19

The roof garden at the Andrea Hotel, the Thursday night gatherings, and a life of fun and happiness, flitting aimlessly like a wanton butterfly sated with sweet and poisonous nectar—all this could have gone on forever if I hadn’t met Mina Gamil at the right time.

The hotel had been our constant refuge ever since Prince had bought it. It was on the top three floors of an old building in Behler Passage, just steps away from Talaat Harb Square. On the roof there was a restaurant, a bar, and a small square in the corner, slightly raised off the floor, for those who wanted to dance especially on Thursdays, the only night when Prince let go a little, forgot his role as manager and owner of the place, and became just a customer like all the others around him. Often he would send for an imported bottle of something from his private wing in the hotel and chill out, constantly surrounded by young men like flowers. Then he would pick up his oud and start singing. The music might go on until the break of dawn on Friday.

It was also on a Thursday night that I met Mina Gamil for the first time. Prince had told me that Mina was looking for a suitable partner to set up an interior-design business. We had an appointment with him in the early evening, before the usual noise began. He arrived a few minutes early, and my eyes lingered on him for some moments. I was drawn to a slight squint in his left eye. It was an almost imperceptible defect but somehow it lit up his face. His black hair was parted to the side like a well-behaved schoolboy’s. Prince had told me about him on the phone and indicated that he was one of the “luvvies.”

Prince briefly made the necessary introductions and went straight to the subject of the proposed partnership. When Mina spoke I was surprised by how serious and dignified he was. I thought that maybe he didn’t want to mix business and pleasure right from the start. He had a reasonable amount of money, but not enough to make a good beginning, and he was looking for a young man who wanted to go into business and who had some familiarity with the nature of the work. He mentioned Prince’s account of my previous work, and since I remembered my work experiences as failing for various reasons, I accepted his complimentary remarks in silence. I raised a glass of beer as a toast to him and looked into his strange eyes. He raised his glass of water and smiled a fragile smile. We exchanged telephone numbers and made an early appointment to discuss the details, and he soon indicated he was ready to leave. Prince invited him to stay, since the evening had hardly begun, but he declined, saying he had other commitments. I sensed he was uncomfortable with the ambiance. He confirmed our appointment before going, and when we shook hands I pressed his hand gently. He didn’t react in any way, but headed briskly for the elevator.

“Why’s he so serious?” I asked Prince.

“That’s exactly what you need,” he replied enthusiastically.

He said that Mina’s seriousness would encourage me to be focused and committed, and that the company would be our company and so I wouldn’t face the same problems I had faced in previous jobs. All I had to do was provide my share of the company’s capital, then go along with Mina step by step so that we would succeed and so that my life would have some meaning, instead of spending it wandering around aimlessly. He elaborated on this theme in a short sermon, saying that although life appeared to be empty it was in fact full, but with traps that could lead to ruin at any moment.

Two or three days later I met Mina in the À l’Américaine café. As I prepared for the meeting I tried to find a balance between a pragmatic demeanor and a sense of levity and play, but his quick glance at my orange shirt warned me that I had veered too far in one direction. We didn’t go into details of the partnership directly. We spoke a little about Prince and about many of the people he looked after and whose lives would be harder without him. Mina said in passing that he hoped Prince would settle down with someone faithful, instead of moving rapidly between short-term partners. This hope of his irritated me, maybe because it smacked to me of criticism of Prince’s promiscuous lifestyle, a criticism that would also apply to me, even if Mina didn’t know much about me. I defended Prince’s lifestyle and explained candidly that I thought freedom and being uninhibited were preferable. With a calm that would often irritate me at the beginning of our relationship, he said that freedom might work for some time, or perhaps early in our lives, but after a while we fall prey to loneliness and need something deeper than quick, easy sex. That thing need not be love. Call it what you like: something close to empathy; finding someone you can talk to without embarrassment or fear.

I thought that what he said was romantic and foolish. I had turned that page long ago. I believed in flesh and blood, nerves and muscles, and nothing further—no feelings, emotions, or any of that. I saw all such things as delusions made to deceive adolescents and naïve people through novels, movies, and songs. But I didn’t have the energy to get into an argument with him, especially when I saw that he wanted to turn the conversation to the crux of the matter, which was our business plan.

I liked his idea, which was simply that we should specialize in interior design for new shops and cafés in malls and upmarket areas. When we realized we could raise only a modest amount of money to start with, and of course after consulting my mother, who agreed to lend me a reasonable amount, I asked him why we shouldn’t restrict our work to very small businesses, because the owners didn’t have enough money to commission well-known companies and because they had a greater need to exploit every inch of their limited space. There wouldn’t be any major competitors harassing us, and with good advertising and modest pricing we could gain ground specifically in this market. When I suggested this idea, I noticed for the first time since we had met that his view of me was changing, as if he had discovered that he’d hit upon just the right partner. Then we rented an apartment as an office, furnished it quickly, and set to work. We gave the company an English name, Free Space, at the suggestion of Prince in a daytime session in the roof garden.

