22

About ten days after i came out of prison, I told Prince I wanted to see my daughter, little Badriya. That was before I embarked on my program of therapy and writing, or dared to leave the hotel room in the evening on aimless rambles.

When Prince called Shireen and made an appointment, I was overcome with hesitation and fear. I was still hesitant when Prince’s car was taking us slowly through the downtown traffic. I didn’t know how I could face Shireen after everything that had happened. I had seen her only once during the trial, in the first session, a few weeks before the divorce took place.

We drove into Garden City from the corniche. Although I had been away no more than a few months, I was almost overcome by tears when I saw the familiar buildings of the elegant neighborhood and the trees in the streets. When we stopped in front of the building, I froze in my seat next to Prince.

“Would you like me to come up with you?” he asked.

I gave him a quick nod, grateful for his suggestion. While I was checking that my pen and notebook were in my jacket pocket, I heard the voice I loved to hear. “Papa, Papa!” it cried.

I turned and all my hesitation suddenly vanished. It was little Badriya, five years old, with frizzy hair framing her round head like a shiny black halo, waiting for me in front of the building and trying to break free from the hand of her nanny. Without a moment’s hesitation, I opened the car door and ran to her, picked her up, and kissed every part of her face and head that my lips could reach. Although I tried to control myself, I broke into tears when we were in the hallway. Badriya just lifted the sunglasses off my eyes and wiped my tears away. “Don’t cry, Papa,” she said. “You’ll get better and get to speak again. I pray to God for you every day. Not just me but Somaya too. Isn’t that right, Somaya?”

“That’s right, my dear,” said the nanny as she pressed the elevator button.

As I carried Badriya into the lift, she sneaked a peek at Prince. “Who’s that, Papa?” she whispered in my ear. “A friend of yours? Uncle Sallam is visiting too.”

It was true—I was no longer Shireen’s husband, so one of her relatives had to attend our meeting, or maybe Shireen’s kindly uncle had something he wanted to say to me, accounts of some kind to be settled or an indirect apology for the method they had adopted when they sought a divorce. The elevator moved and Badriya didn’t stop whispering in my ear about what had happened to her during my absence from the house, about the time she had spent with her mother in her grandfather’s house, and about playing in the street outside with the kids there. She said something about one of the friends she had met there and laughed, and in her laugh I heard a distant echo of the laugh of my precious mother, Badriya the Elder—a laugh like the vague impression that remains from a dream.

Suddenly I found myself in the house, the house where I had lived for years, where I had eaten, drunk, slept, made love with my wife as much as my desire and willpower allowed, attended to my mother’s comfort, and said farewell to her dead body. It was here that I carried my aunt’s body from the bathroom to her bed, and read, drew, planned my life, listened to a thousand songs, watched hundreds of movies and shows, and laughed. Yes, I well remember that I used to laugh often on the slightest pretext. And where was that fat clown now?

Sallam, Shireen’s uncle, greeted me and embraced me with a warmth that seemed strange under the circumstances. He patted me on the back with the affection of an aging father. He seemed to be giving me his condolences and I wondered who had died. Since I couldn’t speak for him, Prince introduced himself, and Sallam’s eyes lingered on Prince’s face a little longer than necessary after the handshake, as if he were trying to uncover something hidden behind the red face with its protruding cheekbones and gray eyes under white eyebrows. He was trying to detect some stigma, a proof of guilt, and maybe he wanted to have a look at the man he had recently heard so much about.

He led us to the living room as if it were his house. Inside, pictures of Mother and other people who had passed away awaited me, beautifully arranged on three walls around us. Nothing had changed, and yet everything had changed. Prince took his leave, saying he would wait for me in a coffee shop close to the house, as we had agreed on the way. When he left I felt that my back was bare. I clung to Badriya as my only life buoy. I now realized who had died. It was me. It might as well have been my soul that had come back, after I was dead and buried, to have a last look at my loved ones and at the lost dwellings it had lived in. I wished I could close my eyes and then reopen them to find that everything had reverted to how it was just two years earlier—with me, Mother, Shireen, Badriya, and life like a children’s song that began again as soon as it ended.

