14

I didn’t have to wait long before I came across my kindly old man, but he was very different from the way I had dreamed of him. I didn’t meet him after dawn prayers. He wasn’t dressed in white robes and he didn’t have a halo around his head. He came up to me in a place full of steam and naked bodies seething with sexual desire. He was Prince Aktham, who became my godfather and who still holds me protectively by a silken leash.

On my exploratory excursions I had found my way to a working-class Turkish bath not far from Ramses Square. It was an old building that may have belonged to the Ministry of Antiquities, and it was almost sunk below the surface of the earth. It was frequented by men seeking to bathe and have a massage, while we frequented it for other reasons. For us, it was a place to meet people and cruise. Not much happened inside, although the staff were complicit. Two men might find seclusion in a dark corner for a while, but only desperate men would bring their encounters to a conclusion there.

My first time there I was amazed and bemused by the naked bodies, the inquisitive stares, and my strange sense nonetheless of familiarity with such an environment, as if I had experienced it before. With time and repeated visits I started to talk and laugh and sometimes exchange kisses and light caresses with strangers, who felt protected by the almost complete anonymity. Before going I would usually pluck up courage by drinking several bottles of beer in some downtown bar and then, in the outer hall of the hammam, I would abandon my clothes, my name, and my whole life. I went in stripped of everything but my desires, unsteady on my feet because it was hard to move in the heavy wooden bath clogs, covered only by a wrap around my waist.

I might have caught sight of Prince before that night, with his hair dyed fiery red at the time and his extraordinary attachment to a kind of elegance associated with past eras. He was never without his hat and cane. He aimed quizzical glances at me whenever he saw me in one of the places we frequented. He seemed to expect me to appear in front of him and perform rituals of loyalty and obedience. I would ignore him, and he would merely blow the smoke from his thin brown cigar in the air, and maybe smile or wink at me. But on that evening in the hammam he reached out and held me before I fell into a trap that someone had laid for me.

The trap was a massive dark-brown man; everything about him was bursting with obvious virility. We had made eye contact, and then he came over to me and started a conversation. Prince saw us whispering to each other and understood the game. I was going to go off with that giant to his apartment, which he said was nearby. The man went off to change ahead of me and later, before I too went to change, I felt a cold hand on my shoulder. I turned around and recognized at once the elderly man who was trying to act young. He looked into my eyes, shook his head slowly, and whispered a single word that rang like a bell: “Danger!”

Then he took me by the hand and we sat outside the steam room, where he stretched out, lit a cigar, and told me that the man I was about to get involved with was a thug who had made a profession of selling his body to men, then started cooperating with the vice squad as an informer, and now made a living out of blackmail by threatening either to expose the men to their families or hand them over to the police. “You shouldn’t go off like that with just anyone, Mr. Hani,” he said in a deep voice that would suit a broadcaster. “You’re a well-brought-up lad and your mother’s a big actress and there are lots of bad guys, here and everywhere, and for them you’re a wonderful opportunity for blackmail.”

I believed him without hesitation and he inspired me with trust and reassurance. I wasn’t surprised that he knew me so well, because he was Prince. I stayed by his side as if hypnotized until he decided to go. We agreed to meet again soon and I felt that I had come across a real school and that I should join it immediately. I also realized that he wasn’t stupid or boring, as I had thought, maybe because he looked rather like a feudal lord who had escaped from a wax museum.

Only two days later I was sitting with Prince at a table that was always reserved in his name at a strange place called the Cobweb, a restaurant and bar that sometimes provided live music, on the ground floor of a building in Zamalek. The decor was weird and depressing, like old castles in vampire films, but it was an ideal place for whispering gossip, telling secrets, and taking lessons from Prince. In our first meeting there, because of the name of the place, I told him how, when I was about six years old, a small spider had dropped onto me while I was sitting on the toilet seat. It landed on my neck and quickly slipped into my pajamas. I screamed, sprang up, and, my bottom half completely naked, ran to my mother and grandmother. “A spider! Help me, Mama! A spider, Mama!” I shouted.

