28

It was badriya’s birthday party. I left the children and retired to the balcony on the pretext that I wanted to smoke, taking my coffee with me. I slumped into a rattan chair like a corpse. I had turned into a depressive old man overnight, since the robbery incident, which Shireen had heard about without the embarrassing details. My vigor was sapped and I stayed home, managing the company solely by phone calls. Shireen put up with my mood swings with a patience that embarrassed me on some days and was so unbearable on others that I wished we could have a furious argument and insult each other. I looked at the people walking along the street under the building, laughing and chatting on their phones, and I wished them all a slow death.

Little Badriya came onto the balcony with a cloth puppet over her right hand. Imitating the voice of a cartoon character that I didn’t recognize, she said, “Everyone wants Hani. Come on, Hani! Come on, Hani!”

Another child followed her, and then two more, joining her in her chant. At first I smiled at them and was about to throw away the cigarette and join them, but I felt too lazy. Suddenly I was terrified of these little creatures with their faces painted in bright colors to look like animals. Their high-pitched shouting and manic enthusiasm frightened me. I imagined they had been sent from hell to torment me. Calmly I told them to go away now and said I would join them shortly, after I had finished my cigarette and my coffee, but Badriya started to lead them in another round of ever more frantic chanting: “Come on, Hani! Come on, Hani!”

“Enough of that!” I shouted, without thinking what I was doing.

A silence fell and the other children scurried off the balcony in alarm, while Badriya stood looking at me in amazement for a few moments. She suddenly shuddered and screwed up her face as if she were about to burst into tears. I threw the cigarette away and was about to get up and hug her, but she disappeared in a flash. She didn’t want to talk to me despite all my attempts and, in tears, she stayed in her room with Shireen.

The atmosphere was completely ruined. I took my car keys and fled the scene of my crime. After driving around, I ended up in a hotel bar, far from everyone. In a mirror behind the counter I saw someone I didn’t recognize, though he did look like me. I told my lookalike in the mirrors behind the lines of bottles that I shouldn’t allow myself to poison their lives any more than I had already, so I should keep away from them. I told myself that my little outburst that day might be followed by things that would be more dangerous to the little girl, who was blameless in all this. I decided to leave home and live by myself somewhere else, even if I had to claim that this was on the advice of my psychiatrist.

While walking half-drunk through the downtown streets after midnight, I remembered my old loneliness, my innocent loneliness. It may be the point at which this story began—a young boy alone in a big apartment, his mother always out, speaking to imaginary brothers, inventing disagreements and reconciliations with them. The strange thing is that for a moment that isolation had a pleasant taste again, but this time it would not be the isolation of an adolescent in his family’s apartment. No, I would set off into the world like a stray bullet. I might separate with Shireen and she might find herself a real man. Even the company could be wound up and closed down, because in fact it was just a respectable pastime for the son of a famous actress, so that people didn’t see him as a lay-about living on his mother’s wealth.

While I was making my plans and imagining how I would put them into effect step by step, I heard a clear voice calling me. It was Omar Nour in the middle of a late-night drinking spree. He welcomed me, gave me a hug, and introduced me to some of his friends and colleagues. They said they were celebrating the fact he was leaving for Kuwait in two days to work on a newspaper there. Everyone was happy and singing, so I thought I would take refuge with them from my personal hell. I soon ended up with them in a large apartment in Bab al-Luq, where a German woman lived with her Egyptian boyfriend. I abandoned myself to the noise and the drinking, and danced like crazy.

I remember that at a certain moment I was sitting on the floor crying, with a foreign woman speaking Arabic nearby. She patted my shoulder and massaged my head as I told her about Abdel Aziz, until I collapsed on the spot, dead to the world. I woke up midmorning and found myself lying on the carpet among strange bodies, cans of beer, empty wine bottles, and bowls overflowing with cigarette butts. I washed my face and sneaked out. After drinking a coffee in a nearby coffee shop and racking my brain, I remembered where I had parked my car the night before.