I looked at a large photograph of our wedding, and in a few seconds I remembered my terror on that day, when I resorted to furtive swigs from a hip flask of cognac in my jacket pocket. When they were taking pictures of us on the hotel balcony that overlooked the Nile, Shireen noticed the bulge in my pocket and asked what it was. I took it out and she drank a mouthful in front of her friends and relatives, and one of them let out a cheer. We were very much like circus performers on that day—having fun and clowning around with everyone. We danced with Fifi Abdou to Hakim songs, and we had dozens of pictures taken with dozens of stars and guests, and then went up to our suite exhausted.

Before the break of dawn we finally had sex. After two or more attempts I managed to take her virginity, drawing on my brief experience with Amal and by having fantasies about sex with some of the performers who had entertained us at the fake wedding party. Shireen’s softness as a woman was more than I could bear. I was relieved to see the light-red drops of blood, though I also trembled in fear in case I had unintentionally injured her. She was gratified and forgiving, but I felt like a criminal lying next to his victim, who closes her eyes to hide her disappointment. Maybe my time in prison was meant to punish me for my crime.

Seated in our old living room again, I shied away from the future that was in store for me, and I couldn’t take my eyes off a large old photograph of my mother on the back wall. Didn’t she take part in the crime too, albeit with good intentions and with love? Does ignorance absolve us of guilt? Mother was smiling in the picture, standing there seductively and elegantly, holding a bunch of flowers, all of them white—flowers that hadn’t faded for more than fifty years. Badriya noticed my glance, held my chin, and turned my head to face her. “By the way,” she said suddenly, “I’ve finally decided. I’m going to be a famous actress like Grandma. So I’ll be Badriya Number Two and she’ll be Badriya Number One. What do you think?”

I quickly took out my little notebook and wrote her a message: “Badriya Number Two will be the prettiest and greatest actress in the whole world.”

With artificial theatricality, Uncle Sallam read out to her what was written on the piece of paper. Then she tore the piece of paper out of the notebook and ran off, calling Somaya.

Then Shireen came in. I looked at her impassively, as if I didn’t know her. She was wearing dark, modest winter clothes, a plain dark-blue headscarf, and no makeup. I knew it meant she was in mourning. Uncle Sallam left us and Somaya brought coffee and took Badriya, slightly resistant and grumbling, off to her room. I quickly wrote a message to Shireen: “I’ll never forgive myself for anything that happened to you two because of me.”

I looked at the piece of paper for a moment before I handed it to her. My handwriting looked shaky, like that of a child who has only just started learning to write. I shuddered as I saw Shireen struggling for words. In the past she had always had a ready answer but now she was stumbling to start a sentence. She stood up and pulled the sliding door closed, as if to cut us off from the rest of the world and everything in it. She came up to me without hesitation, stood next to me, and slapped me hard on the face. “Why did you get married?” she said, choking with tears. “Why did you have children? Shame on you, Hani. Shame on you.”

The slap hurt me more than all the abuse and pain I had received in prison. Just to have her hand touch my cheek with such anger made me understand instantly everything she had put up with because of me, both before and after the scandal. Both of us cried in silence, far apart. Then she came over to me, took my head, rested it on her shoulder quite instinctively, and started to massage my shoulders as if she were now my mother, until we calmed down a little. When I took out my pack of cigarettes, she took one and lit it herself. “I started the moment it happened—a cigarette every now and then,” she said.

Then she poured her heart out, inhaling the warm air from the room and turning it into the words she had stored up inside her over the previous months. She spoke about how she was forced to ask for a divorce, after my name and job were published in the newspapers; how she had taken refuge in her uncle’s house for a long time, until she felt that the people here had almost forgotten the scandal. She said she had asked herself day and night whether there was anything wrong with her as a woman. And if there was nothing wrong with her, what had induced me to ask to marry her, if I didn’t desire her? Then she said she didn’t absolve herself of responsibility, because she had made a mistake when she ignored her suspicions. To her, I was an amusing interior designer, with a mother who was a famous actress, both comfortably off. “And me? In the end I’m nothing,” she said. “My only assets are my tongue and my wits—wits that hadn’t even helped me to discover that something wasn’t quite right in the first place.” Throughout our years together she had kept her suspicions at bay. She had turned a blind eye, ignoring all the feelings she had as a woman, as well as her intuition, which had never let her down.