My mother and grandmother had a good laugh at me that day. But the story didn’t end there; it had only begun. I told Prince that since then I had started to see spiders constantly in my dreams—spiders of various shapes and sizes, either one big spider or many small ones running toward me. The storyline in the dreams might vary, but the spiders were a constant. In my subsequent meetings with him, I told him about the panic attacks that I had, about my relationship with my mother, about how studying made me feel stifled, about my contempt for myself because of my homosexual tendencies, and my fear that I could never be attracted to a woman, however hard I tried. The words just poured out of me whenever I was alone with him, when I didn’t have to share his table with beautiful faces and there was no party underway with jokes and songs. He attracted all kinds of people, us and others, grown men, young men and women. He was very much like the head of a Sufi order, followed by disciples wherever he stopped, and he never begrudged his advice or an answer to any question on any subject. He was far from modest and was unwilling to admit his ignorance on any matter. To my eyes at the time he seemed to be a walking encyclopedia, especially on anything that mattered to us, the “luvvies,” as he was in the habit of calling us.

He taught me to be careful and hesitant, to watch where I trod and not to throw myself at any available man, to sample, compare, and choose. I learned how to separate my public social life from my secret life with its impulses and adventures. I learned how to be ambitious, and I started to think about the future, almost for the first time. I was no longer embarrassed to buy condoms at the pharmacy and I never had sex without one, because Prince’s stories about acquaintances who had contracted AIDS kept ringing in my head. He took me and others by the hand, to lead us through the murky jungle of desire, where we did not know which fruits were poisonous and which animals were predatory. At his table in the Cobweb I formed real friendships with others who had the same inclinations. I broke off contact with my old group of friends and looked down on them as worthless and vulgar. Now I knew how to enjoy wine, music, and men, while listening to Prince’s life story, which he didn’t hesitate to retell whenever a new guest joined his ever-open table.

Prince had inherited most of his wealth and connections all at once from his brother, who was seventeen years older than him and who died before Aktham reached the age of thirty. His brother was the great songwriter Elhami al-Alfi, who never had any children and who adopted his brother as his son, business manager, and private secretary. Young Aktham had no significant academic qualifications or any evident profession, but his social skills were obvious. He spoke many languages and knew how to smile, flatter, and move in artistic circles as if he were in his own bedroom. Not content with that, Aktham had dreams of performing himself. He felt he was born to be a star in the world of music and song. He tried to convince his elder brother that he had a good voice but the composer was sensible enough never to play along with his delusions. He consoled Aktham by saying, “Your real talent is in your ears, Aktham. With them you can tell diamonds from dross. Don’t forget that I often take your advice on a new tune or the voice of a singer.” Elhami wanted him at his side and hoped that Aktham would forget his dream of singing one day and abandon his passion for men. Once Elhami despaired of him and said, “Do what you want, but without scandals. As long as you live among people with your dignity intact, no one has the right to ask whether you sleep with women, men, or cats.”

Maybe he gave him that advice toward the end of his life, after the last obstacles to candor between the two brothers had come down, as the great lyricist lay ill in bed in London. It wasn’t his first medical crisis. His desperate attempts to have children, by trying every possible form of treatment, had not left his body unaffected. He had a disease that was unknown even to the Western doctors at the time. It started to emaciate his body with every hour that passed, and within a few weeks he was reduced to a skeleton that a nine-year-old boy could have lifted. Young Aktham was the only person at his side when he passed away in the late 1970s. He was the one who held him up as he went to the toilet or looked out of the window. He was the one who played him old recordings to remind him of his greatness. He was the one who listened to Elhami’s last performance on the oud, when his arm was as thin as a stick, with fingers like needles holding the plectrum.

In those final days, the elder brother finally yielded to Aktham’s old wish and wrote a song for him. That was the birth of “Lightly, Lightly, Love,” which I would hear Prince sing innumerable times and which he refused to sell to any singer or to allow anyone else to sing, as if it were the only real thing he had inherited.