29

I took part in the various acts of the funeral drama without shedding a single tear. I played my role perfectly when I prayed for my mother in the Kawakbi mosque in Agouza. Then the coffin left for the Basatin cemetery. I was surprised that the unknown director had managed to muster all these actors and crowds at such short notice, then put them in place so skillfully and have them identify with their roles so successfully.

I knew she was now hidden in that box, covered with a drape embroidered with Quranic verses in gold thread, making fun of us all. With them I laid Mother’s body on her white linen shroud, and took it down into the women’s enclosure in the family vault. I was convinced I was dreaming. Everything would come to an end in a few minutes. I would wake up lazily and leave my bedroom to find Mother in her favorite place on the sofa. That’s why I was so fearless. I was playing a role with Mother and all the time I was having an imaginary conversation with her, and together we were making fun of everything happening around us. We were shooting her last movie, and she had insisted that I take part in it. “My son has promising talent,” she told them. “Give him a chance.” But would the director fire me if I still couldn’t cry?

I stood there receiving condolences, Mother, as if you really had died. Everyone wore black and some of them played their roles well. They even cried and hung their heads on their chests as they sobbed. Then they stood in front of the cameras to say a word or two about the late actress. Toward the end of the condolences session, I sat down for a moment to relax, smoke a cigarette, and ask myself when Mother would turn up, stick her tongue out at them, and make fun of them all. I shut my eyes and listened to the famous Quran reader repeating verses from the Maryam chapter, ringing all the possible changes. My mind wandered for a while. In my reverie I saw Mother’s face as she had been thirty years earlier, smiling at me as she tried on a new dress I remembered well—a Chinese-style dress with a row of buttons running at an angle down the front, made of satin and printed with large bright flowers. As she spun around on her high heels, she asked me, “Ha, so what do you think, Mr. Hani?”

Before little Hani could answer her, I felt a hand touching my shoulder. I opened my eyes to see Abdel Aziz standing next to me, looking at me with honest sympathy. He offered me his condolences and told me that he had arrived back from Germany only a few hours ago and that otherwise he would have been by my side from the first moment. He could have been anyone else who had come to offer his condolences. Mother’s last movie had undermined all his magic and allure. My little dream about my mother had turned my head and I was almost euphoric, confident she hadn’t really died. All the time I was wondering when all these people would leave. When could I be alone with Mother again, to tell her what I thought of her beautiful Chinese dress?

I slept alone in her bedroom for days, taking in the smell of her clothes, teetering on the brink of madness. Sometimes I felt that the time had come to cry, if only a few tears. Only then could I admit that Mother had died and that I was crying for her. Only then could I release all the anger and fear inside me. I gathered up the old photo albums, the family videos and CDs of her performances, her letters and postcards. I packed up these treasures and decided to cut myself off from the world in the office until I could cry. I gave the staff indefinite paid leave and made sure I had an adequate stock of whisky. Then I camped there, switching between the old video player and the computer screen.

I started with the oldest documents, from the time when the sisters, Badriya and Husniya, were budding performers with ivory complexions and honey-colored eyes. I went inside the photographs and spoke to them, and we laughed. I heard their laughter echo around me. They confided many things to me as we drank glass after glass together, about the days when they dipped bread in oil because they didn’t have any other food, about waiting for their dresses to dry, about the single kohl pencil and the single tube of lipstick they had, about their joy at their first speaking role in a movie, about the groping they had to put up with from actors and studio workers.

Over the next few days I switched from photograph to movie to serial without a tear ever wetting my eyes despite the whisky, the solitude, and the confinement. I often saw her among the specters of my drunkenness: she was vivid, alive, and more tangible than everything around me. She laughed, came up to me, and wrapped her fur with pistachio-green feathers around my neck. There was nothing in the whole world but me and her.

Make me weep, O Lord, so I can escape this delirium and accept that Mother is dead and have a rest. How I had wept in the past, for the most trivial of reasons, and now I couldn’t. I went from room to room in the company offices with my glass in my hand, half-clothed, without a ray of light seeping in from the outside, talking to myself. If I couldn’t cry, I’d rather die. She had been there at home all those last years, while I was loose on the streets, madly following my desires and seeking my pleasure, and now where was she? Then I addressed Mother: show yourself, appear, Badriya, Badridar, Badara, enough of playing coy. Where are you hiding? Have you really gone to the Lord as well? Then I addressed God: “Take me, now that You’ve taken her. How can You leave me alone like this, when You knew that I didn’t have anyone else and that I am the weakest person in the world without her? Why her? She was devoted to worshipping You night and day, and she was charitable to the poor and the wretched, so why have You taken her from me?”

After I don’t know how many days Shireen couldn’t take any more anxiety, especially as I had turned off my cell phone and disconnected the landlines at the office. She had to check on me through the doorman, who told her how I was, based on brief encounters whenever I asked him to go and buy things for me. When she dared to come and visit me, I almost threw her out. She noticed I was drunk and mentally disturbed and that the office was in chaos, so she panicked and started to appeal to others for help. She spoke to Asma and told her she was terrified that I had been in such a state for so long and that I might do something to myself. Asma suggested that Abdel Aziz come to see me in the office and try to talk me out of this reclusive and overindulgent form of mourning.

At noon one day I woke up to the sound of the doorbell ringing persistently. I got up from the sofa, irritated and ready to explode at the doorman or whoever it was. I opened the door and found Abdel Aziz standing in front of me with a solemn expression on his face, like someone on an official mission. I was taken aback and thought of several things at the same moment: my unshaved face, my puffy and bloodshot eyes, my anger toward him, as if he were the hidden reason why my mother had died, and about how I wanted to cry right now if I could. Several moments passed before I invited him in. I closed the door and turned to him. He took me in his arms all at once and started to rub my back with compassion.

I stood immobile for some moments, unwilling to hug him back. But I breathed in a familiar smell from his body and it surged through my bloodstream, like the smell of my father. Only then did the miracle happen. Small pools of tears gathered in the corners of my eyes and I almost gasped for joy when I felt that I was finally close to crying. I then embraced him too, clung to him, and let the tears flow gently, without any sobbing. It was just lines of salty water running down my face. But within seconds the pace picked up, and I started heaving and whimpering on his chest. “My mother died when I was eight years old,” I heard him whisper in a trembling voice, his hot breath on my bare neck.

He joined in the crying as we hugged each other. We stayed like that for maybe ten minutes. It seemed like a whole lifetime of mourning, and neither of us was weeping just for the loss of a mother, whether a few days ago or decades ago. We were also weeping at the loneliness we had lived through and that was still with us, but this time we did so together.