20

“All that’s lacking is the right girl.”

That was the expression that Mother never stopped repeating in various forms, for years and years. It was the yoke that tightened around my neck every day. After separating from her husband and then giving up work completely, she now had time for me. It was she who told me about her divorce, showing no signs of regret. On the contrary, she looked cheerful and free and smiled as if she were saying, “Here I am, yours again, all yours.” I wasn’t happy with that. In fact, I might have been frightened and annoyed, and I said to myself that she no longer had anything to distract her from me and from her insistence that I get married. After a while she wasn’t satisfied just to talk. She started proposing names to me and inviting me to go with her to family meetings. I took care to avoid them by any means possible. The last ambition of her life was for me a frightening ogre, the existence of which I had long ignored. The old methods—prevarication and making excuses—were no longer working.

I hadn’t been unaware of her suspicions about my sexual inclinations since that cold night when she asked me to stay away from Prince. In front of her I always had to act as though I liked women, without ever being certain that I had succeeded in deceiving her finely tuned antennae. I left boxes of condoms in places where she might find them—condoms that I really did use, though for completely different sexual activities. It was like living out a detective story, leaving a trail of evidence that proved I was guilty, in the hope she would believe her son was a normal man like other men and that his aversion to marriage was just a question of avoiding responsibility and clinging to a life of freedom and frivolity.

She called me to her bedroom one morning before I could escape and go out. She didn’t broach the subject of marriage. On the contrary, she said she was thinking of moving to Saudi Arabia to live out the rest of her life there, especially as one of her actress friends, after retiring years earlier, was living in Madina with her husband, an Egyptian preacher. She had stayed with her for a time after her first post-retirement pilgrimage to Mecca. I saw what she said as a veiled threat directed at me, as I couldn’t imagine living without her. She was my remaining proof that I wasn’t completely alone, that I wasn’t a branch cut off a tree that no longer existed, and that I hadn’t fallen from the sky, like rain on the ground, naked, screaming, and unprotected—though that was of course something I had wanted when I left home and stayed with Omar Nour a few years earlier. Then I started hearing long phone conversations between her and her old friend in Saudi Arabia, as they talked about details of her stay in the city. I stole Mother’s passport, hid it in my drawer in the office, and hoped she would soon forget the whole subject. But she didn’t forget. She kept insisting and threatening to get a replacement passport, and saying that she would go as soon as possible. Our arguments became a daily ritual that could occur at any time.

When Mina asked me to wind up the company and buy his stake in it or find another partner, I realized that it isn’t easy to stop irritants when they start to seep into your life through some crevice, and in the end they may sweep you away like a deluge, leaving you drowning in misery. When I realized it would be difficult to find the right business partner to replace Mina, I swallowed my pride and made overtures to my mother again. I told her everything candidly, except for the real reason why Mina had decided to leave. She made it clear she was willing to help me immediately, but on one simple condition—that I at least get engaged before she signed the check. I had expected anything from her except for this bargaining with my life. I hated her and was so appalled by my hatred that I was willing to deny it completely by any means possible, even by submitting humbly to her demand.

In the roof garden, I laid out all my concerns at Prince’s table, and he advised me to go along with her game for some time because an engagement could be broken off for any one of a thousand reasons, and even if I got married, the option of divorce was always available. I also consulted Omar Nour, telling him everything. He said that maybe the time had come for me to come out of the closet. He said my mother was an actress and understood the world and wouldn’t reject her only son because he didn’t like women, and if that was impossible then I should let her go wherever she wanted, or I should go, escape her and her world, and try to make for myself an independent life; that I should take a house where I could live with someone I loved, instead of having brief encounters in the office after working hours or in other dubious places. He said that if I didn’t escape now I might forever lose the chance to save my skin.

Unlike Omar and some of the other “luvvies,” a tendency to disobedience was not one of the qualities I could boast of, yet inside me there had always been a kind of secret and repressed rebelliousness with a disfigured and distorted face, because I aimed my weapons at myself, wavering between a false and baseless sense of superiority over others and pleasure in humiliating myself and forcing myself to yield to any gust of wind that blew my way. What could I do when faced by the storm that was my mother, who harassed me night and day?

In the end I took Prince’s advice and, like a radar antenna, I started looking around for a victim or maybe a partner in the farce in which I meant to play the lead role. At that point I noticed Shireen. She had already been working with us for about a year, and she soon became like a sister to Mina and me. Since he wasn’t inclined to chitchat or clowning around we spontaneously excluded him from our little circle, which had regular sessions every morning for gossip and jokes, before we lost ourselves in the bustle of work. It was this brother–sister relationship that encouraged me to think of Shireen as a fiancée—just a fiancée—in the hope that I could persuade her to play this role for a time and then we would separate while preserving our friendship as it was. Then I dismissed this idea completely, because it involved humiliating her.

She had told me a little about her troubled background. She had grown up in her uncle’s house after her father died and her mother remarried and moved to Libya. Her mother came back some years later, old, rich, and alone after her Libyan husband had died. She asked to have her only daughter back. She wanted to take her away from the only life she knew, from her uncle and aunt and their children, who were now like brothers and sisters to her, especially Asma the youngest, whom Shireen had helped to bring up and who was like a daughter or sister. She refused to go back to her mother despite the money and comfortable lifestyle her mother tried to tempt her with. She saw her mother as a stranger, and even her accent made her laugh. I was aware of these problems, which had recently flared up, and I thought that maybe getting engaged would be an escape plan for her too, or a temporary respite for us both. After initially dismissing the idea, I ended up asking to marry her, a few weeks after the humiliating offer Mother had made.

I remember we were in a shopping mall in Nasr City, supervising the interior design work in a flower shop. Shireen was talking to me about work matters and I wasn’t paying attention to what she was saying. I was staring at her but not hearing a word. Slightly embarrassed, she touched her nose and face in case I was looking at something she hadn’t noticed. Then she said, “Ground control to Hani.”

“Tell you what, Shireen, why don’t we get married?” I replied, out of the blue.

The worker closest to us stopped what he was doing and turned to look at us, his mouth agape. Because she had a cold, Shireen was wearing layers of woolen clothes in warm, cheerful colors and her nose was redder than a beetroot. I had suggested marriage as casually as if I were offering her a cup of coffee. She thought I was joking as usual, so her surprise didn’t last more than a few seconds and I didn’t notice that at first she thought I was serious, at least for a moment.

“Why not?” she replied in a serious tone. “Are you free tomorrow?”

The swarthy worker laughed inanely as if he were watching a comedy movie. We both glowered at him and he went off, covering his mouth with his hand. It was a naïve and awkward moment, but it led us unwittingly to a shared destiny. In the meantime I was staring at her red nose, which had a tiny beauty mark at the tip, as if I had just discovered it was there. “Very well then, tomorrow it is,” I said.

We were half serious, half joking, but at the end of the day we agreed to take a short while to think it over, to be sure that our mental faculties were sound. I had no need to give it lengthy thought, because I knew that if I hesitated for a moment, I would back out and run off forever, so far away that no one would be able to find me again, not even myself. That’s what I wish I had done.