23

As soon as i saw him I was no longer myself. I remember that Shireen noticed the change in me from the first moment. It was at the party celebrating his engagement to her cousin Asma. “What’s wrong, Hani?” she asked me several times.

I was usually the life and soul of the party on occasions such as this, dancing and encouraging others to dance. But as soon as I saw the groom that night, going into the reception hall surrounded by the pomp and noise of the bridal procession, arm in arm with Asma, I was transfixed. I found myself tilting my head and looking at this man as if he were some strange creature. I told myself that I was grown up and sensible, that I had already tried everything, but how naïve I was!

It wasn’t hunger of the flesh, because the volcano inside me had subsided long ago and, as I entered my forties, all that remained was a slow-moving stream of lava. It might erupt on irregular occasions but it would soon die down. I made do with infrequent encounters I snatched in secret from time to time—quick transactions with men whose circumstances were similar to mine and who sought only a tranquilizer for their pain, without any commitment or complications. Then we could go back to sleep, confident that our public, respectable lives would stay on track. I thought I had reached dry land, but how naïve I was. I was terrified when faced with the strange monster called love that I had heard about all my life without ever meeting it. I had even come to see it as a myth, and I made fun of those who talked about it. That night the monster was as seductive as it was frightening.

Shireen and I reached home late that night, silent and a little tired. As I drove home absentmindedly, my body felt like a wreck, as if someone had dealt me a death blow. At home, Shireen checked little Badriya, then came back and stood there, taking off her hijab and her shiny black evening dress, which was rather too tight. I took a quick shower, and then went to bed in my nightclothes, carrying some old photo albums with me. One of them was full of pictures of my father in his childhood and youth, and I sat browsing through them. I was aware of Shireen’s quizzical looks. I called her over, pretending I wanted to bring her in on a little mystery. “Come and look, Shiri,” I said. “Isn’t there a resemblance between Asma’s fiancé and my father?”

She couldn’t see the resemblance as clearly as me. I started pointing out my evidence for the similarity. I cited his square face, his broad forehead, the nose that was flared like Gamal Abdel Nasser’s, and of course the bushy mustache that almost hid his upper lip. She played along, making jokey comments on my father’s wayward youth and his love affairs and how maybe he had once climbed over the wall into the home of Abdel Aziz’s big family in the southern town of Minya and left progeny there. Then she smiled, undid the top buttons of my pajamas, and said, “Thank God his only son turned out to be sensible, don’t you think?”

When we made love I tried to finish quickly, but for some reason I lay trembling on top of her for ages. I couldn’t shake off that strange feeling that had come over me. It was knocking on a door inside me with the urgency of a child trapped in a dark, cramped space. Sleep eluded me after Shireen slipped into her gentle, intermittent snoring with its familiar rhythm. When the sound of praying, hardly audible, reached me from Mother’s room around dawn, I thought of getting up and eating something, in the hope I could then go to sleep. When I came out of the kitchen I saw Mother on her way to her bedroom, leaning on her stick. She was muttering some prayers she had memorized with as much skill as she had memorized her lines for the roles she had played in the past: “In the name of God, in the presence of whose name nothing can do harm. In the name of God the Protector, in the name of God the Healer, in the name of God, in the presence of whose name nothing can do harm on Earth or in Heaven, for He is the one who hears and the one who knows.”

Her voice faded into the distance. For some reason I didn’t try to speak to her or alert her to my presence. I stood there watching her small, patient steps, and repeated after her those words of her whispered prayer that I could hear. Where does strength go when it leaves us? How is it that beauty withers till nothing of it remains? Was this the tigress who used to inspire such awe and reverence in me? I didn’t move until she reached the door of her room and shut the door behind her, and the flow of her prayer was interrupted. Then I fell asleep immediately, a deep sleep without dreams.

I tried without success to forget about the groom, but a few days later we were invited to dinner with the couple to get to know each other properly. We met in a fancy restaurant on the river in Zamalek that Abdel Aziz clearly visited regularly. I did everything I could to appear normal, but my tongue was in knots and the words stuck in my throat. I was even worried they might see this as a sign that I was displeased or bored with them. Shireen lifted the burden from my shoulders when she saw that I was unusually silent. She bombarded them with questions and advice for the future. I followed the conversation distractedly, commenting or intervening as little as possible, just enjoying listening to his resonant voice. I noticed for the first time that he pronounced his r’s rather like w’s, which gave him a certain boyishness that contrasted with his mature Upper Egyptian masculinity.

