32

Alexandria in early april is like another beautiful lie. I pushed the balcony door open and the end-of-day sun blitzed us—Abdel Aziz, Essam, and me—with red light. We had reached Agami two hours earlier, and the old villa seemed to be yawning and rubbing its eyes. The watchman and his children had done what they could to clean it up before we came, but erasing the hidden wrinkles was an impossible task. We sat on the cane balcony chairs, relaxing after a fish dinner with the women, who were staying in a more modern apartment in a building not far off. Mother and I used to sit here alone whenever we were lucky and she wasn’t busy with work, if only for a week or ten days. It was growing old but I only saw it as it used to be, since every nook and cranny brought back clear memories of my mother.

After she died, I had to force my body through the motions of living—having a shower, eating, drinking, going to work, and doing errands. I was merely improvising, contriving a life without savor for the sake of my mother’s memory, and then for Shireen and little Badriya. I received special treatment from those around me, as if I were a precious glass ornament that they held with trembling hands for fear it might break. Mother never stopped visiting me in my daydreams and when I slept. I would suddenly see her quite clearly, as she had been ten years earlier, when she was at the height of her glamour and glory. She would be laughing or singing, and I would drift off with her, indifferent to those around me and what they thought of me, because madness, like death, brings relief.

Then I started pretending that I was back to normal, just so that others would stop worrying about me and asking me how I was—especially Shireen. As soon as she felt I had withdrawn inside myself again, she would hurriedly try to draw me out of my shell. Even Abdel Aziz maintained his support with irritating devotion. During this period he seemed to be pursuing me and I didn’t know what his motive was. He wasn’t good at making jokes, which sometimes made me feel sorry for him. For their sake I forced myself to talk and laugh and went back to taking an interest in myself, in what I ate, and in taking my tranquilizers. I went out, went to the office, and even appeared on television programs to talk about the talented actress who had died. But I hid from everyone the fact that she visited me all the time and that our conversations at her bedside sometimes lasted for hours, until I fell asleep. Only Dr. Sameeh knew this, and he was reassured only when I told him I knew they were just fantasies that comforted me and eased the pain of her death.

The only point of the trip to Alexandria must have been to help me recover. I no longer remember who was behind the proposal but it came up suddenly while we were having dinner at the home of Shireen’s uncle. Everyone was soon enthusiastic about the idea, as if they had already agreed to it behind my back. Even Abdel Aziz, who was always busy, seemed willing. But Uncle Sallam wouldn’t let Asma go with us unless her younger brother, Essam, came too. He was a law student who was as light and agile as a monkey and who always gave me a strange feeling that I was now old, by the way he dressed and spoke, the music he listened to, and of course the way he soon grew bored of everything.

While Essam was having a shower, I sat on the balcony with Abdel Aziz. We began the evening in silence, each of us apparently waiting for the other to speak. This may have been the first moment we had been alone with each other since he hugged me at the office after I locked myself up there a few days after my mother died. No, his tearful embrace hadn’t had the same effect on me as the prince’s magic kiss had on Sleeping Beauty, because I hadn’t yet recovered from my grief for my mother and it hadn’t led to us rolling around on the floor and stripping naked in a frenzy. Our embrace that time was something small and fleeting but it was more eloquent than anything I had dreamed might happen between us; something that wavered between brotherliness and sympathy, between denial and acknowledgment. Here we were together, alone again. I got up, fetched my laptop, and played an Umm Kulthoum song. I could hardly listen to anything else, simply because my mother loved her so much. When Essam came out of the bathroom, I went and showered and changed my clothes. I had chosen to sleep alone in a small room with one big bed, so that Abdel Aziz could share the other two-bed room with his young brother-in-law. I wasn’t ready to sleep in the same room as anyone else, especially Abdel Aziz. The room wasn’t the only thing that Abdel Aziz and Essam shared; there was also hashish. They had started the ritual by the time I came out of the bathroom a few minutes later, as Umm Kulthoum toyed with the question she was singing—"Does love triumph over all?"—giving it a different coloring each of the many times she reprised it. My mind drifted with her voice, and the sweet aroma of hashish smoke took me back to when I was a child pretending to be asleep on the maroon armchair in my father’s workshop, sneaking a peek out of the little window from time to time at the penises of urinating men. Then a cell phone started ringing with a dancing ringtone. It was Essam’s and he jumped out of his seat. “That must be the guys and they’ve reached Alexandria,” he said.

We could hear his voice from inside cussing his friends playfully and agreeing to join them downtown immediately. Abdel Aziz asked me gravely, “So tell me, Hani, can you remember the first song you heard when you were young that stuck in your head?”

I was taken aback by his strange question. Without racking my brain for very long, I told him it was a song by Aida al-Shaer that I often used to hear on the radio as soon as Grandma Sakina turned it on at seven in the morning. I started singing it to him, pretending to be cheerful:

 

Open the window for me, my dear.

I love the air, my dear.

 

Essam came back all ready to go out and started imploring us to lend him one of the cars. His driving license had been suspended and his father had banned him from driving because of his recklessness and the repeated accidents he caused. I firmly refused, so he worked on Abdel Aziz until he relented, to my surprise. Abdel Aziz just gave him the car keys, saying, “If you get into trouble, I’ll say you stole the keys.”