She also said she had sensed my feelings toward Abdel Aziz almost from the first day, the day he got engaged to her cousin Asma. She felt that my state of mind had changed. My face seemed to light up with electricity drawn from Abdel Aziz and to go out when I was cut off from that source of energy. She felt it, and denied her feelings, months before the arrest and prosecution and before Essam, her cousin, revealed what he had seen Abdel Aziz and me doing together in Alexandria.

When I was arrested, the lie finally fell apart. She no longer had the option of continuing to deny it. Then Essam came out with what he knew and the picture was complete. Even so, she said, she had held out against them and refused to seek a divorce at first, but then she backed down out of concern for Badriya, who was guiltless in all this, and because she knew it was now impossible to go on being married, even if they acquitted me. On top of that she wanted me to hate her as much as she hated me, and so she obeyed them and asked for a divorce. She had wanted to slap me, as she had done just now, and only now could she forgive me. However guilty I was, I hadn’t deserved everything that had happened to me, and because I was Badriya’s father and would remain so, we turned the page quietly and I sincerely wished her well in every way, and we told Badriya that I had gone to hospital for treatment to recover the power of speech.

I came out of Mother’s building toward nine o’clock in the evening, holding a cardboard box with some of my stuff. Quickly and awkwardly, I said hello to Saad the doorman and walked hurriedly toward the place where I had agreed to meet Prince, but when I arrived I couldn’t find him. I looked left and right, scanning the faces of the customers in the coffee shop. I put the cardboard box down next to me outside the coffee shop and felt lost and short of breath. I didn’t know if I should sit and wait for him or take a taxi to the hotel. In my breathlessness, I doubted I could lift my feet off the ground. I leaned back against the wall and tried to pull myself together. How would a taxi driver react if I wrote the address of the hotel for him on a piece of paper?

For a moment I thought of going home to Shireen, who hadn’t let me go without setting my mind at rest, after unloading months of rancor, anger, and pain. I could go back and beg her to call Prince. Instead, I took out my old cell phone, which I had scarcely used since my release, but before I could find Prince’s number and write out a message, my eyes filling with tears, I felt his hand on my shoulder. I started and my whole body shook. When I turned and saw him I wanted to insult him and punch him in the chest, but instead I threw myself into his arms, though we had only been apart for two or three hours. He said apologetically that he had had to move his parked car to make way for another car. I wasn’t interested in what he said. I signed to him that we should leave the place fast—very fast.

If it hadn’t been for Prince I would have been lost, now, in prison or over the years. He was always there, available, and all I had to do was call him and he would come. Even so, I would forget him for months when I didn’t need him, and when I suddenly remembered him and dropped in on his haunts, his only reproach would be a critical smile. He was like a middle-aged uncle whose displeasure does not last long and who has recently had a visit from his nephew. No, he wasn’t an uncle. He was probably the only father I ever had. Maybe he was that old man I had been looking for and whose appearance I had awaited as an adolescent coming out of the mosque after dawn prayers. The difference was that he couldn’t recreate me out of nothing, erasing all my vices with a stroke of some heavenly pen. He couldn’t and he didn’t want to. He was still holding out against time, ignoring the impact of the years on the pride of an aging peacock, using expensive perfumes to fight off the horrible smell to which he had been condemned for years. He was still looking after his “luvvies” with all the influence, connections, and experience at his disposal, even if he had to wage wars he could have done without. If only I could just be like him, for little Badriya’s sake—to be the kindly old man who dispels the gloom and offers peace of mind and a sense of security. But I was very far from being able to do that. All I could do was observe people and the world from behind dark glasses, and they seemed remote and unfamiliar, just like the scenes from my life that I’m dragging out of my memory and setting down on these pages.

In the cardboard box I had carried out of the house I found many photographs, including one of just me and Abdel Aziz on the balcony of the beach house in Agami. I don’t remember now who took it. Was it a coincidence or had Shireen deliberately put it among those pictures? He had his strong arm around my shoulders and was smiling, arrogant in his self-confidence, while my face suggested a joy as fragile as an April fools’ joke.