I followed their conversation about Asma’s writings, which were one of the reasons she and Abdel Aziz had come to meet, in the context of his work as an editor on a newspaper that devoted a whole page to the opinions of young people, besides his many other duties and responsibilities. He seemed to be a rising star in the media world and he was conveying that impression through carefully studied references, while flashing a modest smile that failed to conceal his admiration for himself. I guessed he was over thirty, though I couldn’t fix his age precisely, but he was definitely several years older than Asma. He came from a family of tough men with a violent history. I would discover later from Prince that his family had an extensive network, with its base in Minya and branches across the country. Most of the menfolk held senior positions or high rank in the army, the police, or the judiciary, and included businessmen who were pillars of the ruling party. But Abdel Aziz didn’t mention that at the dinner or later, except briefly and to a limited extent, as if he were embarrassed to be associated with them and wanted to be forgiven for the connection.

He might have noticed the signs that I was nervous, or maybe he picked up one of my furtive glances at him. He graced me with a polite smile and opened a conversation with me on various unconnected themes—the nature of my company’s work and the economic situation in general, and then ending up on football. Whenever I didn’t show enough interest in pursuing the conversation, he stopped talking or turned to talk to his fiancée or my wife. I was careful drinking the expensive wine so that I wouldn’t let slip any signs that might have consequences for which I wasn’t yet ready. When I shook hands with him by my car, I looked into his eyes earnestly, as if entrusting him with a secret, but he didn’t say anything. His smile tightened and he frowned, as if facing an enigma.

For days I went over what had happened at the dinner, what he had said and what he had done. Had he really given a suggestive smile to a young man who was serving in the restaurant, or had I imagined it? Damn the ambivalence of doubt! When and how could I meet him again, at least to try to change his impression of me? Then I would tell myself I had to get a grip. Now that I had taken the first step by deceiving myself and getting married, I had to keep going till the end. I no longer belonged to myself. There was Shireen now, and more important than either her or me, there was little Badriya.

I had never imagined that I would be able to feel like a father. When I picked up Badriya for the first time, an hour or less after she was born, I felt an aversion that was almost nauseating as I looked at this strange creature who was said to be a part of me. I completely avoided her for days and just watched her from a distance, while she was nursing or off and away on one of her sleep journeys, during which she grew at an astonishing rate. As she grew, her features began to take shape. A recognizably human hand the size of a postage stamp would suddenly appear from between the folds of her tiny clothes. At first out of a sense of duty, and then gradually out of curiosity, I moved closer to her and tracked her changing appearance and her strange convulsions during bouts of crying that I found harrowing. I was staggered by the amount of attention this pet animal needed in order to become a human being like the rest of us. In hindsight, I imagined Mother looking after me as a baby about forty years earlier, and I tried to gauge the amount of love that all those around me had invested in me. I even caught myself sometimes feeling grateful to Mother for forcing me to get married. That way I could experience the sense of extending into another body, one that was new and fragile. Eventually I plucked up courage and started to pick Badriya up again and again and rock her to sleep. I ended up singing to her one night while Shireen was taking a shower: “Her mother’s beloved, oh my goodness, how I love her!”

When she gripped my little finger until she fell asleep, I almost cried at the miracle of creation made flesh before my eyes. This was another trap I hadn’t reckoned on—a grip as fragile as cotton candy but as strong as a steel chain.

Again I was a man alone among women, and again I yearned to run far away before I suffocated on their numbing and familiar smells. I longed to smell the sweat of a man. That was my only salvation, or else I would turn into a real female and join their flock, to be surprised one morning to find my nipples producing warm milk like Shireen’s breasts. Shireen’s interest in sex had abated, as if in giving birth she had taken from me what she wanted, and that was that. This pleased me to some extent, but I was still worried she might have despaired of me completely, of me giving her a pleasure that she still expected. Sometimes we would revert to being the Hani and Shireen of old, the colleagues at work, and we would tell each other stories, reliving our lives from the beginning, up to the moment when we became attached.

I told her many things, except for the one thing that, if a man told his wife about it, he would no longer be a man and she would no longer be his wife. Maybe Shireen had long had suspicions without having the courage to name them. How often had she sensed it but denied it! How often had she felt that the man she was living with was saving his enthusiasm and his passion for something else or someone else other than her? Maybe throughout her years of marriage she had been mulling suspicions, and I had been missing her stealthy glances at me as I stood in front of the mirror preparing to go out, examining my complexion or the sparse hair between my eyebrows. Our eyes would meet in the mirror for a few seconds—four little question marks colliding and vanishing in the same moment. And we went on singing the song of fake happiness until Abdel Aziz appeared, like a highwayman in the dead of night.