Essam told us not to wait up for him because he would be spending the night with his young friends at the home of one of them in Raml Station. He then disappeared from the face of the earth and we sat in embarrassed silence pretending to listen to Umm Kulthoum. I fetched two cans of beer from the fridge and then I remembered the question Abdel Aziz had recently asked. “And what about you?” I asked.

“Me what?”

“The first song you remember from when you were very young.”

He smiled as if remembering something we had spoken about years ago, not just a few minutes. He started telling me a long story, as if his whole self had reverted to that distant moment in his childhood in Minya. It was when he was very young, maybe before he went to school or maybe when he was in the first year of primary school or maybe it was the first time he went out alone at night to buy ice cream from a store that was far from home. The shopkeeper didn’t see him at first from behind the high counter, but he kept banging his coin on the glass front of the cabinet where the biscuits and chewing gum were on display until the shopkeeper noticed him. Anyway, the radio was on, playing a song that Warda was singing at a concert. She was repeating one particular verse:

 

What do we care for our critics?

We’ve been through enough already.

We toiled and we suffered

Until we met one another.

 

In his rich voice and with a laugh, he said, “The audience at the concert was going wild. I took the ice cream and headed home, and all along the way I was singing those words: ‘What do we care for our critics? We’ve been through enough already.’ And even now I don’t know what the song’s called. Every few years I hear it by chance in a café or on the radio, exactly the same verse, as if it’s chasing me, and every time I hear it I tell myself I must look it up and find it; that I must for once listen to it from start to finish and then forget about it completely until I hear it again. Imagine, it’s been about thirty years.” He started laughing with a certain bitterness.

Smiling enthusiastically, I said, “I remember that song, but I don’t know what it’s called either.”

Then the silence returned and neither of us was able to break through it until the Umm Kulthoum song was over. I didn’t bother to play another one. The balcony was charged with tension and the slightest breeze could have whipped up a storm. He had his right hand on his left shoulder and started to groan and massage it languidly. “Didn’t you tell me once that you know how to give a massage?” he asked me frankly, stubbing out the joint he was smoking.

I nodded, my heart racing, overawed by the moment I had long awaited and imagined.

“Because my shoulder’s been stiff all day. Could you . . . ?”

I interrupted him, knowing that I mustn’t let slip the opportunity he had offered me. “It wouldn’t work properly here, in the open air. Come into the room,” I said.

In my bedroom, with two rapid moves Abdel Aziz took off his traveling clothes and then his undershirt. All he had on were his white briefs, tight around his bulging genitals. The little room glowed with the pure bronze of his skin. He lay down on his stomach and relaxed, turning his face toward the wall. Like a professional masseur, I took my time. His broad back stretched in front of me like a desert wet with dew. I focused the pressure of my fingers on the shoulder he said was stiff and he started to groan, making subdued sighs that sounded sweeter to my ear than all of Umm Kulthoum’s songs. Then he turned over to lie on his back and the shape of his penis was clearly visible under his briefs. He gave a serene smile that pained me.

“It’s good like that,” he whispered. “You’re doing well.”

I was hesitant for a moment and didn’t know what I should do. I looked at him and he was silent and smiling too, as if he was enjoying the moments of suspense before the icy barrier collapsed. Finally he pulled me toward him and whispered, “Come and lie next to me.”

I didn’t want anything more than that. I tasted his lips slowly and we held each other’s hands. Then my face burrowed at length in the thicket of hairs on his chest and stomach and I licked his navel. Suddenly we were naked and our arms and legs were locked together, flesh to flesh. My friend penetrated me and it was like the first time in my life. I didn’t want that moment ever to end. I wanted us to die like that, him and me, or the planets to stop turning and time to stand still. When he hugged me after coming, he could feel I was crying. He touched my eyes with his lips and licked the tears away with his tongue. It wasn’t pure joy because a sadness was present among us too.

The first time wasn’t as I had imagined it in my dreams, where there was no sweat, no breathlessness, and no fumbling over the insertion. In my imagination fireworks in psychedelic colors had exploded and flashed across the sky of the universe. But the real version, although it was rough, had a feel to it, and a taste, a sound, and a smell. His inclination toward men was an obvious fact and not just a whim or a matter of curiosity. He had come prepared with packs of condoms and I realized that he had decided in advance that we would come here.

My excitement was edgy, looking around for the punishment that would surely be imminent. I was so excited I almost forgot I was still afraid of what was hidden for me in this brown body with its toned muscles, and inside his head, which was sculpted like a pharaonic statue.

I wanted to scratch his skin and flesh off to reach whatever was beneath, and I wanted to get into his head, to open all its dark rooms and fill them with light and air, just to be sure, so that my fears could dissipate and my joy be undiluted.

After a second round that was long and less frenetic, sleep stole him from me. I kept looking at him, listening to his snoring, which was like the bubbling of a water pipe, and smelling the rough animal aromas of his body, mixed with his cologne. I smiled contentedly, only because in recent times I hadn’t woven fantasies in my imagination. In the taste of his sweat, I sensed a victor who didn’t know what to do with his victory.