me tight at the waist as if he were worried I might escape his grasp and run off. I didn’t enjoy anything about it, but I just wanted to try, to break a barrier, to take revenge on myself and on my insignificance and fragility. I was a doll, made of cloth and straw, that had suddenly realized it was just a doll and that after this nothing could hurt it, however many pins they stuck in it and however hard they pulled its hair; a doll now lying half naked on a dirty carpet, with a thin stranger urging it to get dressed quickly before anyone took them by surprise.

It was not a passing fit of madness or just a reaction to the abrupt end of my relationship with Ra’fat. It was a sign of how my life would be for many years to come. I tore up that man’s phone number and forgot him as soon as I left the building. He was just the first in a long line of phantom men, faceless and nameless, who plied my body and whose bodies I plied, with no illusions and no demands other than the impulse of the moment.

I learned the art of the hunt through practice, without a teacher. I learned how to make eyes and read the reaction on men’s faces. I learned how to slip through the crowds once we had made contact, either ahead of my prey or some distance behind, until we were somewhere relatively safe. I learned how to sneak a peek at the penis of the man standing next to me at the urinals, awaiting his reaction, or how to make eye contact with men rubbing themselves in the crotch as a signal. I picked up university students and staff and met men who gave their bodies to those who wanted them in exchange for a meal or a small sum of money. I found bus routes that were known to be crowded and served as meeting places for gay men, some of whom took the bus only to cruise. I played the game in my room in the Abdin apartment, in dozens of unfamiliar rooms, and sometimes in public places. I tried some dodgy Turkish baths, where gay men met and sometimes flirted.

I started going out cruising whenever I felt the urge, rarely meeting up with the same person more than once. Even when that crazy period of my life was over, I continued to meet men I didn’t know and wouldn’t remember. Some man might stop me and remind me who he was, claiming we had done it together at one point. A man might say, “We went to my place in the clinic. Don’t you remember when I examined you and gave you an injection?” or “I’m George, the bartender in the hotel in Dokki, Mr. Hani. You wouldn’t let me leave the room for three hours. How could you forget?” Those were the ones I ran into again by chance, just a random sample from a sea of bodies. I submitted to the currents, which took me where they wanted, like a beautiful floating corpse.

Voraciously I started to explore the nightlife of the city and the creatures of the night. I found out more about the other persona that came to life inside me as soon as evening fell. That version of me grew and gained strength with the years. He lost his shyness and went out with his face uncovered. I saw him reflected in the reactions of every new man I slept with, and in my imagination I saw him with a headdress of painted feathers, decorated with strings and chains of beads, crystals, diamonds, sequins, and pearls. He wasn’t so much a person as a character in a music-hall dance, a circus performance, or a moving cabaret of flesh and blood. Only superficially did he look like other people.

I began to attract men like me wherever I went, and a small circle formed around me. They were my courtiers and I was their queen. They started to call me Hanushka. I was no longer embarrassed about Mama’s work, as I had been previously. In fact I boasted about it, and when I spent lavishly on my nefarious coterie, I would tell them, “Say a prayer for Mama, girls.”

I deployed my old talents—fooling around and making jokes. I made sarcastic jibes at everyone, my friends and the men who played the role of male bees, who pursued me as I ascended until only the strongest and most patient of them could reach me. I was now Hanushka, an insatiable vampire that refused to settle down with any one catch. I would sleep with them once or twice, just to try them out, and then I might throw them as castoffs to the girl who was nearest. I didn’t get involved, I didn’t hang around, I didn’t want to know anything about the other person or hear his stories. I only wanted his body, his warmth, the sound of him groaning or grunting at orgasm. Just sex, a guest with few demands, a plaything destined to be erased from my memory. And the show went on.

The joker went back to his mirror at the end of the day. I went back to a bedroom where I was alone in my nakedness. I might feel a slight thrill for some brief moments as I took off my clothes and made ready for bed near to dawn. It felt like I was Mother as she took off the accessories that went with the characters she was playing. I wasn’t really Hanushka: that was the right role for me, but it was just a role, no more and no less. Perhaps I identified with the role more than I should, so much so that I no longer knew who the real Hani Mahfouz was or how to go back to being him when I wanted. I had many versions of him. It’s true: they were all based on the original, but they were not the original. They weren’t me. They were all masks, with nothing behind them. A void that was terrifying but that gave me pleasure. In these brief moments, I might write a few lines in my diary before putting it back in its place in a locked drawer, where I would forget about it for weeks or months, until I again had a wave of doubt. Just a few passing moments when the star, the celebrated artiste, the man-killer, lost the plot as she walked through the dark wings behind the theater stage. But as soon as the lights fell on her face she immediately went back to the role she had been assigned, because the show must go on.