25

I met abdel aziz again, and then again and again. The pretext I would use for contacting him had been obvious to me since that dinner—I would offer to help him and Asma prepare and furnish the apartment they were moving into when they were married. When I plucked up my courage and called him the first time, his voice sounded innocently grateful for my offer. It was the voice of someone unaware of the trap that awaited him, or maybe someone who was deliberately ignoring it.

Merely anticipating my meetings with him made everything different. I spent more time than necessary ensuring my clothes were in matching colors. I wavered before choosing a cologne, and I relished all this indecision. There was a spring in my step, as if I had lost at least half my weight. I suddenly loved life. I went back to joking with everyone, especially Shireen. I played with little Badriya as if I were younger than her. We would roll around on the carpet in her room as I tickled her, blew at the nape of her neck to make funny sounds, and nibbled her stomach till she almost died laughing. From time to time Shireen would throw a quick glance at me as I stood in front of the mirror before a meeting with Abdel Aziz. She observed silently and contentedly. She wanted to ask why I was suddenly and mysteriously so happy, but she held back. I don’t know what I could have said if she had asked me. I might have lied and claimed that I was the happiest person in the world because I had everything that any sane man had ever dreamed of, and that was true but it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t the truth. I wasn’t about to say, aloud, my face red from embarrassment and happiness, “I’m in love. I’m in love, Shireen. I love Abdel Aziz, the fiancé of your cousin Asma.” I shivered with malicious pleasure when I imagined her reaction.

It was a happiness for which there was no justification as long as nothing obvious had happened, as long as I couldn’t be certain. We only had brief meetings in public places or at his apartment in the Digla district of Maadi, with its bare walls and floors. Nothing happened, but I was anticipating events and my imagination was moving at a breathless pace, building up and knocking down, tracing possibilities and setting out plans and scenarios. Even so, just waiting for an appointment with him gave everything a different flavor and made me sing songs, imitating some singer or other to my little female audience—Mother, little Badriya, Shireen, and Somaya the nanny. I would stand by the kitchen door holding a ladle like a microphone and sing to them in a silly imitation of Samira Said’s seductive style:

 

He said he came to me two days later,

Crying his eyes out, complaining of a new love.

He spoke as my fire burned; I heard him as my mind wandered;

I kept silent, with my heart as a witness.

See how unfair it is, people?

Is that right or is it wrong?

Oh how my feelings were hurt—

These pains of mine are the hardest pains,

And I advise you to be patient, my heart,

Because his love turned out to be delusions.

 

Then I would bow absurdly low to their applause and cheers, pick up my jacket and keys, and go out. I would smile at the angry drivers around me, stuck at traffic lights that never changed, and they would think I was an idiot or that I was high. I bought all the garlands of jasmine from a girl who was selling them in the street and gave her loads of money, and moved on lightly through life as if I had lost weight without the humiliation of dieting or exercising.

As soon as I met him, I changed. I became another person. I had special powers like the strange creatures in science fiction movies. All my senses sprang into action and worked at full capacity. My eyesight was sharper, and I missed nothing about him, even if it was just a downy hair on his earlobe that was dancing in the wind, and I wanted to kiss the hand of the barber who had left it there when he depilated Abdel Aziz’s ears. Yet I wasn’t completely detached from reality. I knew when to speak and when to keep quiet, how to make a joke or a witty insinuation, how to tell him a story that on the surface seemed pointless and irrelevant to our conversation but still contained a suggestive element. All he had to do was come down off his faraway branch and take hold of a suggestive kernel, stepping toward my hidden little trap.

I wasn’t prepared to listen to anything that might deter me from pursuing my course. I ignored every voice that tried to bring me back to reality, whether from Prince or from within me. At the height of my infatuation I heard about the murder of one of the “luvvies,” and the wretched story shook my confidence in the exquisite dream that was taking over my life.

I read the news one morning like everyone else, and I learned more of the details through Prince later, in evenings in the roof garden. The victim was a ballet dancer from a well-known family and they found him at home, lying on a comfortable sofa in front of the television. Blood had spurted from the back of his head and on the wall nearby there was red patch that was turning black. I imagined the murderer holding his face gently to kiss him and then suddenly going crazy and banging the victim’s head against the wall, time after time. I remembered the young man when I heard his name. I had seen him briefly several times. Once he had been dancing wildly in a discotheque on the Nile and another time it was New Year’s Eve in Alexandria, when I was stunned by the white fur coat he was wearing. I was fascinated by the idea of a white coat that didn’t have a single thread of any other color. That night I smiled at him and nodded. Clinging to the arm of a muscular young man, he returned my greeting.

As was usual in such cases, his sexual orientation soon came to light in the investigations, and they arrested all the gay men he knew, in his immediate circle and beyond. They held them for days without charge or justification, and subjected them to all kinds of abuse and pressure until one of them was willing to confess to anything. The news leaked out to the newspapers, which turned the case into a sensational drama about the perversion that is anathema to all religions, about imported phenomena that were alien to our society, and about the natural consequences of such an offense. The vice squad saw it as a promising opportunity and started to carry out random roundups of gay men or suspected gay men in all their usual places. It was in those days that I heard for the first time about the head of the vice squad in Cairo, a man who took special pleasure in hurting and humiliating gay men.

They would hold them for two or three days, then release them as soon as they were referred to the prosecutor’s office. It rarely led to real prosecutions. Nevertheless, those who went through the experience told horrible stories about what they had endured in the police stations, about the insults, the beatings, the threats, and the pressure to work as informers for the vice squad. I heard the stories and ignored them. Maybe I thought that such things only happened to other people. I felt protected, but I didn’t know why. Maybe Mother would protect me, just by being alive and having connections and money, or maybe my car, which I moved around in all the time, or the tall building I lived in. When I heard about this brutal murder I tried not to think about it, so that I could treasure my newfound sense of joy, and protect it from contamination by any frightening news I might hear. It was like blowing the dirty dust of the world off a chick’s clean feathers. A few days later, the victim’s fugitive lover returned from Marsa Matrouh, maybe because he couldn’t forget the murder scene, with the blood, the victim’s startled eyes, and the way that beautiful head had slumped into his hands. He handed himself in and confessed to his crime and that was that. The media didn’t focus on the incident for long, perhaps because of the status of the murderer and his victim.

On one occasion Prince linked the murder indirectly to my relationship with Abdel Aziz, which was still in its very early stages. “It’s a crime worse than murder when we try to change other people’s natures to suit our whims,” he said gravely. I gathered that two years earlier the victim of the murder had converted his young lover from the love of women to gay relationships, and that he had first met him as the fiancé of his elder sister’s daughter. He managed to snatch the man away from her within weeks. The other man might have been a little curious but at the end of the day he wasn’t inclined toward men. I could trace the outlines of the story from start to finish, and it wasn’t a pretty tale. I kept imagining the extraordinary white coat spattered with blood, and it wasn’t a pleasant sight. Yet I insisted on going all the way with Abdel Aziz, whether as murderer or as victim, it didn’t matter.