31

Karim never saw his father, except in an old photo that his mother kept among the paltry treasures she hid in the storage compartment under the seat of the sofa. But she spoke to Karim about him, without affection in her voice, but with amazement and reverence as if she were talking about a pious holy man rather than just a petty criminal.

I don’t know if it was Karim’s mother who stuffed his head with nonsense, or whether he was born with a natural disposition for such things. In his childhood, she told him about his father in brief moments of respite while catching her breath and having a rest from hardship, on the eve of a religious holiday for example, after bathing him in the small washtub, dressing him up in clean clothes, and taking him in her arms in their tiny room in her parents’ house. His head was full of myth-like stories about Saadoun al-Halabi, the tough guy and hashish dealer whose forefathers were said to have come from Syria to Egypt long ago, married local women, and had children. The family name Halabi—"the Aleppan"—was a clear indication that he did indeed have distant roots. I no longer remember much of what he told me over the weeks and months in prison. But I remember, for example, that this Saadoun supposedly acquired his extraordinary strength when he drank the water of the river when it was steady—that is, when the Nile was completely still, undisturbed by a single ripple, which is something that happens only once in a thousand years. Whoever drinks from the river at that moment gains a strength that no other creature can overcome.

It is certain that Karim’s mother gave birth to him when she was close to forty. She was a woman who was slightly mentally disturbed, with a brazen rustic beauty. She had no children with her first husband, so he divorced her, and for years she roamed the lanes of Khorset selling vegetables, crying her wares in a rich voice: “Fresh rocket! Radishes sweeter than bananas! Finest lemons! Lettuce sweeter than honey!”

At least that’s what Karim liked to whisper to us in our corner of the cell, imitating her call in a singsong voice. She lived under the protection of her brothers—a beautiful divorcee pursued by malicious gossip as she came and went. Then Saadoun saw her one morning as he was starting his day in a coffee shop, and he was stunned by the sight of her whiteness amid her black rags. “Do you have a lemon, pretty girl?” he shouted.

“The only pretty thing is your tongue,” she replied with an idiotic smile.

Like everyone else, she was afraid of him. He picked up a lemon and with his big teeth bit into it whole with the peel on, his eyes pinned on the naïve peddler, who was clenching her teeth in a sullen attempt to resist vomiting, though she did manage to maintain her smile.

After that first encounter, the tough guy asked where she was from and who her family was, and because he was a man who feared God and cared about his fate in the afterlife he sent a messenger to her brothers on the evening of the same day. Within a week Shafya, Karim’s mother, had joined the long line of women that Saadoun had married. He rented a room for her on the roof of a building not far from her family’s house, the same room in which she would give birth to this beautiful boy and where he would live until he decamped to the capital.

I couldn’t even imagine how a young man could live with his mother in one room, with a mud ceiling and wooden beams that always needed repair. When it rained there, water would drip down on them and his mother would arrange empty pots and pans under all the spots where the roof was leaking. Karim told his tales without turning them into sob stories, but always with irony and with a smile that came and went. I imagined the scene with the pots and pans collecting the rainwater as it dripped, with my mother suddenly appearing in this scene of poverty on the screen of the black-and-white television in the same room, whispering to her lover on the telephone that the coast was clear at her place and he should come to her at once. Karim smiled under his cover, identifying with the beautiful actress, not with the handsome lover. And then the pots and pans filled up and he stood, sighing irritably, to empty them in the only bathroom, which was on the ground floor, making his way carefully so that his feet didn’t slip on the mud on the roof and on the stairway.

Shafya had been married to Saadoun for about a year when her only offspring begin to stir in her belly. The tough guy was not destined to hold this baby in his arms because the government arrested him in a well-executed ambush. As expected, the police were able to find him only after one of his closest associates betrayed him, much as happened to Adham al-Sharkawi, a Robin Hood character who was active in the Nile Delta. The government didn’t just arrest him and his young accomplices; it also humiliated them in front of their families, dressing them up in women’s headscarves, mounting them back-to-front on donkeys, and parading them through the streets in disgrace as a lesson to others. Karim hadn’t been weaned yet when they heard that Saadoun al-Halabi had died in prison. Some said it was from grief, others that they had murdered him, and others that he had dug a tunnel and escaped but the government had covered it up to save face, so maybe he was still alive somewhere and would reappear one day to reunite his children, now dispersed in Cairo and Gharbiya Province, so that they could live like princes in his restored kingdom.

Even in those dark hours in prison, when I was gasping for air and snorting crushed pills through a rolled-up banknote, it was obvious to me that, in weaving the legend of his father, Karim had borrowed from many films, such as The Harafish, Mulberries and the Cudgel, and Saad the Orphan.

“So later they threw me out of the institute,” Karim added suddenly, skipping ahead a number of years.

After preparatory school, he had joined an Azhar institute that taught religious instructors for primary schoolchildren. He left the institute for many reasons, including his eccentric behavior, such as daydreaming and saying strange things about how God sometimes talked to him. That exposed him to ridicule from the other children and threats from the pious among them, especially when they caught him in the bathroom with one of the janitors, which confirmed their suspicions about his sexual orientation. They disciplined the janitor and took Karim to the principal. “I don’t want to see you here again except for exams. You can come like a dog, sit the exams, and then go. Otherwise, on my mother’s honor, I’ll hand you over to the police and have you arrested.”

Karim wasn’t upset. On the contrary, he was relieved that he was spared the long trek to the institute and back every day. He looked for work to help his mother, who went out at the crack of dawn to sell vegetables and continued to hope that one day he would go back to the institute that had expelled him, to obtain a qualification he knew would do nothing to help him achieve his grandiose ambitions. He was a chronic daydreamer who rarely stopped dreaming. Although he loved moulids and Sufi musicians and dervishes, he was also obsessed with fashion. He would sit for hours imagining himself in fine clothes, and he drew sketches of models in strange garments, although he wasn’t a very good draftsman. He hoped one day to meet a famous fashion designer, whose name he told me. When he asked me if the man was like us, I said, “God alone knows.” He imagined the conversation they would have and how he would convince the designer that he had talent and a feeling for fashion, elegance, and carefully choosing and matching colors.

When I heard about this passion of his, I ended up telling him about my father and grandfather, in sentences that faltered at random, disjointedly and breathlessly. I told him about the old workshop in Adli Street, about the ladies and the film stars, and how I played between their feet as a child. In a slip of the tongue I told him that Mother was the actress Badriya Amin. He gasped loudly and put his hand over his mouth. Some of the people near our beds noticed and one of them asked him mockingly, “What’s up, nancy boy? Just lost your virginity, have you?”

He pursued me with questions about my mother for days after that, and sometimes I saw her sitting with us in the cell, listening to us with a sad smile.