34

Even before essam saw us together and blew our cover, the pleasures of the body were not completely undiluted. Every now and then a sense of guilt tormented me when I admitted to myself that I was betraying everyone with Abdel Aziz. We were clearly taking advantage of their inadvertence. I mentioned my unease to him but he didn’t seem at all interested in the idea, and I felt from what he said that he saw what we were doing as just innocent play, like something that any two men might do together, such as play backgammon or cards, smoke a joint, or talk crudely about women. I went along with him but without conviction. Then I was surprised to notice that he openly ignored or belittled Asma, his fiancée. They weren’t doing any of the things that an engaged couple is meant to do, and it didn’t matter whether her brother Essam was present or not. He didn’t spend time alone with her or go for walks along the beach with her, for example. Most of their conversation was with us as a group, and it didn’t focus on their future, but rather on best-selling books and writing and publishing in Egypt. Asma would often get emotional and accuse him of promoting bad books based on personal considerations and relationships. She would put aside her feminine persona and turn for some reason into something else, something resentful and indignant, maybe because she was no great beauty or because she felt she was inferior to him in every way. After lunch in the apartment one day, she told him, “You’re very clever at knowing how to make everyone happy, but your own attitude is mysterious—if you even have an attitude in the first place.”

He smiled and didn’t answer. Then he left us and disappeared for the rest of the day, coming back quietly to the beach house in the evening, as if he had forgotten what had happened. Maybe he saw her as a stubborn child that he would gradually have to tame, and if he didn’t succeed he would leave her where she was and move on as if nothing had happened. Shireen and I patched things up between them the very next day but the seeds of the problem had been sown and it complicated what should have been simple daily pleasures. Our clandestine trysts became more tempestuous, with a certain violence and roughness on his part. Repressed anger seemed to have accumulated over his lifetime and now he was finally letting it out, disguised in the form of sex with a man who submitted to him voluntarily.

I told him I knew that no sex could be real without an element of violence in it, however hard one tried to make it gentle, but we could steer it in the other direction, toward tenderness, if we wanted. I carefully avoided using the word love or any similar words, but Abdel Aziz seemed to switch from one state of mind to another at a moment’s notice, and he wasn’t in control of what he was doing. After he had come, he came back to the real world around him like someone in a Sufi trance who no longer knows where he is. He avoided looking me in the eye and seemed embarrassed about what he had done.

I no longer sat on the beach with them with my chest and shoulders bare. To hide the dark marks he left on my skin I started wearing something light, on the pretext that the wind was cold. I didn’t give up hope of clipping the monster’s claws, as if I were living out some myth. But, unknown to us at the time, the sandcastle came crashing down two or three days before our vacation was due to end, when Essam saw us embracing. He had left us at nine o’clock to visit his friends, and as usual we took advantage of his absence to have sex. We finished and calmed down and then we went back to sitting on the balcony. I was trying to coax out of Abdel Aziz whether he’d had any previous experiences with men. He was evasive but I pressed him, and eventually he gave in and started to tell me about what he claimed was his only experience.

It was in his first year at university, when he started to break loose from the family network and discover himself alone. He was moving from one furnished apartment to another, and at one stage he had to move out of one and wait three days before moving into the next. He didn’t know where to go. He thought of going to a small hotel but a colleague suggested that he stay with him. The colleague tempted him by promising that they would binge on alcohol and hashish during Abdel Aziz’s stay. Abdel Aziz agreed and went with him, leaving the cardboard boxes with his books and other stuff with the doorman at his new apartment. His colleague carried out his promise, but the alcohol and hashish were only one part of the plan. He had wanted Abdel Aziz for some time and didn’t how to get him, or if he was available in the first place. That’s what he admitted to Abdel Aziz after the incident. Maybe, like me, the man had detected secret signals that Abdel Aziz transmitted.

They spent three days out of their heads, trying out every possible pleasure, without of course deviating from their designated roles as master and slave, as man and catamite. With every hour that passed, Abdel Aziz had to resist his feelings of contempt and disgust toward his friend. But the feelings rose silently inside him like an incoming tide. Even the alcohol and the drugs could no longer mask his revulsion and enable him to get an erection. He told himself that as soon as he moved into the new apartment he would end all contact with this colleague. That’s what he did, without looking back even once or giving him a word of thanks or saying goodbye to him. He threw him away like a used condom that we hold between our fingertips in disgust and drop into the nearest trash can. In a remorseful tone that I felt was insincere, he said, “Even when I saw him on campus, I steered clear of him.”

Suddenly he noticed I was looking at him disapprovingly. He raised his index finger and looked at me warningly. “You’re another matter, and anyway, I’ve changed,” he said.

He reached out toward me, inviting me to approach, like someone encouraging a young child to crawl toward him. I rose from my chair and sat on his lap, resting my head on his chest. The darkness on the balcony concealed us from view from outside, but then we found Essam standing behind us. He stood still in embarrassment for a moment and I saved myself with a quick lie, claiming that I had remembered my late mother and had started crying, and Abdel Aziz had tried to comfort me. Then I started wiping away nonexistent tears.

Essam didn’t seem convinced. He said nothing and looked suspicious, and at that point we noticed a large bandage on his head. He had been in a fight. We latched onto this injury as a lifesaver. Cleverly, Abdel Aziz started bombarding him with questions about what had happened, while Essam was rude and evasive about answering. I left them and went off to my bedroom to be alone. I could hardly settle in one place and my whole body was shaking. I reproached myself for not being careful enough and for exploiting the memory of Mother to escape. I wanted to cry to myself, so I went outside. I walked toward the beach and only noticed I was barefoot when I felt the cold sand and found it difficult to walk in. My fears were creeping around me in the dark like silent dogs. When I’d had my fill of crying, I saw Mother again and she scolded me, saying, “I hope you had a good time.”

“Essam saw us and it’s not impossible he’ll tell them,” I said.

“The chickens always come home to roost,” she said.

When I told Dr. Sameeh what happened in Agami between me and Abdel Aziz he asked me about Shireen, my feelings toward her, and whether I felt any guilt or remorse. I didn’t know what to say, except that I slept with her from time to time. He smiled strangely, as if he knew I understood his question well but was being evasive. Since my mother’s death I had become reliant on Xanax and antidepressants, and maybe that was another reason why sex with Abdel Aziz seemed a little lackluster once he had finally yielded. I knew that these drugs affected one’s appetite for food and sex and everything, and now I could rarely get an erection without ridiculous effort. Our last two days in Alexandria were absolute hell, and as soon as we were back in Cairo I felt really relieved. I went back to my old routine as if nothing had happened. I spent hours asleep, like someone with jetlag, and I learned as much about my dream world as I knew about the real world. I started looking at the world through a hazy screen, smiling to myself for no good reason. I regained my ability to dream of things that soon came true in reality. I even dreamed that Shireen told me the news that Abdel Aziz and Asma had broken off their engagement, about twenty-four hours before she actually told me. I was sitting on the carpet sorting out dozens of photos of Mother that were scattered around me when I heard the news. Shireen had just finished a long conversation with her cousin. She came and said just one sentence: “Asma’s engagement has been broken off.”

She twisted her lips as if she couldn’t stand the taste of the sentence in her mouth. I pretended not to be interested. “I sensed it,” I said sagely.

We made some trite remarks about luck and fate, and then some scathing words about Asma being stubborn and highly strung and Abdel Aziz being arrogant for no reason. Eventually I managed to slip out of the circle of photos of Mother spread around me. In the bathroom mirror I looked at my pale, plump face and at the new lines endlessly being etched in it by an invisible pen in a hand that had neither compassion nor understanding.