17

Walk, hani. don’t stop walking, or else you’ll freeze up and be done for. Move fast, like someone being chased, running away from all the stories, the old and the new, the same stories you’re chasing when you write. By day you describe scenes from your past as honestly as possible and at night you erase them and imagine yourself as another character, a stranger to yourself, so you try to behave as this stranger. A perfectly normal man, like all these people. Are they really normal? What are they hiding behind those faces and those skulls? What is a normal person in the first place and what do they look like? Are those people who tormented me and humiliated me normal?

Write, Hani. Write. Don’t stop writing. That’s what Dr. Sameeh advised me to do, after I sent him some of your writings over the past few weeks. He also said he was reading them with great interest, lapping them up. As he reads, he imagines my voice, which he knew for ages before I lost the power of speech. He imagines me saying aloud what I wrote.

I also imagine my voice sometimes. I hear it repeating phrases in my head. It might sing one of the songs I hear in that little bar where my feet take me almost every evening. I was there two days ago, when one of my aunt’s songs was broadcast and I heard a discussion about her among some of the regulars. What they said was a mixture of truths and untruths, but one of them referred to the son of her sister, the actress Badriya Amin, and said I had been arrested about a year ago in the big case of the perverts on the Queen Boat.

I was terrified. For a moment I thought they knew who I was and were addressing me obliquely by insinuation. Miraculously, I kept my fear under control and refused to get up and leave. Or maybe it was the fragile courage of alcohol. Then I invited them to a beer and told them by pen and paper about Husniya and the myths about her. I denied what they had said about Husniya’s nephew. I wrote about her as if I were writing the script for a movie on the life of the late singer. On pages torn out of my notebooks I gave them scraps of the truth. I didn’t say I was that nephew or that the worst periods in my life had been when Aunt Husniya came to stay with us. I didn’t say I had carried her body out of the bathroom to put it on her bed, after she killed herself with an overdose.

I said I’d write about all this in the morning in my room, where the calm contrasted with the frightening voices in my head. I’m writing now in the quiet and warmth of the hotel room, but I’m still out of breath, like a man running from a pack of rabid dogs.

Whenever my mother came back from visiting her sister in the clinic, she would cry and say that her heart bled for her and she no longer knew what to do. The only time I went there with her, I found my aunt fully alert and focused, and it was painful to hear her begging me to persuade Mother to set her free and take her away.

“I’m better now, Hani,” she said. “The doctors here are only interested in money. Make your mother take me out of here, my dear, please. I die a death here every day.”

My mother finally took pity on her and discharged her. Or maybe it wasn’t so much pity as the need to have her sister by her side. Aunt Husniya settled in with us and went through a meek and obedient phase until the comic drama resumed between them. I left the house to them most of the time, or kept to my room, leaving it only to go to the kitchen or the bathroom. I left them in their own world, while I busily wove the tent of my loneliness day after day. I studied, I read, and then I drowned in the seas of the Internet, which I had recently discovered and which became my companion in solitude for years. I met people and chatted and watched pornography from every country in the world, lounging on my seat like a pasha, smashing the rocks of my lust by masturbation after masturbation, without wanting to go out and find a real man who would give me only the transient delusion of gratification.

Although I tried to ignore them, it was difficult to avoid the two old ladies completely. I would catch myself looking at them furtively from a distance. Growing old had made them more alike than they had ever been—almost twins. Husniya was the pale, ravaged version, while Mother was the fresh, wholesome version, but the underlying appearance was the same. Mother reduced her acting commitments to a minimum, maybe out of concern for her health, which wasn’t as good as it had been, or so that she would have time to play with her elder sister, who had ended up dependent on her charity.

All they had left to do was rummage around in their bag of memories. One of them would pull out whatever her hand happened to find there—maybe a rose, maybe a scorpion. I’d find one of them kissing the other on the cheek, or I’d be woken up by the sound of them quarreling over who was the star. Both seemed to be embarrassed that they felt sorry for each other and obviously needed each other, so they projected their emotions into poisonous attacks on each other. That was after my aunt abandoned the veneer of submission and self-absorption, within a few months of coming to live with us, and recovered her old vampish spirit.

My aunt made sure she reminded Mother all the time that she could take credit for bringing Mother back into the theatrical world and introducing her to directors and actors, after she had gone off and gotten married and everyone had forgotten her.

Mother wouldn’t take this lying down. She would respond by making fun of my aunt’s supposed talents, her degenerate taste in men, and her consumption of too many drugs.

My aunt would flutter her eyelids and say, “Some people know how to live well.” Or else she would kiss her own hand back and front, and say, “Well, thank God, we’ve had our fill and had some crazy fun. I’ve never denied myself anything.”

Then it would be my mother’s turn to remind her how she had picked her up off the street unconscious and how there were many people like her sleeping on the sidewalk and eating from the garbage cans because they didn’t have anyone at their side to feel sorry for them and look after them.

These contests would go on, quietly or feverishly, for days on end, until they dragged in my father and the incident when he groped my aunt, and he often received his fair share of their malice. Whenever I caught scraps of these conversations, I felt sick and my head spun. I no longer knew where I was or what time I was in. It felt like we had gone back to the Abdin days, to Grandmother Sakina and her Primus stove, but this time we had lost all our innocence and compassion. Or it was one extended moment that took on different forms, though it was without doubt all the same vulgar drama.