I found I faced a real choice for the first time, a choice I had to make alone rather than in the presence of everyone else. After I graduated, until I met Mina, I had worked in several places, mostly in jobs that came to me through Mother or Prince. The jobs were all more or less connected with my special expertise in drawing and interior design. Once I had designed sets for television programs, and once I’d worked as an artist in a company that made animated movies. That went on for years. I started each new job enthusiastically. I wanted to prove myself, and so I would wake up early and take care of my appearance, avoiding garish or conspicuous clothes. But within a few weeks, or months in the best of cases, the enthusiasm would wane and it would end in disillusionment. They would dismiss me politely when they felt it was no use having me with them, or else I would stop work one day, out of irritation or disgust at their stupidity.

This time was completely different. I stopped staying up late and began to start the day early, sometimes to prove—to Mina at any rate—that I wasn’t a lazy, pampered mama’s boy. At first we relied on our personal connections. We had small colored flyers printed and we distributed them wherever possible. Mother’s connections brought us our first clients: one of her friends decided to open a hairdressing salon for her daughter. The second client came through Prince: an adventurous gay artist had decided to open a workshop to print cloth and clothing with designs requested by the customers. Gradually other clients showed up, and we found the days passing rapidly because we were so inundated with work that we often forgot to eat.

The experience was a challenge for Mina as much as for me, because he had long wanted to be independent of his uncle’s company, especially after rumors of his sexual inclinations came up as a result of a failed love affair. The other party had pursued him in an attempt to threaten him with blackmail. I came to know Mina well, and I discovered that beneath his serious, staid exterior there was a soft core. I noticed that under his dark suits and heavy shoes he sometimes wore shirts and socks that were all colors of the rainbow, so I suddenly remembered that he was one of the “luvvies.” I once caught him singing along in a low voice to an old song coming out of his computer: “If I had my way, if anything was up to me, I could buy you an island and a silver yacht, if only, if only . . . .”

“My God, you have a better voice than Muharram Fouad!” I shouted at him mischievously.

His face lit up with a shy smile.

After Mina’s gay tendencies leaked out, his brothers silently kept their distance, except for one brother called Atef, who lived in Naples with his Italian wife and who continued to support him. Whenever I heard Mina talking about “my brother Atef,” I felt a sudden yearning for a sympathetic brother of my own. He said that Atef believed in individual freedom and thought that everyone had the right to have sex in whatever way and with whomever they wanted as long as they didn’t hurt anyone else, and I was left with a twinge of something like envy for Mina. Once when we were coming back from an evening in the roof garden, emboldened from drinking, I held his hand in the elevator, kissed and licked the palm, and looked into his eyes. He stroked my cheek lightly, then moved closer and kissed it quickly and lightly, like a bird pecking.

He asked if we could sit in his car awhile, and in its dark warmth, glancing from me to the quiet street and back, he told me he loved me very much, like a beautiful brother that God had given him to compensate for the brothers who had ostracized him, although they lived only a few yards away from him. But he wasn’t attracted to me and he had promised himself long ago not to have sex with any man without an emotional attachment, because he was worried he would forget how sweet those feelings were if he slept with every available person he met, yet he didn’t criticize anyone who did so as long as that gave them fulfillment and relief.

I listened to him with mixed feelings and looked at his kind and handsome face. Then I kissed him on the cheek and left, intending not to try ever again. I went straight home without going cruising, though I was very much in the mood for sex. The desire waned over the days as a new face took shape in the mirror—a new and unfamiliar version of Hani; a version that was more at peace and more confident about himself and the whole world. If my mother hadn’t constantly insisted I get married, I would have said that this was the happiest period in my life. Then came a shock from an unexpected quarter, after Mina returned from a two-week vacation as the guest of his brother Atef’s family to tell me bashfully that he wanted to wind up the company as soon as possible. In Italy he had met an attractive middle-aged man, half Moroccan and half Italian, who had lived there almost since childhood. The man had turned his head, so much so that my partner had decided without hesitation to go to Italy and live with him.

Mina told me he had abstained from sex and been as celibate as a monk for ages, and whenever he masturbated to pornographic sites on the Internet, alone late at night, he felt empty and degraded, and sometimes he cried out of embarrassment and self-pity. On some occasions he felt that he needed psychotherapy because of his inability to do what other people did and he thought that his hope of finding the right partner for life, after the ordeal of his first and only love, might have upset his psychological equilibrium permanently, because after that he wouldn’t allow anyone to be intimate with him. He told me that all these fears evaporated as soon as he exchanged a few words with the Moroccan man, a shopkeeper who spoke broken Arabic and was always laughing when he spoke. From the first meeting, it was obvious that they had an unusual rapport, and the man invited Mina to dinner the following day. Mina agreed hypnotically, although he knew nothing about him. At the third meeting, when he went to bed with him, Mina discovered that he could still give himself and allow himself to go with the flow. He said he had often heard people say they had been born again, but until now he hadn’t believed them or understood what they meant.

His eyes were shining with gratification and enthusiasm, and I felt as if he were telling me one of those fairy tales that end in a magic kiss, and they live happily ever after and have loads of children. That was a story I could only observe or listen to, always from a distance and always happening to others. I gave my friend a hug and wished him well. Then I asked him to tell me more about his knight, maybe so that I could escape my own crisis and turn a blind eye to the phantom of my loneliness, which stood waiting in the corner with a morbid, vengeful smile.