Before I could carry out any of the steps in my plan to escape and keep my distance, Mother had a serious heart attack and I came around from my adolescent fantasies. All my brave plans fell apart as if they had never existed, and the only thing that mattered to me was the sudden danger that I might lose my mother. For ages I hadn’t considered this possibility at all. I had thought of her as immortal, maybe from the time Aunt Husniya had died. But now we were carrying her out on a gurney, and prying eyes behind windows took pleasure in seeing a once-powerful woman lying on her back, tied down with straps. I just couldn’t imagine her ceasing to exist. I said she would recover, that it was just a temporary setback to her health. I spontaneously looked up to heaven in tears and pleaded with God, reproaching myself for having moved away from Him all these years. I asked for His mercy and forgiveness, not for my sake but for hers. Then I thought again and admitted to myself that I needed her to live more than she did. As if God were right in front of me, I begged Him to spare my mother for me, if only for a few more years, until I was strong enough and ready to part with her, if ever I could.

After she left intensive care, I would sit by her side reading the Quran in a whisper or steal snatches of sleep in the visitors’ room, which was piled high with bunches of flowers sent by famous people. That’s all that most of her acquaintances did, and only a handful took the trouble to visit her—an actress from her generation or one from the next generation who cultivated her image as a woman of compassion. Then Adel al-Murr, her former secret husband, turned up looking like a very old man. His hands were trembling all the time, and he was leaning on both his stick and the arm of a handsome grandson of his. At first I was upset to have him visiting my mother but I soon laughed at myself and felt grateful for his visit, which finally made her smile as she went over pleasant memories with him. It was he who spoke, while she laughed with difficulty.

“Do you remember Ismail Arar, the lighting guy whose body produced electricity?” he asked. “I remember once we set him on Madiha Gouda because she didn’t want to work. He touched her elbow and shoulder, giving her electric shocks, and she was screaming and saying, ‘Okay, damn it, I will go and act, but get him off me!’”

With Mother he only brought up things that weren’t embarrassing—things to do with their work together and pleasant memories, stories they weren’t embarrassed to tell in front of his grandson and me. We stayed in the background in silence, exchanging friendly looks from time to time. He planted a kiss on her hand before going, and tears glistened in her ashen eyes. I watched him walk off down the corridor in a silk suit as white as the little hair he had left.

As soon as Mother had recovered a little and could get up, go to the bathroom, and perform her prayers while seated, she insisted on coming back home, indifferent to the doctors’ advice that she needed care and observation during her recuperation. She overruled us all and was content to have just one nurse visit her at home every day. I thanked God for answering my prayers, and I had every intention of being grateful for those divine blessings to which I had been blinded by my foolish obsession with the knight of my dreams.

It was like a celebration, with all of us gathered around Mother, meeting her slightest desires for some days, until the afternoon of that inauspicious Friday in September, less than two weeks after she had come out of hospital. She was sitting on her favorite sofa with fruit and the remote control on the table in front of her, holding the latest issue of the magazine Radio and Television, tracking the lines with her magnifying glass held up close to the page. Without lifting her eyes off the magazine, she mumbled, “Hey kids, they’re going to show the serial Saqiyat al-ayyam from the first of the month. We have to record it this time.”

“We’ll record it every day, Mother. That’s one of your finest roles,” Shireen replied immediately.

Silence reigned in the living room for some minutes, till Mother lowered the magnifying glass, put it on her lap, and lifted her nose a little as if sniffing the air. “What’s that nice smell, Shireen?” she asked. “Did you light some incense?”

Shireen looked at me and said she hadn’t lit any incense, but if Mother wanted, she could fumigate the room with incense. Mother wagged her finger to say no, but insisted she could smell something very pleasant. “It’s like a rose garden floating in the air, kids,” she said.

We smiled, unsure what to say. She smiled back at us and then, as we watched, her head abruptly slumped forward onto her chest.