I had to get out of the house until they went to sleep. I took refuge with Prince in the hotel he had bought in Behler Passage downtown after the Cobweb was sold and converted into something else. When I got tired of spending the evening with Prince in the roof garden of his hotel, I went looking for Omar in the Hurriya café or the Stella bar to talk about books, the state of the country, and the way we were ostracized. He told me of his big plans, none of which ever came to fruition. He would tell me about the few brief sexual adventures he had had. I would tell him about mine, and we discovered we had lost our old appetites and could go weeks or months without a successful sortie. He said it was strange and amusing that people had the idea that we had sex all day and all night. They didn’t think we were like other people, obliged to study in order to succeed or to work in order to eat and live, or that we also took an interest in public affairs and the state of the country. According to them, our only interest in life came down to sex. I didn’t tell him that we sometimes seemed that way to them, and sometimes to ourselves, because the problem of sex was insoluble. Maybe if they accepted us and we accepted ourselves, we could see the many things that we and they had in common. But usually I just listened to his long monologues in silence.

In the meantime, I continued roaming the streets, especially after I graduated at about the age of twenty-five, when I faced a massive void. I wasn’t cruising: walking the streets at night had just become a diversion, despite the crowds and the noise, or maybe because of them. I developed a habit of spying on people, taking snapshots of them in my head, especially in those moments when they escaped the hell of their daily lives: a middle-aged man, for example, leaning on a windowsill, watching the world beneath him with disappointment and discontent; a girl smiling dreamily as she looked at a dress in a shop window and tucked a strand of hair under her hijab; a well-dressed man bending down to tie his child’s shoelace as the boy held his father’s ear as if to tell him off for behaving badly.

I thought of buying a camera and taking real pictures, to keep myself busy. Maybe I would take it up as a profession, but I thought that would ruin the pleasure and reveal me to the victims of my spying. I thought I might also become a writer if I worked hard and concentrated, but I soon admitted to myself that I didn’t have the patience to sit and write, even for just an hour. I thought of acting, and said it would suit me better than anything else. My life was dominated by daydreams. I saw myself as a movie star in the spotlight, surrounded by gossip about why I wasn’t married yet. Then I would come to my senses when I remembered I was plump and prematurely balding, an appearance that might qualify me to play roles as the hero’s gluttonous and amusing friend. I was sure that the artistic life was the only life I could imagine for myself . . . but what art should I choose? I had no idea, and intentions and fantasies were as far as my efforts went.

I went home reluctantly in the end, exhausted from roaming the streets, to catch up on the same old soap opera between the two sisters. Our maid, Umm Ibrahim, had started following the drama with interest as it unfolded, and she would brief me on new developments while I had a bite to eat at the kitchen table.

“Mrs. Badriya threatened she’d send Mrs. Husniya back to the clinic. Then Mrs. Husniya threatened to go on television and tell the whole story,” she said.

Then my mother started wearing the hijab and took very few acting roles—basically mothers or women in historical or religious serials. She felt she had gained new ground in her war with her sister, and her criticism of her took on an unfamiliar religious aspect. If my aunt put an old hairpiece on her head, or slipped off during the day to do her face or try on a fur coat and jewelry, my mother would seize the chance. First she would give Aunt Husniya her fill of ridicule, then suddenly switch into a short sermon interlaced with verses from the Quran, sayings of the Prophet, and traditional adages. My aunt’s usual response to all this was outrageous laughter, or else she would spread her arms wide, shake her sagging, shriveled breasts, and sing her an old song: “Who are you singing to, handsome? We’re the ones who invented love songs.”

The appropriate last scene in this tawdry and tedious drama finally came when I had to break down the bathroom door to find my aunt stretched out in the empty bathtub, her eyes wide open as if she had finally seen that extraordinary thing that had managed to elicit a look of surprise from her. Her body was heavier than I had expected and she was a strange color, ashen but turning blue. Everything happened surprisingly quickly, as if I were watching a movie in fast motion. It ended as suddenly as it started, without me knowing what had happened. I never found out how the heroin reached the house, given that she hardly ever went out. I suspected Umm Ibrahim for a while, until I remembered the short, fat nurse who had met her in the clinic and who visited her regularly after she came to stay with us.

My mother managed to keep the details of her death under wraps. The show-business press took some interest in the old singer Husniya Amin, or Husna as her fans called her, who had recorded only a few songs for the radio and had appeared as a singer in one or two movies more than twenty years earlier. Some television and radio stations played whatever songs of hers they had on hand, possibly out of respect for her sister, the talented actress.

At my aunt’s funeral I saw a handful of old show-business people, and for a fleeting moment I thought about Mother’s funeral and what it would be like. Who would attend? Where would I be? What would I do then? My imagination didn’t come to my aid in any way. I couldn’t even imagine Mother being dead, with me standing as I was standing then, receiving people’s condolences. I couldn’t breathe properly, my chest felt tight, and I started looking around for her, as if her existence were under threat, as if she might be taken away from me at any moment. Then I saw her in the distance, her face radiant against the black of her clothes, sad and broken but tough and robust, shaking hands with the mourners and bowing her beautiful head. I told myself that Mother wouldn’t die. I had to have faith. I had to believe it. This was something about which there was no doubt. She would not die now, or soon, or even in ten or twenty years. Until that day came, I would have to be ready, to train myself to imagine her death, otherwise I would go mad when her moment came.

The first time I saw my face in the mirror after my aunt’s funeral, I found that little hairs above my ears on both sides had turned white, and that my baldness was on the advance again. I also remembered that I had no job and no real life separate from my mother’s life and that the last time something I’d seen in a dream had come true was many years earlier and it had been trivial—just a pair of red socks that I liked, one of which had gone missing, and I dreamed it was stuck in the bookshelf behind Of Love and Other Demons, and in the morning I found it in that exact spot.

I felt that something was bound to happen, something was bound to change, even if for the worse. When I was about to cry in front of the mirror, I pulled myself together and whispered to myself, reproachfully and imploringly. “You’ve grown up, Hani,” I said.