35

When i listened to karim’s stories in our corner of the cell in Tora Prison, I couldn’t possibly tell where the facts ended and the fantasies began. Sometimes I envied him his ability to live in another world. I tried to learn this skill from him so that I could escape at times from the nightmare around me, if only for a few stolen minutes every day.

Karim said he had talked to God since he was young, sometimes to himself and sometimes aloud. God was his best friend, even if it was a one-sided conversation, but he soon discovered there were many ways God could whisper secrets to him—through a phrase a passerby used in the street, in which he detected a secret message meant for him, or in the first thing he heard when he turned the television on. The chirping of a sparrow might sound like the answer to a question he had asked himself. He liked to listen to God’s voice in all such things, although he knew he was cursed because he committed the sin of the people of Lot. But then he consoled himself by saying it was God who created him as he was, and maybe God had some purpose he would never understand however hard he tried, and maybe He would help him repent someday.

He had tried to pray regularly, to fast on Mondays and Thursdays, and to remember parts of the Quran he had forgotten. His uncle, who knew of his sexual activities, once asked him, “Have you made friends with some fundamentalist?” Then Karim decided to move to Cairo in search of a private life away from his uncle, who smoked marijuana all the time, and from his mother, who lived on alms although Karim, as a man, should have provided for her. Maybe he struck out in search of the man in his life, the dream that never left him however many books on Sufism he collected and however many hours he spent engrossed in them, though he didn’t understand much of what was in the books and they only made him more puzzled and confused. Sometimes he would interrupt his own storytelling, look at me, and ask me questions such as, “Do you think God is inside us or outside?”

When I reacted by pursing my lips and shrugging to mean I didn’t know, he would volunteer his own answer: “Both, and anyway it doesn’t make any difference.”

He made sure he took those books on his move to Cairo, where he slept on the floor in the home of “Captain” Salah, one of his mother’s cousins, who agreed to put Karim up with his own children until Karim found somewhere else to live. Within a day of arriving in Cairo, Karim was working with Salah in a small nightclub called the Arizona in the Tawfikiya district downtown. On his first night, while changing the ashtray at one table, he knocked over a bottle of whisky worth a small fortune, and half of it spilled on the floor. The manager insisted on firing him but the customer who had bought the bottle saved him, forgiving him and giving him a twenty-pound tip. He then gave him a tape of the Lebanese singer George Wassouf to play until the band turned up and the live music began. That customer was Fathi al-Touni, a dealer in car spare parts who liked nothing better than toying with people and who saw young Karim as just another opportunity for fun and amusement.

Karim learned a great deal at the Arizona. With every night that passed there, he discovered there was a massive gap between what he saw on television and what took place around him. In the downtown environment he mastered the language of eyes and discovered that he was really handsome and that he didn’t need to make much effort to seek out men and attract and seduce them. He just needed to act naturally. Even his Nile Delta accent gave his voice a distinctive timbre. He memorized the words of George Wassouf’s songs so that he could sing them to Fathi al-Touni as he stood next to him in the early hours. The other staff in the nightclub worked out what he was up to but he didn’t care. They called Karim “his cousin” because of his distant relationship with “Captain” Salah. When he plucked up courage and objected to this name, they started calling him unpleasant names such as “the pansy,” “the fairy,” and “the queen,” so he decided he would leave the place, especially as he had already moved out of Salah’s house and rented a room in an apartment in Omraniya, which he shared with other newcomers to Cairo.

One fresh morning, when he left the Arizona after mopping the floor for the last time, he had Fathi al-Touni’s business card in his shirt pocket close to his heart, checking every few minutes that it was still there, as if it were his lifeline. Before looking for another job, he decided to visit Fathi in the spare-parts emporium that he owned, close to the Rivoli Cinema. When he went into Fathi’s glass-walled office, the owner, puffy-faced and contracting into a scowl his bushy eyebrows, dyed glossy black, gave him a quizzical look as if he didn’t recognize him. After a silence that lasted longer than the few seconds one might expect, he shouted at Karim in a harsh, hostile voice: “And what can I do for you, boy?”

It was like a bucket of cold water poured over Karim, who didn’t understand and didn’t know what to say. Was it conceivable that Fathi had completely forgotten him, when only a few days earlier he had been making eyes at Karim and saying nice things to him whenever he came close to his table, such as, “Aren’t I lucky? You’re prettier than this fruit here"? And now this look of surprise. “I’m . . . I’m Karim, from the Arizona. ‘Love is king, love is king,’” the pretty boy stammered in a muffled voice.

“Are you an idiot or what, boy?” Fathi said, in the same rude tone.

Karim realized that for some reason Fathi was pretending not to know him, so he decided to leave. “I’m sorry I disturbed you,” he mumbled.

He turned away and was reaching for the handle of the glass door, with a lump in his throat and tears in his eyes, when he heard the laugh, the malicious laugh he knew well, the laugh that the devil laughs when he enjoys playing with his victims. His hand froze on the door handle and he heard Fathi’s voice revert to nightclub mode. “Come here, boy. Come here, Karim. I’m only joking with you,” it said.

Fathi laughed and laughed at his prank. He took Karim’s hand, and they left the store to go for a walk downtown.

“My god, if you’d seen your face in the mirror at the time!” Fathi joked.

They had lunch at a kebab restaurant nearby, and then settled in a bar called the Cyprus, where Fathi peppered him with questions about everything in his life, especially about his previous sexual experiences, which he seemed to enjoy hearing more than anything else. Karim told himself that maybe he had found what he had long been seeking, and he overlooked his irritation at the way Fathi behaved, spoke, and ate. I still remember the glint in Karim’s eyes and his serene smile when he mentioned the beautiful clothes that his boorish patron bought him, describing in detail the colors, materials, and brands. His world suddenly expanded. He tasted kinds of food he hadn’t even known the names of and visited places where everything was permissible.

He spent a few weeks in Fathi’s heaven and Fathi didn’t make any physical advances, except for some kisses, embraces, and light flirtation at drunken, dissolute parties with a number of Fathi’s acquaintances, which puzzled Karim and made him wonder. Although he was frightened of the moment he expected would come, he was also impatient for it, because afterward either the dream would continue or it would come to an end and he would go back to being alone and hanging out on the pavement with Mohamed Sukkar.

Then Fathi called him one night and abruptly summoned him to a hotel. Karim had often fantasized about this encounter in advance. He imagined special preparations, rituals, candles, and wine. He imagined that every kiss would be like something out of A Thousand and One Nights. But the reality fell far short of his dreams. The hotel was just a cheap boarding house in Clot Bey Street, quite inappropriate for Fathi’s status.

In a horrible room, Fathi thrust his short thick penis into the boy’s ass nonstop for a full two hours until Karim was worried the pain would overwhelm him and he would scream and cause a scandal. He couldn’t work out what exactly Fathi’s problem was, but he noticed that Fathi’s scrotum was almost flush with his groin and didn’t hang down at all, unlike with other men. He also saw that his testicles were obviously withered, so maybe he had some defect that meant he couldn’t ejaculate.

Anyway, Karim was bleeding from his anus, crying, and begging Fathi to have mercy and set him free. The man started hitting him like a maniac, with his hands and his feet, and Karim didn’t try to defend himself. Karim began picking up his clothes, covering himself as best he could and saving his skin. In the minibus home he was crying and people were looking at him, and he could still feel warm blood wetting his clothes from below.

Karim didn’t cry after telling his story. He smiled out of the side of his mouth, as if remembering a silly joke. Then he turned his face away and took out his little Quran.